90 Days of ILP

It's not every day that one of the key founders of American Buddhism gives a ten-dollar talk in your frigid town. Courtesy of hyper-alert German visitor Dennis, my friend Marco and I took a work break up to the Chatauqua center to see famed Zen patriarch Richard Baker-roshi give a talk entitled "Why Practice?". Now a rude person would have dubbed this event "Why Bother Making a Point?", but not I. I went more to feel the presence of the notorious (and notoriously open-hearted) Soto priest than to engage in an intellectually-stimulating discourse.

It began promptly at 7:30, so we showed up at 7:35. The audience of 50 or so was already seated, eyes closed, and a minor functionary had to scramble from Baker-roshi's side to collect our crisp bills. Soon enough, Baker opened his eyes and launched into a rambling, Bob Newhart-meets-Alan Watts discourse on... something. The old man touched down all over the place, grasping at whatever straws came into his brain (the Superbowl, his 5-year-old daughter, the chirping patterns of birds in Central Europe) and mouthing generic spiritual platitudes about movies and art.

Yet at the 8:20 mark he suddenly gave sure evidence of the Zen realization for which he's been lionized. To paraphrase (badly):

The zazen posture allows the body and mind to 'sleep' while your awareness maintains a type of wakefulness. Soon you will not only hear the birds outside [birds were a constant theme throughout his talk], but you will hear your hearing of the birds, which is often accompanied by bliss, a non-referential joy. This is the experience of senses experiencing themselves. But the bird outside does not hear its singing in the same way you do, and this is the Mystery: your senses aren't shared by the world. The world extends into your senses but can't be fully known. (The Chinese translate this mystery as "Li", which among other things means "steep", as in, "this Mystery is steep, tough to climb up"). An element of the world is this 'not-knowing', this Mystery, and we are through practice we are mooring ourselves in this Mystery.

Following a bathroom break, he took some questions (there weren't many-- most people seemed to just be smiling in subtle bliss), and then it was done, and we were back in the cold, looking for a hot meal.

It was a fine ending to a day characterized by anything but deep awareness and blissful awakedness. From the moment I arose, it was a day of nonstop distraction, endless blogs and emails and instant messages and task lists and "Hey, check this out!" and rumors and scandal and innuendo. At 2:00pm, when I took a 5-minute meditation break in the conference room, it felt as though I was subsisting in the midst of a swirling tornado of ideas--thoughts, words, video clips, famous bloggers ranting about the lack of transparency at Microsoft, Web 2.0 companies with cool APIs, hipster productivity applications, and everything else.

In reponse, I cleared my deskop of its drain-clogging 200 files, and shot down another 800 files from my email Inbox. I might be going down in the middle of this tornado, but I will go down fighting.