My teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi is still alive and teaching at the age of 102. Roshi once said, ‘We cannot know the truth of all this through the intellect alone. We have to be willing to open to all of this in every moment – to give ourselves to every person and everything to the point of dissolution. Then the self that has to be negated has already disappeared.’
Turning towards a more spiritual life is not just a way to become an improved version of the person we are. It is more than that altogether - a casting off, a willingness to shed familiar securities, a willingness to embrace the unknown. To give ourselves away moment after moment. This is not so much a reasoned and sensible step as an instinctive response to a world that feels out of balance. As the contradictions in our collective and individual lives make themselves felt (in depleted resources, climate change, conflict and despair), the very suffering that we have been trying to avoid touches us on the shoulder.
So there arises in us a sense that the answers may lie elsewhere, in something more interior, more subtle. As Leonard Cohen (himself a long-term student of Sasaki Roshi) sings, ‘May the lights in the land of plenty shine on the truth someday.’ And we start to turn inward. Not because an authority has told us to or because we want an improved model of an old car but because we have seen for ourselves that the whole transport system is crashing. We begin to take a long, soft, look at ourselves – at who we really are, at how we really fit into the universe around us, at what we really need for a life that is balanced, whole and fulfilled. We begin to pick up books in the ‘spiritual’ shelves of bookstores and notice articles on meditation in popular magazines. We gravitate to the company of people whose conversation is quieter and more considered, people who speak from the heart. And sooner or later we find ourselves on a meditation cushion sitting still, doing nothing. We take on a discipline. We find ourselves a teacher – someone who speaks to the place where we are but who has also a perspective from further along the road – and we travel with him or her for a while.
At times we drink this in like holy water, at other times we wonder what the hell we are doing. But we keep on going because something fundamental has changed. We begin to move – sporadically and in lurches – beyond the world of convention, beyond attachment to opinion, beyond right or wrong, and into something altogether more open. We walk in the dark towards the place where we belong. And it is too late to turn back for that would mean we would have to pretend for the rest of our lives, something we are no longer willing to do. In this way the great ship begins to slowly turn and flow with the current. Our direction becomes clear; not because we have the words for it but because our deepest longings are instinctively assuaged and we sense our true home.
At the farm the workers from the district have gathered for their Christmas church in the Zendo. They hold nothing back when they sing. When they pray they cover their heads with rough hands. And afterwards they open their plastic packets and share the food they brought with them. It doesn’t matter what tradition you belong to. Whenever you give yourself completely to what you are doing, you are already on the Way.
