not so sure
I am not so sure, right now, about this Zen thing. In fact, I have aroused suspicions and feel skeptical, quite side-eyed, at this stage in my practice. My newfound doubt didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s directly related to freshly dug earth roiling through my psyche, a necessary but unpleasant healing season that only recently became available. This rich emotional processing was utterly unexpected but I’m discerning what’s needed to support its cycling through and this knowledge has suddenly made me leery of Zen, an odd experience since the practice has been a refuge over the last 13 years. But I’m leery these days because my healing process is colliding unhealthily and directly with a core Zen practice, that of abandoning fixed views.
You see, Zen teaches the human mammal to methodically unearth and examine fixed views. It trains us to develop the ability to hold all views lightly, to become facile at surrendering points of view when they cause unnecessary suffering. This is an exquisite skill to have and I’m grateful for it. That said, in this particular phase of my recovery, the practice of relinquishing fixed views has become riddled with problems. The fact is that mammalian bodies have static and fixed views for exceptionally good reasons, and these reasons are worthy of respect. There are numerous instances in which fixed views should be embraced, even cherished, rather than challenged. I won’t belabor the first and most obvious reason which is, of course, survival of the body. Most of us hope to delay our physical death, and to do that we need to tacitly hold on to our perceptual equipment. We need to cling to those sensory systems that give us a fixed view of stairs, for example, expressly so we don’t topple down them. The Tathāgata would hardly fault a student for being uneager to separate from the very skandhas[1] that make her navigation of the material world possible. I also doubt he would expect students to legitimately divest in the machinations of biological life itself: the production and maintenance of our organ cells, for example, or the reliable engine-beat of our hearts. I do believe that the Buddha, as an accomplished inner scientist, did relinquish tethers to the operations of his own physical body in an absolute willingness to let it drop, to die, but I think he knew that truly dropping the body would be an enormous ask for a typical person and so would have regularly ceded us the comfort of clinging to our organic activities. Point being that I’m not suspicious of Zen for inviting students to practice detachment from the body as I don’t imagine that most students, until we’re in the late-stage dying process, would be confronted and therefore rattled by that request.[2] We’re unlikely to be undone by the treacheries of death meditations[3], so I don’t perceive working to let go of the longings of the body as dangerous per se. What I am experiencing as dangerous are attempts to relinquish fixed views in the emotional and psychological landscapes. Currently in full-body contact with my own tragic history, it’s very clear to me that there are times in the lifespan of a human being when we can and damn well should cling to a perspective—even if that perspective is uncharitable, even if it is skewed, even if that perspective can cause someone else profound, unnecessary suffering. Let me explain.
I came to my first zendo bleary and shattered, a feral adult-child washed ashore after decades of psychological, and often physical, torment. In the zendo, I sat in earnest with the awful texture of that experience and held my seat courageously, almost nobly, refusing to give up on myself. I wanted to see the contents of my mind no matter how ugly or painful, and I wanted to liberate as much of it as I could. I was willing to inquire into any and all of my views on reality so I could stop habitually living them out, thrusting them onto the world without seeing, hurting myself and others. After years of devoted practice and countless fruits from it, I’m now facing a different practice, one in which I do not become disloyal to my thoughts and perspectives but instead I stake them into the deepest and hardest of ground. I declare the absolute incontestability of their existence, without regard for any other actor and without apology for my egoic and binary thinking. I’ve realized in short order that survivors of brutality, torture, manipulation, neglect, and abuse should not be in the immediate business of challenging or relinquishing the points of view of any part of us that bore witness to our trauma. If you’ve been gaslighted for decades, if the truth about what you’ve experienced has been disconfirmed, obfuscated, denied, or distorted throughout the course of your life, you do not need to practice disbelieving your own story. You do not need to drop the narrative. Those of us who’ve endured these kinds of experiences already struggle acutely to have our realities come into focus. A clear view of events is desperately hard won. It takes us years, sometimes decades, to swim out of the murky waters, look back at our early life, and identify and vocalize our version of events. Many of us were children when the trouble began. Many of us were loyal to our predators because we were dependent on them. Most of us felt instinctively, at a primal level, that something in our environments was amiss but we didn’t have words for it. We didn’t know what “normal” was supposed to be. We only knew something important was being lost. Sadly, we couldn’t name it.
My work these days is to fully believe my story. To finally declare that my observations were spot-on, that the awful experience was real, and my knowledge of it accurate and true. I don’t need to doubt my point of view, second-guess myself, or hold my perspective lightly. I don’t need to soften my anger by lingering on causes and conditions. I do not need to examine my expectations around parenting, wondering if they were too high. I do not need to practice compassion for the family abuser or attempt to see the world from her eyes. What I need to do is stand on the ground of my fixed view of pathological behavior. I need to have unshakable faith in my insight into what happened—to me and my father and my siblings. I will continue to be a dedicated Zen student, but at this time of healing, I will not ask what pieces of my self-centered dream to let go of. Instead, I will let those pieces reveal themselves and when they do, I will hold them tightly so they can finally be witnessed by someone who loves them and believes them. Even if every single thing I experience in meditation is a projection of my own mind, I will cling to parts of that projection like I would cling to a tree in a hurricane. Doing anything otherwise—at this stage in the process—would re-injure me. This would be not only irresponsible but cruel, a form of unwholesome self-abandonment. For now, I will let my story be immobile. I will let my view, as partial as it is, become fixed, solid, permanent, hideous and real. I hope one day to be able to hold it lightly, but I’m not urging that day forward. I won’t step into that kind of groundlessness until my system is ready for it, genuinely able to welcome the transformation forgiveness and aperspectivity can offer. That gift may never come to me in this lifetime. Until it does, however, I will drop none of my thoughts on this matter. I will witness them, cling to them, hold them near. I will believe my story.
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[1] Sanskrit: aggregates or heaps: 1. Form: the physical body. 2. Feeling: the sensations in the body. 3. Perception: the sense organs and the models of objects they provide. 4. Mental formations: concepts and thoughts, abstractions. 5. Consciousness: awareness of the composites of the other skandhas.
[2] Although I think there must be a serious psychological problem with detaching from the body as well. Sexually abused or physically violated human beings, many of whom have already learned to disassociate from the body as an act of survival, surely need to practice coming home to the body, not abandoning it again.
[3] Most students will go an entire life of practice without doing meditations on bodily death.