Mysticism
Photo by Hali Marten
Zuisei speaks of that which is beyond ordinary knowing and must be known intimately. As she puts it, devoting our full attention to the breath or a koan can be an act of love. Zazen itself is that act of love, an act rewarded in ways we cannot predict.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei’s notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.
Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes,
I sleep—I sleep long.
I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid.
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on.
To it, the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines!
I plead for my brothers and sisters.
Do you see O, my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.
I began writing this talk before dawn on a day so overcast the sky was heavy with its own weight. It pressed down on the water (for I sat facing a lake), and everything was slate grey. The mountains that normally outline Chazy Lake were completely hidden in fog. They were nonexistent, as if they had never stood there, green and noble. It is the best time of day, I think. Those couple of hours before the sun rises and with it, the activity of the mind. So I sat, looking at the water rippling in the wind, and at the swaying branches of an ailing elm whose roots, after years of the bank’s erosion, are half suspended in air. It’s still a relatively young tree but already its days are numbered. I wonder if a tree knows this, if it can feel change in its roots, its branches and leaves.
A friend of mine told me some years ago her four-year-old said to her, “Mommy, aren’t we constantly dying?” And I thought, oh, if only you can hold on to that knowledge, for you will need it. But don’t get me wrong, the morning was not gloomy, despite the sky and the fog. It was very beautiful. And, as I looked at it I wondered what I should write about. And then, across the water, a light appeared on the other bank, almost directly across from me. It was too bright to be a car, too big to be a house light, too concentrated to be a floodlight, too still and too insistent for me to ignore. I suppose it could have belonged to a boat, but if it did, I never saw it.
And as I watched, it split in two—one perfectly round orb on top of the other. It got longer and brighter until I almost couldn’t look at it directly. I turned away for a fraction of a second only, and when I turned back, it was gone, and it was as if it had never been there.
I don’t know what it was, but I know it was there—and then it wasn’t. Like a thought you catch out of the corner of your mind. Or in that moment of waking, there it is and the next instant… gone. And all you are left with is a faint trace, like an afterimage. A suggestion of something you should look at more closely, that is still indistinct.
The poem I read is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It’s one of the last sections, right before those famous lines that Daido Roshi used to love to quote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).” It comes just before Whitman says he has filled and emptied past and present, and now moves to fill a new fold in the future.
Just before he addresses the “listener up there” (God, I’m guessing), asking if he has anything to confide to him. He asks jokingly, it seems, like a mother asks another 4-year-old, caught with her hand in a glass jar and chocolate all over her face, “Anything you want to tell me?”
When I was four, my family and I were staying at a stranger’s house (stranger to me, not a stranger to my parents). I woke up early, saw a big white wall all along the stairs. I had a bag of crayons and I got down to work. I’ve since wondered why I did that. An irrepressible artistic urge, or was I anxious about something? Was there something I needed to get out, make real, make observable, concrete—so I could make sense of it?
William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, speaks about “The Reality of the Unseen” that which mystics of all religious traditions have struggled to see and express for millennia. There’s the world of the seen, there’s the realm of the unseen, and in the border between the two, mysticism converges.
Not that I’m claiming at four I was having a mystical experience with those crayons, though maybe I was. But, maybe I was just feeling bold. Maybe I was uncomfortable and this seemed like a perfectly good outlet.
About fifteen years later, I painted a simple mural on a wall of my college dorm and I didn’t ask anyone beforehand either. I got up in the middle of the night and painted this thing and waited to see what would happen. To my great disappointment, nothing happened. A few people commented on the mural and that was that. It stayed until I graduated. So much for my quiet rebelliousness, it was so quiet, no one noticed.
My own actions aside, I was thinking of the question what if…? The question that artists, mystics, scientists, inventors have been asking for thousands and thousands of years. What if what I see is not all there is? What if I’m not seeing fully? What if there’s another realm, another world, somewhere just out of sight, which I haven’t touched yet? What if trying to express it, I make visible the invisible?
Flora Courtois, a modern-day mystic believes there’s a reality that permeates everything, including the senses. But the senses are limited, so how do I perceive this directly? And she senses that it must be singular, in a way. That underneath the variety of experience, there must be some kind of unifying principle which holds it all together. The Greek philosopher Anaximader called it apeiron “the indistinct.” We would call it mind. We would call it, the ground of being. Just like the mystics of old, Courtois began to have visions. Like a family of cave dwellers, they know there’s more, but they’re afraid to venture forth. But she did, she had to, she knew she couldn’t stay in a cave for the rest of her life.
Another vision: a kind of office building—all right angles and flat surfaces. She spent all her time facing the wall moving an assortment of colored blocks. And in every single room of that building, people were doing exactly the same thing, sitting dully at low metal desks moving blocks around. A window with a vista, an iridescent landscape. It’s always been there, but she never noticed it before. When she comes back into the building to communicate what she’s seen, she has no words for it.
Whitman says: “I don’t know what it is, but I know it is in me.” At the end of the poem he says: I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable. It is a word unsaid; it’s not in any dictionary, and you cannot name it” and then he names it—Happiness . (Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself). Still, this is no ordinary happiness. It isn’t just good fortune or chance.
It includes form, union, plan, eternal life. It is “the natural order of things, the Tao.”
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.
Which means, it is our naming that gives birth to particular things. When they remain unnamed, they remain universal, unified, eternally real. When we unname what we see, we make real the unseen. This is why we sit, hour after hour, turning the senses inward, letting our minds settle, holding them stable. Focusing on one thing, staying and letting go.
This is why, in the midst of so much that needs attention, that needs our care, our work, our involvement, we stop and not do, for a while. This is why we protect so fiercely stillness and silence—to protect the unnamed things. To guard that which does not need guarding, but which will be forgotten if we do not remind ourselves. And paradoxically, a good deal of this remembering happens by forgetting. By forgetting names and colors and sounds and thoughts and opinions. So it is, in the language of the Tao Teh Ching or the Faith Mind Poem, remembrance by forgetting, attaining through non-doing.
We say, at the beginning of every retreat, “Please turn off your cell phones so you can give yourself to the cloister of the Monastery.” Really, what we should say is “so you can give yourself to the cloister of your mind, of your being.” The Latin claustrum means “enclosure;” a place that’s shut in. In a convent or monastery, it referred to a covered walkway where the nuns or monks could take fresh air without being seen or disturbed by others. Interestingly, there’s also a small area in the brain called the claustrum, and its function is to regulate consciousness and cognition, like the conductor of an orchestra. It takes information from the senses in the form of motor, visual, and auditory cues and it puts them together to form a full picture.
As I sat by the lake, I could see the water rippling. I could hear it gurgling as it hit the bank. I could smell the dampness in the air and my claustrum put those cues together and told me they came from the same source. But, if I had chosen at that moment to use my mind differently,
if instead of writing and reflecting about what I saw, I had sat very still and just gazed at the water, if I had let my mind rest in awareness without moving to name…
Evelyn Underhill says:
All that is asked is that we shall look for a little time, in a special and undivided manner, at some simple, concrete, and external thing. This object of our contemplation may be almost anything we please: a picture, a statue, a tree, a distant hillside, a growing plant, running water, little living things…
Look, then, at this thing which you have chosen. Willfully yet tranquilly refuse the messages which countless other aspects of the world are sending; and so concentrate your whole attention on this one act of loving sight that all other objects are excluded from the conscious field. Do not think, but as it were, pour out your personality towards it: let your soul be in your eyes. Almost at once, this new method of perception will reveal unsuspected qualities in the external world. First, you will perceive about you a strange and deepening quietness; a slowing down of our feverish mental time.
Next, you will become aware of a heightened significance, an intensified existence in the thing at which you look. As you, with all your consciousness, lean out towards it, an answering current will meet yours. It seems as though the barrier between its life and your own, between subject and object, had melted away. You are merged with it, in an act of true communion: and you know the secret of its being deeply and unforgettably, yet in a way which you can never hope to express.
I don’t know if anyone else has said it better, what happens in the act of merging, and what is required to get there.
As the day got lighter, and the wind picked up, and the fog lifted slightly, I began to see the hem of the mountains’ skirts across the lake. And the fog slowly lifted, revealing houses and a solitary fishing boat. Then a pair of loons broke the surface of the water and swam very close together. They batted their wings as if they were clapping. And now and then one of them would tip its head into the water looking for fish. And they would look at each other now and then as if discussing the best moment to dive—which they must have found because soon they all disappeared. I saw all this and underneath it all was that something that the earth and all the planets swing on. Outlines of the thing which you cannot see with your eyes. Actually, you can, but only if you remain wholly still and silent.
At the end of our trip, driving on a narrow country road, we passed a church. It was a small Episcopal Church, all stone and spires. And its sign said: “The sermon this morning: ‘Jesus Walks on Water.’ The sermon tonight: ‘Searching for Jesus.’” I could almost see the minister cracking herself up as she wrote the sign.
Many years ago Daido gave a talk called “Jesus Walks on Water.” It became the hands-down best-selling talk on Audible for us. And the whole premise was that miracles like walking on water are just distractions. That a true miracle is to have a cup of tea, boil an egg, walk across a room. In fact, there’s a Chinese proverb that says exactly that: “The miracle is not to fly in the air nor to walk on water, but to walk on the earth.”
It has taken us millions of years to learn how to walk effortlessly. That’s something that artificial intelligence cannot yet do—copy our human walk. It can beat us at chess or math, but it cannot walk like we do. They call this Moravec’s paradox (he was an AI researcher who said we can replicate high-level tasks like reasoning and intelligence because they’re only a few thousand years old, but not low-level tasks like walking or breathing because they’ve taken so much longer to develop). I think of this sometimes when I feel myself getting dull with my breath, or kinhin…
Walt Whitman again:
“There is apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every… human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education… an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of this multifarious, mad chaos…this revel of fools and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call the world—a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.”
I take it that God is that hunter holding in hand all those strings, all those threads—the whole congeries of things, keeping them in check. I see this balance as the pattern of the fabric of the world. The sense that amidst all this chaos, this general unsettledness, there is a clear image, a definite pattern that emerges slowly if only we do not rush in to fill it ourselves. If we can only not rush to fill it ourselves, which is hard to do—to be so innocent of knowledge, of certainty
I think this is, perhaps, our greatest obstacle in this time, our certainty. Maybe it’s always been true. Our certainty about what is right and wrong. Our certainty about what is important and unimportant. About who we are, what we are here to do, and in what manner. Our certainty that what we can see and touch is realer and more relevant than what is not visible. It’s not that it’s unimportant, of course, but how is it important? How is it relevant? How do the seen and the unseen interact?
This soul-sight and root-center for the mind—it’s not that it will fix all of our social, political, religious problems, our personal problems, our family problems. The pattern must be enacted. It must be corrected when necessary. Most importantly, it needs to be seen, it needs to be recognized. But without this soul-sight, without this root-center, we’ll just flail about in our mad chaos, in our make-believe. That’s why we call what we do “waking up.” Waking up from the dream of our lives, from our constant “selfing.” I haven’t yet come across a more difficult task, nor a more fulfilling one.
The last morning I woke up to a clear dawn. The sky, still dark, was tinged with yellow and orange in the east, and the faintest shades of green and blue that were also reflected on the water. A band of fog played over the lake and the mountains stood silent behind it. And looking at the quickening lake, and the silhouette of the elm—this time standing perfectly still—and the dock that seemed to be birthed from water, I thought, “If you could really do what you’ve said so often over the last ten years—‘See things as they are’—every day you’d be weeping. You’d be weeping out of sheer joy and wonder, and also grief for what you’ve missed and continue to miss. And for the terrible, astounding, beautiful, reality of all of it.”
I believe our certainty isn’t actual knowledge, it’s a buffer against that nakedness, against too much reality, too soon. So it’s a good thing that practice takes so long, that we see, in general, so gradually. We are certain until we’re not, and then we’re ready to take a step. And we do and then we become certain again, until we’re not, and then we take another step. And little by little, we walk ourselves into waking.
Explore further
01 : Tao Te Ching (pdf) by Lao Tzu
02 : The Call to Contemplation with Zuisei Goddard