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As a tribal Jew with more than a little religious learning late in childhood, I found myself enjoying the colorful rituals of Orthodoxy, but soon rejected many of the theological principles of monotheism. (One God implies one chosen People) I became interested in Zen-more a collection of teachings than a religion-as early as age 14, but didn't pursue meditation training until 1976, when I had resigned my mental health job. As a member of the sangha, (Sanskrit for local congregants), I continued attending activities at a local Zen center, until some difficulties arose that convinced me to stop coming for awhile while continuing daily meditation. The center has since promoted a delightfully intelligent, jolly, and wise young woman from the membership, Wendy Egyoku Nakao, who is now a Roshi in the same Soto-Rinzai Mahayana tradition as her now-departed predecessor. I am very fond of her, respect her as my teacher, contribute financially to the Center, and she has welcomed me to return. I credit my Buddhist meditation training for yielding a deep feeling of relatedness to all living - sentient - beings. We all share "Buddha nature", the sometimes perplexing but ultimately reassuring convergence of commonality and individuality. In addition to practical reasons (driving conditions) for further delay on my part, I am currently struggling with the question of compatibility of Buddhism with the fundamental canonical "red in tooth and claw" factors in Darwinian theory. I don't want to lose touch with Egyoku. I did publish a paper in 1998 on the subject of psychoanalysis and Zen in the journal "Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought" and in retrospect possibly idealized Zen meditation a bit in that article. As to a truly deep spiritual experience, I refer to the encounter I had with global and celestial realities while on my voyage to Hawaii in 1966, described in a yet-unpublished paper I presented to psychiatric and psychoanalytic colleagues on my near-death experience during a 3-month hospitalization in late 2005 and early 2006. (An old sailor's prayer was "O God, Thy Sea is so great and my vessel is so small!") Here is the relevant excerpt: I don't have the time to describe the details of how I decided that by letting go of the feeling of self defined by my attachments, both positive and negative, I might possibly delay my ending. I concentrated on my many links to those I truly loved--my family, my friends, my patients as well. This, along with my wife's reaction to my request that she accept the idea of my demise, led to an appreciation of the pain they would feel if I chose death, a pain that, loving them, I would not inflict as long as I had a choice. In addition, I was able to get in touch with an ontological, or spiritual, realization that, far from excluding my loved ones, embraced them all in an overall theme of interconnectedness. I shall now turn to that realization, which did more to keep me alive than any amount of self-analysis I could muster. My associations turned to the memory of what I have long considered a model spiritual experience for me, and I will beg your indulgence by describing it in some detail. Always seeking farther shores, I sailed to Hawaii 40 years ago as skipper and navigator of our 36-foot teak-hulled ketch, the Sea Dragon. My brother was first mate and ship's doctor, my daughter was cook and watch mate, my son was bosun, and there were two other teenagers in the crew. It was a merry voyage in late June, as our little vessel rolled, pitched, and pirouetted in the trade winds with 6 to 8-foot regular cresting seas seeming to push us along. One early evening, Marianne went below to cook and serve dinner. I remained at the helm, alone on deck. As it grew darker, I felt lonely, longing to join my happy crew seated at the teak table below, chatting in the warm glow of the kerosene lamp under the skylight. I concentrated instead on our compass course, and the trim of the sails relative to the wind. Quite unexpectedly, I felt a shiver of realization of how I, and we, were in synchrony with the perpetual interactive clockwork of cosmic forces, acting on our little ship by means of wind, ocean current, and wave. The loneliness began to subside. Our planet wobbles in its rotation, so that any fixed point on its surface undergoes changes not only of day and night but also of the times of day and night according to, and responsible for, the changing seasons. Prompted by the action of the sun, the ocean currents distribute warm and cold water all over the globe, and high and low air pressures range over land and sea. The trade winds, blowing from the northeast in the northern hemisphere and from the southeast in the southern hemisphere, reflect both the rotation of the earth and the flow of wind from high to low pressure. Each roll of the boat as the seas passed under us was a reminder of myself as a cog in an infinite assemblage of cosmic gears. These include the random processes of Darwinian natural selection affecting the biomass of this planet. (Of possible interest to psychoanalytically oriented professionals is the likelihood that the largely unconscious mental life of humans and the synaptic plasticity that enables brain and behavior changes to result from psychotherapy are an outgrowth of these Darwinian processes). The "ancient mariners" of our past sought out the trade winds for thousands of years because they pushed those sailing ships toward their intended destinations. I felt a common bond with them. It helped because Sea Dragon was actually a smaller-scale replica of an early 19th Century trader. Another source of wonder on that voyage flowed from Marianne and I taking the 4 to 8 watch, AM and PM, feeling awe and wonder at the darkening of sea and sky at dusk and the faint hues of growing light in early mornings. How many of us have the privilege to behold the subtle changes of light at dusk and dawn for over 16 consecutive days? The sea, always changing in character and hue every few hours, was fundamentally the same. Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose, echoing the basic Zen ontological principle, can be a way of describing the ocean as well. |