The Inadequacy of Being Nothing

Whilst staying at Throssel Hole recently a period of working meditation afforded me this deep feeling of inadequacy or uselessness. I felt completely helpless. I bit down on the accompanying anxiety and finished off my dish drying and went to meditate in the ceremony hall. On the cushion my heart was ripped open - this deep cold metallic feeling of inadequacy glimmering in moldy bronze. I sat and I sat and watched attentively.

Anyone who has meditated for any length of time knows that not all meditation experiences are happy or unhappy. A lot of the time they are uneventful and boring. Sometimes we get little clues. The few insights I’ve experienced like this have given me clues into how I should operate as a better human in society. In that, me feeling useless deep down covered up with things and the accompanying anxiety, is not going to be very useful in my life or anyone’s around me. Right now I feel like I'm talking about some kinda heart break and it does feel like that with these experiences sometimes.

I feel this state of inadequacy has been some kind of negative beacon that’s coursed me to react, generally overreact in certain situations. I feel this deep sense of uselessness has probably caused a lot of negative situations in my life. But what really is this insight? A lot of people practice to receive certain states of enlightenment and awakening. I have little interest or direct training in such matters but they seem to me quite useless and through experience of these states or Jhāna ultimately see them as empty and something to work through. Although Zen does have the ten bulls or ox herding pictures, generally from my experience and the teachers and monks I have encountered discourage dwelling on such matters. Buddhism is ultimately not a contemplative philosophy it is a means of or call to action. Any experiences one has through practice should be instantly related to one’s day to day life - referencing them as points of validation to the depths of practice seems not only useless but possibly destructive to the practice. We must use any insights or understandings off our cushions. Someone once asked me how deep I had gotten with my practice. I replied: I once helped an old lady across the road and didn’t think the act either good or bad till I got home later that day.

So while I could get carried away by this insight into the sense of inadequacy I could look at what is really going on here. Firstly who is feeling the inadequacy? Secondly what is inadequacy? Point me towards these things. When I stop for a moment after being carried away by this I see I can’t really point at these things. The best way, for me, is to note these things and move beyond them and get back to my cushion.

late winter 
the green fractures
of snowy hills

_-_-_

loneliness 
in this park
the emptiness of birds

_-_-_

on the prayer tree
tying your favourite colour
another year alone

2 haiku & 1 senryu

morning train -
in every tired face
my tired face

moon dog -
a memory of you
walking beside me

first frost -
a roe deer appears
from the woods

Death Songs

A reflection on death as prescribed by Philip Kapleau’s The Zen of Living and Dying

death as having the appearance of an executioner, that is, as though a murder were standing in front of one ready to strike one down.

A cold breeze that strikes the gut pushing jelly through and into the viscera. Reaching and reaching on down and pressing on a cheap beer ponch. Home lost and found. A jolt in the legs. An awkward twitch - comes and goes. A freezing blue-white that washes the face inside out. Linoleum eyes violet shaded. They falter. The cold sweat blink. The commonness of consciousness drip drops forming a puddle in no form.

Gentle wild flowers bob in compassion realised on some summer courting hills. The town works clockwork beneath us all. A church slowly fills. Traffic forming on the hill. Traffic disappears. You take a cloth out to wipe your brow. Chewing a tall pice of grass - it’s sweet. Something muttered under breath.

A patch, a spot. The horse’s nape. Speckled and spotted. The undrained water on the road reflecting moonlight. The bough gently breaks - no autumn. A splish splash. Murky water distilled. No lotus. The man in the moon homeless. Hoof beats soft in their protein way. They, in themselves, a memory of the driveway framed by rhododendrons. Purple in its autonomous haze.

The wheat harvested. The hands rest on the table. Both cracked. A plate of potatoes steam. The steam collects on the ceiling. The window gently pushed open. A cat sneaks its way in. The fork cleaned on a cleaner bottom edge of a shirt once tucked.

The cotton bud ambrosia. The floating sandals and bathed feet. Clicks of lights. A crunch of floorboards. Something not quite there. A benevolence rooted in pity and despair. Forgotten scents. A memory. Snapshots of the pyramids. A film of sand on the windscreen. 

Mikey goes to Hollywood

Friday 6th

I pick the hire car up from Arnold Clark’s on Allison St. It is past 10 and the morning is slowly slipping away into afternoon. The car is a powder blue Hyundai something or other. It is small and I know it will be hard to handle the further south I get on the windy motorway past Dumfries. On cue the weather starts to turn worse and slowly deteriorate the further south I get. 

Although the weather has started to be somewhat problematic I make it onto the outskirts of Carlisle sooner than expected. I have a notion in the back of my head to visit Hadrian’s Wall - so I do. Bank’s Turret. This section of the wall sits on one side of a valley. The wind howls and shakes. The Roman remains don’t seem to mind me or the weather. 

Curving down the rural leaf sodden back roads I notice a kestrel in a field I bring the car to a halt to watch it. After a while I decide to leave my bird friend in piece whilst doing this I check over my shoulder for a passing car and notice in the adjacent field a rainbow has formed. 

Finally arrive at the abbey. Wilfred, as he introduces himself and John, greet me and show me around the monastery. We make small talk. I make awkward talk. I feel both stupid out of place and strangely at ease. This contradictory theme carries on. The building is cool and calm. 

making my way

to the monastery 

geese overhead

Later as the sun pinkishly sets I reflect on my journey. There seems to be an objective beauty to nature. I’m not sure I should put anymore weight in it than that. What else can I or anyone say about such things? 

After evening sitting I take tea in silence. There is my ego wanting to say something about this and the day; there is also the loneliness in realisation that there is nothing to say about  the day or anything for that matter. 

Saturday 7th

Morning bell rings at 6 am. Not even the birds are awake. We stir beneath the buddha. Great golden solemn and peaceful. The sutras usually chanted at the end of a soto sitting are set to a style of music that is usually reserved for christian psalms and such. It is both beautiful and strange.

morning bell -

up before 

the sun or rain

Breakfast and meditation we are set to work. The job I have been given is to separate any stones that are in a  big tub of black eyed beans. I notice the faith and doubt I take in this is quite similar to my general practice. This is meditation. Is there even any stones? Why in  fuck am I sifting beans for imaginary stones? And so the chattering goes on and on. 

sorting beans -

everything

the buddha

More sitting and more work. I scrub the kitchen floors and try to drive the doubt out with sweat and tiredness. By the late afternoon I feel tired. We sit some more. 

autumn night -

a spider prefers the toilet

over the meditation hall

Taking tea before the final meditation of the day. The sky is outside reflects my tea - black. I sit and sip reading a battered old copy of Basho’s Narrow Road. Pains in my back come and go. 

drenched in silence

every second

in every hour

Sunday 8th

Taking tea. Just 9am and meditation, breakfast and work done. The work this morning included sweeping leaves and cleaning the windows. There was shit from the long gone migratory birds. 

as I clean their shit

my mind shifts 

to absent swallows

The Japanese calligraphy reads: ‘this fleeting body reveals the light’. It was by Keido Chisan Koho Zenji. 

I see the buddha every hour observing the subtleties in the changing light from outside. I notice what I see in that face is actually my own projections. From the tiredness, sadness, happiness is actually coming from me. I see myself in the buddha. Fleeting, but I catch myself looking back at myself now and again. 

I am in and of this world. This world is and of me. The rain seems to have finally shifted. Autumn has hit its stride. Carrion birds flit over the valley the abbey faces. The red and yellows of autumn almost gone leaving just the green of pines. 

Goodbyes and gasshos. I feel a strong sense of compassion from the monks. I do my best to express my gratitude without sounding like an idiot. Taking my leave the rain starts again. All the way back I listen to a christian service followed by choir music on Radio 3

As I enter the outskirts of Glasgow the weather changes. A sun set sallow by the brooding clouds. The christian choir music has now shifted on to more contemporary renditions. A choir is singing The Power of Love by Franky Goes to Hollywood. There is nothing from the day so I cruise home tired from an arduous drive and happy to be home. 

1/11/2015

Autumn rolls along today pushing us further away from something and yet not. That nothing into nothing. The temperature not quite cool yet, even though the doomsday meteorological threats of winter whine over and over. Broken record headlines on cheap rags. 

The song birds wrestle and tussle mid-air amongst sallow and crimson leaves. Their markings pronounced and cut with the ragged death veins of the sycamore, beech and birch leaves. The first bare barren trees. The banks of the white cart river slowly becoming starved as the bramble and hogweed slowly die off and allow the river shore time to recuperate and remember itself. A rested motion. Oblivious the river rolls and the pebbles bob and ebb. The water birds out of site but still in time, some other curve or nook. 

There is something strangely resting yet purposive about the rainbow’s coloured arch that rises over the later midday scene. Staring dumbly at its wonder. Little spits of rain falling. The breeze bobs and crooks as the small birch shedding a few yellow leaves here and there. Cars endlessly motion by. 

Later sun set. Clouds seem to sulk into sallow submission eventually embarrassed willowing away. Children point up and mumble something to mommas that pretend to understand a little. Some diagnosis of love between loved ones. The diagnosis day done. Workers leak out of public transport. Some take short cuts through the park. Some momentarily stop and light cigarettes. Thick blue plumes of smoke mingles with the blue’s of twilight. 

The sound of fireworks sent echoing through the maze of tenements into proceeding early Autumn night. The air cool and heavy hanging over the long evening. At the community green between the houses the habitants are lighting fireworks. Kids howl at the colours, cracks, whistles and pops. Giggling under the heavy smoke. 

clearing father’s house - 

an old photo of my brother 

carving a pumpkin 

Matthew McConaughey’s law

The only redeeming point in that god awful movie Interstellar is possibly the scene between Matthew McConaughey’s character and his on screen daughter, where he explains the reason why he named her Murphy. His daughter, Murphy, is very upset because she believes she was named after something that is bad. 

To calm her down he explains that murphy’s law means whatever happens will happen and that’s fine with us. This clearly echoes the points found firstly in Case 6 of the Blue Cliff Record where Unmon cuts through our fruitless discursive judgmental thinking with ‘Everyday is a good day’. This is a consistent theme or point in zen literature. Another example can be found from the voice of Linji, where he states: ‘I dislike nothing’ or ‘There is nothing I dislike'. 

It is our desire to change reality or to crave things getting better that enact sod’s law or murphy's law. If the grass is always greener then any event or endeavor is doomed. If we just accept reality as it is how can things turn out badly? Things, events, turn out as they are. Events, past, present, future as they are, are beyond judgement and are not even separated by time. Judgement in this instance is not only fruitless but not even nearly accurate. When we want something out of our reach it’s more likely than not going to come to fruition. We crave. We desire - endlessly. Therefore what sense is there in living a life of continuos craving and desiring things that one will never attain? What sense is there in not accepting things as they are? 

This mindset is not to be confused as passivity or a giving up and accepting everything as good whether it is bad or not. It is not looking on the bright side of life. It is, to reiterate a shift away from discursive judgmental thinking. If we accept things as they are we have a better chance of seeing things as they are, right? As Zen Master  McConaughey states: ‘whatever happens will happen and that’s fine with us’.