A Path to a Revelation

More catchup...
Two weeks ago at my Thursday night zazen sitting I was suddenly overcome with a dramatic sense of not knowing why I was there. What was I doing? Why? I've never really shown much interest in this sort of thing. I'm not really facing any deep existential crisis. What the heck is driving me to sitting on a cushion in someone else's living room?

But the interesting thing was that there was a sense of something compelling me to do it. I just didn't know what. I could come up with all sorts of reasons why meditation was a good thing, but they all seemed like justifications for something I already wanted to do, not the compelling reason in itself. And then it occurred to me that I didn't really know why I was compelled to do a lot of what I do. Particularly when it came to my job. What was it about my job that really drives me to drag my family all over the world spending resources I don't really have?

Interesting questions, but no real answers.

Then, last Thursday, the reading at the start of the second sitting started something like "How do you answer people when they ask you why you sit on a cushion?", which certainly got my attention. I don't really remember much about the rest of the reading though because I was distracted by a newly triggered idea. The reading kept touching on the idea of the importance of the 'practice' itself, something which was heavily discussed in the book I had also just finished (On Zen Practice by Taizan Maizumi Roshi).

The reason this set me off is that I had been interviewing students all day long as part of the grading process for lab. And these being typical undergraduates, they had terrible lab books. So I ended up trying to explain to them that what we were really trying to teach them in lab was not physics, but rather the much more subtle art of good experimental practice. I was stressing the art of good lab practice.

During the reading, this idea crashed headlong into the question from the previous week and sparks flew. First, there suddenly seemed like there was a strong similarity between Zen practice and my own scientific practice, and so maybe the mysterious reason behind those two compulsions were one and the same. Second, science is an art, and so is Zen. Third, I suddenly realized that I was strongly attracted to Zen as an art form, both Zen inspired art and just the beauty and simplicity of the practice itself. Zen is art. Science is art. Was that it?

So I tried an experiment. Using the Big Mind technique I've been playing with, I asked to speak to the voice of Art. Low and behold, Art answered, and wouldn't you know it, it answered in a way that is rather similar to Big Heart, or The Way, or Non-Seeking-Non-Grasping Mind. Holy crap! Art is, to me at least, a transcendent voice. And one that speaks strongly to me! I sit because it is beautiful to do so.

I talked about this in the 'open sharing' and when the discussion came around again, the guy to my right made the comment that he too felt a kinship between the practice of Zen and his practice as an artist. But the interesting thing was that he felt like in both cases the practice was a method of making an opening and clearing a space for inspiration to happen, but not a method for making the inspiration, which comes forth spontaneously. More sparks went off, because that is a brilliant way of describing the practice of observational astronomy (and at some level, experimental science in general).

All in all, a very interesting session, and at the end, Manu suggested that I should write something about Zen and Astronomy for their Zen magazine Hazy Moon. I thought about this all the way home on the train, and the result bubbled up spontaneously almost whole when I got home. It took a few days for me to get back to it and finish it, but the resulting essay will be my next post.