And let us repeat that the direct perception of this perfect existential vegetative joy should not entail any fear of death but, on the contrary, should definitely neutralise this; indeed the fear of death presupposes the imaginative mental evocation of death; but the direct perception of existential reality in three dimensions, in the present moment, would cast into the void all the imaginative phantoms concerning a past or a future without present reality. – Hubert Benoit, in The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought
‘Just sitting’ meditation is exactly this direct perception of existential reality in three dimensions. But not many people can do a long sit, this way, straight off.
Does it ever occur to you that it is very odd that we find doing nothing difficult? That we don’t like to find the mind silent, and still. When I assign a seeker the experiment of just sitting quietly doing nothing; or, the experiment of investigating whether their self-images can really get the whole person, the aliveness that is the person sitting on the meditation cushion, it can be scary for the person.
One person said to me, “A part of me thinks that makes perfect sense, and another part of me says, ‘Let’s not go there!’” And, she demonstrated the feel of that by holding her hands in a stop motion, not letting in the suggestion. It was good that she could see it was a ‘part,’ and not the whole of her.
I was listening to the Nathalie Goldberg & Dosho Port CD Zen Howl. On it Natalie suggests that we usually allow our thoughts to dominate our minds, and she says this is because we have of a fear of being here.
She describes her discovery, as she developed in her zazen, that to just sit was frightening. Her heart raced, when her mind quietened down, she says, because being here was too real. That’s one way it happens, the fear of just being here is too real, for a mind used to being cushioned from reality by thought-production.
I am suggesting that we have become used to a ‘reality’ which is mediated by our egocentricity, and to just sit is to open to the big life process, and the ‘more’ which we can’t own, can’t control, can’t predict, and so on. If we can just sit, and not interfere with our experience, we find that we are not something apart from the big, wild, life process. Existence is the big thing that holds you – what Karl Jaspers called Existenz, the source of authenticity – but it’s also what you are.
Considering it from the point of view of giving up our egocentric view of life, another way of experiencing this is that the fear happens because being truly here feels like dying – dying to the familiar kind of self, oneself organised by one’s self-images. At such times it feels like our usual self is going to disappear.
However, when approached skilfully, the practice of ‘just sitting’ (which all Buddhist schools teach) can be the deepest form of self-realisation, because the meditator sees directly that existence is the main thing, not living – and that existence is beneficent. There’s a poem from the Zenrin-kushu, a Zen text:
Sitting quietly, doing nothing.
Spring comes, and the grass grows of itself.
This doesn’t sound possible, to a non-meditator. “How can that be,” he says? “Just sitting and letting life happen, without any preferences? The mind doing nothing?”
It’s so ironic, that the very things that make meditation attractive – a silent, still, spacious mind – are the things that look like death to the untrained mind. I asked a non-meditator, once, what did he think would happen if conscious thought stopped. “We’d die,” he said without hesitation.
However, that was his imagination masquerading as certainty. Silent meditation of the ‘just sit’ variety is a good training for living without the fear of death. We give ourselves a daily practice of ‘simply existing.’ It needn’t be long, if you’re a beginner to could just set a timer for three minutes, and while aware of leg, arms and breathing, just sit without any rules about ‘how to meditate’ or ‘how to be mindful for three minutes.’ There’s nothing you have to change, remove, or add to yourself in that time.
The way I got into this, decades ago, was to feel into ‘just being.’ I knew that this much (at some level, or at least provisionally) was true: I ‘am.’ So, I figured that if I just let the ‘I am’ be here, and feel it without elaborating it into ‘I am this,’ or ‘I am that,’ then I could safely forget about that great bugbear, Survival. There’s a book based on Ken Wilber’s work, called The Simple Feeling of Being. That title says the whole thing, I think. But you have to sit with fear, before it stops being a pest. We can give up fear of fear.
One has to meet the resistance of the imagined self. It resists the imagined not-self. The not-self comes in many forms. We’ve mentioned some. I’ve said that it comes in the evocation of a future moment in which “You will die, if you just don’t get this mind thinking!” It feels like that silence, that stillness, is another not-self which will engulf you. Appreciation of just sitting can be an antidote. One is not appreciating the present, when fear is present. But, you can discover that the fear is just another present experience, and appreciate its now-ness energy.
Three minutes can be interminable, of course. Conceiving time itself creates fear. The fear of death can only occur in that over-arching conceptual framework called serial-time! Does that make sense to you? Any time you are fearing, just ask yourself: “Am I telling a story involving a future?” This is so, even if the future feels like a immediately pending moment; or, if it feels like a general future. However, sitting quietly, relaxing, breathing, aware of your two sit-bones, welcoming fear, this enables the insight that all this commotion is contrived by the imagination; and, like all things, it passes.
Furthermore, you can enter Being-time, which can’t be measured out in units laid out in a line. What peace and joy! Didn’t Jesus say to Nicodemus that man must die in order to be reborn?