Make America Zen Again
“Zen is boring.” Those are the words of Korean Zen master Seung Sahn. The quote appears in the book The Intimate Way of Zen: Effort, Surrender, and Awakening on the Spiritual Journey by James Ishmael Ford.
Seung Sahn meant that the practice of Zen meditation could get monotonous. Ford picks up on this to make a larger point about how boredom and the fullness that goes with it can lead us down a path that results in spiritual insight and creative inspiration.
America used to be a Zen nation. A gigantic country, it offered people space in which to lose themselves—and find themselves. Henry David Thoreau. Jack Kerouac. Timothy Leary. Essential was an expansive boredom that could put one in a fugue state, receptive to the spiritual flow of the universe. On long summer days in the 1970s I’d sit on the front stoop for hours, eating a piece of watermelon, absorbing the heat and just watching the world exist. Was there skateboarding, concerts, long bike rides, baseball games, the beach, skateboarding and puppy-love make-out sessions? Yes. Yet there was also endless, cosmic boredom.
That boredom came with silence, which offered a path. In The Intimate Way of Zen Ford sees the silence as the doorway to something. Here he describes his first attempts at a spiritual practice:
What I got was silence. It took me a long time to notice that silence was one of my opportunities, perhaps the greatest of them. Part of the problem for me at the beginning was that I had no idea what I was actually seeking. It was some sort of inchoate longing, and the best I could articulate it was, Is God real? For me it proved just a slice this side of impossible to notice there were questions within that question. It would have been very easy for me to take that silence as there is no response and nothing to respond. In one sense, after all, that is what happened. I looked and found nothing. And, as they say, not the good nothing.
He goes on:
I believe many people come to such a moment and decide that’s the end of the search. If we look at the world as objectively as we can, the atheist stance is a very reasonable position. Well, perhaps agnosticism is the most reasonable. What is knowable is elusive, at best. The God that is presented as normative in Abrahamic traditions, a God that intervenes in history, that responds directly to prayers, that has a plan for you and me—well that’s a hard God to believe in given the givens of life. And that silence, that nothing, seems to be a refutation of God. But I also noticed some haunting quality to that nothing I kept encountering. Something I couldn’t see directly but that seemed to appear at the edges of things. Elusive. Now there, now not.
One of the great ills plaguing America, and especially young people, is they’re never given a chance to enter into rewarding boredom. They’re addicted to their phones. They can’t sit for two minutes, much less two hours. Sitting on my front stoop on those summer days in Maryland I thought about God, life, literature, art, beauty, sex. The only break in the action would come when the cute twins who lived next door would appear at the end of the street, taking that long walk back from the pool, hair wet, towels in tow, dressed in halter tops and cut-off Levis. Lovely jet black hair and brown skin. They’d float along, not even a dog barking in the heat, then pass in front of me, look over, wave, and keep moving.
Books were a part of a summer mediation—a continuation of the flow not a disruption. The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, Judy Blume, Robert Heinlein, Huck Finn, the Earthsea books. “If you want to truly sense the breadth of your companionship on the path,” Ford writes in The Intimate Way of Zen, “the first thing is to read. Somewhere along the way in our Western Zen communities people got it in their heads that you aren’t supposed to read. Okay, there are reasons. Words are traps. It’s easy to make them into little shrines, offer some incense, and be on your way. But within the vast literature you will find innumerable companions offering rather useful pointers. Get some reading lists. But don’t settle just for Buddhist texts. Read the mystical literature of other world religions. And more than that.”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea told me about my shadow. C.S. Lewis taught me about the immortality of love.
Ford also advises seekers to “look at art. Really look.” In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it’s notable that the kids take time during their long summer day to visit an art museum, to be still, look and listen. Ford also recommends listening to music and taking walks: “There are those who say Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony justifies the whole of human existence. They might be right. Explore the world’s sacred music. Take walks. Lots of walks. Learn how to saunter as Henry Thoreau suggested. Volunteer in a Catholic Worker soup kitchen. Attend a Quaker silent meeting. Go to an Anglican High Mass.”
I recently decided to leave journalism, a profession that can’t tolerate boredom—and as a result, produces a lot of garbage. “Remember,” Ford observes, “the desire for novelty is as natural as natural can be. And at some point it is harmful to the spiritual life. Enjoy that cup of coffee or tea. Fully. And when you’ve finished the drink, put it down. Be wary of the temptations for a second or third cup. Notice. Be aware. Meet the mystery. Even when it is boring. Especially when it is boring.”