Riders on the Storm
People come to Zen centers seeking something. They come as “seeker”s. Often their visit was triggered by trauma, loss, heartbreak. Sometimes just a hollowness, a felt not-wholeness. Life could be, should be more. More than what? More than it is. They are seeking relief from suffering. Seeking refuge from the storm of life. They are seeking a transformative experience, a life-changing experience. They are seeking enlightenment.
What is seeking enlightenment? Looking for, waiting for, trying to create some big thing to make it all ‘ok’. Bob Marley’s critical lyric, “…people think Great God will come from the sky, take away everything, make everybody feel high…”. Seeking the slap or turning word from the Zen master, the shaktipat from the Guru, the vision of Virgin Mary. Some big thing that will happen to ‘me’. Zen literature contributes to this notion of epiphanous experience. The moment of enlightenment when “the heavens break open and the earth trembles…”. Even the story of the Buddha himself, after years of long and arduous practice, austerities so severe he nearly died, finally experiences annutara samyak sambodhi, ‘supreme perfect enlightenment’. One and done…the ‘Big One’.
It seldom happens like that. But it can. And even when it does, sometimes it doesn’t ‘work’. Like a bird trying to land on paper thin ice, cracking under even such a light load. The weight of the world keeps shattering the clarity of enlightenment. Don’t be mistaken, enlightenment experiences, kensho, seeing ‘one’s true nature’, are great, really great. But they are far from game over.
Enlightenment experience is a seed, it needs fertile soil to sprout, grow, mature, produce its own seed. Otherwise it was just another experience, a flash in the pan. “What was that? It was great!” Just another victory on the field, another orgasm, another acid trip. It seemed remarkable; it was remarkable. But it was…not is. Being snared by the ecstasy of enlightenment experience is being trapped in another incarnation as a hungry ghost, clinging to grasses and weeds.
After Buddha’s annutara samyak sambodhi he lived and taught for decades. His enlightenment was the beginning of his practice as the Buddha, not its endpoint. His initial insights, the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the 12-fold Chain of Causation, all of it, were just the beginning. As conditions arose, he arose with them, as them. No gap. He was neither victim nor villain in the theater of life. Life itself as the theater, the set, the actors… the script. The improv play of life, being written as living!
Our practice is like this. Experiences happen, even enlightenment experiences. Sometimes they offer insight in our human condition, into the suffering which surrounds us. Sometimes they create enough space for wisdom and compassion to arise, to use skillful means, upaya, to ease that suffering. But just as often enlightenment experiences are not life-changing. Just like waking up…nothing has changed.
What is the Buddha waking up to? What are we waking up to?
Life is a life-changing experience.