Shinzen helps transform the former Michal Nathaniel Holt into the mighty Yüshin, He of ‘Heroic Authenticity’.
What have we here? Having not posted since a now distant 2019, taking our own time for retreat and rejuvenation, the annual pilgrimage West has almost come full circle, back to a Midwest February Winter. In-between, we walked the earth a bit and celebrated another annual Year-End Retreat with my teacher Shinzen Young. He’s the black-robed cat on the left above, in the Zendo or Meditation Hall where we sit in silence for minutes upon hours upon days. Here however I was happy to capture and honored to witness the activity that is Shinzen imparting a Dharma name to one of his students, the former Michael Nathaniel Holt being dubbed Yüshin, translated as Heroic Authenticity. Heyoka-style, I used to make fun of the dharma-named crew, thinking that while it may certainly work well for Choshin, the former Deborah Blackburn and Shin’s adept assistant, I had the No-shin I wasn’t too sure about all these other lotions, motions and potions. Having observed the sincere, heroic and authentic vibe of the Above Ceremony, I’m now a convert. I came to scoff, but remained to pray.
More on that a year or so away. For now, we’ll revisit one of Shinzen’s best and brilliant dharma talks from the twelve-day silent retreat. This talk, while not for the faint of heart and lengthier than a regular post in this space, was my wildly encouraging take-away, math rant aside. I’ve done my best to edit a bit for engagements sake, knowing reading is a different sort of listening than a live talk, but Shinzen’s artistic take on the consciousness of poetry of both the writer T.S. Eliot and Master Lin-Chi founder of Ch’an Buddhism is pretty standout for the science nerd he is. And it gave me a sense of pride to still be learning so much from my teacher, who is several Mega-parsecs up the road., after all these years. “We have a lot to look forward to,” to quote Shinzen. More stories from the other leg of our Winter travels and upcoming Spring Retreat Season also soon to come.
“Having given you a bit of a preamble on the historical and cultural background of Zen Master Lin Chi and now I wanted to read this quote - one of my favorite from him – as I translate from Chinese in real time for you. The reason I like this passage is that it describes, at first very logically and then very poetically, riding the Ox home (note this is a reference to Shinzen’s former talk on a series of short poems and accompanying drawings used in the Zen tradition to describe the stages of a practitioner’s progress toward enlightenment). It’s also very relevant to a particular issue that comes up over and over again in practice. I’m often asked by people who are going through… weird stuff… it’s a long list – confusion, perceptual disorientation, mental turmoil and so forth - but often associated with going particularly deep. You’ve all heard me say this a gazillion times before, that if someone comes to me alarmed and says: ”I went really deep to where I’d never gone before and”, then 80% of the time I know what they’re going to say next, “And then I became frightened.” Fear then can come up, and as mentioned perceptual disorientation, often associated with different flavors of disorientation. Or breaking up. There’s even a term from Southeast Asia – Bhanga – which literally means to break up or fragmentation. Going deep then, you have these different flavors of disillusion, and disorientation, and fear arises. I think the main reassurance people want to know, especially since it’s often a new thing, is where is all this leading?
Lin-Chi’s Description - sometimes called the Four Fold analysis - poetically describes where this leads. Although initially disorientating, unnerving, and fear producing - you might have the initial sensation that your belly button has been ripped away, the rug is pulled out from under you, there’s no firm purchase - you are scattered to the wind, the boundaries are no longer defensible, and so it seems like a process of disorder. But if you keep equanimity it evolves into a sense of perfect order, a sense of extraordinary order. In Zen, they use poetry to make us exercise our intuitive muscles in order to understand. So the sense that you’re falling backwards off a cliff forever or on eternal TILT, we could interpret this initially as a problem. Or we could hold this as the beginning of becoming intimate with the forces of contraction. The sense of being scattered to the winds we could interpret it as a problem, or we could relate to it as an initial contact with the universal forces of expansion. If we interpret it as a problem, then we have the standard paradigm for meditation – basically that we control the scattered and find a center. And that’s o.k., that’s an o.k. way of looking at things. But there’s another way. There’s a saying in Zen that a good doctor can cure your illness but only an extraordinary doctor can show you how you were never sick.
These early experiences then, that one is scattered or dismembered psychologically and can’t find a center, if you don’t take them personally, it will show you, eventually, the dance of space. This seeming disorder leads to an ordering principle so primordial, it can never be disordered. In the West this impermanence in the Buddhist tradition was equated with Fire, from very early times, starting with Heraclitus, who talked about this eternal living flame that comes down the line through the romantic poets — the living flame of love, la llama del amor — and very much present in Elliott. What at first looks like death — perhaps because it’s the peristalsis of the formless womb that moment by moment gives birth to the self and scene, the inner and outer worlds — is the flame of love that unites the inner and outer scene, the inner and outer See Hear and Feel. In the beginning, there’s the sense that there’s a self here and a world back there, but they aren’t separate at all, there’s just simultaneous expansion and contraction and in between is the steam or foam of form, the technical term I’d use being exceedingly subtle vibratory flow. If that flow coagulates, then we get a perception there’s a thing, a self, inside here separate from the outside. But if those scintillating shimmering champagne bubbles don’t freeze, then there’s no longer anything keeping them from merging into the absolute rest of the Source (++ edit of Shinzen’s mini math rant on the history of the evolution of Zero and going beyond the concept of affirmation and negation++).
Remember — the style of Eliott is to have thee extended metaphors. On one hand, he’s describing the German bombing of England. The bombs they dropped were ironically called Taube, the German word for Dove, the Christian symbol for the Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit that descends, the Pentecostal Fire from the view of Christian mysticism, a force that burns up the sinfulness, but you must be willing to give yourself over to that. You must give yourself over to this thing that seemingly will destroy you, but its breaking up and softening the substance of your soul by burning up all of that which separates. A good thing to remember when the bombs drop… because they will.
“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire.”