Don't Destroy that Journal!

I am reading Lawrence Shainberg's 1995 memoir, AMBIVALENT ZEN for the third time.  I probably won't read it all again -- just browsing this time, finding sections that catch my eye.  It's laugh out loud funny -- and I did remember that.  It's also a lesson in how to turn angst and confusion and pain into art.  The key, I think, is in allowing the reader to know you, the author, in all of your weaknesses.  For me, as someone who did Zen with the same ambivalence -- wondering why, oh why it had to hurt so much, but not knowing any other alternative to relieving my suffering -- I know how hard it is to bring half-conscious thoughts and assumptions to light and put them in words.


But there is one section of the book I forgot and now read with dismay:  where Shainberg destroys years of personal journals.  I do understand his logic -- his idea  that this kind of navel-gazing wasn't ever going to bring him self-understanding -- but I wonder if he ever regretted it.

I have never, thank God, burned any of my journals, and recently I went back and looked at some that are from several decades ago.  I read them with new eyes, and with an eye to solving the personal dilemma that motivated them.  And it worked!  I had told myself a story about this traumatic event living at a Buddhist temple in Japan decades ago, and I saw how my need to believe everything happened a certain way kept me trapped in the suffering.  Without those journals, which allowed me to experience the past (and myself) with new eyes, I would have remained stuck in the story my mind had created about what happened then. 

So, the moral is, don't ever destroy anything you write -- especially not anything personal.  You may never look at it again, but do you really want to deny yourself the possibility that what you wrote will be useful in the future?

Pondering Dogen and Proust

Recently I interviewed the novelist and Zen Buddhist prist, Ruth Ozeki, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING.  I made a commitment to myself to turn the recording of our conversation into an edited, publishable transcript as quickly as possible, but I got caught up in a way I didn't expect.

In the interview, we discussed generally the many quotations by the Zen Patriarch Dogen, and, glancing back through them a couple of evenings ago, one in particular caught my attention:

"Thus, the self, setting itself out in array, sees itself:  This is the understanding that the self is time."

And I realized I knew exactly what Dogen meant:  we are not in time, or experiencing time, but we are time -- and when we touch the "eternal moment," we discover that it is not just another type of moment but that it embraces all moments, all of what we are as eternal being.  There is not one thing called  "me" and another thing called "time."  When we know ourselves as time, we know nonduality.

The other author whose work sets the tone and is quoted in Ozeki's novel is Proust.  And so, reading this Dogen quotation, I felt moved to go back and read the end of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and see if Proust's illumination was the same as Dogen's.  But this took the whole evening because, unlike Dogen, Proust didn't just say it pithily in one sentence.  No, he went on and on, page after page.  And my evening passed with no more work on the transcript.

So today, I was thinking about this, and I realized that the reason Proust took so long to get to the point was that writing was an exploration for him:  when he experienced something new and didn't know quite what, in order to find out, he had to write about it.  And then I realized that my process is exactly the same as his!  In fact, I've often thought of my spiritual practice to be writing, although, having read Proust when I was much younger and more academic in my approach to writing, the similarity never occurred to me.  

After my interview with Ms. Ozeki, we were speaking more casually, and she asked me what my spiritual practice was.  And somehow, being asked this by a Zen priest who is also a writer -- and a much more accomplished one than I -- I completely forgot that for years I have considered writing to be my practice, and a very valuable one that has illuminated many spiritual questions I have grappled with.  Instead of saying this, though, I heard myself reply with an embarrassed laugh, "I don't have a practice."  Then I added hurriedly,  "But I did, in Japan."  And I imagined Ms. Ozeki to be thinking, but to be too polite to say, "But you were in Japan decades ago!"

Well, now I can answer, "My practice is the same as Proust's."  And who can question that?