Ambivalent Zen by Lawrence Shainberg -- unambivalently recommended

I'm still enjoying reading around in a book I read many years ago:  Lawrence Shainberg's AMBIVALENT ZEN (1995).  It belongs on the "Enlightenment Journeys" book review page of this blog, but I'd have to read the whole thing again to do it justice.  Suffice it to say that it is hilarious while also informative with respect to American Zen (especially Rinzai Zen).  It's hard to write a book about meditation practice, especially a practice which you admittedly are not succeeding in, but Shainberg does a marvelous job.  Here is just one of many passages I could quote verbatim:

"Returning to the cushion, I am ocnvinced that everything I seek in Zen is suddenly within my grasp.  All I have to do is push a little harder, cast aside my caution and timidity.  When my half-lotus, as often, begins to feel off-balance, I lean back and pull my right leg onto my left so that both feet, soles up, are high on opposite thighs.  Until now, it has never occurred to me that this posture -- the Zen equivalent of the four-minute mile -- would ever be available to me, but such is my intoxication at this moment that my body seems infinitely supple.  What are physical limitations, what indeed is the body itself, in the face of unobstructed concentration?  My chest pounds.  I am short of breath, so awash in sensuality that for an instant I feel -- literally! -- on the very of an orgasm.  It's as if I have unlocked a vault within myself, released an energy that dwarfs anything I've known before.  Ignoring the pain in my knees and ankles -- how can I call it pain when I am feeling so much pleasure? -- I sit like this until the timer sounds, at least another forty-five minutes.  And then, when I try to move, I feel as if the lower half of my body has been amputated.  My legs and feet are completely numb, paralyzed.  It is unimaginable that I shall ever move them again.  I consider screaming for help until I remember that the nearest neighbor is five miles away.  I see David [his brother] -- shaking his head, reflecting sadly that I'd still be alive if only I had listened to him -- arriving in June to find my bones in a neat little mound on my cushion.  Five or minutes will pass before I am able to take a foot in my hand and move it just a hair in the direction of my knee, nearly fifteen before I can stand erect and take a few steps, more than ten years before I attempt this posture again."

If you liked this passage, you will love this book.

 

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?