This is why such talk is discouraged in Zen.
But keeping makyo moments mum can create other obstacles, notably a sense that you've received special dispensations when you experience them yourself, when in fact all you've done is dream awake. And getting attached to such phenomena can be as damaging to your Zen practice as tales of others' accounts; possibly more so.
Therefore, today I'm going to buck the trend and relate a few groovy trips I've had when I was supposed to be sitting.
Surely the most entertaining was the time I entered satori and had an argument with a bird. The bird – an actual one, who was real and everything – was perched on a tree at some distance and calling boldly, as songbirds are wont to do. And I was rebutting his assertions. (Silently; in my mind.)
I'm fairly certain my opponent was unaware he was engaging in dharma combat. Any road, most birdsong is one-sided communication, meant to warn others of the arse-kicking that awaits if they overstep some invisible territorial limit.
But the experience was very real to me. And amusing; I almost laughed out loud.
A few minutes later I felt my hand open a door to a deep, infinite black cellar, whereupon I shouted into the emptiness, and found great meaning in the lack of echo.
That was just one occasion, though enhanced and intensified by satori. In less cinematic instances I've entered the classic state of oneness; the bliss high; the disappearance of ego and attendant evaporation of the tribulations it catalogues; and the expansive awareness of Creation in all its numberless galaxies. If some of these images crop up on the old blog here, doubtless they're inspired, at least in part, by these lapses in monastic discipline.
But sadly, human beings have long taken such falderal for "visions" or "the voice of God" or "gifts of the Great Mind" or any number of other self-aggrandising misapprehensions. Whole religions have sprung from this crap.
And crap it is. You may in fact find insight in such hallucinations, but only if they jar something else loose in your skull, and only then if you pay close attention to your reaction. It's like a koan; the tale itself contains no teaching. It's the things your head does in response that lead to opening.
There's a famous story of a Zen monk – one of the more prominent Ancestors; I forget which one – who became enlightened after years of intensive practice by a pebble bouncing off his rake. The same principle is in play when you trip out on the cushion. Pebbles hit stuff.
Because sitting, like sleep, ploughs up the silt. And as in your night dreams, clods of it can acquire significance, generally by apophenia. The result may lead to useful insight, but all the action is inside your head, and no more substantial than anything else that happens in there, however spacey and novel it may feel in the moment.
I think most serious meditators experience such flights from time to time. I had them more often in the beginning. In recent years they've become fewer and less dramatic. If such things don't happen to you, maybe you're just better at this zazen thing than the rest of us.
Either way, don't get attached. Smile at the pleasant visions, raise an eyebrow – figuratively speaking – at the distressing ones, and watch both of them pass.
Then return to the breath.
We're not here to be Awesome Zen Masters. The job description is: sit still and do nothing.
And all that 60s-era far-outtedness sounds like something, to me.
(Photo courtesy of Jan Meeus and Unsplash.)
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