revisiting Buddhist dreams

In my early to mid-thirties, I was in the midst of a pedal-to-the-metal interest in Zen Buddhist practice ... 20 to 40 hours a week of seated meditation while I painted apartments in New York for a living. No one ever took up a spiritual practice because they were so damned happy and I guess I wasn't much different. "Enlightenment" sounded pretty good, even if, like others who use the word, I really didn't know what it was. Still, even without knowing, "enlightenment" was somehow better, and better was better than whatever I had, so ... go for it!

This go-for-the-gold frame of mind included a very intense sense that if I wanted gold, I was going to have to dig ... sacrifice anything and everything. And somehow this brought me to the notion that I should go to a shrink ... use any tool and any means to straighten out my life, replace uneasiness with relaxation and joy ... and, of course, "enlightenment," whatever the fuck that was.

Jack was a big man, an ex-Jesuit who lounged comfortably as we sat facing each other once a week for seven or so years. I picked him (I thought) because his gimlet-Catholic background would allow him to understand my interest in Zen or spiritual matters. That was terribly important in my mind at the time ... even if it was hardly important at all. I had some fear that going to see a shrink might somehow eviscerate or nullify my interest in Buddhism, but would calm my fears with "Even if it means giving up Buddhism, still, I want to get things straightened out." Which, of course, is what Buddhism is all about in the first place.

Naturally, I wasn't about the let psychology become a shifty fill-in for Buddhism ... the kind of stuff you see on the open Buddhist market these days. But simultaneously, since I was going to a shrink, I was not about to dismiss or shirk the disciplines of that realm.

Jack only offered me one suggestion as our relationship shaped itself: "Remember your dreams. Write them down when you wake up." It was hard homework for me: I rarely if ever remembered my dreams, though it became easier with practice. But also, I marvel at the craftiness of the suggestion: Jack knew that I (like him before me) was a smart person ... one of those people who work tooth and nail to explain and control and paper over the discomforts that bring them to Zen or shrinkery in the first place: If you can explain and analyze it, then things feel better ... NOT.

Dreams don't bend a knee to explanations and analyses. Dreams frolic and skip and are full of humor and horror ... dreams are whatever takes their fancy. They are loose as a goose ... the antithesis of the explaining, analyzing, understanding mind that can't figure out why explaining, analyzing and understanding doesn't nail things down. Dreams are like some colt in an open field, running and leaping and stopping short and running some more because ... because ... because being alive is so damned much fun. Tight-assed explanations can go suck a pipe ... this is life, for Christ's sake! Jack, you were a wily bastard!

Sometimes the dreams we discussed would be light and feathery. Sometimes their revelations would leave me lying on my living room couch for the rest of the day ... exhausted, depleted, wrung out, horrified. Sometimes there were no dreams to discuss so we would just talk.

And through it all, I kept going to the Zen center, going to retreats, sitting in front of the wall and focusing the mind to the best of my ability. No-fuckin'-around Zen practice. No-fuckin'-around shrink practice. Go for the gold.

And all of this came back softly this morning when I awoke remembering a dream. I hesitate to mention it because people can get pretty squirrely about dreams, their deeeep import, their mystical implications... especially if the subject matter is 'spiritual.' But I liked the dream in retrospect so....

I was sitting at a table I had built back in the 1970's -- a rip-off Shaker design in which the top flips up when the table is not in use and becomes a chair to sit on. With me at the table were Soen Nakagawa Roshi and his student Eido Shimano (sort-of roshi). It was Shimano who ran the Zen center at which I had once spent so much pedal-to-the-metal time. Soen sat to my left, sort of at the head of the table, and Shimano sat to Soen's left. It was as if Soen were instructing the two of us, though he was mostly addressing Shimano.

Woven into this scene, somehow, was a white rabbit's foot -- an item with magical or quasi-magical attributes that had gotten lost or misplaced. Shimano and I were both concerned about it. Soen was talking to Shimano, going over how things should be in the Zen center, how visitors should be treated. It wasn't a heavy lecture, just a bit of pointing-out. Shimano was listening with that sort of disciplined irritation a child might exhibit when receiving parental instruction ... I know that, but there's no escaping parental instruction, so just keep your mouth shut.

Since Soen didn't seem to be paying attention to me, I fished around under the table and found the white rabbit's foot resting on the shelf that acted as the chair seat. I brought it out and displayed it with some satisfaction: I had found the talisman ... pretty kool, hunh?

Soen stopped talking to Shimano, looked at me and either said or transmitted with his look a kind of avuncular reproof ... "Stop fooling around!" And then he went back to talking about how visitors to the Zen center needed to be treated. I didn't feel as if I had been slapped down. Rather, Soen's transmission just felt like a piece of information that brought magical stuff into perspective. Magical stuff wasn't bad ... it just wasn't very relevant: Knock off the grab-ass!

I awoke from this dream feeling a certain pleasantness.

It was a pleasantness that observed, "Whose table were you sitting at, anyway?"

My table, my life, my rabbit's foot, my instruction, my company.

Poof!

No big deal ... but pleasant enough.