On Enlightenment - Part III

Meditation. Panic. Raindrops. Nabokov. A four-part series, 12/3/2024 - 12/6/2024.

Photo by Sven on Unsplash

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This happened so long ago now, my twenty-two-year-old daughter hadn’t been born yet, if such a time was possible. I was with my wife and two-year-old son. The three of us had taken a walk in a park near our house. We’d been out trudging through damp Seattle woods, chatting, stepping up and around fallen trees. This was during my first year of daily meditation. I hadn’t yet depleted my store of beginner’s mind. I carried high hopes for the coming enlightenment – all that.

Some of you will understand the idea of walking as meditation. This is, critically, the intentional, focused way I plan to walk to Finisterre—when pain, boredom, and the bottomless need for approval and attention don’t get the better of me.¹ When you walk as a meditation, what you do, you do with attention, you do with care, you do with intention. What you say, you say thoughtfully, but without making all of this obvious to anyone, at least as I understand it. You might seem quieter to the people around you. Better yet, you might seem like you’re fully listening to them, because there’s a chance that, in that occasional fleeting moment, you have been.

And as I was about to get into the car, I saw a maple leaf by the driver’s door. In the middle of that green leaf was a single, silvery-white water drop magnifying the green plant-velvet behind it.

When I was a kid, you’d come across magazine ads for Bausch & Lomb contact lenses. They pictured bright leaves with water drops bunched on them. One of the droplets was secretly a contact lens. If you stopped to take a look, you’d learn your job as the advertisement reader was to pick it out. I found it impossible not to try, a class of beginner’s mind in its own right.

I remember thinking about that ad as I picked up the leaf from the gravelly parking lot. I remember reaching down to pick up the leaf by its thick maple leaf stem then holding it up to look at it more closely.

There is something spiritually clean and precise about a droplet of water clinging to a leafy backdrop, the way the droplet glistens and shivers, the way it magnifies the delicate network of veins on its velvet background, the nervous tension in the trembling meniscus. And that afternoon, on a whim, I tilted the leaf to the water droplet’s straining point, knowing that at any point the drop would break free from its angelic architecture and release itself. I was edging the drop up to the spill point. I tilted and tilted and tilted and then the water droplet broke

across the surface of my mind.

For whatever time it takes a water droplet to break free and slide, that leaf and the water droplet and my mind became one single thing. I was not watching it. There was no me in the conventional sense. I was a water droplet exploding across a leaf. Whatever space I was centered in was gone. For the tiniest fraction of time this happened, in the narrow window of microtime it takes a droplet to break apart and roll free, I was liberated. How long did it last? A third of a second maybe? A hundredth? No time at all? I can report back to you that as a sensation it didn’t feel “good” or “bad.” There was no sense of pleasure in it. It just happened.

I don’t know how else to put it: I’m not some weird guy.

Put yourself in my shoes. Imagine how relaxed you’d have to be to pick up a leaf with a water droplet on it to check it out. You’d have to be pretty dialed down. You’d have to be with friends camping or something, hanging out around the fire late at night, maybe having a beer, the kids still up when they shouldn’t be, laughing in the tents, their flashlight spots moving across the nylon, and, with all right in the world, you might pick up a leaf next to your green folding chair like I did that afternoon, simply to look at it more carefully. Imagine you’re in that moment and mental space.

I was in that space.

Then suddenly it was like I disappeared, or maybe I expanded. It is very, very hard to say what happened exactly, but it happened.

And oh, how I have tried to pick that lock again but nothing! It is a closed door, and now I can’t look at a water droplet without wanting it to explode across my mind. I have stared stupidly and fixedly at leaves, dumb and mute. Not a ripple. I’ve watched water droplets trickling idly down the glass shower door and along the windows of my car during the long waits for the ferry ride home. I have listened to the sound of faucets.

But no.

Nothing.

Silence.

There are only regular old leaves and normal water drops and the stubborn continuum of me staring at them waiting for something supernatural to happen.

But for a moment, like a flying fish, I broke the surface. I saw the something you have to leave the ocean to see, but before I could even look around, I was back in the water again. Maybe a hand plucked me out of the water and threw me back.

I can see now that no matter how fast and furiously I navigate within my ocean, the ocean remains invisible to me. I can see how I can swim around the ocean for the rest of my life and never break the surface again, expending all of my energies and stores of hope.

And yet, they say, my friends from the Zen Bookshelf say, tantalizingly, that the surface of the ocean is right there. It is in front of you. It is so simple. “Look at me!” they say. I’m seeing it right now as I write! Green ocean and blue sky and white clouds. Herons and gulls and a hot sun! So simple!

Wake up, wake up they admonish you, and maybe just to prove you’re listening you do something, anything, swimming ever faster in flicks and darts and half-circles around nowhere.

Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?

It is not it.

Later on in a Zen book on drawing, I read an account of somebody drawing an old man lost in artistic concentration when suddenly and unexpectedly they felt like they were the old man. There was no me artist object here and old man subject there. The artist became the old man. Not figuratively. And it wasn’t a substitution. He wasn’t imagining the world from the eyes of an old man or having old man thoughts – or miraculous as it might be – he wasn’t relocated into the world of the old man. He was no longer watching life occurring as if on a movie screen at the front of the theater. He was the movie screen. And Everything was playing.

So, the Zen writer knew.

I must have pointed at the book in amazement. It was the same thing, my water droplet fractional moment, perfectly described.

I wonder often when people describe the dying of the self or being at one with things if they live in a continual state of that moment. It hardly seems possible to exist with the inner outer boundary completely broken apart like that, although to be honest I wasn’t there long enough to get a sense of what the functional possibilities might be. I don’t really know what to make of it more than I’ve written.

I have no news from that world, except to say that it is the single experience that validated all later investigation into the idea of enlightenment being more than a nice way of acknowledging somebody is deeply wise, of enlightenment being as a lofty credential of wisdom, a spiritual PhD. For a flash, I wore that robe as if by accident or theft.

But, you know, dissolving boundaries aren’t worth the trouble and thirty years of staring at a cave wall. There has to be more to it. There has to be something else you’ve seen or know when you notice the kingdom of God at hand. At hand. Those can’t just be words. As a child believer, I stumbled over them and I felt they were too easily skimmed by teachers in the Church. Jesus wasn’t talking about the distribution of tickets for something to take place later, although we’ve largely settled on that.

The Jesus of the Bible wasn’t talking about that. Don’t skim the scary parts. He was clear something was at hand, and repeatedly so. It was something at hand, not coming soon. Yes, there are other interpretations, but if I was still a Christian I would know better than lean into them.

The at handness was the whole beautiful point of it. That is Good News. It’s a living experience, not a hereafter experience. It’s an assurance for something in the now, not the later. I take him at his word on this. And he made it, frankly, possible, attainable, and worthy of striving for. He gave a promise of something unknown to you, but very real, and here. Somehow. Some way.

Some of you will see the kingdom of God before these temple walls fall...

Something is going on here and now, and you should pay attention during this bizarre opportunity for consciousness that life is, because there’s a play within a play.

There is a mystical aspect to life. The moment with the raindrop moved me gently from a place of there might be to there is. And I have a further sense, a deep hunch, that this odd riddle holds the secret of my other little problem, my “smallest problem in the world” problem – and likely each and every last one of my other problems, too.

So here I am – again – on my road to Finisterre. I’m going to start again every morning at the beginning. Every day. For ten weeks. Beginner’s mind. I’m going to do everything I can like I’m playing Zen guitar. I’m going to play the same thing but more slowly and then more slowly again, like my Buddha in the brown robe instructed.

This walk to Finisterre is a way of cleaning up my guitar case as best I can. I’m going to find the stillness that seems to make everything else possible, because if I can’t find it dedicating ten weeks to it, I’m probably never going to do it. That’s just a fact. The years are going to race on by me here, and sickness and death are going to overtake me, and I’ll never know. That fact scares me enough to really hunker down.

I’m going to pick a meditation plan and stick to it even if it is the worst plan in the world. I am going to tilt, tilt, tilt my life in one direction, dialing down further and further every day until something in the angelic architecture slides suddenly, sideways into

One.

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1. This essay was cut from the final edit of Finisterre, the story of my 1000-mile journey along the Camino de Santiago. Link to full manuscript here. I’m leaving the Finisterre references as-is. For the readers of Finisterre, they might be interesting context. There are some other references to things like “the smallest problem in the world” that won’t be clear here. I’m leaving as-is and avoiding the over-engineering twenty years on.