Preamble
Soto Zen is quite resistant to talking about kensho. Outright discussion of it can be met with disapproval. The risk is that someone in the middle of their practice will hear the stories and conclude that the point of Zen practice is to have a kensho experience or “get enlightened”. Soto is especially insistent that you are already enlightened and living just as you should be, in this present moment, with no further effort necessary – so having a shiny exciting goal in your head is just giving you a very compelling thing to be attached to, which you’ll probably have a hard time letting go of.
And yet here I am writing this.
I am writing this because I never really liked the secretiveness. My Zen sangha was otherwise refreshingly open and honest, but there was this one thing that people were reluctant to speak of. I found it a little patronizing. Perhaps I am pulling the ladder up behind me - I didn’t get hooked on hearing someone else’s kensho story, and probably I benefited from that. I don’t really know.
But occasionally people ask, and it’s an experience that was important to me that I like to share, so here I am. Consider yourself warned: you might want to take a moment right now to reflect on whether reading this might give you ideas and attachments that could frustrate your journey.
There is one other thing that needs addressing.
I am not better than you. This is an account of a hella strange psychospiritual experience that, yes, was cool in the moment. Yes, it fundamentally and permanently changed my worldview in an instant. But this isn’t a brag. I do not claim to be “enlightened”. I don’t like discussions of whether someone is “enlightened”, as if it’s a fixed property of a person. I don’t think it is.
Some people like to nitpick and fiddle over definitions of enlightenment, stages of enlightenment, etc. I don’t. If pushed, I’ll say I’ve had an enlightenment experience, but this doesn’t make me some kind of superior spiritual being, or wise in a way that someone who hasn’t had a kensho experience isn’t. I am still a doofus.
Kensho is an initial awakening. It is a glimpse, not a magic bestowing of ultimate spiritual maturity. I have met a number of ordained Zen teachers, presumably who have had kensho experiences, who have behaved terribly, including psychological, spiritual, and sexual manipulation and abuse. Further practice - ongoing, and in my opinion indefinitely - is required to integrate and deepen the insight. I consider myself far from any kind of integrated or deep insight.
Okay, that’s enough. Storytime now.
My kensho experience
My kensho experience happened in the early evening of December 11, 2021, on retreat with the Greater Boston Zen Center, at Mercy By The Sea retreat center in Connecticut.
My Zen practice leading up to the retreat
I first walked into the Zen center in April 2015. For a few years I’d been agonized by depression, suicidal ideation, and the gnawing feeling that there was something I was looking for - what is the point of my existence, who am I supposed to be, what is it all for? - but I couldn’t find it - am I crazy? come on man, there’s no capital-M Meaning to life, only sucking it up and doing what you can to keep it at bay, put it away - no, but I can’t - dude, you’re crazy, this is stupid –
My therapist eventually said: “you should learn to sit with your emotions and not freak out about them. Try meditating.” So I did.
I was, and remain, a pretty bad meditator: for the vast majority of my Zen career I meditated once a week, at the Zen center, with absolutely no home practice. The meditation practice worked on me, in terms of making me aware that my attention was something I could pay attention to, refocus and manage; but it was the philosophy and life orientation that resonated with me deeply, even from the beginning. I gained the willingness to turn towards difficult feelings; the ability to accept they were there; and - intellectually at first, but then very slowly making its way into my spirit - compassion for myself.
I loved the practice. The chanting was my favourite: the bells, the high ritual of a chant leader, everyone’s voices together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes wildly dissonant. The fiddly protocol of knowing when a bell means get up versus staying seated, which hand position to use when you walk, when to bow as you leave the zendo and when not.
The sangha went fully remote via Zoom over COVID, and I couldn’t stand it; but when we reconvened I threw myself into the practice even further. I graduated from playing instruments to becoming a practice leader, helping run the evening sits and giving orientations to newbies; I led the chants; I ended up as board president of the nonprofit.
And yet I’d never done a retreat. The most intense practie I’d had up until then was a Zazenkai, an all-day sit, which for me was eight hours of relentless, unmitigated boredom and resentment, but nothing else.
In early 2021 I quit my job and took a year off work. By the end of the year I had done an enormous amount of personal growth and found a lot of contentment and equanimity in my life. A retreat felt like the right thing to do.
Sesshin
Sesshin (Zen retreat) is a highly regimented experience. Even a short retreat, which runs Thursday evening through Sunday morning, is tough: you are up at 4.30am, alternating between sitting and walking meditation in four 2-3 hour blocks over the course of the day. There is protocol and ceremony for everything: morning tea service, greeting the teacher, private interviews, bedtime liturgy.
And mealtimes… mealtimes are A Whole Deal. There is a specific way to set out your bowls. Your chopsticks must point this way and your spoon must point that way, and they reverse directions at the end of the meal; everyone times their eating to take their last bite at the same moment; but none of that starts until you’ve done a long series of chants and gestures beforehand, except for dinner where they’re all performed silently; and don’t forget to save a food offering for the hungry ghosts, but not too much because they have tiny thin necks and you don’t want to choke them.
And despite it being my first sesshin, I had also agreed to be Jisha - a teacher’s assistant - so I had to monitor the location of a stick that represented one of the teachers, as it got passed around the room to indicate who was next to go for a private interview.
I loved it. At first.
And then… there’s only so long you can stare at the same carpet and contemplate who would choose such a weird pattern. My precious rest periods got hijacked by interminable meetings where the people ringing the bells and managing the food got excruciatingly anxious over the precise sequence of what happens when, as I sat in the corner seething with resentment, thinking “just… let… me… shower…”.
The early mornings. The boredom. The lack of sleep. The unfairness of my rest periods being consumed by other people’s anxiety. It got to me.
Thursday rolled into Friday. The group did a walking meditation outside, on the beach, at sunset. I missed it because I had to make sure the teacher-stick was with the right person.
By Saturday lunchtime I was pure rage.
I flew into a teacher interview and lost it. “What is the point of this practice? What the fuck am I doing here? We get up atrociously early. I don’t even get to shower, let alone catch up on sleep in the rest periods because my job is to watch a stick move around the room. I missed the sunset walking meditation yesterday. I sit, I walk, I sit, I stare at the fucking carpet. All of this, and nothing to show for it. Why the hell am I here? What’s the point? Why shouldn’t I leave, right now?”
A pause. The teacher is a kindly guy in his seventies: calm, warm. “You’re close. I can’t point to it, not directly. It’s like” - he draws on the carpet with his finger - “there’s a point, but you can’t draw an arrow to it. The best you can do is draw tangent lines on a circle that’s around the point. And maybe with enough of them, you can get the impression of where the point is.”
“Keep going.”
So I did.
Kensho
Afternoon rolled into evening. I got luckier with the timing of people going in and out to see the teacher and managed to join the group for sunset walking meditation.
As we walked on the beach, the waves matched my mood: they were crashing in hard, stormy. There were looming, black clouds on the horizon as the sun went down. I reflected on my retreat experience.
I had come here to deepen my practice, to get somewhere, to gain some insight, or have some experience. Something. Instead I’d had two days of being bored, and tired, and frustrated, and tired. So deeply exhausted that I could feel it in my soul. And now it was the last evening - we’d do a morning sit tomorrow, but we’d be done and out by 10am. It was basically over.
I wasn’t going to get what I wanted out of this retreat, and I didn’t want to accept that.
“Can you accept that?” I asked myself. “Let it in? Feel it?”
“No! No no no no no! I don’t want to! Reeeeee!” Resistance.
Okay, that’s fine. I hold the resistance, cradle it gently.
“Can you accept it now?” “no no no no no!!!!”
And so I went, back and forth. An attempt at acceptance; resistance; holding the resistance.
In Zen we say everyone is a Buddha. “Buddha” means something like oneness, everythingness, maybe universe-consciousness, and to be a Buddha means to be it. Not part of it, but it in its entirety. I am a Buddha, you are a Buddha, the dog is a Buddha. Maybe you don’t feel like it, but you are.
The sun kept sinking. I kept walking along the beach, single file, in the line of people meditating; left hand in a fist, right palm wrapped around it, resting on my belly.
Everything I had learned, that over years had become part of me, written on my heart, even occasionally managed to put into practice. Defusing from my thoughts. Turning towards the difficult feeling. Accepting it’s there. Allowing it, without resistance. Self-compassion.
I found acceptance. “I’ve done this whole retreat and not gotten anywhere. And that’s okay.”
“I can still be a Buddha-
💥
I am All Buddhas
The whole universe spoke. “I” was not Hussein, the 35 year old guy walking on the beach; “I” was everything, past, present and future. Everything that has ever been and ever will be, across all of space and time.
Finally, I understood. All of it: it all made sense. I had known all along: my mind knew, and my heart knew, but they didn’t know together, and now they did.
I looked at a tree. I was the tree. I looked at a flower; I was the flower. I looked at the ocean, thought of a small patch of it, and immediately had the sense that it was too big for my mind to hold. I thought of my sangha, my Zen comrades walking with me on the sand. Could I be one of them? An overwhelming sense of taboo: yes, you could, but it’d be a violation. A smile. Of course!
Later, it became my turn to see a teacher. I sat in front of her, smiling, laughing through tears. I understand now! Why am I crying?!, I cry-laughed.
“Why do you think we have tissues on hand?” she said, grinning and passing me the box.
“So, uh. What the fuck do I do now?”
“Ah, we have a saying for this: after enlightenment, laundry.”
Vindicated! I was right to have been looking for so long - there was something to find. The point of all this was to be Hussein. And being Hussein just meant being in the world, doing whatever I did. There was no way to get it wrong, nothing to get wrong. A little jello nub wiggling around next to other jello nubs on the outside of a massive jello ball. It’s all one jello ball, but the nubs tend to forget that and think they’re separate, lonely things. But they’re not, and one of them remembered that, remembered that it was actually the big ball and not the nub.
The shift in my sense of self, from this fleshy person thing to the entire universe lasted strongly for a few hours. I was the pipe in the ceiling; I was walking down a corridor and I was the corridor I was in (trippy!).
Later in the evening we did another walking meditation, and the leader took us in a circle around a big dining table. She fell into step behind the last person, and the circle closed, with no clear head or tail. I looked down on the group from somewhere outside my body, appreciating this, and then noticed that one of them was about to stumble.
“Shit! That one! Pay attention – it’s your job to drive him!” So I swooped back down into my body and caught myself before I fell over.
Later that evening I saw a shooting star, and laughed at how cheesy the whole thing was.
Aftermath
Zen retreats end with a warning: you’ve been in a container, you might’ve had some intense experiences… don’t make any big life changes for a bit. No divorces, no tattoos, no sudden emigrations. Let it rest, get back to your normal routine, try not to talk incessantly like a crazy person to people who don’t understand, and remember to ask how they’re doing too.
The shift in sense of self remained but died down over the next few days. I would be going about my business, and then trip back into it - I described it to a friend as “like stubbing my toe and being thrown into everythingness”. Another part of this shift was seeing myself not as an entity, but a process, a way of being in the world; a verb instead of a noun.
A couple of days later I drifted into a very unpleasant experience: I felt like I was stuck behind my eyes. It was as if my sense of self was still identified with “the universe”, but was now trapped inside a human body. I could think “I need to go drink some water”, and then I would notice the body I was stuck in get up and refill the water glass: it knew how, without me telling it to. Interesting, but dissociated; it felt horrible. I got in touch with one of my teachers, who kicked it over to one of the other teachers, who contacted his teacher and then called me back to say, essentially, “this is normal and will blow over in a day or two”. And it did.
Now what?
Now what indeed!
The experience took me from saying “I practice Zen” to “I am a Zen Buddhist.” On the final day of the retreat I realized that I was now vegetarian - not so much for ethical reasons, just because if I am the same thing as the chicken, then eating it feels like cutting off my arm and eating that. Not unethical so much as stupid. This realization happened to me - I was not a willing participant and consider myself a victim, because meat is delicious and I miss it.
I also understood that the fundamental discomfort at my core - the “who should I be?” question - had been permanently answered; and with it, the root of my depression addressed. I have not had depression or suicidal ideation since. Now I know the answer to “who should I be?” is “Hussein!”, I have a different question: what kind of person do I want Hussein to be? But instead of being an existential problem that I could get right or wrong, the new question allows for exploration, taking an interest in my own values and how I might choose to be in the world.
This led me to take the Zen precepts in June 2022. Taking the precepts consists of a period of study, where you reflect on each precept and decide what it means for you; and a ceremony, where you take the precepts, share your interpretation, get flicked with water from a pine twig, and are given a “Dharma name” that the teacher thinks represents your character. Mine is tetsu gen, 徹元, which translates literally as “penetrate source” and I interpret as something like “dedicate yourself completely to understanding the root-origin”. I got it because I ask a lot of questions.
Not too long after taking the precepts, I ended up leaving the sangha. The phrase “Zen drama” might sound funny but it sucked, a lot, and left me largely without support integrating my experience. I have mostly been away from sitting meditation practice since, though I occasionally drop in to a group I’m fond of.
I still consider myself a Zen Buddhist. It is written on my heart and will never go away. It’s hard to imagine anything else having more of an impact on me - a life partner? the birth of a child? - but possibly not even those. It is the foundation of how I see the world; for me, it is everywhere. The practice has forever changed me, liberated me. An incalculable gain. Nothing I can ever do is capable of expressing the depth of my gratitude.
I used to be afraid of death. Not any more. “What about my legacy, my contribution, the things I wanted to do with my life?” - these questions miss the point. The purpose of my life is to live it, from beginning to end, and having lived will mean I have done that. When it ends, “Hussein” will exist in all the ways that I have interacted with everything, the pattern and its infinite ripples of consequences rolling on. If, separate from that, I also have a soul or consciousness, it will be delighted to return Home, to be part of the jello ball - not that it was ever anything else.
Nowadays I am back to self-ing. I still think about “I”, I am inordinately concerned with the things I want and don’t want, and most of the time I think of myself as a noun rather than a verb. But I know, very deep in my bones, something immovable. It is trite to say “it’s okay”, but that is what it feels like: even amongst all the things in the world that are Not Okay, that are worth our attention and care and trying to Do Things About, the process that is the universe is continuing, doing exactly what it should be doing. This even includes the days where I’m sad, or tired, or freaking out, or grumpy.
I’m going to leave you with a piece from my old sangha’s sutra book. It, for so long and more than anything else, was the thing I needed to hear; I returned to it again and again, particularly in hard times. I still do: I have it framed by my door.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some laundry to do.