Being fully absorbed in an activity is enlightenment

Usually I hate to stop reading a book after I’ve started it. Unless it is really bad. I figure that even though I’m not enjoying the book very much, there will be something in pages to come that I’ll learn or be entertained by. So I’ll read more rapidly, less carefully, as I make my way further into the book.

This just happened to me with Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, by Dainin Katagiri. I go hot and cold with this book as Katagiri shifts from interesting practical advice about living to conceptual Buddhist Zen-talk that often leaves me both confused and bored. After speeding through some of the book’s short chapters that didn’t appeal to me, today I was rewarded with some observations about flow that grabbed my attention.

Often Buddhist writers are vague when it comes to talking about enlightenment. Katagiri has a pleasingly simple take.

When you fully devote yourself to your activity, the moment and you come together, creating a kind of momentum or energy. You and your activity become one, and this refined activity very naturally leads you to forget yourself. In a moment you go beyond the phenomenal world of time and space to the source of time, where your life is calm and stable and your activity is clear and pure. When there is no self-consciousness it is called bodhi, enlightenment. Bodhi-mind is freedom. It is the function of mind that is beyond dualistic consciousness.

Okay, I don’t know if I’d call this crystal clear. It is pretty easy to grasp, though. Katagiri is describing a flow state, where the activity being engaged in happens naturally because the distance between the doer and the deed is minimized greatly. Self-consciousness is replaced by simply consciousness. We know what we’re doing, yet it seems like the doing is happening on its own outside of our conscious intention.

Katagiri writes:

When I was a beginning driver, I drove to San Francisco on Route 101. That road is very curved. I tried to drive safely, but I was scared. My eyes were always on the road, pretty close to the car, and the dotted line really bothered me. The lines jumped out at me, like stars in my eyes, so my driving was very shaky. But if I looked away from the car, I also felt very unstable. So I didn’t know what to do — where should I look?

Finally I became exactly one with nature and just drove. Nature was always there, trying to help me, but in the beginning I was not ready to receive that help. So I continually tried to practice, and finally I could accept it. Nature came into me and was absorbed into my driving. Then my driving was safe.

When you are driving safely, your mind is never caught at a certain place. But if your mind is caught, you’re confused, scared. That is just like our Zen practice. In the beginning we don’t trust our practice. It’s a little shaky. We don’t know what to pay attention to: to ourselves, to zazen, to space? We know that we should accept the whole situation, but we don’t know how. At that time all you can do is try to be present in this very moment.

I’m not extolling amphetamines as a path to enlightenment, but bennies (benzedrine) taught me something during my stint working in a cannery during summer break when I was attending San Jose State College in California. My night shift went from midnight to 8 am, or something like that. At first my job was to stand under the sorting/pitting lines, wearing full waterproof gear, hosing fruit pulp that fell from the lines into floor drains.

I hated this. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I hated it. For the first half of my shift.

Then I’d take a benzedrine tablet during my “lunch” around 4 am. The amphetamine rush completely changed my mood. I was totally focused on one thing: hosing the pulp into the floor drains. Doing that became absolutely fascinating. There was no longer any resistance to the job in me. I became one with the hose, the pulp, the drains, the water dripping down on me. It was all good, perfect, no need for improvement. For a few hours I enjoyed a form of enlightenment, being fully absorbed in this activity.

Similarly, Katagiri says:

So just continue to act with total devotion to what you are doing until there is total oneness between you and your activity. That is called shikan, or samadhi. You and nature melt into one.

…Acting with total wholehearted devotion  you know what you are doing, but your consciousness cannot touch action itself because your consciousness is dissipated within action. Then you can go beyond the frame of your body, beyond the perception of your mind, beyond the object of your activity, and see the perfect unity of your life with nature.

If you play the piano, right in the middle of playing the piano, you can see that oneness. If you ski or climb mountains, you can see this. Devote yourself to accomplishing something, and very naturally you experience no self-consciousness. At that time you really enjoy what you are doing. Then maybe you say it was fun. But what you enjoyed is not merely something that gives pleasure to you; there is something deep.

This is called enlightenment. If you are a skier, when you become one with your skis, the mountain, and the snow, you are just the practice of skiing. You are physical posture, mental posture, and breathing, and your activity is in perfect balance. There is no sense of self-consciousness, because you are really one with your skis and the mountain. You, your skis, the snow, and the mountain are all working together, and your activity is perfectly balanced, with no confusion.

If you experience skiing like this, you cannot stop doing it. When new snow falls, you immediately want to go skiing. People say it’s dangerous and they criticize you. They ask you, “Why do you like such a dangerous sport?” But you don’t care because you really enjoy your life with the mountain. You cannot stop, because when you and the mountain are in balance, there is peaceful feedback from your activity; some kind of momentum or energy is going between you and the mountain.

This reminds me of a blog post I wrote in 2012 while on vacation in Maui: “Why biking and other risky activities are dangerous, but not fearful.” I said:

I’m never scared while riding my powerful scooter.

(I usually put some sort of macho adjective before “scooter” when I write about my passion, to differentiate a Suzuki Burgman 650 from weenie scooters like teeny Vespas; nothing wrong with them, where I live it just seems like they’re almost always ridden by young women wearing pink helmets, a demographic I don’t identify with.)

As Krieder says, there’s too much that needs concentrating on while engaged in a risky activity for fear to be present in one’s mind. Even when riskiness raises its dangerous head, dealing with the situation occupies the brain cells which otherwise might scream Scary!