I made my way back toward the monastery and noticed a middle-aged man waiting near the entrance; he had his hands clasped, indicating that he would like to speak with me. When I walked over to where he was waiting, he said, "Thank you for a moment of your time. I must make a difficult decision and was hoping you could help."
I nodded my head in acknowledgment.
"When I first came to this area," he began, "I was very happy. The weather was different, I had many new things to see and do, I met interesting new friends, and I was able to find satisfying work. I felt that this place was where I would live for the rest of my life. But lately, I have been thinking I might be happier if I move away. Now I find the weather not so agreeable, and as I become more familiar with many of the people I once admired, I find them to be not as interesting as I once thought. I am tired of my work, and no longer derive any satisfaction from it.
"Why are you distressed by this impending decision," I asked him.
The man glanced down at the forest floor for a moment, "The way I am feeling now is no different than when I decided to move here - I was fed up with everything where I was living. Now I am tired of everything here and want to make another fresh start somewhere else so that I can be happy again," he confessed.
When I asked him why he was uneasy regarding this, it was a rhetorical question, of course. I knew that a new place and new things would certainly make the man temporarily happy because I remembered how quickly I tired of things when I was young.
The man agreed that everything would be fine for a while in a new place. "I will be honest with you," he said, "I am uneasy because I have moved around quite a bit in my life. But now, I'm getting older, and I don't seem to have as much confidence as before. Frankly, I'm getting frightened. My amusements last a shorter period of time after each move, and I don't have as much energy as I once had. Now, the happiness fades more quickly with each move, and lately, I find difficulty in being amused at all, with anything, and with this feeling of boredom and depression, I have no recourse other than continually moving on. I am afraid that someday the moving won't help, or that I will be too sick to move. Then what?"
The man hung his head again, and I couldn't help feel a great compassion for him and our fellow human beings, so desperately trying to find happiness, and so afraid of the emptiness. I was no different at one time.
I remained quiet for a moment, so that the man could reflect. Then I said:
"There are some who must move on, but others are afraid to move, and our attempted escapes enslave us either way. We become older, and when we do, the amusements of life slowly lose their appeal, and although we think it is merely a matter of finding the right town or the right friends, no place or acquaintances can live up to the illusions of our youth. The wide door to our many escapes then begins to narrow.
"Our minds are fearless and open when we are young, allowing us to be completely alive and in each moment without old memories and baggage. We easily adapt to new situations and diverse friends, but as the years go by, we change in many ways, one of them being an increased discrimination and prejudicial judgment rooted in fear, and based on our accumulated experiences.
"We become set in our habits, and when things don't go our way, discontent arises. Time also compresses; ten years in youth will become three years in old age because we have seen, untold times, the things a young person will see for the first time. The journey home is always swifter."
He looked distressed. He didn't want to hear any of this but had no choice. "Please, I know what you are saying, and it is true, but so difficult to accept," he replied. "Do you wish me to continue, for what I say to you might not be pleasant," I asked. "Yes," he said, "of course, continue. I'm sorry."
"Seeing new things and having new experiences will always appear to stretch time, this is why we escape into diversity. Sooner or later, however, we can no longer find anything new or interesting, then we come up against what we have been running from our entire lives; our wall of discontent, and we realize that there is nothing in this world that we can really count on. Then we finally see the truth, which is emptiness. It is this emptiness that we have been avoiding all of our lives with our mindless pursuits."
I hesitated for a moment to see if he wanted me to continue. What I was saying was not uplifting for a man who had everything invested in this world and depended upon it for his happiness. Reality is Reality however, and the way of Zen masters is not to manipulate words; they let the chips fall where they may. For those who have made the turn from the world, to deeper pursuits, this Reality is not depressing in the least, quite the contrary; it is a ray of hope. Reality only hurts in the hearts of those caught in the quicksand of the world. The world had this man by the throat.
He looked up and said, "For some time, somewhere deep inside, I have been aware of the things you speak of, but still, I continue to hope for that perfect situation where everything would be good again. But I'm beginning to realize that it doesn't exist, and all that I'm finding is loneliness. I am grateful that you didn't give me a typical sermon saying how wonderful things are, and how if I would just keep my mind busy and keep a bright outlook everything would be fine. This is what somebody once told me, they went as far to say that I was too pessimistic and that if I changed my mental attitude and began thinking positively, my life would improve."
"Many people who are ready to embark on the spiritual path are told by uninsightful people that they are too pessimistic," I answered, "and the fact is, from a worldly point of view, they are unenthusiastic, because they have stopped fooling themselves. They have begun to understand that anything acquired is easily taken away, and that anything found is easily lost.
"Therefore, they see quite clearly the danger of relying on the shifting sands of the world for their permanent security. This revelation, however, leaves them in a dilemma; they don't yet have Truth or Reality to fall back on, they only see emptiness, and being unprepared to face this emptiness, this Shunyata, they are never able to see through to the other side. Seeing their dilemma clearly, however, moves them out of the darkness so that they can begin to move toward Reality." You are caught in the experience of physical existence and unable to transcend it. Until you do, as long as you attempt to escape the Reality of physical existence and the suffering it entails, instead of standing firmly like a warrior and facing it, you will never acquire the passion necessary to see past earthly existence."
His hapless eyes indicated that I should continue.
"Those who remain in darkness and are incapable of seeing clearly require help of a different nature than you, because they are too terrified to look at reality. My close proximity to them without troubling their minds, and without frightening them with truth, is the extent of the assistance I can offer. In the mean time, they will still find pleasure in their expectations, but the results of those expectations - the realty at the end of those dreams - will someday devastate them. Then they will grow old and outlive their fantasies, and having nothing left, will either fall into great depression and anger, or succumb to some weak finality; some belief promoted by this group or that group, and never have the satisfaction of knowing for themselves."
"I don't want this to happen to me," he said. "I won't surrender to that."
His 30 years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Theravada Buddhist monk.
He lived at Wat Pah Nanachat under Ajahn Chah, at Wat Pah Baan Taad under Ajahn Maha Boowa, and at Wat Pah Daan Wi Weg under Ajahn Tui. He had been a postulant at Shasta Abbey, a Zen Buddhist monastery in northern California under Roshi Kennett; and a Theravada Buddhist anagarika at both Amaravati Monastery in the UK and Bodhinyanarama Monastery in New Zealand, both under Ajahn Sumedho. The author has meditated with the Korean Master Sueng Sahn Sunim; with Bhante Gunaratana at the Bhavana Society in West Virginia; and with the Tibetan Master Trungpa Rinpoche in Boulder, Colorado. He has also practiced at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the Zen Center in San Francisco.
E Raymond Rock (anagarika addie) is a meditation teacher at: 