After immersing myself in Eastern philosophy in college, I finally turned to meditation in my senior year when a bad acid 
trip made it crystal clear that psychedelics didn’t offer the definitive answer to the deeper questions of life. The first time I entered a zendo, I knew I had come home: The incense, the robes, the formality, the silence, all spoke a language I recognized immediately as my own.
Before long I was sitting hours, days, even weeks at a time. Sure, my knees and back ached, but so what? I couldn’t get enough of the stillness. To use a favorite phrase of one of my teachers, Shunryu Suzuki, I was obeying an “innermost request” that drew me inexorably to meditate, and something deep inside seemed to be awakening after years (or lifetimes?) of sleeping. Or you could say I had fallen passionately in love–not with a philosophy or a spiritual practice, but with some mysterious, beneficent presence that filled my meditations on a regular basis. Of course I got lost in thought like everyone else and forgot I had a breath to follow. But the act of meditating held a freshness, an aliveness, and a magic that was extremely nourishing and precious.
Like a baby discovering the world for the first time, I didn’t have the language or the concepts to describe what was happening, so I was constantly in awe. Then I became an expert on meditation–a “senior student.” I was ordained as a monk and began teaching to others. I read all the Zen books available at the time, which described the rigorous practices and awakening experiences of the old Zen masters. In my struggle to “die on my cushion,” as my teachers kept exhorting me to do, my sittings lost their original spontaneity, wonder, and juiciness and gradually became more effortful, deliberate, and dry. Even when I tried to recapture the old simplicity, I just got tangled up in the complexity of my efforts.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” If I had taken these familiar words of Suzuki Roshi’s to heart, I might never have relinquished the innocence and openness of a beginner’s mind for the narrow authority of the expert’s.
Facing the Unknown
In my subsequent years of spiritual exploration, I’ve discovered that this innocent, open awareness is in fact the awakened, expansive, all-inclusive consciousness of the great masters and sages. As one of my teachers, Jean Klein, often said, “The seeker is the sought; the looker is what he or she is looking for.”
But how, you may ask, can you keep this freshness and innocence when you’ve been meditating for years? In my experience, you can’t keep it at all. Any effort to hold on to some special inner state is doomed to failure, because states and experiences come and go like the weather. The point of meditation is to reveal the sky, the inner expanse that remains when all the clouds disperse.
Unfortunately, our thinking mind can’t find the sky, no matter how hard it tries. Minds simply don’t know how to meditate–though they can go through the motions, pretending. Sure, they do a great job of analyzing, planning, and creating, but true meditation exists in a timeless dimension beyond the mind. If not, meditation would merely be another form of thinking. The real value of techniques is to keep the mind busy and ultimately exhaust it until it finally relaxes and allows true meditation to happen.
