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Message from Henry: Zen Death

June 3, 2020

Today’s message from Henry is a short excerpt from Henry’s path of training as recounted in One Blade of Grass.  We pick up where we left off last week.  Click here to read last week’s message.

It’s hard to know what exactly happened, but when I look back on it, there’s simply nothing. Not even an awareness of nothing. A gap. But not even a gap. Blackness. But not even that. It’s hard to know what to call it. Death, perhaps. “Death” seems to aptest term.

One possible fact: nothing at all. Not emptiness, which might still suggest space with nothing in it, but nothing. Nothing to see, no one to see, no seeing.

It was like a boot kicking out the lamp that had illuminated all things. No vast space: that was still something. Not everything being one: that was still something. No no-self: somehow there was still an awareness of that.

This was reality at last. Nothing. Not even a witness.

The ultimate joke…

… The world rearranged itself like epochs of continental drift, all happening here and now. Huge pieces of the world moving about. The dokusan room flew under the basement, which bobbed up into the sky. The trees across the car park whizzed past the windows. Everything was a merry-go-round.

Zen has its own name for this There’s no shortcutting the process. In order to be reborn, first we had to die.

Message from Henry is published in our June 1, 2020 Newsletter.

Image: Rose by jcx516, Pixabay.com

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