This is the fifth day of this March. 2025, seven day seshin. And we're continuing with Flora Courtois, her book and experience of enlightenment. And just picking up from where we stopped yesterday, where she's describing how she she so wanted to share her experience with others, but she didn't know how I she didn't really have the words for it. She says, My first attempt was with my friend Suzan, a piano student, to her, I said something like this. Su, there is a way to know the universe and your soul and yourself as one whole all at once. If you can do that, you won't have to strain so to learn it will come naturally. We talked frequently, until I realized I was not really communicating this to her at all. Another day, near the University Health Service, I ran into my old friend, the psychiatrist, Dr Rafael. How are you getting along? He said, sometime, if you have time. I said, I'd like to come in and tell you about a wonderful thing that's happened to my vision. He gave me a long quizzical look. Well, he said, I wouldn't worry about my vision if I were you, you're looking awfully well. And off he went. She then says about this time, a paper was required of me in a general science class. My background in any physical science was almost non existent at that time, but I recklessly decided to try to put down on paper in the objective language of science, what I felt I had discovered Through changed vision. The paper was titled one law. It was another unsuccessful attempt. My professor commented that he had no idea what I was talking about.
How inadequate words were to even suggest this experience to anyone else. What seemed to me, the most marvelous and significant of experiences seemed hardly of passing interest to others.
The same goes with trying to explain to someone who has never done zazen before what it's like, or what seshin is like, and even among fellow practitioners,
it's difficult, isn't it, to put into words, And that's because we're directly encountering our mind. You
uh, she goes on. I came to feel that to talk about this personal experience was to expose to shallow interpreters. Temptation and disrespect what was most worthy of respect, I decided then never to speak of it again, until I was confident it would be appreciated. Autumn came to Ann Arbor, bringing with it a carnival of colors and sparkling air, wandering in the fields and along wooded paths, sometimes lying on a grassy bank, looking up at the stars in the evening, I felt completely at home in a indefinable way. I felt the presence of others who understood, and I felt confident that so long as I lived with this open vision, everything else would somehow be right and just as it had, had always been intended. So it came about that the changes described here, so strange and incredible at first, gradually came to seem quite natural.
So this, this word that she uses, open vision, was a label that she came up with because she didn't have another terminology to explain her experience or put it into context. And she says, at first it was so fresh and exhilarating she was also filled with immense gratitude,
and gradually it just became ordinary, natural and just things as They are,
What changed was her relationship to thoughts, including her relationship to this sense of self and other,
she now had a clear view of the ground of it all.
Then she says, for the next year, for the next year and a half or two I lived each day with joyful awareness. It never occurred to me to think of myself as in any way enlightened. I'd never heard such terms as enlightenment or religious experience, let alone Ken. Show if I had heard of Buddhism at all. It was simply as an obscure Asian religion. You
so this experience she had, it's not limited to people who practice Zazen. It's not limited to those who go to seshin, nor to those who do seshin In person.
For those sitting online don't. Underestimate
doing zazen at home, and also don't underestimate daily practice outside of seshin and practice off the mat, practice in activity. Don't underestimate that
there's no special time or place that's reserved for waking up.
Though, I gotta say the conditions of seshin are ideal and
and that the structure of it And the schedule are designed to support intensive practice and
and as for the structure of sejin, even the smallest things that we do can make a really big difference, like Zen do forms whenever we place our hands palm to palm and bow to the Buddha figure On the altar to one another
before eating a meal upon entering the Zen doksan,
doing it with an undivided mind, we're activating our true nature Just in that brief moment of resting one palm against the other,
but It's important to do it wholeheartedly and with sincerity. Knock not kind of half ass, not loosely cupping the hands,
such that the palms don't connect. They don't unite, but also not pressing them too firmly in a rigid, tense kind of way. I
doing that vow that Gu completely, that's our true nature, functioning
along with every other brief moment we're in,
Flora goes on by now, I had married and was working in Detroit. During this time, I read a book entitled the Bates method of sight without glasses. The author, Dr Bates, impressed me as having an unusual point of view about seeing I was struck by his frequent use of the term central fixation, and wondered if, by any chance, he might understand about open vision with a little investigation, I discovered. Dr Bates was deceased, but that his widow lived and carried on his work in New York City, I resolved to go there and talk to her. After saving up for many months, I made the trip to New York where I visited Mrs. Bates. She was a kind, friendly person. We had a most pleasant visit, but this experience taught me that she was talking about local site while I was struggling to express an entirely different dimension of vision. So I'd never heard of this, this book or author before, and looked it up. It turns out that Dr William Bates was a rather controversial figure in the history of eye care. As a ophthalmologist, he came up with this method for improving eyesight that involved staring at the sun for extended periods of time without glasses or UV protection. So today, his treatment is widely recognized as a kind of quackery.
She goes on back again in Detroit, I was becoming ever more dissatisfied with my job as a professional writer in the business world. Quite naively, I decided that by becoming a psychologist, I might find a way to deepen my own experience and also bring it to others. I had long since concluded that organized religion offered me no help in this way, once again, I returned to study at the university, now changing my major from English literature to psychology. Here one day, seemingly by accident, I picked up a copy of William James's varieties of the religious experience. William James is a poet, and with a shock of recognition, read for the first time descriptions of the kind of experience I had had. This led me directly to Asian literature when I read the Dao De Jing, and soon after my first Buddhist Sutra, tears filled my eyes. They struck such a familiar chord, the sutras seemed to speak with unveiled clarity. Mandalas fascinated me. I wondered if anyone living had had such an experience as mine, or if mine were some kind of anomaly. So we can see this is now turning into her coming to the path story. She had been on the path all along and didn't know it. I
she goes on after we had moved to California, I continued my exploration of Asian literature, reading my first book on Zen, discovering the works of such Western mystics as Meister, Eckhart, John of the Cross, William Blake and the text, the Cloud of Unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing. I felt a special affinity with Eckhart and Blake, the term mystical seems to me to be a misnomer for these authors expressing, as they did, so deep a grasp of reality. The cloud of the unknowing is. A 14th century work that's tied to Christian mysticism, and all these writers are part of that tradition.
In Christian mysticism, God is understood as that which is transcendent, infinite, encompassing, everything,
as opposed to some old, bearded white guy up in the heavens. I
don't know very much about Christian mysticism. But I have read some of Meister Eckhart, and there's this wonderful quote from him, and it speaks to this, this new vision that Flora describes. He said, The I through which I see God is the same I through which he sees me and
she continues in about 1950 I took a course in comparative religion from a Buddhist scholar at a nearby university. At this professor's home, I met a writer of popular books on Zen Buddhism. I listened in rapt attention as these learned men talked at great length about Buddhism, yet no mention of practice of any kind was ever made.
It must have been about this time that I began to feel a subtle pride in knowing firsthand what these authorities apparently knew only in theory. I began to think of myself as someone who had had an experience of enlightenment and was therefore secretly special, like one with an old sickness that had lain dormant for many years, I developed a new kind of egotism, more pernicious than ever before, because it was accompanied by a sense of possessing special and superior knowledge.
So at this point, she now has a conceptual framework. She
a word for it and an explanation for her experience.
And she felt prideful because she latched on to the thought of having achieved something, having attained something very special.
And as an attachment, it is a kind of sickness,
sometimes referred to as the the. Stink of enlightenment.
It's so easy to become attached to expand. Experiences we have in zazen, experiences of the past, past seshins. And this is the case for anyone who has practiced for some length of time. It's a risk that we all face, and it is a product of ego conditioning, and that's why ongoing practice is essential.
Aside from having pride in yourself or in your practice, you might grasp at making something happen again. It could be as simple as having a really good round of zazen, or a period where your mind felt incredibly still, completely forgetting About Time, wanting more of that that's that's clinging you.
Or it could. Could also be the opposite, having a so called Bad round of zazen, one of those rounds that feels like it will never end, physical pain, emotional pain,
finding yourself and trying to plan and plot maneuver around so that it doesn't happen again. Don't want to go back there. Of course, you can't go back there. Conditions change, everything passes, both both that, which we call good and bad pass, and that's the nature of mind.
Any attempts to man manufacture your experience. I uh, that's, that's the stuff of thoughts.
Flora goes on my college career, which had been interrupted so many times by the need to work by war time and the demands of family life, was finally completed at a Southern California College in a psychology department of good academic standing in those years, for a student to make a serious study of any aspect of religious or mystical experience was not acceptable. The closest I came to doing so was to write several papers, referring to the extensive literature on authentic religious experiences from all times and places, once or twice. I pointed out such accounts in the works of the poet William James to a psychologist or psychiatrist on the teaching staff, the reaction was invariably to label them as psychotic episodes or regression in the service of the ego. Finally, I became interested in a subject which seemed related to the opening of inner vision, that is to changes in perception during states of deep relaxation, since one of the clearest recollections from my own experience was of the wonderful release of all tension the
at graduation time, the head of the Psychology Department encouraged me to go on to graduate school at a nearby University to develop this interest in studying for a doctorate. For the next few years, I became immersed in a high pressure graduate school machine. The compulsion to be scientific seemed too narrow and constricted everyone's perspective, leading us all to an obsessive concern with counting and measuring. No Orthodox Church was ever more rigidly doctrinaire the necessity to regurgitate quantities of busy work to earn good grades. Made original work virtually impossible. In over 20 graduate courses, I made what seemed to the faculty to be an impressive record of a grades for what seemed to me to be a mediocre quality of performance.
This is how a lot of people experience their school and work life, working hard, trying to prove your worthiness in the eyes of others, trying to get ahead, trying to work your way up the food chain,
can feel like a just an exhaustive and meaningless pursuit.
So flora, she became skeptical about what she was doing with her Life.
A few paragraphs later, just skipping ahead a bit, she says, I became increasingly of two minds about all this. On the one hand, stimulated by the university atmosphere. On the other, disturbed by a sense of wandering further and further off course. To the extent that I had become academically successful, I had become, in a deeper sense, unwise, unintelligent, unfree and UN loving.
Her wonderful experience and. Where did it go? It faded. She found herself getting entangled in thoughts she wasn't yet practicing zazen because she only knew about it on the conceptual level.
She only read some books about Buddhism, so she didn't have a method for integrating her awareness into her daily life,
which requires daily zazen
and seshin.
She then says, this busy life was suddenly interrupted by the necessity for some major surgery and a prolonged convalescence, all the knowledge I had accumulated in these years could not be compared to that which I had learned In one measureless moment long before every formal subject led to the same abyss. So a decision was made, and against the advice of every interested faculty member, I terminated my studies for a lesser degree, a masters, and return to a quieter and more ordinary life. Now, I spent more time with my family, read and wrote poetry, helped my husband when needed, with business and worked occasionally as a volunteer in the community, but in those intellectually busy years, I had built no inner bulwark against a deep despair that I began to feel in the early 1960s
I grieved that the priceless opportunity I had been given In my youth somehow had been dissipated and wasted. All my efforts to communicate what seemed most important to me had failed. Never, once had I found the way to pass it on directly to anyone else, not even to my family. There seemed to be no one to whom I could even speak of this. I longed for guidance, both religious and practical. I also long to be a member of a truly religious community, when, for one reason or another, I tend I attended one of our community's churches, all I seemed to find was an organized effort to protect and distract People from the awesome struggle and dangers of transformation. I The awesome struggle and dangers of transformation.
Over a period of several years, during my long nights, I lived with that profound sense of abandonment called by St John of the Cross, the dark night of the soul. On the surface, my life looked successful enough, but on the deepest level, I felt I had failed in living every day in joyful awareness,
a source of tender patience and calm strength to my family. And others as well.
This phrase, dark night of the soul,
refers to a period of intense, intense inner struggle. Often it involves feelings of confusion blankness
of meaning, loss of purpose and
in seshin, It can take the form of confronting fear, anxiety And a self doubt,
and it's part of the process. For many it's a necessary part of the process of looking into the mind. If you find yourself in that state, the thing to do is to relax right there. Don't run away. Don't abandon it. Look, see what's there you it.
Within darkness, there is light.
And of course, within light, there is darkness.
Flora, then says, my only hope lay in my confidence that what was lost was here all the time and beyond time, nearer than I knew, I realized finally that to continue to indulge in regret was also a subtle form of egotism. The enemy was this very suffering separate self, just as I had done years before, I began to sit alone again in quiet concentration, but my life was a busier one, more preoccupied with family duties, I sat Less intensively and more intermittently than in my youth. I i for some time, I sat alone, and later learning of a group of people who sat regularly together in meditation, I joined them. Then I heard that a Zen Center had been started by a small group in Los Angeles. So at last, I came to zazen and to the heart of the matter, sitting in the Zen do, listening to my zoomi Roshi read from the ancient texts. I felt my exile was over. I had returned home. I. I now know that to have had, in any measure an enlightenment experience is only a beginning, even to speak of how of having had it is to risk losing it immediate. Immediacy is surely everything. Immediacy is surely everything. When I read that line, it reminded me of a verse by the Polish poet, this lava szmorska, one of my favorites. It's a poem titled The three oddest words.
When I pronounce the word future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word nothing, I make something, no non being can hold I
Flora ends her account by saying this to be re enlightened at every moment forever requires eternal vigilance. How can it be otherwise to continue to practice such awareness at every moment is implicit to the very nature of enlightenment. Thus practice is reality. Reality is practice. This was the indispensable pillar that had been missing from my life. Now, like a slowly rising tide, quietly less dramatically, the timeless vision returns the infinite possibilities for joyful awareness open at every moment to This I now vow to give all my attention. I
