[b]Peter Matthiessen
Zen has been called the “religion before religion,” which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something “greater” than ourselves, something apart and far away. It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to seek one’s own true nature is “a way to lead you to your long lost home.” To practice Zen means to realize one’s existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To “rest in the present” is a state of magical simplicity…out of the emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation. To travel this path, one need not be a ‘Zen Buddhist’, which is only another idea to be discarded like ‘enlightenment,’ and like ‘the Buddha’ and like ‘God’.[/b]
[i]Sure, maybe. But it still comes down to this:
1] how ought “I” to live on this side of the grave?
2] what is to become of “I” on other side of it?
And, here, their guess is just as good as ours.[/i]
There’s an elegiac quality in watching American wilderness go, because it’s our own myth, the American frontier, that’s deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.
Not counting Yellowstone of course. Unless it does.
Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form…the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center.
This [of course] will always only be is as deep as you need it to be. If you need it to be at all.
And as the wary dogs skirt past, we nod, grimace, and resume our paths to separate destinies and graves.
So, how deep do you need this to be?
You mean, Billy exclaimed at last, you mean…his voice rose high and clear…you mean – and he jumped to his feet, and standing there under the giant trees, pointed at himself, a small outraged boy named William Martin Quarrier, aged eight: You mean I just came crashing down into Ma’s under-pants?
My advice: Just say “yes” and hope for the best.
[b]In the book of Job, the Lord demands, Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the eart
I was there! Surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the ‘snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks’ of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe.[/b]
Clearly, one explanation for where religion ends and science begins. And, given miracles, it might even be true.