Below are direct quotes from the essay except where bracketed, which indicates [my own editorial insertion]. Emphasis is my own addition.
My quest to understand consciousness took me to a cave in New Mexico and then deep into the cosmos….
Anyone who thinks the contemplative life amounts to a form of quietism or a retreat from the world’s suffering should spend some time shadowing Joan Halifax, the Zen priest and anthropologist…. she [led annual treks] through the mountains of Nepal, bringing a cadre of doctors and dentists to remote mountain villages…
I don’t know if Halifax has shed the last remnants of her ego—she would say she hasn’t—but the selflessness she manifests in the conduct of her life is something to behold, a reminder of what the exploration of human consciousness can lead a person to do and be. This, too, is a Buddhist principle—that overcoming one’s own small self should lead to greater compassion for others, and that the suffering alleviated when we transcend the ego is not only our own.
The first thing you notice about Joan Halifax is her undiminished beauty—the shining blue eyes and the easy smile and the generous sweep of white hair. That she’s 83 is hard to believe. She moves …with a graceful authority…
What was the point [of housing me in solitude]? Why did Roshi Joan want me here rather than at … the main house, with its creature comforts…
It took me a while to realize that for Halifax, the practice of Buddhism was everything and theories were of little use or consequence. …
I asked her to describe exactly how her factory for the deconstruction of selves operated.
People come on silent retreat for a week or two at a time and spend most of their days sitting in the Zendo—the meditation hall—facing a wall or tracing walking meditations on the gravel paths that meander through [the retreat’s] gardens. (I’d witnessed this glacial parade of earnest zombies.) …Halifax has written, zazen, or sitting, “is not a mental exercise, a thing you do with your mind.” Rather, “it is about being radically open to things just as they are, not grasping at or rejecting phenomena, but simply being present and at ease with moment-to-moment uncertainty and groundlessness” and “letting openness or not-knowing deconstruct our version of reality. It is the method of non-method.” Just sitting, upright—that, apparently, is all there is to zazen.
“Living in silence means you can’t start a conversation, so there’s no opportunity for self-presentation. Then there are the rituals that organize the day. These draw people into the group and relieve them of having to make decisions. Rituals take the place of a certain amount of volition.”
But it is the agony of meditating for hours at a time that finally breaks down the ego. I asked her what people meditate about. “Mostly they ruminate and plan,” she said. “They do that until they can’t stand the thought of themselves any longer. You’re just sitting there for hours on end, and the entertainment value of watching the same reruns all day long diminishes over time. Pretty soon, it becomes unsustainable; they’re exhausted and uncomfortable, and that’s when they drop in.”To “drop in,” Halifax explained, is to enter a state of being completely present in time and space, experiencing “the sense field”—the world as it appears to our senses prior to thought—without conceptualizing, and surrendering the sense of a separate self. The recipe was simpler (and much less appetizing) than I would have imagined: To transcend the self, force yourself to be alone with it long enough to get so bored and exhausted that you are happy to let it go. Poof!
[Think] of the Zen retreat as an initiation ceremony, or rite of passage, and like most such rites, it involves the metaphorical death of the ego followed by rejoining the group. … “There is a lot gained when we give up the self,” [Halifax] noted. “We break out of rumination. We discover we’re part of something larger, and we learn it feels good to care for others.”
I came to understand that Roshi Joan had sent me to [silent retreat] because there were no words or ideas she could offer that would teach me as much as simply being completely alone with myself in the middle of these mountains, with no phone or any other screens (and no toilet).
One morning, I decided to try a meditation I’d learned from my time with the Nepalese French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who has written extensively on the self as an illusion. To see this, he suggested I explore the rooms of my mind, one by one, as if searching for a thief—what he called “the thief of self.” Looking within, I found all sorts of mental stuff but, as Ricard had predicted, none of it qualified as a self. Rather, I witnessed a parade of unbidden, free-floating perceptions, feelings, images, sensations, and thoughts, but I could locate no thinker of these thoughts or perceiver of these perceptions.
The longer I sat, the stranger these appearances became, as the space of my awareness became an empty stage. Picture a circus ring where all kinds of images might suddenly and inexplicably appear out of nowhere. Why is there now a bank of three old-timey telephone booths with men inside making calls? And what’s this hammer suddenly coming down on a knee?! Or that automatic glass door swinging open for no one? These stray images were then blasted away by a blazing sun that completely filled the space of awareness before transforming itself into a gigantic eyeball—a sighted sun with a black circle of iris. …these dreamy, hypnagogic images were more curious than frightening, probably because it was easy enough to chase them away, to change the mental channel, simply by willing it.
…After a day or two, I fell in love with the silence, and the voices stopped. I found the handful of chores completely absorbing, as if nothing in the world mattered as much as splitting firewood, fully occupying my attention and leaving no remainder of thought, self-consciousness, or anticipation. The distance between living and meditating had narrowed to a sliver. When I described the satisfactions of my routine to Roshi Joan during one of our hikes, she smiled: “That’s the sacredness of the everyday.”
Something was happening to my sense of self, and it seemed to have everything to do with what was happening to my sense of time. I had never given much thought to the relationship between self and time, but it explains a lot. When the self is deprived of time past (memory) and future (anticipation), it melts away. Absorbed in meditation, or in my chores, or in watching a small herd of elk graze in the meadow below at sunset, I could feel my time horizon shrink. The feeling was unfamiliar…. But now, for longer and longer stretches, I was simply here, being, with no thought of the past or the future.
… The miraculous everyday fact of consciousness loomed larger than “the hard problem” of how a brain produces subjective experience. …Had I “dropped in”? … To stay in that state of unthinking presence was like walking a tightrope only to suddenly look down, panic, and come plunging back to Earth.
Except once, when I managed to look not down but up. I had woken up in the middle of the night and stepped outside into the cold night air. There was a new moon, and the only light in the world was that of the stars, which were out in force, brighter and more numerous than I’d ever seen them, but also strangely different. Instead of dotting the same black scrim, like pinholes in a two-dimensional theater backdrop, the stars were scattered through space at dramatically varying distances, a vast swarm of them filling every last corner of an even vaster, more numinous, and emphatically three-dimensional darkness.
Even stranger, the … space between the stars had flipped to … a soft, almost palpable blackness that embraced the stars and reached all the way to Earth, enveloping it and me in the same intergalactic blanket. For the first time, I could see—no, could feel—that the stars and I shared the same infinite space. …allowing me to see more of the galaxy and space itself than I ever had. There was hugely more of it and less of me, rendered infinitesimal in the presence of this immensity.
This moment of being fully, freshly present to the universe stopped me cold and made me wonder if all my hard thinking about consciousness had missed something crucial about it. The more I focused the narrow beam of my attention on what consciousness is and what it does and how it came to be, the less of it I was actually experiencing—whatever it was. My time … beneath this night sky showed me the price of my impatience with the mystery.
“Always keep a don’t-know mind,” Roshi Joan had said to me. Sometimes not knowing opens us to possibilities that knowing, or trying to know, or thinking we already know, closes off. … [M]y days of solitude in these mountains had shown me, that wider circle of light, that numinous lantern of awareness, is still available to us, so long as we can break the spell of self and its distractions.
Consciousness is a miracle, truly, and remains the deepest of mysteries, yes, but it is also so very simple that it can fit into a sentence: I open my eyes and a world appears.
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