In 2006 I travelled back and forth between Galiano Island and San Francisco, to learn about end-of-life care at the Metta Institute. From Day One we were told that the program—aimed at practitioners in hospice and palliative medicine—was not acquiring skills and techniques, but to undergo a transformative experience. ”Fine with me,” I thought, and then “How did I get myself into this soup?” all the while nodding knowingly without comprehending the distinction.
By year-end, we twenty-five sat once more in a circle to ponder “How has this experience transformed you?” I wept through most of the day just as I had done through most others. “Peter’s weeping practice” somone said, referring to a line from the Indian mystic Sri Anandamayi Ma (1896-1981): “The way to peace is to cry a cornucopia of tears.”
Twenty months have since passed and things continues to shift in me: hard to explain, yet noticed by others. Influenced by Zen practice, I hesitate to intellectualize lest language gets in the way. As Thomas Merton puts it:
“The convenient tools of language enable us to decide us what we think things mean and tempt us all too easily to see things only in a way that fits our logical preconceptions and verbal formulas.”
We habitually don’t see things as they are and, instead, manipulate what we see to fit our preconceived notions. Rather than borrowing someone else’s explanation of truth and reality, Zen urges us to plough the inarticulated ground of our everyday experience. Daisetz Suzuki (1870-1966) used to say that “Zen teaches nothing.” What it does is to encourage us to wake up to what’s right in front (and inside) of us at any given moment. This applies to life’s ordinary events which get filtered through our lenses of prejudice and wishful thinking.
Which brings me to the Metta Institute experience I mentioned at the outset. It appears that “true wisdom is not a replacement of old knowledge with new knowledge but a transformation whereby one [begins to know] what was always potentially knowable” [borrowed from Shannon with words in italics added].
sources: Merton, T. (1968). Zen and the birds of appetite. New Directions, p. 48; Shannon, W.H. (1981). Thomas Merton’s dark path: the inner experience of a contemplative. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, p. 199. image: by Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972).
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