GONNGGGG… My late Zen teacher, Dr. Edward Wortz, had a wonderful iron bowl. Of all the meditation bowls I’ve ever heard, it made the sweetest, purest sound as Ed struck it to begin and end our meditation periods. That sound, accompanied by the fragrance of incense settling in the room, took the hard edges off the day, inviting you to be present. After striking it, Ed might offer a few words of guidance to start off the period, his voice, like the bell, warm and calm. It reassured you that there really was a way out of suffering, a path of wisdom and compassion. And then, as day gradually turned to night, the birds still singing, children playing under the trees, the cool evening air coming in through the open windows, we began our listening meditation.
The initial instructions for the listening meditation were simple: sit still, relaxed and alert, and listen to whatever sounds appear in your environment. Listen with “bare attention”; that is, without adding any thoughts, labels, or judgments to the sounds. Listen, in Ed’s words, as “sounds come into existence, stay for varying lengths of time, and then vanish…as does all experience.”
Sometimes Ed used the bowl to illustrate later stages of the practice. As we sat there with our eyes closed, he would strike the bell and say, “Listen to this sound [the bowl went GONNGGGG] exactly here. Now listen as it decays [gonngggg].” After several moments the gonngggg would finally disappear, replaced by the birds, or crickets, or a car passing by. Ed would say, “Now, listen! Exactly where the sound was listen to the no-sound.”
My ears would strain, reaching for the no-sound. My brain would strain, too, trying to figure out exactly what he meant. No-sound? What is the sound of no-sound? Did he mean the absence of the gong’s sound, or the memory of it, or was there some experience he wanted me to have? Gonnnngggg… God knows, I tried to hear it, the no-sound. The gong would fade and fade and fade until it was just a faintly crackling vibration. Sometimes my attention would be right there when the last note dropped out, but…so what? The sound was there; then it wasn’t. I just didn’t get it.
That was seventeen years ago. The room where we meditated — to me it was a beloved and sacred room — was the office where Ed conducted his psychotherapy practice in Pasadena, California. To get to his office from the sidewalk, you’d push through a vine-covered gate that creaked, then walk past a small patch of roses and a cool, moss-covered wall until you reached the side door. It got so that just going through that creaking gate signaled a change in consciousness. It signaled the opportunity to spend an hour or two in the company of a remarkable man. Funny, he might have appeared to all the world as just another sixty-year-old white male, but if you paid attention you would have seen that his countenance shone with wisdom and compassion. His features seemed designed for that very purpose.
“Sounds come into existence, stay vary- ing lengths of time, and then vanish…as does all experience.” I heard Ed say this countless times. Gradually, as I became a Buddhist, I realized that he was giving us a gentle lesson in impermanence: everything has its life in time, then vanishes.
The room vanished first. Ed’s wife, Melinda, developed Alzheimer’s at the tragically early age of fifty, just as she was completing her Ph.D. in art history. At about that time, Ed was diagnosed with prostate cancer. In spite of these pressures, he maintained his practice with the same equanimity and grace he always had.
But after several years he could no longer care for Melinda at home, so he sold their house and moved to a smaller place in Santa Monica, to provide her the highest level of care. As he could no longer accommodate the meditation group, Shannon, my wife, volunteered our house in the Hollywood Hills. And thus, from one day to the next, Ed’s beautiful home in Pasadena, the office, the creaking gate, the birdsong in the trees-all vanished from our lives.
Fortunately, we had a nice room in our house, too. It had been recently renovated, with a fresh carpet put on the floor. The windows looked out on a scruffy, undeveloped hill that produced a nightly symphony of sounds. Birds, crickets, coyotes, dogs, frogs, and owls all sang to sharpen our listening. Ed came across town every Tuesday to lead us, still using the bowl to point towards something within our own awareness. He called it “the ground of listening” — the awareness from which sounds emerge and into which they fade. Phenomena come and go, he said, but awareness abides. It is “stainless,” reflecting whatever appears without prejudice or residue, in the way a pond reflects the overhead flight of geese in one moment and a passing cloud in the next.
For ten more years I listened. Sometimes, for seconds at a time, I would virtually disappear into the listening, but still there was no grand breakthrough, no deep realization of the ground of being. I felt guilty for being so obtuse. “How many are the no-sounds?” Ed would ask. Crap, I didn’t know. One? Infinity? One for each sound? I floated some answers, but Ed merely chuckled in his affectionate way. Clearly, the ground of listening had something to do with my own awareness, that much was given, but what made it so special? Stainlessness? I still didn’t get it.
Of course, there were distractions. My screenwriting career over the years had brought me mostly misery — misery and money — so I decided to get out. I cashed in our savings, borrowed money on the house, and put it all in the stock market — just in time to watch the NASDAQ crash. We lost it all. We went from being well-off to being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in the course of one year. My meditation practice helped me cope with the transitory nature of wealth, but it wasn’t a great time. Plus, other serious personal and family problems conspired to push the listening meditation to the back burner. And then Ed’s cancer came back.
Over the next several years, we watched Ed cope with prostate cancer and its various treatments with more dignity and grace than I could have imagined possible. Melinda died and he married a wonderful woman, Karen, a kind and cheerful kindergarten teacher who had helped him care for Melinda during those last, identityless years. As part of their wedding vows, Karen and Ed promised to be married for a hundred years, a defiant embrace of the present moment in the face of impermanence and illness. They did have a couple of years together after that, and Ed described these as being the happiest of his life, right up until the end.
As Ed grew weaker, he stopped coming to Tuesday night meditations. And then Shannon and I did something that might seem strange: we put our house on the market. Shannon’s mother and first husband had died in this house, and she could not bear to face another loved one’s death while living within those walls. Neither one of us wanted to walk through that room, our zendo, with Ed no longer there. We decided to get out of debt and make a big change, so we sold the house and moved to New Orleans. We said goodbye to Ed and Karen the day before we left; he hugged us and told us that he loved us. There were no recriminations for leaving town. Nothing but kindness and warmth, as always. He understood, he loved us, and he let us go.
The day before Ed died, in November, 2004, he told a friend, “I’m ready to get the hell out of here.” His death, by all accounts, was remarkably sweet and peaceful, with him clear-eyed and loving, comforting others until the end. Before leaving behind Karen, two daughters, three stepdaughters, grandchildren, and a community of friends and followers, he wrote, “Just like everyone else, I have (had) problems. But nothing destroys the underlying joy.”
Although there were many ingredients to Ed’s remarkable life — starting young as a top scientist for NASA, meeting his own Buddhist teacher, becoming a psychotherapist to help others more intimately and directly — I believe I’ve figured out one secret to his joy: he practiced bodhichitta, the awakened heart of unconditional love. He seemed to love everyone who came into his presence without fear, judgment, or grasping. It feels so good to love, he seemed to say, why hold back?
One of Ed’s traits that Shannon and I do not share is nonattachment. He was our one and only teacher for this lifetime, we agreed, and now we had been cast into the wilderness. It was time to find our own way. After one year, we weren’t doing too hot. We loved New Orleans for its bohemian, disintegrating, unpredictable ways, but at some point we lost track of our meditation cushions. We got caught up in a social world the likes of which we’d never seen. Surrounded by a dozen newfound friends, gay and straight, all of whom turned out to be gourmet cooks, gracious entertainers, and serious drinkers, we went along for the ride. I was astonished to see Shannon, whom I’d always known as a rather reserved person, metamorphoze into a life-of-the-party-girl whose quips would be quoted for weeks. We didn’t sit much, but we didn’t seem to miss it. Everything was fresh and new, and we were having a great time.
Then came Hurricane Katrina. Among many other things, the storm blew away the last vestiges of our meditation practice. After a five-week evacuation, we returned to find that the city looked as if the hurricane had blown through only the day before. In the stultifying heat, New Orleans had become a post-Apocalyptic nightmare that went on for block after block, mile after mile of blacked-out streets, moldering houses, toppled trees, dead animals, dead cars, looted businesses with doors still ajar, boats abandoned on the side of the road. The people trickling back into the city seemed as if they’d aged five years in as many weeks.
We gathered with our returning neighbors and ate communally every night, swapping MRE’s and evacuation stories all of us drinking even more heavily than before. It seemed the natural thing to do: drinking to push away the darkened city, drinking to ignore the depression that was rising like a black tide. It didn’t work, of course, so we drank some more.
Finally, in December, after a paroxysm of dinners, bar crawls, and Christmas parties, spitting in the eye of death or whatever we were doing, I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt ashamed of myself, like I’d let Ed down. I had to revive my practice, somehow. That might sound logical and doable enough, but to me it felt almost impossible. My mind had grown so agitated and depressed. Day after day I could find neither the time nor the motivation to get to my meditation cushion. It wasn’t coming intrinsically, so I decided to impose it extrinsically, in the same tried-and-true manner in which millions of other Americans confront their demons at this time every year by making a New Year’s resolution. Needing to light a fire under my butt, I came up with a big one: I resolved to become enlightened. Awakened. Like the Buddha. To put teeth in it, I gave myself a deadline. One year.
Of course, coming up with a resolution like this is akin to saying, “I promise to be struck by lightning in the next year.” It’s not realistic, feasible, or even rational. There are just too many forces beyond our control. On the other hand, having made such a promise, one can take constructive steps to improve the likelihood of it happening, like spending more time on golf courses during electrical storms. In my case, that meant dusting off my cushion and reviving the spirit of spiritual investigation. I framed it as a kind of experiment, to see how far on the path of insight and compassion I could travel in one year’s time, while remaining in the context of my everyday American life. The resolution worked haltingly at first — but as the months passed I returned to practice with renewed determination. I couldn’t guarantee that lightning would strike, but I could make sure that I was out there with my club in my hand.
It’s now June, and the experiment continues. I’m back to sitting every day, doing the listening meditation. Shannon and I started our own Tuesday night group, to support our practice and to reach out to others who might want support with theirs, and we already have an earnest and congenial little group taking shape. It’s truly heartwarming. Suddenly, there are meditators coming through our gate where before there were none, each arrival signaled by the creaking of our gate, just as Ed’s gate had welcomed us years before. What’s more, the new zendo (formerly our living room) faces the street, so there is an unending stream of sounds to listen to: birds, cars, passersby, mule-drawn carriages, distant trains, ship horns on the nearby Mississippi River.
Which brings us to the jackhammer. Upgrading its lines to fiber optic, Bell South has been tearing up our street for the last month, filling it in, then tearing it back up again. The noise began about the same time I started getting up every morning to do the basic listening meditation — just bare attention to sounds, not worrying about the no-sounds or the ground of listening or anything like that. Then I came across this passage in Coming to Our Senses, by Jon Kabat-Zinn:
Have you ever noticed that your awareness of pain is not in pain, even when you are?… Have you ever noticed that your awareness of fear is not afraid even when you’re terrified? Or that your awareness of depression is not depressed; that your awareness of your bad habits is not a slave to those habits; or perhaps even that your awareness of who you are is not who you think you are?
Something in my memory stirred, a connection wanting to be made. This quality of awareness reminded me of what Ed had described as “stainlessness.” I went to my cushion, eager to investigate. As fate would have it, at that moment a loud jackhammer was breaking up the street just outside our window. Perfect. I closed my eyes and RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT TAT! I zeroed in on the sound, looking to see if it had any inherent qualities of unpleasantness. It didn’t. In awareness, in the absence of resistance, it was neither good nor bad, pleasant nor unpleasant. I could imagine myself, under different circumstances, taking this racket personally, tensing my jaw and getting annoyed, but not this time.
I focused on this specific quality of stainlessness — the way my mind could perceive the sound but not in any way be marred by it — and recognized that this quality was always present. Before, my attention had always been centered on the sounds, but now I made a subtle shift in focus to notice the awareness in the sound. And I caught a glimpse of something that amazed me, something that I am determined to investigate further: it seemed as if this stainless quality applied equally to whatever experiences arose in my awareness: sounds, smells, thoughts, or bodily sensations. You see, I normally label certain contents of awareness “me” or “not me,” “solid” or “seen,” “inside my body” or “out there,” but I saw that stainless awareness does not make these distinctions. And it seemed I can’t swear that I saw this clearly, but I sensed it — that with determination and concentration, having tasted this awareness, I could enter it even more deeply. Not just see it, but become it. Of course, that would be quite a departure from my usual way of constructing self and world, and it wouldn’t be easy. But nevertheless it was there, in every moment, as intimate as sound or touch or thought. Could this be the ground of being of which Ed spoke?
I was pulled out of my meditation by a profound feeling of regret. The loss of Ed welled up with a painful new twist. In that moment, more than anything, I wanted to bring him my fledgling little insights and show him that his efforts had not been in vain. I could just imagine his eyes beaming, the warm smile that would spread across his face. For several moments I sat there mourning the loss of that exchange. But Ed is gone. That exchange never happened. And next time, I know, if I am to enter more fully into stainless awareness, I’ll have to leave even Ed behind.