Interest by Kevin Gaughen Read Free Book Online Page A

his thoughts for what they were: a raging river of anxiety. He was astounded at how little control he had over his own thinking. All his life he’d assumed he created his thoughts, but nope, it was his thoughts that created him. How long had he been stuck in this madness?
    As time went on and he watched his thinking day after day, Len realized how stupid it was. All of it. At the beginning, Len wasn’t able to extract himself from it; the thinking forced his actions as though he’d been conscripted into slave labor. Until that point, he hadn’t realized it was happening and couldn’t fight it. With time and practice, though, his belief in the veracity of his thinking began to fade, and his inner monologue went from being a compulsory drama to more of a passive soap opera that he’d watch with amusement.
    Then one day, it just stopped. For a few minutes, his thinking, that incessant chatterbox in his head, just stopped. It was like someone had finally shut off the spigot. Stillness. A dead calm that glittered with life. Len could feel his lungs expanding and contracting and his heart beating. For the first time in his life, without the distractions of subjectivity, he paid attention to the breeze moving over his arm hairs and the feeling of the floor pressing back against his feet. He’d never noticed that stuff before. His field of vision widened, his nose became sharp. Breathing. Walking. There was just the doing of these things, without any of the usual commentary or judgment. With the bullshit layer of thinking gone, all that remained was the exquisite immediacy of presence.
    Then that profound awareness disappeared. The thoughts came rushing back in to fill the vacuum, ruining the experience. Days later, the vivid calm came back. It would recede and return several more times that year, until he felt it on a regular basis. Eventually it would come to him several times in an hour.
    Len remembered one moment that really stuck with him. After three years of constant meditation, and enough of those periods of thoughtless open awareness, his mind was finally tilled and seeded. And a seed sprouted. It was early April and he was twenty-five years old. Len had just finished morning meditation in the Zendo. Afterward he went to help some of the monks make breakfast in the kitchen. While waiting for some water to boil, Len looked out the window and saw the darndest thing: snow. Snow in April!
    Just then, for reasons unknown, the usual boundary between himself and the rest of the world dissolved. A fourfold wave of insight and joy washed over him, and he saw with absolute clarity some things he’d chosen to ignore his whole life.
    The universe itself is a living, conscious thing.
    Everything is here on purpose.
    Everything is going according to plan.
    Everything is absolutely perfect.
    A kensho , they called it: an initial glimpse, rather than the full experience, of enlightenment. It wasn’t like fireworks or angels singing or any of that, it was more like the mirthful relief of finally putting down a heavy object that he’d been carrying his whole life.
    For a few months after the experience, things were easier than they’d ever been. He saw that the obstacles in his life had been purely mental. When they’d just evaporated that day, nothing remained but beautiful flow. Insults rolled off his back, hard work was no longer hard, and for a while there were no difficulties.
    As the lungs breathed air and the heart beat blood, the human mind was also an organ of habit: it created thoughts. These thoughts, when mistaken for reality, tended to be clung to. It was this clinging that caused suffering. But after some time, as happened to most who experienced spiritual awakenings, the grace subsided, and Len’s habit of believing his own bullshit returned to him.
    Len eventually had a falling out with his teacher, and he left the monastery two years later to pursue journalism. He sometimes found himself wondering if he’d made a