Daishin Morgan, Rev. Master

This article comprises the opening chapters from a new book by Rev. Master Daishin, titled Delving.

Night Walks

Plenty of things scared me as a child, but I found I had an affinity for the dark.  I was drawn to walk at night in the woods behind the house where I grew up on the Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London. At the bottom of our garden was an allotment and beyond that and down a bank, the wood began. When the suburb was built, the planners left two mature pieces of woodland untouched to serve as parks that were imaginatively named Big Wood and Little Wood.  Big Wood was my territory as a child. It was perhaps 50 acres of mature oak trees with an under-storey of hazel, crab apple and large patches of bramble. Tarmac paths ran through the wood but between those paths something of the wild remained, at least for a child’s imagination.  On all but the darkest nights, I found that if I looked up as I walked, I could avoid crashing into the trees by observing the canopy outlined against the sky. I learned to walk off the paths in the dark with some confidence.

I had a happy childhood – my resort to the woods was not driven by any trauma or particular unhappiness outside of the usual growing pains.  When I began to play in the wood, I terrified myself with an imagined monster.  It had the head of a bull and an indeterminate body made of swirls of purple and yellow ochre. Once I had imagined the monster, I could not un-imagine it, and I expected it to appear in the wood at any moment.  As I came to know the wood intimately, my monster receded.  I spent many hours playing there with friends and on my own.  I came to love the wood, and discovered that at night its character changed. It must have been when I was nine or ten that I began my night walks, especially in the early dark of winter. My family had a West Highland Terrier and I would often take him with me.

I was drawn instinctively.  The woods had a presence at night that fascinated and called to me. The call was only a little stronger than my fears of what my imagination could still conjure up, and sometimes I got spooked and ran. It was not so much a presence within the wood that drew me as the presence of the wood.  I was not hunting ghosts, rather a feeling that echoed inside me.  As I learned how to find my way in the dark, I began to know my fear a little better.  I could move fairly quietly and realised that if I met anyone, they would probably be as frightened of me as I might be of them. I saw that I could be the hunter as well as the hunted. Outside of the woods there were many things that frightened me and that I ran away from, but there in the wood, I felt strong.

My later practice of zazen reflected those childhood walks. Although my rational mind needs to argue things through, I still follow the same primary instinct that drew me to the woods.

Delving

Life is essentially creative. I have a wish, like a banked fire inside, to express who I am. To seek an expression that is true requires delving into the depths of my being. Like an artist, I draw on what is already here, yet what is created is a new expression of life. Even if the work is a cliché, it is new at the moment of creation. If life seems like the repetition of old patterns, each ‘repetition’ is still new, it is this one now, and the world is different because of it. What makes a work worth the term “art” is that it is brought into being by the artist delving into themselves in an effort to express something true. The artist must go to the well and lower the bucket without knowing what may fill it.  The painting or the poem does not already exist down that well. It comes into being through the act of delving. The artist must pick up the brush or the pen and begin. Delving involves recognising when its expression is not quite true and trying again and again. Making art, making any true expression, requires self-belief.  The artist must navigate hubris on one side and self doubt on the other, never losing faith that truth can find expression.

The truth of human life does not exist beforehand; it is not ‘out there’, nor is it ‘deep inside’.  Truth appears in the making. It does not exist before it is expressed. Creative expression is in the living, and we can see that living reflected in art. That is why art is so important.  Life burns to express itself.  To recognise the uniqueness, the inevitable and unavoidable originality of every life, is rare. We may love or abhor what is made, but the making, the living, is a creative act.

Life is radically immediate, yet many people imagine a second little person sitting inside their head directing operations. One of the insights that comes from delving into oneself is that there is no such person.  This can be quite unsettling.  The realisation comes more in the nature of an insight than an argument.  It leaves the awkward question, “who/what could possibly know this?” If it is not an infinite regression of one little person sitting inside the head of another little person… then what?  One definition of ‘reality’ is that which does not depend on something else for its existence. In other words, reality is that which is sufficient.   Our ‘knowing’ of reality cannot be like being another person watching us know something in our own head.  There must come a point in the delving when we realise that delving is commensurate with being. From then on delving is no longer about trying to discern some fact or answer, it is life sufficiently being itself.

Zazen, or what passes for it, can sometimes have a passive quality: it takes an act of engagement to let the bucket down into the well. There is no telling what may be disturbed. Truth, sufficiency, realisation are not constructed, they are realised in their expression. Expression and awakening are simultaneous. They are not a sequence with awakening first and then expression.  We cannot hold awakening even for a moment.

For someone like me who is not given to great experiences (not by choice), spiritual life has involved quite a lot of plodding. For some years I wanted to be totally transformed by an utterly unquestionable experience that would blow away all doubt and inadequacy. I thought awakening must be something like that. Instead, I had to come to terms with being ordinary. I was drawn to those aspects of the Zen tradition that emphasise the presence of awakening in the everyday, the emphasis on there being no division between training and enlightenment.  I applied myself to the question, “What is this?” with some rigour.  I looked closely at the gap that appears to be created between the observer and the object when looking or questioning takes place. The question, “What is this?” is equally the question, “Who is looking?”  I began to realise that the “what” and the “who” are the same thing. There was an intellectual element involved in this, but it was, and remains, an intuitive recognition.

I have had my moments, but I characterise my experience as undramatic, and I have come to value this lack of drama. I don’t believe I chose a path so much as had to sit where I found myself. No two people’s experience is the same, so I cannot say, “do it like this.” What is required though is a deep commitment, one that is engaged with the everyday.   I can see now that we all have to plod, and the fireworks are not as anyone imagines them. Rigorous engagement is necessary, wherever you find yourself sitting.

Zazen is to sit still – that stillness is alive. It is not grasping at anything or going anywhere else, yet it involves active engagement of this profound commitment. This commitment needs refining – it is not a matter of replacing an inaccurate truth with a more accurate truth. The commitment is to this that is taking place now, and that is more complex than we imagine and easier said than done. The limitation is in our thinking, not in our being.

It is commonplace to say that we should let the past go and live in the present. Our perception of the present is quite complex. Suppose you were abducted, blindfolded and then released into a foreign land with no idea of where you were or even what planet you were on.  Picture what it would be like as you remove your blindfold.  Your ability to comprehend what you are perceiving is dependent on making comparisons with remembered sights, smells etc.  Suppose that this is an utterly alien world and nothing is familiar. You would be like a newborn baby only with an adult’s mind. It might be terrifying. Would you be able to make sense of anything? In this new world, you would have to slowly assemble new memories and experiences and gradually build up some familiarity before you could distinguish one feature from another. It would take some time to be able to function, and you might never feel at home. The point here is to see how dependent we are on memory for our comprehension of the present moment.

When we feel at peace, how dependent is that on familiarity? Sitting in zazen is familiar to me.  That is not wrong or a problem, yet I need to be aware that it is dependent on memory. There is another step to take, a deeper awakening, a more profound renunciation, one that goes beyond the memories and the perceptions rooted in this interaction of past and present. It is an awakening to the entirely present, and we can have absolutely no idea of that at all.  The moment that blindfold comes off in the supposition above gives us a hint.

A world that we can have no idea of is a place of self-abandon.  I am neither free nor bound. There is an inclusive, marvellously-functioning, local reality.  This is only accessible if I am prepared to be present without insisting on being present as myself.

The final verse of Robert Frost’s wonderful poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening is:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

It is in “the darkest evening of the year” that Frost feels the pull of the “lovely, dark, and deep”.  We have responsibilities, and the “lovely, dark, and deep” calls to us. We fear going very far towards that “sleep” because we rightly intuit that it involves the loss of ourselves.  We think the only way that can be is in death. So we divide the dark and deep from the everyday and believe that in doing so we are choosing life. It was the lovely, dark and deep that called me to the woods as a child.

Rev. Master Daishin’s new book will be available to order from Throssel Hole Bookshop soon. A notice will appear on the Throssel Blog when it is published.