Sedlec Ossuary
Chapter 75 of Shobogenzo is called Jisho-Zanmai or “Samadhi as Experience of the Self.” Samadhi is “the balanced state.” Practice and experience become the same thing. No differentiation.
Walking across Westminster Bridge on a busy Saturday night. Hundreds of bodies heading towards me; skin drawn tight over grimacing skulls. “This is what they’ll look like when they’re dead,” I think to myself. An image of Sedlec Ossuary, the bone chapel comes into my head; a church made from cartilage and ball sockets. Walking across Westminster Bridge on a busy Saturday night. What exactly am I doing here?
“This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air” William Butler Yeats
Putting ghosts to rest. It’s the first time I’ve been back to London for four years. Earlier in the day as I cross Victoria Street an alpha male cyclist blur shouts “Get out of the fucking way” at an elderly Caribbean woman. He kicks out at her as he rides by and she crashes to the ground. People rush to help her up; she’s fine. The cyclist doesn’t even look back. Later on the same journey a female cyclist is knocked off her bike by someone driving a blacked out Mercedes. My friend K who I’m staying with says that the cyclists in London act as if they are in a state of warfare with everyone else – “it’s like a religious cult” she says “there’s no reason to use a bike in a city like this where there are so many transport options.” I make a counter-argument about environmentalism and creating a vision of a different city but the next night I am nearly hit by a cyclist coming down the street in the wrong direction. The words on the floor say “Look Right” which I do, stepping out into the path of a cyclist coming from the left. I just catch myself getting ready to shout “Fuck!” The urge dissolves.
This is why I left. Too many people in a too small space. Stressed rats start biting each other in lab conditions. Where’s the fun in that? The endless chatter never stops. It just gets louder and louder. Those little adrenaline jolts and rushes caused by fight/flight responses, they don’t power me up anymore. I am a different person. From a mindfulness point of view I can’t decide whether to observe or wade in fists flying. Breathe, Breathe, Breathe.
“We experience in each other the state in which the head of a god is covered with hair, and we experience in each other the state in which the face of a demon is topped by horns. We have the experience of following circumstances while among alien types and we go on changing while living among like beings.” (p.32)
Woah! London is a neon sutra – the whole universe in ten directions – eating, putting on clothes, mountains, rivers, grass, “instantaneous movements and demeanors” (p.32) When meeting London, like meeting a sutra “we muster the body-mind to learn in practice” London is “gouging out eternity” – centre of the galaxy, the place where things happen. The place where subjective self (bombarded by too much stimulation) and objective self (trying to remain poised and balanced in the chaos) come together. Bam salute – “whole body at each moment.” (fn 19, p.34)
Neon Sutra
Sitting in a Pizza Express near Soho after a day of fun and culture, someone on the table next to me is talking loudly about her modelling career, her companion makes promo videos – both conjuring something from nothing. Phones ping and ting and it all echoes in on itself. The model talks about how important it is to shake off anyone who gets too attached in case it affects her career. I don’t want to listen. But I do. “When they get too eager I just stop replying to them, they soon get the message.” We are all stuffing our faces. A few streets away Anselm Kiefer makes Nazi Salutes in order to confront Germany’s past in paintings on the walls of the Royal Academy.
“Who will clear my house after I die?” the question pops up while I’m meditating. Where the hell did that come from? Which one of us will die first? Aaah. Bringing together single molecules and universal (dis)order – getting free of self and others: “and if we exhaustively explore the self, we will have already exhaustively explored the external world. And if we exhaustively explore the external world, we will have already exhaustively explored the self.” (p.35) How do we get back to beginners mind? Do we go “back” or “towards” beginners mind? “Who will clear my house after I die?”
Samahdi is that balanced state between London and my house being cleared out after I die. It is the living in-between. The moving between animate and inanimate. Breathing in and out. It is being in the body and doing things in the world. It is getting back from the City and breathing a sigh of relief. But in the breath is the virus that infects my system right now. Neon sutra and carbon lifeforms. Time loses its meaning while the virus stays in control.
