Corpse Practice @ MindSay

Once I realized how foolish I had been in labeling my year in heaven my enlightenment I hardly spoke of it to anyone ever again—with the single exception of my new friend, my former student, artist and poet Marc Magisana—unless perhaps obliquely by a word or two just in passing. Basically I just kept quiet about it until 1984 when it all tumbled out into the novel I wrote in that single summer but could not publish.

Thanks to my experience of whatever it was my faith in the dharma was adamant, my diamond beyond any doubt, but I was high no more.

Married a second time and in 1984 struggling with seven-year-old twins and practicing the dharma as best I could on my own, so far as I knew I had neither freed nor saved even one sentient being nor in spite of my having incorporated the principles of personal honesty and nonviolence into my classroom teaching had I any effect on the killing and war and threats of war still featured daily in the morning newspaper and on the evening newscast on TV.

But though I was discouraged I wasn’t depressed, and I had the summer off to write, and once I turned the handle and opened the faucet out it poured—my experience, my enlightenment—indifferent to embarrassment, to absurdity, to scorn, to ridicule, to humiliation, to contempt, to mockery, to taboo, and to shame, even in fact defiant.

Like Allen Ginsberg, I wanted to howl.

But by then my enlightenment—whatever it had been—was long since over and my novel was less an account of my year in heaven than a description of my present life in hell.

I called it The Archeobiopsy de Marnk Twang.

Nobody cared.

For twenty years I maintained a daily routine. Though I often called myself a Buddhist, I had no teacher other than my two friends John and Billy—by mail and later by email—and the writers whose books I was constantly reading.

Neither did I sit.

From 1977 to 1984 each night when I went to bed before I fell asleep I lay flat on my back—no pillow under my head—either in bed or on the floor. I closed my eyes, spread my legs slightly, my feet eighteen inches apart, my arms a foot away from my body, my palms up, the tips of my thumb and index finger of each hand meeting lightly in a mudra, the gyan, and I followed my breath.

I did this until my breath slowed and my mind was calm.

On some nights I lay on my back following my breath for only ten minutes; on other nights—when my mind wrestled in turmoil over my marriage or my job or both—I might lie in bed following my breath for an hour or more. The longest I ever lay on my back in this meditation was three hours.

In addition to the dozens of dharma books I read constantly—on spirituality and religion of all kinds, on meditation techniques, and on yoga—to try to figure out what had happened to me and what I had experienced I also read books about World War 2 and the Holocaust.

In one of the dharma books I learned of savasana, the corpse or dead body pose for relaxation, and this was the pose I had adopted for my nightly meditation. It seemed the simplest and its simplicity and its name seemed to suit me both because of my beginner’s idea of Zen and because of my obsession with world war and the industrial killing and death resulting from war.

This nightly ritual—usually for from ten minutes to an hour depending how long it took for me to calm myself—I continued without missing a single night for nine years.

Though I tried to be aware my meditating with my eyes closed meant that I sometimes—perhaps often, I’m not sure—dozed off and fell asleep. I knew because when I woke my thumb and finger tips had slipped from their mudra and no longer touched. When this happened I either resumed my meditation or just rolled over and went to sleep.

In addition to meditating on my back each night I also used meditation at other times when I felt especially stressed. Not long ago I read an essay in which the author stated that this is exactly the wrong way to use zazen but it worked wonders for me. Each morning when I awoke the first thing I did was remind myself of the precepts I believed I had learned from my religious experience—no killing, no lying, no attachment.

Let go and be kind.

Each night when I assumed my corpse pose I practiced dying. I practiced giving up everything, surrendering so that—just as in the Christian prayer I had learned and recited every night as a child—if I should die before I woke I could surrender to death totally and accept it and so that if I should wake I could start fresh and new from zero and do my best again each day to teach nonviolence and peace, generosity, honesty, truth, compassion, and kindness. I hasten to add that I know my even saying this sounds not only immodest but ridiculous.

They were just words.

Still in my own silly way promise and practice I did. Thanks to the magnitude of my subjective, private, yet precious experience, with regard to virtue I was from that time forward never again a cynic.

Never!