The Will to Do Nothing: An expression of the Heart

By PhD Charles Freligh

Find internal peace,

external authenticity,

and universal harmony,

through the ancient paradoxical art of "doing nothing."

In order to find peace,

we must feel what we feel inside,

and express it outside.

This takes

• Language: English
• Publisher: Second Arrow Well-Being
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986733722

Book preview

THE CALL

Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds?

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am no religious nor atheistic person, and am generally repelled by ideology that states, This is how things are. My immediate internal response incredulously wonders, How do you really know you’re right?. However, at an indeterminate point in my early twenties, I began increasingly feeling the rumbling call of life’s deep questions (one might refer to this as becoming spiritual if so inclined) along with a gravitational pull to descend the endless ladder of societal expectations occupying me in chronic distraction from hearing, seeing, and feeling the call beckoning from the ground below. Through trial, error, and luck, I’ve found methods of responding to the inner call that have revealed some level of personal truth and have overhauled the course of my life. These methods can be boiled down to a complementary dynamic of conceptual learning and experiential practice, and more specifically the learning of what you might call philosophy and the practice of what you might call meditation.

I realize the word meditation can evoke a variety of connotative meanings, both positive and negative, but see if you can wipe them clean for the time being, as I will be addressing the topic thoroughly in a later section (Zeroing). Meditation is simply a word, and many other words (e.g., contemplation, prayer, centering, etc.) may equally represent the meaning I intend when using it, depending on your personal definition of those words. For now, the following is all I mean by the word: a practical method of reducing the mind’s habitual noise to increase the fidelity of the signal it receives.

The habit of reading philosophy, initially mostly stoicism and existentialism, had already been percolating by the time I was first exposed to the practice of meditation, which became the necessary activating ingredient to complement my intellectual exploration of philosophy, the heat to my uncooked meal. On one occasion while studying clinical psychology in New York, my neuroscience professor led the class through an eye contact meditation consisting of staring directly into the eyes of another student without breaking gaze for ten minutes. As someone fairly wracked with social anxiety, this was not my activity of choice, or so I thought. I turned toward my neighbor, with whom I’d never spoken a word, and proceeded to engage in a deeply intimate and vulnerable encounter as our first point of contact. I don’t think we shared any dialogue afterward either, but I can still picture his bespectacled gently earnest face, perched in the front left corner by a window in the dimly lit classroom, a little more than arm’s length from my own face, playing a vital role in an experience that would grab and shake the trajectory of my life, blind as I was to this fact at the time. Thank you, whoever you are.

Little unexpected blips can have such sweeping consequence depending on one’s openness to them. I can’t articulate what it was exactly about this staring in silence that was so interesting, and maybe that unexplainable interestingness was just it — there was something novel there to be explored further. When the ten minutes ended, I only wanted to keep going longer, to keep puncturing this norm of social propriety (Don’t stare) that acted as a signaling beacon of the potentially flimsy foundation underlying all such restrictive norms and rules of life. Maybe none of these rules are true. Maybe no one really knows what they’re talking about. Thoughts like these awoke from latent slumber. In the settling dust of this interpersonal experiment, I felt something at once alien and strangely familiar, like discovering the outline of a camouflaged secret door you never knew existed in your childhood home, the feeling of the call rising to the surface and becoming somewhat visible. My insides were magnetically tugged towards the newly outlined door through questions like What am I? and What is all of this, really?. I subsequently plunged headlong into a practice of addressing these questions through first-hand experience, through what you might call meditation, this newfound method of cooking, digesting, and metabolizing my raw philosophical ingredients.

Meditation, directly looking at the workings of consciousness through the lens of consciousness itself, seemed to offer a portal into the realm where these deeper questions lived, a domain beyond the jurisdiction of conceptual thought, discourse, and research. There was a pristine laboratory of mind fully equipped for experimentation with the most sophisticated and sensitive instruments just waiting to be unlocked and utilized. I felt let in on a secret, not one to be found externally but rather existing somewhere in the inner depths, somewhere inside my empty cup. Philosophical and scientific learning offered hints at the possible location and physical description of this secret, but direct internal looking (i.e., meditation) made its presence imminently felt and the signal of its call increasingly loud and clear.

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

— Albert Camus

Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji. Anytime I share with someone for the first time about my experiences at a Zen Buddhist monastery, I wonder what they’re really thinking. I often assume they either think I’m a weird religious zealot or that I vacation at a relaxing spa retreat center, and neither interpretation represents my subjective reality. I understand, however, that I can never really know what someone else is thinking (it’s hard enough to clearly know what I’m thinking), and that I’m defensively projecting upon the other in an effort to protect myself and exert control over their potential judgment that’s, in reality, out of my control and likely much more nuanced than I assume it to be.

Assumptions notwithstanding, I first found Dai Bosatsu Zendo (DBZ) while searching for an immersive meditation experience, a fire in which to forge the sword of my mind beyond the flame I could muster in the midst of daily living. Logistically, as a graduate student with a piling mound of student debt, I couldn’t afford a formal course or retreat at the time. Also, the idea of learning from and practicing alongside monastic residents was simultaneously intriguing and intimidating. I was drawn to the challenge of being thrown into complete unfamiliarity and having to find my feet amongst professional meditators. Most monasteries I researched required new guests to have attended some other monastery previously, precluding my ability to attend. DBZ, however, required only a written application describing my experience, intention, and sincerity, followed by a casual phone interview. Best of all, my stay would be free of charge so long as I worked alongside the community while there.

I recall my first drive up the mountain, scaling its winding and increasingly steep gravely slope. I could just barely appreciate the unspoiled natural scenery of snow-drizzled trees and meandering transparent creeks through a psychological blanket of anxiety and discomfort bracing against the uncertainty of what was to come once I reached the top. I drove slowly to delay the point of arrival and even entertained the idea of making up an excuse to descend back into normalcy, something like, Sorry, I suddenly got sick and don’t want to infect the community, or, There was a family emergency, but I hope to return in the near future. As the worried thoughts swirled, inertia led me up the mountain and across a small wooden bridge, an invisible mental threshold of no return. The narrow road opened to a forest-encircled lake and next to it the monastery in all its subtle, earthy, geometric beauty.

DBZ is a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monastery, and its inhabitants live by a disciplined intensity of tradition and ritual based on this sect within Buddhism. There is a particular way to meditate, a particular way to eat, a particular way to walk, a particular way to perform chores, each entailing a series of detailed steps and procedures, and quite a bit of group chanting, mostly in Japanese. As a newcomer who did not identify as Buddhist and had no previous experience in such a setting, the onboarding training I received felt slightly overwhelming, though it was delivered in a clear and compassionate manner by the monk who welcomed me. I was struck by his simultaneously energized yet relaxed presence and his apparent ability to use only as many words as necessary, but not too few. I found him at once intimidating and calming, and he must have observed a poorly hidden expression of stress as I attempted to consolidate all I’d been told. When in doubt, just follow along with the others, he said lightheartedly as we parted ways for the evening.

I spent a few hours the first night mentally repeating the instructions I’d received as if cramming for a morning exam: Okay, I have three bowls for meals and they’re stacked and wrapped inside a cloth like this. We all open our bowls in unison, placing this one here, this one here, and this one here. Or wait, did the first one go over here? I bow once before sitting on my cushion, or was it twice? And what am I bowing to again? Should I just be silent and pretend I’m chanting while the others chant? Was it a mistake coming here?. As I settled into my floor-level bed and began the transition into rest, I felt uneasy but also excited at the challenge of fitting into this alien lifestyle, and confident that the coming days would offer the psychological and spiritual immersion I’d been seeking.

At the time of writing this, I have returned to the monastery each year since my initial visit. It has become a central nourishing Mecca of my sense of self and understanding of life. I remain decidedly not a Buddhist, but this feels irrelevant. Whereas I first participated half-heartedly in the complex ritual practices, I now view them as opportunities to whole-heartedly engage in the otherwise habitual activities of everyday life, from sweeping the floor to taking a sip of water. Each seemingly microscopic action offers a fleeting chance to express the full meaning of being alive, a gift waiting to be opened and reopened, whether it be the opening of an actual gift or a refrigerator door.

Whereas I first hesitated to chant Japanese phonetic sounds that I didn’t understand, I now consider this practice as beneficial because I can’t interpret the sounds conceptually. It is an opportunity to focus purely on the act of making sound, unfiltered by intellectual analysis and self-conscious concern about the meaning of the sound I’m making. What’s it like to read the word jurgolomzit? Or wimmerdissle? Just feel these sounds without any concern whatsoever about making sense. Every single action and perception can potentially be experienced as completely New depending upon the spirit I bring to it.

What is it like Now, to hear these words in your mind as only sounds, to let go of their meaning and just hear and feel them, or to see them and experience their thin squiggly shapes just for what they are, emerging from a blank background? Just feel these words as you would the warmth of sun touching your forehead.

I recall the experience of one particular chant in which the same ten lines were repeated faster and faster, louder and louder, culminating in a final crescendo of all participants taking a deep shared inhale then screaming wildly in unison, letting out every last ounce of what was inside until there was nothing left, followed by the most pure void of still silence. An unknowing onlooker might well describe this scene as a picture of insanity. They might be right. This screaming practice has found its way into my daily life — I do it sometimes while driving — and I encourage you to try it as an experiment, if your interest is at all piqued. An uninhibited scream can provide a cathartic expression of visceral energy that may not otherwise have any practical outlet for release. Imagine yourself now, if you will, the version of you who wishes to be completely and utterly freed from the shackles of externally-imposed rules, responsibilities, and expectations, standing up and exclaiming a floor-rattling Fuck off! to the visible and invisible weight of life. What would that feel like? And what exactly would stop you?

Above all, my time at the monastery has established a nonverbal confidence and faith in, simply, the present moment, and in myself as an expression of the present moment, that any question or problem can find its purest answer only within my Right Now experience, and nowhere else. This confidence has been cultivated not only in the form of calm and relaxation, but also in pain, psychological and physical. Days at the monastery are filled with anywhere from four to ten hours of seated meditation split into hour-long chunks (punctuated by walking meditation, meals, or work), and all of this motionless sitting may invite the unwanted guest of excruciating physical pain. For me, sitting in a kneeling posture straddling a vertically-flipped cushion, the pain would begin needling inside my ankles, gradually burn its way into my knees, and finally pulse throughout my back and ribs at its peak of intensity.

I inquired about others’ experiences of pain and it seemed I was not alone nor doing anything wrong in terms of posture. The monks, particularly those who had not developed significant flexibility early in life, appeared to be quite familiar with this sitting feeling, but, when I peeked at them during group meditation, they seemed completely unaffected while I, in juxtaposition, embodied a straitjacketed physical effort to resist the uncomfortable sensations, like a constant internal scratching of sharpening itchiness. I was given nonjudgmental permission to use a chair if I so desired, which would have relieved the pain, but was also gently encouraged to continue sitting as I had been and to utilize the pain as an object of meditative attention, to shift into a curious stance of something like, What is this pain? and What is this discomfort, really?. I decided to continue without the chair.

The pain swelled from ankle to knee to back like one massive bee sting zapping each bodily cell. This is the worst one yet, I internally growled. As I attempted to focus on counting the breath (my established anchor for presence), I was instead beset by insatiable craving for the closing bell to be rung and resentment toward the bell-ringer for making us go longer than he needed to — the reactive untrue story of my frustrated thoughts. Subtle tears squeezed from my eyes like rain inching down a car window. I notice the urge to mock myself for overly dramatic storytelling, but I know in that moment the feelings seemed unbearable and were only being borne second by second amidst a constant urge to stand up and leave. No one is making you do this, I thought, but the deepest part of me wanted to persist, as if it knew something that the in-pain me was unaware of. I attempted to shut everything out through intense focus, Just keep returning to the breath, just keep returning to the breath.

As the straining effort continued, I heard bird sounds coming from the wooded area surrounding the meditation hall and was honestly annoyed by them, an aversive reaction to the tune of something like, Please shut up and let me focus!. It was as if there was a circle surrounding me and I wanted everything outside the circle to stay away and let me be, inside. The containing circle seemed to tremble as if preparing either for collapse or volcanic release, and what happened next is challenging to describe. The innocent birds triggered the peak of my frustration, a boiling point crossed at which resistant effort became meaningless — there was none left to give. My engine of resistance crawled and sputtered to a halt, and a complete giving-up naturally occurred. As all effort evaporated, the boundary circle somehow flipped.

The circle that had enveloped me like an impenetrable membrane, keeping me inside and the world outside, suddenly became inverted, became porous to all. In that Copernican shift, nothing was or even could be wrong, because I was no longer apart from anything. The door of me opened wide and the space on either side of the door's now exposed threshold was endless. Now the bird sounds passed through me. Now physical sensations harmonized naturally with the general buzzing of surrounding air and ground. Pain was nonsensical because there was no separate subject to be the owner of pain, no gravitational center discrete from its orbiting objects. I was an open container, an infinitely empty cup. I can only imagine that Alan Watts, one of my personal favorite thinkers, was describing something similar when he stated, Experiences move through this state of consciousness as tracklessly as reflections of flying birds on water.

In the openness, in this space of no resistance, of doing nothing, arose an explosion of loving feeling and creative thinking, like drilling down deep enough through the earth to release an unexpected geyser of hot, pure, golden liquid. The liquid was filled with a sort of accepting and appreciative care for the people in my life, a bubbling up of intimate faces, brother and sister, mom and dad, close friends (I’d not yet met my wife at this time, but she has filled many of these experiences thereafter), all marching happily across my mind and body as a celebratory reminder of how lucky I am to know them.

The uprising liquid was also filled with creativity, bright constellations of all I'd read and learned emerging clearly and obviously in new arrangements cast against the vast night sky of awareness. I once heard author Neil Gaiman describe the idea of an internal compost heap, the notion that everything you do, read, see, hear, everything you receive and absorb, is constantly adding biodegradable matter to the heap inside you, to be decomposed and ultimately give life to something new, some new synthesis of your unique combination of experiences. Maybe there are no new ideas per se, but each unraveling moment offers the possibility of an original admixture of existing elements. In the upward waterfall of love and creativity, I felt as though my compost heap was now bursting with delicate flowers of intuitive un-self-conscious thought, one of which was the germination of this current creation: "The Will to Do Nothing" sprouted in my mind all at once as an aphoristic symbol of both my specific momentary condition and broad underlying life philosophy. As I continued to sit in the fertile space once consumed with resistance, it was as if sepal, petal, pistil, and stamen naturally blossomed from the stalk of this simple phrase into a full-bodied flower, a clear map outline of the collection of ideas you find yourself reading Now. I was hearing, seeing, and feeling the call in high definition, a signal that had been echoing in centripetal proximity but never quite known, now flowing through the unobstructed openness just as the sounds of birds. In the words of writer Henry Miller, One cannot travel the Path before one has become the Path. Said differently, maybe the Path becomes one if one gets out of the way.

Opportunities to speak individually with the monastery leader, the roshi, were given on occasion. Dokusan was the formal title for these meetings, and I took my chance to discuss the circle inversion experience at dokusan with the roshi a day or two later. Specifically, I wanted to know what her perspective was on thinking-based insights occurring within meditation such as those I’d witnessed burst through the peeled back veneer of my otherwise solid self a few days prior. Following an intricate ceremony of bell-ringing, a brisk walk down the dark corridor to the small room where she was waiting, and a choreography of three sequential deep bows, I lifted my head following the final bow, now mirrored a few feet from hers, and engaged in a few long seconds of who-will-speak-first?.

Forfeiting the game, I asked something like, In meditation, are any thoughts potentially valuable, or are all thoughts merely distractions from a more pure thoughtless presence?. With a rising facial gesture of recognition in which the head moved back and up as the eyes moved down, she responded, In samadhi, each thought is a lotus flower. The word samadhi can be described as a state of complete absorption in which the self-conscious thinking mind has taken a break from its default analysis about what’s happening in favor of a mind that is fully engaged in, simply, what’s happening. I understood the roshi’s words to mean that thoughts which arise out of this absorbed state are of a different quality than the typical radio interference of analytical and judgmental self-conscious thinking. Thoughts arising from samadhi are like flowers blooming, sprouting out of one’s control, gifts to be appreciated and enjoyed. These flowers are constantly blooming but become smothered, starved of water and sunlight, by habitual mental noise, including the noise of one's desire to receive them. All that’s needed to receive the gift is to clear the debris, and wait. Just keep waiting.

Another story from the Zen world seems to fit here. Some of these stories can be referred to as koans (KOH-ON) and, as I understand it, there are no correct interpretations of or answers to them. Rather, koans are narrative devices aimed at short-circuiting the intellectual, rational, thinking mind, while simultaneously evoking something else, something you never needed to figure out and would be able to see and understand clearly if only you could let go of trying to understand. Here’s my own re-telling of one such story:

Once, there was a young monk living within the walls of a Zen monastery. He desired to give his life to the practice of meditation and vowed to let nothing and no one distract him from the goal of enlightenment. In the meditation hall, he would sit diligently, legs folded into a stable base, spine straight like a tall stack of coins, eyes barely open with a soft gaze aimed diagonally at the hardwood floor, mind focused only on the dynamic cycle of breathing continually filling his body and releasing into space, back and forth. If unwaveringly maintained, this would be the doorway to his enlightenment.

Such focus, however, would last only a short time before some external annoyance would arise and disrupt him. A physical adjustment or a cough from one of the other meditators. The creaking of the old floors. The faint sound of food being prepared on the other side of the monastery. Each time he began dipping into stillness, he was quickly interrupted by some external source, his inner calm stirring into frustration.

The monk decided to make a change. He would take his cushions and meditate outside, away from the other meditators and sounds of the monastery, in isolation. He found a suitable spot overlooking the nearby lake, resumed his meditative posture, and dropped into silence. He couldn’t help but feel some pride in his decision, as he noticed this environment was much more conducive to his desired practice. It was not long, though, before he heard a rustling of leaves, the scurrying of squirrels, and a building cacophony of forest sound that would be pleasant in the context of an afternoon stroll but was now intolerable set against