Zen and the Art of Methadone Maintenance

“Joshu Sasaki, 107, Tainted Zen Master” read the Times obit (NYT, 8/4/14)  Prostitution may be the world’s oldest profession, but Sasaki’s fall from grace is one of the occupational challenges of all those who choose to profess. Nothing new about teachers hitting on students. The Times cited Harold D. Roth, professor of religious studies at Brown, in his defense. “Everything he did was in the devoted service of awakening enlightenment in his students,” Roth is quoted as saying. “Com’on baby light my fire,” sing The Doors and according to the obit “former students…said he would tell them that sexual contact with a Zen master, or roshi, like him would help them attain new levels of ‘non-attachment,’ one of Zen’s central objectives.” Well at least Sasaki himself benefited and if the form of enlightenment he preached proved shallow to his former students, that great come-on could have been nothing less than enlightening for future generations of sexual predators for whom the mantra of non-attachment provided one of the best lines in the business. Parenthetically Sasaki might have found employment as a guru during the heyday of Sullivanian psychoanalysis where polygamy was the therapeutic intervention du jour. It’s funny how great discoveries come about. Alexander Fleming produced penicillin by accident. Viagra was originally a heart medication (“Discovered by Accident, Viagra Still Popular 10 Years Later, “ Fox News, 3/24/08) It was revealed as a treatment for ED when patients, who were given it, began to get hard-ons. Sasaki may have lost his credibility as a Zen master. However, he inadvertently was following the path of Frank Harris who wrote My Life and Loves. Sasaki may end up going down in history as one of the great philanderers. He didn’t lead his conquests to satori but he provided momentary enlightenment to those whose minds he chose to blow.

Babysitting 1

Bodhidharma practicing Zazen by TsukiokaYoshitoshi (1887)

A lot of people give up meditating because they don’t experience enlightenment. They are looking for a white light experience, transcendence or at the very least a knowledge which will enable them to better handle reality. Meditation might provide the last of these three alternatives in the way that sleep can often clear the mind when you're stumped on a problem. However, the end result of meditation may be no more than the meditative state. The meditative state becomes a fixture of the imagination, the way muscle memory works for athletes, and its postures, the straightened back, the lowered eyes, the left hand cupped in the right with the two thumbs touching (the mudra of Zen) become the entry into such a state. But what is disconcerting and profoundly difficult about meditation is not the holding of the posture, which may or may not be filled with back or butt ache in the beginning, or even the moratorium on ambulation. It’s what actually devolves from the sitting. In fact sitting is the exact reverse of hallucination or white light experiences. There's an old expression, you can speak to God, but if God speaks to you, you’re a paranoid schizophrenic. Meditation is not for a new generation of sixties love children, whose feet are planted firmly in the sky. It’s not for the faint of heart since it plants your feet firmly in the reality of the present—something which is definitely an acquired taste. 

The Absence of Presence

George Carlin in l969

Have you ever had the feeling that someone is not really there? It could be them or you. Either the person in question is quite distant and removed because they are thinking of someone or something else or you are having one of those out of body experiences in which you experience both yourself and others as strangers. This last is almost like amnesia but not quite. Verfremndungseffekt is a term for alienation in the theater coined by Brecht, but it can happen in real life. You know exactly who you and they are. You are simply experiencing one degree of separation, as if you were hovering like a doppleganger right outside the confines of personality. This condition, which we might term, “the absence of presence,” is becoming an increasingly common affect disorder that had been camouflaged by more globalized feelings of alienation (experienced, for example, by baby boomers against the military industrial complex in the 60’s). Ask anybody if they haven’t experienced it at one time or another. George Carlin humorously commented “I’ve adopted a new lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.” Human beings are social animals and alienation is a social phenomenon, what the sociologist Emile Durkheim described as “anomie,” while “the absence of presence” is a syndrome that has the earmarks of a neuropsych disorder. What is the cure? Followers of Zen or the recovery movement talk about living in the now. “You only have today,” they will tell you and alas, this may be the best and only known analgesic, capable of lessening the disturbing feeling of apartness that comes to those who suffer from “the absence of presence.”