In Closing

Zen does not teach to destroy all the impulses, instincts, and affective factors that make up the human heart, it only teaches to clear up our intellectual insight from erroneous discriminations and unjustifiable assertions; for when this is done, the heart knows by itself how to work out its native virtues.

Daisetz T. Suzuki (1870–1966)¹

D. T. Suzuki authored 26 books in English on Zen and allied topics. Given how much they contain, he may reasonably be considered to have been practicing a longitudinally ripened form of Living Zen before he died at the age of almost ninety-six.² His first attempts to meditate in a Zen setting were discouraging. Lucky for us, he persisted.

If you have been meditating for a while, try to remember how strange it seemed when you first sat down to practice. Chapter 4 could serve as a reminder: Siddhartha was only a beginner when he first sat under a rose-apple tree as a young child. May similar remindful moments keep springing up in your future. Let them help you recall how to meditate, to introspect, to discover why you’re so biased, to then follow your best intentions, and to relate to others more fruitfully.

Pause. Suspend those cultural pressures that would urge you to buy the latest personal electronic device, keep looking down while you manipulate it. Let moments of reflection allow you to raise your sights above eye level. Look out into those elevated dimensions of space that lie above the horizon. Now is an appropriate time to renew your interests in meditating more regularly. Decide to meet fresh challenges on this ancient Path—to climb difficult mountains after mountains. Each time you do, you could be developing significant new dimensions of your character, as William James had foreseen.

Perhaps gazing far out toward the horizon on one side will allow you to tap into a more structured, conservative kind of outlook.³ Maybe you will then be reminded to adhere to traditional precepts. Some have withstood the test of millennia. If gazing far out toward the horizon on that other side recalls a more open, liberal outlook, then may the long history of the Way remind you: new potentials emerged each time meditation evolved in a new cultural setting, enabling its practitioners to let go of biased concepts and institutional rituals long outgrown.

So, make time to go outdoors into the natural world. Here you can easily reclaim your native attentiveness and train it in a balanced, ongoing manner. Here, it will be simpler to elevate your gaze, let go of word-thoughts and concepts, uncover fresh intuitions.

The following sentences condense the bottom-line message of each previous chapter:

* “Just this” means that no you intrudes into clear consciousness.

* Your sovereign sense of Self learns to become less intrusive after years of submitting daily life experiences to mindful introspection.

* Meditation cultivates attentiveness. Attentiveness includes the kind of globally receptive, other-referential awareness that operates subconsciously. Allocentric is another word that describes such an open, other-referential awareness.

* Stay in touch with your own deep affinities with the trees and plants, rooted in the Earth, that also undergo their own natural cycles of growth, decay, and regrowth.

* “Just this” points toward the direct experience of insights that convey wisdom, wordlessly.

* Birds capture our attentiveness. On rare occasions, bird songs can trigger an awakening.

* “The more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to succeed.” (William James)

* Zen practice means detaching from thoughts. (Foyan Quingyuan)

* Remindfulness is a kind of “lowly listening.” It serves, in the Emersonian sense, as our natural source of intuitive “guidance.”

* Awareness matures over the decades. Its early, strong I-Me-Mine orientations evolve toward gentler, more adaptive, You-Us-Ours attitudes of allocentric and ecocentric identification.

* Gazing up and out there into the distance can create a beneficial influence on one’s perspective.

* Decade after decade, the brain’s innate resources keep learning and transforming intuitive functions.

* Meditation offers ways to transform our “optical delusion” of consciousness. Einstein used this phrase to describe the Self-centeredness that keeps each infinitesimal Self imprisoned, unmindful of this incredibly vast universe.

* Creativity resembles meditation, to the degree that with great flexibility they both deploy convergent and divergent attentive processing mechanisms.

* An authentic enduring happiness becomes possible when Self-centeredness yields to selflessness, and affirmative attitudes govern one’s maladaptive emotions.⁴

Remember: as you cultivate the clarity of mindfulness and re-mindfulness on your journey, Living Zen becomes the actual daily life practice of opening up to directly experience the basic oneness you share with the ordinary, wondrous world. Just this. Then, increasingly, the innate neural expressions of kindness, intuition, compassion, and gratitude can become embodied subconsciously in your everyday activities.