In the chapter about Steve Jobs and Buddhism, we mentioned metacognition, our ability to examine our own minds. The founder of Apple practiced this, sitting in a zazen position facing a wall.
But there is no need to strain your back by sitting on a meditation cushion, or to be inspired by a Zen master, in order to observe your thoughts. It’s enough to sit down in a quiet place and observe what flits across your mental screen without judging it at any point.
What we are doing is shifting the focus of our attention inward and asking ourselves, “What am I thinking?”
If we observe with detachment, we’ll see memories, ideas, pleasant or disturbing emotions, beliefs, rational or absurd thoughts as they pass through our mind.
Even if what appears on your inner screen is an aberration, your attitude should be neutral, lest you stray from the assumption that “You are not your thoughts.” When we separate the observer from the observed in this metacognition exercise, we manage to detach ourselves from our mind at the same time we observe its processes. This helps us reach a state of calm.
When we stop identifying ourselves with our thoughts, our ego dissolves and we flow fully with the moment, at the same time deeply and intuitively understanding the nature of reality. These moments of epiphany are a solitary ichigo ichie, moments of such lucidity that they encompass a whole life.
As we approach satori, the Zen vision of enlightenment that is completely tied to the moment, let’s pause to identify the enemies of the present, the habits and attitudes that rob us of the gift of now, preventing us from experiencing unforgettable moments.
Projections. As we have seen in the first part of this book, when our mind travels into the past, where pain and resentment reside, or the future, a place of fear and worries, we are pulled away from the present moment.
Distractions. We can experience the present fully only if we aren’t trying to do several things at once. A man strolling through the forest and updating social media on his phone is not living in the moment. In fact, he’s not even in the forest.
Fatigue. Getting a bad night’s sleep or being overworked can get in the way of our enjoyment of the present moment. In the first case, because we’re in the grip of tiredness. In the second, because we’re so mentally active that we can’t reduce our level of stimulation enough to live in the present. A simple example is when we rush out of the office to go to a movie, but once we’re seated, we can’t focus on what’s happening in front of us because the problems we’ve been grappling with are still flying around in our head.
Impatience. Wanting to make things happen—for example, a lover who can’t wait for the first kiss—also removes us from the present. Ichigo ichie demands that we give ourselves over to what we experience without any kind of expectation. Whatever is happening is the best we can experience, because we are experiencing it now.
Analysis. There is a common saying that goes, “If you want to be happy, don’t analyze everything.” When we try to dissect the moment, we’re in danger of killing it. Why must we search for the meaning of everything? Wanting to understand why what we’re experiencing makes us happy immediately ruins that happiness. The joy of the moment can’t be defined, dissected, understood; it can only be lived.
Has it ever happened, in the middle of an activity you enjoy, that you felt like time no longer had any meaning? Just like when we dive into water and the only thing we feel is our body entering the coolness of another element, when we experience flow with an activity that absorbs us, we find ourselves mentally outside of time.
Albert Einstein explained it this way when asked about the relativity of time: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”
In fact, every ichigo ichie moment situates us in timelessness. It becomes meaningless to measure time because, as in Einstein’s example, an hour can seem like a second, yet despite this, the memory of an experience can persist for days. Sometimes it can last a lifetime.
This happens because when we experience flow—when we flow completely with life—we step into timelessness. Not only time but also the whole world seems to disappear.
We find ourselves close to the kenshō and satori that we will now examine.
In Zen Buddhism, when the present takes hold of our entire being, turning the past and the future and the physical world into an illusion, we are considered to have reached satori.
This state of momentary enlightenment, which sometimes arrives completely unexpectedly, is the ultimate goal of Zen practitioners: to capture a moment that contains all the beauty and understanding in the universe.
Daisetsu* Teitaro Suzuki is responsible for bringing Zen to the United States. He published the first books in English that made this branch of Japanese Buddhism accessible to Americans.
Suzuki eschewed the paraphernalia of other schools of Buddhism, with their symbols, rituals, and sacred texts, maintaining that, “To be immersed in Zen, you just need to focus on your breath, on a movement, or on an unchanging landscape like a blank wall.”
For Suzuki, satori, the sudden enlightenment sought by Zen practitioners, has the following characteristics:
1. It’s irrational. It can’t be reached through logic, since it challenges any kind of intellectual reasoning. Those who have experienced satori can’t explain it in a coherent or logical way.
2. It’s intuitive. Satori can’t be explained, only lived and felt.
3. It’s direct and personal. It’s a perception that emerges from the innermost part of consciousness.
4. It’s an affirmation of life. It implies acceptance of all that exists, of all things as they emerge, independent of their moral value.
5. It gives us a sense of the beyond. When we experience satori, we sense that it is rooted somewhere else. The hard individual shell encasing one’s personality shatters the moment we experience satori. The feeling that follows is one of complete liberation or complete rest, of finally having arrived at one’s destination.
6. It has an impersonal tone. In Suzuki’s words, “Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Zen experience is that it has no personal note in it, as is observable in Christian mystic experiences.”
7. Feeling of exaltation. Upon breaking with the restriction of being an individual, we experience an infinite expansion of our being.
8. Momentariness. “Satori comes upon one abruptly,” Suzuki maintains, “and is a momentary experience, in fact, if it is not abrupt and momentary, it is not satori.”*
We have both practiced different kinds of meditation throughout our lives: zazen, mindfulness, and metta bhavana, among others. We have no preference for any specific kind, having found all of them to be effective tools for living more in the present.
If you are new to these practices, find the one that suits you best and that makes you feel good. At first it might be useful to have someone supervise your physical position and address any doubts that might come up. Eventually, you can incorporate meditation into your daily routine without any outside help.
For those with anxiety, there are mindfulness apps that you can use to meditate, even if only for five minutes a day.
The following classic Zen meditation can be practiced anywhere. All it takes is twenty minutes a day to see enormous progress in your level of serenity and in your ability to capture the moment.
1. Sit in a peaceful spot, where no one can bother you. You can use a meditation cushion or a simple chair. Sit comfortably, with your back straight.
2. Focus all your attention on the air that slowly enters and leaves your nostrils. Give all your attention to this life-giving process.
3. To help you concentrate, you can count your breaths in groups of ten. If you lose track at any point, or if a thought pulls you into the past or the future, start counting over again.
4. Don’t worry if, while you meditate, all kinds of thoughts come into your mind. Think of them as clouds floating by. Remember that you are not your thoughts. Let them pass by without judging them.
5. If during the meditation you manage to keep your mind free of thoughts for only a few seconds, consider this a success. After your meditation session, you’ll feel as rested as if you’d been asleep for hours.
6. Don’t transition too quickly from meditation to activity. After you finish your session, give yourself time to stretch and move your body before going back to your other activities.