WRR@LARGE

by Joy E. Stocke

Joan Halifax Roshi is one of Buddhism's leading contemporary teachers, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author of numerous works including The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom. Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher at Upaya Zen Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Roshi Joan has worked in the area of death and dying for over thirty years and is Director of the Project on Being with the Dying.

"My field is dying.

You could say I've been on a death trip for the past twenty-five years. How do we die?

How we die and how we live can't be separated because the factors and policies surrounding death affect the well-being of the planet.

Although, I'm a specialist in death, I'm also an incredible generalist. How did I come to be a generalist on a death trip?

Ralph Abraham and Amy Varela (psychoanalyst and wife of the late neuro-scientest Francisco Varela) remind me that to be in a changing system, catastrophes - or unexpected changes both personal and political - can produce new emergences.

My own catastrophe was blindness and paralysis at age four. I was blind until age six and was not well-socialized, so I became an introvert with a personality; a one-on-one, or a one-in-a-thousand being. Since I could not see and spent much time alone, I had to learn to see beyound seeing. And because I was so young, my blindness was a non-tragic, but interesting time in my life.

The person who took care of me was an African American woman whose mother was a slave. She was very poor, but to me she seemed freeer than anybody. Because of my relationship with her, by the time I reached my late teens, I was deeply committed to the Civil Rights Movement.

My generation also became aware of the damage we were doing to the ecological system. We had the opportunity to develop a path of social action. It was not then - and is not now - frivolous.

I had the opportunity to work with folklorist and musicologist, Alan Lomax, who, with his father founded the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. What I learned in my relationship with Alan was the importance of cultural and environmental diversity. The Civil Rights Movement spoke to that. We spoke up against the way our society was pressing us into a kind of monoculture, one where everything becomes objectified. I've discovered that this issue of objectification has pervaded our global culture, this notion that we posses the earth.

With Alan I started my fieldwork in Pentecostal churches, my caregiver's church, and became fascinated with alternate states of consciousness I witnessed during service. In 1969, I went to Mali to the Dogon people. Every 53 years they have a seven-year period of initiation. I sat there and thought, how do we transform in our own culture? Our initation rites offer no alternative but to send kids to war. Or we get them drunk. There is no opportunity for true maturation.

The question came to me. How do I deepen my life? I had begun sitting in meditaion in 1965, just sitting. And I thought, this is a refuge that gives a wonderful gift every day, after a while, and sometimes.

The Buddha himself had a really hard time in meditation. Mara, the ruler of desire and death, always came to him, even into his death because the Buddha died at a time of war; a time and place not so different from now. What he came to understand is that nothing is fixed in time and space.

It was liberating to realize how groundless our moment-to-moment experiences really are. We have to ask the question, what is a self? Is that a me and everything else is not me?

In meditation we know there is no other. Even Einstein knew that the idea of the "other" is foolish.

There is one thing we all have is breath - an engine - a piston that goes up and down. The in-breath. The out-breath. The piston that one day stops. So Buddhism is medium for dying people, caregivers, famiy institutions.

Upaya Zen Center is a place that expresses diffrerences that nourish and engender one another. And so we must always live with questions about the institution we created in order to do our work. Do we downsize? Or answer a bigger calling? How do we have a sense of profound intimacy and socialize ourselves into healthy growth knowing that growth engenders breakdown? Knowing that we're not going to grow without catastrophe? This is a great and interesting problem.

It takes surrender, but incredible determination to punch through our points without attachment to outcome.

Thich Nat Han said, 'Our own lives are the instrument where we experiment with the truth.'

We should remember that only ten percent of people die quickly and painlessly. For the rest of us, whether we are on a conscious death trip or not, we will share this process with the people we love, and they will do this with us.

www.upaya.org