I felt very much at home sitting around the fire on the first evening, happy I'd come and ready for the retreat. I'd taken a bit more care than usual to prepare myself with additional meditation and tried not to arrive too tired. My wife and I have had a lot of sadness in the last few years, which has beaten us down, and the retreat was a chance to emerge from this. I also wanted to explore the way in which meditation sometimes becomes effortless and to understand more about the process of working on a question, at least to become familiar with it. John's lucid chess analogies pointed the way.
The retreat began steadily. At my first interview I talked about the difficulties we have faced over the last few years. We are beginning to come through it, and I was feeling "Well, what now, how to proceed?" Was there some form of words that encompasses this situation, this question. It seemed to me that "What is life?" was the question. How was I to face this situation and live in it?
The beginning - advancing your pawns. It feels like talking to old friends late at night. "What is life?" began as a discussion of the pleasures of life, but quickly passed on to painful themes. My daughter's birth, my feelings of pain and guilt at the time. I remember a long period on the second day of wondering how people could have children, how they could subject them to life, to the full horror of it. What are parents thinking of to allow casually another person to be born? All this was intertwined with my own guilt and sadness, my own parents. It all seemed to be about love and loss, sadness and tears.
Then the horror of life became the dominant theme, feelings I've always had but seldom talked about. Who would want to listen? Some terrible images of mutilation and children, not actual visual images so much but the two ideas inextricably linked. No feelings of violence or anger, just honor and vulnerability. The horror of birth. At one point the pain of existence expressed itself as a feeling that every surface of the zendo was covered with razor blades - every perception seemed imbued with pain. Although I felt all these things keenly it was less horrific than it might seem; I still felt fairly steady, able to watch these experiences. All the time too I was kept on course by John's guidance and talks. The analogy with opening, middle game and end game was crystal clear to me and, even while going through all this, I knew roughly where I was in the process. The middle game was long and turbulent but the emotional turmoil gradually eased and resolved My meditation was mostly steady and spacious, the question burning into me.
The morning of the fourth full day was absolutely filthy, cold and wet, yet I found myself humming 'singing in the rain' when doing exercises at 5am. Happiness just welling up inside me. Then, having tea, the question was inside me, filling me, producing images of beauty and pain, inextricably mixed. Then there were more tears - of joy this time, waves of gratitude washed through me, filling my eyes with tears, fullness of emotion. The world was extraordinarily beautiful. I remember being transfixed by the sight of a walking stick completely absorbed in the vivid beauty of my surroundings. There was an absolute cascade of momentary insights and experiences, each lasting a few seconds or so. I remember thinking 'Why do we have Buddhas on the altar? Anything would do'.
Outside, later, I leant on the gate in tears of gratitude. Walked up the hill saying 'yes, yes, yes' in a kind of affirmation. Then on the way down I realised that the time of emptying and negating was over. Now it was a question of allowing something to fill this space that had cleared. I began to quieten down and feel - this is hard to express - pleasantly stupid. I kept thinking of Eccles from the Goon Show, good-heartedly and inanely bumbling his way through. It was a cheerful unthinking daze, but accompanied by spaciousness and clarity.
Then, later, things became ordinary again - and yet not quite ordinary - a sense of freedom, lightness and spaciousness, - alive and untroubled - no emotional turmoil, no great highs or lows. I felt that the question had passed through me, matured me somehow. I felt as if I had resolved the question - and yet also that it wasn't complete. Later after another talk, I realised, that I had entered the 'endgame', in which I just had to allow the koan to work within me. The day passed quite easily, quietly. I remember saying at one point that 'it's as if the answer is gradually coming into focus'. The solution was present, but I couldn't quite see it.
During the afternoon various solutions and obstacles emerged for inspection. An endless, exhausting, series of responses came up for inspection. I knew they all had to be jettisoned, just looked at with a wry smile and allowed to drift off. I found an image for getting rid of them: an idea would come and I would imagine setting a detonator under it and blowing it up. Boomf, all gone, mind clear again, just a few fragments. I blew up my pride in getting this far, my attempts to understand what was happening, all kinds of reflections and thoughts, some useful and interesting, others not - they all got the treatment though.
Then my partner said something about people suffering, and suddenly the people in the room came into focus as individuals. A general feeling of warmth and openness suddenly had specific links. I had a strong sense of connection to everyone there, very quiet, very simple... What is life? ... 'People talking in a big space' was the phrase that came to me. There was a sudden click, and a feeling of not exactly certainty but 'oh, I see'. When it came to my turn to talk the question seemed to have gone. I was just looking into a space where it had been.
I asked John for an interview. We went upstairs, he lit two candles on the shrine, What is life? 'People talking in a big space'... I tried to describe the feeling. John asked, almost casually, whether there was one word that summed up this feeling. I was blank for a moment then it came to me... love. John said, "Yes, I thought that might be it..." and asked other questions which helped me explore and appreciate what I was feeling. This made me realise that it was a very spacious feeling, not particularly directed at any one person. Unlike all the previous responses, which became dust after a few minutes inspection, this one just expanded the more I looked at it.
I felt very much that I wanted to do some prostrations, then I went back downstairs and just continued. I didn't want another question, feeling that this was a kind of still point before the question opened out again. It was marvellous to have some time to allow the answer to expand and reveal itself.
I went back to talking about my daughter again, feeling love for her, and other people close to me. I talked about my work, my practice all kinds of things, re-examining them in the light of this spacious warmth. There was a great feeling of release of energy; things I wanted to do but was holding back from suddenly seemed possible. During meditation I tried to push more deeply into the feeling. Sometimes I had intuitions of merging with the hillside outside the window - on the edge of vanishing into it.
