Earlier this month I did a 3-day Zen intensive (known as a “sesshin”). In a sesshin you do about seventeen rounds of sitting mediation during the day and evening. Each round lasts 24 minutes. While there is a talk by the teacher, as well as hour-long breaks for meals and rest, that’s still a lot of “zazen” (the name used for Zen sitting mediation). The obvious question that comes up when I tell people about sesshin is “what’s the point?”

Why would anyone do that?

Today I want to offer a brief answer because it speaks to a lot of other questions we explore in this newsletter including the ones about life, consciousness and AI.

First, a quick note about “contemplative practice” itself (i.e. zazen mediation) . If the idea of sitting for 17 rounds zazen starting at 5:30 am and ending at 9 pm makes you want to jump out of your skin, I hear ya. When I started practice 30 years ago getting through a single round was challenging.

“When’s the damn bell gonna ring to end this round?!” was always the basic mantra running through my head. But they call it “practice” for a reason. In time, and with practice, you learn to take what’s called the “backward step” away from the endless stream of thoughts. You also learn that sitting is actually a very physical endeavor as you settle into, and then climb onto the breath like a surfer riding a wave.

I could go on about the mechanics of sitting as most people think it’s about thinking i.e. controlling thoughts . It’s not. But what I am interested in today is what you learn from all this. Zen tends to say things like “we don’t get anything from sitting” or “we sit because sitting is what we do”. At a very deep level all that is very true, but as your practice deepens you do come face to face with two amazing possibilities: immediacy and intimacy.

After awhile, when you do a longer period of sitting, you get so bored of your thoughts that they kind of drop away. Then, this bigger space of silence opens up. What you find there is the naked immediacy of the present moment. It’s that illusive “now” that everyone always talks about. The remarkable thing is this “now” is not a big deal. That’s becuase it’s not the idea of now or the concept of now. Instead it’s just the breath - rising and falling - and the light moving across the wall and maybe, the sound of a crow outside the window.

And with that immediacy comes the flip side - intimacy. This “now” is not an abstraction existing out there. It’s yours. Maybe it’s better to say that you are not really different from this “now” which includes everything. Intimacy is a good word because it calls up ideas of closeness, of friendship, and even of love.

When you have enough time to let practice do its work, you find a transformation from the distracted mind to the concentrated mind and from there - if you’re lucky - a glimpse of the unified mind.

That progression - distracted, concentrated, unified - is how immediacy and intimacy can be appear and be “learned” in contemplative practice. It’s pretty awesome. In its slow way it can also be life changing. That’s one of the main reasons why I keep doing it and why I am so profoundly grateful I found out about it the first place.

That’s all for now. Later, at some other “now”, we can unpack how this relates to those big questions of life, the Universe and even AI.

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