Titles

I renamed this blog “The Company of Oneself” because I figured that I was mainly writing to myself, and I thought that the  phrase was nice.

I have recently begun to think about Zen a lot, and the concept of the “here and now”, questioning my ego, and so on. I’ve sat zazen only a couple of times, but I know that I’m going to benefit from the practice in the long run (the very long run: it’s going to be a couple of birthdays).

I read the title of this blog again, and I realized that “The Company of Oneself” describes zazen. You don’t sit to worship with a group; you aren’t in it to gain status among your peers. Yes, you can sit in a zendo with others (as I have done and will do countless times more) but it’s not required. When you become a buddha, you are the direct beneficiary of that experience.

Staring at a wall, trying not to think, realizing that you are one with the universe, that is being in the company of oneself.

Zentheist?

If you would let me, I shall now tell you a story from my childhood:

I was raised in a nondenom Christian household; my house was the Bible study house at one time. My mom used my Animaniacs cassette tapes to help us children remember biblical stuff. Remember that Nations of the World song that everyone loves? Replace the countries with the books of the bible, in order of appearance in the NIV.

I stopped being a X-ian was I was about 13 years old or so. I remember being in church with my family. Then, something in my head changed, and I looked around in the church (it was a big building, like an auditorium) and I asked myself, “Why are these people here? Why are they listening to that man talking? Why am I here?” After the long consideration of a few milliseconds, I came to the conclusion of, “This is stupid,” and nothing further.

To say that I became atheist by that time would be inaccurate, because I simply rejected what was presented to me on a conceptual level. I still behaved like a straight-edge X-ian, and I didn’t think/feel out what kind of person I needed to be.

After some years, I came to humanist conclusions, more or less, but I never quite believed that science as we know it (at the time of my thinking this in my earlier days till the present) does not have all the answers, nor will it ever.

[I'm going to leave that comment about science-belief unexplained for now, and see if I've fed any trolls.]

Very recently, I graduated college, and it’s lead me nowhere. I live at home, and work in a city that’s more than 60 miles away in one direction. Most of my time is working and driving, and nearly all of my money is spend in fossil fuels.

I was drifting into despair, the kind of despair that if you drift too far, you never come back from.

No matter how much I convinced myself that things weren’t that bad for me, both with my own intellectualism and the evidence of worse things from NPR (etc) still didn’t help. In fact, it made it worse.

And just at the point when I was frightening myself, I came across Zen. At the beginning of this week, I went to the MZC and I found myself in zazen.

I’m going to tentatively declare that my life is going to plot a new course, and I’m going to be steering that course sitting down.

Stay tuned.