Inspiration in Zazen
When I began practicing zazen and studying spiritual teachings, I was inspired by Nisargadatta’s I Am That (Durham, 1973). Nisargadatta Maharaj taught in his modest home in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India until his demise in 1981.
The spiritual practice that Nisargadatta recommended was to “establish yourself firmly in the awareness of ‘I am’” (p. 53). In explaining “I am,” he said, “try to feel what it means to be, just to be” (p. 60).
I was pleased to find that this deep feeling of being was familiar to me as I practiced zazen. When I put aside sensation, thought, or emotion and returned to my focus on breathing, I was resting in “I am” just as Nisargadatta described.
I was inspired to continue to practice zazen when I saw this. I was additionally inspired by Nisargadatta’s description of his own inner experience after he practiced “I am” for a few years. I hoped that I might approximate such experience as I continued my own practice.
Nisargadatta, for example, functioned perfectly well without a sense of his personal self or ego. He said that “one’s entire personal life may sink largely below the threshold of consciousness and yet proceed sanely and smoothly” (p. 32).
Even if a vestige of ego did arise, he continued, he could easily put it aside: “Occasionally an old reaction, emotional or mental, happens in the mind, but it is at once noticed and discarded. After all, so long as one is burdened with a person, one is exposed to its idiosyncrasies and habits” (pp. 31-32).
Finally, Nisargadatta said, no doubt of himself, that there “will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable” (p. 3).
May every practitioner find such inspiration to continue zazen.