So I’m sitting cross-legged in the meditation hall at the San Francisco Zen Center a couple days ago. Incense wafts through the air, bells are rung, ancient chants are intoned, and then profound silence descends. The assembled monks embark on their meditative journeys to the centers of their minds. All at once a thought bubbles up to the surface of my consciousness, like an arrow piercing the cold emptiness of the pre-dawn air.

I am soooo over this shit.

God how I fucking hate it. After 25 years of doing this stupid crap, stick a fork in me, I am done. When I was a youngster the mere idea of sitting in a temple with a group of dedicated monks all pursuing the sacred Dharma gave me an iron-hard boner you could have sliced pound cake with. How I longed for that serenity, that peace. How I fantasized of ascending to the heights of Supreme, Unsurpassed, Perfect Enlightenment. How I dreamed of the day I might be in the very spot I’m in right now, living the life of a wandering monk, flitting here and there from temple to temple absorbing the words of the wise and dispensing my own wisdom to those new to the Way, spending my days deepening my practice.

But god-dammit I’d rather be at Amoeba Records right now. It’s just up Haight Street. I could be there in 20 minutes. I think that new Om record must be out by now, the one they recorded live in Jerusalem. Maybe even that new Robyn Hitchcock boxed set. But noooooo. I not only signed up for this shit, I signed up to do a five-day long zazen intensive at the Berkeley Zen Center right afterwards, followed immediately by two weeks cloistered at Tassajara monastery deep in the mountains of Carmel Valley — where there are no record stores at all. Fuck. What in God’s name was I thinking?

One of the greatest things about Zen practice is that it’s incredibly portable. You don’t need anything special. You don’t need a temple or monastery. You don’t need to memorize any chants or read any books. You don’t need a congregation. Zen goes anywhere you go. You can do your sitting on a rolled up towel in your dorm room, which is how I started.

But human beings like to do things together. We’re social creatures. And so a monastic tradition also developed within Buddhism. A lotta folks think that if you’re not hip to the monastery thang you ain’t no Buddhist. They’re wrong. Shakyamuni himself did not come to his understanding as a member of any religious order, and there is a laundry list as long as your arm of other great teachers who either shunned monastic life, or came to monastic life after establishing the Way on their own, or who did a bit of the monastic stuff when it was necessary but largely stayed away from it. The non-monastic tradition in Buddhism is just as vital as the monastic one.

But the pull towards making Buddhism a social thing, and only a social thing, is strong. In America, we seem dead set on turning Buddhism into a string of socially agreed upon clichés and buzzwords.

A couple weeks ago or so I put a post up on my blog in which I moaned about some of the buzzwords and neo-traditions that have become au currant among American Buddhists these days. One was that dependable puppy dog of a word, “mindfulness.” Christ I hate that word. The word seems to indicate some vague state of thinking hard about what you’re doing. And I know we’re all taught that we should think about what we’re doing. But that’s not the Buddhist approach. Do what you’re doing. When thinking becomes a distraction, stop thinking and get back to doing. I’m also sick to death of hearing hipster Buddha dudes use the word “skillful” to describe things they like and “unskillful” to describe things they don’t. It’s a total misuse of the old Buddhist idea of upaya, or “skillful means,” by which ancient Buddhist teachers are said to have taught in unorthodox ways. These days it just means whatever’s under discussion didn’t rub the guy who called it “skillful” the wrong way. I’m also fed up with the concept of the “dharma talk,” which has come to mean something like, “guys in funny robes using buzzwords like ‘mindfulness’ and ‘skillful’ to lull people who think of themselves as ‘spiritually minded’ to sleep.” I’m tired of watching entire audiences nod out like opium addicts while smiling knowingly whenever a favorite word or phrase floats through the haze.

Whatever. Anyway, after I said this stuff a whole buncha folks got really mad about it. Fine. Be as mad as you want. I, myself, am not the least bit angry about this. I was just fed up with it and continue to be fed up with it.

Back when I was first in punk rock, the thing that irked me the most, and finally drove me out of punk rock altogether, was the fact that the philosophy we espoused was all about questioning things. And yet you were not allowed to question punk rock itself. It was great to question Reagan and nuclear proliferation and the cops and school. But if you started asking things like, why do we all have to wear leather jackets, or why can't we have vocal harmonies in some of the songs, or why can't I grow my hair long if I want, that was taboo.

American Buddhism as it stands today is pretty much the same way. Buddhism isn't that way. But the stuff that lotsa people call "Buddhism" is. It's a subtle distinction, I know. But an important one.

So when I started calling bullshit on the idea of mindfulness, and skillfulness and "Dharma talks," the reaction was almost identical to what used to happen when I'd go on stage at hardcore shows in the early '80s with long hair and bell-bottoms. You can't do that! We can challenge everything in the world, but don't you dare challenge us!

If Buddhism can’t be challenged it isn’t Buddhism anymore.

We're all looking for a place to settle. We want stability. We want something dependable. Buddhism is all about addressing that very issue. It aims for the ultimate stable resting place. But Buddhism takes things in a very different direction from our habitual way of dealing with our longing for stability. Religions and subculture movements like punk rock want to reduce things to formulas. Believe that Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God and you're all right. But the words "Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God" mean something absolutely different to each individual who uses them. Words such as “mindfulness” and the like take on all kinds of different meanings when they reach the mass culture. And when they stop meaning anything useful it’s time to retire them.

This is hard for lots of folks to get a grip on. They want Buddhism to be like a bumper sticker, “Buddha said it, I believe it and that settles it.” But that’s not the Buddhist way.

At any rate I’m totally over all that stuff big time. And yet, by the time you read this I’ll be finishing up one retreat and heading off to another — being all “mindful” and listening to skillfully delivered Dharma talks.

Sometimes even when you’re over stuff you still gotta do it anyway. Sometimes you gotta do it especially when you’re over it.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

The new CD by Zero Defex, with Brad on bass, is available now from CD Baby. Get yours today!

I originally wanted to write another article about my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! which will premier next Wednesday July 25th at 7:30 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood (get your tickets here). But some other stuff has come up I want to write about. So you are all honor bound to attend the movie premier next Wednesday without my hyping it any further here. If you’re not there I will beat you up.

So last weekend I was up in Montreal, at the Fantasia Film Festival. This is my third visit and I’ve made some friends up there including a guy named Thibault DuChene. Thibault is a grad student at McGill University’s Counseling Psychology Department who is interested in Zen as well as in the various technologically enhanced meditation methods now on the market, such as isolation tanks, and sound and light generators intended to induce meditative states. Thibault has access to a place where you can rent time on some of these contraptions. Knowing full well that I have said some not so nice things about such mechanical meditation devices in the past, Thibault invited me to come and check some of them out myself.

I don't think isolation tanks and sound and light generators are bad, or evil, or any of that. And who cares if I did. But I do say that the effects they produce have nothing at all to do with what we are aiming at in Buddhist practice. Yet there is tremendous confusion on the issue. I once saw a Buddhist Master tell his student that she could make years worth of progress along the Buddhist path by spending just a few hours in an isolation tank. He was full of shit. Ads in Buddhist magazines claim that sound and light generating machines can have you meditating as deep as a Zen monk in minutes with no prior experience. Also bullshit.

I’ve said this before and people always screech, “You’ve never tried these things!!! How can you know?!?!?!” This is ridiculous logic. I’m certain dog shit does not taste like chocolate without ever having done a blind taste test. In any case, none of those crumb-bums can ever again tell me not to knock ‘em if I haven’t tried ‘em. So there.

An isolation tank is like a really, really big bathtub. It’s filled with thick salt water kept at exactly body temperature. The tub is enclosed on all sides by a fiberglass shell that shuts out as much sound and light as possible. The reason it’s filled with salt water is so that you float in it just like you can float on the Dead Sea, without your body ever touching the bottom. When you lay in this thing, shut the door, turn out the lights and let the salt water fill up your ears you lose almost all sensory information from the outside world. Theoretically there’s no light, no sound, and no sense of touch.

Once I got in I found quickly that did not like the fact that my, urm, bait and tackle bobbed out above the water like a little pornographic island. It’s not like a normal bathtub where the bottom half of your body sinks. Still, I relaxed and tried to let the experience occur as it would. At first, in the absence of any visual evidence to the contrary I tended to experience the tank as being immensely huge, like the ceiling was miles above and the salt water extended to the edge of the known world. This soon passed when my feet bumped up against the end. But it was cool for a couple minutes.

In order to try and get as meditative as possible as I lay there I tried to establish the state of mind you get in Zazen practice. I found this utterly impossible. Zazen is a physical practice and depends as much upon bodily sensations and feedback — including a certain degree of discomfort — as any sport. The design of the isolation tank is based on the idea that mind and body are two distinct and eternally separate entities. But the state of mind divorced from body never exists in nature. We think it might, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who could convince me they’d ever experienced such an absurd thing.

Close as it strives to come, the isolation tank doesn’t really provide the sense of mind free from body. I could hear people walking around upstairs by the vibrations carried through the structure of the building. I could hear my own heartbeat. I could feel the water to a degree and I was certainly aware of my, urm, bait and tackle flopping around there like a rotted keilbasa carelessly tossed into the Great Salt Lake. I could also see darkness around me. And darkness isn’t really the same as the absence of optical information.

In any case, I tried my best to let myself go. But after a few more minutes I just nodded off. I was awakened at the end of my hour by some weird new age music that reminded me a bit of the soundtrack to Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (the second greatest film of all time, the first being, of course, Cleveland’s Screaming). When I got out I was disoriented and dizzy. It took a minute or so to find my land legs again. This too was quite different from Zazen which has sometimes left me a bit stiff legged but has never interfered with my natural sense of balance.

My biggest disappointment is that I did not transform into an ape man like William Hurt did when he came out of the isolation tank in the movie Altered States.

After the isolation tank was over I got a chance to sample one of them sound and light machines that are supposed to have you meditating as deep as a Zen monk in mere minutes.

The one I tried was called the Pulsar. But just in case anyone doubts that these guys really do claim their stuff works just like Zazen, there’s another similar machine called The Zen Master.

To use it you sit on a comfy fake leather recliner just like dad used to slouch in to watch the Indians get beat by the Cubs. Then you slip on some DEVO-style sunglasses in which a bunch of little blue lights have been embedded. Finally you strap on a pair of headphones and switch on the unit. A CD plays a series of tones that are synchronized to the lights embedded in the glasses such that the lights blink at different rates according to the tones.

Weeeeeee-woooooop-wahhhhhhhhhh-Nnnnnyurnggggggg-woooooooop….

While the isolation tank had been relaxing and pleasant, this thing was just annoying. But I was committed to giving it the old college try for the full thirty-minute dosage. After a while it stopped being annoying and started being boring and once again I nodded off. I could not see the point of this one at all, I’m afraid. My only guess is that the tones might interrupt a person’s trains of thought and produce something that felt like whatever people who haven’t got a clue in the world think Zazen feels like.

So my verdict is that isolation tanks are pleasant enough and may have some therapeutic value but the sound and light machines are a complete waste of time. Both are highly artificial constructs created to try and realize some idea that thought has created. Zazen on the other hand aims to free us from everything thought has constructed. This is a far more vital concern. And something absolutely different. Nuff said.

Here's an outtake from CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING!. Something you won't see on Wednesday (but it'll be like this).



Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.