Setting forth sitting still

Welcome to the monk-experiment blog. I dislike the word blog. To me it sounds like a lamination of blob, flog, bog, blot, and the like. At least it evokes frogs, which are amphibious and known good sitters. The word might sound better in Russian, where Bog means God, but that's a bit grand. Anyway, here it is. Old pond. Frog. Blog.

Fleas, lice, horse pissing near my pillow. I've had the fleas anyway the past couple of nights. The house dog has left, and the fleas are forced to subsist on the human flesh. Fleas do wake one up, of course, and how bad can that be? I'll tell you how bad: Bad enough that I do everything I can to avoid them! I pick 'em off my rocket-ship pajamas and defenestrate them from the second floor before I retire to my bedroll for the night. They find me all the same.


So what is the monk experiment? I use the word monk to mean anyone whose primary vocation is to awaken, that is to study first-hand the deep causes of suffering and to act accordingly. Essentially I'm trying to breathe life into the form of non-dogmatic practice in this land of doors barred against the wild. I don't know whether it's actually possible to fail at this endeavor, but I do know that whatever happens is going to depend on many people.

I have an autistic streak. I was a head-banging, toe-walking, sensory-overloaded "little professor" as a child, with a congenital dearth of social instinct. I longed for relationship I was poorly able to arrange. Eventually the rigors of autism led me to non-dogmatic spiritual practice. I am autistic but also a hard scientist by temperament and training and so I experimented with a range of time-tested practices while shunning rigid doctrine. In particular I tested immobile upright sitting, sometimes called zazen. I have now been practicing regularly without fixed doctrine and with zazen at the center for over thirty years.

Autism throws the monk experiment into two contrasting lights. In the first I am an autistic person who has found a way to relate to people: A way centered in practices like zazen that demand little social instinct and minimize sensory overload. In the second light I am a person who has plunged into the travail of a neurological condition and found there a treasure that I now return to share. There is truth in both views, and in either case we may both benefit. In the first case I am an object of your mercy, and in the second potentially you of mine. Autism just looks to me like one of nature's ways of making monks.

In time I came to be surprised by the value of sitting quietly upright with others, and of sitting a little stiller and longer than was strictly comfortable. Zazen is poised exactly between sorrow and joy, and encompasses both. I found that zazen makes an excellent center from which to face in various helpful directions. Given this experience I strongly encourage quiet upright sitting together, and freely offer to support attempts at this.

Shared non-dogmatic practice sustains me as I continue the monk experiment. I invite and encourage you to sit together informally sometime. We can meet in an online silent video meditation hall if you wish. The benefit of this practice extends well beyond us. For more information contact me at gregory888 at gmail.com and (415) seven eight nine - six zero three nine.

I aim to continue an occasional record here of the state of the monk experiment in order to see if it's possible to write non-dogmatically about practice. The blog may be ephemeral, and if it or reader comments begin to feel too much like shooting from the lip I may pull part or all of it.

Old kitchen. Sandwich. Lunch!