0 commentsChatting up two Israeli soul-seekers at a nightclub with Akshay and Sid. I ask them to tell me what they are doing here and what their swami has been teaching of their last month. I'm not aggressive about it, but when they give me vague answers, I keep asking. They are still not forthcoming, and I am trying to be understanding. We are in a Friday night bar, after all, and zen is much more personal than introductions.
Or is it? I'm not giving up now. It's honest interest, so I keep pushing them to talk about their Search. I request a concise, layman's explanation to what their instructor instructs as she sits in a center of Buddhist students for a few hours each day. The Israeli girl - she's draping a nice red frock around her shoulders - starts to open up a little. "Some people study zen for ten or twenty years of meditation - and still they don't have anything. Our darsham says that might be the wrong approach. Well, not necessarily the wrong approach. She just offers to teach us a shortcut."
A shortcut to what? The girl and her male friend hem and haw. Do you stop wanting, do you lose your desire for material objects? More hemming and more hawing. More pushing from me.
"Here, like this. You work in front of a computer all day, you bag groceries, maybe you do construction work. We're learning how to do anything, and to not care about it, to be able to do it for one hundred hours and be..." There's a pause. These kids speak with a lot of pauses, I just haven't been documenting them. It's like they want to say Be Happy, or end it with another obvious, but they are holding back.
"Our darshan explains it and says that once you Understand, if you wanted to lay in bed all day and never leave your bedroom, you could be a perfectly happy tomato."
I mull this over in my head. Depending on what sort of mood I am in, I will remember this as either the dumbest thing I have heard all week - or the most spiritual.