Inner, Outer & Intuition

An interesting thing happened as I was driving home from the Empty Gate Zen Center tonight. The dharma talk, given by resident monk Kwan Sahn sa-nim, and Zen Master Bon Soeng sa-nim, remained as close to me as the cool of the night, so rather than listen to NPR or to music (as I usually do while driving alone), I chose to drive in silence… to watch the light shimmer on the dark water beneath the Richmond Bridge. I was reflecting on the Zen Master’s response to my question about open-eyed meditation, which they suggest doing at this Zen center, versus meditating with eyes closed, which I’ve been doing for many years now. During the question-and-answer period, I asked the Zen Master to speak more about the suggestion (which was made by one of the monks in the brief introduction to meditation that preceded our sitting period) that we meditate with eyes open. He replied that it can be easier to go into dreamy states when meditating with eyes closed, whereas open-eyed meditation lends itself to the clarity of what is immediately present (I forget his exact words, but feel that this is close to what he said). What he added, as if it were an afterthought, made the biggest impression on me: With formal sitting practice, we anchor meditation into our daily lives. It’s more difficult to do this if we meditate with eyes closed, because then can’t meditate with eyes-closed when we’re driving or washing the dishes.

So as I drove home, rather than listen to the radio, I chose to invoke meditative awareness while driving. Alert mind, open eyes, deep breath, shining light on dark water, hands on steering wheel, foot on gas petal, body in car seat. That’s when the interesting experience happened: thought of my friend, Frank, came into my mind so vividly that I chose to pick up my phone and contact him. And just as I touched my phone, it rang… and it was Frank, calling me.

This isn’t an earth-shaking synchronicity or coincidence, but for me, it was a very rich moment, because it helped me to experience in one instant the three main themes of my evening: Inner, Outer, and Intuition. And it helped me to see (without necessarily understanding) that they’re all the same thing.

Although I haven’t stated it explicitly, I’ve already touched on the Inside and Outside themes, above. When I meditate with eyes open, sometimes I feel quite conscious of and influenced by what is around me in the so-called “outer” world – the grain of the wood in the floor of the dharma room, the person whose head kept bobbing during our sit, the small bug who flew into, out of (and back into, and back out of) my field of vision. When I allowed my eyes to close during tonight’s meditation, I felt more absorbed in the “inner” world, with the different levels of absorption that can arise in a focused, eyes-closed meditation.

As you know, Zen doesn’t have much patience for mentally-constructed dualities like this. Talking too much about “inner” and “outer” worlds is a direct invitation to get whapped with a (literal or proverbial) Zen stick. And this is where the third, resolving theme of my evening makes its appearance: Intuition.

In his dharma talk, Kwan Sahn sa-nim shared with us a quote by Zen Master Seung Sahn sa-nim, the Founding Teacher of the Kwan Um School of Zen, who said something to the effect that when we experience intuition, “the inner and the outer disappear.”

This was my experience when I picked up the phone tonight to contact my friend, only to see his inbound call appear in my hand. And this was the truth that I knew that resolved the mental confusions of “inner” and “outer” created by my thoughts about closed-eyed and open-eyed meditation.

How, precisely, this all fits together is far beyond my ability to communicate, and I don’t understand it anyway. But I can feel the relationships. And I’m very grateful to the teachers at Empty Gate for their wise Dharma Talks, and to my friend Frank, for calling me when he did, so all of this could come together in a moment where ideas of “inner” and “outer” disappeared…

… at least for an instant.