UnMind 112. Gravity & Gravitas — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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Your zazen may lead
To a kind of gravitas —
But it’s only Zen.

“Gravity,” the John Mayer song that won a Grammy in 2005, begins with the lines:

Gravity is working against me
And gravity wants to bring me down

Truer words, as we say. One of the four fundamental forces, as defined by Google:

There are four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range.

Gravity is said to be the constant teacher, for a toddler who is just learning to stand. Every time they finally get their balance — boom! — they fall down again. With repetition, they finally learn how to maintain balance even while walking, which has been described, dynamically, as falling forward and catching yourself with your feet. Some animals, like horses, are born ready to walk, with a little help.

With repetition over time, we adapt to gravity and lose awareness of it, until we don’t. Zen’s walking meditation, kinhin in Japanese, is a bit like learning to walk all over again. We raise our elbows to shoulder-level to act as outriggers for balance. If you find yourself losing your balance from time to time, you are doing kinhin correctly. Like a tightrope walker, we become more aware of the precariousness of our balance. We also become sensitive to the long-term effects of gravity on our body shrinking with age. I have lost about 3 inches so far, my own personal version of the incredible shrinking man.

When we feel we are losing our balance, an increasingly common and dangerous issue as we age, we experience a sense of dizziness, or vertigo. If we actually fall down, we experience the acceleration of gravity, with the unpleasant slam of our body mass on the ground. But typically we are unaware of the constant pull of the gravitational field. What we refer to as “weight” is the measure of the mass of an object, such as our body, in thrall to the gravitational mass of the Earth. It is said to be about six times that of the moon. One would assume from this that for every planetary or other celestial body, the mass of the being’s body, moving within the orbit or g-force field generated by the mass of the larger body, would determine the relative weight of that being, in that particular context. So what, you say?

Consider that in zazen, because we sit still for relatively long periods of time in an upright posture, our relation to gravity is relatively constant. So the ability to once again feel gravity as a constant comes into play. It becomes obvious when we are meditating that we are out of balance, leaning one way or the other, rather than sitting upright, which ordinarily we do not feel, having adapted to our usually crooked posture. This is why we do the rocking motion as we are settling in, to find our center in the field of gravity, like a metal filing lining up on a magnet.

Rising for walking meditation, we become acutely aware of moving in gravity, at an excruciatingly slow pace. And when we return to the cushion, we feel the immersive embrace of gravity, as we once again settle into the zazen posture. As we enter into deeper physical samadhi — equipoise or equilibrium — the forces of gravity and their impact on the various parts of the body even out, resulting in a sense of effortlessness, even a sensation of floating. Our sense of time undergoes a similar reorientation to that of our position in space, which will be a subject for a future segment of UnMind.

Falling back to gravity for the time being: If you picture yourself sitting on the globe of the earth, like a tetrahedron perched on a sphere, you can see that the peak of the tetrahedron would lie on a radius that runs to and from the center of the planet to the crown of your head. This illustrates what Matsuoka Roshi called “sitting-mountain-feeling,” which he used to indicate how one knows when the posture is perfectly balanced. He also described it as if the top of your skull is pressing against the ceiling. Extremely solid and stable. Of course, the human body is more complex than a geometric figure. But when all the bones of the skeleton are arrayed properly, and the tension or turgor in the musculature membrane is evenly distributed, it feels as if the body is composed of one material throughout — wood, stone, or metal. You have become a statue, so to speak, with gravity pulling down on you from below, atmospheric pressure bearing down from on high.

Gravity is a central operating principle of the universe, according to the science of (astro)physics; Dharma & karma may be said to be operating principles of reality, according to the teachings of Buddhism. Note that I said “teachings,” not “beliefs.” Buddhism is not a system of beliefs, but rather what we may call conjectures, concerning the true causes and conditions of our existence. One of which — a big one — is gravity. The most difficult-to-embrace aspect of the definition quoted above is its imputed “infinite range.” That it is the weakest of the fundamental four is a bit slippery as well. It certainly seems that it would have to be stronger than forces operating only at a microscopic level, and only at very close range. But gravity can not overcome these other micro-forces, fortunately for us.

It may be appropriate here to interject another parallel I find between science and Zen, according to my poor understanding of both: Even Einstein did not “understand” gravity; even Buddha did not “understand” Dharma, or karma. These principles, or phenomena — again, not beliefs — are beyond understanding, in any ultimate sense. This is not merely a semantic quibble, but goes to the essence of the concepts of gravity, Dharma, and karma. They are real beyond concept, in some sense, but also, in their ubiquity, not really “findable.” Like most fundamental phenomena, they cannot be isolated.

Let’s entertain a thought experiment regarding gravity, no offense to the great Master physicist. Who, by the way, was known to sit in a chair holding his pen, and drift off into a kind of meditative reverie, which he described as not exactly thinking, but “visceral” in nature. At a certain point he would lose consciousness, dropping the pen, which would wake him up. Then he would retrieve the pen and start over again. This sounds, by the way, similar to Hakuin Zenji’s “Naikan Tanden” healing exercise, with which you may be familiar, designed to help you get a good night’s sleep, and which we sometimes practice on overnight retreats.

When you are lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, picture yourself floating in space, safe and sound on your mattress. Once you can feel your whole body’s position, or proprioception, imagine that your bed suddenly disappears. What happens? You instantly fall to the floor with a thud, subject to Newton’s second law, the acceleration of gravity, at 9.8 meters or 32 feet per second squared, or “per second per second.” So the thud, accelerating only a couple of feet from the disappearing mattress to the floor, is already considerably more than your body mass. That’s going to hurt.

Now if you imagine the floor disappearing as well, you fall into the basement or crawl space, at a proportionately greater acceleration, and corresponding thud, or splat. So while we may perceive that we are relatively free of gravity, it is a form of delusion, based on sensory adaptation. Falling off a cliff, we would impact a series of surfaces with greater and greater force, as we approached the bottom. We are constantly in danger of being flattened like Wile E. Coyote, or sucked into a sinkhole or quicksand, if we step off the edge of whatever surface is between us and the slippery slope of the gravity sink.

“All things are like this,” again quoting one of Master Dogen’s favorite and frequent constructions. What we are actually feeling, at all times, is the pull and drag of gravity, along with our body’s resistance and adaptation to it. When we sit in zazen, a kind of reverse-adaptation sets in, where we become sensitized to the fact that we have adapted to sensory input, including most especially gravity, the most constant and unforgiving force acting upon us, but also a panoply of others, such as the effect of light and dark with the daily cycle of revolution of the planet. The latest fad in the meditation and retreat business, made famous by none other than Aaron Rogers, the celebrity professional football quarterback, consists of immersion in total darkness — requiring absolute shielding of the subject from any natural light. Zen instead recognizes that there is no need to go to that extreme, as indicated in the Ch’an poem by Master Sengcan: Sandokai—Harmony of Sameness and Difference:

In the light there is darkness
But do not take it as darkness
In the dark there is light
But do not see it as light

Perhaps the attraction of immersion in darkness can be understood from a Zen perspective, as suggested in a later Ch’an poem, Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi:

In darkest night it is perfectly clear
In the light of dawn it is hidden

These translations always beg the question: What, exactly, is referred to as “it”? It, of course, is the meaning and effect of the practice of Zen, its raison d’etre. It is also our reason for being, from a deeply philosophical perspective. Some great sage lost to my memory said something to the effect that knowing this “it” in the morning, it is okay to die in the evening. Master Dogen wrote, when returning from his sojourn in China, that his life’s work was finished. So this “it” is IT – is everything, the only thing in life truly worth pursuing. Which brings up the principle of gravity in another context: what is the most grave aspect, or dimension, of life? Declaring death to be the answer may be true, but a bit glib.

In Zen, as in most philosophical, religious schools of thought, and even in professions, such as medicine, we find precepts – fundamental tenets that are expressed as the wisdom and working principles of the field. In Buddhism, there are ten such that are referred to as “grave” precepts, those that determine or define key parameters of the life of a Bodhisattva or Buddha, not to mention that of a lowly follower of Zen. What is grave about them is that they address the most fraught dimensions of life and behavior, such as killing, stealing, lying, and so forth. For which everyone already harbors some kind of precept, though it may not rise to the level of conscious intent and awareness, as in Zen.

One final thought on gravitas, which, being a human perception operative mainly on the social level, does not carry the weight of gravity — no pun intended — and so is undeserving of the same degree of consideration. My only comment is that through the practice of meditation — that is, of the real zazen — it may appear that you develop a kind of gravitas, charisma, or magnetic personality, a depth of seriousness that others find intriguing or attractive, even before you have any real insight into the truth of Zen. Don’t let it go to your head. It is only a side-effect of zazen.

Not sure where the next segment will take us. Down another rabbit-hole in the wonderland of Zen and Design Thinking, for sure. Maybe the space-time thing. And maybe this time we will come out on the other side of the wormhole.