Shozan Jack Haubner - Single White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex

The truth has a way of getting out, whether we like it or not. Usually, though, it comes out all wrong. Truth telling is not a straightforward or simple process. It always requires a birth, and births are messy. You cannot recall what happenedyou recreate it.

This book is a collision of journal entries, reportage, creative misremembering, and fictional devices including compressed and invented events and characters (I rarely use real names except for pets). I call this genre personal mythology. The stories told are not a record of objective reality. They are the fever dream of a man wrestling with his memory, his teacher, his lovers, his peers, and himself. Lets just say the whole book was inspired by a true storyas if there were such a thing.

I have been searching for a true story my whole life. Writing and spirituality have always been intimately connected for me. I began writing in earnest my junior year of high school when I had what some might call a spiritual opening, though for me it was more like a taste of unfiltered reality. I was driving my beat-up station wagon down the 94 Freeway just outside of Milwaukee. It was a humid, starry night. In case youre wondering, Id spilled some manure in the back seat a few months earlier that thunderstorms then soaked through a broken window. Now tiny green sprouts were growing up from the torn seat cushions, because thats how I roll.

I felt awesome. Earlier in the evening Id danced with a pretty senior (who had a slight mustache) in a friends big blue gazebo. Something was very right with the world, and it was getting righter and righter, yet there was nothing special about the moment. I simply looked out the passenger window as the giant outdoor movie theater whizzed by. Then something completely shifted. It was like the bottom of my mind dropped out. This moment changed the course of my life (I was going to write TV commercials), yet the texture and feel of the opening itself is lost to me. I came back to myself instantly, and all that was left was a question. The opening had no content. The question, however, was a tiny jewel. I turned it over and over inside me for decades.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Nothingness makes so much more sense.

In Zen, we learn that these twoindeed, allopposites depend on each other. My Zen teacher, the Roshi, taught that you could call the world outside of you, the world of distinctions, of bright and shiny things, Father. And you could call the world inside of you, the rich, embryonic inner darkness, Mother. Sometimes the infinity of things outside of you penetrates through the sense gatessight, sound, smell, touch, tasteand dissolves within the inner darkness, the fathomless psyche. Other times the formlessness within expands outward, embracing the world of form through your actions. From either outside coming in, or inside going out, a new thought or feeling arises and your sense of self is born in a process analogous to a baby crowning through a mothers hips. In this way a new self is being conceived, arising, and passing away every instantsometimes initiating, sometimes receiving, but always appearing and disappearing at the meeting point between something and nothing.

Roshi called this True Love. He described it over and over, but it took years before I was able to live his words with my whole body. After moving to the monastery to study Zen full time I eventually became the head monk. Every morning we would gather at the work-bell and get our assignments from the work officer. Then I would turn around and head up the stone stairs for the office without thinking twice about it. One day I turned to head up the stairs when I realized that I was going from one conversation, the one behind me, to another, the one waiting for me in the office. Id been doing this my entire life: shaking loose the moment behind me while anticipating the one ahead. One thing I had never done was simply walk up a flight of stairs.

To cultivate the mind of meditation is to stop looking forward to or dreading the next moment, and to stop reliving or regretting the past moment, and to start living in this one. The present comes fully equipped. To pursue happiness usually means rushing right past it.

Suddenly I experienced the miracle of locomotion, the way legs do their thing, carrying me like two faithful, marching animals; the way the space before me manifests a split second later as myself. It felt like I was scaling a flight of stairs for the very first time, and in a way I was. Once you discover your own legs and the ground beneath your feet, the path becomes clear. It is, quite simply, wherever you choose to go.