Notes from the Black Diary: Zen
Day 1: Can't even control the twisted facial contortions or the ticks. Just me and the void, screaming at each other. It feels like such a long way to go to escape it. Just staring at the wall, crying.
Day 3: I have some control, some of the time, over wayward thoughts. I wouldn't go as far as saying this is positive, but it feels like a movement forward. The effort is enormous.
Day 6: I can count to two. One breath in, one out.
Day 10: Out breaths.
Day 17: After several minutes, I feel a cranking of the upper hemispheres apart and a flow of bright clarity into the gap.
Day 18: Hypnagogic state; the room as screen. Realise this is a dream, but that if a dream can be so real, the real could be a dream. Look at body, and it melts, taking self with it.
Day 25: Feel head empty space, reflecting emptiness of all behind form.
Day 27: Hypnagogic vision of head as empty box, the inside surface of which is a cosmos of stars.
Day 38: A child drops a book in the hall, and the noise rings clear through reality. Feels like something close breaking through.
Day 40: Seeing is just seeing; hearing is just hearing; mind is just mind. All that is left is the way. Then suddenly there's a cat. Cats are just a facet that is cat nature. We rise and we fall back.
Day 80: There is nothing behind it all, or rather, nothing/indescribable. Everyone's inner voice bubbles from the nothingness. Hilarious. Things luminate during meditation.
Day 81: Can the bubble of nothingness be felt? What is it that sees?
15 May 2018
Notes:
1 In 2018 I had a massive breakdown, the cause of which hung over me for a year and a half before resolving with what I felt, and still feel, was the utter destruction of everything that formed me as a person. During that time, I spun into a horrendous pit of anxiety and psychosis. After a few months I recovered enough to spend some of the period revisiting Zen for the first time since I was a teenager in the hope that it would help. They say if you can't meditate when the world is at its worst, you can't meditate at all; I could either meditate or scream, and I did a great deal of both. I was in a very extreme state. Ultimately, I'm not sure the meditation left me in a good place, but it did at least get me there. These are my notes from that period.