“What was that Raoul said about a harvest crew?”
“When Armstead and The Six originally came back from Titan after entering Symbiosis, they brought an enormous quantity of the Symbiote back with them, using the Siegfried to tow it. But that was about thirty years ago, and Top Step has graduated a lot of Stardancers since then. It’s becoming necessary to restock…so an expedition was sent out three or four years ago to mine more from Titan’s upper atmosphere. They’re on their way back right now, with gigatonnes of fresh Symbiote. Some of you in this class will be partaking of it. Yes, Jo?”
Jo was using her Teacher-May-I gesture, I noticed. “Is there, like, a directory of their phone numbers, or what?”
“You just say, ‘Teena, phone…’ and the name of the Stardancer you want, just like calling anyone else in Top Step. If there are no Stardancers nearby with attention to spare to relay for you, she’ll tell you, and ask if you want her to contact your party directly, by radio. Glenn, what’s bothering you?”
Glenn did have a frown. “This business of telepathy being instantaneous. It just doesn’t seem natural.”
“Where you come from, it is not especially natural, occurs rarely and often requires decades of training and practice. Where you are going, it is far more natural than that discarded old habit, breathing.”
“But everything else in the universe is limited to lightspeed. Why should telepathy be different?”
“Why should you ask that question?” Reb asked.
Glenn fell silent…but her frown deepened.
A thin professorial-looking man gestured for attention. “Yes, Vijay?” Reb said.
“I think I understand Glenn’s dilemma. To be confronted with empirical proof that there is more to reality than the physical universe…how is one supposed to deal with that? It’s—”
“—terrifying, yes. There might be a God lurking around out there, armed with thunderbolts, demanding insane proofs of love, inventing Purgatories and Hells. There are techniques for helping with that fear. You were taught some back at Suit Camp. Sitting correctly. Breathing correctly. I’ll teach others to you, and they’ll help a lot. But the only way to really beat that fear—or the other, perfectly reasonable fear many of you have, that you’ll lose your ego when you join the Starmind—is to keep on confronting it. If you retreat from it, suppress it, try to put it out of your mind, you make it harder for yourself.” He was looking at Glenn as he said that sentence, and she slowly nodded. Reb smiled. “All right, now we’re going to learn the first technique of Kûkan Zen. Namely, how to sit zazen…in zero gee.”
“I thought you said, ‘without religion,’ ” Glenn complained.
He looked surprised. “But Zen isn’t a religion—not in the usual sense, at least.”
“It isn’t? I thought it was a sect of Buddhism. Buddhism’s a religion. It’s got monks and temples and doctrines and all of that.”
Reb nodded. “But it has no dogmas, no articles of faith, no God. It has nothing to do with telling other people how they ought to behave. There has never been a Buddhist holy war…except intellectual war between differing schools of thought. You can be a Catholic Buddhist, a Muslim Buddhist, an atheist Buddhist. So although it may be religious, in the sense that it’s about what’s deepest in us, it’s not a religion.”
“What is it, then?”
“It is simply an agreement to sit, and look into our actual nature.”
The very first chapter of Suzuki-roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind concerns correct sitting posture: that should be a clue to how important he considered it.
On Earth the classic full lotus position is something a Soto Zen Buddhist may take or leave alone, as his joints and ligaments allow. But in Kûkan Zen (I learned later that Reb coined the term: kûkan is Japanese for “space”), the lotus posture becomes both more important and less difficult. It is fundamental in “sitting” kûkanzen, the space equivalent of sitting zazen.
In the absence of weight, if you don’t tuck your feet securely under the opposite knees, any “sitting” posture you assume will require considerable muscular effort, impossible to maintain for any length of time. When you relax, you end up in the Free Fall Crouch, the body’s natural rest position, halfway between sitting and standing.
What’s wrong with that? you may ask. Well, the idea is that Sitting, in the Zen sense, is something you do with full and powerful awareness. It requires some effort to do properly. Sitting zazen on Earth is not like sitting in a chair or standing or lying down or squatting or anything else humans do as a matter of course. It is a special posture you assume for the purpose of meditation, and after enough self-conditioning, just assuming that posture will make you begin to enter a meditative state.
And terrestrial zazen posture involves total relaxation in the midst of total attention. If relaxation alone were the goal, you would meditate lying down. The attempt to maintain a specific, defined posture (spine straight, chin down, hands just so) involves just enough effort and attention to make you see that you are, in a way, accomplishing something although you’re merely sitting. It’s one of those paradoxes—like using your mind to become so mindful you can achieve no-mind—that lie at the heart of Zen.
Reb felt it necessary to maintain that paradox, even in an environment where it’s more difficult to maintain anything but Free Fall Crouch. Full lotus position is stressful for most beginners, in gravity—but it becomes quite tolerable in zero gee. Even for someone a lot less limber than I am: over the next few days I saw senior citizens who hadn’t touched their toes in decades spend time in lotus. The worst part is getting unfolded again.
Similarly, Reb was forced to modify hand arrangement. Suzuki’s “cosmic mudra”—left hand on top of right, middle joints of middle fingers aligned, thumb tips touching—tends to come apart without gravity’s help. Reb interlaced the fingers to compensate.
And of course the zafu (round pillow), and the slanted wooden meditation bench used by other Eastern religions, are useless in space. In their place Kûkan Zen uses one of the most ubiquitous items of space hardware, as humble and commonplace as a pillow on Earth: the Velcro belt.
If you simply drift freely while meditating, you will naturally drift in the direction of airflow, and sooner or later end up bumping against the air-outgo grille. Distracting. But if you temporarily shut down the room’s airflow to maintain your position, in a short time your exhalations will generate a sphere of carbon dioxide around your head and suppress your breathing reflex. Even more distracting.
So you leave the airflow running…and stick the back of your Velcro belt to the nearest convenient wall. People can tell you’re meditating, rather than just hanging around, because your legs are tucked up in lotus and your hands are clasped.
When two or more people are sitting kûkanzen together, it’s customary to all use the same wall, all face the same way, for the same reason that on Earth Suzuki’s disciples sit facing the wall rather than the group. Humans are so gregarious it’s hard for them to be in each other’s visual field without paying attention to each other.
That’s Kûkan Zen. Simple elegance, elegant simplicity.
The second chapter of Suzuki’s book deals with breathing. We didn’t get to that until the following day. Hawkins-roshi would put special emphasis on breathing (even for a Zen teacher), since once we graduated, we wouldn’t be doing it anymore…
At the close of our first lesson in Kûkan Zen 101, Reb said, “One thing before I let you all go. Does everyone understand why I brought you here to meet Harry Stein?”