I owe this profound entry into the expression of the unconscious force — which, if we listen to it, is not our enemy but our ally — to Ejo Takata, who was my Zen master for a period of five years. Without really knowing what I was getting into, I agreed to be part of a group that meditated for seven full days, sleeping only twenty minutes each night. Full of courage, I knelt with my buttocks supported on a cushion, crossed my hands, put my thumbs together with minimal precision as if I were holding a cigarette paper between them, stretched out my spine, felt myself anchored in the ground and united to the center of the Earth while my skull reached up toward the sky, relaxed my face and then the rest of my muscles, eliminated all words and feelings from my mind, and, believing my technique to be perfect, prepared to remain there motionless, like Buddha, for a week. After barely two hours, the torture began. My knees, legs, back, and entire body hurt. If I moved just a little, the giant Mexican patrolling with his baton would give me a hiding on the shoulders. If I winced when flies walked on my face, the master would yell demonically. My imagination flared up, and so did my anger. What was I doing here, suffering needlessly in the midst of these enlightened shaved heads? I saw my shoes in a corner, like open mouths, inviting me to fill them and leave this hell. At the sound of a gong, we had to run to the dining room and gobble down a bowl of rice, almost boiling hot, in two minutes, without leaving a single grain in the bowl. We returned to meditate with bloated bellies. A concert of belches and continuous farting began. With anger and shame I noticed that the others, especially the women, were holding it in better than I. At midnight we lay down like dogs to sleep on the floor for those divine twenty minutes. We awoke to screams and insults and had to run to sit and continue our meditation. We were allowed to go and defecate once a day in a communal latrine, where a row of holes over an artesian well invited men and women alike to completely give up privacy. I resisted and resisted, out of pride rather than mysticism. Takata began playing the drum, singing the Heart Sutra. Luz María, a chunky lesbian in front of him who also was playing the drum, flew into a rage and threw her instrument at his head. The monk made a minimal movement, ducking by a few centimeters so that the heavy instrument passed millimeters from his ear and smashed into the wall, leaving a hole. Ejo, not in the least perturbed, kept chanting the Sutra. No comment was made about this assault.
By the fifth day I had become a scarecrow. My knees were swollen and bloody, my belly was full of gas, my eyes were tear filled, and there was a pain in my chest. At three in the morning, I was dragged by two aggressive students to a room where the master was going to give me a riddle, a koan. I was forced to fight and defend myself as the fanatical pair rained blows on me. I crept down the stairs and sat in front of the curtain hiding the sacred room.
“My chest hurts,” I said. “I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
“Break yourself!” they replied, and left.
A gong sounded, indicating that I should go in. And so I did. There was Ejo, transfigured, dressed in a ceremonial robe that made him look like a saint. He looked at me with an objectivity that I construed as contempt and said to me as I knelt before him with my forehead touching the floor, “It does not begin, it does not end. What is it?”
I had been prepared to respond to a classic riddle, “This is the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” to which I would have raised my open right hand, answering with a broad smile, “Do you hear?” Or, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” to which I would have responded by screaming, “Mu!” But when asked this question, so simple, so ingenuous, so obvious, I could only stammer, “Ejo, what do you want me to say? God? The universe? Me? You? All of this?” The monk took up a hammer and hit the gong, signaling for all the zendo*5 to hear that I had failed. I bowed, humbled, and began to leave. Then Ejo yelled, “Intellectual, learn to die!” These words, spoken in an atrocious Japanese accent, changed my life. Suddenly, I realized that all my searching up to that point, everything that I had done, had been carried out by a cowardly intellect that, afraid to die, was clinging to the iron bars of reason. Existence began when the actor-self stopped identifying with the observer-self. In a flash, I entered the world of dreams.
SIX. The Endless Dream
I had my first lucid dream at the age of seventeen without realizing it. As I was not prepared for such an important event, I felt a profound terror and thought I was immersed in an anomaly. In the first part of the dream I was in a cinema in which an animated film was being shown. There was a landscape of large rocks in the film that gradually became softer and softer until they became dark rivulets that seeped out of the screen and into the room. I then saw that I was sitting in the middle of the vast cinema as the only spectator. I knew beyond doubt that I was dreaming, which is to say that I woke up in the dream. This knowledge that everything I saw was unreal, that my own flesh did not exist, that this lava of molten rocks swallowing row after row of seats was pure illusion, was distressing to me. Despite the fact that it was a dream, the danger frightened me. I wanted to run but I thought, “If I go through that door, I will go into another world and will never be able to return to my own; perhaps I will die.” Then I panicked! My only hope of salvation was to wake up. I found it impossible. As impossible as if at this moment you were to lift your eyes from this book and tell yourself, “I’m dreaming, I must wake up.” I felt trapped in a monstrous world that was trying not to let me go. I made an immense effort to get out of the dream, I felt paralyzed, I could not move my arms or legs, and the lava was coming toward my seat. It would soon bury me. I continued desperately trying to wake myself up. I ascended from the depths to my real body, which was sleeping stretched out on the surface like an ocean liner. I reintegrated myself into my body and woke up drenched in sweat, my heart beating rapidly. I felt that this dream was a sickness, though in reality it was a gift. Thereafter, I felt threatened every night when I went to bed. I was afraid that the dream world would swallow me forever.
This fear prompted me to read books about dreams, their mechanisms, their qualities, and how to interpret them. There are different kinds of dreams: sexual, harrowing, pleasant, and also therapeutic. In ancient times the sick would visit the temple hoping to dream with a goddess who would cure them. Dreams were considered prophetic. Freud gave them the role of revealing our psychic residue, our frustrated desires, our amoral impulses, systematically attributing symbolic meaning to certain images. According to Jung explaining the events in dreams was not important; the focus should be on continuing to live through them in a waking state by means of analysis in order to see where they would lead us, what message they were giving us. However, all these interpretative methods consider the dream as something we receive with the goal of getting it to act in the rational world. They are symbols, not realities. A patient says often enough, “I had a dream,” but never, “I visited a dream.” The next stage, situated beyond rational interpretation, is to enter the lucid dream in which we know we are dreaming; this knowledge gives us the ability to work not only with the content of the dream but also with our own mysterious identity.