Question
I have used all sorts of drugs since adolescence, and I am currently “tied” to taking painkillers regularly for their psychoactive effects.
At the same time, life took me by the hand when I was quite young and set me on a spiritual path, a path I still hesitate to call the Way. After discovering Tibetan Buddhism and then Theravada through reading, I practiced yoga for several years before becoming passionate about aikido. Finally, I have been practicing Zen for a while, and to me it is the purest essence of contemporary spirituality.
The suffering my addiction causes, and the energy of despair, are a real driving force for my practice. Don’t the patriarchs say that satori is rooted in illusion, and that the lotus grows in the mud of swamps?
Yet I feel trapped in a dualistic pattern of destruction and construction that has become a true way of life, and I find myself cultivating this “bipolarity.” I feed on guilt. Periods of “chemical mutilation” are followed by periods of intense practice, and I still cannot break the cycle. To borrow Master Deshimaru’s words, I always feel I am “walking south while thinking of the north,” or vice versa. Despite everything, I have faith and a sense of slowly progressing toward harmony, entirely independently of my will.
I have inherited a personality that is very sensitive to energetic phenomena, and I experience spiritual practice as a profound upheaval of my inner world, with an acute awareness of the revolution it entails. This frightens me, entrenched as I am in the comfortable pattern of pleasure and displeasure on which I have built myself all these years. A solution for people like me surely lies in the famous answer, “Have you finished eating? Then go wash your bowl!” and in patience. But there it is: my everyday life is what it is, and today I am full of doubt. I would like your opinion on this situation and on the steps I could take to perhaps get past what I believe is a turning point.
Forgive all these “I’s,” and a thousand thanks for your Light.
Anonymous
Answer from Master Kosen
Indeed, it is a cape, a peak! What am I saying, a peak? It is a peninsula.
Kosen