A Tiny Break From Cynicism and Criticism

Here below please read the text from Sit In: What It Is Like, a book by the late, great zen poet, artist and philosopher Paul Reps, who, among other cool accomplishments, authored the first North American book of haiku in 1939. Sit In was published by Zen Center Press (San Francisco), in 1975. It is a tiny, sweet out-of-print paperback with Reps' ink painting-poems throughout, bought at San Francisco's Dog Eared Books. He doesn't tell you that he's teaching you how to meditate, but he does. He's basically the only zen poet who writes about how to meditate with a grounded practicality that I can grasp. Yes, it's not short, but it is CONCISE. Trust me, read it. You'll thank me later.


~~start quote~~



Book begins here



Head and heart are not apart



Sit in in-vites you

Into new experiencing

As new all through

Doing (no thing) well



In the Orient

Those who sit in

Become stronger healthier

And surer of their cosmos position



So may you



Humans from over the world

Visit these sitters

And often wonder what they are doing



This book explains what

So they may visit you



The act of sit in

Takes self discipline



Then it takes self guidance

Even to take a step you guide it



Then it takes other guidance

The coming together of cosmos as you

Accepting this togethering thankfully

Graduating from dissatisfaction



All this packs in sit

Keep in before words about it

Do not go beyond in



As men give their life for country

Give yours for life itself

In any position or act of good will

Graduate in



Please compose ourself

This may take a little while

Then



As you sit in

Without moving even a finger

With a friend present or

Present elsewhere



1 minute the first day

2 minutes the second day

3 minutes the third day



Increasing minutely up to 10



Or later maybe more



Preferably at the same time place

Perhaps in an empty quiet room



Your integrity begins to show

Cell rhythms smooth in

And you feel better and

Better



When standing

We balance our human instrument

As three inverted triangles



Head into shoulders



Shoulders into pelvis



Pelvis into feet



As this mobile balancing

Leans slightly

Muscle stress begins to recover

Us into weightless

Perfect

Bliss this



As we compose

Our lowest triangle

Into a firm base

Including our whole body

In-ing begins



Sitting crosslegged

On a hard cushion

Or forward on a low flat seat

with both feet on ground

Somthing amazing happens



We open

Shut up

Up in



Sit comfortably then most

Comfortably erect



Centering your weight equally

On two sit bones



Forehead smooth

Soft eyes near closing



Inbreathflow high through nostrils



Shoulders releasing

Back firm

Neck soft

Jaw not tight



Head floating up from back

As if about to nod yes

Though not yet nodding



The sitting itself

Your answer



The sitting itself

Your healing



Just do it



Difficult when stiff

More and more fluidly flexive

When firm and gentle with you



Impulse subdued



Emotive re-act pacified



Radiance through



Too simple to believe

In experiencing

Millions of years before yoga

Thousands of years before zen



Re-discovered gloriously by buddha

(2500 years ago) and other sages

And variously formalised





If a dull moment comes



Stretch



Loosen



In



"What is it like?"



Like inlight

Actually we are made of light

Too instant for birth death



"How?"



Observe natural breathflow

Outbreathflow

Inbreathflow

Imagine turning palms of hands

Down with outbreathflow

Up with inbreathflow

Continuing without moving hands

In your rhythm of suns and seas

Given with birth



Lo the great harmony



"Are you dreaming it?"

Waking from dream and

From waking dream

Graduate in



"Does it help others?"

Are you others?

Are others you?

Is empty full?



"Can it be done with overstepping

Overdoing overgoing?"

Yes



"Does it get to be a habit?"

If you sit and sag

Try too hard

Try to repeat it



It's electric

Just as it sits



Earned benefits of sit in

May be due in part to:



a) Your willing to practice it

As an act of integrity



b) Charging your batteries

Minding your business



c) Doing nothing beyond in



d) Mind attention accommodating

One aggregate at a time wholly



e) Smoothing broken breathflow



f) In-viting innate nerveflow

Bloodflow lymphflow juiceflow

Cell consciousnessing



g) Pressures on large base

Nerve cluster opening inner doors

To tophead



h) Entering silent sound

Awarefullness



i) Self-learning to do(no-thing)

When about your daily work

Moving water-smooth light-bright

So nothing is the water



j) Multiple other reasons unknown

As yet to us air and light breathers



in this lifetime

IS resolves

to help one individual

you (who me?) so

wondrously put

together



Something

Is

Immediate

Unchanging in change

Inchanting me me

In each grassblade



"Who me?"

Instead of me or I

May one answer



IS -- is does it



Is

Sits





Fresh

Shouts the bud



Strengthening



Trueing



Utterly still



You may feel it is meditating

Or praying or composing

Or graduating from talk-back



Before before say

Keep in

Firm as pyramid

In deep wake

As in deep sleep

Instantly regenerating

Rejuvenating



New life begins here



Thank you for your life



Our energy sea sees us.

Earth and its creatures are negative to light.

We break through to inlight.



any questions?

reps

ZEN CENTER

300 Page Street

San Francisco, Ca 94102



OPEN HERE



~~end quote~~



This guy Paul Reps only has one original book still in print, his famous Zen Telegrams, which is how I found him. The book Zen Flesh Zen Bones, his translations of ancient zen texts, is also still in print, and includes the sexiest poem I've ever read: Centering, with the two sexiest words ever put together in a love letter: "devotion frees."



Here is the most complete bibliography that I can muster for his sixty years of generating random, beautiful little books. I have most of these books, thanks to E-Bay(search titles AND descriptions, people don't always put Reps in the product title), and the Bay Area's (once Reps' home) used book stores, especially Dog Eared Books and Forest Books.



-- 1939 More Power To You: Poems Anyone Can Make. (California). (A book of "visual haiku" published 27 years before Robert Spiess' first collection of haiku, The Heron's Legs, was published, and over 20 years before any of the few other very early North American haiku collections were published in the early and mid-sixties.)


-- 1951 Unknot the World in You.


--1957 Zen Flesh Zen Bones.


-- 1958 Naked Essays by a Wandering Foreigner, publisehd by Komo Hadaka Aruki (Japan).


-- 1960 Big Bath.


--1961 Gold/ Fish Signatures (on ricepaper).


--1962-1964 Picture-Poem Primer (dated 1964 per Bibliography in Letters to a Friend, may be 1963 or earlier).


--1965 Unwrinkling Plays.


--1967 Square Sun, Square Moon.


--1967 Ask a Potato.


--1969 No Need to Kill: 10 Ways to Meditate.


--1971 Be!: New Uses for the Human Instrument.


--1974 Deep Wake.


-- 1975 Sit In, What It is Like.


-- 1978 Juicing: Words & Brushwork.


-- 1981 Letters to a Friend.


-- 1990 Let Good Fortune Jump on You.


and

---- a mysterious undated one-page folded puzzle 8 Ways to You by "Hut-of-Light" (Hawaii).



Read your Reps! It's a panacea better than chocolate, better than a snow day, better than a warm cat asleep on your lap. Or at least more reliable.