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.
