Richard Rose on Paul Wood

from: Definition of ZenKent State University, 1976

From a lecture at KSU, Kent, Ohio

Source: 1976-Definition-of-Zen-Kent-State at www.direct-mind.org

PDF (16 pages, 110 KB): Definition-of-Zen-KSU.pdf

... Then I found a fellow by the name of Paul Wood, who had had an experience that was possibly much longer than mine; it seemed to be more profound and detailed. I met him in Akron, Ohio. He had come to this realization by meditating on the Lord's Prayer. And I was utterly amazed, because I thought that system was all washed up and that you have to find, as Chilton-Pearce says, a new set of symbols to go by. That you have to toss out these old ones, that weren't delivering results.

What had happened, he was an aviator who had dropped some bombs on Japan. And being a good Christian he wondered why the God who watched the fall of a sparrow didn't stop those bombs from landing in the right place. And this obsessed him or pursued him until the Air Force got rid of him; they said he was a risk. So they sent him home mumbling to himself. And he got down to Texas where he worked, and he mumbled to himself until his wife threw him out. She decided he wasn't going to be serviceable anymore so she got rid of him. And he wandered the streets still mumbling to himself. He took first one job and then another, and his family wouldn't have anything to do with him. He had some children; his kids made fun of him, apparently.

So he got a job, as he told me, at an automobile dealership selling cars, and one day he put his head down on the desk and asked God to kill him. He had tried to commit suicide two or three times but he couldn't do it, didn't have the courage. And when he woke up he said he was in the hospital. He was there for about ten days. And he said he was travelling on a starship, like in Star Trek. He was travelling in outer space for about a week or ten days.

I met him in a garage in Cuyahoga Falls. We sat in this dirty garage with some of the so-called brains from Goodyear and Firestone. We had to go to the garage because my friend who invited me over had some noisy kids in the house, and we couldn't talk, so we went out into the garage. But I sat there and listened to this man's experience and I was utterly amazed. And I said to him. "How? What brought this about?"

He said, "Well, everything hit the fan and I didn't know where to turn, until I got the Bible out. And the Bible says that when you're troubled pray thusly." And what followed was the Lord's Prayer. So he said, "I decided to give it all. If that's what it takes, repeat the Lord's Prayer; eighteen hours a day if necessary. And we'll analyze it, study it, take it apart. And whatever was meant by it, we'll try to find out." And he stayed with it. But he said the more he spent time on it and the more he walked the streets mumbling that stuff, the worse things got. He'd lose one job after another. But what was happening – something was taking him to a breaking point – in other words, to the point where his head stopped. And when his head stopped he knew everything.

Now this is what they really mean in this Zen literature about no-mind. They mean the point where the head stops. And they talk occasionally about killing the Buddha, or killing the mind. But you can't kill your mind. These were terms that were either lost or had something wrong with the translation, or misinterpreted. The mind is killed for you. You can't set out to kill your own mind. The only thing you can do is set out to find the truth. But in the process of finding the truth, you have to somehow put a stop to this relative hassle that goes back and forth: "It could be this but it also could be the opposite. Or let's look at it from two sides." No, you have to go right down the middle. Look at it directly. Become one with it. You can't reason it out, back and forth.

So he tried of course to pass this on to a few people, and he couldn't do it. Because he could only tell them to use the Lord's Prayer. But there was something missing when they got to studying the Lord's Prayer: they hadn't been aviators, they hadn't dropped bombs and killed people, they hadn't gone through all the little detailed steps of hell that he went through. And he couldn't project them into that.

Each man's path is slightly different. So that's the reason that no religion or philosophy has a priority on enlightenment. There shouldn't be any implication that you have to join anything. They say to have faith – but I say one of the things you've got to keep doing is doubting, not having faith. That you have to have faith is a paradox you walk right through: You have to have faith in yourself. You have to have the faith that you will either find or you'll go crazy, or drop dead. If you have that kind of faith you might get something. ...

 

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