George Groebner/The Mossy Log
On Oct. 20 in a sunlight-bathed Gregg Pavilion, Andrew Mason closed his eyes, sat on a cushion in a manner that demonstrated impressive knee flexibility and struck a ringing bowl to begin Lewis & Clark’s weekly Monday Meditation session.
Mason — a Zen meditation practitioner with 40 years of experience — leads these sessions in collaboration with Greg Smith, a retired LC professor of teacher education. The Oct. 20 meditation consisted of 5- and 10-minute sessions of sitting and connecting with one’s senses. The room was silent aside from the occasional ringing of the bowl, in stark contrast to the midday bustle of campus just outside.
“I love the fact that we can come together in the Gregg Pavilion and sit in broad daylight.” Mason said in an interview with The Mossy Log
He noted that when he first started practicing Zen, it was “in many ways less mainstream than it is now.”
In addition to his sessions at LC, Mason leads group meditation sessions at Ring of Moss Zendo, a Zen Buddhist center in Milwaukie, Oregon and does silent retreats several times a year where participants meditate for 14 hours a day. When I asked how meditation had been helpful in his life, Mason responded that he has been meditating with such dedication and for so long that it is difficult to assess what it helps with and what it does not, but said that he considers Zen a “fundamental source of honesty.”
“It’s a practice of letting as much drop away as can possibly drop away,” Mason said.
Elizabeth Sherwin, an LC grad student currently pursuing her master’s in professional mental health counseling, is very new to meditation but described the session as a “lovely break in the day.”
“I’ve never really done this before formally, and it felt valuable enough to my day that I would do it again,” Sherwin said.
Mason described the focus of Zen meditation as “letting things be what they are” and resisting the human urge to capture and control everything around us, using the examples of picking flowers and taking photos of sunsets. These are not inherently bad actions, but they are impediments to appreciating the world as it is — through the lens of an observer rather than a participant.
Among a variety of reasons, Mason values Zen for helping him to imagine what the world would be like without humans. He notably appreciates the humility in recognizing all the similarities it likely would have to the world today, as well as the biodiverse flourishing that would take place in humanity’s absence. However, he does not see humans and non-human organisms as inherent adversaries.
He noted that Zen has the potential to help us “connect better with the banana slugs and the salal (a type of shrub) and the fir trees around us.”
Of course, most people are less concerned with the divide between humans and banana slugs (and, truly, when was the last time you felt that a banana slug knew the real you?). We are often more concerned with the divides between people in modern society. Here, Mason also believes that Zen has an important place.
“When we’ve got a global pandemic, wars like we haven’t seen in thirty years and politics as divisive and nasty as they are right now, to be able to see through the clutter and figure out what really matters (and) connects us all is as important as it gets,” Mason said.
Mason also attributed the world’s current degree of conflict and polarization to the mentality of “control tower human being,” and argued that in this context, Zen meditation “certainly is as important as it’s ever been.” However, he rejects the idea of meditation being a means to an end, or even as something that can work or not work.
“I would not describe what we’re doing as mindfulness, or at least, I would just as soon describe it as mindlessness,” Mason said. “There’s extraordinary stuff afoot when we just let go.”
Meditation sessions take place every Monday in Gregg Pavilion at 12:15 p.m.
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