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A Know-it-all In Search of Beginner’s Mind, or Zen and the Art of Zen
I have flown to star-stained heights, on bent and battered wings
In search of mythical kings, mythical kings
Sure that everything of worth is in the sky and not the earth
And I never learned to make my way down … where the iguanas play
— Dory Previn, 1970
Little did I realize when I heard this song, age 19 in 1971, that she was foretelling my future. Almost. Around about this same time, I met a woman — a few years older, perhaps as much as 25! — who fancied herself a practitioner of Zen. I grew up in East Point Georgia; I had never heard of Zen. When I asked her what Zen was, she threw a pack of cigarettes at me. I caught it on the fly and she pointed at the pack or maybe my hand and said, “That. That’s Zen.” “Jesus, what an asshole,” I thought to myself.
That was my second encounter with Eastern philosophy. My first was when I visited a one-time class in something called Kundalini Yoga at the Quaker House in Atlanta. I had an actual experience of feeling my kundalini — orsomething? — rising up my spinal column, filling my skull like a lighter-than-air gas. When I lay on the floor in corpse posture, being guided through what may have been my first meditation, I saw fantastic colors on the back of my…
