A great deal of water has flowed under the bridge since I last posted here in 2009. In that year it was necessary to place this blog on hold because I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, one of the several bone marrow cancers that afflict the elderly. I have been successfully treated, in the main, and the disease for the most part driven into remission, which is just as well because there is no cure.

Since the onset of the disease I have undergone a number of sophisticated cutting edge therapies together with an astounding (to me at least) orthopedic procedure that installed a titanium steel tube in my left femur in order to keep the bone from cracking or breaking due to a large new lesion. Multiple myeloma is so named because its most noticeable and perilous effect is to dissolve lytic lesions in various regions of the body. They often look as if someone had shot cannonballs through the bones. An equally undesirable effect of MM is the hypercalcemia, excessive calcium levels, that result from the dissolving of bone tissue. This causes all sorts of complications, three of the least pleasant being kidney failure, anemia and pneumonia.

I was diagnosed quite late in the fourth stage of development of the disease. Consequently the extreme anemia caused two coronary events of the "dry pump" type, where the heart struggles to obtain oxygen from a bloodstream that contains little or none. Both of the coronaries occurred, luckily, in the presence of the internist who was treating my pneumonia, so that I was at once placed in the hospital's intensive care unit.

And that is where there appeared, so to speak, a silver lining within the otherwise dismal clouds threatening my existence. Twice during my sedation and intubation my heart stopped and I died, and that is why I am recounting these events. Alert and very competent nurses quickly got my heart going again each time it stopped, but during those brief times I went not just to death's door but right through it. The experience was not at all like the ones we often read about. There was no tunnel, no extracorporeal flight, no vision of departed loved ones. Rather there was nothing but an ocean of dazzling light into which I was dissolving like a cloud in the sky. I had no weight or mass, indeed no body. I felt, if that is the word for an unbodied experience, only an intense delight and a sense of having dropped an intolerable burden. The expression "perfect peace" scarcely suffices.

The great English philosopher-teacher Douglas Harding remarked shortly before he departed the world, "It is very interesting to die." What an understatement! The experience of dying, even for a minute or two, eclipses everything else that life contains. I recommend it to everyone, which is perhaps a redundancy because it comes necessarily to each and every one of us. Life is, after all, fatal.

One of the most vivid memories of that momentary death experience is a striking parallel to what we encounter in practicing zazen, and indeed most meditative practices in the wisdom traditions. Buddhism, never at a loss for a descriptive technical term, uses the Sanskrit term "shamatha" to denote the effortless, stable one-pointed focus of the mind, called "ichigyo sanmai" or "one-pointed samadhi" in Zen. In the state of shamatha it is possible to experience "vipashyana"or "insight," the supramental perception that samsara and nirvana are one. In their Chinese form as "Chih" and "Kuan"  or "Shikan" in Japanese, these complementary states are the focus of the Tendai school of Buddhism.

My recollection includes a timeless moment in which Shamatha and Vipashyana arose simultaneously, utter stillness and total insight. As it is said in (I believe) the Mumonkan, "Who would not wish to enter this gate?" You doubtless know where I'm going with this. It's not necessary to pass through death's door in order to enjoy the unitary experience of shamatha-vipashyana. Zazen, either with a wato (koan) or in shikan taza ("just sitting"), carries us unfailingly to that inimitable destination, the Gateless Gate where we experience, as Yengo wrote, "peace, ease, non-doing and inexpressible delight."