I had a lot of stress pains last week due to my job and one of my coworkers asked me if I knew Zen.   I know Zen.   I went to school and I studied philosophy.   I told him the story about the Zen Master who I saw in college during the early 70's.

If you wanted to see the Zen Master, you had to sign up.   He was a legend among those people who were in the philosophy classes.   It did not cost anything, but you had to wait on some list until your name came up.   Someone in the philosophy department maintained the list for the school.  There may have been another list for the townies, out-of-staters or foreign travelers because the waiting list was too long to be made up of only the students in the school.   I really couldn’t imagine the value of his advice or teachings to the non-college crowd in the area.   What does a farmer need the Zen Master for?   The farmer gets up early, sees the blazing sun come up over the fields that he has already been working in for hours, he sees the same sun go down while the night sky lights up with countless stars and he is alone to think all day about life, rain, sun and taxes.   What more does he need to think about?

There are several stories that have been passed down through the years about the Master, which propelled his legend and made it so we were compelled to get on the list and see him.  The stories were so inconsistent that there was a separate philosophical debate over the overall objective of his teachings.  The Master was an underground celebrity.   People who never got an audience while they were in school would come back from all parts of the country to fulfill their appointment when their name finally came up.   It was like trying to get Bozo tickets.   You had to put in your order years in advance.   I probably should have signed my kids up when they were born.

One of the legends was the Peter Lichten story.   Peter was a senior in the philosophy class.  He was a good student and he had many friends in the philosophy circles.  People outside those circles thought he was weird.  People in those circles thought he was pretty normal.   Peter got his chance to see the Master at least ten years before I came to the school.   Everyone who was there saw Peter go up the Master’s hill.   He stopped for a short time with the Master and he went over the other side of the hill out of site, never to be seen again.  The school administration and Peter’s classmates were concerned about Peter’s disappearance, as was the police.   Word from the Master was that Peter is still here with us, so he was no help at all.   The police took that statement a different way so the Master had a lot of enlightening to do.   Peter’s body had gone on to search for Peter’s mind.   Peter may have surfaced in later years, but in the annuls of the school’s lore of philosophy, Peter is still out there searching for himself.

Then there was the story of Julie Mayanashlovski.   Julie had the longest public session with the Master on record.   She was not a student.   She was a townie.   They saw her come walking across the corn field past the cars and march up the hill.  She had no appointment and she walked like a spirit possessed right past the Master’s handlers.  Something special was happening and they all knew it.  She reached the Master and she did not kneel.   Within a few minutes the Master was seen jumping up.   Julie stood there with her arms folded as the Master soon fell to his knees and appeared to be sobbing uncontrollably.   Somehow this poor little town girl had found a way to touch the Master’s heart.  The Master was seen reaching into his little purse and he rose up his hand within his crouching position and he handed her something small and shiny.   Materialism had found it’s way into the Master’s teachings.   She came down the hill, walked right past everyone and continued across the field until she was out of sight.   It had been said that Julie was the only person that had actually taught the Master something and he had subsequently invited her to live with him on his farm to continue the ‘teachings’.

Finally, there was the legend of Stan Berrie.   Stan’s story was only one year old by the time I came to the school.   Stan’s appointment had come up two days before his graduation.   Stan wasn’t one of us, he was a physical education major who found out about the Master in his freshman year from one of the girls he was dating.   Stan did not keep his appointment out of respect or curiosity.   He thought it was all bullcrap.   He almost did not get his chance to see the Master because he would not shut up while he waited in line for his turn.   No one in line wanted to hear the criticism that Stan directed toward the Master and his teachings.   When Stan’s turn came up, he went up the hill carrying an ominous smirk on his face and a threatening posture to his walk.   He stood over the Master and although people could not hear what was being said, they knew that it was a loud one-way conversation with all the finger pointing being given by Stan.   Stan briefly stopped his assault and the Master gestured with his hands, palm side up.   The Master seemed to rise as if he was not subject to the forces of gravity.  No one could tell for sure whether or not he was rising with his feet above the ground because his robes were so long, but that was the impression that the people had.   The Master’s hands had dropped to his sides and his head had bowed.   Then ‘Pop’!   The Master sucker-punched Stan in the face knocking him out cold.   It was said that the years of physical education had created a callous over Stan’s ability to understand the processes of the mind so the Master had to use extreme measures to reach him.   Stan was carried down the hill and because school had just ended, we were not able to hear from Stan himself what he had learned that day. 

This Zen Master lived on a farm about 20 miles from the Farm-town University.   One spring day my name had magically come up and I was invited to see him.     My name may have come up because I had recently received some celebrity status of my own as I bombed horribly in the school talent show a few weeks earlier.   I played an old man on a park bench that talked to pigeons about Dostoevsky.  Maybe the Master or someone at school who worked on the list felt that I really needed help - and soon.

I drove out to the Master’s farm and I had to park at the bottom of a very steep and wide hill.   There were a lot of people in line there to see the Master.   The Master was sitting in shin-high hay on a grass mat on top of the hill.   One by one the pilgrims went up – alone - and they got to talk to the Master.   The people who were in line were kept quiet by the Master’s handlers.   No one, at least while I was there, went over the other side of the hill and disappeared like Peter.

When my turn came, I churned up the hill and stood in front of him.   I don’t know if I was out of breath from the hike or from the experience of seeing the Zen Master.   He was a longhaired clean-shaven Caucasian male who appeared to be in his mid-thirties.  He was sitting in the lotus position, of course, and he wore a white and red robe.   He had a little tin pot of tea cooking on a burner next to him.  As we stared at each other, I broke the silence as I asked him to enlighten me.   He told me to sit down and take off my sunglasses.   Wow, was it bright.   Now I could not see anything at all.   I sat down and squinted at him as he reached over to his teapot, placed a dirty little cup in front of me, and he began pouring the tea.  He filled up the cup and he did not stop pouring the tea.   The cup overflowed and he got tea all over.   I thought he was blind.    He emptied the entire pot into my cup and onto the ground.   I faked a sip from the tea, fearing some acid or mescaline was in it.   He said,  'rise up and take with you what you learned today'.  Now that was puzzling.   What did I miss?   I got up, thanked him, for what, I don't know, and I lurched back down the hill.   I did not want him to think that I was so stupid that I did not understand his message.

When I got to the bottom of the hill, I turned around and saw the Master moving his grass mat to a dry area of the hill.   That son-of-a-bitch was wearing my sunglasses and they would not let me go up the hill without another appointment.   For years I tried to figure out what he was trying to tell me.   One lesson that I got out of it for sure was to always put my sunglasses in my pocket and that lesson has served me my whole life.

When I got back to school on Monday, everyone in class asked me to tell them about my experience with the Master.  I told them that the Master put his hand on my forehead and I saw a lightning bolt flash within my brain.   All my ideas of dimensions were shattered as I had a vision which the English language – no - the human language has no words to describe.   It astounded us that over the centuries in every culture, throughout human history that there was no language that describes the indescribable.    “Haven’t we evolved enough to be able to make a word to describe this experience?”, I said.   Since I was the only person in the class who had actually received an audience with the Master, I told them that I was in agony over not having someone else there to re-live the experience and share the understanding of what we had seen together.   We would not even have to use words between us since the experience would flow through our souls. 

I stood up among my classmates, held out my hands, and I said that we must have a word to describe the experience of the indescribable.  I said to them that I hate to state the obvious, but because this word is missing in our language it still makes us the equivalent of apes.   I coined the word ‘Afondasia’ for all human kind so that we can continue to make progress as an organism.   Actually, I thought I had heard of an Italian cookie by that name, but I did not want to reveal that to them.

Yes, I had heard the legends.  Each story has been, and will be passed down from generation to generation so that the ones that follow behind us can see the light more clearly.  I wanted to assist with the stories so I made up that mind-blower.

Over the years I have thought about my real encounter on the hill with the Master and I have wondered about whether or not there really was a lesson there.   One day it hit my like a snowball on the nose.   I thought about the overflowing cup and I realized the message that he was attempting to convey, but it took years of living to see it clearly.   He was telling me to always think.  I thought about that stinking lesson for years as I tried to uncover the message.  The lesson was to pursue and to think.  Was that the message?   I will have to think about it a little more.

I told this story about the overflowing teapot to the coworker who had asked me whether or not I knew Zen.   He was not a very bright individual and it was very difficult to train him at work.   You could teach him something on Tuesday and you would have to retrain him on Thursday, even though he did the same job on Wednesday.   Before I was able to tell him my interpretation of the lesson, he said that he understood it very clearly.   He said that the teapot was like our brain.   It can only hold so much no matter what you tried to pour into it.   The lesson was clear to him immediately and it had a personal message especially tailored for him.

I returned to the philosophy department 20 years later as one of the professors had announced his retirement.   Among the people in attendance at the party were students from the current class.   I asked them if the Master still gives appointments at his farm.   The Master had lost his farm many years ago and it was not known where he had gone.   There was no longer a person in the philosophy department that maintained the list because there was no list.  I asked about the legends of Peter Lichten, Julie Mayanashlovski and Stan Berrie.  Each student said they have heard the stories, but there was no force behind them any longer and the stories were all beginning to fade away.   I asked if they had heard about Afondasia and I was astounded to hear that everyone recognized the name.   ‘What does it mean?’, I asked.   They all replied, ‘It’s an Italian cookie’.

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