Sober Zen

Emotional sobriety is hard but it is a pre-requisite of staying sober

Zen, the circle of enlightenment (Image from Clicr.com)

What does zen mean? As adjective it means “peaceful and calm”, as noun:noun

1. a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism emphasizing the value of meditation and intuition rather than ritual worship or study of scriptures.

2. Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese word, ch’an, which comes from a Sanskrit root meaning “thought,” “absorption, A” or “meditation.” And meditation is at the heart of Zen, along with an emphasis on self-control and insight.

There are other definitions, but these two are sufficient for my purpose. I have written elsewhere about the calm feeling I have.

I describe being “lost in a glorious eternity of being, creative and at one with the world”. That seems pretty zen to me. That glorious eternity of being…at one with the world is a pretty good facsimile of enlightenment. I feel blessed. Not all the time, but mostly, blessed.

I know understand the true meaning of prayer, and what it means to have that prayer answered.

But the miracle is not that I have attained that through sobriety but that I FELT that serentity the morning I stopped. There was a sense of calm, of deliberateness, of pre-destination, of wholly being in that sense of serenity that nothing would ever be the same again.