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An excerpt from Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen by Brad Warner

As long as you have a goal that has not yet been met, you suffer. There is dissonance between you as you are right now and you as you think you’ll be once your desire is met. You feel incomplete. It’s like being hungry. You think you need to accumulate or acquire whatever you desire in order to complete yourself.

But you’re wrong if you think satisfying a desire will complete you. You are complete as you are right now — no matter what you think you lack. It’s not that your life couldn’t improve if you got that thing you want. Maybe it could. And maybe you really do need to acquire whatever that object might be. More than likely, though, if you examine it clearly, you’ll see that you don’t really need that object after all. Still, even when you do need whatever it is, that isn’t the problem.

The problem is when you allow the idea that fulfilling a desire will make you happy to dominate your experience. The bare fact that you have desires and goals is not a problem in itself. It’s perfectly normal. You couldn’t rid yourself of them if you tried. So there’s no point in trying.

When practicing zazen, you put your desires aside. Any idea you have about wanting your practice to be anything other than what it actually is, is just another thought. It’s no more worthy of attention than, say, a random thought about pink potato chips or suddenly remembering the name of your second-grade teacher. As you would with any other thought, you put aside the thought that your practice ought to be clearer, calmer, more insightful, or whatever you think it should be.

Desires are just thoughts that occur in our brains. Some are useful, some aren’t. What messes us up is the way we identify with our desires. We have a desirous thought, and then we attempt to own that thought. And because it is now my desire, I think I must do something to satisfy it.

Once you learn to stop this process of identifying yourself with your thoughts, you find that desires don’t really have much of a hold on you. They’re just more thoughts your brain generates. Just more brain secretions.

According to a scientific study I once read, we have around fifty thoughts each minute. I’m not sure how they tabulated that. But I’ve watched my own brain do its thing during meditation long enough to see that the number of thoughts I generate throughout the day must run into the millions.

Most of these thoughts we simply ignore. We barely notice them at all. They’re subtle and fleeting. Other thoughts are a bit more concrete and stick around a while longer. Yet we still dismiss them.

Some thoughts appear to be tagged for immediate dismissal by some sort of habit-based mechanism in the brain. These are our supposedly “evil” thoughts, the thoughts we’ve been taught since childhood are not to be allowed. Each one of us has a different set of these. But we all have them. Sometimes if we become aware of such thoughts, we get deeply disturbed by the fact that they even appear in our minds.

But we shouldn’t, because the mere fact that such “evil” thoughts appear in the mind doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. The brain is just firing away, doing what it needs to do, and some of that random activity is perceived as thought. As long as we don’t act on the kinds of thoughts we know we shouldn’t act on, we’re fine. I mean, it’s probably not a good idea to linger too long on the worst of our thoughts. But it’s not a big deal just to have them.

Other thoughts, though, are attractive. When they appear in our minds, we begin to play with them, like a little kid playing with a lump of dirt. We manipulate them, we caress them, we pull them apart and put them together in new ways. And these thoughts often turn into desires and goals.

All we need to do is learn how to allow such thoughts to dissipate and vanish the way we allow most of our other thoughts to dissipate and vanish. Which is easier said than done.

When we identify with these thoughts, that is, when we imagine that something called “me” is generating these thoughts, that’s when we get into trouble. One of the key ways we define who we are is to state what we desire. For example, I’m Brad Warner and I want to be a bestselling author. What I want is, to a large extent, who I am.

So we fear that if we were to let go of our desires, we would be letting go of who we are.

But I’ve found that this really isn’t the case. I’ve discovered, through a long and often very difficult meditative practice, that I am not my desires at all. I can let them go — all of them — and still retain my core being.

When you do zazen, you sit there and you meet your desires moment by moment. And you don’t do anything at all to satisfy even the easiest ones to satisfy. You’d rather be checking Facebook, but you don’t. You want to scratch, but you don’t. Or at least you put it off for a while. You want this meditation session to be full of peaceful feelings and bliss, but you stick with it even when it’s full of conflict and distractions. You just sit still.

This usually causes desire to redouble its efforts. Rather than getting more blissful and full of peace, you might get positively enraged. It’s not an easy practice, however simple it seems. It never was. Not for anyone.

This is one of the reasons why methods that are advertised as quick and easy ways of experiencing spiritual bliss or achieving altered states of awareness are ultimately damaging and a colossal waste of time and effort.

Achieving spiritual bliss and altered states of awareness are just more ways of giving in to desire. Your desire for bliss or altered states is satiated for a little while, but then it comes back again even stronger, and you have to make even greater efforts to achieve more bliss or states even more altered than the ones you’ve achieved, or else simply suffer for the lack of them. This is how the folks who sell those methods of meditation keep you coming back for more, by the way.

But bliss will always make you feel like shit after a while.

When people come to meditation because they want bliss, they generally want mind-blowing and spectacular experiences. And those really do sometimes happen to people who meditate. But they’re actually kind of a problem. This is because they can’t last forever; they cannot be permanent.

Brad Warner is the author of Letters to a Dead Friend about Zen and numerous other titles including It Came from Beyond Zen, Don’t Be a Jerk, and Hardcore Zen. A Soto Zen teacher, he is also a punk bassist, filmmaker, and popular blogger who leads workshops and retreats around the world. He lives in Los Angeles where he is the founder and lead teacher of the Angel City Zen Center. Visit him online at www.hardcorezen.info.

Excerpted from the book Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen. Copyright ©2019 by Brad Warner. Printed with permission from New World Library.

Sometimes when I hold something or look at something, I get this tingly, chilly feeling. That's all that happens, however. How can I find out what this is? I try to read more into it, but I can't seem to get any further than this feeling. Do you think I'm psychic? If so, what can I do to develop my abilities further?

- Patti

Astrea:

I'm sure you have a gift for psychometry. This is the ability to read people, places, and things by holding something that was either dear to the person or particular to the place. That tingly feeling you get is something you should develop further so you can really use it.

To develop your skill, you must make every one of your five (regular) senses tune in to the object you're touching or holding. First, try to turn those feelings into something visual. Once you can picture something that is related to the item you're holding, examine that picture in your mind.

With practice, you'll be able to tell if the item you're holding belongs to a man or a woman, what age that person is, and how long ago they held or owned it.

Next, seek the scent of the object. How does it smell, and what is the taste you have in your mouth? Is it salty? Sweet? Bitter? That's a key to the personality of the object.

Is the owner speaking? While you may not be able to make out exact words, what is that voice like? How does it sound? Is it high-pitched or low and baritone? Use those five senses to engage your sixth sense - your psychic awareness. Be methodical about this and practice a lot.

Begin with small, simple things that belong to a person. Focus on items that have only had one owner because those are less confusing. Keys are good because usually they belong to just one person.

Antique jewelry can create a mess in your head because it has probably passed through many hands. Clothing also gets handed down, as do toys. Also, at least at first, make sure that your friends aren't trying to fool or test you.

In a few months, you'll be able to branch out to rocks, leaves and soil to read places. Start with items from places that you've actually been so that it's easier for you to identify where it is you go. These are the most fun for me because you get to mentally go there when you're holding the rock. You can travel the whole world this way!
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The most difficult items are things that have belonged to people who have crossed over, so don't try to read those until you have a little more experience. Sometimes our loved ones are so eager to come through that they can short-circuit our psychic wiring, which can lead to a bad headache.

Also, people with your gift are often natural mediums, so you have to take care that you don't hurt yourself by doing things you're not ready to do yet. Reading objects is like solving a puzzle, so if you're good with puzzles, you should be good at psychometry too.

*****

Susyn:

How wonderful! What you're experiencing is definitely a sign that your psychic gifts are coming to life, and once they awaken, there's no stopping them.

Psychic abilities (or in this case ESP, which is a precursor to psychic abilities) appear at different times for different people. What you're experiencing is the ability to sense energies beyond what normal people can - hence the term Extra-Sensory Perception.

Your ability to perceive the invisible fields of energy surrounding the objects you hold tells me you are especially sensitive to these vibrations. Because of this, I strongly recommend you invest in a crystal pendulum. Divining with a pendulum will allow you to ask specific questions or evaluate your options based simply on the energy fields the pendulum picks up.

Here are two more exercises you can use to build your powers or use them to do readings for people:

At a local rock or metaphysical store, purchase seven stones of different colors. Use the key below and pick one stone to represent each of the seven chakras or energy centers in the human body. (The type of stone is unimportant).

Red: Root Chakra/ Physical Body
Orange: Creation Chakra/ Creative Energy
Yellow: Solar Plexus Chakra/ Personal Power
Green: Heart Chakra/ Emotions
Light Blue: Will Chakra/ Self-Expression
Indigo: Mind Chakra/ Intellect
Purple: Crown Chakra/ Connection to spirit

Sit in a quiet space where you won't be distracted, and one by one, pick up a stone and hold it in your hand. As you sit with it, note the images, thoughts or feelings you have. Also note on a scale from 1-5 the level of energy you feel emanating from each stone.

You can use these stones to check your own and others' energy centers. If the energy from the stone is low, that indicates an area you will want to meditate or record so you can clear any blocks.

Another great way to develop your gifts is to have people bring you objects or items that belonged to someone who has crossed over. It's best if this was someone you didn't know.

Trusting the thoughts or feelings you get and expressing them will help you see how often your psychic impressions are right, which in turn will deepen your ability to trust them and encourage further development.

There are many ways to develop and use this talent, so work with it and stay open to these feelings. By practicing, you'll encourage your psychic gifts to grow and prosper.

Good luck to you!