Plain as the Nose on your Face

Who you REALLY are...
is simple, open awareness right here and now... as plain as the nose on your face!
~ Francis Fran Bennett

"When I was a young professed monk at Gethsemani in first, temporary vows, we had a Korean Zen Master coming to the monastery occasionally and giving Zen sesshins to any of the monks who were interested in coming. I attended all these little retreats of Soen Sa Nim, the founder of the Providence Zen Center. He had a group of students at the time in nearby Lexington, Kentucky, and so, whenever he came to Kentucky to visit his students there, he would come over to us Trappists and offer us a little retreat and teach us about Zen meditation. I also began corresponding with this Zen Master and tried to see if maybe I could get enlightened like the Zen Buddhist monks I had read about in Merton’s book, Mystics and Zen Masters.

Several times, when I was practicing Zen and working with this teacher, I had little inspirational glimpses or what the teacher called satori, when I suddenly found myself wholly in the present moment. I specifically remember the first one, as I was walking down the stark cloister hallway at Gethsemani just after a Zen retreat with Soen Sa Nim. I wrote the following little poem about this satori. I am That Simply, the Sun is beaming in, slanting through the long, clear, narrow windows, as the dust particles dance in the bright, white sunbeams and all there is, in this beautiful, clear light is, THAT. It was a first, fleeting but wonderful moment of simply being fully, consciously present.

These little realizations of presence happened many times during my Zen period and I began to make a connection between the experience of present-moment awareness and the experience of what I called the presence of God—the fleeting glimpses I had had as a young boy and teenager. They seemed to be essentially the same experience, just called by different names. I experienced in both, the same sense of transcendent love and joy and ecstatic awareness, the same sense of presence. There was in both experiences a literal ex-stacy: a standing out of, or freedom from, the habitual sense of a little ‘me’. I had wonderful glimpses that, while experiencing the presence of God, or the present-moment awareness, there really was no possibility of a petty little person called ‘me’, with a personal history, a name or role or definable identity. All there was, was this. And what this was, was the presence of the holy mystery we named God..."

~ Francis Bennett,   I Am That I Am: Discovering the Love, Peace, Joy and Stability of the True Self

Photo ~ Francis Fran Bennett with Mukti and Adyashanti