“The inner alchemist has caused dead and worn-out cells to fall and the gold of new skin to appear with perpetual health and loveliness. Truly divine Love in demonstration is eternal youth. The divine alchemist is within my temple, constantly coining new and beautiful baby cells. The spirit of youth is within my temple - this human form divine, and all is well.”

Baird T. Spalding “Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East”

Master Kaisen, Czestochowa 2002

It was a sunny November afternoon on the day, on which the most exciting meeting I had ever experienced until that time was about to begin in the Community Center in Czestochowa. I was setting my camera on the tripod, waiting for the Master. The press conference, where Master Kaisen (teacher of the Japanese soto zen) has met with the media representatives, wasn`t finished yet. Not everyday happens that such an interesting figure as minister of Buddhist’ practice from the distant Japan appears in a drowsy Catholic town.

I have never seen Master Kaisen before. I was practicing in his sanga for one year, but his person always seemed very remote. He resides in France, in his monastery near Paris, together with many monks. Ania, my friend from sanga, has once participated in a sesshin in Master Kaisen’s monastery and described this trip as the most wonderful experience in her life.

I imagined Master Kaisen as a perfect teacher, on the side of which I could meditate for the rest of my life. Despite of the fact that I didn’t know about him much, his teachings, communicated through his disciples, supplied for my hunger for spiritual knowledge.

It was neither the kind of knowledge I could learn in school I went to, nor any similar teaching I could have encountered before. It was a teaching based on a strict zen practice, stripped of the dogmas, theories and assumptions. Immersed in meditation we were sitting still for an hour, sometimes two, and staring into some one tiny point on the floor we were experiencing the crystallization of the mind. In the purest way – without thoughts, words and illusions – we were learning to be “here and now”, always conscious of the present moment.

The experience of meditation played in my life an important role, being the best function of the ability to recognize the nature of things.

While I was getting mind programming education in high school, being flooded with piles of information, on zazen I could finally fully open the flower of my mind and recognize the Universe as the entirety of my own self. I had become acquainted with this kind of Buddhist practice in my past lives, where being incarnated in a man’s body I used to meditate aside a fencing master and learn the asceticism, discipline and total liberation from fear.

Liberation from the fear was the key experience for me in that period. Zazen is like entering into an inner coffin, it is the experience of one’s own death. In the land I had lived during that time I was a fencer, one was never sure with whom he might happen to approach a duel.

For the warriors of that time death was ubiquitous and accompanied us at every hour of day and night. Therefore samurai warriors sit zazen, turning themselves into a still statues in order to control the emotions and desires raging within them. After sitting zazen fear ceased to exist, dissolved within the emptiness along with everything else.

In sitting zazen I was becoming a mountain – powerful, majestic and fearless mountain ready to face death in each second. I was associating the rigidity of this practice with my male incarnation, while there was nothing I could desire and nothing that could knock me out of balance.

I loved that strength and bravery within myself so much, I felt complete owing just to this harmony only. While living here as a woman I also felt unity in every aspect of myself, I loved within me everything that, for which other women was searching outside. I had within me both the male and female elements united in the perfect harmony of Yin-Yang.

Having experienced such a past zen practice, upon living here as a 14 year old girl I had already started practicing zen every evening. My mother was always nervous and neurotic and my father never lived with us, so I had nobody who could meet my security needs.

In order to acquire balance of Yin-Yang, I had to pierce deeply into my own male element to extract peace. As a young girl managing my hormonal storm during the time of puberty, I didn’t want to participate in the dilemmas of my peers – I would rather meditate or study I-Ching instead.

It’s hard to understand for the man of the West how important it is to achieve the equilibrium of the elements: male and female, but I didn’t believe that there was anything that could be lack of within myself. That’s why I sit zazen everyday.

I loved the state of turning into a statue – resistant to all. On the outside there could be storms and fires, but I, deeply rooted within, didn’t experience any emotions, having my consciousness hold only to the unity with Universe. Thus I had more time for analyzing various phenomena and for observing, and crumbling of the unknown that surrounded me. So while others were practicing the surrendering to the emotions raging within them, I was studying mystical teachings.

I loved to immerse within the vastness of emptiness, in which suffering, stress, anxiety and longing were disappearing. Even as early as being a child I was aware of my identity and that’s why - despite of my Catholic education - I practiced zazen along with yoga every day almost unknowingly. What you have ever learned is never lost in a void.

As I waited for Master Kaisen I was wondering what kind of relations I had with him in my past lives. Most probably he was also my master, because not every 16 year old has enough merits to be priveliged to meet the master at such a young age.

I have read two of his books as of yet: “Budodharma – a Samurai Path” and “Warrior Monk: Autobiography of the Monk Budoka”. I liked it mostly because Master Kaisen had this magnetizing “something” that was attracting me. His sanga had given me something I didn’t get from any later practices. I have found myself in this practice. I lost myself in it.

Having shed my old identity, forcedly imposed on me by my Catholic family, and thanks to the support of my master I could finally become again the great, fearless warrior I used to be. It wasn’t that my feminity bothered me – conversely – it was wonderful to have breasts always at hand.

But the longing to myself as an invincible samurai didn’t leave me until I got back to the core of my past practices. When I have remembered my past I felt deep calmness and peace, as if all I could desire had been already found and fully realized.

Thanks to zen I have fully opened my mind and heart. I have realized the great powers of my will, decisiveness, consequence, tenacity in following chosen direction, humility and untamable freedom of spirit.

I started to recognize the cyclic regularities that had been controlling the surrounding world. My perception widened unbelievably. Being a trained parrot is nothing similar to the broadening the mind in order to achieve the ability to the unconstrained observation of phenomena.

Channeling is not all the same with the ability to utilize the entirety of the knowledge of the Universe. Broadening the mind and perceiving with one’s brain is something highly different from channelings, obtaining knowledge from ghosts or similar practices of this kind, inconceivable to me.

Broadened mind means seeing phenomena with the Great Mind, as zen masters say. The science of mathematics through exercises is not the same as the ability to perceive solids and forms, to manipulate them in space, to compose them just as lego blocks and to construct from them everything you want, and to do all that in your mind, in your imagination.

Thanks to zazen techniques I was able to activate the machine of imagination, a Great Infinite Mind able to contain the references to all phenomena of the whole Universe , just as the dynamic database full of links, thanks to which one is able to gain free access to the Internet, except that my head took over the role of the Internet here.

Later I found out that Vyacheslav Bronnikov, a known Russian scientist, have been teaching in a department of Moscow University the same thing I had found out. Therefore I may assume that instead of choosing the official educational path, I did right choosing the path of experience.

When I speak about lessons brought out of zazen practice, I mean the ability of perceiving with mind or “seeing” the ambient occurences in an extrasensory manner. It has nothing to do with magic, it is mind natural capacity – spreading out and encompassing everything. How is it else possible to know the exact parameters of surrounding objects, while my sight rests in the midst of a tiny spot merely one meter afar?

It is possible when one uses  “scale infinity” technique, as the modern physics calls it. If it was not for my incredible experiences of “seeing with mind” I would have never understood Vyacheslav Bronnikov’s assumptions like I would have never been able to examine the scientific theories of Shipov or understand and analyze the books of Stephen Hawking. While I was contemplating the treasures of zazen the moment of my final meeting with my beloved master has approached.

He appeared at the doors. He was dressed in a black monk robe just as the disciples surrounding him. He entered the platform majestically and asked everybody to sit zazen. The Japanese robe he was wearing reminded me about times I was a monk myself. We had been wearing a slight different brown robes. I had been learning fencing with passion, contemplating the power of male and the delicacy of female elements.

In this incarnation Master Kaisen was teaching kendo (stick fighting), but I was sentimentally reminding myself my past fencing practices – first duels and the great defeat, which ended my life in my male body of that time. Samurai of those times fought to death.