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Flora Courtois (1916-2000)

Buddhist name: Ekō [慧光?]

Flora Courtois was a student of Maezumi Roshi, considered a founder of ZCLA, was recognized by Yasutani Roshi as having the experience of enlightenment by oneself alone which, on account of his urging, she wrote about in a small book titled "An Experience of Enlightenment." Flora died in early 2000 at the age of 84 so she would have been in her early 50's when she made the drive to Tassajara in 1968 with passengers Maezumi Roshi, Yasutani Roshi, Soen Nakagawa Roshi, and Eido Shimano Roshi.

PDF: Mahayana Buddhism and the Growing Perceptual Revolution
by Flora Courtois
The Eastern Buddhist. New series, Vol. 14, No 2 (Autumn 1981), pp. 47-70

PDF: An Experience of Enlightenment
by Flora Courtois
Wheaton, Ill. Theosophical Press, Quest Books, 1986. xiii, 90 p
Reprinted as Chapter 16 in: The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment: On Zen Practice. Wisdom Publications, 2002, 2016. pp. 115-136.

The late Flora Courtois followed her own path to mystical experiences. Not part of any group or school, she struggled as a student to shed the unnecessary to find reality. Leaving the daily concerns of most others behind, she immersed herself in meditation and study.
In addition to writing this book, Courtois went on to co-found the Los Angeles Zen Center and was an officer in an organization that studied the similarities between the major religions.
http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/read/published_collections/flora.shtml

Experience 1
"When I was sixteen, minor surgery had to be performed. An ether cone was placed over my face and as I breathed in deeply, a great whirling spiral of light approached from an enormous distance and at great speed. At the same time, a voice of unmistakable authority seemed to say that when the center of the spiral reached me I would "understand all things." Just as the center reached me I blacked out, but after recovering there remained an unforgettable conviction that what I had heard and seen was in some inexplicable way the deepest truth." (pp. 18-19)

Experience 2
"Standing at the kitchen window one day, and looking out at where a path wound under some maple trees, I suddenly saw the scene with a freshness and clarity that I'd never seen before. Simultaneously, as though for the first time, I fully realized I was not only on the earth but of it, an intimate part and product of it. I was as if a door had briefly opened. I stood there transfixed. I remember thinking: "Distant places on the map such as Tibet and North Africa are extensions of right here, all interrelated!" (pp. 24 - 25).

Experience 3
"Standing in April, Easter vacation arrived and I went home to Detroit to spend a week with my parents. There, about three days later, alone in my room, sitting quietly on the edge of my bed and gazing at a small desk, not thinking of anything at all, in a moment too short to measure, the universe changed on its axis and my search was over.
The small, pale green desk at which I'd been so thoughtlessly gazing had totally and radically changed. It appeared now with a clarity, a depth of three-dimensionality, a freshness I had never imagined possible. At the same time, in a way that is utterly indescribable, all my questions and doubts were gone as effortlessly as chaff in the wind. I knew everything and all at once, yet not in the sense that I had ever known anything before.
All things were the same in my little bedroom yet totally changed. Still sitting in wonder on the edge of my narrow bed, one of the first things I realized was that the focus of my sight seemed to have changed; it had sharpened to an infinitely small point which moved ceaselessly in paths totally free of the old accustomed ones, as if flowing from a new source.
What on earth had happened? So released from all tension, so ecstatically light did I feel, I seemed to float down the hall to the bathroom to look at my face in the mottled mirror over the sink. The pupils of my eyes were dark, dilated and brimming with mirth. With a wondrous relief, I began to laugh as I'd never laughed before, from the soles of my feet upward.
Within a few days I had returned to Ann Arbor, and there over a period of many months there took place a ripening, a deepening and unfolding of this experience which filled me with wonder and gratitude at every moment. The foundations had fallen from my world. I had plunged into a numinous openness which had obliterated all fixed distinctions including that of within and without. A Presence had absorbed the universe including myself, and to this I surrendered in absolute confidence. Often, without any particular direction in mind, I found myself outside running along the street in joyous abandon. Sometimes when alone I simply danced as freely as I did as a child. The whole world seemed to have reversed itself, to have turned outside in. Activity flowed simply and effortlessly, and to my amazement, seemingly without thought. Instead of following my old sequence of learning, thinking, planning, then acting, action had taken precedence and whatever was learned was surprisingly incidental. Yet nothing ever seemed to go out of bounds; there was no alternation between self-control and letting go but rather a perfect rightness and spontaneity to all this flowing activity.
This new kind of knowing was so pure and unadorned, so delicate, that nothing in language of my past could express it. Neither sense nor feeling nor imagination contained it yet all were contained in it. In some indefinable way I knew with absolute certainty the changeless unity and harmony in change of the universe and the inseparability of all seeming opposites.
It was as if, before all this occurred, "I" had been a fixed point inside my head looking out at a world out there, a separate and comparatively flat world. The periphery of awareness had now come to light, yet neither fixed periphery nor center existed as such. A paradoxical quality seemed to permeate all existence. Feeling myself centered as never before, at the same time I knew the whole universe to be centered at every point. Having plunged to the center of emptiness, having lost all purposefulness in the old sense, I had never felt so one-pointed, so clear and decisive. Freed from separateness, feeling one with the universe, everything including myself had become at once unique and equal. If God was the word for this Presence in which I was absorbed then everything was either holy or nothing; no distinction was possible. All was meaningful, complete as it was, each bird, bud, midge, mole, atom, crystal, of total importance in itself. As in the notes of a great symphony, nothing was large or small, nothing of more or less importance to the whole. I now saw that wholeness and holiness are one. " (p.43, 47-51)

PDF: Review: The Buddha Does Not Know, He Sees
by Frederick Franck
The Eastern Buddhist. New Series, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Autumn 1987), pp. 100-104

The door to infinity
by Flora Courtois
Parabola, Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer 1990. Pp. 17-19

AT THE HEART of Zen practice there is a kind of radically intimate
attention. This absolutely firsthand quality of experience characterizes
the beginning of our lives and, if we are not drugged, the end. No "other"
mediates between us and the intimate aloneness of birth. No memories, no
thoughts, no plans invade this pure innerness with their shadowing images.
So, too, in the spare simplicity of our deaths.

Here attention is reality and reality attention.

But in the days and years of our living somehow we lose touch with this
clarity and think to possess ourselves in images. In so doing, we fall into
a bad case of mistaken identity. We think our living instead of living our
thinking. In the language of koan study, we miss the point of life and so
live at second, third, and fourth hand.

Yet the opportunity to be restored to our original, unborn, divine
condition is always immediately at hand. There are no real or absolute
contingencies.

Every moment lived in absorbed attention is simultaneously a beginning and
an end, at once a birth and a death. In such attention we are radically
open to the unexpected, to letting life live us. Any event, however small
or seemingly trivial, properly attended, opens the door to infinity.

In Basho's famous haiku, the plopping sound of the frog jumping into the
clear still pond rises whole, perfect, and infinitely mysterious. No time
here for meaning to be added or we'll miss the next plop as it comes.

There's a bit of Faust in us all, believing as we do that the more we learn
about something the closer we are to it. Not so. Any event, fully attended,
uproots all our knowing at the source and carries inexhaustible surprises.

To use the language of instrument design, we may say that when we quiet all
the interfering noises in our system we then maximize the information in
the messages we pick up and transmit.

Yasutani Roshi said that shikantaza (just sitting) is like standing in a
clearing in a deep forest, knowing danger is about to strike but not
knowing from what direction. If we focus too much ahead we will miss it if
it comes from below and so on. Total, uncluttered readiness for the
unexpected is what we need. If we think we've got it at one moment we may
lose it the next.

THE POINT IS that all phenomena, all dharmas, whether seen or heard or felt
or whatever and whether pleasurable or painful, it matters not, all without
exception, open us to reality if we give ourselves to them. "How can we
know the dancer from the dance?" wrote William Butler Yeats. Zen says the
whole universe is art and we are the artists.

"God," wrote Meister Eckhart, "has left a little point where the soul turns
back upon itself and finds itself." At another time he described God's
little point this way, "The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which
God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same."

"To have satori," wrote D.T. Suzuki, "is to stand at Meister Eckhart's
little point, where we may see in two directions at once, God's way and
creature's way."

"Attention, attention, attention," wrote Zen Master Ikkyu many centuries
ago when asked to write down the highest wisdom.

"But what does attention mean?" asked his questioner.

Master Ikkyu replied, "Attention means attention."

Surely Meister Eckhart's eye, which is simultaneously God's eye, is the
inner eye of immanent, transcendent attention. Quieting the busy surface of
our minds, we free our inner eye to find that little point which penetrates
right to the heart of things: No need to look for vast, cosmic fireworks or
for a great big impressive way to enlightenment if we enlighten each moment
with attention.

TRUE ATTENTION is rare and totally sacrificial. It demands that we throw
away everything we have been or hope to be, to face each moment naked of
identity, open to whatever comes and bereft of human guidance.

Nor is the potential for pain to be underestimated. Now we come face to
face with the radical fact that there is nothing, however dear, that cannot
be taken from us from one moment to the next; nothing, however sinister or
horrifying, from which we will be permitted to recoil or separate
ourselves. All the dreadful, mute suffering from which inattention shielded
us will now be seen and heard.

Another name for such full attention is love.

In Christian terms, surely in God's presence the appropriate behavior is to
be quiet and listen. The essence of prayer is attention. To pray is to go
directly to God, without intermediary, and to say nothing.

To be absorbed in emptiness is not to know at all. In the radical unknowing
of pure attention we sacrifice ourselves and discover our original
wholeness.

Although we sacrifice our very lives for the good of all humankind, if
self-images distract our attention we become separated from the true
reality of our living and dying. For the ultimate revolutionary act is not
giving up our lives literally but direct, immediate seeing which is our own
true nature. Such radical seeing is the heart of Buddhism and Zen practice.

So let us keep a "beginner's mind." Only so will we continually discover
"the dearest freshness deep-down things." .

 

 

Flora Courtois: VALAISTUMINEN
Suomentanut / translated into Finnish by Ari Tikka
https://zazenfi.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/floracourtoisvalaistuminen2011.pdf