Nothing Special: Living Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

  STUDENT: More acceptance, less judgment, more relaxation with life, an openness to life.

  JOKO: Openness to life and acceptance are a bit off, though it’s hard to find words that are exactly right.

  STUDENT: Enlightenment has something to do with coming to zero, to “no place.”

  JOKO: But what does “no place” for a human being mean? What is that “no place”?

  STUDENT: Right now.

  JOKO : Yes, but how do we live it? Suppose I get up in the morning with a headache and have a heavy schedule before me. We all have days like this. What does it mean to “be a zero” with that?

  STUDENT : It means simply to be here with all of my feelings and all of my thoughts—just being here, not adding anything extra to what is.

  JOKO: Yes, and even if we do add something extra, that is also part of the package, part of life as it is at this moment. Part of the package is, “I just don’t want to do this day.” When that thought is what I acknowledge as being present, then I am just pushing my boulder. I go through the difficult day and I go to bed, and what do I get to do the next day? Somehow the boulder slipped back down the hill while I was asleep, so here I go again: push, push, push. “I hate this…yes, I know I hate it. I wish there were some way out, but there isn’t, or at least I don’t see a way out right now.” Perfect in being as it is.

  When we truly live each moment, what happens to the burden of life? What happens to our boulder? If we are totally what we are, in every second, we begin to experience life as joy. Standing between us and a life of joy are our thoughts, our ideas, our expectations, and our hopes and fears. It’s not that we have to be totally willing to push the rock. We can be unwilling, so long as we acknowledge our unwillingness and simply feel it. Unwillingness is fine. A major part of any serious practice is “I don’t want to do it.” And we don’t. But when our unwillingness drifts into efforts to escape, that’s another matter. “Well, I’ll have another piece of chocolate cake. I think there’s one left.” “I’ll call up my friends; we’ll talk about how terrible things are.” “I’ll creep into a corner so I can really worry about how bad my life is and feel sorry for myself.” What are some other ways to escape?

  STUDENT: To be very busy and tire myself out.

  STUDENT: To procrastinate.

  STUDENT: To make plans and then redo them over and over again.

  STUDENT: My way is to become temporarily ill.

  JOKO: Yes, we often do that: we catch a cold, sprain an ankle, get the flu. When we label our thoughts, we become aware of how we escape. We begin to see the thousand and one ways we try to escape from living this moment, from pushing our rock. From the time we get up in the morning to the time we go to sleep, we are doing something; we are pushing our boulder all day long. It’s our judgment about what we’re doing that is the cause of our unhappiness. We may judge ourselves to be victims: “It’s the way they are treating me.” “I’m working with somebody who is unfair to me.” “I can’t defend myself.”

  Our practice is to see that we are just pushing—to get that basic fact. Nobody realizes this all the time; I certainly don’t. But I notice that people who have been practicing for some time begin to have a sense of humor about their burden. After all, the thought that life is a burden is only a concept. We’re simply doing what we’re doing, second by second by second. The measure of fruitful practice is that we feel life less as a burden and more as a joy. That does not mean there is no sadness, but the experience of sadness is exactly the joy. If we don’t find such a shift happening over time, then we haven’t yet understood what practice is; the shift is a very reliable barometer.

  Burdens are always turning up in our lives. For example, suppose I have to spend some time with somebody I don’t like, and that feels like a burden. Or I have a tough week coming up, and I’m discouraged by it. Or the classes I’m teaching this semester have unprepared students in them. Raising kids can make us feel burdened. Illness, accidents, whatever difficulties we meet can be felt to be burdens. We cannot live as human beings without meeting difficulties, which we can choose to call “burdens.” Life then becomes heavy, heavy, heavy.

  STUDENT: I was just reminded of a concept from psychology of “the beloved burden.”

  JOKO : Yes, though “the beloved burden” cannot remain merely in our heads; it must transform into our being. There are many wonderful concepts and ideals, but if they don’t become who we are, they can be the most fiendish burdens. Understanding something intellectually is not enough; sometimes it is worse than not understanding at all.

  STUDENT: I’m having trouble with the idea that we’re always pushing the boulder up the hill. Maybe it’s because right now everything seems to be going my way.

  JOKO : That could be. Sometimes things do go our way. We may be in the middle of a wonderful new relationship. The new job is still exciting. But there is a difference between things going our way and true joy. Suppose we are in the middle of one of those nice periods when we have a good relationship or a good job, and it’s just great. What’s the difference between that good feeling, which is based on circumstances, and joy? How would we know?

  STUDENT: We have a fear that it will end.

  JOKO: And how will that fear express itself?

  STUDENT: In some body tension.

  JOKO : Body tension will always be present if our good feeling is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is. Sometimes in pushing the heavy rock we will even have a nice period. How does joy accept that good feeling?

  STUDENT: Simply as it is.

  JOKO : Yes. By all means if we are in a nice period of our lives, enjoy it—but without clinging to it. We tend to worry that we will lose it and try to hold on.

  STUDENT : Yes, I notice that while I’m just living and enjoying it, I’m fine. It’s when I stop and think, “This is great,” that I begin to worry, “How long is this going to last?”

  JOKO: None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.

  STUDENT: We have rocks in our heads.

  JOKO : Yes. When we entertain the rock in our heads, the rock of life seems heavy. Otherwise our lives are just whatever we are doing. The way we become more content to just live our life as it is, just lifting the burden each day, is by being the experience of lifting, lifting, lifting. That’s experiential knowledge, and intellectual understanding may evolve from it.

  STUDENT : If I knew that the rock was going to come down each time, I would think, “Well, let me see how fast I can get it up this time. Maybe I can improve my time.” I’d turn it into a game, or somehow create some significance in my mind.

  JOKO : But if we are doing this through eternity, or even over a lifetime, what will happen to the significance we create? Such a creation is purely conceptual; sooner or later, it will collapse. That’s the problem with “positive thinking” and affirmations: we can’t keep them up forever. Such efforts are never the path to freedom. In truth, we are already free. Sisyphus was not a prisoner in Hades, living out eternal punishment. He was already free, because he was just doing what he was doing.

  Responding to Pressure

  Before service we recite the verse of the Kesa: “Vast is the robe of liberation, a formless field of benefaction. I wear the universal teaching, saving all sentient beings.” The phrase “a formless field of benefaction” is particularly evocative; it calls forth who we are, which is the function of a religious service. The point of Zen practice is to be who we are—a formless field of benefaction. Such words sound very nice, but living them in our own lives is difficult and confusing.

  Let’s look at how we handle pressure or stress. What is pressure for one person may not be pressure for someone else. For a person who is shy, pressure might be walking into a crowded party. For another, pressure might be being alone, or meeting deadlines. For another, pressure might mean having a slow, dull life without any deadlines. Pressure could be a new baby, a new lo
ver, a new friend. It might be success. Some people do well with failure but can’t handle success. Pressure is what makes us tighten up, what arouses our anxiety.

  We have different strategies for responding to pressure. Gurdjieff, an interpreter of Sufi mysticism, called our strategy our “chief feature.” We need to learn what our chief feature is—the primary way we handle pressure. When the pressure’s on, one person tends to withdraw; another struggles harder to be perfect, or to be even more of a star. Some respond to pressure by working harder, others by working less. Some evade, others try to dominate. Some get busy and talk a lot; others become quieter than usual.

  We discover our chief feature by watching ourselves under pressure. Each morning when we get up, there is probably something in the day ahead that will cause pressure for us. When things are going badly, there’s just nothing but pressure in our lives. At other times there’s very little pressure, and we think things are going well. But life always pressures us to some degree.

  Our typical pattern for responding to pressure is created early in our lives. When we meet difficulties as children, the smooth fabric of life begins to pucker. It’s as if that puckering forms a little sack that we pull together to hide our fear. The way we hide our fear—the little sack that is our coping strategy—is our chief feature. Until we handle the “chief feature” and experience our fear, we can’t be that seamless whole, the “formless field of benefaction.” Instead we are puckered, full of bumps.

  Over a lifetime of practice one’s chief feature shifts almost completely. For instance, I used to be so shy that if I had to enter a room with ten or fifteen people—say, a small cocktail party—it would take me fifteen minutes of pacing outside before I could get up my courage to enter the room. Now, however, though I don’t prefer big parties, I’m comfortable with them. There’s a big difference between being so scared one can hardly walk into a room and being comfortable. I don’t mean to say that one’s basic personality changes. I will never be “the life of the party,” even if I live to be one hundred and ten. I like to watch others at parties, and talk to a few people; that’s my way.

  We often make the mistake of supposing that we can simply retrain ourselves through effort and self-analysis. We may think of Zen practice as studying ourselves so that we can learn to think differently, in the sense that we might study chess or cooking or French. But that’s not it. Zen practice isn’t like learning ancient history or math or gourmet cooking. These kinds of learning have their places, of course, but when it comes to our chief feature—the way we tend to cope with pressure—it is our misuse of our individual minds that has created the emotional contraction. We can’t use it to correct itself; we can’t use our little mind to correct the little mind. It’s a formidable problem: the very thing we’re investigating is also our means or tool for investigating it. The distortion in how we think distorts our efforts to correct the distortion.

  We don’t know how to attack the problem. We know that something’s not right with us because we’re not at peace; we tend to try all sorts of false solutions. One such “solution” is training ourselves to do positive thinking. That’s simply a maneuver of the little mind. In programming ourselves for positive thinking, we haven’t really understood ourselves at all, and so we continue to get into difficulties. If we criticize our minds and say to ourselves, “You don’t think very well, so I’ll force you not to think” or “You’ve thought all those destructive thoughts; now you must think nice thoughts, positive thoughts,” we’re still using our minds to treat our minds. This point is particularly hard for intellectuals to absorb, since they have spent a lifetime using their minds to solve problems and naturally approach Zen practice in the same way. (No one knows this better than I do!) The strategy has never worked, and it never will.

  There’s only one way to escape this closed loop and to see ourselves clearly: we have to step outside of the little mind and observe it. That which observes is not thinking, because the observer can observe thinking. We have to observe the mind and notice what it’s doing. We have to notice how the mind produces these swarms of self-centered thoughts, thus creating tension in the body. The process of stepping back is not complicated, but if we’re not used to it, it seems new and strange, and perhaps scary. With persistence, it becomes easier.

  Suppose we lose our job. Floods of thoughts come up, creating various emotions. Our chief feature springs in, covering our fear so that we don’t deal with it directly. If we lose our job, the only thing to do is to go about finding another one, assuming we need the money. But that’s often not what we do. Or, if we do look for another job, we may not do it effectively because we’re so busy being upset by the activity of our chief feature.

  Suppose we’ve been criticized by somebody in our daily life. Suddenly we feel pressure. How do we handle it? Our chief feature jumps right in. We use any mental trick we can find: worrying, justifying, blaming. We may try to evade the problem by thinking about something useless or irrelevant. We may take some sort of drug to shut it out.

  The more we observe our thoughts and actions, the more our chief feature will tend to fade. The more it fades, the more we are willing to experience the fear that created it in the first place. For many years, practice is about strengthening the observer. Eventually, we’re willing to do what comes up next, without resistance, and the observer fades. We don’t need the observer anymore; we can be life itself. When that process is complete, one is fully realized, a buddha—though I haven’t met anyone for whom the process is complete.

  Sitting is like our daily lives: what comes up as we sit will be the thinking that we want to cling to, our chief feature. If we like to evade life, we’ll find some way in sitting to evade our sitting. If we like to worry, we’ll worry. If we like to fantasize, we’ll fantasize. Whatever we do in our sitting is like a microcosm of the rest of our lives. Our sitting shows us what we’re doing with our lives, and our lives show us what we do when we sit.

  Transformation doesn’t begin with saying to ourselves, “I should be different.” Transformation begins with the realization expressed in the verse of the Kesa: “Vast is the field of liberation.” Our very lives themselves are a vast field of liberation, a formless field of benefaction. When we wear the teachings of life, observing our thoughts, experiencing the sensory input we receive in each second, then we are engaged in saving ourselves and all sentient beings, just by being who we are.

  STUDENT : My “chief feature” seems to change according to the situation. Under pressure I am usually controlling, domineering, and angry. In another situation, however, I might become withdrawn and quiet.

  JOKO : Still, for any person, different behaviors in responding to pressure come from the same basic approach to handling fear, though they may look different. There is an underlying pattern that’s being expressed.

  STUDENT: When I feel pressured—especially when I feel criticized—I work hard and try to do well; I try not to just react, but to sit with the anxiety and fear. In the last year, however, I’ve come to realize that when I feel criticized, underlying my efforts to perform well is rage. I really want to attack; I’m a killer shark.

  JOKO : The rage has been there the whole time; being a nice person and a fine performer is your cover. There’s a killer shark in everybody. And the killer shark is unexperienced fear. Your way of covering it up is to look so nice and do so much and be so wonderful that nobody can possibly see who you really are—which is someone who is scared to death. As we uncover these layers of rage, it’s important not to act out; we shouldn’t inflict our rage on others. In genuine practice, our rage is simply a stage that passes. But for a time, we are more uncomfortable than when we started. That’s inevitable; we’re becoming more honest, and our false surface style is beginning to dissolve. The process doesn’t go on forever, but it certainly can be most uncomfortable while it lasts. Occasionally we may explode, but that’s better than evading or covering our reaction.

  STUDENT : Often I can
see other people’s patterns much more quickly than my own. When I care about them, I’m tempted to set them straight. I feel like I’m seeing a friend drowning and not throwing a lifesaver. When I do intervene, however, it often feels like I’m butting into their lives when it is not my business at all.

  JOKO : That’s an important point. What does it mean to be a formless field of benefaction? We all see people doing things that obviously harm them. What should we do?

  STUDENT: Isn’t it enough to be aware and be present to them?

  JOKO : Yes, that is generally the best response. Occasionally people will ask us for help. If they are sincere in asking, it’s fine to respond. But we can be too quick to jump in and give advice. Many of us are fixers. An old Zen rule of thumb is not to answer until one has been asked three times. If people really want your opinion, they’ll insist on having it. But we are quick to give our opinion when nobody wants it. I know; I’ve done it.

  The observer has no emotions. It’s like a mirror. Everything just passes in front of it. The mirror makes no judgment. Whenever we judge, we’ve added another thought that needs to be labeled. The observer is not critical. Judging is not something the observer does. The observer simply watches or reflects, like a mirror. If garbage passes in front of it, it reflects garbage. If roses pass in front of it, it reflects roses. The mirror remains a mirror, an empty mirror. The observer doesn’t even accept; it just observes.