Nothing Special: Living Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

  Zen practice is sometimes called the way of transformation. Many who enter Zen practice, however, are merely seeking incremental change: “I want to be happier.” “I want to be less anxious.” We hope that Zen practice will bring us these feelings. But if we are transformed, our life shifts to an entirely new basis. It’s as if anything can happen—a rosebush transformed into a lily, or a person with a rough, abrasive nature and bad temper transformed into a gentle person. Cosmetic surgery won’t do it. True transformation implies that even the aim of the “I” that wants to be happy is transformed. For example, suppose I see myself as a person who is basically depressed or fearful or whatever. Transformation isn’t merely that I deal with what I call my depression; it means that the “I,” the whole individual, the whole syndrome that I call “I,” is transformed. This is a very different view of practice than is held by most Zen students. We don’t like to approach practice in this way because it means that if we want to be genuinely joyful, we have to be willing to be anything. We have to be open to the transformation that life wants us to go through. I have to be prepared for the possibility that I will become a bag lady, for example. Now, I don’t really want to be a bag lady. We fantasize that when we practice, we’re going to be comfortable with ourselves and life is going to be very smooth. We think we’re going to be wonderful new versions of who we are now. Yet true transformation means that maybe the next step is to be a bag lady.

  That certainly isn’t what brings people to Zen practice. We’re here to get our present model repainted a little bit. If the car of our life is a deep gray, we want to turn it into lavender or pink. But transformation means that the car may disappear altogether. Maybe instead of a car it will be a turtle. We don’t even want to hear of such possibilities. We hope that the teacher will tell us something that will fix our present model. A lot of therapies merely provide techniques for improving the model. They tinker here and there, and we may even feel a lot better. Still, that is not transformation. Transformation arises from a willingness that develops very slowly over time to be what life asks of us.

  Most of us (myself included at times) are like children: we want something or somebody to give us what a small child wants from its parents. We want to be given peace, attention, comfort, understanding. If our life doesn’t give us this, we think, “A few years of Zen practice will do this for me.” No, they won’t. That’s not what practice is about. Practice is about opening ourselves so that this little “I” that wants and wants and wants and wants and wants—that wants the whole world to be its parents, really—grows up. Growing up doesn’t interest us very much.

  A lot of my students try to turn me into a substitute parent. That is not my role. Students in difficulty often come running to me; as much as possible, I set them to dealing with the problem themselves. Once students have some idea of how they might deal with the problem, the best thing to do is to let them struggle. Then there is some possibility of transformation.

  Transformation is allowing ourselves to participate in our life right this second. That’s scary business. There is no guarantee of comfort, of peace, of money, of anything. We have to be what we are. Most of us, however, have other ideas. It’s as though we are a tree that produces leaves and fruit of a certain kind. We want to produce this because it’s comfortable. Transformation, however, is to produce what life chooses to produce through us. We can’t know what this is going to be. It might mean any kind of a transformation—in the work we do, in the way we live, in our health (it might even get worse, not better).

  Still, transformation is joy. Transformation means that however life is—whether difficult, easy, comforting, or noncomforting—it is joy. By joy I don’t mean happiness. Joy has more to do with curiosity. Think of babies about nine months to a year, crawling about, encountering all kinds of marvels: one can see the curiosity and wonder on their faces. They’re not crawling in order to absorb information, they’re not trying to be better babies who can crawl more efficiently; in fact, they’re not crawling for any reason. They are simply crawling for sheer enjoyment and curiosity. We need to regain the capacity to feel curiosity about everything in our life, even the disasters. For instance, suppose that a long-time partner walks out on us unexpectedly. Such a dire event can plunge us into a melodrama of reaction. Can you imagine being able to view that with curiosity instead? What would it mean to view such a disaster with curiosity?

  STUDENT: We would be in a state of wonder.

  JOKO : That’s right. We would be interested in the whole thing, including our emotional reactions: our screaming, our mood swings, our physical sensations—just curiosity, second after second after second. That may sound cold, but it’s not; it means that for the first time we’re open to the situation and can learn from it and handle it. That curiosity is also part of joy, a state of wonder. We don’t care about curiosity and wonder, however. We’d rather fix things so we’ll feel good. But the curiosity I’m speaking of can be there, whether we feel good or bad.

  Years ago I was associated with a top-notch scientist. I asked him what it meant to be a scientist. He said, “If there is a plate on a table near you, and you know there is something under the plate—but you don’t know what it is—being a scientist means that you can’t rest night or day until you’ve seen what’s under the plate. You have to know.” Practice should cultivate this kind of attitude. Through our efforts at self-protection, we’ve lost most of our curiosity about life. When we’re depressed, we just want to make the depression stop. Likewise when we’re worried, lonely, or confused. Instead, we need to approach our state of mind with curiosity and open wonder. That open, curious listening to life is joy—no matter what the mood of our life is.

  This is the way of transformation. We become less wrapped up in our self-protected view of life—wanting what we want—less attached to pictures or fantasies of how our life must turn out. Practice, the way of transformation, is a slow shift over time into a new way of being in the world. This way will be therapeutic, to be sure, but that is not its purpose. A person who is totally curious is neither happy nor unhappy. A crawling baby who discovers a measuring cup we have put on the floor is neither happy nor unhappy. Instead of being “happy,” the baby is absorbed. It’s not ambitious; it’s not a good or bad baby; it’s simply absorbed in the wonder of what it is seeing.

  Unfortunately, babies turn into adults. It’s not that the best practice is to be like a baby. Ideally, we keep the openness and wonder of a baby, yet have the mature mind and abilities of an adult. Instead of seeing with curiosity and wonder, however, we approach life with a self-centered agenda, wanting everything to suit us and make us feel good. The people we like are the people who give us good sensations. The friends we really want to be around are the ones who make us feel good. People who consistently make us feel bad go onto another list. A person who is just open and curious, however, doesn’t do this, at least not to the same degree.

  As Carlos Castaneda writes, our practice needs to be impeccable. This means being as aware as we can be in every moment, so that our “personality,” which is made up of our self-protective strategies, begins to break down and we can respond more and more simply to the moment. Impeccable practice means, for example, working with one or two projects in practice and just pounding away with no letup. Suppose we have a habit of believing thoughts such as, “I’m no good.” Impeccable practice means we hardly ever let that thought slip by. Even though we will miss one now and then, impeccable practice means to keep that practice pressure on ourselves. It’s not that we’re trying to be better, or that we’re bad when we fail. Still, we need to be meticulous. Impeccable practice means we never stop. The way of transformation doesn’t mean, “Oh, I’ve practiced enough today; I think I’ll go off and have a good time.” There’s nothing wrong with having a good time, but impeccable practice is to be aware of that, too. Otherwise, we’re just kidding ourselves.

  Though it is meticulous, a mature practice has no struggle. In the firs
t few years, however, there’s no way to avoid the struggle. Gradually, over the years, the struggle becomes less. Practice is also not something to set aside when things are rough. Instead of “Things are so tough right now, I’ll practice next week,” we need to practice right now, with the struggle itself; otherwise, practice is just one more toy we’re playing with and a waste of time.

  The way of transformation requires an impeccable warrior—which is not the same as being a perfect warrior. Instead, we constantly do our best, working with specific care. Instead of resolving, “I’m going to be aware,” we need to resolve, “I’m going to be aware specifically when I do that.” Instead of trying to work with everything at once, we work on one or two items at a time, maybe for two or three months, and just keep pounding away. If we let even one thought go by, such as “Oh, I’m really a hopeless person,” without being aware of it until afterward, then we want to sit up a little straighter and try again. We need to apply ourselves steadily, to build up muscle for the long, hard journey. In the end, we realize that it’s not a long, hard journey, but we won’t see this until we see it.

  When I’m away from the Zen Center of San Diego, people sometimes set up a two-day sitting and do it. That’s good. Not everyone can participate; some people have young children,

  for example. Still, to undertake a sitting like that—to sit for two days, struggling to maintain awareness—is what we’re talking about. In a serious practice there is no way to skip over this kind of struggle. There has to be a struggle for a long time. There is no way out of it. Struggling develops strength. It means growing up. When we complain, when we’re bitter about what somebody did to us, bitter about what life has done to us, then we’re being children. There’s some big breast we’re trying to hold onto. Zen practice is about growing up. We shouldn’t enter a practice like this until we really want to do it. We must really want a life that’s transformed.

  The Natural Man

  No matter how many years we’ve been practicing, we tend to misunderstand the nature of practice. In one way or another, we suppose that practice is about correcting an error. We imagine that if we do this or master that, we will finally overcome the error in ourselves. Our lives will “get fixed,” and we’ll somehow do better.

  Many forms of therapy begin with the assumption that there’s something wrong in the person seeking therapy, and therapy is about repairing that wrong. We carry this attitude—so widespread in our culture—into our own spiritual practice.

  We assume there’s something wrong with our lives because we don’t feel content with ourselves. From our personal standpoint, something is wrong. What needs to be understood about this dilemma?

  Consider a hurricane. From the standpoint of the hurricane itself, there’s no problem in destroying thousands of trees, pulling down power lines, killing people, devastating beaches, and so on. That’s just what hurricanes do. From our point of view, however—particularly if we have a house that has been battered by a hurricane—there’s something very wrong. If we could, we’d be fixing hurricanes. We haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

  Unfortunately, when we try to fix things, we often create a whole new set of problems. The automobile is a fine invention that eases our lives in many ways; yet as we all know, it has brought us a whole host of major problems. Left to itself, nature makes all kinds of messes. But they seem to heal, and the natural process restores itself. When we get the idea that we need to solve all of the problems of life, however, we don’t do so well. The reason for our failure is that our viewpoint is limited to our ego needs, to “what I want.” If what was happening in our lives were okay with us, nothing would disturb us.

  Should we just become passive and allow everything to be as it is, without doing anything at all? No. But we get ourselves into trouble by the emotional context we supply, the attitude that there’s something wrong that needs fixing.

  In particular, we want our personal selves to be different than they are. For example, we want to make ourselves “enlightened.” We picture being an enlightened self as somehow glorified, different, and separated from the rest of poor ordinary mortals. Enlightenment seems to us to be a great achievement, the ultimate ego attainment. That eagerness to become enlightened pervades many spiritual centers as an undercurrent of excitement about spiritual practice. It’s ridiculous, really.

  Still, when we feel miserable, we like to imagine that we can find something that will fix us up, so that our relationships will be always wonderful. We imagine ourselves always feeling good, doing work that doesn’t have any painful twists and turns.

  Let’s take a look at what we might call “a natural man.” (We might just as well talk about “a natural woman,” but in this example, let’s talk about a male.) In the Bible a natural man would be Adam before he was expelled from the Garden of Eden—that is, before he became conscious of himself as a separate self. What was that natural man like? What would it be like to be a natural man?

  STUDENT: A natural man would be full of wonder.

  JOKO: That’s true, though he wouldn’t be aware that he was full of wonder.

  STUDENT: There would be no sense of separation between himself and the world around him.

  JOKO: That’s also true. Again, he would have no awareness of his lack of separation.

  STUDENT: He would just be.

  JOKO: Yes. He would just be. How would he behave? For example, would he be saintly, or would he occasionally go out hunting?

  STUDENT: He’d do whatever he needed to get by.

  JOKO : He’d do what was needed to survive. If necessary, he would hunt, rather like the Native Americans who made offerings to the animals that they had to kill.

  STUDENT: Would he have wars with his fellow tribespeople?

  JOKO: Possibly, though I doubt that there would be blood-shed. Perhaps some disagreement here and there.

  STUDENT : I think of a natural man as being like my cat: eating, sleeping, doing whatever comes up from moment to moment without any awareness or thought about it.

  JOKO : That’s about right. Dogs are a poor example, because we make them over into what we want them to be. But cats are more independent, more like a natural man.

  The natural state is what practice is about. To be a natural person doesn’t mean that one turns into some kind of a saint. Without a sense of separation from the world, however, there is always an innate goodness and appropriateness of action. For example, our two hands don’t behave inappropriately toward each other, because they are part of the same body.

  A natural man enjoys food. He enjoys loving. He gets upset now and then, but probably not for long. He may be fearful when his survival is threatened.

  In contrast, our lives are very unnatural. We feel ourselves to be separated from the world, and that removes us from the Garden of Eden. In separating ourselves from the world, we have also separated the world into good and bad, satisfactory and not satisfactory, pleasant and painful. Having separated things in this way, we’re always trying to steer to one side and avoid the other, so that we encounter only the parts of life that suit us.

  Nature is like the hurricane. Whatever happens, happens. We don’t want that in our life, however. We want a hurricane that takes other houses, but not ours. We constantly seek a safe little haven in the middle of the hurricane of life. There is no such place. Life is really about simply living and enjoying whatever comes up. Because we have ego-centered minds, however, we think that life is about protecting ourselves. And that keeps us entrapped. An egomind is self-centered. It spends its time thinking about how it’s going to survive and be safe, comfortable, entertained, pleased, nonthreatened at every juncture. When we live in this way, we’ve missed the boat. We’ve lost our center. The further we go from the center, the more anxious and eccentric—that is, away from the center—our lives become.

  From our earliest moments in life, we are developing an ego-mind. To be living from ego-mind is simply looking at life in a certain way. There’s no
thing intrinsically wrong with this; it’s just that we see life only from our own viewpoint. Our essential nature remains undisturbed at all times. We can’t see it, however, because we’re now always looking from a limited, one-sided viewpoint.

  We’re far away from “just living,” as a natural man or woman would live. We’re thinking about living all of the time. We probably spend eighty or ninety percent of our time doing this. And we wonder why nothing feels right and isn’t right. From our point of view, we’re very uncomfortable.

  Left to his own devices, the natural man is essentially good. He hunts when he has to. He does what he needs to do. Because he doesn’t feel separate, however, he does very little harm. We have only to look at ourselves, to see how far we are from this kind of life.

  Our essential task in practice is not to try to achieve something. Our true nature—buddha nature—is always there. It’s always undisturbed. It’s present. We recognize that we are just fine once we get in touch with it. We’re not in touch with it, however, because we’re off to the side, one-sided. And this creates problems in our lives.

  It is often said that the essence of any religious practice is renunciation of the self. That’s true enough, if we understand the words rightly. What do we have to renounce, however?

  STUDENT: Attachment.

  JOKO: Yes. Attachment is rooted in what?