Nothing Special: Living Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

  STUDENT: Self-centered thought?

  JOKO : Self-centered thought. Suppose someone says to me, “You’re stupid, Joko.” She’s simply giving me her opinion. I fire back with my opinion: “I’m not stupid. You’re the one who doesn’t know what you’re doing.” And so we go back and forth. We fall into these games because of our self-centered, egotistical minds. From such a standpoint, there’s always something wrong with the world. In fact, however, life itself is fine, quite undisturbed. What causes disturbance are our opinions.

  Practice is not about finding something. We don’t have to find enlightenment. We don’t have to find our buddha nature. It’s who we are. What we need to do is to remove our blindness, so we can once more see it. What are some practical ways to remove our blindness?

  STUDENT: Label our thoughts.

  JOKO : Yes, we can label thoughts so we see them as merely thoughts, something we cook up. We need to see that they have no essential reality.

  STUDENT: I think one has to accept the fact of blindness. I can’t label something until I’m willing to look at it.

  JOKO : That’s true. We are usually not willing to do the work of looking until we’re suffering. That’s bound to happen in an egocentered life: suffering, in myself and in people around me.

  Our little mind produces complaints. It produces bitterness and a feeling of victimization. It produces ill health. It’s not the only cause of ill health; still, a body that is constantly tight has a double battle to fight. Little mind produces smugness and arrogance. It also prevents us from being in touch with our body sensations and with life itself. When we are in touch, on the

  other hand, our lives are more like that of the natural man. What does that mean?

  STUDENT: It means a sense of appropriate action.

  JOKO: Yes. What else?

  STUDENT: Greater openness. Natural intelligence takes in information through the senses and functions as part of everything else.

  JOKO : Yes. We tend to see clearly. We tend to know how to balance things out and what to do in a particular situation. We tend to remain calm, because we’re not upset by every little thing. We tend to be more playful. We tend to be spontaneous. We tend to be more cooperative. We tend to see others more fully, instead of viewing them as things to be manipulated.

  These results do not come easily. The work that we do on the cushion at times is very dreary. We get tired of labeling our thoughts and going back to our body sensations. This work is not pointless, but it takes years. We’re stubborn, and we don’t want to do any of the necessary work. When we don’t, however, life is hard on us and on everybody else around us. Even so, we often fail to do the work that is needed.

  Renunciation of self sounds exotic; we imagine Christ on the cross or some other remarkable action. But renunciation of self is mostly quite simple and basic. Renunciation of self happens each time we see our thoughts spinning and we label them and give up our little self—that’s what the thoughts are—and return to what’s happening. We return to taking in the body sensations, the sound of the cars, the smell of lunch. That is what renunciation of self means. When we sit for a week in retreat, we should do this ten thousand times: labeling our thoughts, seeing the fantasy, and returning to an awareness of what is, which is renunciation of little self for the sake of big self. The result: just life itself coming in.

  There’s nothing fancy about this. We do this perhaps ten times a sitting period; if we’re really alert, perhaps twenty or thirty times. If we get lost in our thoughts for fifteen minutes, we cut out some of our work.

  Nobody rushes up and gives us a gold star for doing this kind of work. Nobody. In order to do it, we have to understand what’s involved. Everything—our whole life—is involved. Everything we really want is involved in this dull work that we do, over and over and over.

  Then there are times when we simply aren’t willing to do the work for a while. “No matter what Joko says, I’m going off into this daydream.” So we run our little fantasy, and then we return to the work. Our mind comes out of its self-centered fantasy and goes back to feeling our knees, feeling the tightness in our body, just letting it be. In that second, we have renounced ourselves. That’s the enlightened state: just being here.

  We always return to our little self. But as we sit, gradually the intervals where we just stay with life as it is get a little longer, and the interruptions of our self-centeredness are a little shorter. The interruptions don’t last as long, and we don’t take them as seriously. Increasingly, they’re like clouds that drift through the sky: we note them, but we are less controlled by them. Over time, this process makes a marked difference in our lives. We feel better. We function better. After an intensive retreat, for example, most people find that what was a problem before is now trivial, even funny. The “problem” hasn’t changed, but the mind is different. The point of my talks—and of sesshin itself—lies in this return to daily life. When we get back to the more complex demands of our ordinary lives, however, we often forget to continue to practice. Instead of letting our little mind go haywire, we have to continue to watch and observe. If we don’t, then the clarity we have gained begins to fade. That doesn’t have to happen; we don’t have to fight with someone the day after sesshin.

  The longer we practice and the more the habits of practice become just who we are, the longer the benefits of sesshin last. Eventually we reach a point where there’s no difference between sesshin and daily life.

  It’s important to remember that we’re not fixing anything. We’re not trying to be different from who we are. In fact, practice is simply returning to that which we always are. We’re not doing anything special. We’re not trying to be enlightened. We just keep returning, renouncing the little self, over and over.

  As we do this work, we begin to feel life in a different way, and this is the only thing that can really teach us anything. Words like these come and go; if we don’t do the work, the words don’t mean anything. Reading a book or listening to a talk isn’t enough by itself. It’s the work that we do that gives us a taste of a different way of feeling about our life. As that taste gets stronger, we discover that we can’t go home again, even if we want to. As we transform ourselves into more of who we truly are, the effects become established, and our lives change.

  Are there any questions?

  STUDENT : You describe practice as returning in each moment to sounds or body sensations, but what if I’m practicing with a strong emotion, such as grief or anger?

  JOKO : What is an emotion? An emotion is simply a combination of body sensations and thoughts. The thoughts are self-centered thoughts. “How dare he go out with somebody else! He said he loved me.” Such thoughts grip us like a fire. “How dare he do that!” Our thoughts spin and whirl. “He shouldn’t do that!” On and on they go. Now as we think these thoughts, the body is tightening. Suppose, however, that we begin to label the thoughts. It may take days, but at some point our thoughts begin to collapse and we’re just left with this tight, suffering body. If we just stay with the tight, suffering body, without thoughts, what happens? The tightness increases and then collapses—and the emotion is over.

  The fact is, there’s nothing real about a self-centered emotion. We all think our emotions are important; yet there’s nothing less important than a self-centered emotion. The emotion is simply tension and thoughts that we’ve cooked up. The thoughts are essentially unreal; they’re not related to reality. For example, I may think that the hurricane is unfair—that it shouldn’t hit me. Such thoughts are futile, unrelated to reality. They’re not important. My body sensations are simply what they are, neither good nor bad. When we understand self-centered emotion, we see that it is unnecessary.

  STUDENT : When I’m labeling thoughts, and a thought gets up and starts walking into my head and halfway through I say, “Whoops, it’s a thought,” should I immediately go back to my body sensations, or is it a good idea first to observe the thought fully before I set it aside?


  JOKO: If that thought has any great push in your life, it’ll be back. You needn’t worry about not finishing with it.

  STUDENT: What is a true emotion?

  JOKO : A true emotion is in response to reality. Suppose my friend falls over with a heart attack. I’d certainly have an emotion as I jumped to do something. On the other hand, when I’m angry about something that happened five minutes ago, that’s not a real emotion. If someone has insulted me five minutes ago, I don’t want to know that my emotion about that insult is unreal. Instead, I want to dwell on “He shouldn’t do that. He’s terrible!” When I take my little emotions seriously, then I reinforce my idea of myself so I can keep playing this game.

  STUDENT: Can anger be a true emotion?

  JOKO : It can be, but it’s rare. If I see someone beating up another person and I jump in and do something to stop the harm, there is probably some anger in me. But that’s more like a little storm than what we ordinarily call anger. Almost always, when we think we’re expressing true anger, we’re fooling ourselves.

  STUDENT: Is there a true emotion of empathy?

  JOKO : True empathy or compassion is not itself an emotion. It can contain emotions, such as love. But compassion as such is simply openness to what is. Since it is absolutely open, it will be receptive and able to see what is best to do and will do it. Compassion may be the end result of practice. Nobody is always compassionate, but if our practice is real, we’ll become more compassionate. We become more aware of others as persons, not simply as things to be controlled or manipulated or fixed, but as centers of real awareness. That capacity grows with practice. If it doesn’t, then we’re not understanding practice, or we’re simply not doing it.

  I don’t have to investigate what somebody is doing on the cushion if I see their behavior in the rest of their lives. It’s obvious when a practice is growing. The feeling of victimization, of “poor me,” goes down. The person has much more awareness of the needs of other people and increasing willingness to meet the needs—something very different from being a “do-gooder.”

  STUDENT: So compassion doesn’t necessarily feel like something?

  JOKO : No. If we’re truly listening with compassion to another person, we may not feel much of anything; we simply listen and act appropriately. We confuse compassion with love. Compassion can contain love, which may be an emotion, but compassion is not itself an emotion. In true compassion there is no separation, which means there are no self-centered thoughts between me and whomever I’m with. No separation is compassion.

  STUDENT : The dictionary definition of empathy is to feel what another is feeling. That doesn’t necessarily mean reacting to what they’re feeling, or sympathizing. Compassion means being with their experience, but not being in it.

  JOKO : One who is truly compassionate never gives it a thought. It’s simply absolutely natural. It’s not a result of trying to be compassionate. Trying to be compassionate is like trying to be spontaneous. We either are, or we aren’t. If we’re not, we can be sure that we’re caught in a self-centered dream of some sort. When we’re caught in our thoughts, we won’t be compassionate. So all of practice is to investigate the self-centered dream which we like so well. If we’re not caught in that, we’ll be compassionate.

  STUDENT: Are love and compassion the same thing?

  JOKO : Sometimes love has an emotional connotation for short periods. Truly loving somebody doesn’t mean we feel emotional about them, however. We can love our children and wish they’d wipe their feet off before coming into the house. Being irritated that they don’t wipe their feet is an emotion, but the underlying love is not. The love for one’s children remains steady.

  In the case of romantic love, there’s nearly always an element of need, a thought that we’re going to get something out of it. “I’m so excited to be with you.” “I get such a good feeling when I’m around you.” “You make me so happy.” “I feel whole when I’m with you.” “You meet all my needs.” When something happens to destroy our fantasy, the words change: “I really hate him! I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”

  In fact, nobody makes us happy or sad; we do that to ourselves. Romantic love is full of illusions; genuine love, or compassion, has no illusions. It is simply who we are.

  VII

  WONDER

  The Fall

  There was once a man who climbed to the top of a ten-story building and jumped off. As he passed the fifth floor on his way down, he was heard to say, “So far, so good!”

  We laugh at the man because we see what’s coming up for him in a moment. How can he say he’s doing well, so far? What’s the difference between the second when he is at the fifth floor and the second just before he hits the pavement? The second before hitting the pavement is what most of us would call a crisis. If we think that we have only a few minutes or days before we die, most of us would say, “This is a crisis.” On the other hand, if our days are proceeding normally (the usual job, the usual people, the usual tasks), life may not seem wonderful, but at least we’re used to it. At such times we don’t feel we’re in a crisis, and we may not feel impelled to practice with diligence. Let’s look at this supposed difference between crisis and noncrisis.

  Sesshin is an artificial crisis. When we commit ourselves to a retreat, we have to stay and struggle with a difficult situation. By the end of the retreat, most of us have gone through the crisis—at least enough so that we see our life somewhat differently. It’s sad that we don’t understand that each moment of our lives—drinking a cup of coffee, walking down the street to pick up a paper—is it. Why don’t we grasp that truth? We don’t get it because our little minds think that this second that we’re living has hundreds of thousands of seconds that preceded it and hundreds of thousands of seconds still to come, so we turn away from truly living our life. Instead, we do what human beings spend all their time doing, which is a complete waste of time: we try mentally to scheme so that we will never have to suffer through a crisis. We spend all of our energies trying to be liked, successful, nice, agreeable, assertive (or non-assertive), depending upon what we think will do it for us. We have schemes. Most of our energies go into these schemes, as we try to handle our life so that we never hit the bottom. That’s why it’s so wonderful to get close to that bottom. That’s why people who are seriously ill, or who have a devastating circumstance in their lives, often wake up. Wake up to what? What do we wake up to?

  STUDENT: To the present?

  JOKO: Yes. And what else?

  STUDENT: To impermanence.

  JOKO: Impermanence. All right, that’s true.

  STUDENT: To our bodily sensations.

  JOKO: Yes, and more than that, we wake up to what?

  STUDENT: The wonder of it all.

  JOKO : The wonder of this second. When this second is not me, or anything else, but just, Oh!—and that doesn’t mean some giant emotion, but just—then all of our worries are nonexistent. But usually we have such a realization only when we are pressed hard enough that our mind is pulled into the present moment; then we can forget all our schemes of fixing ourselves, somebody else, or circumstances. Most people spend fifty to ninety percent of their waking hours trying to avoid the bottom. Yet we can’t avoid it. We’re all on our way down, every one of us. We can’t avoid the bottom, but we spend most of our life trying to do that.

  Waking up means realizing that our situation is hopeless—and wonderful. There is nothing for us to do except simply to live this second. When we’re in crisis, or in sesshin, we may not wake up fully, but we wake up enough so that the way we see our life shifts. We realize that our usual maneuvers—worrying about the past, projecting an imaginary future—don’t make sense; they waste precious seconds.

  From one point of view, we’re always in crisis: we’re always falling toward the bottom. From another point of view, there is no crisis. If we’re going to die in one second, is there any crisis? No, there’s just that second. One second we’re alive; one second we’re dea
d. There’s no crisis; there’s just what is. But the human urge to do the impossible keeps us mucked up. We spend our lives trying to avoid the unavoidable. Our energies, our emotions, our projects go into making money, being successful, having everybody like us, because we secretly believe that such things will protect us. One of our most powerful illusions is that being in love can give us real protection. In reality, there is no protection, no answer. Our lives are absolutely hopeless. That’s why they’re wonderful. And it’s not a big deal.

  Who wants to be successful? Who wants to be liked? All of us. There’s nothing wrong with such wants—unless we believe the illusion. Even wanting to make a million dollars can be great fun—as good a game as any—if we see it simply as a fun game, and we don’t hurt people as we play it. But we don’t see it as a game, and so we hurt others as we pursue our lethal path.

  Enlightenment is simply knowing the truth, not in the head but with one’s whole being, knowing that “this is it.” It’s wonderful. Got a toothache? That’s also it—wonderful. When we think about the toothache, of course we don’t think it’s wonderful. But it is wonderful simply to be what life is in this second, toothache and all.

  Unfortunately, our human minds do us in. For the most part, animals are less manipulative with their lives. Sometimes they may try to play tricks; I once had a dog who didn’t like to come home when he was called, so he’d stand behind the hedge on the opposite side of the street. That worked well in the summer: he’d stand hidden behind the hedge, just as quiet as could be. But when the leaves fell off in the fall, he’d still run there to hide, standing quietly—and completely visible! Still, dogs and other animals do not get as confused as we do about the purpose of their lives; unlike us, they just live.