STUDENT : Thinking about the new balance in the Middle East reminds me of the extra tensions in my relationship recently. We’re going through our own little battles and changes, and we’re working out new balancing. It’s like a microcosm of what’s going on in various parts of the world. And by watching the Middle East conflict, I can see a bit more clearly what’s happening to me right now at home.
STUDENT : When I lived in the Middle East for three years, a point of view that many Arabs hold came through clearly to me. In this country we get much of our oil from that area; yet we waste much of what we use. We have a greedy need for oil. Our greed is out of control, and we’re taking someone else’s resources to satisfy our own greed. It’s part of the chaos. There is an Arab perspective on these questions that is really quite valid.
STUDENT : Recently I returned from a trip to Africa. While traveling in Africa, I would sometimes encounter Arab men in their flowing robes. I noticed my reaction to them, based upon things I had been told about how oppressive some Arab cultures are to women. I felt my body getting tight. One day as I was walking down the aisle on a plane and brushing past one of these Arab men, he said, “Excuse me,” and he looked into my eyes and smiled. At that moment something opened to me, and I saw him simply as a person and not as an Arab.
STUDENT: I’m often fascinated by all the chaos around me. I watch the conflict in my own mind, and other people tell me of the things that they’re going through, and then I see the people going to work in Los Angeles county. It’s a huge confusion, and almost everybody gets to work. It’s almost unbelievable! If I imagine someone out there trying to choreograph it all—“Move, move, move!”—it would be totally impossible. Everything seems pressed to the breaking point. Yet because of the pressure, people back off a bit and let others in, and the whole thing flows. It’s fascinating that it works at all.
JOKO : Once while flying to Los Angeles, I was talking with a fellow passenger who was a city planner. He looked out the window, down at the freeways and buildings, and said, “It can’t hold together much longer!” But things do hold together because there’s an adjustment that takes place. Somehow people adapt.
STUDENT : I notice that I relax because of the inevitability of the chaos—and perhaps others do, too. Maybe that’s what keeps the city from being more insane than it is. Anyone who drives any distance on a freeway or a crowded street actually has to let go, in order to cope. It’s a time in the frenetic city when people have to let it be, and let go to what’s happening. It’s a sort of spiritual play.
JOKO : In the fighting in the Middle East and elsewhere, we see the end result of the inner violence in all of us. We imagine that we can solve our problems by external fighting and war. We spend unbelievable amounts on armaments; yet our child mortality rate is one of the highest in the industrialized world. That’s part of the chaos, too. It’s fine to take a personal point of view, and try to change these things. But our personal point of view needs to be balanced by a recognition that millions of things—far more than we can ever comprehend—are coming together, shifting, and changing, all the time.
Until we face our own situation, with all the chaos in our lives, we can’t do much else in any effective way. There’s going to be chaos in any case, but when we face it, we see it differently. We don’t want to face it, however. We want to live inside the boxes we have created and just keep redecorating the walls rather than breaking out the door. We really like our prisons; that’s one reason that practice is so difficult. Resistance is the very nature of being human.
A person like Saddam Hussein does not appear out of a vacuum, for no reason; he is the result of many, many circumstances, just as Hitler was. We shouldn’t think, however, that if the whole world did zazen, there would be no chaos. That’s not it either. The chaos will continue. We don’t need to worry about that. But if we practice, in time we are more willing for things to be the way they are. We’ll continue to have personal preferences about how things should go, but not personal demands. Preferences and demands are very different. When things don’t go the way we prefer, we adjust much more quickly to how they are. That’s what happens after years of sitting. If you’re looking for something else—well, sorry….
Paradoxically, learning to be with the chaos brings a deep kind of peace. But it’s not what we usually picture to ourselves.
STUDENT: Is that the wonder? JOKO: That’s the wonder.
VIII
NOTHING SPECIAL
From Drama to No Drama
In Zen practice we move from a life of drama—a kind of soap opera—to a life of no drama. Despite what we may say, we all like our personal dramas very much. The reason? No matter what our particular drama is, we are always at the center of it—which is where we want to be. And through practice, we gradually shift away from that self-preoccupation. Thus, to move from a life of drama to a life of no drama, though it sounds extremely dull, is what Zen practice is about. Let’s look at this process more closely.
When we begin sitting, it’s good to begin with several big breaths, filling up the abdominal area, the middle chest, and the upper chest until we’re full of air, and then just letting it out and holding the exhalation for a moment. Do this three or four times. In a sense, it’s artificial, but it helps to create a certain balance and forms a good basis for sitting. Once we’ve done this, the next step is to forget it: forget controlling our breath. We won’t entirely forget, of course, but it’s useless to control the breath. Instead, just experience it, which is very different. We’re not trying to make the breath long, slow, and even, as many books suggest. Instead, what we want is to let the breath be the boss, so that the breath is breathing us. If the breath is shallow, let it be that. As we become our breathing, the breath of its own accord starts to slow down. The breath stays shallow because we want to think rather than experience our lives. When we do this, everything becomes more shallow and controlled. The word uptight is very apt; it describes this condition well. We’re drawn up into our head, throat, shoulders; we’re scared, and our breath comes up, too. A breath that stays down (as it tends to do after years of sitting) is one where the mind has given up hope. All that we hope for, we slowly give up, and the breath stays down. It’s not something we have to try to do. The practice is simply to experience the breath as it is.
We also think we should have a quiet mind. Many books say this: that to become enlightened is to have a quiet mind. It’s true: when we have no hope, our mind quiets. As long as we have hope, our mind is trying to figure out how to fulfill those wonderful things that we want to happen to us, or trying to protect ourselves from all the terrible things that shouldn’t happen. And so the mind is anything but quiet. Now, instead of forcing the mind to become quiet, what can we do? We can be conscious of what it’s doing. That’s what labeling our thoughts is about. Instead of being caught up in hope, we begin to see, “Oh, yeah, for the twentieth time today, I’m hoping for relief.” After a good sesshin, we may have said it five hundred times: “I hope he’ll call me when sesshin is over.” And so we label: “Having a hope he’ll call me when sesshin is over.” “Having a hope he’ll call me when sesshin is over.” When we’ve said that five hundred times, what happens to it? We see it for what it is: nonsense. After all, the truth is that he either will or won’t call. As we watch the mind over the years, the hopes slowly wear out. And we’re left with what? It may seem gruesome, I know: we’re left with life as it is.
It’s useful to go about this process with an attitude of investigation. Instead of viewing our sitting as good or bad, something that should steadily improve, we should simply investigate, watch what we’re really doing. There is no good or bad sitting; there is only awareness or unawareness of what is going on in our life. And when we maintain more awareness, the questions we have about our life are seen in a new light. We’re left not with another viewpoint, but with a different way of seeing things. As this process develops over time, very slowly the mind quiets—not completely,
and what quiets is not the thoughts. (We can be sitting twenty years, and have thoughts rushing through our minds.) What quiets is our attachment to our thoughts. We see them more and more as just a show, like watching children at play. (My mind thinks practically all the time. Let it think, if it wants.) It’s our attachment to the thoughts that blocks samadhi. We can have lots of thoughts, yet be in deep samadhi, so long as we’re not attaching to them and are just experiencing. It is true that the longer we sit, the less we tend to think, because we tend to obsess less. So, the mind does become quieter, though certainly not because we say to ourselves, “I have to have a quiet mind!”
As we sit, from time to time we gain different insights about our lives. Insights themselves are neither good nor bad, and from the point of Zen practice, they’re not even particularly important. Though they may have some usefulness, zazen is not about gaining insights. They do occur; we suddenly see, “Oh, yeah—that’s what I do. Interesting.” Yet even grasping the insight is just stuff that’s coming and going, coming and going through our minds. We become scientists living this experiment called our lives. Our selves and our thinking are spread out in front of us; we look at the show with interest, but not as our own personal drama. The more of this perspective we develop, the better our lives are. For example: if we’re doing an experiment on salt and sugar, we don’t say, “That’s terrible! The salt and the sugar are fighting!” We don’t care what the salt and the sugar are doing, we just watch them and observe their interaction. In contrast, we usually do care about what our thoughts are doing. We don’t just watch them with interest, as scientists just watch to see what happens. “If I mix this and this—interesting. If I mix in different proportions—interesting.” The scientist simply watches and observes.
When this quality of watching, observing, and experiencing our lives gets stronger, reality (which is just awareness) encounters unreality, our little drama of thoughts. And we see more clearly what is real and what is unreal, as light illumines the darkness. But when we bring more reality (awareness) into our lives, what had been dark and troublesome seems to change. When we bring more awareness into our lives, we begin to eliminate our personal dramas. And we don’t really want to do this. We like our personal dramas, and we like to maintain them. Each of us has his or her own pet story; for example, we may believe, “My circumstances are particularly bad. My childhood was worse than most.” Or, “That one experience has really wrecked things for me.” It’s true, these events happened, and they have created our conditioning. But so long as we maintain our beliefs that the stories we tell are the truth of our lives, genuine practice will not take place. The beliefs block practice.
Unless there is some willingness to abandon these personal life beliefs, there’s nothing that I or anyone else can do. Sometimes enough suffering will itself create that little chink into which awareness can enter. But until that little gap occurs, there’s nothing anyone can do. And people who are really stubborn can maintain their personal stories until they’re dead. Such persons have hard lives. A personal belief of this kind—“I am a victim”—is like a dark closet. If we want to sit in this closet with the door shut tightly, nothing can get in. Unfortunately, so long as we insist upon sitting in this closet (and we all do, sometimes), we find that no one really wants to come in and sit with us. Frankly, nobody is particularly interested in someone else’s drama. What we’re interested in is our own. I may want to shut myself in my own closet, but I’m certainly not going to sit in yours.
We all get in our particular closets. The closet is our personal drama, and we want to be alone in it, to sense ourselves at the very center of it. It’s a juicy misery. And whether we realize it or not, we love it. But when we’ve had the experience of opening the door and letting the light in, once we’ve seen what it’s like to have some genuine light in the closet, we never can stay in the closet indefinitely again. It may take us years, but eventually we’ll open the door. One way of looking at sesshin is that it forces that door open for some of us. That’s why sesshin can be uncomfortable.
At some point, we begin to see that what happens in our life is not the issue; there will always be something happening. What happens will always be a mix of what we like and what we don’t like. There’s no time when that ceases. As we become more of the scientist, however, we are less caught up in what’s happening and more able simply to observe what’s happen
ing. The ability and willingness to do this kind of observing increases over years of practice. At first it may be minimal. Our job is to increase this willingness and this ability.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how we feel. It’s not important whether we feel depressed, jittery, scattered, happy. The job of the student is to look, experience, be aware. For example, depression, completely experienced, ceases to be depression and becomes samadhi. Jitteriness can also be experienced, and as we experience it, a shift occurs, and we don’t have to worry about being jittery. No circumstance, no feeling, is the point. The point is the opportunity to experience.
We often suppose that we have to dredge up submerged psychological “stuff” and work on it. That’s not quite true. After all, where is this stuff hidden? It’s not really accurate to suppose that there is some stuff underneath consciousness that will work its way out, though it may feel that way to us. During sesshins we may become emotional, sad, desperate, but these emotions are not hidden mysteries that suddenly appear. This is just who we are, and we’re experiencing who we are. When we try to work this stuff out, it’s just another form of self-improvement that doesn’t work. Practice is not a matter of sitting so that our stuff can come up in order that we can work on it and make ourselves better. The fact is, we’re already fine. It’s not a question of going somewhere.
We block our awareness by our guilt and by our ideals. For example, suppose I’ve told someone, “I’m just not a good teacher. I don’t handle every situation perfectly.” By becoming attached to that thought, I have blocked any capability of learning. Guilt and ideals of how I should be block the only thing that matters, a clear awareness: “I see what’s happening, I did goof up, didn’t I? Well, what can I learn?” Another example might be a cook worried about dinner. Suppose the dinner is burned. The cook doesn’t have to go into “Oh! it’s the end of the world! What will people think of me, I just burnt everything!” At that point, what can be done? Simply look for every loaf of bread in the house and pass it out. It’s not the end of the world if the dinner burns. But guilt blocks learning.
The only thing that matters is awareness of what’s going on. When we get into ideals and guilt, decisions themselves become difficult, because we don’t see how we’re caught in our worries: “Is it going to benefit me? What will happen? Is it really a good move? Is my life going to be more secure, more wonderful, more perfect?” Those are the wrong questions. What are the right questions? And what are the right decisions? We can’t say in advance, but at some point, we will know, if we don’t get caught up in the guilt, the ideals, and the perfectionism we usually bring to our decisions. Sitting is about this kind of clarification.
All techniques are useful, and all are limited. Whatever technique we bring into our practice will serve us for a while—until we start not really using it or drifting with it or dreaming. So the important thing with any technique is our intent. We must intend to be present, to be aware, to be practicing. And nobody has that intent all the time. We have it intermittently. We also want to find a teacher who is going to take care of all of this for us; we all want to be saved and taken care of. The intent to practice is the most important thing. There’s no technique that will save us, no teacher who will save us, no center that will save us. There’s no anything that will save us. That’s the cruelest blow of all.
Turning our lives of drama to lives of no drama means turning a life where we’re constantly seeking, analyzing, hoping, and dreaming into one of just experiencing life as it appears, right now. The key factor is awareness, just experiencing
the pain as it is. Paradoxically, this is joy. There is no other joy on this earth except this.
This kind of practice has a deadly effect: it will take away our drama. It doesn’t take away our personality. We’re all different, and we will remain different. But the drama is not real. It is the blockage to a functioning, caring life.
Simple Mind
The only mind that can sense life in a transformed way is a simple mind. The dictionary defines simple as “having or composed of one part only.” Awareness can take in a multiplicity of things, just as an eye can take in many details at once. But awareness itself is one thing only. It remains unchanged, without additions or modifications. Awareness is completely simple; we don’t have to add anything to it or change it. It is unassuming or unpretentious; it can’t help but be that way. Awareness is not a thing, to be affected by this or that. When we live from pure awareness, we are not affected by our past, our present, or our future. Because awareness has nothing it can pretend to, it’s humble. It is lowly. Simple.
Practice is about developing or uncovering a simple mind. For example, I often hear people complain that they feel overwhelmed by their lives. To be overwhelmed is to be caught by all the objects, the thoughts, the events of life, and to be affected emotionally by them, so that we feel angry and upset. When we feel like that, we may do and say things that hurt ourselves or other people. Unlike the simple mind of pure awareness, we are confused by the multiplicity of the external environment. Then we can’t see that everything external is us. We can’t see that everything exists in us until we can live eighty or ninety percent out of a simple mind. Practice is about developing this kind of mind. It is not easy. It takes endless patience, diligence, and determination.
Nothing Special: Living Zen Page 24
