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| Everyday ZEN |
REFLECIONS YARO BLOG – NOVEMBER 2022
Dear reader,
Just this morning I realised that I
id not write my November Blog. I was busy reading the world news. I have
Canadian news, American news, Spanish news, and Australian news. All news seems
to be a copy of the same stories: wars, floods, major accidents on bridges and
boats. And the horrible Halloween chaos and deaths from a panic effect in South
Korea.
As usual, I search for some inspiration
from wise teachers and found a ZEN book entitled “ EVERY DAY ZEN by Joko Beck
who, in her chapters describes with wonderful simplicity, everyday life.
“We tend to run our whole life
trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people,
or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and
pursuing the other.”
One of her chapters caught my
attention as it was just what I was reflecting about: RENOUNCING.
She states that renouncing life
creates more pain and suffering – the kind of suffering that our soul feels and
not much can be done to stop it. However, she teaches that being present and
aware, is a way to overcome every hurt in life. Accept and do not renounce is
her theme and here is a quote from her book:
Renunciation
Renunciation Suzuki Roshi said,
“Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world but accepting that they
go away.” Everything is impermanent; sooner or later everything goes away.
Renunciation is a state of nonattachment, acceptance of this going away.
Impermanence is, in fact, just another name for perfection. Leaves fall; debris
and garbage accumulate; out of the debris come flowers, greenery, things that
we think are lovely. Destruction is necessary. A good forest fire is necessary.
The way we interfere with forest fires may not be a good thing. Without
destruction, there could be no new life; and the wonder of life, the constant
change, could not be. We must live and die. And this process is perfection
itself.
All this change is not, however,
what we had in mind. Our drive is not to appreciate the perfection of the
universe. Our personal drive is to find a way to endure in our unchanging glory
forever. That may seem ridiculous, yet that’s what we’re doing. And that
resistance to change is not attuned with the perfection of life, which is its
impermanence. If life were not impermanent, it couldn’t be the wonder that it
is. Still, the last thing we like is our own impermanence. Who hasn’t noticed
the first gray hair and thought, “Uh-oh.” So, a battle rages in human
existence. We refuse to see the truth that’s all around us. We don’t really see
life at all. Our attention is elsewhere. We are engaged in an unending battle
with our fears about ourselves and our existence. If we want to see life we
must be attentive to it. But we’re not interested in doing that; we’re only
interested in the battle to preserve ourselves forever. And of course, it’s an
anxious and futile battle, a battle that can’t be won. The one who always wins
is death.
What we want out of life as we live
it is that others reflect our glory. We want our partners to ensure our
security, to make us feel wonderful, to give us what we want, so that our
anxiety can be eased for a little while. We look for friends who will at least
take the cutting edge off of our fear, the fear that we’re not going to be
around one day. We don’t want to look at that. The funny thing is that our
friends are not fooled by us; they see exactly what we’re doing. Why do they
see it so clearly? Because they’re doing it too. They’re not interested in our
efforts to be the center of the universe. Yet we wage the battle ceaselessly.
We are frantically busy. When our personal attempts to win the battle fail, we
may try to find peace in a false form of religion. And people who offer that
carrot get rich. We are desperate for anyone who will tell us, “It’s all right.
Everything can be wonderful for you.” Even in Zen practice we try to find a way
around what practice really is, so that we can gain a personal victory.
People often say to me, “Joko, why
do you make practice so hard? Why don’t you hold out any cookies at all?” But
from the point of view of the small self, practice can only be hard. Practice
annihilates the small self, and the small self isn’t interested in that one
bit. It can’t be expected to greet this annihilation with joy. So, there’s no
cookie that can be held out for the small self, unless we want to be dishonest.
There is another side to practice, however: As our small self dies—our angry,
demanding, complaining, manoeuvring, manipulative self-a real cookie appears:
joy and genuine self-confidence. We begin to taste what it feels like to care
about someone else without expecting anything in return. And this is true
compassion. How much we have it depends on the rate at which the small self
dies. As it dies, here and there we have moments when we see what life is.
Sometimes we can spontaneously act and serve others. And with this growth
always comes repentance. When we realize that we
have almost constantly hurt
ourselves and others, we repent—and this repentance is itself pure joy. So let
us notice that our efforts in Sesshin are to perfect ourselves: we want to be
enlightened, we want to be clear, we want to be calm, we want to be wise. As
our sitting settles down into the present moment we say, “Isn’t this
boring!—the cars going by, feel my knees hurting, notice my tummy growling…” We
have no interest in the infinite perfection of the universe. In fact the
infinite perfection of the universe might be the person sitting next to us who
breathes noisily or is sweaty. The infinite perfection is this being
inconvenienced: “I’m not having it my way at all.” At any moment there is just what’s
happening. Yet we’re not interested in that. Instead we’re bored. Our attention
goes in another direction. “Forget reality! I’m here to be enlightened!” But
Zen is a subtle practice: even as we fight it and resist it and distort it, our
concepts about it tend to destroy themselves. And slowly, in spite of
ourselves, we begin to be interested in what practice really is, as opposed to
our ideas of what we think it should be. The point of practice is exactly this
clashing space in which my desires for my personal immortality, my own
glorification, my own control of the universe, clash with what is. This moment
occurs frequently in our lives: the moment when we feel irritability, jealousy,
excitement—the clash between the way I want it and the way it is. “I hate her
noisy breathing. How can I be aware of what is when she does that?” “How can I
practice when the boys next door play rock and roll?” Every moment offers us a
wealth of opportunities. Even on the calmest, most uneventful day we get many
opportunities to see the clash between what we want and the way it really is.
All good practice aims to make our false dreams conscious, so that there is
nothing in our physical and mental experience that is unknown to us. We need
not only to know our anger, but we also need to know our own personal ways of
handling our anger. If a reaction is not conscious, we can’t look at it and
turn away from it. Each defensive reaction (and we have one about every five
minutes) is practice. If we practice with the thoughts and physical sensations
that comprise that reaction, we open to wholeness, or holiness, if you want to
call it that. In good practice we are always transforming from being personally
centered (caught in our personal reactions) to being more and more a channel
for universal energy, this energy that shifts the universe a million times a
second. In our phenomenal lives what we see is impermanence; the other side is
something else; we won’t give it a name. When we practice well, we are
increasingly a channel for this universal energy, and death loses its sting. A
major obstacle to seeing is unawareness that all practice has a strong element
of resistance. It is bound to have this unwillingness until our personal self
is completely dead. Only a Buddha has no resistance, and I doubt that in the
human population there are any Buddhas. Until we die we always have some
personal resistance that has to be acknowledged. A second major obstacle is a
lack of honesty about who we are at each moment. It’s very hard to admit, “I’m
being vengeful” or “I’m being punishing” or “I’m being self-righteous.” That
kind of honesty is hard. We don’t always have to share with others what we
observe about ourselves; but there should be nothing going on that we’re not
aware of. We must see that we are chasing ideals of perfection rather than
acknowledging our imperfection. A third obstacle is being impressed and side-tracked
by our little openings as they occur. They’re just the fruit; they have no
importance unless we use them in our lives. A fourth obstacle is having little
understanding of the magnitude of the task that we have embarked upon. The task
is not impossible, it’s not too difficult; but it is unending.
A fifth obstacle, common among
people who spend much time at Zen centers, is substituting talk and discussion
and reading for persistent practice itself. The less we say about practice, the
better. Outside of a direct student-teacher setting, the last thing that I will
talk about is Zen practice. And I don’t talk about the dharma. Why talk about
it? My job is to notice how I violate it. You know the old saying, “He who
knows does not say, and he who says does not know.” When we talk about practice
all the time, our talk is another form of resistance, a barrier, a cover. It’s
like academics who save the world every night at the dinner table. They talk
and talk and talk—but what difference does it make? At the other end of that
pole would be someone like Mother Teresa. I don’t think she does much talking.
She is busy doing. Intelligent practice always deals with just one thing: the
fear at the base of human existence, the fear that I am not. And of course, I
am not, but the last thing I want to know is that. I am impermanence itself in
a rapidly changing human form that appears solid. I fear to see what I am: an
ever-changing energy field. I don’t want to be that. So good practice is about
fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analysing,
fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloudy cover to keep ourselves
safe in a make-believe practice. True practice is not safe; it’s anything but
safe. But we don’t like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve
our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just
another cloud between us and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing
with an impersonal searchlight: seeing things are they are. When the personal
barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything? We just live our lives.
And when we die, we just die. No problem anywhere.
