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Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television. We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety.
Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.
So the crux of zazen is this: all we must do is constantly to create a little shift from the spinning world we’ve got in our heads to right-here-now. That’s our practice. The intensity and ability to be right-here-now is what we have to develop.
Our Zen training is designed to enable us to live comfortable lives. But the only people who live comfortably are those who learn not to dream their lives away, but to be with what’s right-here-now, no matter what it is: good, bad, nice, not nice, headache, being ill, being happy. It doesn’t make any difference.
When we’re lost in thought, when we’re dreaming, what have we lost? We’ve lost reality. Our life has escaped us.
When we label thoughts precisely and carefully, what happens to them? They begin to quiet down. We don’t have to force ourselves to get rid of them. When they quiet down, we return to the experience of the body and the breath, over and over and over. I can’t emphasize enough that we don’t just do this three times, we do it ten thousand times; and as we do it, our life transforms.
A mind that is not aware will produce illness.
There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is.
Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is.
If we persistently label any thought the emotional overlay begins to drop out and we are left with an impersonal energy fragment to which we need not attach. But if we think our thoughts are real we act out of them. And if we act from such thoughts our life is muddled.
We “rid ourselves of conceptual thought” when, by persistent observation, we recognize the unreality of our self-centered thoughts. Then we can remain dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by them. That does not mean to be a cold person. Rather, it means not to be caught and dragged around by circumstances.
People tell me they want to be free of their troubles; but when we stew in our own juices we can maintain ourselves as the artificial center of the universe. We love our drama.
All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That’s all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.
We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life; not in avoiding pain, but in being pain when it is necessary to do so.
Emotion-thought is the root of delusion, a stubborn attachment to a one-sided point of view, formed by our own conditioned perceptions.
If we cease looking, searching, what are we left with? We’re left with what’s been right there at the center all the time. Underneath all that searching there is distress. There is unease. The minute that we realize that, we see that the point isn’t the search, but rather the distress and unease which motivate the search. That’s the magic moment—when we realize that searching outside of ourselves is not the way. At first it dawns on us just a little bit. And its gets clearer over time, as we continue to suffer. See, anything that we search for is going to disappoint us. Because there are no
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What’s underneath all that search is what? Fear. Unease. Distress. Feeling miserable. We’re in pain and we use the search to alleviate that pain. We begin to see that the pain comes because we are pinching ourselves. And just this knowledge is relief, even peace. The very peace we’ve been searching for so hard lies in recognizing this fact: I’m pinching myself. No one’s doing it to me. So the whole search begins to be abandoned and instead of searching, we begin to see that practice isn’t a search. Practice is to be with that which motivates the search, which is unease, distress. And this is
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The first part of our practice is as if we were in the middle of a confused, busy street; we can hardly find an empty place and the traffic is going every which way. It’s confusing and frightening. And that’s the way our life feels to most of us. We’re so busy jumping out of the way of what’s coming toward us that we can’t understand our own entrapment in the traffic. But if we watch it for a while we begin to see that there are holes in the traffic here and there. We might even step up on the sidewalk and begin to take a more objective look. And no matter how busy the traffic, here and there,
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Like ourselves, other people are simply experiencing which looks like behavior. Yet we view them as behavior; we only see their behavior and are unaware of their experiencing. In truth experiencing is universal because that is what we are. When we can see the foolishness of our bondage to our thoughts and opinions, and increase the amount of time we live as experiencing, we are more able to sense the true life—the true experiencing—of another person. When we live a life that is not dominated by personal opinion but is instead pure experiencing, then we begin to take care of everyone, ourselves
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