Everyday Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

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.

I do each and every one of these, often on the same day.

We all know people who might as well be dead; they have so contracted into their limited viewpoints that it is as painful for those around them as it is for themselves.

Regrettably, the author does not suggest that we help those people by killing them. We apparently should just let them go on living -- I mean, suffering.

Zen is almost a thousand years old and the kinks have been worked out of it;

The fact that it is a thousand years old does not support the claim that the kinks have been worked out. Catholicism is two thousand years old, and that shit is kinky as fuck.

It takes courage to sit well.

Luckily, sitting on my ass is one of my core competencies.

Zen is not a discipline for everyone.

Those other people can go fuck themselves. The Scientologists are recruiting, maybe those who can't hack Zen can hook up with Xenu or something.

After we have seen the same movie five hundred times it gets boring, frankly!

Except "The Empire Strikes Back", which is always awesome. Also, children will watch "Blue's Clues" over and over, finding reassurance and comfort in the same thing happening forever. Also, compared to sitting on a cushion, even thinking is exciting.

It doesn’t matter what our practice is called: following the breath, shikan-taza, koan study; basically, we’re all working on the same issues: “Who are we? What is our life? Where did we come from? Where do we go?” It’s essential to living a whole human life that we have some insight.

I'm not convinced. We ultimately don't know what happens to us when we die, and we can live fulfilling lives anyway. To take the analogy of the wave, from "The Heart of Buddha's Teaching", we know that the water that makes up the wave continues even once the wave breaks up on the shore, and we know that the energy that made up the wave continues, but that unique combination of material and energy lasted only for an instant -- every moment as the wave rushed towards shore it was different -- and then is dissipated. It doesn't make the wave any less meaningful or any less beautiful or any less of a wave to acknowledge and accept this.

But in my story that attention was relatively easy. It was with an object that I liked.

Again, I question this -- learning to listen to a few notes, when you're at the point of playing solos, requires letting go of your immediate ambitions and learning to do something you know well as if you are a beginner. Learning to sit on a cushion and follow your breath -- you really are a beginner. There's less ego to put aside. It seems like a stupid thing to do at first, granted, but you haven't spent years learning to sit on a cushion and follow your breath the wrong way.

And what really is, at a Zen sesshin, is often fatigue, boredom, and pain in our legs. What we learn from having to sit quietly with that discomfort is so valuable that if it didn’t exist, it should. When you’re in pain, you can’t spin off. You have to stay with it. There’s no place to go. So pain is really valuable.

Pain allows us to focus on the pain, and how we are big and strong and can endure the pain. It allows us to not focus on what is happening. It's a crutch.

One mark of a mature Zen student is a sense of groundedness. When you meet one you sense it.

You may wonder whether they are smug or serene, but the effect is unmistakable.

We can’t have just a piece of the Buddha. Buddhas come whole.

If someone mails you the finger of the Buddha to prove that they have him captured, you can scoff -- that is not the Buddha they have, it is someone else. Buddhas come whole, and are indivisible.

We’re all just babies.

Screaming, howling, shrieking babies. Spitting bits of vomit and phlegm up after every meal.

The last words of the Buddha were, “Be a lamp unto yourself.

I do kind of wonder if that was a mistranslated insult, or just a desperate plea by a dying man to be left alone to die in peace.

This is a very radical teaching, not for everyone. People often turn away from such a teaching; they don’t want to hear it.

Apparently, the more "Americanized" version of Zen involves making the person feel special. I don't want to get all "you fucking millennials want a fucking trophy just for showing up," but there's something completely patronizing about this. A modest amount of dedication to an endeavor is not a great feat. Suspending judgement on something, and just doing it for a while, is not a great feat. To say that meditation, and training your mind to let go more easily, isn't for everyone is like saying that knee exercises aren't for everyone. I'm sure there are people who don't need to carefully strengthen their knees, but the basic skills are available to anyone who has knees.

What do baby birds do?

Fun Fact: No one has ever seen a baby pigeon in New York City, despite the countless pigeons everywhere. There are lots of theories to explain this -- they are raised elsewhere and come to the big city later before leaving to raise children elsewhere; people just don't notice the baby pigeons; etc. I prefer the following explanation: those are the baby pigeons. The full grown pigeons are the size of men, and flightless, and live in the subways.

When I hear that sound I want to do something, anything, to stop it.

"It wasn't a chicken, it was a baby!"

Now every time a person with red hair passes through my life I feel uneasy for no obvious reason.

Perhaps she just hates the Irish? I mean, it was a common thing in olden days.

Either we die—because if we remain very long in the bottleneck of fear we will be strangled to death—or we slowly gain comprehension by experiencing the bottleneck and going through it. I don’t think we have a lot of choice. How about you?

Yup, death it is. Strangled by the bottleneck.

First, practice is not about producing psychological change. If we practice with intelligence, psychological change will be produced; I’m not questioning that—in fact, it’s wonderful. I am saying that practice is not done in order to produce such change.

Why not? If there is observable, measurable, predictable effects, why would we not pursue them if they are helpful? Who picks up a book like this if they aren't interested in change?

Practice is not about having or cultivating special powers. There are many of these and we all have some of them naturally;

Being vegan is is what unlocks most of those powers.

At the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA) I sometimes had the useful ability to see what was being served for dinner two doors away. If they were having something I didn’t like, I didn’t go.

We call this fabulous and amazing ability a sense of smell.

Again, we tend to be much more so after years of practice, but it is not the point.

And again, I would ask why not? There was a time when people would pick someone they wanted to emulate, and try to adopt the qualities of that person. If you admired the Dalai Lama, you might meditate.if you admired FDR you might sit in a wheelchair, smoke a cigarette with a flamboyant holder, and do nothing while millions of Jews are killed. This entire "be yourself" thing is flawed. What if you're an asshole? What if you are Donald Trump? The last thing you should do is be yourself.

If the mind will not take care of a situation with awareness, the body will. It will help us out. It’s as if the body says, “If you won’t take care of it, I guess I’ve got to.” So we produce our next cold, our next rash, our next ulcer, whatever is our style. A mind that is not aware will produce illness.

If you get sick, it's your own damned fault. Nice to know.

If we were afraid of being in water and didn’t know how to swim, the first victory would be just to lower ourselves into the water. The next step might be getting our face wet. If we were expert swimmers the challenge might be whether we can enter our hand into the water at a certain angle as we execute our stroke. Does that mean that one swimmer is better and the other worse? No. Both of them are perfect for where they are.

Um, no, actually the swimmer who can swim is a much better swimmer. She might not be a better person, but she's a better swimmer.

As our practice proceeds the delusion comes under attack; and slowly we begin to sense (horror of horrors!) that we must pay the price of freedom.

Freedom isn't free, it's a buck ninety-five.

The other story is about Pandora’s box. You remember—somebody was so curious about the contents of that mysterious box that he finally opened it—and the evil contents poured out, creating chaos. Practice is often like that for us; it opens Pandora’s box.

Odd to refer to that someone as he. Pandora was a woman, or possibly a girl, and the entire story has a misogynistic air to it -- were it not for this foolish woman, there would be no evil in the world. Referencing the story without the misogyny leaves it feeling incomplete.

Practice is not easy. It will transform our life. But if we have a naive idea that this transformation can take place without a price being paid, we fool ourselves. Don’t practice unless you feel there’s nothing else you can do. Instead, step up your surfing or your physics or your music. If that satisfies you, do it. Don’t practice unless you feel you must.

This is very nicely non-prostelitizing. Too many philosophies, religions and cults want to bring everyone on board through aggressive recruitment. This relies on reverse psychology.

It takes enormous courage to have a real practice. You have to face everything about yourself hidden in that box, including some unpleasant things you don’t even want to know about.

I wouldn't call sitting on your ass "courage."

If we’re at a stage in our lives (and it’s not good or bad, it’s just a stage) in which the only thing that matters to us is how we feel and what we want, then practice will be too difficult.

I know we are not supposed to be judgemental, but I'm willing to judge this -- it's bad.