Everyday Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

The first way of looking is to seek a solution outside ourselves. At first this may be on a very ordinary level. There are many people in the world who feel that if only they had a bigger car, a nicer house, better vacations, a more understanding boss, or a more interesting partner, then their life would work. We all go through that one. Slowly we wear out most of our “if onlies.” “If only I had this, or that, then my life would work.” Not one of us isn’t, to some degree, still wearing out our “if onlies.” First of all we wear out those on the gross levels. Then we shift our search to more subtle levels. Finally, in looking for the thing outside of ourselves that we hope is going to complete us, we turn to a spiritual discipline. Unfortunately we tend to bring into this new search the same orientation as before. Most people who come to the Zen Center don’t think a Cadillac will do it, but they think that enlightenment will. Now they’ve got a new cookie, a new “if only.” “If only I could understand what realization is all about, I would be happy.” “If only I could have at least a little enlightenment experience, I would be happy.” Coming into a practice like Zen, we bring our usual notions that we are going to get somewhere—become enlightened—and get all the cookies that have eluded us in the past.

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. Without exception, we all do this. We remain separate from our life, looking at it, analyzing it, judging it, seeking to answer the questions,

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.

It takes courage to sit well.

When the mind becomes clear and balanced and is no longer caught by objects, there can be an opening—and for a second we can realize who we really are.

Our job for the rest of our life is to open up into that immensity and to express it. Having more and more contact with this reality always brings compassion for others and changes our daily life.

Just be patient. We might have to do it ten thousand times, but the value for our practice is the constant return of the mind into the present, over and over and over.

But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.

No matter what your life is, I encourage you to make it your practice.

As human beings we have a mind that can think. We remember what has been painful. We constantly dream about the future, about the nice things we’re going to have, or are going to happen to us. So we filter anything happening in the present through all that: “I don’t like that. I don’t have to listen to that. And I can even forget about it and start dreaming of what’s going to happen.” This goes on constantly: spinning, spinning, spinning, always trying to create life in a way that will be pleasant, that would make us safe and secure, so we feel good.

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.

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.

One mark of a mature Zen student is a sense of groundedness. When you meet one you sense it. They’re with life as it’s really happening, not as a fantasy version of it. And of course, the storms of life eventually hit them more lightly. If we can accept things just the way they are, we’re not going to...

The job is not easy. It takes courage. Only people who have tremendous guts can do this practice for more than a short time. But we don’t do it just for ourselves. Perhaps we do at first; that’s fine. But as our life gets grounded, gets real, gets basic, other people immediately sense it, and what we are begins to influence everything around us.

Being what we are at each moment means, for example, fully being our anger when we are angry. That kind of anger never hurts anybody because it’s total, complete. We really feel this anger, this knot in our stomach, and we’re not going to hurt anybody with it. The kind of anger that hurts people is when we smile sweetly and underneath we’re seething.

We see what we are: our efforts to look good, to be first, or to be last. We see our anger, our anxiety, our pomposity, our so-called spirituality. Real spirituality is just being with all that.

Just do the best you can. Stay with your sitting. Come to sesshin, come to sit, and let’s all do our best. It’s really important: this total transformation of the quality of human life is the most important thing we can do.

else. Now life happens to be both a severe and an endlessly kind teacher.

You don’t have to go to some special place to find this incomparable teacher, you don’t have to have some especially quiet or ideal situation: in fact, the messier it is, the better.

(which usually means, until we have suffered and have been willing to learn from the suffering)

I don’t necessarily need an intellectual knowledge of what my conditioning has been, although this can be helpful. What I do need to know is what sorts of thoughts I persist in entertaining right now, today, and what bodily contractions I have right now, today.

Actually anyone in practice has some of these delusions operating. We all hope to change, to get somewhere! That in itself is the basic fallacy. But just contemplating this desire begins to clarify it, and the practice basis of our life alters as we do so. We begin to comprehend that our frantic desire to get better, to “get somewhere,” is illusion itself, and the source of suffering. If our boat full of hope, illusions, and ambition (to get somewhere, to be spiritual, to be perfect, to be enlightened) is capsized, what is that empty boat? Who are we? What, in terms of our lives, can we realize? And what is practice?

When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance—which is absolutely the most valuable thing there is—to face ourselves.

If we find that certain thoughts come up hundreds of times, we know something about ourselves that we didn’t know before. Perhaps we incessantly think about the past, or the future. Some people always think about events, some people always think about other people. Some people always think about themselves. Some people’s thoughts are almost entirely judgments about other people. Until we have labeled for four or five years, we don’t know ourselves very well. 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. That’s a theoretical description of sitting. It’s very simple; there’s nothing complicated about it.

Does that mean that one swimmer is better and the other worse? No. Both of them are perfect for where they are. Practice at any stage is just being who we are at that moment.

Sometimes after my talks people will say, “I don’t understand that.” And that’s perfect too. Our understanding grows over the years, but at any point we are perfect in being what we are.

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.

But we don’t need the emotionally self-centered activity that we call thinking. It really isn’t thinking, it’s an aberration of thinking.

Suppose we have a program called “I lack self-confidence.” Suppose we decide to reprogram that to “I have self-confidence.” Neither of them will stand up very well under the pressures of life, because they involved an “I.” And this “I” is a very fragile creation-unreal, actually—and is easily befuddled. In fact there never was an “I.” The point is to see that it is empty, an illusion, which is different from dissolving it. When I say that it’s empty, I mean that it has no basic reality; it’s just a creation of the self-centered thoughts.

Doing Zen practice is never as simple as talking about it. Even students who have a fair understanding of what they’re doing at times tend to desert basic practice. Still, when we sit well, everything else takes care of itself. So whether we have been sitting five years or twenty years or are just beginning, it is important to sit with great, meticulous care.

“If you can only rid yourselves of conceptual thought, you will have accomplished everything.

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.

the whole orientation of life must be transformed.

Because our usual mode of living—one of seeking happiness, battling to fulfill desires, struggling to avoid mental and physical pain—is always undermined by determined practice. 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. Too large an order? Too hard? On the contrary, it is the easy way.

Finally we realize that there is no path, no way, no solution; because from the beginning our nature is the path, right here and right now. Because there is no path our practice is to follow this no-path endlessly—and for no reward. Because no-self is everything it needs no reward: from the no-beginning it is itself complete fulfillment.

What is created, what grows, is the amount of life I can hold without it upsetting me, dominating me. At first this space is quite restricted, then it’s a bit bigger, and then it’s bigger still. It need never cease to grow. And the enlightened state is that enormous and compassionate space. But as long as we live we find there is a limit to our container’s size and it is at that point that we must practice. And how do we know where this cut-off point is? We are at that point when we feel any degree of upset, of anger. It’s no mystery at all. And the strength of our practice is how big that container gets.

We fear being flooded and overwhelmed. It’s as though we’ve walled off part of the ocean, and when the dam breaks the water just rejoins that which it truly is; and it’s relieved because now it can flow with the currents and the vastness of the ocean.

Practice is not easy. It will transform our life.

This is the ego, our anger that life is not the way we want it to be. “It doesn’t suit me! It doesn’t give me what I want! I want life to be nice to me!” It is our fury when the people or events in our lives simply don’t give us what we demand.

Dharma talks are not necessarily something to understand; if they shake you up and confuse you, sometimes that’s just right.

What is the point of all those stories? Basically, I could care less about the dishpan. But we do not lose all our particular, little neurotic quirks from practice. Neither my daughter nor I really cares about the movie; but these little squabbling interchanges are what life is all about. That’s just the fun of it. Do you understand? We don’t have to analyze it, pick it apart, or “communicate” about it. The wonder of living with anything is…what? It’s perfect in being as it is.

What I’m saying is that they’re not different. If someone close to you dies, then the wonder of life is just being that grief itself, being what you are. And being with it in the way that you’re with it, which is your way, not my way. Practice is in just being willing to be with it as it is.

That area grows, but always there’s that point where we can’t possibly see the perfection, and that’s the point where our practice is.

It’s not that “I” hears the birds, it’s just hearing the birds. Let yourself be seeing, hearing, thinking. That is what sitting is. It is the false “I” that interrupts the wonder with the constant desire to think about “I.”

Always we must practice getting closer and closer to experiencing our pain, our disappointment, our shattered hopes, our broken pictures. And that experiencing is ultimately nonverbal. We must observe the thought content until it is neutral enough that we can enter the direct and nonverbal experience of the disappointment and suffering. When we experience the suffering directly, the melting of the false emotion can begin, and true compassion can emerge.

So right now each one of us can look at our own life. What are we searching for? If we begin to see through the searching, do we see where we must look? Do we see what we can do? A willing ness to practice will come out of the conviction that there’s nothing else to be done.

However, as we endeavor to practice with relationships, we begin to see that they are our best way to grow. In them we can see what our mind, our body, our senses, and our thoughts really are. Why are relationships such excellent practice? Why do they help us to go into what we might call the slow death of the ego? Because, aside from our formal sitting, there is no way that is superior to relationships in helping us see where we’re stuck and what we’re holding on to. As long as our buttons are pushed, we have a great chance to learn and grow. So a relationship is a great gift, not because it makes us happy—it often doesn’t—but because any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror we can find.

So we can distinguish the arising—which is God, Buddha-nature, the absolute, just what is—from the world which is formed instantaneously, the other side of the arising. In fact, the two sides are one: the arising and what we call the world are not different. If we could really get this, we’d never again have any trouble in our lives, because it would be obvious that there is no past or future—and we’d see that all the stuff we worry about is nonsense.

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 and others.