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Whenever we want anything we know our practice has to continue. And since none of us can say other than that, it just means that for all of us our practice continues.
The development of a human being into what I would call a balanced, wise, compassionate person is not simple.
Practice is not a trimming on your life. Practice is the foundation. If that’s not there nothing else will be there.
When we teach a group of children, we’re not teaching the children, we are expressing the true self in a way appropriate to the classroom.
But if you students of the Way do not rid yourselves of conceptual thought in a flash, even though you strive for aeon and aeon, you will never accomplish it.”
Of course, if you’re anything like me, you’ll avoid it as long as possible—because it’s one thing to talk about, but extremely difficult to do. Yet when we do it, we know in our very guts who we are and who everyone else is; and the barrier between ourselves and others is gone.
So as we do zazen we patiently refuse the domination of these thoughts and opinions about ourselves, about events, about people; and we constantly turn back to the only certain reality: this present moment.
Our personal drive is to find a way to endure in our unchanging glory forever.
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.
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.”
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, analyzing, 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.
What is the enlightened state? When there is no longer any separation between myself and the circumstances of my life, whatever they may be, that is it.
The immense cunning of the human mind can operate very well when not challenged; but under the assault of sesshin, sitting motionless for long hours, the dishonesty and evasions of the mind become crystal clear. And the tension created by the cunning mind also begins to be felt. It may take us aback to realize that nothing outside of ourselves is attacking us. We are only assaulted by our thoughts, our needs, our attachments, all born from our identification with our false thinking which in turn creates a closed-in, separate, miserable life. In daily sitting we can sometimes avoid this
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There is nothing about ourselves that shouldn’t come under scrutiny.
What makes life so frightening is that we let ourselves be carried away in the garbage of our whirling minds. We don’t have to do that. Please sit well.
Each moment, as it is, is complete and full in itself.
If you are afraid, just be fear, and right there you are fearless.
If we try to make ourselves calm and wise and wonderfully enlightened through Zen practice, we’re not going to understand. Each moment, just as it is, is the sudden manifestation of absolute truth. And if we practice with the aspiration just to be the present moment, our lives will gradually transform and grow wonderfully. At various times we’ll have sudden insights; but what’s most important is just to practice moment by moment by moment with deep aspiration.
The biggest error we make in our life and our practice is to think that this house we’re living in—which is our life just as it is, with all of its problems, all of its ups and downs—has something wrong with it. And because we think that, we get busy. We’ve been busy most the years of our life adding that extra structure.
It’s as if we have to go full circle. Our life is always all right. There’s nothing wrong with it. Even if we have horrendous problems, it’s just our life. But since we refuse to accept life as it is, because of our preference for things that are pleasurable, we pick and choose from life. Said another way, we have no intention of settling for life as it is when it does not suit us.
We’re deadened by the ideals of how we think we should be and the way we think everybody else should be. It’s a disaster.
Until we see what we’re doing, we will do it. So in practice one of our tasks is to keep upping this ability to see. Very tricky, since we don’t have a great deal of interest in seeing anyway!
The most efficient way to wear out the superstructure is to keep doing all the nonsense that we’re always doing, but to do it with as much awareness as we can possibly muster. Then we see more.
But our responsibility is always right here, right now, to experience the reality of our life as it is. And eventually to blame no one. If we blame anyone we know we’re caught; we can be sure of that.
JOKO: Right. Essentially, in Zen terms we are “no-thing”…we just are doing what we’re doing. But if we see the unreality of this superstructure, we tend to do good. When there is no separation between ourselves and others, naturally we do good. Our basic nature is to do good.
We human beings all think there is something to accomplish, something to realize, some place we have to get to. And this very illusion, which is born out of having a human mind, is the problem. Life is actually a very simple matter. At any given moment in time we hear, we see, we smell, we touch, we think. In other words there is sensory input; we interpret that input, and everything appears.
We dislike being with life as it is because that can include suffering, and that is not acceptable to us. Whether it’s a serious illness or a minor criticism or being lonely or disappointed—that is not acceptable to us. We have no intention of putting up with that or just being that if we can possibly avoid
If I feel that I’ve been hurt by you, I want to stay with my thoughts about the hurt. I want to increase my separation; it feels good to be consumed by those fiery, self-righteous thoughts. By thinking, I try to avoid feeling the pain. The more sophisticated my practice becomes, the more quickly I see this trap and return to experiencing the pain, the razor’s edge. And where I might once have stayed upset for two years, the upset shrinks to two months, two weeks, two minutes. Eventually I can experience an upset as it happens and stay right on the razor’s edge.
We want somebody who will take our fear away or promise us happiness. No one wants to hear the truth, and we won’t hear it until we are ready to hear it.
“What else do you have to do?—you might as well practice with each moment as not.”
We think not in terms of work that needs to be done for life, but in terms of how we can serve our separate self—an enterprise that never occurs to a white blood cell. In a short time its life will be over; it will be replaced by others. It doesn’t think; it just does its work.
When something really annoys us, irritates us, troubles us, we start to think. We worry, we drag up everything we can think of, and we think and we think and we think-because that’s what we believe solves life’s problems. In fact what solves life’s problems is simply to experience the difficulty that’s going on, and then to act out of that.
My action emerges from my experience. But we don’t do that with the problems of life; instead we spin with them, we try to analyze them or try to find who’s to blame for them. And when we have done all that, we try to figure out an action. That’s backwards. We’ve cut ourselves off from the problem; with all our thinking, reacting, analyzing, we can’t solve it.
If New Jersey does not have to exist as a separate entity, it doesn’t have to defend itself. If we do not have to exist as a separate entity, we have no problem.
As long as we don’t feel open and loving, our practice is right there waiting for us. And since most of the time we don’t feel open and loving, most of the time we should be practicing meticulously.
And each time we go through this barrier something changes within us. Over time we become less separate. And it’s not easy, because we want to cling to that which is familiar: being separate, being superior or inferior, being “someone” in relationship to the world. One of the marks of serious practice is to be alert and to recognize when that separation is occurring. The minute we have even a passing thought of judging another person, the red light of practice should go on.
So practice is not just coming to sesshin or sitting each morning. That’s important, but it’s not enough. The strength of our practice, and the ability to communicate our practice to others, lies in being ourselves. We don’t have to try to teach others. We don’t have to say a thing. If our practice is strong it shows all the time. We don’t have to talk about the dharma; the dharma is simply what we are.
The problem with talking about “enlightenment” is that our talk tends to create a picture of what it is—yet enlightenment is not a picture, but the shattering of all our pictures.
Life is not particularly the way we want it to be, it is just the way it is. And that need not prevent our enjoyment of it, our appreciation, our gratitude.
Daily zazen is essential; but because we are so stubborn we usually need the pressure of long sitting to see our attachments. To sit a long sesshin is a major blow to our hopes and dreams, the barriers to enlightenment.
There can be no hope because there is nothing but this very moment.
But we see life in terms of problems, not decisions.
And one way to get a problem to change into a decision is to sit with it, doing zazen.
JOKO: And we can only truly give when we don’t need some return.
It is as if we have felt that our evening meal was not complete without dessert, so we go without dessert for a time as a means of learning about ourselves; and that is good practice.
we do not need to “renounce” anything, we need only to realize that true renunciation is equivalent to nonattachment.
So long as we have any picture of how we’re supposed to be or how other people are supposed to be, we are attached; and a truly spiritual life is simply the absence of that. “To study the self is to forget the self,” in the words of Dōgen Zenji.
By arrogance I mean the feeling of being special, of not being ordinary.
Because of the fear of pain we all build up an ego structure to shield us, and so we suffer. Freedom is the willingness to risk being vulnerable to life; it is the experience of whatever arises in each moment, painful or pleasant.
Few of us see being alone as just being alone; we see it as loneliness and misery. Yet I’m not talking of some kind of withdrawal into a cave. I mean that in being alone we can practice devoting ourselves to everything and everyone.
