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Categories are created by taking something continuous and drawing the proverbial line in the sand to separate one into two. The placement of this line requires a judgment. Without judgment, categories could not exist. In fact, one could go so far as to say the next closest word for interpreter would be judge (but without the moral aspect of judgment). To interpret is to judge things, and there is no way around this.
Simply becoming aware of the interpreter and the endless categories it creates through judgment frees you from being tied to the inevitability of these judgments. That is to say, when you become conscious of the interpreter, you are free to choose to no longer take its interpretations so seriously.
When someone approaches you with a “this is the way it is” attitude, you can appreciate that this person is dominated by the left brain, that they are a servant to its master. As a result, there is no need to take their actions or attitudes personally; it's a biological function that they have not yet recognized. This small perspective shift is enough to change how we live with each other and ourselves.
Furthermore, when you become aware that the left brain is just doing its thing, interpreting and judging, the stories it creates don't tend to provoke the physical reaction in your nervous system they once did.
Every day it needs to get its fix, and it does that in a variety of ways: telling stories about what it perceives, comparing and categorizing itself again others, judging things as right or wrong—and it uses all of these processes to define “you” as “yourself.”
As you can see by now, a vast array of problems can come out of this thinking. Rather than embrace reality as it is, the left brain is hopelessly addicted to storytelling and interpretations about reality, which provide a short-term hit of purpose and meaning but an inevitable crash of suffering. And most people never even know this cycle is going on.
Think of this soccer tournament. Beyond the being and doing of boys kicking a ball on a field, it is all a story. Winners, losers, championships—these are all based on categories, labels, patterns. Language and thought provide the tools to generate these stories. Our whole lives, even our very sense of self, might be thought of in the same way as this soccer game. The abstract stories themselves aren't the problem, but becoming lost in them creates the problem. Our suffering comes from getting swept up in these stories and forgetting that they are not themselves reality.
In psychology, this eventually turned into the happiness movement, where people were desperately trying to find happiness by avoiding any and all negative emotions. Of course nothing could be further from the practice of Zen. In Zen, there is no such thing as a wrong emotion, and therefore nothing to strive for or fight against. My students know very well not to tell me to “have a nice day” because there is nothing wrong with a bad day or a bad mood.
Complaining is a popular and well-accepted form of social interaction. I don't mean being skeptical or offering constructive criticism—those can be very helpful. By complaining, I mean objecting to things as they are in a way that isn't helpful, such as, “this cloudy weather is terrible!”
define complaining as finding some fault with reality,
