C.J. Beck Everyday Zen notes

19 Highlights | 7 Notes

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Contents

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What we are saying is, “When will Mommy and Daddy come? When will a great teacher, a supreme authority, come and stuff me with that which will end my pain, my suffering?” The news is, Mommy and Daddy have already come! Where are Mommy and Daddy? Right here. Our life is always here! But since my life may look to me like discomfort, even dreariness, loneliness, depression, if I actually were to face that (life as it is), who would want that? Almost no one. But when I can begin to experience this very moment, the true teacher—when I can honestly be each moment of my life, what I think, feel—this experiencing will settle itself into “just this,” the joyful samadhi of life, the word of God. And that is Zen practice, and we don’t even have to use the word “Zen.”

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If we understand that each moment of our life is the teacher, we can’t avoid doing that. If we truly are each moment of our life there is no room for an outside influence or authority. Where could it be? When I am just my own suffering where is the authority? The attention, the experiencing is the authority, and it is also the clarification of the action to be done.

Each moment teaches us

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Very early we all begin our attempt to protect ourselves against the threatening occurrences that pop up regularly. In the fear caused by them, we begin to contract.

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Once we begin to use language the rapidity of this contracting increases. And particularly as our intelligence grows, the process becomes really speedy: now we not only try to handle the threat by storing it in every cell of our body, but (using memory) we relate each new threat to all of the previous ones—and so the process compounds itself.

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I’m reminded at this point of the two famous verses about a mirror (one by a monk who was a fine student of the Fifth Patriarch, and the other by an unknown who would become the Sixth Patriarch). These verses were composed so that the Fifth Patriarch could judge whether or not the writer had true realization. The monk’s verse (the one that was not accepted by the Fifth Patriarch as the truth) stated that practice consists of polishing the mirror; in other words, by removing the dust of our deluded thoughts and actions from the mirror, it can shine (we are purified). The other verse (the one that revealed to the Fifth Patriarch the deep understanding of the man he would choose as his successor) stated that from the very beginning “there is no mirror-stand, no mirror to polish, and no place where dust can cling...” Now while the verse of the Sixth Patriarch is the true understanding, the paradox for us is that we have to practice with the verse that was not accepted: we do have to polish the mirror; we do have to be aware of our thoughts and actions; we do have to be aware of our false reactions to life. Only by doing so can we see that from the beginning the bottleneck of fear is an illusion. And it is obvious that we do not have to struggle to rid ourselves of an illusion. But we can’t and won’t know that unless we relentlessly polish the mirror. Sometimes people say, “Well, there’s nothing that need be done. No practice (polishing) is necessary. If you see clearly enough, such practice is nonsense.” Ah...but we don’t see clearly enough and, when we fail to see clearly, we create merry mayhem for ourselves and others. We do have to practice, we do have to polish the mirror, until we know in our guts the truth of our life. Then we can see that from the very beginning, nothing was needed. Our life is always open and spacious and fruitful. But let’s not fool ourselves about the amount of sincere practice we must do before we see this as clearly as the nose on our face.

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Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don’t want to hear that.

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From the ordinary point of view, the price we must pay is enormous—though seen clearly, it is no price at all, but a privilege. As our practice grows we comprehend this privilege more and more. In this process we discover that our own pain and others’ pain are not separate worlds. It’s not that, “My practice is my practice and their practice is their practice”; because when we truly open up to our own lives we open up to all life.

my life is perfect my life is a privilege

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To pay the price means that we must give what life requires must be given (not to be confused with indulgence); perhaps time, or money, or material goods—and sometimes, not giving such things when it is best not to.

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A life of no-self is centered on no particular thing, but on all things—that

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Let’s look at a series of practice steps, realizing that in the heat of anger it’s impossible for most of us to practice as the drama occurs. But do try to step back; do and say very little; remove yourself. Then, when you’re alone, just sit and observe. What do I mean by “observe”? Observe the soap opera going on in the mind: what he said, what he did, what I have to say about all that, what I should do about it...these are all a fantasy. They are not the reality of what’s happening. If we can (it’s difficult to do when angry), label these thoughts. Why is it difficult? When we’re angry there’s a huge block that stands in the way of practice: the fact that we don’t want to practice —we prefer to cherish our pride, to be “right” about the argument, the issue. (“Do not seek the Truth—only cease to cherish opinions.”) And that’s why the first step is to back away, say little. It may take weeks of hard practice before we can see that what we want is not to be right, but to be A Bigger Container, ABC. Step back and observe. Label the thoughts of the drama: yes, he shouldn’t do that; yes, I can’t stand what he’s doing; yes, I’ll find some way to get even—all of which may be so on a superficial level, but still it is just a soap opera.

As we do this practice we need to be charitable with ourselves. We need to recognize when we’re unwilling to do it. No one is willing all the time. And it’s not bad when we don’t do it. We always do what we’re ready to do.

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Remember also that a little humor about all this isn’t a bad idea. Essentially we never get rid of anything. We don’t have to get rid of all our neurotic tendencies; what we do is begin to see how funny they are, and then they’re just part of the fun of life, the fun with living with other people. They’re all crazy. And so are we, of course. But we never really see that we’re crazy; that’s our pride. Of course I’m not crazy—after all, I’m the teacher!

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I never give a dharma talk that I don’t hate, because it’s never possible to tell the exact truth: I always tend to go a little too far this way, or a little too far that way, or I use the wrong words and somebody gets mixed up...but again, that’s part of our training. Dharma talks are not necessarily something to understand; if they shake you up and confuse you, sometimes that’s just right. For example: we can say that everybody in the universe at this particular moment is doing the best that he or she can. And then the word “best” creates trouble. It’s the same difficulty we have with the sentence, “Everything, just as it is, is perfection.” Perfect? Doing their best? You

mean, when someone’s doing something horrible they’re doing their best? Just through our use of words we get awfully mixed up in our life and in our practice. In fact our whole life is confused because we mix up our concepts (which are themselves absolutely necessary) with reality. So dharma talks tend to challenge our usual concepts. And using words in a certain way adds lots of confusion and that’s just fine. Today I want to add to the confusion. I’m going to tell a little story and then head off in some other directions, and see what we make of all that. At this center we don’t talk much about the precepts or the eight-fold path, for a very good reason: people misinterpret the precepts as being prohibitions, “thou shalt not’s.” And that’s not what they are at all. Nevertheless, my talk today is about the precept “Do not be angry.” I won’t mention it again! But that’s what the talk is about: “Do not be angry.” Suppose we are out on a lake and it’s a bit foggy—not too foggy, but a bit foggy —and we’re rowing along in our little boat having a good time. And then, all of a sudden, coming out of the fog, there’s this other rowboat and it’s heading right at us. And...crash! Well, for a second we’re really angry—what is that fool doing? I just painted my boat! And here he comes—crash!—right into it. And then suddenly we notice that the rowboat is empty. What happens to our anger? Well, the anger collapses...I’ll just have to paint my boat again, that’s all. But if that rowboat that hit ours had another person in it, how would we react? You know what would happen! Now our encounters with life, with other people, with events, are like being bumped by an empty rowboat. But we don’t experience life that way. We experience it as though there are people in that other rowboat and we’re really getting clobbered by them. What am I talking about when I say that all of life is an encounter, a collision with an empty rowboat? What’s that all about?

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Now you may say that’s all very well with things on this level, which are of course fairly trivial. What about serious problems, such as grief and anguish? 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. Even “willing”—that word is not quite right either. Most of life, as we see it in the stories I told, is hilarious, that’s all you can say about it. But we do not view it as hilarious. We think that the other person should be different: “They should be the way I think they should be.” When we come to what we call “crisis points” in our life, it’s not fun—I’m not saying that—but it still is as it is. It is still the perfection.

Practice being with life the way it is, just as it is

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As our practice becomes more sophisticated we begin to sense our tremendous deficiencies, our tremendous cruelty. We see the things in life we’re not willing to take care of, the things we can’t let be, the things we hate, the things we just can’t stand. And if we’ve been practicing a long time there’s grief in that. But what we fail to see is the area which with practice grows—the area in which we can have compassion for life, just because it is as it is. Just the wonder of Elizabeth being Elizabeth. It’s not that she should possibly be different; she is perfect in being as she is. And myself. And you. Everybody. 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.

Well, it’s always an empty rowboat. Again, the point is, the longer we practice the less likely that is to come up. Not because we say, “I won’t be angry”—the reaction just isn’t there. We feel differently and we may not even know why.

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We might suppose that once we see the game, the game will be over—but no. That’s like telling someone who is quite drunk not to be drunk. We are drunk, perpetually. But to bully ourselves, to exhort ourselves, does no good. “I’m not going to be like this” is not the answer. What is the answer? We have to approach the problem from another angle, to come in the back door. First, we must become aware of our illusion, our drunkenness. The old texts say, illumine the mind, give it light, be attentive. This is not the same as self-improvement, trying to fix our lives. It is shikan—just sitting, just experiencing, just knowing the illusions (the I sentences) for what they are.

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.” And all the while the wonder is occurring: the birds sing, the cars go by, the body sensations continue, the heart is beating— life is a second-by-second miracle, but dreaming our I-dreams we miss it. So let’s just sit with what may seem like confusion. Just feel it, be it, appreciate it.