Nothing Special: Living Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

  If we don’t struggle with life, does this mean that life can’t hurt us? Is there anything outside of ourselves that can hurt us? Being Zen students, we may have learned to say—intellectually at least—that the answer is no. But what do we really think? Is there any person or situation that can hurt us?

  Of course, we all think there is. In working with my students, I hear countless stories of being hurt or upset. They are all versions of “This happened to me.” Our partners, our par

  ents, our children, our pets—“This happened, and it upset me.” We all do this, without exception. That’s what our life is. Perhaps things go fairly smoothly for a time, and then suddenly something happens to upset us. In other words, we’re a victim. Now that’s our usual human view of living. It’s ingrained, almost inborn.

  When we feel victimized by the world, we look for something outside of ourselves that will take away our hurt. It could be a person, it could be getting something we want, it could be some change in our job status, some recognition, perhaps. Since we don’t know where to look, and we hurt, we seek comfort somewhere.

  Until we truly see that we’re not separate from anything, we’re going to struggle with our lives. When we struggle, we have trouble. We either do foolish things or we feel upset or we feel unfulfilled or we feel as though something’s missing. It’s as though life presents us with a series of questions that can’t be answered. And as a matter of fact, they can’t. Why?

  Because they’re false questions. They’re not based on reality. Feeling that something is wrong and seeking ways to fix it—when we begin to see the error in this pattern, serious practice begins. The young woman who called me hasn’t reached this point. She still imagines that something external will make her happy. Maybe a million dollars?

  With people who practice, on the other hand, there’s a little chink in the armor, a little insight. We may not want to recognize this insight. Still, we do begin to comprehend that there’s another way to live beyond feeling assaulted by life and then trying to find a remedy.

  From the very beginning, there’s nothing wrong. There is no separation: it’s all one radiant whole. Nobody believes this, and until we have practiced a long time it’s hard to get. Even with six months of intelligent practice, however, there begins to be a little shake in the false structure of our beliefs. The structure begins to fall apart here and there. As we practice over the years, the structure weakens. The enlightened state exists when it falls apart completely.

  Yes, we do have to be serious about our practice. If you’re not ready to be serious, that’s fine. Just go live your life. You need to be kicked around for a while. That’s okay. People shouldn’t be at a Zen center until they feel there’s nothing else they can do: that’s the time to show up.

  Let’s return to our question: can something or someone hurt us? Let’s take up some real disasters. Suppose I’ve lost my job and I’m seriously ill. Suppose all my friends have left me. Suppose an earthquake has destroyed my house. Can I be hurt by all that? Of course I think that I can. And it would be terrible for such things to happen. But can we truly be hurt by such events? Practice helps us to see that the answer is no.

  It’s not that the point of practice is to avoid feeling hurt. What we call “hurt” still happens: I may lose my job; an earthquake may destroy my house. But practice helps me to handle crises, to take them in stride. So long as we are immersed in our hurt, we’ll be a bundle of woe that is of little use to anybody. If we’re not wrapped up in our melodrama of pain, on the other hand, even during a crisis we can be of use.

  So what happens if we truly practice? Why does the feeling that life can hurt us begin to soften over time? What takes place?

  Only a self-centered self, a self that is attached to mind and body, can be hurt. That self is really a concept formed of thoughts we believe in; for example, “If I don’t get that, I’ll be miserable,” or “If this doesn’t work out for me, it’s just terrible,” or “If I don’t have a house to live in, that’s really terrible.” What we call the self is no more than a series of thoughts that we’re attached to. When we’re engrossed in our small selves, reality—the basic energy of the universe—is hardly noticed at all.

  Suppose I feel I have no friends, and I’m very lonely. What happens if I sit with that? I begin to see that my feelings of loneliness are really just thoughts. As a matter of fact, I’m simply sitting here. Maybe I’m sitting alone in my room, without a date. Nobody has called me, and I feel lonely. In fact, however, I’m simply sitting. The loneliness and the misery are simply my thoughts, my judgments that things should be other than what they are. I haven’t seen through them; I haven’t recognized that my misery is manufactured by me. The truth of the matter is, I’m simply sitting in my room. It takes time before we can see that just to sit there is okay, just fine. I cling to the thought that if I don’t have pleasant and supportive company, I am miserable.

  I’m not recommending a life in which we cut ourselves off in order to be free of attachment. Attachment concerns not what we have, but our opinions about what we have. There’s nothing wrong with having a fair amount of money, for example. Attachment is when we can’t envision life without it. Likewise, I’m not saying to give up being with people. Being with people is immensely enjoyable. Sometimes, however, we’re in situations where we have to be alone. For example, one might have to spend six months doing a research project somewhere in the middle of a desert. For most of us, that would be very hard. But if I’m doing research in the middle of nowhere for six months, the truth of the matter is, that’s just the way it is; that’s just what I’m doing.

  The difficult, slow change of practice grounds our life and makes it genuinely more peaceful. Without striving to be peaceful, we find that more and more, the storms of life hit us lightly. We’re beginning to release our attachment to the thoughts we think are ourselves. That self is simply a concept that weakens with practice.

  The truth is that nothing can hurt us. But we certainly can think we’re being hurt, and we certainly can struggle to remedy the thoughts of hurt in ways that can be quite unfruitful. We try to remedy a false problem with a false solution, and of course that creates mayhem. Wars, damage to the environment—all come out of this ignorance.

  If we refuse to do this work—and we won’t do it until we’re ready—to some degree we suffer, and everything around us suffers. Whether one practices is not a matter of good or bad, right or wrong. We have to be ready. But when we don’t practice, a sad price is paid.

  Of course, the original oneness—that center of multidimensional energy—remains undisturbed. There’s no way that we can disturb it. It always just is, and that’s what we are. From the standpoint of the phenomenal life we live, however, there’s a price that is paid.

  I’m not trying to create guilty feelings in anyone. Such feelings are themselves merely thoughts. I’m not criticizing the young woman who didn’t want to take practice seriously. That’s just exactly where she’s at, and that’s perfect for her. As we practice, however, our resistance to practice diminishes. It does take time.

  STUDENT : I can see how we can be one with other people, but it’s hard for me to understand what it means to be one with a table or something like that.

  JOKO : One with a table? I think the table is a lot easier than people! I haven’t had anyone complain to me about conflict with a table. Our troubles nearly always are with people, either individually or in groups.

  STUDENT: Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by being “one with.”

  JOKO: “One with” is an absence of anything that divides.

  STUDENT: But I just don’t feel like a table.

  JOKO : You don’t have to feel like a table. By “being one with the table,” I mean that there’s no sense of opposition between you and the table. It’s not a question of some special feeling, it’s a lack or an absence of feeling separated in an emotional way. Tables usually do not arouse emotion. That’s why we don’t have any
trouble with them.

  STUDENT: If someone has, say, arthritis, and is in pain all the time, do you say that that doesn’t hurt?

  JOKO : No. If we have persistent pain, we should of course do what we can to deal with it. But finally if there’s still a residue of pain, all we can do is experience that residue. It doesn’t help to add onto the pain judgments, such as “This is terrible! Poor me; why is it like this?” The pain just is. Taken in this way, the pain is a teaching. In my experience, most people who have had a serious illness and who have learned how to use it have found it the best thing that ever happened to them.

  STUDENT : If someone can’t hurt us, and we can’t hurt someone else, that doesn’t necessarily give us license to speak our mind because we can’t hurt anybody.

  JOKO : That’s right. If we misinterpret the point and say, “I can tell you off because I can’t hurt you,” already that’s a separation. We don’t attack others unless we feel separate from them. All serious practice presumes a devotion to basic moral precepts, moral grounds.

  STUDENT : What about the historical samurai ethic in Japan? For example, a samurai warrior might say, “Since I’m one with everything, when I slice off the head of an innocent person, there’s no killing: that person is me.”

  JOKO : In an absolute sense, there isn’t any killing, since we’re all—“alive” or “dead”—just manifestations of that central energy that is everything. But in practical terms, I don’t agree with the samurai ethic. If we see that we’re not separated from other people, we simply won’t attack. The samurai warriors were confusing the absolute and the relative. Absolutely, of course, there is no one who kills and no one to be killed. But in the life that we live, yes, there is. And so we don’t do it.

  STUDENT: In other words, if we confuse the absolute and the relative, we might use the absolute to justify what we do in the relative?

  JOKO : Yes, but only if we live in our heads. If we take practice to be about a philosophical position, we can get really confused. If we know the truth of practice in our very bones—without even thinking about it—we won’t make that mistake.

  STUDENT: Before I started sitting I didn’t think things could hurt me either, because I didn’t feel them.

  JOKO : That’s quite different. You’re talking about a psychological numbness. When we’re numb, we’re not one with the pain; we’re pretending it’s not there.

  STUDENT : When I finally tune in and feel how much I’m hurting myself in different ways, it becomes much easier to stop the counterproductive behavior. Until that time, as you said, we’re going to do what we’re going to do. If we’re going to screw things up, that’s what we’re going to do.

  JOKO : That’s right. And I don’t mean never to object to others’ behavior. If someone has done something to me—perhaps stolen all my money for groceries—I may need to object and take some action. If others mistreat us or cause us pain, they may need to know about it. But if we speak to them with anger, they’ll never learn what they need to learn. They won’t even hear us.

  The underlying attitude or knowledge that we’re not separate creates a fundamental shift in our emotional life. That knowledge means that whatever happens, we’re not especially disturbed by it. Having the knowledge doesn’t mean we don’t take care of problems as they arise; however, we no longer inwardly say, “Oh, this is awful; nobody else has the troubles I have.” It’s as if our understanding cancels out such reactions.

  STUDENT: So feeling hurt is just our thoughts about the situation?

  JOKO : Yes. When we no longer identify with such thoughts, we simply handle the situation and do not get caught emotionally by it.

  STUDENT: But one can feel hurt.

  JOKO : Yes. And I don’t mean to deny that feeling. In practice, we work with the complex of physical sensation and thought that is “I feel hurt.” If we totally experience the sensations and thought, then the “feeling hurt” evaporates. I never would say that we shouldn’t feel what we feel.

  STUDENT: You’re saying to give up the attachment to the hurt?

  JOKO : No. We can’t force ourselves to give up an attachment. Attachment is thought, but we can’t just say, “I’m going to give it up.” That doesn’t work. We have to understand what attachment is. We have to experience the fear—the bodily sensation—that underlies the attachment. Then the attachment will just wither away. A common error in Zen teaching is that we have to “let go.” We can’t force ourselves to “let go.” We have to experience the underlying fear.

  Experiencing the attachment or feeling also does not mean dramatizing it. When we dramatize our emotions, we just cover them up.

  STUDENT: Are you saying that if we really experience our sadness, for example, we wouldn’t need to cry?

  JOKO : We might cry. Still, there’s a difference between just crying and dramatizing our sadness, or our fear or anger. The dramatizing is quite often a cover. For instance, people who get in fights and throw things and yell and scream are not yet in touch with their anger.

  STUDENT : Back to the young woman who thought practice should be less serious and who didn’t want to come here to sit: are you equating serious practice with sitting regularly in a Zen center?

  JOKO : No, though such regular sitting is immensely useful. I have some students living at a distance who have very strong practices; still, they find some way to get here once in a while. The young woman just isn’t ready yet to be doing that. And she’s the one who suffers, which is the sad part.

  The Subject-Object Problem

  Our basic problem as humans is the subject-object relationship. When I first heard this stated years and years ago, it seemed abstract and irrelevant to my life. Yet all of our disharmony and difficulty come from not knowing what to do about the subject-object relationship. In everyday terms, the world is divided into subjects and objects: I look at you, I go to work, I sit on a chair. In each of these cases, I think of myself as a subject relating to an object: you, my work, the chair. Yet intuitively we know that we are not separate from the world and that the subject-object division is an illusion. To gain that intuitive knowledge is why we practice.

  Not understanding subject-object dualism, we see the objects in our world as the source of our problems: you are my problem, my work is my problem, my chair is my problem. (When I see myself as the problem, I have made myself into an object.) So we run from objects we perceive as problems, and seek objects we perceive as nonproblems. From this point of view, the world consists of me, and things that please or don’t please me.

  Historically, Zen practice and most other meditative disciplines have sought to resolve the subject-object dualism by emptying the object of all content. For example, working on Mu* or major koans empties the object of the conditioning we attach to it. As the object becomes increasingly transparent, we are a subject contemplating a virtually empty object. Such a state is sometimes called samadhi. Such a state is blissful be

  *Mu—literally “no” or “nothing”—is often assigned to beginning students as a means of focusing attention.

  cause the empty object is no longer troublesome to us. When we have achieved this state, we tend to congratulate ourselves on how much progress we have made.

  But this state of samadhi is still dualistic. When we achieve it, an inner voice says, “This must be it!” or “Now I’m really doing well!” A hidden subject remains, observing a virtually blank object, in what amounts to a subject-object separation. When we realize this separation, we try to turn on the subject as well and empty it of content. In doing so, we turn the subject into yet another object, with an even more subtle subject viewing it. We are creating an infinite regression of subjects.

  Such states of samadhi are not true enlightenment precursors, because a thinly veiled subject is separated from a virtually blank object. When we return to daily life, the blissful feeling dissipates and we’re again at sea in a world of subjects and objects. Practice and life do not come together.

  A clearer
practice does not try to get rid of the object, but rather to see the object for what it is. We slowly learn about being or experiencing in which there is no subject or object at all. We do not eliminate anything, but rather bring things together. There’s still me, and there’s still you, but when I am just my experience of you, I don’t feel separate from you. I’m one with you.

  This kind of practice is much slower, because instead of concentrating on one object, we work with everything in our life. Anything that annoys or upsets us (which, if we’re honest, includes almost everything) becomes grist for the mill of practice. Working with everything leads to a practice that is alive in every second of our life.

  When anger arises, for example, much of traditional Zen practice would have us blot out the anger and concentrate on something, such as the breath. Though we’ve pushed the anger aside, it will return whenever we are criticized or threatened in some way. In contrast, our practice is to become the anger itself, to experience it fully, without separation or rejection. When we work this way, our lives settle down. Slowly, we learn to relate to troublesome objects in a different way.

  Our emotional reactions gradually wear themselves out; for example, objects we have feared gradually lose their power over us, and we can approach them more readily. It’s fascinating to watch that change take place; I see it happening in others, and in myself as well. The process is never completed: yet we are increasingly aware and free.