The trouble with this way of living is that what benefits me now may hurt me later, and vice versa. The world is constantly changing, and so our associations lead us astray. There’s nothing safe about a world of objects. We’re constantly wary, even of those people whom we say we love and are close to. As long as another person is an object to us, we can be sure that there’s no genuine love or compassion between us.
If having experiences is our ordinary world, what is the other world, the other fork in the road? What is the difference between experiences and experiencing? What is genuine hearing, touching, tasting, seeing, and so on?
When experiencing occurs, in that very moment, experiencing is not in space or time. It can’t be; for when it’s in space or time, we’ve made an object of it. As we touch and look and hear, we’re creating the world of space and time, but the actual life we lead is not in space or time; it’s just experiencing. The world of space and time arises when experiencing becomes reduced to a series of experiences. In the precise moment of hearing, for example, there is just hearing, hearing, hearing, hearing, which creates the sound of the airplane or whatever. Thup, thup, thup, thup…: there’s space between each; and each one is absolute hearing, hearing, hearing. That’s our life, as we create our world. We’re creating with all our senses so quickly that we can’t possibly keep track of it. The world of our experiences is being created out of nothing, second by second by second.
In the service we do, one of the dedications states, “Unceasing change turns the wheel of life.” Experiencing, experiencing, experiencing; change, change, change. “Unceasing change turns the wheel of life, and so reality is shown in all its many forms. Peaceful dwelling as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings and brings them to great joy.” Peaceful dwelling as change itself means feeling the throbbing pain in my legs, hearing the sound of a car: just experiencing, experiencing. Just dwelling with experience itself. Even the pain is changing minutely, second by second by second. “Peaceful dwelling as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings and brings them to great joy.”
If this process were absolutely clear, we’d have no need to practice. The enlightened state is not having an experience; instead, it’s an absence of all experience. The enlightened state is pure, unadulterated experiencing. And that is utterly different from “having an enlightenment experience.” Enlightenment is the demolition of all experience built of thoughts, fantasies, memories, and hopes. Frankly, we’re not interested in demolishing our lives as we have ordinarily known them. We demolish the false structures of our lives by labeling our thoughts, by saying for the five hundredth time, “Having a thought that such-and-such will happen.” When we’ve said it five hundred times, we see it for what it is. It’s just empty energy spinning out of our conditioning, with no reality whatsoever. There is no intrinsic truth in it; it’s just changing, changing, changing.
It’s easy for us to talk about this process, but there’s nothing that we are less interested in doing than demolishing our fantasy structures. We have a secret fear that if we demolished them all, we’d be demolishing ourselves.
There’s an old Sufi story about a man who dropped his keys on the dark side of the street at night, then crossed the street to the lamppost where it was bright to look for the keys. When a friend asked why he was looking under the lamp instead of where he dropped the keys, he replied, “I’m looking here because there is more light.” That’s what we do with our lives: the familiar framework is where we want to look. If we have a problem, we follow a familiar framework: thinking, stewing, analyzing, keeping the crazy business of our lives going because that’s what we’re used to doing. Never mind that it doesn’t work. We just get more determined, and keep searching under the lamppost. We’re not interested in that life which is out of space and time, constantly creating the world of space and time. We’re not interested in that; in fact, it’s frightening to us.
What pushes us to abandon this melodrama, to sit through the confusion? At bottom, it comes down to the unease we have with the way we are living our lives. Beyond a life of having experiences is a life of experiencing, a life of compassion and joy. For true compassion and joy are not things to be experienced. Our true master is just this: changing, changing, changing; experiencing, experiencing, experiencing. The master is not in space and time—yet none other than space and time. Our experiencing of life is also the creating of life itself. “Unceasing change turns the wheel of life and so reality is shown in all its many forms.”
A poem by W. H. Auden captures much of our ordinary state:
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
We would rather be ruined than changed—even though change is who we are. We would rather die in our anxiety, our fear, our loneliness, than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die. And the cross is also the crossroads, the choice. We are here to make that choice.
The Icy Couch
In experiencing we lose our seemingly dual relationship to other people and things, which is, “I see you, I comment on you, I have thoughts about you or myself,” or whatever. Dual relationship is not hard to talk about; but nondual relationship—experiencing—is harder to describe. I want to consider how we get away from living a life that’s experiential, how we fall out of the Garden of Eden.
Every human being while growing up decides that he or she needs a strategy, because we cannot grow up without meeting opposition from what we might call the “not-self,” that which is seemingly external to us. Often we meet apparent opposition from our parents, friends and relatives, and others. Sometimes the apparent opposition is severe; sometimes it’s fairly mild. But no one grows up without developing a strategy to deal with it.
We may decide that our best option for pleasant survival is to be a conforming, “nice” person. If that doesn’t seem to work, we may learn to attack others before they can get at us, or we may withdraw. So there are three major strategies for coping: conforming to please, attacking, or withdrawing. Everyone in some way employs one or another of those strategies.
In order to maintain our strategy, we have to think. So the growing child relies more and more on thinking to elaborate that strategy. Any situation or person encountered begins to be evaluated from the standpoint of the chosen strategy. Eventually we approach the whole world as if it were on trial, asking, “Will that individual or event hurt me or not?” Even though we may do it with a social, smiling face, we ask that question of everything we meet.
Eventually we perfect our strategy so that we no longer know it consciously; it’s now in the body. For example, suppose we develop a strategy of withdrawing. When we meet anything or anybody, we tighten the body; the response is habitual. We may tighten our shoulders, our face, our stomach, or some other part of the body. The particular style is unique to each person. And we don’t even know we’re doing it because once the contraction is established, it is in every cell of our body. We don’t have to know about it; it’s just there. Although the response is unconscious, it makes our life unpleasant because it is a withdrawal from life and a separation from it. The contraction is painful.
Yet everybody has it. Even when we think we’re relatively happy, we may be able to detect a mild tension throughout the body. It’s nothing spectacular and may be very mild. When everything is going our way, we don’t feel bad; yet the mild contraction never ceases. It’s always there, with every person on earth.
Children learn how to elaborate their strategies, incorporating everything that happens to them into the framework of their personal systems. Our perceptions become selective, incorporating those events that fit our system and screening out events that don’t fit. Because the system is supposed to keep us safe and secure, we’re not interested in having it weakened by contradictory information. By the time we reach adulthood the system is ourselves. It’s
what we call the ego. We live our life from it, trying to find people, situations, jobs, that will confirm our strategy and avoiding those that threaten it.
But such maneuvers are never completely satisfactory, because as long as we live, we can never quite know what will happen next. Even if we get most of life under control we never know how to achieve this totally, and we know that we don’t know. So there’s always an element of fear. It has to be there. Not knowing what to do, the average person seeks everywhere for an answer. We have a problem, and we don’t really know what it is. Life becomes for us the promise that is never kept because the answer eludes us. That’s when we may start to practice. Only a few lucky people on the planet begin to see what needs to be done to recover the Garden of Eden, our genuine functioning self.
Perhaps we get a new partner who’s just wonderful. (Particularly in relationships, delusion reigns supreme.) Then we marry or live with him or her, and…whoops! If we’re practicing, this “whoops” can be immensely interesting and instructive. If we’re not practicing, we may trade that partner in and look around for a new one. It seems as if the promise has not been kept. Or we start a new job or a new endeavor. At first it’s fine, but then we begin to see some harsh realities, and the disillusion begins to set in. If we’re living out of our strategy, nothing seems to work, because phenomenal life by definition is a promise that is never kept. If we fulfill a desire, we’re happy for a brief moment, but the nature of fulfilling one desire is immediately to find another one, and another one, and another one. There’s no way of being free from that pressure or stress. We can’t settle. We find no peace.
As we sit, the endless spinning in our heads reveals to us our strategy. If we label our thoughts long enough, we’re going to recognize our strategy. It’s the strategy itself that generates the buzzing thoughts. Only one thing in our life is not caught by this strategy, and that’s the physical, organic life of the body.
Of course, the body is taking punishment because it reflects our self-centeredness. The body has to obey the mind, so if the mind is saying that the world is a terrible place, the body says, “Oh, I’m so depressed!” The minute the images appear—thinking, fantasizing, hoping—the body has to respond. It has a chronic response, and at times that response exacerbates into depression or illness.
The main teacher I’ve had all my life has been a book. It may be the best book on Zen ever written. However, it’s a translation from French, and the writing is unwieldy, with sentences
that are whole paragraphs. After reading one of those sentences, you may ask yourself in puzzlement, “What did he say?” So it’s a difficult book; still, it’s the best explanation of the human problem that I’ve ever found. I studied it at one time for ten or fifteen years. I have a copy that looks like it’s been through the washing machine. The book is The Supreme Doctrine by Hubert Benoit, a French psychiatrist who was in a severe accident that left him almost completely helpless for years. All he could do was just lie there. The human problem was his all-consuming interest, so he used those years of recovery to thoroughly delve into it.
Benoit’s term for the emotional contraction arising from our efforts to protect ourselves is “spasm.” He calls the ceaseless chatter of our internal dialogue “the imaginary film.” The turning point for him comes when he realizes “that this spasm, which I have called abnormal is on the road that leads to satori [enlightenment]…. One can indeed say that what should be perceived, under the imaginary film, is a certain profound sensation of cramp, of a paralyzing grip, of immobilizing cold…and that it is on this hard couch, immobile and cold, that our attention should remain fixed; as though we tranquilly stretched out our body on a hard but friendly rock that was exactly molded to our form.”
What Benoit is saying is that when we rest at peace with our pain, this repose is the “gateless gate.” And it’s the last place we want to be; it’s not pleasant, and our whole strategic drive is for pleasantness. No, we want somebody to comfort us, save us, give us peace. Our ceaseless thinking, planning, and plotting are always about this. Only when we stay with what is beneath the imaginary film and rest there, do we begin to have a clue. The way I usually explain it is: instead of remaining with our thoughts, we label them until they settle down a little and then we do our best to stay with that which really is, the nonduality that is the sensation of our life at this very moment. That goes against everything we want, everything our culture teaches us. But it’s the only real solution, the only gate to peace.
As we settle into our sensation of pain, we find it so appalling that we skitter off again. The minute we land in the sensation of discomfort, we spin back again into the imaginary film. We simply don’t want to be in the reality of what we are. That’s human, neither good nor bad, and it takes years of patient practice to begin to touch this reality more and more, becoming comfortable in resting there—until finally, as Benoit says, it’s just a hard and friendly rock that is molded to us, and where we can finally rest and be at peace.
Sometimes we can rest for a short time, but because we are so habituated, we soon go back into the same old mental stuff. And so we go through the process again and again. Over time, it’s that ceaseless process that brings us to peace. If it’s complete, it can be called satori, or enlightenment.
The imaginary film generates the spasm, and the spasm generates the imaginary film. It’s a ceaseless cycle, and it’s only broken when we have become willing to rest in our pain. The ability to do this means we have become somewhat disillusioned, no longer hoping that our thoughts and feelings will be a solution to anything. As long as we hold out hope that the promise will be kept, we’re not going to rest in the painful body sensations.
So there are two parts of practice. One is endless disappointment. Everything in our life that disappoints us is a kind friend. And we’re all being disappointed in some way or other. If we’re not disappointed, we never wear out our desire to think and reestablish ourself at the top of the heap with victory. Nobody wins in the end; nobody’s going to survive. But that’s still our drive, our system. It can only be worn out by years of sitting and by life; that’s why our practice and our life have to be the same thing.
We have the illusion that other people are going to make us happy, that they’re going to make our lives work. Until we wear out that illusion, there will be no real solution. Other people are for enjoyment, not for any other purpose. They are part of the wonder that life is; they’re not here to do something for us. Until this illusion begins to wear out, we’re not going to be content to stay with the spasm, the emotional contraction. We’ll spin right off and go right back into our thoughts: “Yes, but if I do this, things will be better….”
Life is a series of endless disappointments, and it’s wonderful just because it doesn’t give us what we want. To go down this path takes courage, and many people in this lifetime will not do it. We’re all at different places on the path, which is fine. Only a very few who are enormously persistent and who take everything in life as an opportunity, and not as an insult, will finally understand. So if we spend all of our effort in trying to make our strategy work better, then we’re just spinning our wheels. Our misery goes on till the day we die.
So there’s nothing in life but opportunity, nothing. And that includes anything we can think of. Until we are disillusioned about the imaginary film that we spin endlessly (we hardly open our eyes in the morning before it begins), we won’t stay with the cramp. We’ll spin some more. I suppose that is what is meant by the wheel of karma.
Now, I’m not asking anyone to adopt this description as some sort of belief system. The only way we know the reality of such practice is by doing it. Eventually for a few people (sometimes intermittently but finally most of the time), there is what Christians call “the peace which passeth all understanding.”
It has often helped me in difficult times to think of that cold, immobile couch and instead of fighting and struggling, just to be willing to rest on it. Over tim
e we find the couch is the only place that is peaceful, the source of clear action.
As a dharma talk, this all sounds forbidding. Yet the people who endlessly practice are the ones who are enjoying life. This is the gateless gate to joy. People who understand and have the courage to do this are the ones who eventually know what joy is. I’m not talking about endless happiness (there’s no such thing), but joy.
STUDENT : Do you often find that people choose one of the strategies, but as time goes by they may move to another one of these strategies? People who may have chosen to, say, withdraw and not participate may, as they become stronger, decide, “Well, maybe I’m up to conforming and pleasing a little bit.” Do people sometimes move away from the wall and out into the crowd?
JOKO : I’ve often noticed that people who’ve been dependent and conforming begin to move to a false independence. That’s natural, a stage before we can really just be ourselves. The more we practice with the cramp, the more the transformation accelerates. From the standpoint of the phenomenal world, we make progress, though in an absolute sense we’re always fine, just as we are.
STUDENT: Resting with our discomfort, we find that it’s not so scary and we can venture forth a little bit?
JOKO : Right. For example, we may learn that we can be depressed and still function. We just go ahead and do it. We don’t have to feel good to function. The more we can go against our rigid system, the better.
STUDENT: When you talk about the cramp, it sounds like it’s part of the rigid system.
JOKO : No, it is produced by the rigid system, but it’s the only part of that system that is open to giving you a solution. For example, if we have angry thoughts, the body has to tighten up. We can’t have an angry thought about somebody and not tighten up. And if we habitually have a strategy that is angry and attacking, the body will be contracted most of the time. But it’s the only part of that system that gives us a gate to go through; because we can experience that cramp and leave it alone, it is free to open up. It might take five years, but it will happen.
Nothing Special: Living Zen Page 12