Nothing Special: Living Zen

by Charlotte Joko Beck

  Some of us are in the middle of “disasters”; others are not. Of course, we don’t stay forever in the middle of a major disaster, but when we’re in the middle of one we practice hard, showing up at the zendo more often, doing whatever we can to cope. Then when life settles down, we cease practicing with such intensity. One mark of maturing practice is to see that life is always totally a crisis and totally not a crisis: they’re the same thing. In a mature practice, we practice just as hard whether there’s a crisis or not. Crisis or no crisis, we just do it.

  Nothing is really solved until we understand that there is no solution. We’re falling, and there’s no answer to that. We can’t control it. We’re spending our life trying to stop the falling; yet it never stops. There is no solution, no wonderful person who can make it stop. No success, no dream, no anything can make it stop. Our body is just going down.

  The fall is a great blessing. If someone announced a pill that would cure death and allow us to live forever, that would be a true disaster. Picture yourself in six thousand years still thinking the same old thoughts! With a cure for death, the whole meaning of being on this planet would change. And where would we put the new babies being born?

  All of us are aware of aging: gray hair, wrinkles, twinges. From the time we are conceived, we’re dying. When I notice such signs, I don’t rejoice. I don’t like them any more than you do. Still, there’s a big difference between disliking change and trying frantically to stop it.

  Sooner or later we realize that the truth of life is the second we are living, no matter whether that second is at the ninth floor or the first. In a sense, our life has no duration whatsoever: we’re always living the same second. There’s nothing but that second, the timeless present moment. Whether we live the second at the fifth floor or right over the pavement, it’s all the same second. With that realization, each second is a source of joy. Without that realization, each second is misery. (In fact, we often secretly want to be miserable; we like being at the center of a melodrama.)

  Most of the time we don’t think there’s any crisis. (“So far, so good!”) Or we think the crisis is the fact that we don’t feel happy. That’s not a crisis; that’s an illusion. So we spend most of our life attempting to fix this nonexistent entity that we think we are. In fact, we are this second. What else could we be? And this second has no time or space. I can’t be the second that was five minutes ago; how can I be that? I’m here. I’m now. I can’t be the second that’s going to arrive in ten minutes either. The only thing I can be is wiggling around on my cushion, feeling the pain in my left knee, experiencing whatever is happening now. That’s who I am. I can’t be anything else. I can imagine that in ten minutes I won’t have a pain in my left knee, but that’s sheer fantasy.

  I can remember a time when I was young and pretty. That’s sheer fantasy also. Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are simply fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That’s all there is. That’s all we are. Yet most human beings spend fifty to ninety percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it’s all a shame, and on and on; it’s all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.

  Practical thinking—when we’re not clinging to some fantasy but just getting something done—is another matter. If my knee hurts, perhaps I should investigate treatment for it. The thoughts that destroy us are the ones in which we’re trying to stop the fall and not hit bottom. “I’m going to fix him.” “I’m going to fix myself.” Or “I’m going to understand myself. When I finally understand myself, I’ll be at peace and then life will be all right.” No, it won’t be all right. It will be whatever it is, just this second. Just the wonder.

  As we sit, can we sense the wonder? Can we feel the wonder in the fact that we’re here, that as human beings we can appreciate this life? In this respect we are more fortunate than animals. I doubt that a cat or a beetle has this capacity to appreciate, though I may be wrong. And I can lose the appreciation, the wonder, if I wander from this moment. If someone yells at me, “Joko, you’re a mess!” and I get lost in my reactions (my thoughts about protecting myself or retaliating), then I’ve lost the wonder. But if I stay with this moment, there’s just being yelled at. It’s nothing. But we all get stuck in our reactions.

  As human beings, we have a wonderful capacity to see what life is. I don’t know if any other animal has that ability. If we waste it and don’t truly practice, everyone with whom we come in contact feels the effects. That means our partners, our children, our parents, our friends. Practice isn’t something that we do just for ourselves. If it were, in a way it wouldn’t make any difference. As our life shifts into reality, everyone we meet shifts too. If anything can affect this suffering universe, this is it.

  The Sound of a Dove—and a Critical Voice

  I got a phone call recently from someone on the East Coast who told me, “In sitting this morning, it was quiet and suddenly there was just the sound of a dove. There wasn’t any dove, there wasn’t any me, there was just this.” Then she waited for my comment. I replied, “That’s wonderful! But suppose that instead of hearing the dove, you hear a critical voice finding fault with you. What’s the difference between the sound of the dove and the sound of a critical voice?” Imagine we are sitting in the stillness of early morning and suddenly through an open window there is just “chirp, chirp, chirp.” Such a moment can be enchanting. (Often we think that this is what Zen is.) But suppose our boss rushes in and screams, “I should have had your report yesterday. Where is it?” What is the same about the two sounds?

  STUDENT: They’re both just hearing.

  JOKO : Yes, they’re just hearing. Whatever happens to us all day long is simply input from one of the senses: just hearing, just seeing, just smelling, just touching, just tasting. We have said what is the same about the two sounds. So what is the difference? Or is there a difference?

  STUDENT: We like one, and we don’t like the other.

  JOKO: Why is that true? After all, they’re both just sounds. Why don’t we like the critical voice as much as we like the sound of a dove?

  STUDENT: We don’t just hear the voice; we attach an opinion to what we hear.

  JOKO: Right. We have an opinion about that criticism—strong thoughts and reactions, in fact.

  In an earlier talk, I told the story of a man who jumped off a tenstory building, and as he fell past the fifth floor, he yelled, “So far, so good!” He was hoping that he would stay up forever. That’s how we live our lives: hoping to avoid the critical voice, hoping to defy gravity and stay up forever.

  Some do seem to defy gravity. A person who has given me pleasure over the years is Greg Louganis, probably the greatest diver who has ever lived. A superb diver like Louganis has the strength to achieve remarkable height at takeoff, allowing more room for movement on his way down to the water. Height gives him operating space. Another remarkable athlete who seems to defy gravity is the basketball player Michael Jordan, who sometimes seems like he is suspended in the air. Amazing. And we marvel at Baryshnikov, the great dancer. They all get remarkable height, but they all at some point come down. As common sense tells us, gravity always prevails.

  But we do not live according to common sense. We don’t like the critical voice; we don’t like to come down. We don’t like it at all. Yet like it or not, life consists of much unpleasant input. Seldom does life give us just what we want. So we spend all of our time trying to do what no human being can do. We try somehow to stay up there, so that we will never come down and crash. We try to avoid that which cannot be avoided.

  There is no way to live a human life and avoid all unpleasant input. There is criticism, pain, being hurt, being sick, being disappointed. Our little mind says, “You can’t depend on life. You’d better take out some insurance
.” We do our best to avoid any contact with painful reality.

  As we sit in zazen, our mind is incessantly fantasizing, trying to “stay up there.” We can’t do it. Yet as human beings, we persist in trying to do that which cannot be done: avoiding all pain. “I will plan. I will find the best way. I’ll find out what to do so I can survive and be safe.” We try to transform reality with our thinking so that it can’t get near us, not ever.

  There’s a story I’ve told before about sitting in a zendo next to a young woman who kept wiggling. She was fiddling with her ankle all the time. She would stretch it out, she would put it down, she would twist it behind her. She was constantly moving her ankle. The monitor leaned over and whispered to her, “You must be still. You must stop moving your ankle.” She said, “But it hurts.” He replied, “Well, there are many ankles in this room that hurt.” And she said, “But it’s my ankle!” If we have gone through certain kinds of pain, we have some sympathy for another person going through similar pain. But when another feels pain, it’s simply not the same as when we feel it. When others say, “I feel for you,” the truth is that they don’t, not in the way that we do for ourselves. We have one primary objective: we want to keep pain away from ourselves so that we don’t even know about it. We want to stay up in our clouds of thought about our enterprises and schemes for self-improvement.

  There’s nothing wrong with self-improvement as such; for example, we may decide to cut out junk food or get more exercise or more sleep. All fine. What’s wrong is that we add on to such efforts the hope that self-improvement is going to insulate us from unpleasantness—the critical voice, the disappointment, the illness, the aging. By the time Michael Jordan is seventy years old, he’s not likely to be floating around basketball rims as he does now. Likewise with relationships and marriage: what expectations do we load onto them?

  STUDENT: We expect that they will guarantee happiness.

  JOKO : Right. It’s useful to work at making a good marriage. But we add on to that the hope that our partner will help us to defy gravity, and stop our fall.

  As long as we think there is a difference between the sound of a dove and a critical voice, we will struggle. If we don’t want that critical voice in our life and if we haven’t handled our reaction to it, we are going to struggle. What is the struggle about? We all do it. STUDENT: The struggle arises because of the difference between what’s really happening and what is in our mind.

  JOKO: Right. In its own subtle way, our mind is always adding, “This situation is something I do or don’t like.” We have an opinion.

  In just hearing, there is no opinion. When the sound hits our eardrums, there is no opinion; there is just hearing. The struggle in practice is precisely at this point. All day long, sensory information comes in. But from the human point of view, only some of it is acceptable.

  Does that mean that if you gently brush my hand or if you stick a sharp needle in it, I have to like them equally? No, I will have a preference. We all know that we prefer pleasant sensations. (I particularly hate to have a technician stick a needle in the end of my finger to draw blood.) There’s nothing wrong with preferences as such; it’s the emotion we add to them that gets us in trouble. Because of our emotions, we transform preferences into demands. Practice helps us to reverse this process, to dissolve demands back into simple preferences, without emotional freight. For example, if we have a picnic planned, a preference is, “I’d rather it didn’t rain today.” It has become a demand, however, if we get upset when it rains. “I got all this food and I did all this work—and now what am I going to do? Life is really unfair!”

  Sitting helps us to gain an increasingly objective view of the mental creations by which we attempt to protect ourselves so we can “stay up there.” We learn simply to watch the mental creations and to return to open experiencing of sensory input. Sitting is a simple endeavor.

  If we are honest when we sit, however, what we find out is that we don’t want to listen to our body. We want to think. We want to think about all those ideas that give us hope that our life is going to “stay up there.” We don’t want to give up that hope.

  So the first step is to be honest. That means to see our thoughts as much as we can and to listen to the body. Until our hope is fading, we will not spend a lot of time listening to the body. Certainly we don’t want to listen. Over years of sitting, however, that unwillingness slowly changes. Sitting is not about being blissful or happy. It’s about finally seeing that there is no real difference between listening to a dove and listening to somebody criticizing us; the “difference” is only in our mind. This struggle is what practice is about. It’s not about sitting in bliss for a period each morning; it’s about facing our life directly, so that we see what we are really doing. Usually what we are doing is trying to manipulate our life or the lives of others. So we simply observe that we are trying to manipulate people or events so that “I”—this illusion built of self-centered thoughts—cannot be hurt.

  Honesty: recognizing my opinions about my sitting, myself, the person sitting next to me. Honesty: “I’m really pretty irritable, pretty nasty.” Such honesty enables us more and more to listen to the body—for two seconds, twenty seconds, or longer. The less hope we have that we can fix things by thinking, the longer we will be able to stay with listening to what is real. And finally we may begin to realize that there is no solution. Only egos must have solutions, but there are no solutions. At some point, we may even see that if there is no solution; there is no problem.

  Talks like these are not words to ponder; we get something from them and then throw them away and return to simple, direct practice. Will we eventually be wonderful and perfect? No. We are not going to get anywhere. There is nowhere to get. We have already arrived at that place where there is no difference between the sound of a dove—and a critical voice. Our task is to recognize that we have arrived.

  Joy

  I’m often accused of emphasizing the difficulties in practice. The accusation is true. Believe me, the difficulties are there. If we don’t recognize them and why they arise, we tend to fool ourselves. Still, the ultimate reality—not only in our sitting, but also in our lives—is joy. By joy I don’t mean happiness; they’re not the same. Happiness has an opposite; joy does not. As long as we seek happiness, we’re going to have unhappiness, because we always swing from one pole to the other.

  From time to time, we do experience joy. It can arise accidentally or in the course of our sitting or elsewhere in our lives. For a while after sesshin, we may experience joy. Over years of practice, our experience of joy deepens—if, that is, we understand practice and are willing to do it. Most people are not.

  Joy isn’t something we have to find. Joy is who we are if we’re not preoccupied with something else. When we try to find joy, we are simply adding a thought—and an unhelpful one, at that—onto the basic fact of what we are. We don’t need to go looking for joy. But we do need to do something. The question is, what? Our lives don’t feel joyful, and we keep trying to find a remedy.

  Our lives are basically about perception. By perception I mean whatever the senses bring in. We see, we hear, we touch, we smell, and so on. That’s what life really is. Most of the time, however, we substitute another activity for perception; we cover it over with something else, which I’ll call evaluation. By evaluation, I don’t mean an objective, dispassionate analysis—as for example when we look over a messy room and consider or evaluate how to clean it up. The evaluation I have in mind is ego centered: “Is this next episode in my life going to bring me something I like, or not? Is it going to hurt, or isn’t it? Is it pleasant or unpleasant? Does it make me important or unimportant? Does it give me something material?” It’s our nature to evaluate in this way. To the extent that we give ourselves over to evaluation of this kind, joy will be missing from our lives.

  It’s amazing how quickly we can switch into evaluation. Perhaps we’re functioning pretty well—and then suddenly somebody criticizes
what we’re doing. In a fraction of a second, we jump into our thoughts. We’re quite willing to get into that interesting space of judging others or ourselves. There’s a lot of drama in all of this, and we like it, more than we realize. Unless the drama becomes lengthy and punishing, we enter willingly into it, because as human beings we have a basic orientation toward drama. From an ordinary point of view, to be in a world of pure perception is pretty dull.

  Suppose we’ve been away on vacation for a week, and we come back. Perhaps we’ve enjoyed ourselves, or we think we have. When we return to work, the “In” box is loaded with things to do, and scattered all over the desk are little messages, “While You Were Out.” When people call us at work, it usually means that they want something. Perhaps the job we left for someone else to take care of has been neglected. Immediately, we’re evaluating the situation. “Who fouled up?” “Who slacked off?” “Why is she calling? I bet it’s the same old problem.” “It’s their responsibility anyway. Why are they calling me?” Likewise, at the end of sesshin we may experience the flow of a joyful life; then we wonder where it goes. Though it doesn’t go anywhere, something has happened: a cloud covers the clarity.

  Until we know that joy is exactly what’s happening, minus our opinion of it, we’re going to have only a small amount of joy. When we stay with perception rather than getting lost in evaluation, however, joy can be the person who didn’t do the job while we were gone. It can be the interesting encounter on the phone with all of the people we have to call, no matter what they want. Joy can be having a sore throat; it can be getting laid off; it can be unexpectedly having to work overtime. It can be having to take a math exam or dealing with one’s former spouse who wants more money. Usually we don’t think that these things are joy.