Your life is the very door through which you must walk to achieve final liberation.
—Jun Po Roshi
Meditation is often embarked upon to find a little peace of mind in a world that seems out of control. After some time practicing, our goals may shift. Some of us may even aspire to fully Awaken, to see completely through the veil of our temporary self that continually arises moment to moment. We may end up spending hundreds of hours a year dutifully on a meditation cushion, following our breath or a mantra or a teacher’s guidance.
Life, of course, still comes at us. And no matter how much we meditate, parents will still die, bodies will grow old and infirm, and there will be bankruptcies, betrayals, unexpected deaths, and the full intensity of being a human being.
Classic Zen teaches students to stand, immobile, in the face of intense emotions, understanding that their feelings and the complicated emotions and stories they trigger are impermanent and will soon pass. This is certainly true, and the practice of remaining present in the face of emotional distress can be an important practice to keep you from acting out in ways that are unwise and inappropriate to the circumstances.
Yet there’s a problem here as well. Jun Po saw that feelings and emotions were far more than noise that a Zen student must endure until a golden silence returns. Embedded into emotions, like our other five senses, is information. We would not want to remain immobile and serene if our eyes told us we were standing in the path of a speeding car. The information in that sense—a car is about to kill me—is hugely important and requires immediate action.
So, too, with our feelings.
What if our meditation practice, instead of allowing us to endure intense emotions, could transform them? What if your meditation led not just to peace of mind, but also to more honest and empowered relationships to your feelings, your environment, your friends and family, and yourself?
If meditation offers only a “spiritual experience,” an escape from the messiness of life, does this suit anyone who lives outside of a monastery? Does it even suit those who live in monasteries?
Dozens of scientific studies have proven the positive effects meditation can have on the body and mind. Yet this equanimity that we so carefully cultivate can be a trap as well; our well-trained minds learn to be nonresponsive to intense emotions and conditioned reactive patterns. We may not learn to understand and transform the root of our emotionality itself. We may not find the information in the feeling, and if we don’t then we are still subject to it.
The second part of the Mondo Zen practice—the emotional koans—is designed to allow you to recognize, Enlighten, and transform habitual and destructive emotional reactions. Creating space around your emotions is no longer enough, for merely creating that space means that you must always be responding to your conditioned emotional reactions instead of seeing and transforming the information contained within them. Or as Jun Po might say, we need to “Wake up” (become Enlightened), “Grow up” (become emotionally mature and self-aware), and then “Show up” (bring this into all areas of our life).
Today we’re at a community center in central Boulder. We’re in a tiny basement room, with red walls and a high window allowing a sliver of natural light to penetrate the room. Jun Po is wearing jeans and a blue-and-white shirt, and a crooked smile.
KA: We have three more koans. These are the heart of Mondo Zen, the emotional koans. We’ve spent a lot of time already [in Chapters 5 and 6] explaining the deeper feelings that must first arise, such as caring, fear, and sadness, before we can have a strong emotional reaction, such as anger, shame, depression, or anxiety. These emotional reactions are secondary responses to deeper feelings of caring, fear, and grief. Sound about right?
JP: That’s about right.
KA: I have a personal request here.
JP: Oh? Go for it.
KA: I’ve seen you really bring up the temperature, if you will; deliver your insight with a pressing passion and intensity. I know you don’t speak this way as much anymore, at least not to your beginning students, but I think a little taste of that might help drive home some of your points.
JP: You want Rinzai.
KA: I do. This is really the final place we’re talking about this—the reader has been with us, I’m hoping, the whole way. So we can be more direct here, I think, risk a little more intensity.
JP: I’d be delighted. [Smiling and wiggling eyebrows.]
KA: So we haven’t touched on depression or anxiety, or other powerful feelings that people struggle with on a daily basis. Depression seems to be a real modern scourge, a feeling that can rob people of the very motivation they need to figure out what’s wrong.
JP: Only if you stay on the surface will it, by definition, keep you from diving deeper. What I ask people who come to me with depression is to be willing to look at it the same way as with our other emotions. Feeling is information, but emoting is conditional. There’s nothing special about depression. The same is true for anxiety.
I like to use a ringing phone metaphor. When the phone rings, we know that to stop it from ringing we need to pick it up, right? There’s information on the other side of the call. With depression, the phone is ringing, but someone refuses to take the call. They say they’re just too depressed to answer. Anxiety means you’re running around, jumping up and down, frantic that the phone is ringing. “The phone is ringing! The phone is ringing!” Well, pick up the goddamn phone!
KA: So, you’re saying to ask, “What’s the information that’s being transmitted?”
JP: Exactly. What is the depression trying to show you? The reason you may be depressed is that you simply don’t want the information that’s waiting for you. Depression is safer than facing the truth.
KA: Would you treat depression the same if it were over, say, the death of a loved one or something complex like an existential crisis?
JP: [Nodding] Feelings aren’t as complicated as the stories, structures, and emotions around them. So at its root someone is experiencing depression, right? A heaviness. An unwillingness or inability to look at life with energy. So we slow it down. What’s the information in the feeling? Do you realize you are choosing your reactions to your feelings, that no one has ever made you depressed? Depression from an Enlightened point of view can be said to not even be a feeling, but instead a denial of the information within the feeling. It’s an unwillingness or inability to get to, to accept the truth within the feeling. The feeling is the ringing phone, depression is a conscious or unconscious refusal to answer the phone.
There’s information in the feeling, and the information with depression is that something needs your attention, and you can’t, or are unwilling to notice it. Then you end up depressed. So what’s the information? The question is what? What? What I do I need to understand? How do I find out? What is unresolved? What is it I cannot accept?
In the case of death, it’s the loss of someone who is loved, of course. In the case of existential spiritual depression, I would ask someone which one of the three Buddhist marks have they failed to understand, embrace, and realize. Is it the truth of impermanence? Of sickness, old age, and death? Or the truth of selflessness that will set you free from your ego attachment? How exciting, you’re depressed … wake up! Depression is ringing the bell to deeper life. Return to life and answer that phone call.
KA: Along these lines, I’d like to bring up something personal, to you. Your mother recently passed at, what, eighty-six years of age? I remember it hitting you very hard. Could you take us through a little of how Mondo helped you through this?
JP: [Nodding] Yes. In fact, you might even say that I was in a depressive state from it. [Smiling] Understand that Mondo Zen doesn’t promise you that you won’t feel!
Depression, anxiety, anger—for decades to come, until fully Enlightened, these things may and will continue to arise, because we have human minds. Practice, evolution takes time. That is wonderful. When my mother passed, it triggered a lot of latent emotions about my childhood, and about the relationship I had with her. I missed her. I still miss her. Understanding that helps you to understand the emotional energy that’s arising.
KA: And why is that so important?
JP: In the case of death, be that of a person, a job, a relationship, an identity, or the 1,000 other ways we experience versions of death, we can end up wallowing in our grief. At some point, if we don’t get the information in the feeling, something like grief or anxiety can turn on itself and become an endless story of the ego. You become attached to your suffering; you may even identify with it. And then it’s not really about the dead thing, is it?
KA: It’s about me.
JP: [Nodding] From foundational Buddhist teachings, attachment is the root of suffering.
KA: Just to be clear: what about depression over other things? Like a career or life that seems out of balance, excessive debt, or something you can’t even put your finger on?
JP: I hate to break it to people who are depressed, but it’s not an excuse to only complain about things, and to not do anything! Research is showing that, big surprise, anti-depressants don’t really work. That’s because they don’t help you to get the information in the feeling. What is it you don’t want to, or are unwilling to see?
KA: What if one’s sadness or depression, or anxiety, is so strong that it’s in the way of practice, or of insight within the practice?
JP: It’s tricky. We’re very fast in this culture to say, “Maybe it’s just bad brain chemistry.” Okay. Maybe. But then you’re stuck, a victim to your own dopamine and serotonin levels. Someone who claims to be too depressed to do anything is in some kind of self-imposed pinball machine. They’re getting knocked all over the place by their own bumpers. What this person would need to do is drop under the malaise to see what’s really there. If he or she were to drop into the depths of their sadness, go under it, they would find the meaning. Remember that feelings within an Enlightened mind are simply information.
One of the side effects of my chemotherapy treatment is depression. For people with the kind of late stage cancer I had, the survival rate is not high but the suicide rate is even higher. In other words, if the cancer doesn’t get you, the depression does. Sometimes, depression really hits me hard. I get it. And sometimes, there’s not much to do about the information in the feeling, you understand, or the neuropathy in my hands and feet and the nerve damage affecting my taste and causing a dry mouth. These are a constant level of what I call “noise” rather than “pain”
It’s not that I’m not looking at something in my life, it’s that my brain chemistry has been affected by this level of constant stress from the chemo and radiation. Okay. So what else can and am I going to do about that? What is my choice? Just acceptance? And sometimes I can get depressed over the fact that there’s nothing to my depression, you see. [Laughing] When I start to believe that I shouldn’t be depressed, that it isn’t fair, that I should be some other way, the feeling turns to the emotion of suffering.
For most of us, it’s safer for the ego to feel depressed than to face the intensity of what’s really wrong, which might be a marriage gone sour, a job that no longer serves us, or an unwillingness to look at middle age or old age honestly. It can be 1,000 things, you see. It’s not the story that matters, it’s the fact that there is a deeper care and fear underneath. It’s really no different than reacting with anger, or shame. We have these deep feelings that we don’t want to face, because from the ego’s perspective they can be overwhelming.
Depression, in other words, is also a reaction to a deeper feeling. Focusing on the depression is like focusing on the anger. It misses the mark, because it doesn’t go deep enough.
KA: How does one bring meditation into this? To help instead of to hide?
JP: One uses meditation to slow down the reactivity, so you can see depression arise rather than just “be depressed.” It also gives you access, with enough practice, to the imperturbable part of your Clear Deep Heart/Mind that will not turn away from whatever information might be in the depression. You are, right now, resting in dhyana witnessing perfection, moment to moment.
We don’t stuff sex or alcohol or Prozac into the hole, trying to do anything but see what’s really going on.
You get the information in the feeing. You finally experience, understand, and accept the truth of your impermanence. Remember, feelings are ringing phones, answer the phone and get the message in the feeling.
This can lead to complicated places, don’t get me wrong. Depression over a marriage that is ending might leave someone in a very vulnerable place. They may have to go into therapy to work through the relative pain and disconnection and fear they are experiencing. But I caution people in therapy to not substitute a bad made-up story for a good made-up story. Get enough help to strengthen your ego and deepen your meditation practice. Then you can see through the illusion of your separate self, and find the endless compassion, boundless love, and undying unity of your true nature.
KA: Because all the stories are made up?
JP: That’s right.
KA: And this process is the same for something like anxiety?
JP: Exactly the same. You and I could go through it, but I would simply be substituting the word “anxiety” for “depression.” It’s the same.
KA: The Rolodex for negative emotions is pretty big. Lust. Greed. Envy. Boredom. Cruelty. In the interest of time, let me cut to the chase: are you saying that this process can be done for any limiting emotional reaction we may experience?
JP: I’ve never found one it doesn’t work for. [Leans forward, bringing his face within a few inches of mine.]
Listen to me: Nothing impermanent that arises in your mind can make the witness that watches turn away. This is shunyata. Nothing can cause your huge heart of compassion to turn away from the deep care you are really feeling, moment to moment. Watching and caring is what you are, right now.
Nothing can move the timeless, eternal, deathless emptiness out of which this witness arises; dhyana mind, turiyatita, nondual.
The very mind of God does not and cannot turn away, not from your petty little depression, your so-sad fucking story. Boo-hoo. [Shaking head] A little perspective, please. [Pause.] This is meant as a challenge to you, not an insult or to seem uncaring to your suffering—I sometimes worry my playful tone isn’t going to translate into the book!
“My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul.”—Master Rumi
We must finally realize the truth: Emptiness is empty. It’s just this. Everything is as it is, and it can be no other way. That temporarily includes all my wholly conditioned hysterical-historical negative emotions, stories, thoughts, and actions. If I have the will and the willingness to look under them, I will find what I seek. And my suffering can end, at long last.
You are not a victim to your lust, or your pettiness, or your greed, or your willful ignorance. You are not forced into depression by life. Anxiety doesn’t come and get you. Your finances do not depress you. The patriarchy doesn’t make you feel oppressed. Your mother does not make you ashamed. Your father didn’t screw you up. The president doesn’t make you angry. No. No! NO!
[Pause.]
Know! K-N-O-W. Know these are choices that you make. Yes, perhaps as unconscious reactions at first, but eventually conscious choices to turn away from your precious human life.
Why would you turn away from what is?
Do you understand?
KA: I understand all too well. It’s a little overwhelming.
JP: Take your time, Baba. I never said the truth would be easy.
KA: You’re teaching a radical ownership, and when you take ownership of everything in your life, nothing is personal.
JP: [Smiling] Nothing. And everything.
KA: Right. Okay. You claim that the promise of Mondo Zen is that negative and stressful emotions can take us right to spiritual liberation, without exception.
JP: Depression is impermanent. Lust is impermanent. Anxiety is impermanent. You’re impermanent. Everything in the manifest universe, without exception, is impermanent, all arising out of emptiness.
Once an ego truly sees and accepts impermanence, it never again views the world the same way. Everything is transformed, because everything is on fire. You don’t take your little ego’s emotional dramas so seriously. Jealousy may still arise, as it did with me. So may lust, or greed. Remember, it’s not that these things never arise! It’s that when they do arise, we can see the information in the feeling. We can break the cycle of reactivity and instead choose a compassionate, wise response. Your angst eventually becomes your liberation, once it’s properly understood, experienced, and practiced. Fear is experienced as excitement and opportunity. Anger is experienced as deep caring and intense clarity of mind.
You are finally getting the joke!
When we admit that everything is impermanent, we have a lot more equanimity. I’ve had the personal pleasure of being a dying man with stage four cancer. I’ve had the pleasure of working with terminally ill students. When you know you’re going to die—soon—you have a lot more ability to see the impermanence of life. You’re not likely to waste your energy blowing the horn and flipping off the driver of a car who cut you off. You have more important things to do with your time and energy.
But everything is on fire, Baba. Everyone you know is on fire. The man who cuts you off is terminally ill. The president is dying. One day you will wish your mother was still alive so she could do that thing that drives you nuts. And you? You’re heading towards the only ending life can have for you.
The Great Mother eats every one of her children. Get that. Really, really get that. When and if you choose to see that is up to you. When you do see it, remember there are two views. From the ego’s perspective, it’s “boo-hoo.” The ego is impermanent—it will die.
But from your Clear Deep Heart/Mind, impermanence is wonderful. The deathless and timeless essence of this moment is beyond life and death, matter and energy, heaven and earth, or any duality. It is just so, black rain on the temple roof.
The universe is constantly manifesting new and unique things because the old ones are breaking apart and giving way to new forms. So everything’s on fire. How wonderful! Our temporary little egos are here because of that. And one day, they’ll be gone so other tiny egos can replace us.
KA: And when we can’t, or won’t, see this?
JP: We suffer. Suffering is caused by not being willing to see and then accept things as they are. Notice I did not say not being able to see things as they are.
Suffering is tied into attachment to things that are impermanent, which includes everything around you, without exception. Because suffering is an unwillingness to see and accept things as they are, suffering is transformed into liberation when one accepts things as they are. It’s your choice, and it’s the only real choice you have.
This is not nihilism, this focus on impermanence. Buddhism gets a bum rap sometimes for that. But that’s not what I’m saying. When you are Awake, right action and compassion flow from your heart, unstoppable. You don’t strive to be compassionate; you can’t help but be compassionate. We see that everything must be as it is and will not at this time be otherwise. Remember that Enlightenment without compassion is not Enlightenment at all.
KA: That’s why you teach that suffering is, basically, an illusion? If it’s a choice, then it means that suffering isn’t outside of us, doesn’t happen to us.
JP: [Nodding] What the Buddha was trying to show us was the difference between pain and suffering. When I experience pain, there is no emotional charge to it. “Ow” is just “ow”—pain. I bang my head on an open cupboard. It hurts. Yet my pain can contract and turn into anger or rage, and that pain might trigger me to choose to become violent, screaming an obscenity, yelling at my child who left the cupboard open, or telling myself how stupid I am for not looking before I stood up.
My pain, which is real but doesn’t have a feeling to it, can turn into suffering when I allow it to. For most people, this happens so fast that I might not even be aware that there was an opportunity to simply experience the pain—free of my emotional charge. “Ow” is just “ow” because of something painful, but “Fuck you,” “Fuck me,” or “Fuck it” is suffering in reaction to that pain.
This is the key to emotional liberation.
Let me add one more idea, though. I am not recommending masochism! We do not need to sit in our painful emotional contractions in order to learn. Instead, we need to transform our emotional contractions, which requires a little more work, a little more consciousness.
Pain and emotions need to be investigated thoroughly so that we can make the most intelligent response to them, and to be able to deal compassionately and intelligently with the circumstances that have caused them.
So your wife calls you lazy. You “get pissed off.” Slow it down, have the courage to see that you’re a little afraid, a little concerned, and very clear that you doesn’t like being called lazy. So you engage your wife. Not to win a fight. Not to make a point. Not to show her why she’s wrong. Those are all violent reactions. To stay present to what’s really true—the fear and caring and clarity, and to make a decision from this place.
“Help me understand,” is how I like to begin something like this. “Help me understand why you feel that way. Because it hurts me to hear that, to be spoken to this way. Help me understand what’s going on with you. I won’t be spoken to that way, understand, and I want to know what’s true for you.”
KA: And this emotional pain turns into spiritual liberation, because we first meditate enough to stabilize our mind and slow down our reactivity, yes?
JP: [Nods.]
KA: Then from here, once we get the information in feeling, we can choose our responses. And what we find is that emotions arise out of Clear Deep Heart/Mind, so that the more we’re emotionally triggered, the more we can touch in with the emptiness out of which feelings arise. Did I miss anything?
JP: No, grasshopper. [Smiling] You got it.
KA: Well, we should probably go through the emotional koans.
JP: Didn’t we just do that?
KA: Not formally, I’m afraid. The eleventh koan is “Has anyone ever made you angry, shamed you, or caused you to turn away?” And clearly, the answer is no. I don’t think we need to explain that at this point!
JP: The answer is know/no. Know the truth of anger as clarity. And no to living as an emotionally reactive, imprisoned being.
KA: Okay, yes. I understand that clarification. The twelfth koan?
JP: “Silently, through your eyes and your body, demonstrate the intense clarity that always arises before you choose a negative emotional reaction.”
KA: What are you looking for here?
JP: What we’ll see when we do this is that the eyes open wide, we lean in, the body opens up, and there is a pure witnessing quality. Anyone can do this at any time. Simply think of the last time you were mad, ashamed, or turned away from something or someone. Before that reaction, before the conditioned response, see what’s there for you. You’ll find that intense clarity arises, even if it’s just for a microsecond.
KA: I want to note this koan really works best with a partner. When you watch someone else “show you” their reaction, you will always see them open up right before they close down and get angry, ashamed, or turn away. There’s an instant of “getting big” before they react. I’ve done this dozens of times, and it’s the same if someone is going through losing their car keys and getting angry, having a contraction around a child that’s acting out, or feeling intense depression over their finances. The first thing they do is “get big” with their eyes and body, even if it’s only for a microsecond. That’s where you want them to focus their attention, right?
JP: That’s right. This is the clarity they are bypassing. Feelings arise and call to awareness. If you can practice here, if you can slow down your reaction here, you gain access to choice here. You notice you’re noticing the intensity of a feeling, and you STOP. What is really going on here? What is really called for here?
KA: Okay. And that’s where we see that anger is really clarity and concern, and fear is really excitement and opportunity.
JP: You got it. And you can experience it for yourself, with practice.
KA: We’ve already discussed the many ways that can play out, like with the guy whose wife calls him lazy, with depression, or with jealousy. I think we’ve given enough examples. And so we’ve made it to the last koan, number thirteen.
JP: “Visualize yourself transforming a habitual negative reaction into a conscious, compassionate response.”
KA: What is this koan?
JP: This is where we practice our insight. This is bringing meditation out into the world. This is why meditation never ends. You have to pick a place in your life, right now, where you unconsciously choose a reaction to something. And you have to see yourself choosing a different response.
This is a practice. You may not succeed in your efforts at first. But you have to see the path you want. So, for instance, you might imagine your child doing something right after you told them not to do it. You visualize the scene, you feel the feelings arise—care, fear, sadness—you choose a response from clarity.
KA: Which is to do what?
JP: How do I know? This isn’t a formula. When you look at the situation from Clear Deep Heart/Mind, what is true for you? What is called for? Now, imagine yourself doing that, so the next time the situation happens, you’re ready.
KA: I would note that the practice of Mondo Zen is itself a long topic. This is why community is so important, so that we can have other eyes on us, preferably eyes that have deeper insight into shunyata and dhyana mind than we do, and some deeper wisdom to offer.
Before we go, I think we should walk people through a meditation guide around the thirteen koans, but we’ve covered enough for one day, I think. Let’s save that for tomorrow. Would you care to leave this with some final thoughts, Jun Po?
JP: [Long pause.] Within an Enlightened mind, you’ll find these absolute truths: Negative emotional reactions are recognized as a philosophical problem, not a practical one. Feeling is experienced as information. Fear is experienced as excitement and opportunity. Anger, before it becomes violent, is experienced as intense clarity and deep concern. Negative reactions to feelings are recognized as choices, not unconscious reactive “laws,” and are no longer unconscious conditioning. No person nor any arising circumstance has ever made you react in a particular way to a feeling. You have always chosen these reactions.
Meditation is the best and most proven way to develop adequate insight into your true nature, to experience these truths for yourself. Philosophical reeducation and emotional koan practice as we’ve presented here create the new view. This builds the alternative mental structure so that your angst can become your liberation.
No one can give you these insights; no teacher, no god, no burning bush in the night. You must experience them and claim them for yourself. Your seat will not be given to you. It must be taken.
While reading this book you may have had some intellectual illumination. You may have had some spiritual insight. Good for you!
Now you need to practice, practice, practice.
Remember, ata dipa, you are this light!