CHAPTER
15

Taking It Deeper

In This Chapter

There’s a danger that you will misinterpret certain Zen teachings and practices to mean, “This is it, just go about your everyday life, and do your best to be aware and appreciate it.” In a certain sense this is exactly what Zen is recommending, and it’s great if you’ve moved from suffering to a sense of relative ease that makes you think, “Good enough!” However, to rest there results in complacency and imposes a limit on the depth of your transformative understanding.

Life is infinite, so if you want to master the art of living it, there’s always more to learn and do. While it’s true that it’s impossible to keep the precepts perfectly, you need to keep examining your life so you are aware of all of your harmful habits. Continuing to work diligently on those habits throughout your life maintains your humility, and who knows, maybe you’ll even manage to change them!

While it’s true that an experience of no-self is elusive, the key to lasting liberation is a direct, personal verification of emptiness. Many people have achieved it in the past, so why not you? While it’s true that Nirvana is not elsewhere, simply accepting that does not mean you’ve mastered the art of living. This chapter covers some important ways to deepen and challenge your Zen.

A Strong Foundation

When you turn up the heat on your Zen practice, stuff can happen. You can gain insights that, while ultimately liberating, can be temporarily disorienting. You may change in ways that mean your current network of relationships, work, or lifestyle no longer suit you. You can become discouraged and frustrated because you want some particular outcome (such as insight) but it isn’t happening. You may end up experiencing deep self-doubt and wonder whether you are really capable of deep wisdom or compassion.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

If you think too much or too often about whether Zen is giving you the results you want, or whether you are enjoying it, you are likely to stop practicing before you have built up a strong habit of practice you can rely on. Sooner or later, Zen will seem boring, or frustrating, or pointless. If you keep practicing through those experiences, at some point Zen will seem fascinating, effective, and transformative again. And you will have built up a strong habit of practice in the meantime, which can sustain you through difficult times.

In order to sustain yourself through these kinds of upsets and challenges, it’s good to have built a strong foundation for your life. This amounts to healthy routines and habits, and contact with positive, supportive people. Habits are important because they can carry you through a confusing time. As discussed in Chapter 7, they have an energy and momentum all their own. This fact is annoying when you’re dealing with a harmful habit you would like to change, but it works to your advantage when you go through rough periods in your life.

If you’ve built up the habits, you will continue to sit zazen, get enough sleep, eat well, and keep the precepts, even when all hell is breaking loose. Such habits keep you functioning fairly well despite conditions, and give you a sense of grounding when nothing else makes sense. Positive people are those who will encourage your good habits. When you’re going through some difficult changes, such people respond to you with patience and have faith that you’ll find your way. Zen teachers and other Zen practitioners try to provide this kind of positive support for one another.

A strong foundation also means faith in Zen practice itself—faith that it gives good results. This is not a faith you can will yourself to have; it has to be built up slowly, step by step. Each time you see an improvement in your life, or attain a better understanding of something, and can attribute it to Zen, your trust in the practice will grow. The next step in your practice is, by definition, something you have not done before, and you can’t be sure it will take you where you want to go. Knowing that all of your previous steps have been fruitful, or at least not dangerous, gives you the faith to take the next one.

Part of this faith in Zen is trusting that it will bring good results … eventually. Over time, especially if you’re able to get to know some people who have been practicing Zen longer than you have, you start to see Zen as a path from suffering to mastery of the art of living. As long as you’re certain you’re on the path, you don’t have to worry so much about whether you will arrive at your destination. You just keep going. This allows you to be patient and gentle with yourself. Balance this curiosity and determination, and you have a great combination for deepening your Zen.

Generating Determination

Some of the more challenging aspects of Zen practice require hard work and great determination. You may need to sit meditation for many hours, months, or years before you have a sense that you’re making any “progress.” You may need to face things about yourself that you’d rather weren’t true. You may need to keep yourself going through periods when practice seems pointless or frustrating.

Although Zen teachers will generally discourage you from trying to attain something special, or from collecting insights like badges, there is a time and place for the “positive” use of greed. If your desire gets you on the meditation cushion, it has had at least one good effect. The great thing about Zen-related desires is that they lead you toward practices that undermine your delusions and grasping, so eventually your un-Zenlike greed defeats itself.

If you aren’t longing for spiritual attainments, how do you generate the energy and determination you need for intensive practice? It’s best to be creative with yourself. Basically, take advantage of whatever motivates you.

One Zen practice is to call to mind your own inevitable mortality as vividly as you can. You might contemplate how you would feel if you died suddenly in an hour or two. If you had a few moments before death to take stock of your life, how would you feel? Would you have any regrets? Would you be afraid? Would there be things you felt were left undone? Any sticking points that would prevent you from leaving this world with a sense of peace and gratitude are things that still need resolution, and you only have a limited time to do it.

CONSIDER THIS

There is a verse recited in Zen monasteries at the end of the day, which is meant to inspire the students to be diligent in their practice:

“Let me respectfully remind you, life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken. Take heed. Do not squander your life.”

—From the Zen Mountain Monastery Liturgy Manual, edited by John Daido Loori

Some people find metta practice very motivating. This involves the recitation of a verse that sends “metta,” or loving kindness, to other people or to yourself. Silently or out loud, you say, “May [you, or I, or a specific person or group of people] be free from fear and anxiety. May you be at ease. May you be happy.” As you recite, you seek to awaken sincere feelings behind the words.

It’s best to start this with someone it is easy to feel kindness toward, but then it can be extended to others. This practice can generate determination because it encourages a motive based on a desire to relieve whatever suffering you can, rather than on a desire for something the self is going to attain. It can also call your attention to how much suffering there is in the world, and therefore how important spiritual practice is.

One of my favorite sources of motivation is the thought of how liberating the truth is, and how much I still don’t see or understand. Wanting to know the truth can be compelling even if it is tough to face.

In some ways, the story told in the movie The Matrix is analogous to waking up to reality through Zen. In it, the main character chooses to take a pill that will wake him up from the dream he has been experiencing up until then. When he wakes up he realizes he has been held in a comatose state all of his life, and fed a false image of the world. The reality he wakes up to is very grim, while the false image being fed to all the comatose people is relatively pleasant. Still, as you watch the movie, can you imagine yourself choosing to stay asleep, locked comatose in a cocoon and believing in a fantasy?

No matter how painful the truth is, it’s the truth. The difference between reality and delusion in the movie The Matrix is very dramatic, but actually it’s not all that far from the difference between being completely caught in the delusion of self and the clarity of liberation.

Facing Fears

You know the saying, “Ignorance is bliss”? Hopefully, the reading you’ve done in this book so far has convinced you that this is not the case, but the saying does point toward a certain truth. Sometimes ignoring a truth about your life feels preferable to facing it. In such a situation, at least temporarily, acknowledging reality is going to be more painful and troublesome than continuing to avoid it. However, the pain and trouble can only be avoided temporarily. Eventually the truth will come out, and the longer you have suppressed or avoided it, the more traumatic and difficult the coming out will be.

It’s comparable to having a medical problem that requires surgery. The surgery is daunting and will probably be painful, but chances are the problem will only get worse the longer you put it off.

The good thing is, you don’t have to look at facing your fears and problems in an entirely negative way (that is, you’d better face them or they’ll come back to bite you). Fear and the urge to look away are signs that there is something very valuable to be learned. In fact, the bigger the fear, the bigger the lesson. Understanding and resolving fears and problems liberates you and lets you further your mastery of the art of living. Once you have done so, you are a valuable resource for other people with problems and fears similar to yours.

Skeletons in Your Closet

It’s not unusual to start having some insights about yourself once you start meditating and doing Zen practice. It’s like you’re able to get some perspective and can observe your thoughts and actions from the outside. For example, you might suddenly recognize how you repeat a certain behavior that’s not only useless, it’s also counterproductive or harmful. Let’s say that when you start to worry about the state of your intimate partnership, you tend to corner your partner, make them sit down and hear you out as you shed tears over your anguish and anxiety, and then ask them to comfort you.

As you observe this scenario with some Zen perspective, you realize that in essence you’re confronting your partner with a complaint about them, and then you’re asking them to set aside their own feelings of hurt and defensiveness to make you feel better. It becomes clear to you why this approach has not brought you the results you want, but instead has caused more conflict and hard feelings. Now that you’ve seen what’s going on, you do some karma work on this habit and explore some other options.

Once you’ve experienced a few insights about yourself like this, it’s natural to begin to wonder what other skeletons might be in your closet. What else are you going to find out about yourself? How deluded, selfish, and annoying might you really be? What changes might you feel compelled to make in your life, based on what you find out? It takes a great deal of courage to not only face the truth when you’re confronted by it, but to actually go rummaging around your mental and emotional closet, looking for delusions! Especially when you realize your closet is full of them (as all of our closets are).

You can find the courage and motivation to face truths about yourself by working on the aspects of practice described earlier: building trust in Zen practice, and generating determination. After you’ve undergone the mental and emotional surgery required to identify and resolve a problem, you will always think of the surgery as having been worthwhile, however uncomfortable it was at the time of the operation. This builds your faith in the process and in your own ability to survive it, so it becomes easier to face the next challenge.

Add to that the reward of embracing the truth and being able to act in ways that are wiser and more compassionate, and there’s part of you that’s going to be ready to roll up its sleeves and dive right in when you discover another of your fears, problems, or delusions. Finding and dealing with the skeletons in your closet can save your relationships, your health, and your life.

Fear of Emptiness

One Zen way of looking at reality is that underneath all human problems—self-centeredness, grasping, aversion, greed, anger, and delusion—is fear. And at the base of all fears is the fear of not existing. This fundamental fear manifests most obviously as a fear of death, but actually the fear of not existing is more subtle and pervasive than that. Because of impermanence and your inability to find something unchanging and inherent that you can grasp and point to as you, you have an intuition about emptiness. Even if you aren’t consciously exploring emptiness, you have a nagging sense that you might not really exist the way you think you do.

Actually, what you fear is not emptiness, but what you think emptiness is. Until you experience emptiness for yourself, you’re bound to think it’s synonymous with meaninglessness or annihilation. When you hear the Zen teaching that you (and all things) are empty of inherent, enduring self-nature, it can sound like the teaching is that you don’t exist. Naturally, you get very concerned about the reality and continuation of your existence.

There are five characteristic fears about emptiness, and typical reactions to each. The fears are about insubstantiality, annihilation, isolation, vulnerability, and oblivion. You can primarily be afraid of being insubstantial—of being liable to disappear in a puff of smoke, with nothing to hold on to. A typical reaction to this is to try to acquire as many things as possible to make yourself feel less vulnerable to disappearance, including material possessions, relationships, power, and status.

You can be afraid of annihilation, or being brought to a precipitous end by some agent or event, perhaps unidentified. To prevent this you strive to protect yourself by any means necessary, particularly by aggression and by carefully honing your intellect and skills so you can perceive and fend off threats. Your central fear may be of isolation, or the inability to make real, intimate contact with anything or anyone. Consequently you may seek compulsively for the experience of being connected and not alone by trying to consume all the intimacy you can get out of your relationships and experiences—often chasing away intimacy in your efforts.

Alternatively you may fear vulnerability, the inability to protect your territory in this world of impermanence. The reaction to this fear can be pervasive anxiety and paranoia. Finally, your primary fear might be of oblivion, of being nothing and experiencing nothing in a big universe of nothingness. If this is your fear, you tend to sink into depression and torpor.

Everyone has a little bit of all of these emptiness-related fears, although there will usually be one or two that are the strongest for any individual. The wonderful thing is that a true understanding of emptiness (see Chapter 12) cures these fears. However, in order to gain that understanding of emptiness, you are first going to have to face your fears about what it might be or mean. The closer you get to letting go and experiencing no-self, the more inflamed your fears are likely to get. Just knowing this is the case can help you find the courage to go on.

And when you face your fears of emptiness in order to see what emptiness really is, your fears are transformed. You realize that while there is nothing substantial that can be called you, you’re also not separate from anything, so in a way the whole universe is you, and yours. You recognize that there is no inherent, enduring self-nature to protect, but instead there is a buddha-nature that is unbounded in space and time—so there is no need to fear annihilation.

Experiencing no-self gives you all the intimacy you could want, because there is no you separate from that with which you want to connect. You can only isolate yourself within your own mind. Your existence is just flow, a dance with the universe, so you don’t need to worry about protecting your territory. This frees up boundless energy. When you see that emptiness is not nothingness, but the vast, luminous potential within which everything is able to arise, you can live wholeheartedly in the spaciousness.

CONSIDER THIS

The five characteristic fears about emptiness—fear of insubstantiality, annihilation, isolation, vulnerability, and oblivion—are part of a Vajrayana Buddhist teaching called the five wisdom energies, or the five buddha families. It’s a useful teaching for exploring personality and karma. You can read more about the wisdom energies in Spectrum of Ecstasy by Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, or in The Five Wisdom Energies by Irini Rockwell.

Willingness to Not Know

Another way to deepen your Zen practice is to work on your willingness to be patient and nonreactive when you don’t know the answer, the solution, the next step, or how to make sense of things. Facing your fears and deepening your understanding are not activities that are going to give you instant results. That means that a lot of the time you’re going to be in an in-between state of not-knowing. As a matter of fact, much of the suffering you encounter, especially in others or out “in the world,” requires you to take a don’t-know attitude permanently.

If you’re anything like most people, you’re uncomfortable with not knowing. Anything but that! You feel on edge, fearful of what might be coming, full of anxious anticipation, or desperate to do something to fix the situation right now. Not knowing can make you feel inadequate and defensive. It can challenge your sense of self. To end the discomfort, you may exhaust yourself with a frantic search for answers. You may also seize on any answer you can find, although that answer is often wrong or overly simplistic.

As long as you avoid the place of not-knowing, you will never obtain the answers that require time and effort to find. The information you need may not yet be available, or perhaps your ability to see clearly needs more development. Some insights seem to just take time to ripen, so that one day you know something that you’ve been seeking to understand for ages.

In addition, sometimes there is no one answer or solution to a complex problem, such as world hunger. Your inability to tolerate not-knowing may compel you to latch on to an explanation for why things are the way they are (and therefore, an explanation of how things need to change). Unfortunately, this answer may not be as much about hunger as it is about your need to avoid not-knowing. Because you are attached to your particular answer, it may blind you to other answers or to the complexity of the situation. It can also make you defensive (again, on your own behalf).

Fortunately, not-knowing isn’t so bad once you get used to it. If you explore it, you realize that it’s not necessarily about some fault of yours preventing you from giving the correct response. Instead, it can be a generous act to rest in the place where you don’t have the answers, whether they have to do with your karma, spiritual teachings, or the state of the world. This allows wise responses to arise in time, and avoids oversimplifying your view of the world in order to avoid discomfort.

Challenging Yourself

When you’re suffering, you have natural motivation and don’t have to think about what to concentrate on in your practice. You just turn your attention toward the source of your suffering and learn a great deal in the process of trying to relieve it.

When you feel more or less okay, it’s easy to get complacent. You may acknowledge, intellectually, that you aren’t a buddha yet, and you still go about most of your day unaware, and most of your thinking is still self-centered. But what can you do about it? Where do you begin your work when you’re not sure what you should even work on? How do you seek out remaining delusions when you’re still deluded by them? How can you deepen your understanding when you don’t know what deeper would look like?

Working with Koans

This is where koans can help. Koans are questions or problems that bring you up against the edge of your understanding, or your ability to respond with skillfulness. Formal koans are teaching stories that have been collected by some lineages of Zen and offered to students over the generations to challenge their understanding.

A classic example is the story of an exchange between Zen master Joshu and a questioning monk. The monk asks Joshu whether a dog has buddha-nature. The Zen teaching is that all things have, or partake of, or even are buddha-nature, so the technically correct answer to this question would be yes. However, Joshu says, “Mu.” This means “no,” “not,” “nothing,” or “non-being.” The koan is the question why did Joshu say “Mu”?

You may think of all kinds of possible reasons (he wanted the monk to stop being so intellectual, or he wanted the monk to show his understanding by arguing the point), but none of these are the, “answer” to this koan. In fact, the koan often gets boiled down to just one word, “Mu.” You are just supposed to sit with “Mu.” What on earth does that mean?

CONSIDER THIS

Formal Zen koans are notorious for not making sense. For example, in one story a monk asks Zen master Joshu why the ancestral Zen master Bodhidharma went all the way from India to China. Joshu’s answer is, “The oak tree in the garden.” This may seem nonsensical, but many koan exchanges are aimed at pulling the student out of intellectual contemplation and pointing them to the reality around them. In a way, you can think of this as saying, “Hey you! What does your question address, right here, right now?”

A koan like “Mu” brings you up against the edge of your understanding and ability to respond. You may think it’s the dumbest activity in the world, or you may long from the depths of your being to unlock its mystical truth. In either case, if you’re engaging a formal koan, it’s because you want to deepen your understanding and some Zen teacher you respect told you to work on it. So you keep trying. You don’t even know what you’re trying to do.

All of your longing, pride, effort, anger, desire to please, determination to succeed, and conviction that you are separate from enlightenment get involved in this crazy process. What from the outside looks like an intellectual puzzle ends up being a real, personal struggle. Then, at some point, usually after years, you “break through” and “Mu” isn’t a problem for you anymore. This breaking through can’t be explained, it can only be experienced.

Engaging with koans keeps you actively working on mastering the art of living. One way or another, they bring you up against your remaining delusions and limitations: your conviction that you have an inherent, enduring self-nature, your attachments, or your fundamental fear of emptiness.

If you’ve gotten pretty comfortable with emptiness, a koan can challenge you to demonstrate how you can enact your understanding in the world. If you’ve been happily dancing with everyday life for a while, a koan can point out where you still think it’s you that’s dancing, in some subtle way. If you feel a deep sense of peace and joy about life, a koan can show you the limits of what you currently see and know. There’s no limit to mastery of something, and koans help you make Zen a lifelong study.

Everyday Life Koans

Koans arise in your everyday life and provide the same opportunity as formal koans to find the edge of your understanding and apply pressure on yourself. In fact, some schools of Zen do not employ formal koans at all, but there is still an expectation that you will keep up diligent practice your whole life.

How do you identify a koan in your life? A koan is where you come up against an obstacle and cannot get past it. It may be a real-life problem, like a difficult relationship, a tendency to depression or anxiety, or a particularly harmful, entrenched habit. It may be something you cannot accept or understand. What differentiates a koan from your garden-variety problem, or a question you are merely curious about, is how much the koan matters to you. The more you care about resolving it, the more potent and important the koan. The best koans of all feel like a matter of life and death.

Sooner or later you will be faced with a matter of life and death that will present you with an obstacle you can engage as a koan. You may face the loss of someone who should not have died so young, or a crippling illness, or a situation full of injustice. As you encounter this koan, you feel the tension that results from not being able to resolve it, understand it, accept it, or work with it.

This is when you use the tool of insight described in Chapter 8, and invite the koan into your zazen. You don’t analyze it, you explore it. You examine it in detail as a scientist or artist would study their subject. You ask questions, waiting for the answers to arise of themselves, “What is it I can’t accept? What do I think acceptance would mean? Is it true that acceptance would look like that? What am I afraid of?”

If you follow the process of insight through to the end, eventually the koan is not a problem anymore. This isn’t to say that a challenge you’re facing in life—such as illness or loss—disappears, just that it is no longer a problem in the same way it used to be. Despite the challenge, you know you are fundamentally okay, and you feel a measure of spiritual peace despite the pain.

Fortunately, you don’t have to wait until life presents you with great difficulty to find a koan. Zen seeks to be proactive, so you can resolve some of your problems and deepen your understanding before you’re faced with a traumatic situation. After all, your attachments, delusions, and fears are already there, just waiting to be triggered by the events of life. You can seek them out by engaging some of the apparently lighter koans of life, and then tracing the cause of your obstacle deeper and deeper, until you find the life-and-death concerns that underlie attachments, delusions, and fears.

For an example of this process of looking beneath a shallower koan for a deeper one, imagine you have a difficulty in your intimate partnership. Let’s say you’ve been with your partner for many years, and you find yourself getting bored and thinking about being with other people. If you examine this koan very diligently and carefully, trying to be very honest with yourself, you may notice that you long for the intensity of a new relationship, where intimacy and connection are front and center. So you are actually longing for more intimacy and feel you can’t get it in your current relationship. And yet, a new relationship would eventually lose its intensity, so would you have to keep going from relationship to relationship to get your needs met?

Now you can start to question your assumptions about intimacy, and how you get it. Following this line of inquiry may eventually lead you down to your fundamental fear of emptiness—your fear that it means isolation. Facing this fear and working on a personal understanding of what emptiness really is may end up improving your relationship with your partner. This may seem like taking the long way around, but doing it this way results in transformative, lasting change because it’s about changing the entire way you relate to the world.

Avoiding Complacency

Complacency is just another koan, but it’s one that can put you to sleep instead of waking you up. There’s always more to see, understand, and master, so there’s no excuse for slacking off. Still, it’s easy to do. You can keep yourself from getting complacent by engaging koans, working with a Zen teacher, and asking yourself questions like, “What do I still not see?” (There’s always something you don’t see.)

You can also challenge your own understanding to make sure it’s experiential, not just intellectual. (It’s always a little intellectual.) You can keep your eye out for any view you hold and try to drop it in favor of meeting each moment on its own terms. (There’s always another view to drop.) Perhaps most importantly, you can try to keep the fire of your curiosity burning, because letting it go out means you think you’ve seen this all before. And you haven’t.

The Least You Need to Know