Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (7 page)

By opening into the heart of experiencing, we can come to understand that
everything
is workable. This is one of the key points of practice. Our efforts to be in the body, and to label and experience, will inevitably “fail” at times. We will have periods of aspiration and effort, followed by dry spells and apathy. Ups and downs in practice are predictable and inevitable. That we seize these ups and downs as opportunities to judge ourselves as failures or as superstars is the problem. The countermeasure is always to simply persevere—to attend to one more breath, to label one more thought, to experience one more sensation, to
enter just one more time into the heartspace. We can then experience for ourselves that it is ultimately possible to work with everything. It may not be possible today, but it is possible. In fact, it may take years of work in all three aspects of sitting practice for this understanding to become real to us.

Until now I’ve spoken of these three modes of sitting—being-in-the-body, labeling and experiencing, and opening into the heart of experiencing—as if they were distinct from one another. In truth, although each mode does entail a different aspect of practice, they do have one essential thing in common: they all require that we experience this present moment. That’s what our practice always comes down to: just being here. By continually allowing the light of awareness to shine on the confusion and anxiety of the present moment, we break the circuitry of our conditioning. This is the slow transformative path to freedom.

PART II

practicing with emotional distress

7

The Substitute Life

A
N AMBITIOUS LONG-TIME MEDITATOR
comes to see a Zen teacher. As soon as the student sits down, the teacher asks, “What’s the basic human problem?” The student ponders this, then answers, “We’re not awake.” The teacher says, “Yes, but those are just words. You’re just thinking.” And ringing the bell, he sends the student away.

Perturbed, the student continues to ponder, “What is the basic human problem?”, determined to figure it out. A week later he returns. The teacher says, “Well, have you figured out what the basic human problem is?” The student replies, “Yes. The basic human problem is that we think too much. We’re identified with our thinking. We believe our thoughts.” The teacher answers, “Again, you’re just thinking. You have to see the basic human problem in yourself.” The student leaves feeling very dejected.

Wanting to find the right answer, the student pulls out all his Zen books to read and study. When he returns to see the teacher, he’s almost strutting, he’s so sure he knows the answer to this question. Seeing the state he’s in, the teacher asks, “What’s the basic human problem?” And the student says, “There is no problem!” He’s so happy with his answer. The teacher just stares at him and says, “Then what are you doing here?” In that moment the student instantly deflates. His shoulders drop; his head drops; he feels totally humiliated.
Peering at him, the teacher asks, “What are you experiencing right now?” The student, without even looking up, says, “I just feel like crawling into a hole.” At this point the teacher says to him, “If you can fully experience this feeling, then you’ll understand the basic human problem.”

The practice life almost always comes back to dealing with what we could call the basic human problem. But this problem is not an intellectual one. We can’t just sit down and figure it out with our minds, the way the student was trying to do. In fact, trying to figure this out intellectually is part of the very problem we’re looking at. We have to be able to see and experience this problem from the inside out in order to understand it.

The essence of the basic human problem is that we live a substitute life. From our basic human need for protection, security, and comfort, we’ve fabricated a whole maze of constructs and strategies to avoid being with our life as it is. And as a consequence of believing in this substitute life we are disconnected from awareness of our true nature, our naturally open heart.

Our substitute life is made of many different constructs: our identities, our self-images, our concepts of what life is, our opinions and judgments, our expectations, our requirements. All these we take as reality. As a consequence of these tightly held beliefs, we develop certain habitual behavioral strategies to deal with life as we interpret it.

All these strategies are based on core decisions that we made early on about who we are and what our life is about. They are decisions we made to help us cope with the many inevitable pains of growing up. Before these decisions are made, we may begin our lives with a sense of basic wholeness, but when we experience even mundane pain, we start to move away from that sense of connectedness. Perhaps we feel that there’s some hole inside us that needs filling. Perhaps we even feel the terror of utter helplessness or of being totally alone. When we feel this anxious quiver in our being, our natural instinct for protection kicks in. And from this natural desire for security and comfort, we begin to fill in that hole and cover over that core of pain.

Take, for example, the very young child who experiences the pain of being left in the crib for too long (which might be only thirty seconds). Especially if this happens repeatedly, the child develops certain pictures and begins to make certain decisions about how life is. Maybe she decides that life isn’t safe somehow. Based on this belief, the child develops particular behavioral strategies. Maybe the strategy is to withdraw in order to feel safe. Or maybe the decision is that life is too difficult, and the child develops the strategy of trying harder, of doing whatever it takes to cover the inadequacy he feels. Another strategy could be to seek oblivion or to seek love. It could be a strategy of control or aggression or cheerfulness.

In any case, we weave together these core decisions and strategies into a seemingly solid construct that becomes our substitute life. We believe that this thought-based picture of reality is who we are and what life is. The more we believe in this artificial life, the more we move away from “life as it is.”

We live in a psychologically sophisticated age, and given our tendency to psychologize, we are naturally drawn to analyze ourselves, to think about ourselves. But as many, many seekers have found, analyzing in itself does not bring us that basic something we’re looking for.

Analyzing is not the solution to the basic human problem. Instead, living the practice life means we’re willing to look at the extent to which decisions that we made long ago have created a substitute life. We can practice seeing the extent to which the decisions about who we are and how life is color and filter our present experience. We can see how they still hone in on our experience, picking out like radar those aspects of the environment that will confirm the decisions that we have already made.

For example, suppose we’ve made the decision, very early on, that no one can be trusted. At some point long after making this decision, we find a partner who is pretty trustworthy, someone who demonstrates time and time again how trustworthy he is. But one time our partner does something that suggests that he can’t be trusted. With deadly aim we hone in on this instance, saying, “See! I knew you could never be trusted! No one can ever be trusted!” This single experience far outweighs all our positive experiences with our partner, because it’s what we’ve been expecting to see. This is how the decisions that we’ve made literally shape our experience. They don’t just reflect our experience; they color what we take in.

Once we become aware of the core decisions that are running our substitute life, we begin to see how they manifest through every aspect of our experience. If, for example, you see a decision operating in one of your relationships, you can be sure that this decision is also playing some part in your work and probably even in your perception about practice. I was recently with a student to whom I’ve been talking for a couple of years. She was telling me about some relationship difficulties she was having. After listening to her speak, one sentence after another, I said to her, “Why don’t you write these down?” So she wrote them down. Then I said, “Why don’t you write down how you perceive your situation at work?” And she wrote that down. Then I said, “How do you look at your situation in practice? What are your basic thoughts about practice?” So she wrote those down. I read what she had written, then handed the papers to her. Her eyes opened wide. Even though she had used different words for each of these three categories, her core beliefs were essentially the same: “I’ll never be good enough. Things will never change. What’s the point anyway?”

This woman was believing her thoughts as the truth about reality: relationships are like this, work is like this, practice is like this. It was obvious that her core beliefs were coloring and shaping her whole experience. It wasn’t work that was impossible, it wasn’t this guy who was doing all these things to her, it wasn’t practice—it was her preprogrammed beliefs.

The interesting thing about how we perceive and shape our lives through the filter of core decisions made long ago is that we tend to emphasize what is most negative about ourselves. We embrace the negative view of who we are as our deepest truth, as what will never, ever change. Our core belief might be “I’m basically flawed,” or “I’ll never measure up,” or “I’m utterly hopeless,” or “I’m not worthy of love.” Whatever it is, it has great solidity in our believed thoughts. And because it influences almost everything we think and do, it narrows and restricts our life to one of unhealed pain.

Perhaps you’re wondering, isn’t this just psychology that we’re talking about? What does this have to do with “real” practice? The answer is simple and clear. Many of the barriers to leading a more open, more genuine, more giving life come directly from our psychologically rooted decisions. These decisions are like boundaries—boundaries that disconnect us from awareness of our true nature, our naturally open heart. The practice life is about
seeing through
our boundaries, our artificial separations of mind, our self-images, our “someone special to be.” To think that practice is about achieving some permanently enlightened state of mind—stillness or silence or whatever we want to call it—is really just a fantasy about practice. Practice has to include looking at our stuff. Living in this moment means that we’re willing to be with
whatever
this moment holds, including all the ways we are holding ourselves back due to decisions we made in the past.

However, unlike a psychological approach, which might be directed primarily toward changing or adjusting ourselves, practice is about
experiencing
. It’s about seeing the truth about the “self” who has constructed this substitute life. As we work in this way, we slowly dismantle this notion of a “self.” In fact, the most fundamental core belief of all is “I am a me,” with all of the consequent core pain of feeling separate. The more we
are able to reside in this quiver of separation, the closer we come to seeing through its insubstantiality. This is the process whereby we open experientially into a vaster sense of Being.

But in order to experience this, we must begin to see how all-pervasive our decisions about ourselves are—and how mechanically we use our familiar strategies to reinforce these decisions over and over again. As we learn to recognize the imprint of our core beliefs on almost everything we think and do, we can see how this substitute life has become our reality.

That’s what the Zen teacher meant when he said to the student, “If you can really experience what is going on right now, you’ll understand the basic human problem.” Seeing that his strategy was to try to be on top, to be the “best,” to get the right answer, and to gain whatever he could from it, would show the student what his substitute life was about. When the teacher exposed his strategy and the student experienced great disappointment, the possibility opened up for him to understand that dynamic experientially. He could now see what was running his whole life.

Our emotional reactions are always tied to our substitute life and to our core decisions about what life is supposed to be. We all have expectations and requirements of ourselves, of others, of life. When these expectations are not met, we almost always experience disappointment in some form or another. Once we can see this dynamic—and this is where practice most departs from traditional psychology—we can enter into the next phase of practice. That is, we can learn to reside physically in the original hole that our substitute life is meant to cover and protect us from in the first place.

Suppose a man has made the basic decision, “My wife should take care of me.” After a difficult day at work, he’s looking forward to coming home to his mate so he can unburden himself. But when he walks into the house, he finds his wife knee-deep in her own stuff. And what she wants to do is talk to him about it!

It is likely that this man will react, with some form of anger. Depending on what strategies are habitual for him, he might start blaming her: “Why don’t you ever have time for me? This is how it always is!” and things will go downhill from there. Or maybe his strategy is to push the reactive feelings down; suppression is his pattern. Or maybe he has the strategy of martyrdom; he just seethes and wallows in his righteousness.

The strategy we choose is going to be based on reactions. Our reactions are based on our expectations. Furthermore, we always believe in our reaction as “the truth.” That’s all we see. We rarely even see the difference between our expectations and our behavioral strategies. It’s usually one confused mess.

When we can see the relationship among our decisions, expectations, reactions, and strategies—not as the truth but as the fabric of our substitute life—we can then understand what we bring into the situation. In the example above, the whole setup in the first place was the decision “My mate should take care of me.” The disappointment came from the basic setup of that expectation. We can understand how this dynamic works only when we really start looking into ourselves—at our own decisions, our own strategies.