The Authentic Life

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ever feel like your efforts to live a life of wisdom, honesty, and compassion are hijacked by, well,
life?
Take heart. Ezra Bayda has good news: life's challenges aren't obstacles to our path—
they are the path
. Understanding that liberates us to use every aspect of what life presents us with as a way to live with integrity and authenticity—and joy.

In this, as in all his books, Ezra's teaching is Zen made wonderfully practical, in a way that can apply to anyone's life. Meditation is the foundation, but it doesn't stop there. It's about learning to take the practice of presence we cultivate in meditation to all the rest of our complicated lives. Doing that empowers us to navigate our journey with the integrity and authenticity that are what a satisfying life are all about.

EZRA BAYDA teaches at Zen Center San Diego. He is also the author of
Being Zen, At Home in the Muddy Water, Saying Yes to Life (Even the Hard Parts),
and
Zen Heart
. For more information, visit
www.zencentersandiego.org
.

 

 

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Or visit us online to sign up at
shambhala.com/ezenquotes
.

The
Authentic
Life

Zen Wisdom for Living Free from Complacency and Fear

Ezra Bayda

Shambhala •
Boston & London
• 2014

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

© 2014 by Ezra Bayda

Part of chapter 2 appeared in
Tricycle
magazine.

Parts of chapter 4 and chapter 19 appeared in
Shambhala Sun
magazine.

Cover photograph by GYRO PHOTOGRAPHY/amanaimagesRF

Cover design by Jim Zaccaria

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bayda, Ezra.

The authentic life: Zen wisdom for living free from complacency and fear/Ezra Bayda.—First Edition.

pages   cm

eISBN 978-0-8348-2962-6

ISBN 978-1-61180-092-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Spiritual life—Zen Buddhism.  I. Title.

BQ9288.B393 2014

294.3′444—dc23

2013028425

This book is dedicated to Elizabeth Hamilton, my wife, fellow teacher and closest friend. Through our over twenty-one years together, and in spite of my blind spots and human frailties, she has been a constant source of support and encouragement. Particularly in this last and most difficult year, more than anything, it has been her love that has sustained me. It has also allowed me to see her and appreciate her in a new and more profound way.

Contents

PART ONE

The Territory and the Map

1.  Skeletons at the Feast

2.  The Rocky Road

3.  The Eternal Recurrence

4.  Doorways into Reality

5.  Transforming Energy

PART TWO

Awakening the Mind

6.  What about Happiness?

7.  No One Special to Be

8.  Who's Who in the Zoo?

9.  The Misguided Quest

10.  Shades of Gray

PART THREE

Emotional Awakening

11.  The Dilemma of Anger

12.  Saying Yes to Fear

13.  The Great Teaching

14.  What We Really Want

15.  Sound Bites That Matter

PART FOUR

Awakening the Heart

16.  The Bigger Picture

17.  The Song of Meditation

18.  The Most Important Thing

19.  Enjoy the Ride

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PART ONE

The Territory and the Map

1

Skeletons at the Feast

O
ne of my first and abiding memories of of being woken up to the precariousness of life occurred when I was living in New York City in my early twenties: I read a newspaper story about a man shooting people on the street below from the roof of a high-rise. What affected me the most was the arbitrary nature of the deaths—you could be walking along and, without warning, be shot and killed, for no apparent reason. Over the years this sad theme has played out again and again—stories of individuals with guns going on a rampage at schools and workplaces, and even at movie theaters, killing people they don't even know.

Many of the books I've been reading recently have centered around events in Europe during World War II, again involving the theme of arbitrary death. There are numerous examples of the Gestapo shooting people almost on a whim, or breaking into a house in the middle of a holiday supper and five minutes later everyone in the entire family would be dead. In just a moment everything changes.

Or, a version closer to home, how we're all just one doctor's visit away from hearing that we, or someone close to us, has some life-altering condition. In Buddhism this theme is commonly described as the philosophy of impermanence, the objective fact that over time everything changes. I think of it more in terms of skating on thin ice, where we glide along on autopilot, going from one thing to another, pretending we have endless time. We're usually ignoring how thin beneath us the ice actually is; even though we know intellectually that we don't have endless time, we don't really believe it. We tend to ignore the fact that sooner or later there are things we'll all have to deal with—the inevitable shifts in our life circumstances that will trigger anxiety and uncertainty, such as our own declining health, or unexpected and unwanted changes in our finances or our relationships.

In other words, spiritual practice, in large part, involves learning how to respond to life's blows, including our own physical and emotional difficulties. A crucial step is to learn to see our difficulties as our path, as our opportunity. A simple truth that we can all experience for ourselves is that it is often our most painful experiences that lead us to deepened self-discovery, to growth, and even at times to freedom. The more we accept this truth, the more we can view our difficult situations as an opportunity—the opportunity to move out of our protected cocoon world, the opportunity to live in a more genuine way, the opportunity to truly appreciate this life. It's also good to be able to distinguish between difficulties that are real and those that are just creations of our own drama. A Holocaust survivor once said, “There's a big difference between a lump in our oatmeal and a lump in our breast.” All too often we confuse the two. But when the lump in the breast arises, we need to know what to do.

Please be clear that this isn't about worrying about or expecting bad things to happen. That would be simply indulging in negative imaginings, which is the opposite of spiritual practice. This is about honestly acknowledging the things we don't want to look at—opening to the fears that none of us want to face. Yet, paradoxically, facing these fears allows us to come closer to truly appreciating the life that we have, just as it is.

One of the World War II books I recently read was a novel called
Skeletons at the Feast
. The title caught me immediately, although I honestly didn't know what it meant. One interpretation of the phrase “skeletons at the feast” refers to the ancient Roman practice of bringing an actual skeleton to the big feasts, to remind people to seize the day, or, as the phrase goes, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.” This sentiment may have some merit, but mostly, as you probably have experienced for yourself, it can easily lead to a life of desire, grasping, and ultimately dissatisfaction.

Another interpretation of the phrase “skeletons at the feast” is that it describes a life of waking sleep. We sleepwalk through life as skeletons—anxious, confused, and unhappy, even though we're in the midst of the feast of life, the life of wonder and genuine appreciation. A quote from the Bible sheds some light on this: “It is harder for a rich man to pass into the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” In other words, when we live the complacent life of sleep, going from one thing to another as if we have endless time, we have little chance of enjoying the feast of living a genuine life of awareness—the life we're in the midst of right now.

Dostoyevsky once said, “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” Many believe this—that unless we're hurting, we'll never make the efforts that are required in order to wake up from the life of waking sleep. Does this mean we have to lead a
life of suffering in order to enter the kingdom? Is it necessary to fall through the cracks in the thin ice? It's certainly true that many of us enter the spiritual path because we are suffering. When we feel the thin ice beneath us—the anxious quiver, the loneliness, the alienation—we naturally want relief. For me, in my early twenties, it was the constant state of anxiety and fear that drove me to spiritual practice, and my main motivation was wanting to be free from the unending discomfort. It's worthwhile for each of us to reflect on our own situation and on what brought us to spiritual practice, and specifically what we were trying to get away from—where we felt bad and wanted relief.

In a way, don't we assume we have to suffer? It's a basic tenet of both Christianity and Judaism, so it's very much embedded in our cultural way of seeing the world. It's also the First Noble Truth in Buddhist teaching—that life is suffering. Perhaps this is true, that the shocks of life, and our difficulties in the areas of our health, our financial security, or our relationships are what drive us to spiritual practice. But perhaps it is not always true, or at least it is not the whole truth. For example, we can be quite happy in conventional terms—having good health, a good job and relationship—and still feel that something is not quite right. It's not that we're suffering in the usual sense, or trying to get relief from our life, but there's still a feeling that something is missing. In other words, there is a basic unsatisfactoriness that pervades throughout. This is the experience of feeling disconnected from ourselves, disconnected from the heart. So even when a person is not suffering in the normal sense, this sense of existential disconnectedness will often lead one in the direction of spiritual practice. This is the quality that's called aspiration—our genuine desire to connect, or you could say to find God, or to find our authentic way.

The problem is it's very easy to get caught in a myopic, or
Me-centered, view of spiritual practice, and lose sight of our authentic way. A major part of the problem is that we identify with such a narrow part of who we are—that is, our small self, where we identify with our thoughts, our stories, our dramas, our bodies. We live out of the deep-seated illusion that we need to
be
a particular way and, even more so, that we need to
feel
a particular way, such as peaceful or comfortable or in control. As a result, we miss out on the freedom of connecting with a bigger sense of Self—of who we most truly are. In fact, the fundamental problem that prevents us from living authentically is that we're disconnected from our true self.