Photo by Dave
By Bob. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to use zazen and do it here. Thank you to everyone that’s involved in helping make this happen. For me, doing this is learning about myself. One of the first and most obvious things is that my brain does not like to sit and do no thinking at all for very long—not even a minute or so. The longer I sit, the more difficulty I find in doing that.
But the other thing I’ve noticed is that I have a pattern of thinking that’s pretty predictable. It’s usually related to the future—so I’m usually thinking about something, planning something, having conversations that haven’t happened yet. All kinds of stuff like that in the future.
So, there’s a reading that means something to me, that maybe will mean something to someone else, too. I appreciate it a lot. It’s from Charlotte Joko Beck, who was a Zen teacher. The book title is “Ordinary Wonder”:
Anticipating Life
Before we sit, we have a mood, a feeling about what it’s going to be like. In fact, it’s like that with everything: we’re often feeling something in advance of the situation actually happening. This keeps us from being aware or noticing the situation we’re in at this moment. When we go into any environment with other people, we’re often nervous or edgy. We want to be impressive in some way, so we start figuring out what to say or what tale to tell. That’s understandable; you’re going to a gathering and you have to talk about something. There’s nothing wrong with that except it distracts us from how we really feel at that time. We may feel a little bit uneasy. We might be worried that the other people won’t be impressed with us, and we’ll be stuck with our own painful feelings. All these feelings about the situation arise, and we haven’t even reached the front door. We spend our life doing this.
Most of our life is lived in this space in our mind. We aren’t experiencing; we’re being pushed by the core belief into moods and opinions. We’re busy with a whole world of anticipatory thoughts and feelings before the door ever opens. Say you’re going to meet a new person later in the day, and that person is kind of important. You may spend a whole morning figuring out your approach to that person. Maybe you comb your hair differently or you rehearse what you’re going to say. Your whole morning is taken up with this, and the meeting hasn’t even happened yet. Now that doesn’t mean you don’t have to get dressed. You do. You can even get dressed up. But your mind is taken up with thinking about what is going to happen before the contact even takes place.
This anticipation happens with practice itself. After a few years of practice, a lot of people tell me, “I’m getting an awful lot out of this practice, but it wasn’t at all what I expected.” That just happens. Our experiences, when we’re actually experiencing them, have very little to do with our anticipation.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have aspiration. Aspiration gives us diligence and discipline. It’s different than ambition, which is about trying to get somewhere. Ambition is motivated by our core belief that there is something wrong with us that can be fixed if we can get to a certain place. Ambition says, “I will open the door, and I know what’s on the other side, and I’ll take it.” Aspiration is more like, “When the door opens, I will be there.”
Weakening the Core Belief
Now, our true self doesn’t know anything about ambition or anticipating life; it does not become busy with thinking, waiting, measuring, or worrying. Our true self is just perceiving second by second by second. It’s just being itself and responding to whatever happens to be there. When that millisecond of response is over, it’s over. We won’t ever be able to be completely without thought or anticipation, but if we sit regularly, bored or not, it weakens this ego process. It weakens our attachment to our core belief, and at the base, it’s the core belief telling us what life should be like instead of allowing us the space to experience life as it is.
That reading really resonates with me. I notice most of my life is lived in this mind space, thinking about the future, busy with anticipatory thoughts. But zazen—even when it’s boring or difficult—helps me see that, and maybe, with practice, loosens that grip a little.
Bob
Hakone Zendo 