I would like to write about the unconscious, since working with and befriending the unconscious is a key feature of living a deeply satisfying life. The psychotherapist Carl Jung said, “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious” and the title of a talk Suzuki Roshi gave at Stanford University years ago was, “Zen Beyond Self-consciousness.”
One fascinating parallel between western psychology and Buddhist psychology is the belief that our conscious mind is just the tip of an iceberg, the rest of which we are generally not conscious. We drive to work every morning, leaving home and arriving at work, but not recalling much about the drive or even paying attention to where and how we park. And we often move through each of our activities, habitually doing things with little or no awareness of our unconscious thoughts or feelings, even though these thoughts may cause painful emotions. These may include statements that we heard many times from a critical parent, teacher, or significant. They became over-learned and lodged deeply in our psyches so they affect our everyday lives without our even knowing it. There’s a division within Western psychology about the degree to which these unconscious processes are accessible and changeable. In Freud’s view, not only is the unconscious impossible to directly observe, we are utterly at its mercy. However, we can access it by visiting a therapist a couple of times a week or more and relaxing enough to allow our chattering mind to slow down so these deep memories can be elicited. Insight into them frees us from being at their mercy. Practitioners of modern psychodynamic psychology have maintained one key point of Freud’s in particular. They believe that we can all develop insights into how stored memories from our childhood affect us so they don’t plague us. We can release repressed traumas, anger, sexual frustration, the fear of death, which are lodged in our unconscious. Here’s an example from my own life: About 30 years ago I was seeing a therapist to help me deal with a work difficulty, a fear I was having of an older woman at work who unpredictably erupted in anger. Kay served in an administrative capacity, but technically had no power over me. As I looked into this with the support of my therapist, I realized that my fear was a projection of fear I felt in my childhood about my own mother’s angry outbursts. I had over-learned the need to flee from my own mother’s anger to such a degree that I was projecting this feeling on another older woman. Our experience is not only something we cannot control because of the power of projections like these, generally we are not even aware of them. For some time I had wondered why was I afraid of Kay. With the support of my therapist, I learned to see the projections from my mother and little by little free myself of them. Most modern psychodynamic therapists, influenced by both Carl Jung and Milton Erikson, believe that the unconscious has a positive side which Freud did not see, a side which we can draw on to become more authentic. Jung is especially close to Buddhist teachers in positing a collective unconscious, which is common to all humanity. This is a shared storehouse holding latent memories from our ancestral and evolutionary past, which Jung believed we can access through therapy, dream interpretation, active imagination, and even meditation. Both many Western thinkers and Buddhists believe that we can train ourselves to be more open to this deeper part, allowing hidden thoughts and hints to flow upward. Inventors do this, as well as explorers and artists and scholars, creativity in any walk of life requires it. Many of us know about Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, engineer, and inventor. He had been putting tremendous effort into thinking about a seemingly unsolvable problem, which he stopped thinking about and lowered himself into a hot bath. As he was relaxing in the tub, he noticed that the water level rose and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged. He then realized that the volume of irregular objects could be measured with precision, leapt out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting EUREKA (I have found it)! Through meditation or some other form of mind quieting, each of us can calm our conscious minds. When internal chatter is no longer impinging, deeper insights which are always near us, may arise, and we can live our lives with more moment to moment clarity and fewer projections. At the end of his life, Jung suggested that human nature resembled the twin sons of Zeus and Leda: “We are that pair, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one” (i.e. the conscious and the unconscious). Some interesting neurological studies have been done that give some support to Jung’s insight—research on the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of the brain. The left is the logical, analytic, mathematical side. It is the seat of linguistic consciousness, which enables us to describe and think about the world. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is responsible for our orientation in space, our body image, our ability recognition faces, and various artistic efforts. But it’s completely silent. It’s the seat of unconscious awareness that cannot be coded in language. The process of meditation enables us to activate awareness within the right side. Focusing attention in the present suspends left brain executive functions so that the resources of the unconscious can be available to us. It seems that our well being depends on the capacity of the right hemisphere to “read” and delight in the textures and patterns of world beyond language. Here’s an interchange from Chinese Zen in about 900 CE: When Priest Yaoshan was sitting in meditation a monk asked, “What do you think about, sitting in steadfast composure?” Yaoshan said, “I think not thinking.” The monk said, “How do you think not thinking?” Yaoshan said, “Non-thinking.” We have a deep power beneath the clutter and distractions of normal thought, which our right hemisphere allows us to tune into. Even though modern research in brain science occurred after my teacher’s death, I am quite sure that this is what he was referring to when he talked about Zen beyond self-consciousness. In my last blog I talked about Zen Center’s mission statement, focusing on the meaning of “deep and quiet joy”, and suggesting there are three levels. In this piece I would like to talk about the deepest or unconditioned level, as well as the rest of the mission statement:
Our mission is to help people experience a deep and quiet joy- a joy that arises whenever we are fully engaged in the work or play of this moment The deepest level of joy is not influenced by conditions because it emanates from what is called our “Buddha nature,” our still, quiescent nature that does not change regardless of the circumstance. When we sink into this deepest level, we are no longer caught by an “I” that is separate, and our feeling of well being is not affected by things that happen to us. It has no boundary whatsoever and is present in all aspects of our life. It’s what Walt Whitman was referring to when he said, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” In a recent blog I suggested you might get a taste of that by repeating to yourselves, “I am more than my anger (hatred, fear, jealousy)” any time you find yourself getting stuck by an emotion. I mention this deepest level of joy with a slight misgiving. If you idealize it and strive to be someone different than your current experience, you can get caught in the trap of spiritual bypassing, denying or repressing your needs and feelings in the service of an “ideal.” This is not too healthy. As we gradually deepen our meditation through both daily practice and retreats, we are no longer thrown off when things “don’t go right” in our lives. Through patient, persistent practice, which I call turtle practice, we become less and less derailed when someone disagrees with us or criticizes us. Instead, we are able to drink from the deep reservoir of well-being that is the underpinning of life, an underpinning which we experience when we let go of all of the divisions which our mind makes. I call this going into Bodhidharma’s cave. First we need a light to guide us- any kind of light-this could take the form of a phrase like, “I am more than this fear.” At some point we can blow out the light, let go of the phrase and enter and even bask in total darkness. When we do this we have a feeling that all beings, all life, is supporting us. Here’s our mission statement again: to help people experience a deep and quiet joy—a joy that arises whenever we are fully engaged in the work or play of this moment When you honor your commitment to your meditation practice you are on a path of transformation: a path through suffering to happiness (in Sanskrit this would be from dukkha to sukkha). We are attempting to move toward a pinnacle. Whether it be wisdom, awakening, or fulfillment. But we need to be careful with this process. Maybe when you were in grammar school you thought junior high would be the pinnacle. Maybe in high school you thought it would be in college. I can remember looking at the course catalogue my first year in college and thinking that mastering the material in these courses would surely be the pinnacle. But it didn’t happen. Or maybe your career, or maybe your new relationship, or maybe having kids- striving to reach the pinnacle. Or maybe you decide you want to become a Zen “master” by going through the entire formal process. Maybe when you get initiated you thought that would be the pinnacle, but not much happened, or at least not enough. Or maybe when you become ordained, or maybe when you become an independent teacher. Where’s that pinnacle? And your life goes by and you can’t quite remember what the pinnacle should have been. Did you miss it? There it is somewhere in the future just out of reach. As Simon and Garfunkel said, it’s always, “Slip slidin’ away. You know the nearer your destination, the more it’s slip slidin’ away.” My root teacher, Suzuki Roshi, warned us about getting seduced by the sense that we are going to reach a pinnacle later on by telling us not to do stepladder Zen. Yes, Buddhism is a path, but Zen is a dot, which includes all the other dots within it. As you read these words on this moment, could this be the pinnacle? The dot reminds us that we can enjoy each activity by just giving ourselves completely to it and not worry about moving up. Then we can bask in the sun, play in the lake, enjoy the rain, and even quack with the ducks? Are you on a path or on a dot? If you are a Zen Buddhist practitioner, the answer is both. The middle way is one of balance. “Living in the now” is wonderful, but when we walk around doing what we feel like all the time, we can mess things up. Besides, our hearts yearns for some sense of direction. This winding trail I’m walking now is leading me somewhere. It’s a series of dots. I only have a dim vision of where I want to go, but that’s fine. If my vision is too well honed or specific I may be captured by it and forget to the joy of being present on each dot. Dot practice means embracing each moment fully instead of waiting for some so-called pinnacle. When I do this, I can act from the deepest part of my being and stay true to my purpose as a traveler on a path. Then we can value both work (the path) and play (the dot) and experience that they are two sides of the same coin. If your work feels just like work, how can you make it more playful? Lewis Carroll has a suggestion in Alice in Wonderland: “No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.” “Wouldn’t it, really?” said Alice, in a tone of great surprise. “Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle. “Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’” The porpoise represents play. Yes, we all need a sense of purpose, but lets not be so intent on getting somewhere that we forget that play is as valuable as work, and often more liberating. When we do this we are doing just what our mission statement says, “fully engaging in the work or play of this moment.” In Soto Zen Buddhism the word for full engagement is shikan, translated at “just to.” Whether it be shikantaza (just to sit), shikan do the dishes or shikan mow the lawn, full engagement in the activity includes relationship and reciprocity. When I am fully engaged in watering my tomato plants, my energy is not split in a hundred different directions. And as the plants absorb the water and perk up, they are showing their connection with me. Play is intrinsically motivated. It may have an end, but it is the process that’s most valued. When my youngest grandson was four years old, he loved making sandcastles on the beach. He didn’t mind if the sand washed a sandcastle away because the activity itself was his pleasure. Talk about being fully engaged! Regardless of how arduous our work may be, coming back to our beginner’s mind, as Suzuki said. Any time we get tied in knots about a difficult task, we to remind ourselves that we can “start over.” Work is to produce some valued end, in some cases realizing whatever dim vision we are working toward bringing alive. That’s our extrinsic motivation. A mature meditation practitioner has learned how to incorporate both the intrinsic and extrinsic in to her way of life. Let’s be serious about our purpose while we enjoy our porpoise. If we do this each of us can experience “a deep and quiet joy- a joy that arises whenever we are fully engaged in the work or play of this moment.” I’d like to say something about our Zen Center’s mission statement. I wrote it about twelve or thirteen years ago, but have rarely mentioned it over the years. It reads:
Our mission is to help people experience a deep and quiet joy- a joy that arises whenever we are fully engaged in the work or play of this moment. The Buddhist Sanskrit word for joy is mudita, and deep joy is paramudita. The best way to get in touch with this joy is to quiet the mind. “Still waters run deep,” as the saying goes. There’s an inner spring available to everyone at all times. The more you drink from this spring, the more you will settle into your own joyfulness, as well as relishing in others’ joy. This joy will become more of a natural part of your life as you strengthen your meditation practice. The “far enemies” of joy are jealousy (envy) and greed. “Why does so-and-so have all this joy,” you may ask yourself. “Why’s he laughing so much? What about me?” I can remember feeling that way about my first teacher, who seemed to think lots of things that annoyed me were a riot. Joy’s “near enemy,” is exhilaration; grasping at one pleasant experience after another out of a sense of insufficiency or lack. It’s actually not the exhilaration that’s the problem. It’s depending on stimulation or thrills to feel good. I just spent an afternoon with my grandson at an amusement park trying to keep up with him as he ran from one thrilling ride to another. At his developmental stage, this is healthy and normal. But adults who are trying to tap into the deep stillness which is at the base of our being (also known as Buddha Nature) need to pay attention to whether they are addicted to exhilaration to cover our emotional pain or discomfort. The dharma teacher Phillip Moffitt suggests that there are three levels of joy. First, there is the joy evoked by a situation. Maybe you just spent a moment with your pet, or with your own child or a friend’s child. (A couple of hours before I gave my most recent dharma talk, a friend’s three-year-old asked me to play doctor with him. I was having so much fun being cured of my illness that I was almost late for my talk.) Or maybe you finished a challenging physical workout, or took a pleasant walk in nature. It’s natural and healthy to savor moments like these. It may be important to pay attention to things that dilute this savoring. Are your thoughts about the past or the future interfering with the pure enjoyment of your activity? Are you worried that others will be jealous of you? Do you want to hang on to this experience instead of moving on to your next activity? I mentored a guy I will call Norm for starting about 15 years ago. Norm was an earnest meditator, so earnest that he didn’t make time in his life for activities that filled him up, that were naturally joyful. Through a series of one to one meetings with me, Norm began to realize that he was uncomfortable with joyful feelings. He remembered that his parents didn’t have a lot of joy in their lives. He had learned not to trust joyful feelings. They made him feel vulnerable. He came to realize that he had a deep seated belief that if he allowed himself to feel too much joy, he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything significant in his life, a message he got from his parents (and they got from their own immigrant parents). Once he became conscious of this fear and the message he was giving himself, he was able to see through it and begin to deeply appreciate his moments. He even learned to appreciate complements. Norm was CEO of a small non-profit whose mission was to help disadvantaged kids. Earlier this year I went to his retirement party. What a different guy he was than 15 years before! I watched him smile warmly as he received complement after complement for all the things he had done to help kids. When it was his turn to talk, he said, “Yes, I did all of these things.” Everyone laughed at his blunt forthrightness. Then he went on to say, “and everything I accomplished was due to my heartfelt partnership with you.” Afterward, I told Norm how proud I was of him for learning how to tap into his own deep and quiet joy. Following the lead of dharma teacher Phillip Moffitt, I’d like to look at three different components of negative change as well as effective ways of dealing with them. First, there is anticipation; then there is the moment when disappointments arise; finally, there are the after effects.
First, in regards to anticipation, Mark Twain got it right when he said, “Some of my biggest disappointments never happened.” When you start to worry about a possible event, you contract into fear, and this makes what you fear more likely to occur. Years ago, one of our female Sangha members, who suffered from asthma, was afraid to do retreats at our Zen center, because she envisioned herself gasping for air and passing out. But Katagiri Roshi encouraged her to attend, keep her inhaler by her side, and each time she felt constriction in her throat, to focus on the constriction, itself, with no judgment or commentary. By doing this, the woman found that the fear abated and so did the constriction. She freed herself from what William Blake referred to as her “mind-forged manacles.” When we stop fearing a negative outcome, we can let go of the distrust of life that imprisons us and simply embrace whatever happens. Second, how do we work with major disappointments when the negative event actually occurs? The best way to practice this is by staying present and withstanding the emotional pull of small disappointments in your daily meditation practice. All we need to do is:
Third, after a disappointment occurs, its natural to have anger or sadness linger around for a while. However, its possible to accept this loss as an event rather than transforming it into a consuming story. When we do the latter, we make two mistakes: First, we create a false identity, a self that is solid and never changing that is continually reinforced by the story. But if you observe yourself closely, you may see that you are not a single, uniform self but a constantly changing group of personalities. I was trained as a therapist in transactional psychology, which lays out three different components of our “self”, the internal child, the internal parent, and the adult. Over the years I have worked a lot with Zen practitioners to acknowledge, nurture, and take care of the little, vulnerable child inside who often feels fearful and powerless. I also have helped folks become familiar with the internal parent, who we developed as a social necessity, but often turns into a critic, or in many cases a tyrant, with a dominating and even abusive voice. And finally, there is the internal adult, who serves as a mediator between or in the best circumstances, an integrator, which includes the other two in a healthy complementary relationship. And in Zen we go a step further in referring to the Big Self or Heart/Mind, which embraces, not only these three, but also the multitude of energies and voices, which manifest themselves in our psyche. The second mistake we make when we are caught by a memory of negative change is to maintain the illusion that our loss is a fresh event when it has passed. Maybe it was a disappointment in your childhood, the loss of a loved one, a failed relationship, a major disease. No matter how disappointing or traumatic it was, you could allow the lingering emotional stickiness to die by simply letting it arise in and burn itself away in your non-judgmental awareness. In this way it may turn into fertilizer that supports your life. I have written before about the guilt and grief I felt, both when I was unable to help my sister with schizophrenia, and when my younger brother committed suicide in a locked ward. By continuing my daily meditation during this dark time and allowing my confusion, anger, and grief sit with me on my cushion, little by little I both burned off my guilt and burned through my grief and the ashes became fertilizer- fertilizer which gave me strength and energy to spend the next 25 years of my life creating the community-based support which my siblings never had. It’s kind of surprising and quite wonderful that a simple practice like bare awareness can transform the hell of disappointment is into a celebration of life. The historical Buddha pointed out that everything is continually in flux. What we call “things” are conglomerations of points in a process of the continual movement of all life. This is similar to science’s reference to all life as a vibrating energy field. Lao Tzu, a contemporary of Buddha’s in China, advises us to, “Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
This is the ultimate.”
Following his instructions for flowing with each activity works when things are going well. It may be quite easy to experience flow if we engage in activities we are familiar with and love doing. But what about dealing negative change, when things don’t work out the way we would like them to? At the end of April I broke a tendon in my foot playing soccer with my grandsons. The rhythm of my daily life was up-ended. Not only couldn’t I drive or sit on a meditation cushion, I couldn’t even enter into or move around our Zen center without considerable difficulty for some time. Maybe you finally get what you want in your career, or in a relationship or life, but things seem harder than ever. Or maybe an aging parent or you own child has become more difficult to manage. You may say to yourself, “If only this hadn’t happened, I could be in flow.” Disappointments may loom so large that the possibility of experiencing flow seems virtually impossible. Maybe you’ve been practicing meditation for two years, or five years or ten years and you are wondering why it still takes so much of your energy to cope. Why do you still fall in troughs of sadness, depression, worry, irritation, moodiness, anxiety, and lethargy? “Flow,” you may say to yourself, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Someone who read my new book Zen in the Age of Anxiety: Wisdom for Navigating Our Modern Lives complained, “All your book does is tell me over and over to sit in meditation and accept, accept. How does that help?” What he didn’t understand is that the desire to be in a different state of mind or situation than our current one inhibits our natural flow. When dharma teacher Phillip Moffitt discusses this he refers to Dante. In Dante’s Inferno there’s a sign at the entrance to Hell, which says, “Abandon hope, you who enter here.” Of course, we all need hope, but too often hope is a disguised refusal to be with things just as they are. When you reject this moment because it is unpleasant, you are rejecting the only moment you have to be alive. And if you get lost in disappointment about the future or the past, you will never experience the flow that Lao Tzu talked about. Buddha suggests that we don’t embrace change because of the Eight Worldly Concerns: gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. He refers to these as “terrible twins” because each always arrives with its opposite. He also suggests that these concerns are all emanations of the Three Poisons, which are the cause of all of our suffering: not getting what we want; getting what we don’t want; ignoring everything else. In our meditation practice we observe these concerns as they appear, as well as the underlying push/pulls of the Poisons. We observe a particular desire, then see how you identify with that desire and how easily we become frustrated and disappointed. At that moment, we have the opportunity to follow Dante. When Dante first sees the sign he is alarmed. He asks Virgil, his guide through Hell, about it. Virgil answers that it means to abandon cowardliness and mistrust. When we encounter moments of pain and feelings of loss and confusion, we can a.) live in denial, b.) obsess about our pains and disappointments, or c.) embrace what is. This only happens when we enter into a given activity fully without hoping to get something out of it. We can come to see pain and loss as great teachers. “I’m lost in sadness, and so identified with it that it is causing me to suffer.” Luckily, since everything passes as part of the great energy flow of life, so do pain and loss. |
AuthorTim Burkett, Guiding Teacher Archives
April 2022
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