No End to Problems

The beauty of life as it is

Note: This is the article I had planned on publishing a few days ago, but I ended up publishing my “Silence” message instead. It feels now like this article is perhaps worth sharing after all, so here it is, written before I wrote “Silence” and “A Few Words”:

No End to Problems: the beauty of life as it is

We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up,
This is our world.
All we have to do after that—
Is to die.

—Ikkyu

That’s not what most people want to hear, and yet, it can be a profoundly liberating realization. But it’s not what most religion and spirituality, as well as most current versions of nonduality, are offering.

Many things can bring us to the spiritual or religious life or to an interest in nonduality, but some of the most common things are surely the desire to end our suffering, to explain the unexplainable, to provide psychological security, and to remove our fear of both death and the possible meaninglessness of existence. And many of the ways religion and spirituality have addressed all these human concerns involve magical thinking, absurd beliefs and fundamentalist dogmas. The whole spiritual endeavor has sometimes been compared to comfort food or opium—addictive and unhealthy.

In my experience, there’s much more to the spiritual, religious or contemplative impulse than all of that. But I’m always reflecting on what about this whole realm of spirituality is of real value and what is maybe just comfort food or opium (or worse).

There are certainly insights, discoveries and practices that can greatly reduce unnecessary suffering. Meditation and meditative inquiry have been life-changing for me and many others. And there is certainly a capacity in human beings to experience dimensions of consciousness that feel open, spacious, unbound, unconfined, capacious, unconditioned and whole, and awakening to these seamless, boundless, impersonal, transcendent dimensions can also be profoundly life-changing.

But none of this eliminates all our human problems. And that bothers us. We want some undoubtable explanation of life and some final end to problems and troubles. We want metaphysical certainty. This desire and the hope of satisfying it sets us up for endless seeking and creates an appetite for comfort food and opium, for magical thinking and beliefs. And all too often, religion and spirituality (nonduality included) provide just that. But not always.

One of my Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck, said of our problems and difficulties, “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.”

Leonard Cohen, who spent several years as a Zen monk and also traveled to India to meet Ramesh Balsekar, once put it like this in an interview:

“We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal… But there is the consolation of no exit… Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament… and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.”

Or as my first Zen teacher Mel Weitsman told me, “We’re always looking for diamonds in the mud, but actually the mud itself is pretty interesting. That's what Zen practice is about. The mud.”

My teacher Joko Beck was very much about the mud, and about exposing all our curative fantasies. She has a chapter in her first book, Everyday Zen, called “No Hope.” This is an excerpt from that chapter:

Today, what I want to talk about is having no hope. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s not terrible at all. A life lived with no hope is a peaceful, joyous, compassionate life. As long as we identify with this mind and body—and we all do—we hope for things that we think will take care of them. We hope for success. We hope for health. We hope for enlightenment. We have all sorts of things we hope for. All hope, of course, is about sizing up the past and projecting it into the future.

Anyone who sits for any length of time sees that there is no past and no future except in our mind…

I can remember when I used to daydream literally four or five hours at a time. And now—sadly I see so many people dreaming their lives away. Sometimes a man or a woman dreams of an ideal partner; they dream and they dream. But when we live life in dreams and hopes, then what life can offer, that man or woman sitting right next to us—ordinary, unglamorous—the wonder of that life escapes us because we are hoping for something special, for some ideal…

We spend a lot of time looking for something called the truth. And there is no such thing, except in each second, each activity of our life. But our vain hope for a resting place somewhere makes us ignorant and unappreciative of what is here right now. So in sesshin [meditation intensive], in zazen [Zen meditation], what does it mean to have no hope?

It means… to just sit. Nothing is wrong with dreams and fantasies. Just don’t hold on to them; see their unreality and turn away. Stay with the only thing that’s real: the experiencing of breath and the body and the environment.

Now none of us wants to abandon our hope. And to be honest, none of us is going to abandon it all at once. But we can have periods when for a few minutes or a few hours, there is just what is, just this flow. And we are more in touch with the only thing we’ll ever have, which is our life.

So if we practice like this, what reward will we get?… What will we get out of it? The answer, of course, is nothing. So let’s not have hope. We won’t get anything. We’ll get our life, of course, but we’ve got that already… This life is nirvana. Where did we think it was?

—Charlotte Joko Beck, from Everyday Zen: Love and Work

There’s a story I’ve always loved about Shunryu Suzuki, the teacher who founded the San Francisco Zen Center. Once during a week-long sesshin [meditation intensive], Suzuki began his daily talk by saying, very slowly, “The problems you are experiencing now”— will go away, everyone thought he was going to say — “will continue for the rest of your life.” He was joking and he was also totally serious.

That story reminds me of something Karl Renz said that I also love: “You cannot avoid one single misery. Ignorance. None of that can be avoided. All of that is what you are. No end to it. There is no happy end. That’s the beauty of it.”

Why does he call it beauty? Why does the quote delight me?

I think it’s because it relaxes that movement of desperately looking for an escape or for something better, and it opens us to the possibility of simply being alive. I also think it’s because the beauty in life is intimately connected to its fragility and imperfection, which is why we love living flowers so much more than plastic ones.

We often overlook the beauty and wonder in this simple aliveness because we are hoping for something else, some imagined extraordinary experience—we want eternal bliss, a more perfect me (a selfless, no-self, me). And these things always seem to be either in the past, as a memory, or in the future, as a hope. Right now, there’s just the dishes to wash, the laundry to do, our job at the office, shopping at the supermarket, dealing with an unruly child, the pain in our hip—“ordinary, unglamorous” everyday life—just this.

And of course, we also know that “just this” can, in the next instant, involve tremendous pain from disease, natural disasters and human cruelty. We may believe we are more than the bodymind, we may have an undeniable felt sense of being open, vast, spacious, unbound, unconfined, unencapsulated pure spirit—but the human dimension undeniably still shows up, and as bodyminds, as human beings, we are fragile, vulnerable, sensitive organisms, and we’re smart enough to know it. Unlike other animals, we humans have a vivid imagination based on shared and accumulated knowledge and memory. We can worry and be terrified about things that never actually end up happening.

Very often, we are not noticing the beauty and wonder in all the ordinary activities of everyday life because we’re so convinced they are boring, tedious and uninteresting. We are seeking something bigger, better, flashier, more satisfying, more secure, less painful, more enduring, whatever it is. And we are telling ourselves the story of boredom and tedium and “not good enough” and “I’m not all the way there yet,” and “this isn’t it,” and “something needs to happen,” and “what if it gets worse?” and “I hope it gets better,” And we believe and live in these stories.

But we may begin to notice that these stories are all about a fictional character, an imagined “me,” a mental image. We may begin to realize that seeking is painful and dissatisfying. It’s like an addiction—there is something alluring in it, but it never really delivers. We may begin to realize that what we really want is to be at peace with life as it is, to be comfortable with how we actually are, and to be fully alive in our actual moment-to-moment life, here and now, exactly as it is.

Of course, like any addiction, seeking and hoping and fearing don’t end on command. And they rarely, if ever, end once-and-for-all forever after. In my experience, they are gradually worn down by seeing clearly, by awaring (again and again, always now) what is alluring about these patterns of emotion-thought and how they disappoint in the end and what is at the center or root of them. Awareness is the transformative power.

So if we find ourselves seeking and grasping, hoping for a better future or anxiously dreading a more terrible one, can it simply be noticed that this is happening? Is it possible not to judge it, take it personally, or go to war with it? To just let it be as it is? And if judging and resisting happen, can we let that be as it is?

Can we simply feel the seeking energy in the body, the contraction and tension of it, but without calling it contraction or tension—simply feeling it, wordlessly? And perhaps also noticing that this is only another shape that present experiencing is taking—another momentary movement of energy, another impersonal weather event, something the universe is doing. Without the labels and stories, without taking it personally and giving it meaning, without resisting it, how solid and substantial is it? Is it really even a problem?

And likewise, can we truly feel the joy and peace in those moments when everything relaxes and opens and there is simply present experiencing, just as it is?

Maybe we can enjoy the miracle of simply being alive. Maybe when the search for meaning dissolves, the fear of meaningless goes with it. Maybe, as I say on the home page of my website, “In holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom.” Maybe we don’t actually need a security blanket or another mouthful of comfort food. Or maybe we do. There’s nothing wrong with wanting comfort. It’s very human. It’s part of our animal nature. But unlike other animals, we often look for it in ways that will only make the discomfort worse. As I often say, no other animal smokes and drinks itself to death. But whatever happens in the next moment, it will be an unfathomable and unavoidable movement of life itself that cannot, at that moment, be otherwise than how it is.

What I call spirituality or being awake is not about some imagined perfection for this phantom “me.” It’s simply being alive, right here, right now.

Ten thousand flowers in spring,
the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer,
snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

— Wu-men

Or as I put it in my book Nothing to Grasp:

Everything plays its part and then it dies and becomes food for something else in an endless recycling where nothing is wasted and nothing is ever really lost. In that sense, we can’t ever really waste our time, lose our lives, or miss the boat. Wherever we go, here we are. Even the apparent mistakes are all part of the process, the grit that creates the pearl.

During the last year she was alive, at age 95, my mother said many times, “It’s so freeing to realize that nothing really matters.” She said it joyously, with relief, as if a burden had been lifted. She also said over and over, “Love yourself.”

Love sees the True Self, the boundless absolute, right here in the messiness and imperfection of this human life. Love sees that nothing matters in the way we habitually think it does, and at the same time, it recognizes everything as the Holy Reality.

In the end, it gets simpler and simpler. Watching the clouds, hearing the birds sing, drinking a cup of coffee, breathing in and breathing out, biting the fingers, wiggling the toes, opening the heart, being Here / Now – this that you cannot not be – nothing is more important than just this.

—from Nothing to Grasp

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I’ll leave you with a conversation between myself and Robert Saltzman from September of 2018:

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Postscript from this morning:

That’s the end of the post I wrote earlier this past week and originally intended to publish last Wednesday night.

I’m not sure when I’ll be back with more outpourings, but perhaps the absence of words from me for a short while will be a nice break for all of you as well. We can be together in silence. Again, thank you all for your love and support. ❤️🙏

Love to all,
joan