In ordinary life we all carry around what we can call an imaginary baseboard : an electrical baseboard that jolts us whenever we encounter what feels like a problem. We can imagine it with millions of outlets, all within our reach. Whenever we feel threatened or upset, we plug ourselves into it and react to the situation. The baseboard is our defensive reaction. We're always plugged into it, but we especially notice it at times of stress. We have made a decision that ordinary life - life as it actually is - is unacceptable to us. And we try to counter what's happening.
All of this is inevitable. Our parents were not totally enlightened beings or buddhas, but other beings and events contributed too.
Suppose that Gloria has said something snippy to me. The bare facts are simply that she's said something. Immediately, however, I feel separated from Gloria. As far as I'm concerned, there is something wrong with her. Now I have it in for Gloria. The truth is, however, that my issue is not with Gloria ; she has nothing to do with it. While it's true that she has said something, my upset comes not from her but from plugging into my baseboard. I experience my baseboard as a type of tension, which is unpleasant. I don't want to have anything to do with such a feeling, so I go to war with Gloria. But it's my baseboard that is causing me distress.
Whenever something major happens in our lives, we get a sharp shock from our baseboard. We don't know what to do with that shock. Though the shock comes from inside us, we assume it comes from outside, over there.
In fact, the real source of my distress is not Gloria. She did something I didn't like, but her behavior is not the source of my pain. The source of the pain is my fictional baseboard.
In sitting, we gradually become more aware of our body, and we find that it is contracted all the time. What can we do about this contraction ? The first thing is to be aware that it exists. This usually takes a number of years of sitting. In the first years of sitting, we are usually dealing with the gross thoughts that we cook up out of the seeming troubles that we have with the universe. These thoughts mask the underlying contraction. We have to deal with them, and settle our lives down to the point that our emotional reactions are not so obstreperous. When our lives become somewhat more settled and normal, we become aware of the underlying marginal contraction that has been present all of the time. We can then become aware of the contraction more strongly when something goes wrong from our point of view.
The distress is caused not by the events, but by our baseboard. Practice is not about the passing events of our life. Practice is about the baseboard. The point of practice is to become friendly with the baseboard. We're not going to get rid of it all at once ; we're too fond of it for that. But as the mind truly quiets and becomes less interested in fighting with the world, when we give up our position in some pointless battle, when we don't have to do all of that fighting because we come to see it for what it is, then our ability to just sit increases. When we go back to the body, it's not that we uncover some great melodrama going on inside of us. For most of us most of the time, the contraction is so marginal that we can hardly tell it's there. Yet it is. When we just sit and keep getting close to feeling this contraction, we learn to rest in it for longer and longer periods : five seconds, ten seconds, and eventually thirty minutes or more.
Because the baseboard is our creation and has no fundamental reality, it begins to resolve a bit, here and there. After sesshin for a time we may find that it's gone. Then it may be back. If we understand our practice, over years of sitting the baseboard becomes thinner and less dominating. We can catch ourselves being plugged in by watching how we talk to ourselves and others : 'There is something wrong with him. It's his fault. He should be different'. 'I should be better'. 'Life's just unfair to me'. 'I am truly hopeless'. When we play these sentences through our minds without questioning them, then we're waging a false fight and we end up where any false fight leads : nowhere, or into more trouble.
We have to wage the real fight : to stay with that which we do not want to stay with. There is no quick, easy fix. We look for ways to punish others for what they have done. Such activity is not experiencing our anger, but avoiding it through drama. When truly experienced, anger is very quiet. It has a certain dignity. There's no display, no acting out. It's just being with that fundamental contraction that I have called the baseboard. Whe we truly stay with anger, then the personal and self-centered thoughts separate out and we're left with pure energy, which can be used in a compassionate way. That's the whole story of practice. A person who can does this with great consistency is a person we call enlightened. A truly enlightened person is one who can transform the energy nearly all of the time. It's not that the energy no longer arises ; the question is, what do we do with it ?
When we sit with great dignity with this energy, though it is painful at first, it turns into the place of great rest. That means resting in who I truly am. Those who would molest me cannot find me here. Why can't they find me here ? Because there is no one home. There is no one here. When I am pure energy, I am no longer me. I am a functioning for good. That transformation is why we're sitting. It doesn't happen overnight. But if we sit well, over time we become less and less engaged in interpersonal mischief, harming ourselves and others. Sitting burns up the self-centered element and leaves us with the energy of our emotions, without the destructiveness. There is real peace when we rest within that fundamental contraction, just experiencing the body as it is. If I truly rest in it, my body conforms to it, and there is no separation.
At that point, something shifts. How do I feel about Gloria now ? Oh, we had a little disagreement, so we'll take a nice walk today and talk about it. No problem.
'Nothing Special Living Zen'
By/Charlotte Joko Beck
Salam,
Cherine
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