Life in Central America

Don’t make anything!

This was one of the favorite sayings of my Korean Zen master. He never bothered to explain any of his commandments, and we were afraid to ask. He could wilt you with his royal indignation - and he could whack you with his stick. They were perfectly obvious, so how could he possibly explain them?

I always had the hunch that this particular saying was important to me, but I was also baffled. What did he mean? Did he mean “Don’t do anything that wasn’t important?” This seemed reasonable, because I knew I did a lot of things weren’t really important - to me or anybody else. But I also had the hunch there was more to it than that.

Now I can begin to understand what he meant – maybe. And I can also understand why he didn’t explain it – because you can’t. Like a lot of Zen sayings, you can either understand them, or you can’t. And no amount of thinking is going to get you there.

Pain is stored in the muscles

It is probably stored in other places too, like the lining of the stomach and the large intestine - or anywhere in the body. But it is stored in the muscles for sure, especially the muscles of the back.

It also affects the muscles of the face, this is obvious to anyone. A general statement would be: our emotions affect our body. Any dog knows this, and can read body language better than most humans. They know how people really feel, not how they think they feel. (There is sometimes a difference.)

There are subtle feelings stored in the body that cannot be verbalized. But this does not mean they are unimportant. As my meditation teacher likes to say: subtle is significant.

And this is one of the things that start to happen as you develop your meditation practice. You begin to notice feelings and sensations you weren’t aware of before, because you were always covering them up, or avoiding them.

The changes in you life as you become more aware are subtle, and maintaining these changes can be difficult, because the old ways always feel better, even if they are painful.

Dangerous spiritual leaders

Hi Shinzen,

I finally completed this project, and it seems to be popular. Your blog gets about 3 hits a day, so somebody must be looking at it. And I want to do some publicity and get more people looking at it.

But it needs one more talk to make it complete, and I quote:
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Developing a healthy no-self

And the other thing is: take feedback from your environment. Listen to everyone. If they tell you you’re not responding in ways that are appropriate, let the no-self hear that and it will learn, it will process that feedback. How does a baby learn to walk? It falls to the right, it falls to the left, it makes a mistake in this direction, and it makes a mistake in that direction. And when it falls, it gets the feedback: “I put too much weight that way.” When it falls that way, it gets feedback. Eventually, it learns how to be balanced. That’s how the self-self learns.

The no-self learns in exactly the same way: it makes mistakes. And if it’s willing to listen to ordinary people, its environment, then it will learn from those mistakes and will become a healthy no-self. You might think it’s hard enough just to enter the no-self, but that’s only part of the challenge. Because there’s a whole range of no-self experiences from totally pathological to super-healthy. And there’s a whole range, and there’s a lot of in-betweens. But that’s another topic, and I don’t want to get off on that now.
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You must have a tape on this subject. I know you have talked about it, because I heard you myself. It’s a crucial issue that the spiritual community needs to acknowledge.

It won’t make you any friends with new-age people, because they talk about enlightenment all the time, as if it were the same as niceness. They need to be enlightened, because there are always dangerous spiritual leaders, and they do a lot of harm.

Enlightenment can be hazardous

Most people have a warm, fuzzy attitude toward enlightenment. They haven’t the faintest notion what it is, but they are sure it’s a good thing, and no harm can come of it.

Shinzen Young, my meditation teacher, takes a hard-nosed approach to this subject. He recognizes that some enlightened people are pure devils. For example, a Tibetan master gave AIDS to three of is male students, and there have been numerous sexual scandals involving Zen masters. In Japanese they even have a word for this. And Shinzen recognizes there are obstacles in the path to enlightenment. It’s not a bed of roses.

If this interests you, check out his talk Overcoming Three Seemingly Insurmountable Obstacles to Enlightenment. This is great stuff, and I haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else. I haven’t finished transcribing it, but most of it is there.

A blog for Shinzen Young

Shinzen Young was my meditation teacher for many years. It one time, I decided to transcribe some of his talks, so he could print them. He never got around to printing them, so I am going to put some of them on another one of my blogs.

Shinzen has his own site. He has online recordings of some of his talks there. You might want to listen to a few.