Nothing Special: Justice

"An appropriate and compassionate response does not come from the fight for justice..."  --Charlotte Joko Beck

Joko Beck in her book, Nothing Special, Living Zen, observes "When someone insists, 'I am never angry,' I am incredulous. Since anger, and its subsets, depression, anxiety, resentment, jealousy, gossip and backbiting and so on-- dominate our lives, we need to investigate the whole problem of anger with care... For the psychologically mature person, the ills and injustices of life are handled by counter-aggression, in which one makes an effort to eliminate the injustice and create justice. Often such efforts are dictatorial, full of anger and self-righteousness. In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice, but compassion... All anger is based upon judgements..."

The best answer to injustice is compassion, or love.  Joko Beck writes, "An appropriate and compassionate response does not come from the fight for justice, but from that radical dimension of practice that "passes all understanding," love.
As the Christ taught, "love your enemies," and Gandhi and Blessed Mother Teresea of Calcutta both knew, injustice is highlighted and resolved by means of love, of peaceful protest. It's not easy. We must go through the darkness, the pain and grief before coming to the lightness that will ultimately be our guide, and our justice.

"Let us not adopt some facile, narrowly psychological view of our lives. The radical dimension that I speak of demands everything that we are and have. Joy, not happiness, is its fruit."

Joy, the Radical Dimension

"There is no peace without justice" --Pope John Paul II

Joko Beck in her book, Nothing Special, Living Zen, observes "When someone insists, 'I am never angry,' I am incredulous. Since anger, and its subsets, depression, anxiety, resentment, jealousy, gossip and backbiting and so on-- dominate our lives, we need to investigate the whole question of anger with care... For the psychologically mature person, the ills and injustices of life are handled by counter-aggression, in which one makes an effort to eliminate the injustice and create justice. Often such efforts are dictatorial, full of anger and self-righteousness. In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice, but compassion... All anger is based upon judgments..."

The best answer to injustice is compassion, or love. Joko Beck writes, "An appropriate and compassionate response does not come from the fight for justice, but from that radical dimension of practice that "passes all understanding;" some call it love. As Christ taught, "love your enemies," Gandhi and Blessed Mother Teresea of Calcutta both knew, injustice is highlighted and resolved by means of love, of peaceful protest. It's not easy. We must go through the darkness, the pain and grief before coming to the lightness that will ultimately be our guide, and our justice.
"Let us not adopt some facile, narrowly psychological view of our lives. The radical dimension that I speak of demands everything that we are and have. Joy, not happiness, is its fruit." Radical because it is not what the world expects; radical because we may consciously and actively choose it.

Living Awake and in the Truth, Part 2

Simple Mind is away from the computer. The following appeared here earlier this year, January 2, 2009.

Assumptions--are just that, assumptions.
To the Simple Mind, we are aware that things change, and in fact it is desirable because if they did not there would not be the opening for learning, for the new, a relief from what pains us, or hope. We would remain angry, fearful, resentful, confused. Pray for impermanence.
Working with this precept, we no longer try to escape the experience; rather like a scientist, we wait and observe our self, our reaction, our perceptions and what exists in this moment around us.
Reactions, like emotions, are automatic, they just happen. But what we choose to do isn't a happenstance. The will chooses and then we act. This is a freedom that we take so as to make best use and advantage of our circumstances.

What do we do when we find ourselves in the midst of gossip? What about that?
Sometimes we want to feel part of a group or an event by talking ill of another person, or deliberately excluding others, to feel more special or bonded -- us against them. Gossip is when we say things about others that are potentially harmful or slanderous to that other person -- with full knowledge of this in our mind.
This is distinguished from speaking about others with the intention of sorting out our thoughts or feelings, or problem solving.

Then there are the instant reactions that lead us into hurtful speech or action. What about when we feel insulted? How about when an emotion demands our attention?
Before beginning earnest practice, maybe we just walked away or changed the subject to avoid what we judged distasteful. Maybe we excused ourselves with the thought that "they deserve it, anyway."

Sometimes we counted to 10 or went for a walk before answering that insulting remark, that hurtful phrase. These tactics likely stopped or controlled our reactions, but to really move beyond, to move to a Simple Mind requires a different response. A response that perhaps to this point in our lives we are unfamiliar with.
We must through practice, in awareness, dismantle our habitual thoughts and patterns of behavior. These are habits which cause us to suffer; those perceived thoughts, the imagined self which keeps us in the dream.
When we gain in awareness, then our deepest beliefs and fears may be faced honestly and squarely. We respond to what is so, to reality as it is by experience, not driven by fear, anger or other passion. Our response is what is required, according to our will, our desire to be as we are.

With this precept, our practice becomes meeting life in all its possibilities, in its newness, and its sometimes strangeness.

And while certainty, feeling "sure" is seductive, and it can make us feel safe, prayers for change, for impermanence are part of the Way. As a Mahayana practitioner notes, 'when a flower dies, we don't cry, because we know flowers are impermanent.' Understanding this, we will suffer less and be joyful more. Impermanence is not negative!
Does it then, in the Way, mean that we have to lose all that we care for? Of course not; the community remains and is important. What is also important is that we not cling so tightly to persons or things, that we fail to recognize the nature of change.
So, to gain in skillfulness and practice of the precepts, we must turn to experience, the present moment as our guide, and not simply notions or intellectual ideas.

As Joko Beck has said, "when we experience for ourselves the transitory nature of beliefs, then it no longer has us in a strong hold. We can be freer from our requirements--freer to speak truthfully." Isn't it odd how those we care for most deeply, those who have meaning to us in our daily lives, are those for whom we most often hold deeply, and those whom we entrench in our faultfinding?

This is one of the ways in which we may avoid ourselves.
We are dishonest with ourselves first before the other. By focusing not on our own experience, but on what we think must be the experience of another, we criticize, nit-pick, fault. Sometimes, most often, those negative attributes are really our own.
Our own views may thus be frozen; we may not be acting from awareness of our selves-- what are we feeling, what is my perception/experience? If we do not take the critical self view, like that of a scientist, examining our own functioning, our own organism, faultfinding gains a hold. We react to something that may not even be real at all-- at least not real beyond our own mind, and then we suffer the consequences when the world rebuffs us, as it must.


Other ways of avoiding or not being truthful are several:

*Do I add to the story my own facts, interpretations or opinions as though they are true?

Try seeing yourself as the other person whom you spoke about. How do your words fit now? What is your experience?

*Do I keep silent? Do I comment when in a group about something I know, or do I allow it to pass by?

What is your intention in keeping silent? What is your experience? Do I take some advantage from not speaking?

As you practice, keep in mind that in the Simple Mind, speaking truthfully is neither better nor worse.

False Generalizations

Recognize that a concept is just a concept, and not reality. --Joko Charlotte Beck

Generalizations. Assumptions. We all make them. And they cause all of us grief. The world as it is. Reality is not an assumption. It's not the way we want things to be, or the way we think about things to be. "Each moment, life as it is--the only Teacher. Being just this moment--compassion's way."
Joko Beck writes in her book, Nothing Special, Living Zen, about the Sufi sage and fool, Nasrudin who was once said to have been in his flower garden sprinkling bread crumbs over everything. His neighbor saw what he was doing and asked him why. To which Nasrudin replied, "to keep the tigers away!" The neighbor, laughing, said, "but there aren't tigers within a thousand miles!"
"Effective, isn't it?" said Nasrudin. Beck writes, "we laugh because we're sure that the two things--bread crumbs and tigers-- have nothing to do with each other. Yet as with Nasrudin, our practice and our lives are based upon false generalizations that have nothing to do with reality."

If we base our lives, most often unconsciously, upon generalizations or assumptions, and we do not ask ourselves or others about what is happening in our lives in this moment, in this day, like Nasrudin we build our understanding upon false notion, upon false generalizations. "Such generalities obscure the specific, concrete reality of our lives." In fact says Beck, "life is not general, it is specific." Sitting practice, or zazen cuts through the unconsciousness, the grey lights that obscure the more specific observations that we might otherwise make about ourselves and others, views which lead to the questions of how, why, what is this about, or what is necessary?

For example, "instead of I can't stand myself when I do such and such, we [then come to] see more clearly what's going on. We're not covering events with a broad brush" of assumptions, generalizations, powerful emotions--energies that take our focus elsewhere, away from our experience, our situations. Often, in conversations, we exchange notions and we are like two ships at sea, continuing on, lost in a grey murk of conceptual material, of analytic, virtual thought. Avoiding experience, no contact takes place. It may be a form of Zen combat, or it may be without of an experience precisely for that reason-- experience is what we fear to know about.

"In Zen practice, we tend to toss around many fancy concepts: Everything is in perfect being as it is, we're all doing the best we can, things are all one, I [you, we are] one with him. We call this Zen bullshit, though other religions have their own versions." And it's not that the statements are false; they have a universal truth. But, says Beck, "if we stop there, we have turned our practice into an exercise of concepts, and we've lost awareness of what's going on with us right this second. Good practice [zazen] always entails moving through our concepts... recognize that a concept is just a concept, and not reality."

When we "notice our thoughts... then we have to experience the pain that accompanies the thought." Why? Simply because it is our thought, and our pain. We have made them both; they are our very own. "When we can stay with the pain as a pure physical sensation, then at some point it will dissolve, and we can move into the truth... But we have to move from experience which is painful, into truth and not plaster thoughts over our experience. Intellectual people are particularly prone to this error." The rational world of concepts is a mere description of the real world. In contrast, when we allow this pure experience of our own, we come into zazen.

As Bassui says, "clearly seeing into one's nature is called practice. And the seat that puts an end to analytic thoughts is called Zazen."
And only when we "move through [to] the experiential level does life have meaning. This is what Christians and Jews mean by 'being with God.' Experiencing is out of time: it is not the past, not the future, not even the present in the usual sense." Unable to say in words what it is, we can only learn to be it. Some call it 'an-other world,' or 'living in the spirit.'

Catholic Christian writer, theologian, mystic and Pope, John Paul II, exhorted the practice, saying that "it is not enough to have, we must instead be." He emphasized that we must not only, for example, be in love, to have love, but we ourselves must be that experience--we must be love itself. We must not only have pain or grief, but we must, moreover, be that pain and grief.

A challenge indeed for those on the Way. We all have our favorite notions, our concepts of ourselves and others. They can become 'frozen in time.' We are caught by the thinking that emphasizes permanence. Yet the world, ourselves, and others are not permanent. At any moment, any cloud, any storm may take us far away to other shores in other places. Remember that practice is just what is; it is not unusual or exotic. It is not only open to the few; all beings have experiences. Learning to live fully those experiences is what in traditional Buddhist terms, is being buddha-nature itself.
"Compassion grows from such roots," emphasizes Joko Beck.

Living Awake and in the Truth part 2

Assumptions--are just that, assumptions.
To the Simple Mind, we are aware that things change, and in fact it is desirable because if they did not there would not be the opening for learning, for the new, a relief from what pains us, or hope. We would remain angry, fearful, resentful, confused. Pray for impermanence.
Working with this precept, we no longer try to escape the experience; rather like a scientist, we wait and observe our self, our reaction, our perceptions and what exists in this moment around us.
Reactions, like emotions, are automatic, they just happen. But what we choose to do isn't a happenstance. The will chooses and then we act. This is a freedom that we take so as to make best use and advantage of our circumstances.

What do we do when we find ourselves in the midst of gossip? What about that?
Sometimes we want to feel part of a group or an event by talking ill of another person, or deliberately excluding others, to feel more special or bonded -- us against them. Gossip is when we say things about others that are potentially harmful or slanderous to that other person -- with full knowledge of this in our mind.
This is distinguished from speaking about others with the intention of sorting out our thoughts or feelings, or problem solving.

Then there are the instant reactions that lead us into hurtful speech or action. What about when we feel insulted? How about when an emotion demands our attention?
Before beginning earnest practice, maybe we just walked away or changed the subject to avoid what we judged distasteful. Maybe we excused ourselves with the thought that "they deserve it, anyway."

Sometimes we counted to 10 or went for a walk before answering that insulting remark, that hurtful phrase. These tactics likely stopped or controlled our reactions, but to really move beyond, to move to a Simple Mind requires a different response. A response that perhaps to this point in our lives we are unfamiliar with.
We must through practice, in awareness, dismantle our habitual thoughts and patterns of behavior. These are habits which cause us to suffer; those perceived thoughts, the imagined self which keeps us in the dream.
When we gain in awareness, then our deepest beliefs and fears may be faced honestly and squarely. We respond to what is so, to reality as it is by experience, not driven by fear, anger or other passion. Our response is what is required, according to our will, our desire to be as we are.

With this precept, our practice becomes meeting life in all its possibilities, in its newness, and its sometimes strangeness.

And while certainty, feeling "sure" is seductive, and it can make us feel safe, prayers for change, for impermanence are part of the Way. As a Mahayana practitioner notes, 'when a flower dies, we don't cry, because we know flowers are impermanent.' Understanding this, we will suffer less and be joyful more. Impermanence is not negative!
Does it then, in the Way, mean that we have to lose all that we care for? Of course not; the community remains and is important. What is also important is that we not cling so tightly to persons or things, that we fail to recognize the nature of change.
So, to gain in skillfulness and practice of the precepts, we must turn to experience, the present moment as our guide, and not simply notions or intellectual ideas.

As Joko Beck has said, "when we experience for ourselves the transitory nature of beliefs, then it no longer has us in a strong hold. We can be freer from our requirements--freer to speak truthfully." Isn't it odd how those we care for most deeply, those who have meaning to us in our daily lives, are those for whom we most often hold deeply, and those whom we entrench in our faultfinding?

This is one of the ways in which we may avoid ourselves.
We are dishonest with ourselves first before the other. By focusing not on our own experience, but on what we think must be the experience of another, we criticize, nit-pick, fault. Sometimes, most often, those negative attributes are really our own.
Our own views may thus be frozen; we may not be acting from awareness of our selves-- what are we feeling, what is my perception/experience? If we do not take the critical self view, like that of a scientist, examining our own functioning, our own organism, faultfinding gains a hold. We react to something that may not even be real at all-- at least not real beyond our own mind, and then we suffer the consequences when the world rebuffs us, as it must.


Other ways of avoiding or not being truthful are several:

*Do I add to the story my own facts, interpretations or opinions as though they are true?

Try seeing yourself as the other person whom you spoke about. How do your words fit now? What is your experience?

*Do I keep silent? Do I comment when in a group about something I know, or do I allow it to pass by?

What is your intention in keeping silent? What is your experience? Do I take some advantage from not speaking?

As you practice, keep in mind that in the Simple Mind, speaking truthfully is neither better nor worse.