When Sigmund Freud introduced his patients in psychoanalysis, he gave them a very simple, basic instruction: Say whatever comes to your mind. He called this “free association.” And on the surface, it would seem like the simplest thing to do. We all have thoughts constantly going through our minds. Just say them outloud, rather than keeping them to ourselves. Yet it quickly became obvious that it was very hard to do. People were very reluctant to do it. A lot of what was passing through their minds turned out to be embarrassing or weird. They censored themselves. They tried to make a certain impression. So it turned out the simple instruction was almost impossible to follow, and the real work was to watch and find out how people inevitably deviated from that. How did they channel, or steer, or judge, or control, this flow of seemingly spontaneous thought?
And it used to be said, that when a patient got to the point, when they finally could free associate, the analysis was over. We encounter a similar kind of paradox in Shunryu Suzuki’s description of beginner’s mind. He said that the beginner's mind is open, ready for new experience, not full of the expert's knowledge and expectations. Maybe because he was sitting in a room with Americans who seemed to know nothing about Zen and in some sense were a blank slate, he thought that they were free of all the cultural accretions of Japanese Zen.
In a way that was true, but we also know now beginners’ minds are filled with curative fantasies. Everyone comes to Zen with some picture of what it’s going to do for them. Some, certainly in those old days, had all sorts of archetypal or transferrential fantasies about exotic Asian masters, all sorts of pictures of what meditation was really supposed to be like, quieting the mind, making the mind blissful, transcendent, all sorts of stuff.
So it was probably the case that if there was such a thing as a beginner's mind in the zendo, it probably belonged only to the Roshi. It was the result of years of practice, not the first step. And we encounter this kind of paradox over and over again when we talk about just sitting or no gain. Is that something we’re supposed to endeavor to do from the very start or is it the description of the endpoint, after decades of practice? Finally being able to just sit. Finally being able to practice with no thought of gain.
Like Freud’s patients, in a way, our practice is to endeavor to do these things and then watch ourselves fail in characteristic ways. For Joko, practice meant tuning into the irritation or anxiety or anger that accompanied our moment to moment bumping up against the way reality wasn’t conforming to our expectations, the way our sitting wasn’t a good sitting, or the way it was supposed to be something different. We were supposed to be something different. We judged ourselves. We were anxious that we weren’t doing it right. We were annoyed at the way the Zendo was operating. All these things are the inevitable obstacles or avoidances that happen when we think we were going to just sit.
We have a sangha council coming up in which we are asked to consider the different degrees to which reason and intuition function in our practice. And the reason, or knowing, is often something of a pejorative in Zen. We’re presumably practicing in some way to go beyond that, if only because knowing tends to imply a subject-object split. A knower and a known. What would it mean to dissolve that dualism?
And so in Zen we often encounter hyphenated words like not-knowing as an attempt to describe the overcoming of that subject-object duality. Intuition is an interesting question, an attempt at describing a different kind of understanding or engagement that also bypasses that kind of subject-object split. Another way of talking about that might be to think in terms of procedural knowledge or implicit knowing. This is the way we function smoothly in routine actions without giving them any apparent conscious thought.
People often use riding a bicycle as an example. You don’t think about how to do it, and if you try to explain it step by step you’d have a lot of trouble, but you have all this muscle memory that allows you just to get on the bicycle and start pedaling. And we do that in a thousand ways in everyday life, with things like just knowing when you walk through a doorway that you’re going to fit, that you know what a door is. You don’t have to figure out where the handle is and how it works.
There’s a new fleet of taxicabs in New York these days. It’s a rival to Uber that uses only Tesla cars, and when I first rode in one, I didn’t know how to open the door. They don’t have handles. You have to find the little button to push to open the door. So for something that is completely automatic, all of a sudden you don’t know how to do it. You have to start thinking about it. That’s the whole transition from a procedural know-how to knowing something that you have to think about. I have to remember – Oh, Teslas have buttons, not handles. I have to think about it for a minute.
Now, a lot of Zen practice, we could say, involves the substitution of know-how for knowing. When we think of what happens in a zendo, particularly during sesshin, we engage in a simplified, ritualized, disciplined set of actions where we follow a simple set of cues: the bells, the clappers, and we just start having all those become second nature to us. The bell rings, we get up, the clappers hit, we bow. Whatever these things are, they start happening very automatically. We don’t do much talking, we do some chanting, and those chants become very, very familiar. In a way, we have this experience of going from a world in which we’re always thinking about things, and always figuring things out, to a world in which we don’t have to think about anything, in which we start just doing it.
When we start just sitting, we get into this very routinized, repetitive kind of behavior, and doing so, we occupy a different world, and occupy and become a different self in occupying it. We live in a world of procedural know-how. I think for most of us, throughout our practice, spending a lot of time just immersing ourselves in a world of know-how rather than knowing, creates a profound change. It may not sound like it’s anything very spiritual. If anything, it’s a far more routinized life than anything we manage outside of sesshin. We’re not used to thinking that routine is going to be the pathway to spirituality. We usually want to think that the road of spirituality is paved with special experiences, unusual states of consciousness. We don’t like to think that the road of spirituality is the road of repetition and boredom and just doing the same thing over and over and over again. But it looks like that’s how it works most of the time.
When we think about it, how does practice carry over into our daily life? It may function consciously in terms of things like precepts, the vows that we consciously make or try to remind ourselves of. But I think, for me, for most people, the mark of years of Zen practice, is this deeply ingrained habit of non-avoidance. Touch paper once, you know? A bill comes in, you open it, and you pay it. Nothing piles up. You see a piece of paper on the ground, you pick it up. You see a dish in the sink, you wash it. Somebody calls, you answer it. Over and over again, there’s a kind of automatic responsiveness, a lack of resistance, a lack of procrastination, and in a way you think about things a lot less. There’s a lot less – Should I do it now or should I do it later? Do I want to do it or do I not feel like doing it? It becomes remarkable when you see how much of your mental head space is taken up with all the minutiae of judgment and avoidance, attempting to micro-manage all these little things rather than just doing them.
And again, it may not sound like anything about that is very spiritual. From the outside it can look like you’re training yourself in an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I think in fact, we are changed by it, and the world we live in is changed by it. When you do things from that kind of automatic procedural memory and with less and less resistance, you find that a lot of who you were has dropped away, because who you were, yourself, was this whole inner dialog about judging, and wanting, and thinking, and avoiding, just a lot of stuff about – do I really want to do that now? Is there a way I can get somebody else to do it? Maybe I can put it off. I don’t feel like it. All that rat’s nest of thought – a lot of that is what feels like ourself, and a lot of that simply just fades away. And then we also find ourselves occupying a different world, because we’re in a world of importances, a world in which we’re just dealing with one thing after another, and in that sense, we sort of have a better fit with our own life. We don’t have the experience of life as a series of obstacles or intrusions. Think how often our life gets bogged down in that feeling. Interruptions. Intrusions. Things we don’t want to do. Things that we have all sorts of opinions about.
Now, I’m not saying the goal is just to be a mindless idiot, but, you know, it can sometimes feel that way. Yet there really is a way in which you occupy a different world when you operate spontaneously with an attitude of Just do it, rather than seeing the world as constantly something you’ve got to manage. It’s always a little bit out of control. It’s never doing what it’s supposed to do.
Sesshin, in a sense, is that model for a world that can be difficult and arbitrary, and sometimes painful, but our experience is that our resistance to it gradually drops away. We stop thinking that the solution to its difficulty is controlling it. We just let ourselves do the next thing, and Okay, maybe that’s going to hurt, or Okay, maybe that’s not how I would do it if I was inventing it from scratch, or Maybe I don’t like what they’re serving for lunch, but all those things is how we habitually face a life of obstacles and interruptions and difficulties, and some of that just fades into just experiencing the next thing. Now this, now that. That’s what I think slowly seeps into the rest of our life.
It doesn’t sound much like a spiritual practice, except in the end, you’re not who you were, and the world is not what it was.