Author:: [[Charlotte J. Beck]] DateFinished:: 7/7/2023 Rating:: 6 Tags:: #🟨 # Everyday Zen  ## 🚀The Book in 3 Sentences - An encapsulation of how to do Zazen practice in the everyday rather than secluding yourself under a tree and meditating for days on end. - Zazen practice is the art of staying here and now without letting your attachments spin you out of control. - Zazen practice does NOT mean you don't pursue things but rather you pursue them without letting your attachments cloud reality. ### 🎨 Impressions - The book is well written and very understandable for someone that might not have read deep into spirituality. Beck provides great analogies to make her point more clear. This is one of those books that you can return to over your life and get different things out of every single time. - One of the main issues I had with the book is I felt it was way longer than it needed to be for what she was trying to get across. Many of the passages could have been shortened. Sometimes the book felt disorganized as well. ### 📖Who Should Read It? - Anyone interested in spirituality. - Anyone interested in Buddhism. ### ☘️ How the Book Changed Me - The major thing the book made me realize is how EVERY single moment is an opportunity to do Zazen practice. Every moment has the potential to rob us of our agency. Now I'm much more purposeful about being present in the moment and trying to stay awake during all times. # Rough Summary Charlotte Beck gives an encapsulation of how to do Zazen practice in the everyday rather than secluding yourself under a tree and meditating for days on end. In her book, she teaches the art of Zen practice in the everyday. [[Zazen practice]] is the art of staying here and now without letting your attachments spin you out of control. In this way life itself is the teacher. Disciplined students of Zen are those who in every moment of their lives constantly try and find a means of waking themselves up. ### IV Relationships Relationships are one of the best places to do Zen practice inside of because they serve as a mirror back on ourselves who we are. **[[All weak relationships reflect that fact that somebody wants something that the other doesn't have]].** ### III Feelings Imagine being on a foggy lake, rowing in a boat and enjoying yourself. Suddenly, another rowboat emerges from the fog and crashes into your boat. Initially, you feel anger, thinking about the inconvenience and damage caused. However, upon realizing that the rowboat is empty, your anger dissipates, and you recognize that you only need to repaint your boat. The story highlights that in our encounters with life, other people, and events, we often perceive them as causing harm and feel clobbered by them. The metaphor suggests that these encounters are more like being bumped by an empty rowboat, devoid of personal intent. Yet we are hurt by them because of our egos. ### VI. IDEALS [[We don't grow by dreaming about a future wonderful state or agonizing over past feats, but rather fully experiencing our present.]] ### VIII. CHOICES [[The difference between pain and suffering]] ## Highlights [[Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It’s the taking away of something.]] All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that. But to talk about it is of little use. The practice has to be done by each individual. There is no substitute. We can read about it until we are a thousand years old and it won’t do a thing for us. We all have to practice, and we have to practice with all of our might for the rest of our lives. ([Location 222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=222)) - Note: This reminds me of how enlightenment, transcendence, whatever you want to call it isn’t something you reach once and then are done. It’s something you cultivate over time, never truly reaching it. So the crux of zazen is this: all we must do is constantly to create a little shift from the spinning world we’ve got in our heads to right-here-now. That’s our practice. The intensity and ability to be right-here-now is what we have to develop. We have to be able to develop the ability to say, “No, I won’t spin off up here” to make that choice. ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=325)) You may need a guide, you may need it made clear how to practice with your life—what is needed is a guide who will make it clear to you that the authority in your life, your true teacher, is you—and we practice to realize this “you.” There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn’t be anything else. ([Location 402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=402)) ## New highlights added 12-06-2023 at 2:05 PM #### IV. RELATIONSHIPS However, as we endeavor to practice with relationships, we begin to see that they are our best way to grow. In them we can see what our mind, our body, our senses, and our thoughts really are. Why are relationships such excellent practice? Why do they help us to go into what we might call the slow death of the ego? Because, aside from our formal sitting, there is no way that is superior to relationships in helping us see where we’re stuck and what we’re holding on to. As long as our buttons are pushed, we have a great chance to learn and grow. So a relationship is a great gift, not because it makes us happy—it often doesn’t—but because any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror we can find. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=1467)) ## New highlights added 12-06-2023 at 9:13 PM #### II. PRACTICE When a relationship isn’t working, it means that the partners are preoccupied with “I”: “What I want is…” or “This isn’t right for me.” If there is little wanting, then the relationship is strong and it will function. That’s all life is interested in. As a separate ego with your separate desires, you are of no importance to life. And all weak relationships reflect the fact that somebody wants something for himself or herself. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=1591)) - Note: The difficulty I have with this logic is she at once tells us to not let external things take control of our agency, to overly want, but doesn’t give us concrete advice on how determine when you should try and change your situation. She just says follow your true self. ## New highlights added 14-06-2023 at 8:26 AM When we’re lost in thought, when we’re dreaming, what have we lost? We’ve lost reality. Our life has escaped us. ([Location 537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=537)) - Note: This reminds me of one of my worst and best qualities, I can idealize people in my relationships. I have a tendency for positive thinking which means I can alter memories more positively. And I can see my relationships as more positive than they are hurting me when they don’t fit with reality. ## New highlights added 03-07-2023 at 10:45 AM For the vast majority of us, however, practice has to proceed in an orderly fashion, in a relentless dissolution of self. And the first step we must take is to move from unhappiness to happiness. Why? Because there is absolutely no way in which an unhappy person—a person disturbed by herself or himself, by others, by situations—can be the life of no-self. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=802)) - Note: Im glad she emphasizes this as it doesn’t state that if you are in an unhappy situation you should just accept it by not attaching. Where I think she’s wrong is when the unhappy state is inside of a perfectly fine situation and the persons ego is making them unhappy. #### III. FEELINGS that’s what the talk is about: “Do not be angry.” Suppose we are out on a lake and it’s a bit foggy—not too foggy, but a bit foggy—and we’re rowing along in our little boat having a good time. And then, all of a sudden, coming out of the fog, there’s this other rowboat and it’s heading right at us. And…crash! Well, for a second we’re really angry—what is that fool doing? I just painted my boat! And here he comes—crash!—right into it. And then suddenly we notice that the rowboat is empty. What happens to our anger? Well, the anger collapses…I’ll just have to paint my boat again, that’s all. But if that rowboat that hit ours had another person in it, how would we react? You know what would happen! Now our encounters with life, with other people, with events, are like being bumped by an empty rowboat. But we don’t experience life that way. We experience it as though there are people in that other rowboat and we’re really getting clobbered by them. What am I talking about when I say that all of life is an encounter, a collision with an empty rowboat? What’s that all about? ([Location 979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=979)) Outside of a direct student-teacher setting, the last thing that I will talk about is Zen practice. And I don’t talk about the dharma. Why talk about it? My job is to notice how I violate it. You know the old saying, “He who knows does not say, and he who says does not know.” When we talk about practice all the time, our talk is another form of resistance, a barrier, a cover. It’s like academics who save the world every night at the dinner table. They talk and talk and talk—but what difference does it make? At the other end of that pole would be someone like Mother Teresa. I don’t think she does much talking. She is busy doing. ([Location 1827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=1827)) A third way of practice (which I view as poor) is to substitute a positive for a negative thought. For example: if we are angry we substitute a loving thought. Now this changed conditioning may make us feel better. But it doesn’t stand up well to the pressures of life. And to substitute one conditioning for another is to miss the point of practice. The point is not that a positive emotion is better than a negative one, but that all thoughts and emotions are impermanent, changing, or (in Buddhist terms) empty. ([Location 1997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=1997)) In the eye-gazing practice, in which we meditate while facing another person, when we can put aside our personal emotions and thoughts and truly look into another’s eyes, we see the space of no-self. We see the wonder, and we see that this person is ourselves. This is marvelously healing, particularly for people in relationships who aren’t getting along. We see for a second what another person is: they are no-self, as we are no-self, and we are both the wonder. ([Location 2005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2005)) ##### VI. IDEALS We never grow by dreaming about a future wonderful state or by remembering past feats. We grow by being where we are and experiencing what our life is right now. ([Location 2080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2080)) Disciplined students are those who in their everyday activities constantly try to find means of waking themselves up. ([Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2208)) STUDENT: Well, that’s one-half of me. The other half is unemployed and depressed and kind of hungry, and there are people depending on me. And what I hear you saying is, I should just appreciate my hunger and my unemployment and maybe I shouldn’t look for a job?   JOKO: No, no. By no means! If you’re out of a job exert yourself to get a job. Or if you’re sick do whatever you can to get better. But it’s what you add on to these basic actions which is the superstructure. It could be, “I’m such a hopeless person, nobody would ever want to employ me anyway!” That’s superstructure. Being unemployed means to look at your job possibilities in the present job market and if necessary to get some training to increase your skills. But what do we always add on to the basic facts of a situation? ([Location 2225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2225)) ## New highlights added 04-07-2023 at 10:24 AM ##### VII. BOUNDARIES ## New highlights added 06-07-2023 at 3:37 PM Someone said to me a few days ago, “You know, you never talk about enlightenment. Could you say something about it?” The problem with talking about “enlightenment” is that our talk tends to create a picture of what it is—yet enlightenment is not a picture, but the shattering of all our pictures. And a shattered life isn’t what we are hoping for! ([Location 2730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2730)) ##### VIII. CHOICES So what is renunciation? Is there such a thing? Perhaps we can best clarify it by considering another word, “nonattachment.” We often think that if we fiddle with the surface events of our lives, trying to alter them, worrying about them or ourselves, we are dealing with the matter of “renunciation”—whereas in fact we do not need to “renounce” anything, we need only to realize that true renunciation is equivalent to nonattachment. ([Location 2932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2932)) - Note: If you too stubbornly renounce something you tie yourself to it. Freedom is closely connected with our relationship to pain and suffering. I’d like to draw a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain comes from experiencing life just as it is, with no trimmings. We can even call this direct experiencing joy. But when we try to run away and escape from our experience of pain, we suffer. ([Location 2981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2981)) When we completely experience our pain, it is joy. ([Location 2986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VA1PTI&location=2986)) ##### IX. SERVICE