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Message from Cheri - April 2006
Gasshō I hear often that awareness practice is too hard. I’ve heard this for years, of course. I heard it back when I was saying it, and I’ve heard it consistently since I’ve stopped saying it. I said it, I hear it, I argue against the assertion now that I no longer assert it, but I’ve never been able to refute it. Awareness practice is hard for a lot of people. But, why? It makes no sense. There’s no reason for it to be. “It takes so much time.” No, it doesn’t. It’s awareness. Awareness doesn’t take time. “Paying attention is exhausting.” No, it’s not. It doesn’t take any effort; nothing needs to be tensed to practice paying attention. In a blinding flash of intuitive knowing I saw the obvious. Awareness practice is hard because people are already doing a practice that consumes all their time and attention. The established, ingrained, automatic, second-nature practice that demands every moment of most people’s resources is the practice of maintaining egocentric, karmic conditioning. I consider this very good news. If practice were something new, something unknown or unfamiliar, we folks trying to wake up and end suffering would be in an extremely difficult position. But our situation is ideal because all we need do is apply a process we know intimately (so intimately that we think it’s who we are) to what seems a new content (which is ironic since this “new” content is actually who we are.) One of my regular chuckles at the outrageous lies egocentric, karmic conditioning will unselfconsciously spout is when someone new to Zen practice says something along the lines of “I really struggle with all the ritual in this.” How can a person say or think something so silly? It’s easy. That person has never noticed their own rituals. That person has not realized that every split second of their life is devoted to an unconscious repetition of assumptions and habit that keeps in place a whole world of illusion. In fact, the person maintaining the reality of egocentric, karmic conditioning does so in a state of unwavering devotion (albeit unconscious) to which the most ardent religious would aspire. An example? I sleep like this, in this, for this long, and I feel such and such a way based on the quality of my sleep. I wake up and (now you can fill in the blanks for your rituals of bathroom, drinking, eating, etc.). The car you drive, how you keep it, how you drive it, how you keep your living space, what you have in it--can you see the items you maintain “religiously”? When you consider your thoughts, can you see them as a practice? You need to remember certain things; you need to think about certain things but shouldn’t think about others. You feel good with certain thoughts, troubled about others, and feel bad when others show up. You are reminded constantly what you must do, how you should feel, what’s important. All of this is practice. It’s constantly turning the attention to a certain place/thing. If you forgot how you should react, when you should be offended, what you should be afraid of, or what the right values are, you would cease to be who you are. If you forgot for long enough, if you stopped getting all the “you should,” “don’t forget,” “you’d better,” “you must” information for more than a few minutes, you could experience a loss of identity. You could lose your sense of a separate self. You could find yourself in the present, in the moment. Here’s the amazing part of that: If you were to stop the moment-by-moment practice of maintaining egocentric, karmic conditioning, you wouldn’t need to practice awareness. You would be awareness. We have a couple of choices: We can maintain the fiction that we can’t practice being present because it’s too difficult; or we can drop the lie of “awareness practice is too hard,” and go with the truth that awareness practice is the easiest thing in the world (because it’s who we are), and get on with choosing ourselves instead of unconsciously practicing ego maintenance. People occasionally ask me how they can get more willingness. I tell them that everyone has all the willingness they need. We just need to see what it is we are willing for, and then choose whether we want to continue with that or use our willingness for something else. The same is true with practice. We are always practicing something. We just need to decide what we want to practice. What does this mean on a practical level? When you brush your teeth, pay attention to brushing your teeth. When you walk, be aware of walking. If you must have Earl Grey tea with cream out of your favorite cup every morning, for one week have another drink and watch what happens. Changing things is not necessary, it’s just fun and interesting, except to egocentric, karmic conditioning! The point is to give all your attention and awareness to you, to your life, to what animates and supports you. You can do exactly what you do right now, just make sure to practice being with you as you do it. Gasshō
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