Turning towards Spirituality

Excerpt taken from Everyday Zen: Love and Work

When we find our life unpleasant or unfulfilling, we try to escape the unpleasantness by various subtle escape mechanisms. In such attempts we are dealing with our lives as if there’s me and then there’s life outside me. As long as we approach our lives in this way we will bend all of our efforts to finding something or somebody else to handle our lives for us. We may look for a lover, a teacher, a religion, a center—something, or somebody, somewhere, to handle our difficulties for us. As long as we see our lives in this dualistic fashion we fool ourselves and believe that we need not pay any price for a realized life. All of us share this delusion to varying degrees; and it leads only to misery in our lives.

As our practice proceeds the delusion comes under attack; and slowly we begin to sense (horror of horrors!) that we must pay the price of freedom. No one but ourselves can ever pay it for us. When I realized that truth it was one of the strong shocks of my lifetime. I finally understood one day that only I can pay the price of realization: no one, no one at all, can do this for me. Until we understand that hard truth, we will continue to resist practice; and even after we see it our resistance will continue, though not as much. It is hard to maintain the knowledge in its full power.

What are some of the ways in which we evade paying the price?

The chief one is our constant unwillingness to bear our own suffering. We think we can evade it or ignore it or think it away, or persuade someone else to remove it for us. We feel that we are entitled not to feel the pain of our lives. We fervently hope and scheme for someone else—our husband or wife, our lover, our child—to handle our pain for us. Such resistance undermines our practice: “I won’t sit this morning; I just don’t feel like it.” “I’m not going to do sesshin; I don’t like what comes up.” “I won’t hold my tongue when I’m angry—why should I?” We waver in our integrity when it is painful to maintain it. We give up on a relationship that no longer fulfills our dreams. Underneath all of these evasions is the belief that others should serve us; others should clean up the messes we make.

In fact, nobody—but nobody—can experience our lives for us; nobody can feel for us the pain that life inevitably brings. The price we must pay to grow is always in front of our noses; and we never have a real practice until we realize our unwillingness to pay any price at all. Sadly, as long as we evade, we shut ourselves off from the wonder of what life is and what we are. We try to hold on to people who we think can mitigate our pain for us. We try to dominate them, to keep them with us, even to fool them into taking care of our suffering. But alas, there are no free lunches, no giveaways. A jewel of great price is never a giveaway. We must earn it, with steady, unrelenting practice.

We must earn it in each moment, not just in the “spiritual side” of our life. How we keep our obligations to others, how we serve others, whether we make the effort of attention that is called for each moment of our life—all of this is paying the price for the jewel. I’m not talking about erecting a new set of ideals of “how I should be.” I’m talking about earning the integrity and wholeness of our lives by every act we do, every word we say. From the ordinary point of view, the price we must pay is enormous—though seen clearly, it is no price at all, but a privilege. As our practice grows we comprehend this privilege more and more.

In this process we discover that our own pain and others’ pain are not separate worlds. It’s not that, “My practice is my practice and their practice is their practice”; because when we truly open up to our own lives we open up to all life. The delusion of separateness diminishes as we pay the price of attentive practice. To overcome that delusion is to realize that in practice we are not only paying a high price for ourselves, but for everyone else in the world. As long as we cling to our separateness—my ideas about what I am, what you are, and what I need and want from you—that very separateness means that we are not yet paying the price for the jewel. To pay the price means that we must give what life requires must be given (not to be confused with indulgence); perhaps time, or money, or material goods—and sometimes, not giving such things when it is best not to. Always the practice effort is to see what life requires us to give as opposed to what we personally want to give—which is not easy. This tough practice is the payment exacted if we wish to encounter the jewel.

We cannot reduce our practice simply to the time we spend in zazen, vital though this time is. Our training—paying the price—must take place twenty-four hours a day. As we make this effort over time, more and more we come to value the jewel that our life is. But if we continue to stew and fuss with our life as if it were a problem, or if we spend our time in seeking to escape this imaginary problem, the jewel will always remain hidden. Though hidden, the jewel is always present—but we will never see it unless we are ready to pay the price. The uncovering of the jewel is what our life is about. How willing are you to pay the price?