Tag Archives: Joko Beck

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velocity

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It’s going to be a spatter week!  Oh and, Joseph… note the white balance!  I’m too embarrassed to explain why I wasn’t getting the right effect for all the advice I was getting.  But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  There are subtleties in the join-these-dots-please of a teaching I tend to be oblivious to.

The nuances of getting the ink to spatter was one of those moments.  However, it ended up being a good lesson about the physics of objects in motion and letting go of how I think something should happen.  And it lead me down a rabbit hole about mass, velocity, and attaining enlightenment.  If I recall, mass X velocity = momentum.  Which says a lot about the effect of my surplus baggage on sustaining momentum in anything I’m doing – mental or physical – including getting enlightened.  One of the excess bags is the one that I call Wishfulness.  It carries the shoulda’s, woulda’s, and what if’s.  (The coulda’s are in the Resentment bag.)  It gets heavy at times, these moments of wanting a second chance – or even a better first chance. 

Here’s a nice piece from Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen:

To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive.  Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won’t keep on that way….Nobody believes his or her life is perfect.  And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless.  We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life.  So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.

Joko points out that we tend to look outside ourselves – that bigger car, higher salary, better vacations, and so on.  These are the “if onlies” that we go through hoping for a resolution to the puzzle of feeling our suffering and intuiting our boundlessness.

First of all, we wear out those (if onlies) on the gross levels.  Then we shift our search to more subtle levels…we turn to a spiritual discipline.  Unfortunately we tend to bring to this new search the same orientation as before….  “If only I could understand what realization is all about, I would be happy.”

Enlightenment is not something you achieve.  It is the absence of something.  All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal.  Enlightenment is dropping all that.

I’m getting the sense that just dropping off those excess bags at the Salvation Army is not enough.  Velocity has to drop off too.  A full stop?  It suddenly occurs to me that the velocity of the ink is most powerful when the brush comes to a sudden stop on the paper.

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hidden promises

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Sunday’s post announced that Zen teacher Joko Beck was in hospice care.  Scouting around the bloggosphere, I’m touched by how deeply this teacher drew so many of us onto the path of practice – and service.  I read Joko’s book Everyday Zen decades ago, wandering across it as I struggled with the role Buddhism played in my life.  I was in graduate school, mangling relationships and getting mangled in turn by the zeitgeist in Psychology that had yet to understand the concept of empathy.  We were a good match. 

In the turmoil of egos and crazy-making interactions, Joko Beck’s writings were a clean straight arrow shot into the air.  The tempo of a cognitive psychological stance resonated with my studies.  It’s not the intention of her teachings to activate the left brain but it is skillful means if the brain at hand is tilted so.  Whatever it was, I learned and grew from her books.  Nothing special, simply unfolding breath by breath, in my life as it was at that time – and it is now.

When I read the news of her dying, I lit a stick of incense. 

May you journey safely to the other shore, Joko. 

May you finally be free of carrying us, one-by-one, word-by-word, to our transformation. 

May you rest now, trusting in the labor of all of us who take your teachings into heart and plant them into ground. 

May you find your promise kept and no longer need to practice disappointment.

These are some of my favourite readings from Nothing Special:

The problem is that nothing actually works.  We begin to discover that the promise we hold out to ourselves – that somehow, somewhere, our thirst will be quenched – is never kept.  I don’t mean that we never enjoy life.  Much in life can be greatly enjoyed: certain relationships, certain work, certain activities.  But what we want is something absolute.  We want to quench our thirst permanently, so that we have all the water we want, all the time.  That promise of complete satisfaction is never kept.  It can’t be kept.  The minute we get something we have desired, we are momentarily satisfied – and then our dissatisfaction rises again.

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment.  We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us.  This discovery is our teacher.

The promise that is never kept is based on belief systems, personally centered thoughts that keep us stuck and thirsty.

It’s useful to review our belief systems…because there’s always one that we don’t see.  In each belief system we hide a promise.