Life's Not A Problem | Tricycle

Life's Not A Problem | Tricycle: Reflections from Charlotte Koko Beck

"I want to go back to your “little breakthrough.” You said, “Breakthroughs aren’t the point.” But can you get the point without the breakthrough?

What primarily concerns me is the necessity for a student to learn to be as awake as possible in each moment. Otherwise it can seem as if the point of practice is to have breakthroughs. The usefulness of these openings exists only if they clarify life and our ability to live it and serve it. But until mind and body - usually through years of patient practice - cease to want an ego-centered life, the openings and their teachings cannot be distorted into ego successes. Only when mind and body are mostly free of reactivity can a true understanding of what life is become possible - not through a momentary breakthrough, but through an open and compassionate living of life."

Life's Not A Problem | Tricycle | Charlotte Koko Beck

Life's Not A Problem | Tricycle:

This is certainly a departure from the way you were trained. Many Zen practices are about suppression - sheer concentration and shutting out things. I realized that what you shut out is exactly what turns around and runs you. So I began trying to get students to work in a different way, and it proved to be effective. Dogen [the thirteenth-century Zen master] said that to study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self - your thoughts, etc. - is to forget the self. And to forget the self is . . . what? It’s to be enlightened by all things.

Suppose somebody has hurt my feelings - or so I think. What I want to do is to go over and over and over that drama so I can blame them and get to be right. To turn away from such thinking and just experience the painful body is to forget the self. If you really experience something without thoughts, there is no self - there’s just a vibration of energy. When you practice like that ten thousand times, you will be more selfless. It doesn’t mean that you’re a ghost. It means that you’re much more non-reactive, in the world but not of it. Dualism transforms into non-dualism, a life of direct and compassionate functioning."

Exciting insight....maybe try to practice and give it a try!

Life's Not A Problem | Tricycle

Life's Not A Problem | Tricycle

Charlotte Koko Beck on practice as transformation, not as change...Religions attempt to 'change' me; this practice is posited on the idea that 'being with the thought, being with the emotion,' and at the same time avoiding the 'reactivity', I can be transformed.

Awareness

Charlotte Joko Beck on awareness

There's an old Zen story: a student said to Master Ichu, "Please write for me something of great wisdom." Master Ichu picked up his brush and wrote one word: "Attention." The student said, "Is that all?" The master wrote, "Attention Attention."...
For "attention" we could substitute the word "awareness." Attention or awareness is the secret of life and the heart of practice....[E]very moment in life is absolute itself. That's all there is. There is nothing other than this present moment; there is no past, there is no future; there is nothing but this. So when we don't pay attention to every little this, we miss the whole thing. And the contents of this can be anything. Thiscan be straightening our sitting mats, chopping an onion, visiting one we don't want to visit. It doesn't matter what the contents of the moment are; each moment is absolute. That's all there is, and all there ever will be. If we could totally pay attention, we would never be upset. If we're upset, it's axiomatic that we're not paying attention.If we miss not just one moment, but one moment after another, we're in trouble.

--Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special: Living Zen
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book

Being present

Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering
Holding to self-centered thought, exactly the dream.
Each moment, life as it is, the only teacher.
Being this moment, compassion's way.

--Charlotte Koko Beck, San Diego,CA

Anger: A Bigger Container

Tricycle's Daily Dharma: July 14, 2007

A Bigger Container

We can talk about "oneness" until the cows come home. But how do we actually separate ourselves from others? How? The pride out of which anger is born is what separates us.

And the solution is a practice in which we experience this separating emotion as a definite bodily state. When we do, A Bigger Container is created. What is created, what grows, is the amount of life I can hold without it upsetting me, dominating me. At first this space is quite restricted, then it's a bit bigger, and then it's bigger still. It need never cease to grow. And the enlightened state is that enormous and compassionate space. But as long as we live we find there is a limit to our container's size and it is at that point that we must practice.

And how do we know where this cut-off point is? We are at that point when we feel any degree of upset, of anger. It's no mystery at all. And the strength of our practice is how big that container gets. . . . This practice of making A Bigger Container is essentially spiritual because it is essentially nothing at all. A Bigger Container isn't a thing;  awareness is not a thing. . . .

--Charlotte Joko Beck