Is Life Seeming More Hollow? The Antidote Of Practice

Tonight,

I'd like to talk about something I heard a few days ago on a podcast.

A question that cuts to the core of Zen and really resonated for me in a way that things don't usually,

That I hear on media.

This was a podcast,

A journalist named Ezra Klein from the New York Times has a way of making me think about things in new ways.

But this week,

He asked a question that startled me.

He said,

Is life these days becoming more hollow?

And that's what has been rattling around in my head for several days now.

Because our practice is all about this question of hollowness.

Many of us come to Zen practice wanting to live life as fully as possible,

Perhaps wanting to change how we feel about life,

And perhaps more than anything,

Wanting to feel as alive as we can.

And this question of is our life becoming more hollow strikes me as so pervasive now that I think of the things that I pay attention to,

That I actually think mean something.

And then I stop and realize that really doesn't mean anything at all.

Let me give you some examples.

My watch tracks my steps,

It tracks my calories,

It gives me all kinds of data about myself.

And there are times when I don't expend the number of calories or I don't take the number of steps that I want to,

And I can literally feel my mood change.

And then I can catch myself and say,

But wait,

How do I feel?

Do I feel like I've been as active as I'd like to be today?

Regardless of what my watch tries to tell me.

You know,

We have for a long time,

Since social media came into the world,

We have known that having friends on social media is not really like having friends in the real world.

And so we joke about it.

And people can say,

Oh,

I have thousands of friends.

And we know that some of those people actually lead lonely lives.

Also with social media,

This idea of views,

Which is in some ways saying,

Gee,

The world is paying attention.

Is the world paying attention to me?

Yes,

Because I have views.

And I think this week,

What I was hearing was that AI is raising these questions in new ways.

So AI can write our essays so much faster and in many cases better than I can write essays.

And it's disconcerting for me that this bot sometimes is a better writer than I am.

But what does it mean for the young people in our lives,

The young people who find that they can ask AI to write for them,

To do their schoolwork for them?

On the one hand,

It's a wonderful gift.

On the other hand,

We know that writing is one way to learn to think,

To put ideas together.

We also know that AI can now make photos that are hard to tell from photos taken by human beings.

They can draw pictures.

And somehow all this feels hollow.

It feels less real.

But this is as old as time.

Think about money.

Think about money as something that actually has no intrinsic utility.

We can't eat it.

It doesn't keep us warm.

Right?

And yet many people come to me in my psychotherapy practice ashamed because they haven't made enough money,

Because they have their needs met,

But they wanted to be millionaires or even billionaires.

And when I ask,

Well,

What's the money for?

What's it meant to do in your life?

Some of them are like deer in the headlights,

Because it's just money for its own sake.

This thing that's all made up,

That we just all agree to give value to.

Well,

Now we have cryptocurrency,

And many people are frightened that there's really no there there.

There's nothing at the core.

Again,

Something that begins to feel hollow.

One more example.

My son teaches undergraduate students,

And so he gives exams.

What he's found this past spring is that some students were paying other students to take their exams.

And so the professors are having to figure out ways to work with this,

That people have to bring IDs,

And people have to check in.

But when he asks his students,

Why did you do this?

They would say,

Well,

I have to get a good grade.

And sometimes their parents get involved,

And they say,

Well,

My son has to get a good grade.

And when my son,

The professor said,

Yes,

But he didn't do the work.

Well,

The parents just think,

It's so important to get that grade,

That grade that's all made up.

Never mind what did or did not get learned.

So all of this can give life a feeling of hollowness,

Of not being real.

Perhaps you notice this in yourself.

You notice this in your own life,

Whether it's your steps tracked by your watch,

Or some other metric with it,

When you stop and think about it,

You say,

Oh,

Wait a minute,

There's really nothing to that.

But this is not new.

And what I came to,

What I started to remember was that Zen koans have spoken to this for centuries.

Actually,

More than a millennium ago,

The Gateless Gate collection of koans,

Which many of you are familiar with,

And which I have often taught from,

Has several koans that made no sense to me until they did.

And now they make even more sense.

So I'll just give you examples.

They're all from the Gateless Gate.

One,

Case 18,

It is a very short koan where a monk asks Tanzan,

The teacher,

He asks,

What is Buddha?

And Tanzan replies,

Three pounds of flax.

I remember encountering this and scratching my head and having no idea what this was about.

It just seemed like one of those inscrutable Zen things.

Another koan,

Case 21 in the Gateless Gate,

A student asks Master Yunmen,

What is Buddha?

Meaning,

What is the essence of Buddha nature?

And Yunmen replies,

Dried shit stick,

Which is the ancient Chinese way of saying,

Use toilet paper.

Really?

This is the answer to the koan.

And finally,

Case 37,

A monk asks Master Zhao Zhou,

Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?

Bodhidharma was the great Indian teacher who came to China and brought Buddhism.

And in China,

It became Chan,

And then it moved to Japan,

Where it became Zen.

So why did this great teacher come from the West?

And Master Zhao Zhou's answer is the oak tree in the garden.

Again,

We scratch our heads as students and say,

What is this?

What are they talking about here?

And of course,

You know where this is leading.

What they're talking about is this phrase we use all the time in our practice,

This phrase of just this,

Over and over again.

The teachings point us to just this,

Pointing to looking beyond our concepts,

Looking beyond all the thoughts we have about the world to just this.

The feel of the cushion underneath me,

The feel of my breath going in and out.

Because what the ancient teachers keep pointing to is the habit of our minds,

Which is to mistake the map for the terrain,

To mistake the symbolic version for the essence.

Of life.

I mean,

I think about the map and the terrain.

I'm driving through these beautiful hills and mountains and valleys in Vermont right now.

And my GPS gives me a map.

And the map looks nothing like these magnificent formations.

They're the rocks,

The clouds,

The streams.

Right?

And yet,

What the teaching reminds us of is that we are constantly mistaking the maps we make,

Our minds make,

For the terrain of life.

And what practice helps us do is to move beyond these concepts.

And these Zen koans that sometimes jar us in ways,

Certainly jar me,

Are meant to jar us out of our habitual automatic pilot ways of experiencing the world.

And it's not just koans,

It's sitting in meditation,

Which we do right here.

And which we do on our own.

That what Zazen highlights for us is the difference between the thinking mind and the pictures we paint of the world.

And just this,

Just what's happening in this moment.

One of the phrases that I like is,

Knowing whether the water is warm or cold.

No amount of thinking can tell you that.

You have to experience it.

And what Zen practice emphasizes is experience.

Now,

What we don't teach is that thoughts are the enemy.

We simply teach that thoughts are just one experience.

Our minds are built to see thoughts as the whole of reality,

To construct these thought maps of the world,

And to lose touch with the terrain.

To lose touch with what it actually feels like to sit in the grass,

To listen to the sound of a stream,

To listen,

To really listen to the traffic outside of our windows.

And Zazen doesn't prioritize experience over thinking.

It just asks us to notice the difference,

And to notice the ways that we get the thinking mixed up with the experiential world.

That we get these concepts,

We get these badges of achievement,

Like the number of steps I achieve every day.

We get that mixed up with how my body feels,

With what it feels like to be physically active.

And so all of this is a way to provide an antidote to our tendency to create a life of hollowness through the thinking mind.

And that's why Zazen is a practice that emphasizes experience,

And a practice that never ends.

Because the mind will always carry us into thought loops.

The mind will always carry us into automatic pilot.

But by being here tonight,

Immersed in Zazen in the last period,

And just letting my words flow over you right now,

You are experiencing just this.

And this is what Diane Rossetto was talking about in the reading.

She said,

Underlying holdings and beliefs slowly melt into emptiness,

And we are left with breathing in and out.

The sound of the children playing in the yard,

The smell of the just this.

For a time,

The self-centered dream has disappeared into complete awakeness.

These are the turns we make over and over as we are transformed.

Thank you.