Jun Po Roshi on Ego, Feeling, and the Dialogue That Ends Reactivity
The question I kept returning to was simple: at the root, what has to shift in how a person understands things? So I took the classical training I'd been given and condensed it. I folded in what I'd learned from my own psychological waking-up, the whole transformation I went through, and I poured that into the Koan work, the back-and-forth of dialectic dialogue. That process is a way to carry an old tradition into the present, to respect it and at the same time let it live inside our own culture. We keep changing. My teacher used to tell me flatly, "There is no Zen outside Japanese culture." I pushed back. I said there has to be. The point was never that we'd all turn Japanese. The real work is figuring out how to clean the teaching up, how to get down to the fundamentals, and whether we can offer it in a way that actually produces freedom, realization, and genuine change.
Here is how I put it to students: your angst is the doorway to your liberation. Fear read correctly is excitement, it's possibility. Anger, when it isn't a violent reaction, is sharp clarity and full presence. You reach these by holding a dialogue inside yourself, by taking a position within. That resets something, a kind of internal map, almost a neurolinguistic one. The ego can only respond out of the memory structures it has accumulated across a lifetime. It consults its database and reacts. Same stimulus, same trip to the database, same reaction, over and over.
So we use a word: Noknow. N-O-K-N-O-W. I plant that as a seed. Noknow, to interrupt the reflex. And then the obvious question follows: now what do I do? This is where I'd say, die upon your cushion. There's no rebirth without a death first. The ego has to grow, has to crack open. I'll talk to the empty air if I have to. Can I speak to your inner being? Can I speak to the child in you, to the reactive, self-centered patterning? You get the chance to grow up. The ego itself isn't the enemy. It's not a problem in the way people assume. It's a technical problem, not an emotional one, something you solve by shifting your philosophical frame and your whole paradigm according to what you come to understand about the nature of mind. It's your consciousness.
Erik: What do you mean when you call the ego a technical problem?
Jun Po: What happens is that you stop being a victim of your own emotionality. You're no longer at the mercy of confused emotional reactivity. Once you've understood and directly felt what feeling actually is, you see that feeling carries information. Again, this is elementary Buddhism: smell, taste, touch, thought, feeling. Thought and feeling count among the senses. There are the physical senses, and then there are the senses of the mind. All of them exist to deliver information. The trouble starts when we muddle the nature of a feeling with the emotional reaction piled on top of it. We never make it down to the feeling itself.