Jun Po Roshi on Zen as Training Toward Freedom
Think of Zen as dog training. The very first lesson is learning to sit. Sit, quiet down, sit again. Is that hard? Absolutely it is. But hard becomes something you want once you grasp the reason behind it. The whole point is freedom. What you're after is the ability to stay fully awake even when someone insults you, so that nothing knocks you off your center. Your heart cracks open. You end up standing bare, exposed, and clear, if that's what you choose. And to get there, the tradition hands you a path to walk.
Go deeper. Then deeper still. Quiet the noise, again and again. Do I really have to repeat it? How far down does your realization actually reach? Can you hold the steadiness of the witness while you're living an ordinary day, with ordinary problems? Hakuin is the reason I'm sitting here at all. He brought Rinzai Zen back to life in the eighteenth century, and he said that practice carried into daily living is worth a thousand times more than sitting on a cushion inside a monastery. I took him seriously. Meditation, in that sense, has no finish line.
So build the capacity to rest in both the witness and the intelligence while the egocentric self keeps referencing everything back to itself. Hold all of that at once and the game is over, you've arrived home. That's the first task: grow that capacity. Which raises a question. Are you willing to move your perspective at all?
The second question goes like this. If that's true, can you listen cleanly? Erik, can you? Is there pure listening alive in you? Erik says yes, he thinks he can listen purely. And I push back: you think you can? He says yes, that's how he's talking with me right now. I ask whether that's an escape hatch. Can you or can't you? None of this is about you, really. Is there a deep, clean listening inside you that runs underneath your self-reference? Count it off, one, two, three, am I ready? Yes.
Here's something I like to do with the bell. I'll ask whether you can listen without forming an opinion. Keep the sound outside your deeper listening. Fight it: stop, go away. And the whole time, the bell keeps sinking in, further and further. The surface layer is pure reactivity. The bell, meanwhile, rings on, down into the quiet place where you can actually receive. Can you hear it? Can you set the ego aside for even a second, let the mind open, let the heart open? Erik admits it's hard to keep up.
Of course it is. That's exactly why we practice. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? You practice, and then you practice more. The result shows up in direct proportion to the time and energy you put into the discipline. Do the work, you get the result. Skip it, you get nothing. This isn't rocket science. The depth of your inquiry will match, step for step, the hours you spend turning your attention inward.