Jun Po Roshi: Interview Archive
The point is to stop the reactivity. But then what comes next? What am I supposed to do? The old instruction was blunt: die right there on your cushion. You cannot be reborn without first dying, and the ego has to break open and keep growing. So I'll talk to the air. I'll ask if I can speak to someone's inner being, to the child in them, to the reactive patterning that runs on ego. The ego itself isn't the enemy. It isn't a defect. Treat it as a technical matter rather than an emotional one, something you adjust once your understanding of mind changes, once your paradigm shifts. It's your consciousness, after all.
Erik asked what I meant by calling the ego a technical problem.
What happens is that you stop being a casualty of your own emotionality. You're no longer pushed around by confused emotional reactivity. When you actually understand and experience what feeling is, you see that feeling carries information. This is ordinary Buddhism: smell, taste, touch, thought, feeling. Thought and feeling count among the senses too. There are the physical senses and then the senses of mind, and every one of them exists to deliver information. The trouble starts when we muddle the nature of the feeling with the emotional reactivity attached to it. We never reach the feeling itself.
Take anger, and let me pull your view apart a little. Consider that anger, the way most people express it, isn't really a feeling at all. It's closer to an outburst or a violent reaction. When someone says I feel angry, they're usually describing a projection or a lashing out. Yes, there's a visceral charge to it, something secondary layered on top, but you're also interfering somehow. So what's the feeling underneath? Ask a few questions and nobody ever stays stuck. It's fear. And what sits with fear? A relative of sadness. The sense that something terrible could happen. Go one more layer down and you find grave concern: I care deeply about this, and I'm frightened, and I'm a bit sad. So I protect myself. I strike outward, or I strike inward, or I check out entirely. Fine, stop. No, don't just stop. Ask instead what the feeling is telling you. Am I being insulted? Am I actually in danger? Is a bus bearing down on me? What is the thing I need to do? It's a change in how you grasp the nature and the work of emotion, and how you respond to it.
Once that's in place, you can go back and look again at the situations in your own life. Did your mother ever make you angry? Did your father? They didn't make you angry. Those were reactions you selected, ways of intervening. Knowing that, return to those moments and see them differently. In my Zen lineage there's a line for this. Quickly, send me to hell. I think I'm ready to go.