A Satisfying Life
Photo by Jeremy Bishop
What lays the ground for our living of a meaningful, satisfying life? What works contrary to that meaning and satisfaction?
In this talk, Zuisei speaks on the work that we’re each called to do, drawing parallels to that work and our sense of deep personal satisfaction. She also touches on the process by which we begin to believe that we’re somehow not enough. The talk includes quotes by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Buddha (in the Fire Sermon), and more.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
A Satisfying Life
Good evening, everyone. I hope that your holiday was easy and restful, that it was filled with good food, good conversation or that you had some nice quiet time—time for reflection and appreciation.
I’ve been thinking that the yearly calendar offers us so many opportunities to pause and appreciate. Holidays offer us moments in which to re-member, re-constitute any bits of life that might have gotten scattered in our busyness, in our to-doing.
If we go beyond the historical or social significance of any given holiday—some of which can be very problematic, as we know—we can also very simply take them as opportunities to stop and look at ourselves and our lives anew. To take the chance to not do, not make, not chase, not buy or sell, so we can appreciate the holy in our days. So we can notice where we might be forgetting that holiness, and remind ourselves to hold it up and to live it again.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in a little book called Sabbath which I read many years ago, says it in a very poignant way:
Those who want to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. They must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling their own lives… Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the seventh we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.
I don’t know what’s a better phrase: “the profanity of clattering commerce” or “being yoked to toil.” But it is a yoke isn’t it, all this doing and producing, constantly having to make more of ourselves to prove to the world that we matter. Underneath so much of our furious working and getting is the fear that if we don’t do enough, we might be forgotten. This is our preoccupation, to not do enough, not be enough. And so day after day we wrestle. We wrestle with the world, we wrestle with each other, we wrestle with ourselves, as if this were necessary, as if our being needed to be constantly checked, improved upon, enhanced.
I was recently reading work by a writer—who’s also a Zen practitioner, by her own admission—and she was doing her own wrestling on the page. She was reflecting on her need to write, to tell stories and questioning her motivation, and whether if she stopped writing, other people would get ahead of her.
I so badly wanted to write to her, say, “Honey, don’t waste your precious energy worrying about these other people, these more efficient paths—whatever those might be.You are a magnificent writer and that’s enough.” Because she is a magnificent writer, and it is enough, she is enough. If one person or a thousand remember afterward, will it matter? And to whom?
Isn’t the most important thing we can do to honor our lives is to give them our all? All of 1 percent if that’s what we have, or 100 percent? And if that’s the measure, then every single one of us is doing just fine.
But why then this persistent thought, Not enough, not enough, not enough? Why this persistent feeling, There’s something wrong with me. I don’t know what it is but I know there’s something wrong, there has to be.
I spent a couple of decades wrestling with this thought myself, convinced that I alone felt this way and that that’s how it would always be. Then I found practice, and little by little things began to make sense. Slowly I began to think, “Oh, maybe there’s nothing wrong with me.” I’m not the only one, in any case—everyone’s struggling. It’s just that some are better at hiding it than I am.
I remember my teacher saying early on that he would look around at the adults in his life and think, “Doesn’t anyone notice? Does anyone know what the hell is going on?” He could sense that off-ness, that “there’s-something-wrong-ness.” But everyone seemed to be going about their merry ways and he wondered is it just me? Am I just crazy? I used to think, “Why can’t I be more laid back? Why can’t I just enjoy my life?” I did enjoy my life, but I also saw how hard it was. I looked inside and I looked at the world and I thought, Is it always this hard?
We could spend our entire lives carrying that particular boulder around and not even notice. The great Burmese teacher Ajahn Chah was walking through the forest with a few of his monks, when he pointed to a large boulder by the side of the road. “Is it heavy?” he asked. “Well, yes,” they replied. “Not of you don’t pick it up,” he said and smiled.
But we do pick it up, don’t we? And we carry it around and even when we finally notice the weight, we don’t seem able to set it down. Why can’t we just set it down?
The Birth of Ignorance
A couple of weeks ago I talked about how avidya, ignorance is born, and with it the self. Vidya is wisdom, the clear recognition of the truth of things. Avidya is the lack of that wisdom, and it’s essentially a process of forgetting. It’s the process of going from enlightenment to delusion, from wisdom to ignorance, and if we’re lucky, the beginning of the path. Let me review it briefly, since I complicated it a little last time.
In the beginning there was ocean. Ocean as far and clear as the eye could see. You were that ocean, but so much vastness was way too much. It was too vast, too overwhelming, so in a moment that Trungpa Rinpoche called “reverse enlightenment,” a bit of ocean turned, and looking for something to grasp, fell in love with a wave and called it “I.” This is the first moment of ignorance, the initial separation—or the illusion of separation, I should say.
The second moment of ignorance: the wave, sensing something wrong with this new way of being, feels unbalanced. It feels incomplete, somehow. But it figures, well, that’s just the way it is. And so now the wave is not only separate but also confused. That’s the feeling “There’s something wrong here,” which strengthens delusion.
Third moment of ignorance: the wave looks out at the rest of the ocean and sees all those other waves and thinks This is me, and that is them. Sure, they might look like me but they’re not me and they don’t understand me and I don’t even like them that much so Stay over there. And now the separation is complete, self and other have come into being.
To make matters a bit more challenging, the separation comes with amnesia, immediately we forget we were once ocean and we were whole. Now, when we look out at the world, we don’t see ocean. Now all we see is waves.
I recently said to someone, “What if there’s nothing wrong with you?” What if you’re just a bit more attuned to the fact that this can’t be all there is? We’ve gotten so good at ignoring our own wisdom. We have all these ready-made ways to cover it up, ever more numerous. Ever easier and more socially acceptable, but just as painful than when we numb ourselves with alcohol or drugs.
One of you was sharing with me that the word of the year this year, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “brain rot.” And the definition of brain rot is (I’m going to paraphrase slightly): The “deterioration of a person’s mind, as a result of consuming too much material that is trivial or unchallenging.” If reverse enlightenment was possible at the beginning of time, think how much more susceptible we are to it now that our brains are rapidly deteriorating.
Therefore the importance—ever more pressing—of training the mind, of exercising discipline and some restraint so we can keep our minds clear. This is like the famous debate between the Sixth Ancestor and the senior student of the Fifth Ancestor.
Hongren, the fifth ancestor, challenges the sangha to write a poem to state their understanding, and his senior monk essentially says that the mind is like a mirror, and you have to constantly wipe it to keep it clean and clear. Huineng, the Sixth Ancestor, says “No, originally there is no mirror and no dust so what are you going to clean?” And although the story says the robe and bowl of the Buddha went to the Sixth Ancestor, implying that his understanding was deeper than the senior monk’s, the fact is that both are true. There is no mirror, and you have to keep it clean. How? Through zazen, through practicing the precepts, through cultivating wisdom. Samadhi, sila, prajna, the three trainings.
So, we were ocean, now we’re wave. You could say that practice is the process of retraining ourselves to remember that we’re still ocean. And also of carefully working through the very strong inclination we have to collapse into wave, to keep ourselves small and—we think—safe.
Practice is the process … of carefully working through the very strong inclination we have… to keep ourselves small and—we think—safe.
I suspect that deep down all of us have a sense of our ocean nature, but we find it frightening—like my analogy of the field and the broom closet. We’d rather be in the dank, contained space than out in the open, where anything could happen. It’s much more manageable to be small. The problem is it’s not very satisfying.
And when your inner world is not satisfying, you’ll go looking for things to fill it from the outside. But that’s like ordering shoes when what you want is company, what you want is connection.
The good thing is that although we are suffering from amnesia, that forgetfulness is not complete. Some part of us does still know that we are vast and that accumulating things doesn’t make us happy because it’s like throwing toys at the ocean. That’s why it works out so much better for us when we first hear that calling to the path, and we heed it.
If we hear that voice whispering in our ear, “There has to be more than this,” we can ignore it for a while but eventually, like the roar of the ocean, it’ll get too loud. Or it’ll simply flood our lives one way or the other. Things or money or fame or pleasure aren’t actually satisfying because what the ocean really wants aren’t toys. What it wants is to flow.
The Eight Worldly Winds
I’ve been writing a series on the eight worldly winds. They are also called the eight concerns, preoccupations, vicissitudes or obsessions. They are four pairs of apparent opposites that keep us imprisoned in samsara, going from one hope to fear, joy to greed in our search to feel good and not feel bad. These eight winds are gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain. And the piece I was writing was about fame and disrepute, or status and disgrace, recognition and dishonor.
We all want, if not to be famous, then at least to be seen, recognized, acknowledged. We don’t want to be dishonored, disapproved of, condemned. That seems obvious. On the surface, we see that all of us want to feel good about ourselves, and we want to belong. But deep down there’s something else driving this need. Think about it—what is our biggest fear? The fear to not be.
So, the logic might go: the more famous I am, the more I matter (look, all these people say so). The more I matter, the less vulnerable I am. To what? to insignificance, to death, to non-existence.
So what powers all of these winds? Self, our belief in a fixed self. But this pair is love of the self on steroids. The bigger we are, the less we can disappear. And disappearing is not what the self wants. But, if I come to realize I’m not wave but ocean, then what need is there to make myself large. I’m already large, I’m boundless, so what need is there to prove myself?
I can never stop being ocean, no matter what others say or do. I will never not be water, I’ll never be separate, I’ll never not fit. How does any part of the ocean not fit itself? Impossible! It’s foolish to even consider it. And you know what the best part of this whole thing is? The best part is that when you no longer have anything to prove, all of your energy is freed up to just live, just be, just do the work you want to do, for no other reason than that you are the one to do it. No impostor syndrome, no Am I enough, no Is someone doing more or better than I am? Now you’re able to see that those are all moot points. The point is to do the work—the work of waking up, but also the work that only you can do in the world. You with your unique combination of talents, interests, strengths, and weaknesses.
I do believe that each one of us has our own work to do. And in order to know what that is, we have to be quiet enough to be able to listen, we have to move slowly enough to be able to see what needs to be done.
A Life Well Lived
In what is perhaps my favorite endings to the sutras, the Buddha says in the Fire Sermon, “When liberated, there is knowledge that [the person] is liberated. They understand: ‘Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being.’”
“What had to be done has been done.” Wouldn’t that be a wonderful way to end a life, to know that this was true? The Buddha was speaking about enlightenment, of course, about putting an end to suffering, completely. But we can think of it more broadly as doing the work of a life. And by this I don’t mean earning a living either. I mean the work of a whole life, the particular gifts only we can offer the world.
“I did what had to be done.” First, I did my best to understand who I am, what I am, and how to live. And second, I did my damnedest to live what I saw. It wasn’t perfect—no, it was perfect, but it wasn’t flawless. I failed a lot but I tried again, and again. I didn’t give up. Even when I thought I couldn’t do it, when I wondered if it was too late, I kept going and I gave it my all.
And it was a satisfying life. It was a life well lived.
Explore further
01 : The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
02 : Fire Sermon translated by Ñanamoli Thera
03 : Pilgrimage with Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
A Satisfying Life, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard on the work needed to see that we’re enough, and so are our lives—just as they are.