Opening into Reality
Photo by Jason Leung
What does it mean to open into, trust reality, instead of trying to force things into being? How do we reconcile accepting the things we cannot change with changing the things we cannot accept?
Zuisei explores the possibility of seeing things as they are, learning to work with this truth instead of against it, and basing this work on the realization of our interbeing.
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.
I am very happy to be with you tonight. After a two-year hiatus I am delighted to be speaking like this again and to be able to explore and share in the dharma with you.
As I started to think about what I wanted to speak about today, things were churning in me, simmering on low heat. Then last week I participated in One Continuous Thread, the online sesshins that Zen Mountain Monastery has been doing since the pandemic started. When you sign up for one of these, you essentially participate to the extent that you’re willing and able. You can do the schedule exactly as if you were at the Monastery, or you can tailor it to accommodate work, family, the need for more sleep, etc. You can be doing an intensive retreat but also follow your own rhythm, and this is quite wonderful.
I was doing this myself, and one afternoon at the beginning of the retreat, I took a nap and fell into a deep sleep. During it I dreamt that I was talking to you, pretty much like this. In this dream I very clearly heard myself say the following words: “I no longer want to put my energy into making things happen. Instead I want to open into what is already happening.” I woke up and thought, That’s it! That’s the beginning of your talk, at the beginning of a new year!
“I no longer want to put my energy into making things happen. Instead, I want to open into what’s alreadyhappening.” By this I don’t mean I want to passively wait, be an observer of my life. As my first teacher, Daido Roshi, used to say, “Zen is not a spectator sport.” I’ve always said you get out of Zen exactly what you put in because it’s your life. You get out of your life exactly what you put in, not, you get everything you want. It’s more subtle than that, and that’s what I want to talk about.
It’s not just sitting back and waiting for things to happen, it’s actively working to open into, and trust, what’s already happening. It’s working with things, instead of against them or despite them, on top of them. In other words, we put our energy into opening into reality—things as they are. This is a phrase you hear a lot in Zen, “Things as they are.” It’s a phrase I really like because it reminds me that this is different from the way I want things to be, the way I think things should be. Reality is things as they are, no more and no less. If we could live there, truly live there, we wouldn’t need to practice, we would just live, free and at peace with ourselves, with one another, and with the world. The catch is, I want things and so do you, and what I want and what you want don’t always match, right? The “way things are” is not good for me, the way things are excludes you. How do we reconcile “the way things are” with my and your happiness? How do we reconcile “I’m accepting the things I cannot change” with Angela Davis’s famous remark, “I’m changing the things I cannot accept”? What does it meanto open into reality, not as an idea but as a fact of life—my life, your life, our lives together?
One of my favorite Zen sayings is “The three worlds are nothing but mind.” The three worlds are the worlds of form, formlessness, and desire. These are the world of the senses and desire; the world of things, of matter; the immaterial world in which devas are said to live even though their existence is purely mental (the four spheres: infinite space, infinite consciousness, absolute nothingness, and neither perception nor nonperception). Essentially, all of existence. This saying states that moment to moment we’re creating reality with our minds. If you think about it, it’s quite empowering. It’s saying, I am the master of my life, I create my life, which is true. A more accurate way of saying it is that we co-create the three worlds. We, together with one another, we together with the world, with the devas dwelling in infinite space and consciousness, we and the environment, and circumstances, and cause and effect, are creating reality moment to moment. We are creating the world that we live in, the world in which we fight and love, the world in which we live and die. Let’s dream a good dream. The question is, how do we do that? How do we co-create a reality that includes all of us, values all, honors all?
One of you asked me recently, “If karma means that everything happens precisely as it should, then how can things not be preordained?” I think this is one of those questions that if you were to take it to the Buddha, he would sit silently, maybe smiling benignly at you, and he’d say nothing. You might ask again, and then a third time, and he would still sit there and not answer. It’s one of those questions whose answer doesn’t lead to the end of suffering. It’s not the right question to ask, right as in skillful. If I could tell you right now, with absolute certainty, “Yes, everything that is going to happen in your life was meant to happen and you can’t change it, no matter what you do,” would that help you? If I said, with equal certainty, “No, everything is random. Things happen but no one knows why. There’s no real pattern behind the dream.” Would that help you? Fortunately, I can’t do either, I won’t do either. What I will say is that what you and I do matters. Every cause has an effect and the effect matches the cause, although we can’t always see that immediately. Every action I take is intimately tied to every action you take. Knowing that, now, how do you move forward?
I think it’s helpful to remember that our minds have evolved to see the world in a largely dualistic way. We want to know, “Is it this or that? Is it right or wrong? Come on, just tell me, so I’ll know how to act!” We don’t like uncertainty, we crave definition. We want to know, “Oh, it’s this! Now I can relax.” But is that true? Our world is full of facts, both true and false. How relaxed do you feel?
I was reading an article recently that said that the reason behind our dualistic thinking is survival and the cause is language, spoken and written. We’ve evolved to differentiate so we can survive. In order to live my life, I need to know where I end and you begin. I need to know the difference between a wall and a door, life and death, good and bad. The catch is that a lot is lost between dichotomies. Most of life cannot be explained in terms of this or that. We try, we certainly try, but it hasn’t worked out so well, has it? Male or female, black or white, young or old, liberal or conservative, wherever you see a name, you know for sure, trouble will follow. Because reality doesn’t work like this and because it doesn’t work like this, our divided world doesn’t work, doesn’t serve and it won’t last, it cannot last, just like the ocean wouldn’t last a second if the waves suddenly went up in arms, “I don’t want to live near this wave. We’re not in the same class. And that wave? Look at it, there’s something fishy about it, I bet you it leans to the right.” A body attacks itself despite the fact that it needs every single cell to survive.
And the thing is, the names are not the problem. We need the names, as we saw. It’s what we do with them. Ursula K. Le Guin’s story: “She Unnames Them”—I told this story before but not for a few years now. It begins with an old, old story:
"Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them to the man [Adam] to see what he would call them; and whatever the man [Adam] called every living creature, that was its name."
Then, in the inimitable writer Ursula K. LeGuin’s dream, Eve decides to undo what the Lord did. She decides to unname all the animals, ending with herself. Eve, with a wisdom that is innate, realizes that in order for things to more accurately reflect what they really are, something needs to happen. Names have to be returned to the silence. She starts with the whales, dolphins, seals and sea otters. They all shed their names easily, letting them slip away into the ocean. Next she unnames the yaks, who at first put up a fight because yak just sounds right to them. They’ve been called that for as long as they can remember, but the females convince the bulls that from a yak’s perspective, the name is redundant, they themselves never really use it anyway. They agree to do away with it. Horses, cows, sheep, pigs, mules and goats all give up their names happily. The same is true for chickens and geese, turkeys and guinea hens.
When she gets to pets, the problems start. The cats, of course, deny ever having had any names other than their self-given ones and those no one ever knows but them. But dogs and parrots insist on keeping their given names. They want to be called Bailey or Biscuit, Frankie or Goose. Eve has to patiently explain they can keep those names if they want, they just won’t be called dog anymore, or rabbit, or rat. Eventually they too agree to give up their names. Insects and fish, no hesitation, they give up their names like that, until finally, there’s no one left to unname. Eve realizes the full import of what she's done. She can no longer distinguish where one animal begins and another ends, then she does the same for herself.
She goes to Adam, who’s busy puttering with something and she says:
“You and your father gave me this, and it’s been very useful, but lately it doesn’t seem to fit, so I’m giving it back.”
Adam, who’s still not paying very much attention, says, “Oh, okay, put it over there. Um, when’s dinner, by the way?”
Eve’s a little disappointed, she was expecting at least a little bit of a fight.
She shrugs and says, “I’m not sure. I’m going, dear. Take good care. I hope the key to the garden turns up.” She walks away and all the animals are around her, unnamed and unbound, unknown and unbroken, moving and being exactly as they were always meant to be: one great, unified body, the body of reality.
Going back to what I said at the beginning, we can force something into being or we can allow its becoming. Why do you think we sit so much? Popular magazines will tell you that meditation is good for your heart. It’s good for your nerves, your digestion, your sex life. What they don’t tell you, is that meditation is the gate to reality. It is the way, the how we open into reality as it is. It is the place where we can unname the named and see to its very essence. This isn’t just in Buddhism. Every mystical tradition in the world knows that the world we see and hear and touch, the world and all its nameable creatures, are just one side of it, but there’s more.
[Tao Te Ching Verse 1:]
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
There is a realm in which you and I have no beginning or end, in which my want does not impede yours but complements it. It’s the realm in which we know, as surely as we know our name, that we need the whole body to survive and thrive, we can’t leave any part out. Then we come back and re-stick all the labels on things and unfold all the maps but now we know, the map is not the landscape. The name is just a name, useful, when we need to identify something, dispensable when we need to realize our interbeing. That’s what “opening into reality” means first and foremost—“opening into the truth of our interbeing.”
From here, we can move slowly, letting things unfold, looking for places where we’re putting up resistance, where we’ve created a barricade around our wave body and said, You can’t come in, even though you’re already in and always were. I don’t know about you but I forget this, over and over again. That’s why I return to silence and stillness, to remember. That’s what sati means, to remember, to bring something to mind. So, next time you sit on your cushion, next time you’re on a Zoom call watching all those little squares, remember, we’re not just connected you and I, we inter-are.
Explore further
01 : The Unreal and the Real: She Unnames Them by Ursula K. Le Guin
02 : The Three Realms of Existence
03 : Seeing Things as They Are by Nyanaponika Thera