Ango Days 27-34

I maintained daily sitting throughout the week, but once again, when the weekend came, despite my promise to myself that I would "get back on track" with the weekly zazenkai, I did not do it, leaving me with three missed zazenkai to "make up." I told myself I would do the zazenkai on Monday... then Tuesday... but I still have not done it.

This struck me powerfully on Monday morning, a rainy, dark day infused with melancholy. I could not escape the striking thought that with all of the enthusiasm and sincere intention with which I'd started the Ango, I had blown off my practice commitments on Sunday to play Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I thought, what kind of Zen Buddhist am I, to have such minimal commitment to the practice? I try my best to live rightly, and be true to my word, but my Ango commitments have been so easily jettisoned, postponed, or forgotten. Where has my enthusiasm gone? My passion? My sincerity?

My life has become so much less "spiritual" than it used to be, so much less pure, so much more given to vice and distraction than awareness and discipline. I have become more driven to serve my own desires than to practice kindness toward others. My perspective on people has gotten so warped since I moved to the New York metro area. People on the street, in their cars, or in the supermarket are competitors, people in my way, I must get mine before they get theirs, I must show them my displeasure if they impede my movement in even the slightest way. I have become a gentler driver than I was some months ago, but the trigger-instincts of aggression still lie just underneath the surface.

In my zazen practice there has been a feeling of day-to-day inertia and placid passivity. A period begins, a period ends, and there is nothing in between. Thoughts, emotions, coming and going, noticing, letting go, coming back to awareness of this mind resting in itself. Pleasant enough, but I have started to feel "stuck." My practice isn't "going anywhere." How am I ever going to wake up at this rate? How am I ever going to have a kensho? I lack the fire or will to even have much curiosity about what is going on in my mind, much less to break through to the awakened state! Maybe as a Zen student, I am useless: lazy and aggressive, undisciplined, incapable of kensho. So it went with my thoughts on Monday morning.

Fortuitously, I picked up the Fall 2010 issue of Buddhadharma and noticed it contained an article addressing the feeling of being "stuck" in practice. The article is titled "Feeling Stuck? Good!" by Ajahn Sucitto (pp. 43-47). The article has had a profound impact on my attitude and frame of mind. In it, Ajahn Sucitto writes,

"From time to time we come to a stuck place in our dhamma practice... After a while, the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish and becomes the problem rather than the solution. Then we get stuck. And that sense of stuckness spins out into blaming our apparent self, our system of practice... we assess our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws, and our virtues. We fidget, become distracted, and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation...

We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an 'edge.' We want to hold on to some identity, or to a conviction in our practice tradition, but we can't quite do it. We are taken to a place of uncertainty, a place where there is a feeling of not being anything solid but where there is still a hankering to be something. This is the edge.

It's not a comfortable place, but it is a piece of the journey. It is supposed to happen; the edge is the place where the self-vehicle gets overhauled. Because of that, the wheels have to come off. But there's a vital opening for anyone who gets to their edge and manages to feel their way past it. It's there that holding on to one's 'self' at the level of personality unravels.

Generally, to get off that edge of uncertainty we grasp on to all that's left: the uncertainty itself, and whatever it brings up. Often the mind moves away from the edge so quickly that we either shift into doing something, or otherwise displace the uncomfortable feeling... Restlessness builds up until we have to do something to make ourselves feel capable and comfortable again. All this activity intensifies the real obstacle, which is self-orientation...

Notice what takes you to the edge of feeling you're on solid ground. It may be part of your daily routine. Routine acts of service can be testing grounds, places where we no longer feel spontaneous, or on top, or seem to develop much. 'Surely all this humdrum stuff isn't going to take me to the bright gates of the Deathless!' So the wobble begins. Then again, taking responsibility may lead us to an edge of uncertainty about our own worth... This sense of being is so compulsive that if it can't lean on a positive sense of self, it adopts a negative one. Because of this, the stuckness is more difficult than any particular flaw, because the doubt that it stimulates corrodes our faith in the path and the practice.

At this place, all the teachings sound like platitudes we've heard a thousand times (and 'we still haven't become enlightened'), and although we should have gotten rid of our defilements by now, we haven't--and sometimes they even seem more authentic than our virtues. Our unconscious attachment to the teachings... presents its down side, and the romance looks like it's heading for divorce. It's all highly emotive, and emotion creates credibility, because whatever is emotive has vitality to it.

The stuck stuff captures and convinces by its power to stimulate the mind... [but] if we can see them for what they are... these energies won't stick. We realize that the stuck state is just a pattern of sankhara energies that we weren't fully aware of; and when that fullness of awareness is brought to bear, the self is taken out of it and it becomes unstuck. And it takes us to a [place that is] more intimate and comfortable than our personalities."

The article could not have more perfectly captured and illuminated the movements of my mind over the past week. I realized: "This practice has nothing to do with my personality." The virtue of sitting daily is not in the extent to which it fuels some desired-for change or state, but in the extent to which it throws the changeability and insubstantiality of the self and personality into relief. This practice isn't about me, or what it says about me. So maybe I'm not what I wish I was, but that is exactly the point. The definitions of the self, the thoughts of the self about itself, are completely irrelevant to this practice.

The self is strikingly subtle and deceptive. There it was, coiled at the heart of my practice, and I could not see it, camouflaged as it was by a leaf-litter of distracting thoughts and powerful emotions. And the sense of relief I feel now that it has been seen is immense. In a reverse of the Buddha's famous simile, I have seen that what lies coiled in the shadows is not a rope, but a snake; not a useful tool, but a poisonous foe. The self-measurements, the spiritual spoils my ego wants to obtain, are tricks and fantasies to keep me from looking at the thing itself.

The strange thing about the disciplines of Zen practice in general and Ango in particular is that they are easier to maintain when there is a sense of ease and calm, when the pressure to maintain them is lifted--when they become disentangled from the self that wants to define itself through them.