Resistance

Or becoming entirely ready to relate differently to people, places, and things

With a change of the seasons comes a change in my publishing schedule. For with a change of the seasons comes a change in my responsibilities. The tentative plan is a longer weekly letter, the subject likely alternating between Buddhist teachings and recovery from a Buddhist perspective, probably appearing on Tuesday mornings. I appreciate your understanding as I adjust to continually changing causes and conditions. Thank you for your continued support.

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After a bit of a break, I am ready to resume reflecting on and writing about the Twelve Steps. I felt some resistance; I enjoyed the time away. It was and still is busy at the temple, too. Our annual State of the Zendo gathering was this past weekend. The Vesak Sesshin, where we commemorate Shakyamuni Buddha’s birth, is on the horizon, and we will once again welcome the local Sangha for in-person practice soon. There are even snowdrops blooming! Spring is indeed upon us.

Resistance. From a particular perspective, Step Six is concerned with responding to resistance. The step reads:

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

At first glance, Step Six might prompt confusion. It appears concerned with the removal of so-called defects of character. (More on this phrase below.) Yet the opening words are “were entirely ready.” Should not I—and should not anyone, for that matter—already want their character defects removed? Why must I be (or become) ready to remove my character defects?

One response focuses on the stories we tell about how certain behaviors or character traits serve us, even if the behaviors or character traits themselves are unwholesome. A usual example here is anger, particularly in the form of self-criticism. Although we recognize the harm that anger causes to some degree, we still harbor, feed, and otherwise nurture it.

Why? From my teaching days, I recall a student sharing with me that he would not be motivated to improve his performance unless he was angry—hated himself even—for his current poor performance. In this instance, anger was (the student thought) a necessary means to improvement—and I presume not just in my course. Success for him generally depended on continual submission to the inner critic, enabling its free reign over all aspects of his life.

Step Six invites us to relate differently to unskillful behaviors and character traits, even when we believe they are beneficial under some description of “beneficial.” Sometimes, the description mirrors that of my former student. Other times, we tell ourselves that we cannot continue living without holding tightly to the feeling that we are right about many things. I am referring to myself here; I was convinced that that feeling was necessary for self-confidence. For these and other reasons, it often takes time for us to become “entirely ready.”

And that is all right. There is never a need to reorient ourselves to ourselves all at once. Much of the time, I am suspicious of just how possible swift, dramatic change is. Recovery belongs to the steady plodder and is anchored in ceaseless trust in ourselves and an enduring willingness to just keep going.

When I started attending recovery meetings, I heard the causes of resistance explained in several ways. One of those stays with me. First, we—people in recovery—are described as “wanting what we want, when and how we want it, and we want it now.” Sometimes, the word “now” is replaced with “yesterday” or “last week.” It depends on how significant the tendency to be impatient is in that context. Second, it is an essential part of enduring sobriety that we learn to “live life on life’s terms.” What this phrase means, how we perceive its form and color in our lives, varies from person to person.

If you are familiar with the phrase, what does it mean to you? How does it appear in your life? If you are reading it for the first time, what arises in this instant for you, both in your body and mind?

The point of this explanation is that life does not unfold in perfect agreement with our desires, expectations, and preferences. “Life unfolds on life’s terms,” we might say, and therefore, we do not always get what we want, when and how we want it.

There is some sense in which we understand this; we understand it “intellectually,” perhaps, meaning the truth of the explanation is swimming around in the head and has not yet settled in the heart. For that reason, we do not wholeheartedly accept it. There remain thousands of pockets of resistance, circumstances in which we believe an exception should be made for us. Most of the time that does not happen. Maybe it never happens. Instead, we often find ourselves presented with the question: So … now what?

Emerson’s Suum Cuique comes to mind. It reads:

The rain has spoiled the farmer’s day;
Shall sorrow put my books away?
     Thereby two days are lost:
Nature shall mind her own affairs;
I will attend my proper cares, 
     In rain, or sun, or frost.

It is precisely when that feeling of resistance arises that the question, So … now what?—or Emerson’s Shall sorrow puts my books away?—appears. At that instant, you can pivot and respond appropriately.

Here is how Hongzhi Zengjue describes the opening:

Silently dwell in the self, in true suchness abandon conditioning. Open-minded and bright without defilement, simply penetrate and drop off everything. Today is not your first arrival here. Since the ancient home before the empty kalpa, clearly nothing has been obscured. Although you are inherently spirited and splendid, still you must go ahead and enact it. When doing so, immediately display every atom without hiding a speck of dirt. Dry and cool in deep repose, profoundly understand. If your rest is not satisfying and you yearn to go beyond birth and death, there can be no such place. Just burst through and you will discern without thought-dusts, pure without reasons for anxiety. Stepping back with open hands, [giving up everything], is thoroughly comprehending life and death. Immediately you can sparkle and respond to the world. Merge together with all things. Everywhere is just right. Accordingly we are told that from ancient to modern times all dharmas are not concealed, always apparent and exposed.

If you have been reading for a while, you are aware that I often refer to Dogen Zenji’s writings. One passage—a pair of sentences, really—that I frequently cite from the Genjokoan describes the essential difference between delusion and awakening. Once more:

To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.

Lately, it has been my practice to revisit such trusted passages and read the sentences that immediately precede and follow them. A reminder of their context illuminates aspects that were not seen or once seen but have since been forgotten.

Here are the sentences with some context:

The buddha way, in essence, is leaping clear of abundance and lack; thus there is birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas. Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.

To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.

Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. Further, there are those who continue realizing beyond realization and those who are in delusion throughout delusion.

Early in practice-life, I would read those lines in the middle through a normative, prescriptive, or otherwise evaluative lens. Delusion is bad; awakening is good. We should eliminate delusion; we should give rise only to awakening. Eradicate delusion and cultivate awakening. There is a place for these claims and imperatives. Delusion is one of the Three Poisons, after all. Yet Dogen is shining a light elsewhere. We should notice that as well.

Where is the light shining? No matter how much we like flowers, they wither and die; no matter how much we dislike weeds, they sprout and go forth. How do you understand these lines?

One way states plainly that we cannot run from, wall off, or otherwise try to exclude the dissatisfactory, frustrating, or unwelcome parts of living in and with the world. We can try and often do it with great effort. There are whole industries that offer strategies, tips, and tricks for flowers forever at peak freshness and the complete absence of weeds in your garden—that is, for only awakening and never delusion. Guaranteed!

It is not my place to comment on the success of such offerings. I will say, though, that the Buddha and his teachings offer a different way. The Heart Sutra describes this different way as “living without walls of the mind”; Dogen describes it as “leaping clear of abundance and lack”; and there are many other descriptions. All of them invite us, first, to set down familiar ways of classifying and evaluating people, places, and things. A second invitation follows to sit down and observe what is happening within and around us.

If we choose to do this, we will find birth and death, delusion and awakening, sentient beings and buddhas, and flowers in decay and weeds being nourished by the rays of the sun—and an opening in which we can pivot. We can attempt to establish impermeable boundaries. We can slump and resign ourselves to inaction. Or we can remain open, exposed, and in relationship with all things, ready to meet what arises and trusting ourselves to do this with generosity, kindness, and wisdom.

What does any of this have to do with Step Six? The step says that we were entirely ready for the removal of our character defects. I am offering either a substitute for “removal” or a particular understanding of the word.

Several Buddhist texts from the Pāli Canon outline signs of a practitioner’s progress on the path. In Aṅguttara Nikāya 2, for example, we read that when the mind is developed, “all lust is abandoned,” and when wisdom is developed, “all ignorance is abandoned.” Later, in Aṅguttara Nikāya 4, we read that as illumination and serenity are cultivated by a practitioner, “the fetters [of the mind] are abandoned and the underlying tendencies [of the fetters] eliminated.” There are countless other examples, all similar in spirit to Step Six’s “removal” of character defects.

I am not confident that such “fetters” or “defects of character” are ever abandoned, eliminated, or removed, much less that they can be. Sometimes, I prefer substituting “relate differently” for “remove” in Step Six. Following a searching and fearless examination of ourselves, sharing that examination with another person, and recommitting to our basic goodness and shared humanity, we become entirely ready to relate differently to our character defects.

Where in the past we sought swift escape from our unskillful behaviors through still other behaviors, media, or substances, or we clung tightly to them as though a security blanket, we now resolve, with the support of others, to sit down and let energies settle, so that we might become clearer about what is happening within us and around us. Then, we can proceed accordingly.

If anything is abandoned—this is the second option—it is the reaction of “fighting or fleeing.” How can I fight myself with myself and expect that to result in a non-harmful outcome? How can I run from myself, when no matter where I run to necessarily I find myself there?

At times, it feels that the only option is to let go of what contributes to the resistance. From a place of trust in ourselves, we manifest Dogen’s encouragement to “give up holding back your life, to hold on fully to your life. […] Do not forget that this letting go is immeasurable.”

Step Six’s final words still deserve comment. So, I want to close this reflection by briefly focusing on them.

Elsewhere, I share my doubts about claims that we—either people in recovery or human beings generally—are flawed by nature or necessarily sinful creatures. The reasons are simple to state. Understanding them, however, whether intellectually or intimately, meaning that they have settled in the heart, is less simple.

The first is a straightforward denial of the claim that to be human is to be flawed, imperfect.

The second is a straightforward denial that we, as human beings, are anything by nature or necessarily. The second denial grounds the first.

What does it mean to say that we are not anything by nature or necessarily? We meet the same question when reading Dogen’s statement that “the buddha way, in essence, is leaping clear of abundance and lack.” When you leap clear of abundance and lack, where do you land? If you set to one side concerns of perfection and imperfection, flawlessness and being flawed, what remains?

Still, denying that we are flawed by nature or necessarily sinful creatures does not entail that every action we perform, all of our behaviors, and the up-to-now perhaps discernable patterns from them are appropriate, skillful, and wholesome. If you spend enough time in Zen circles, you will likely hear someone quote a much-loved Shunryu Suzuki Roshi saying, “Each of you is perfect just the way you are … and you could use some improvement too.” How do we understand this? What is it that “could use some improvement”?

All of this is me returning to the same question that emerged while writing the final reflection on Step Five. That question is:

If I cannot fail in my efforts to thoroughly follow the path, if I cannot work the whole of a program without acting in ways born of greed, anger, and ignorance, if I cannot go for refuge without sometimes feeling the Eight Worldly Winds at my back, if all of this and more is necessary for continual practice, constant exercising of the art of not-knowing … then what are these wrongs to which I am admitting, and what, if anything, is their exact nature?

I cannot say.

I can say, however, that I feel with great intensity the friction between a way of being in and with the world in which all things have their place and a framework in which certain things must be abandoned, eliminated, or removed. For that reason, I am entirely ready to explore the radical possibility offered by the Sufi poet Rumi, who writes:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.

And I trust that someday I shall see you all there, too.

For some further reading, you might check out these recent offerings:

Illumination and Serenity

Step Five: Part Three

The quotation from Hongzhi Zengjue is from “Cultivating the Empty Field,” edited and translated by Taigen Dan Leighton.

The quotations from Dogen Zenji are from “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye,” edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi.

The quotations from Aṅguttara Nikāya are from “In the Buddha’s Words,” edited and introduced by Bhikku Bodhi.