library/highlights/
selected cuts & bits“When you begin to panic, picture the upsetting events and feel the uncomfortable feelings from a safe distance. Instead of being inside them, you can watch them come. If you watch them come, you can watch them go.” The teacher had said to remember that “fear is a thought, and thoughts can’t hurt you. Thoughts can’t kill you.”
“When those thoughts come, gently push them away.” Jarvis tried that technique. He had a literal image of pushing the bad thoughts away. “I don’t need you,” he said as he swept one aside. “I don’t need you,” when another came. He made it through five minutes. Then ten. He tried it the next morning and the next.
The journey forward isn’t linear but cyclical, and it’s hard. I learned something else that was even more profound: that the process and goal are different from what many of us expect. Instead of working to change our true nature, we must find it. Instead of running from suffering, we must embrace it.
She admired his ability to bear weight that would crush most people and the joy he exuded in a joyless place. His interpretations of Buddhist teachings inspired her, and his insights helped her achieve a deeper understanding of Buddhist concepts she thought she knew.
In 2006, my friend Pamela Krasney, an activist devoted to prison reform and other social justice causes, told me about a death row inmate who, she claimed, had been wrongly convicted of murder. He was unlike anyone she’d ever known—more conscious, wise, and empathetic “in spite of his past.” She corrected herself. “Because of his past.”
At that moment I understood the meaning of spring for the very first time. I had been alive for thirty years, and all that time I’d been caught up in an urgent search for meaning. Now, here, finally, I knew the meaning of spring. That was enough. I didn’t need anything else.
As I stood there with my two feet planted on the ground and looked around, a thought came to my mind: zero. I had nothing. But it was a wonderfully refreshing feeling. This was a zero that would turn into a one, then a two. Beyond that, I could see it turning into a three, a four, a five, even a six. I embraced the sensation of zero and took a deep breath, rejoicing physically in the liberation of being stone broke.
When packing to come to Eiheiji, the cloths were overlapped to form the character for “enter” (入), but on leaving they were reversed to form the character for “person” (人). As I wrapped the packs I wondered: had I at last become a person?
By contemplating life as it is, stripped of all extraneous added value, I found I could let go of a myriad of things that had been gnawing at my mind. Through the prosaic repetition of Eiheiji’s exacting daily routines for washing the face, eating, defecating, and sleeping, this is the answer that I felt in my bones: accept unconditionally the fact of your life and treasure each moment of each day.
Wrapped up in the routines of our daily lives, we let them slide by unnoticed. But I believe that hidden in these ordinary, unremarkable routines of life is a great truth that requires our attention.