Kill Your Self Read online

  Early in our lives, the illusion of self is necessary. We need it in order to assert our rights and boundaries, to be able to say “yes” to some things and people, and say “no” to other things and people. In that way, the self is like a vehicle—it can take you part of the way to the place you want to reach, but only part of the way. A car can take you to the foot of a mountain, but once you get there you have to make a choice—either sit in the car, going nowhere, or get out and start walking. The car can’t take you up the mountain. In the same way, the self, the ego, can only carry you so far. If you don’t want to be limited by your delusions, by a petty sense of who you are, you’re going to have to abandon the vehicle and walk by yourself.

  This book, I hope, will help you walk by yourself.

  It can only guide you, though. I can’t walk for you. I can’t do anything for you, anything at all. No one can, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. No one can save you. No one can make you happy. The Buddha couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it for anyone he met, and he couldn’t do it for any of us if he were alive today. Christ couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it for his disciples, and they became so dependent upon him that they didn’t do it for themselves, and so they fell apart when he was killed. The Gospels allege that Christ walked on water, raised the dead, turned water into wine... but they don’t claim that he made anyone happy. Compared to that, miracles like raising the dead would seem slight.

  When Lazarus’ sisters come to Christ and ask him to bring their brother back to life, he does it. But what does that solve? Lazarus, and his sisters, still have to live with the suffering that comes with living. And Lazarus, and his sisters, have to die. They still live in pain and sadness, they still face grief, and they still live with the fear of death and the fear of grief. They may be alive, but they are not free.

  A woman comes to the Buddha with a dead baby in her arms, and asks the Buddha to bring her baby back to life. The Buddha tells her it’s impossible. She doesn’t believe him. She says she knows he can do anything. So he tells her she’s right, he can do it – under one condition. To perform such a miracle, he needs a mustard seed from a house where no one has ever died.

  The woman heads into town to get the Buddha what he needs. She knocks on door after door, asking if anyone has died in the house. They all tell her there have been many deaths there. Finally, she stops knocking on doors. She goes back to the Buddha and tells him that she gets it.

  What did Lazarus and his sisters learn? What did they gain? Nothing, except for Lazarus’ temporary reprieve from death.

  What did the woman learn from the Buddha? That her happiness, her liberation from suffering, was up to her. She learned that nothing had happened to her personally. Death had come along, because it does. Instead of asking, Why Me?, we might as well ask, Why not me? The pain that had touched her had touched every house in town, and there was nothing the Buddha, or anyone else, could do about it.

  This does not mean that we don’t exist. It means we are not who we think we are, and that is what causes our suffering.

  You can look another person in the face, because you are not them. You cannot look yourself in the face, because you are you.

  In meditation, you can look at your thoughts and feelings and beliefs, because you are not them. You are who is looking.

  WHAT THIS BOOK CANNOT DO FOR YOU

  Practicing meditation by yourself, you may achieve some taste of awakening—but without the support of a teacher and companions, that experience may not be helpful, and may even be harmful.

  There is a hugely popular book by a nondenominational spiritual teacher that is a solid example of this. The teacher is a good writer, and seems to be an intelligent and well-intentioned person, but his book is shallow and self-involved, even though its premise is the necessity of not attaching to ego.

  Even though I see no reason to doubt that he had an experience of what Zen Buddhists call kensho—an awakening experience—he had no training and no teacher, and so he did not know what to do with it. His ego attached to it, and it was no longer a genuine awakening, just another head trip. And then he made a dogma out of it.

  Well, that is my version of it. Here is his...

  He says he was miserable for the first thirty years of his life, and then, at the end of one particularly hellish night, he saw the first sunlight of the day come through the curtains, and he felt his sense of self fall away. He spent the next few years in a blissed-out state, with no work, no relationships, no sense of self. Most of that time, he says, was spent sitting on park benches and feeling good.

  What would happen if you did that? If you had a trippy experience and then just sat around in parks enjoying the feeling? What about your family? Your friends? Your colleagues? How would they be affected? What would your life mean if there was no one, at any time, wondering where you were? There are people who live that way because of drugs or alcohol. When enlightenment is self-centered, it is not enlightenment, but another addiction.

  The Buddha, after awakening, felt sure that nobody would understand what he had to teach, and so he briefly considered just hanging out in the forest and enjoying being awake—which is to say, enjoying being the Buddha. But he could not do that. Because his awakening was complete, because he understood that there was no separation between him and every other being in the cosmos, he could not make anything about himself. And so he lived a life of service to all beings.

  The Buddha did not get to his awakening by himself or by accident. He trained for years with various teachers, before going off by himself and awakening to his nature (the nature of all beings and all phenomena) under the Bodhi tree. His awakening was the result of a committed practice.

  If we experience kensho without training, we experience it without context or understanding, and it is easy to attach to the experience, and to think we now know something—and, later, to start teaching the same delusion to other people. Sitting on a park bench enjoying the feeling of blissful non-attachment is no different than driving on the highway enjoying having an expensive car. It is entirely materialistic and entirely self-centered, delusion masquerading as enlightenment, a dream of awakening while sleeping deeply.

  We need teachers and companions to awaken us from that dream. Sometimes we need to be awakened by a whisper and a gentle touch, and sometimes by a shout and a rough shake, but always with sharp compassion.

  ARRIVING WHERE YOU ARE

  To meet disaster at the time of disaster is fine just as it is

  To meet illness at the time of illness is fine just as it is

  To meet death at the time of death is fine just as it is

  —Ryokan

  Do not choose a coward’s explanation

  That hides behind the cause and the effect.

  — Leonard Cohen

  Not many people are happy.

  Often, when I ask a person, “Are you happy?”, they respond by telling me how good their life is, by which they mean how many material things they have, or what they’ve accomplished in the view of other people, or how much pleasure they have. When I ask again, “Yes, but are you happy?”, the answer is usually no. And, most of the time, I don’t ask at all, because I don’t have to.

  So many of us spend our lives grasping, seeking pleasure, confusing it with happiness. Pleasure and happiness are unrelated. Pleasure and satisfaction are just prettied-up manifestations of pain and dissatisfaction. As soon as you get what you want—a job, a relationship, whatever—you worry about how to keep it, and you fear losing it. As soon as you feel satisfied, you worry about maintaining it, and you fear losing it—and so you have immediately lost it. Pleasure reveals itself to be pain, and satisfaction reveals itself to be frustration and fear.

  The Buddha’s First Noble Truth is often translated as “There is suffering.” But the Pali word for suffering, dukkha, has a more subtle meaning. Dukkha is an all-pervasive lack of contentment, a constant underlying feeling that something is missing.

 
What’s missing? Peace. Happiness. We feel the lack, even when life is supposedly going well. In the search for what’s missing, we may indulge in stupid, cowardly, addictive behavior—drugs, codependent relationships, anything to avoid staying still and facing the self. People live lives of perpetual distraction (I’m amazed every day at how many people’s conversations and blogs are about what they watch on TV), the lives of hungry ghosts, constantly feeding their greedy egos, and always remaining hungry.

  They think, “I’ll be happy when...” When I move to another city. When I get a different job. When I get married. When I get divorced. When I lose weight. When I gain weight. When I write a book. When I get rich. When...

  And if the when arrives, and they get what they want, there’s still no peace. So they move right along to the next obsession.

  When you’re in one place and longing for another, you live in neither. You don’t live at all, unless you pay attention. If you can’t be happy in hell, you won’t be happy in heaven.

  I was driving from Phoenix to Tucson, a trip of about a hundred miles. There was a woman in Tucson I wanted to see. We had not yet slept together, and I wanted her badly. So you can imagine my mood when, about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, traffic came to a stop.

  A half-hour later, it hadn’t started moving again. I used my cell phone to call a friend in Phoenix, and asked him to go online and see what the problem was. He told me there had been an accident, and that the highway was not expected to be cleared until 11 p.m. It was now around 7 p.m, and the woman was expecting me in less than an hour.

  I called her and told her what was going on. She sympathized, and said she’d still like me to come to her house, no matter how late, but that she would understand if, when traffic finally got going again, I decided just to take the first exit, turn around and head back to Phoenix. I told her I wanted to see her, and that I wasn’t going to turn around.

  Another hour went by, with hundreds of cars all parked on the highway, unable to go forward or backward. There was no danger in being stuck there; I had water in the car, and the proximity of hundreds of other drivers. I wasn’t even in danger of being bored; I had books and magazines, as well as the cell phone.

  Traffic started to roll again, and I called my hostess to tell her I was on the move. A few minutes later, the traffic once again stopped, and engines were turned off. I slapped the steering wheel and yelled, “This fucking sucks!”

  And then I realized what was happening. And I began to laugh.

  There was nothing about that moment that objectively “sucked.” If I were a tourist visiting Arizona, I would probably have considered it a peak experience—a beautiful desert night, the air warm and dry, the sun disappearing and the stars appearing. Even the lines of cars had a strange beauty. Amidst it all, when I looked for the cause of my unhappiness, I couldn’t find it.

  Because it wasn’t in the stopped traffic. It was in my mind, and nowhere else.

  My unhappiness was caused by my failing to pay attention to the moment as it was (sitting on a highway in the Sonoran Desert at sunset), and instead comparing it to how I wanted it to be (in bed with a certain woman in Tucson). When I stopped comparing and preferring, I was no longer unhappy, because I was no longer in limbo. I was just where I was, and it was perfect in and of itself. I was happy, and I knew that whatever lay ahead could not make me unhappy, or more happy.

  Later that night, in Tucson, I fell asleep with the woman in my arms. It had been as good as I imagined it would be—she was beautiful, I had strong feelings for her, and the sex was sublime—but, even during its best moments, I was no happier than I had been while stuck on the highway.

  Awakening is not about altered states, or going somewhere else. It is the experience of the actuality of life as it is. There is no place, no situation, that brings us happiness or unhappiness. We bring our happiness or unhappiness to the place or situation.

  So many people are in lonely, alienated relationships—because they never actually get to know the person they’re involved with. Constantly searching for someone to save them, to make them happy, to bring them peace and contentment, they tell themselves a romantic, idealized story about every attractive person they meet, and are too busy projecting their narcissistic fantasy on to the other person to actually get to know them. So, when the other person turns out to be different than the fantasy—“when it becomes real,” as a friend of mine who does this sort of thing puts it—they’re angry and disappointed, and move on to the next fantasy, often leaving the person they were dating wondering what happened.

  Our institutions encourage childish narcissism. Consider the marriage vows. They are, by their very definition, impossible to keep, because they assume permanence, and we don’t live in a universe of permanence. To make a lifetime pledge is to be deluded or dishonest, because, moment to moment and day to day, everything changes. This is not to say that a couple can’t or shouldn’t stay together for life—but they won’t be the same people who took the vows, and they won’t feel the same way.

  I once told a brother monk that when people ask me if I’ll practice Zen for the rest of my life, I answer that if I said yes I wouldn’t be practicing Zen right now—because nothing is static and there is no constant, permanent self that I can declare will always practice Zen. Even though I can’t conceive of ever not doing this, the only honest answer to that question, and any such question, is: I don’t know. Everything changes.

  For as long as a person seeks permanence and security, they are in dukkha. For as long as a person confuses love with attachment, their relationships are fictions. When you think your happiness comes from another person, you attach to them—and when you attach to someone or something, you try to control them. Real intimacy is found in letting go and in not knowing, in practicing not knowing and being comfortable in not knowing.

  The thing that people search for, that they think is missing, is always there. It’s our own perfect, enlightened nature, and, if we practice finding the still point, sitting in lucid awareness, we can experience it. We can realize that our lack of peace comes from our belief in a hallucination—the self, the hungry ghost we devote our lives to trying to feed.

  See through the self, and the happiness is always there. It was there before you were born. It will be there after you die. It came from nowhere and will go nowhere. It wasn’t created and it can’t be destroyed. It can be realized or ignored—and most of us ignore it.

  ONLY SUFFERING

  At The Sitting Frog Zen Center, our services end with this chant:

  Caught in the self-centered dream,

  only suffering.

  Holding to self-centered thoughts,

  exactly the dream.

  Each moment, life as it is, the only teacher.

  Being just this moment, compassion’s way.

  Note that the first line does not specify the circumstances. It is not, “Caught in the self-centered dream and not getting what you want, only suffering.” It is just “Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering.”

  The circumstances do not matter. For as long as we are self-centered, no matter what is happening there is only suffering. Not getting anything we want—only suffering. Getting some of what we want—only suffering. Getting everything we want—only suffering.

  When we do not have what we want, we suffer from greed as we long for it. When we do have what we want, we suffer from fear of losing it. When we are admired, we suffer from attachment to pride, the fear of losing the admiration that we crave. When we are despised, we suffer from shame, and the greedy desire for admiration.

  The desire to stop being self-centered is another self-centered desire.

  So, how do we practice?

  When we are asleep and dreaming, and we realize that we are dreaming, no matter how scary the dream, it no longer has power. So it is with the waking dream.

  We just see what is going on, without getting caught up in a belief that we have to do something about it. As se
lf-centered desires and reactions arise, just note them. “And then what?” people often ask me. And then nothing. Just let them be, neither fighting them nor welcoming them. Just see them for what they are.

  Does this sound simple or easy? Try it, and you may find it is the hardest thing you have ever tried—and the most beautiful and the most liberating. You may find that, over and over, your life begins anew.

  GET YOUR SELF OUT OF YOUR WAY

  To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

  — T.S. Eliot

  Getting what you want doesn’t make you happy. Not getting what you want doesn’t make you unhappy. The former situation is not better than the latter. They’re just different.

  One afternoon, I sat in a restaurant with a friend who said he was worried about me. A few weeks earlier, I had ended a relationship with a woman I loved dearly, with whom I had expected to spend the rest of my life. I knew it was the right decision, but that didn’t make it any less painful. My friend told me he was worried that I might be in shock or in denial, because I didn’t seem any different than I normally did. “I wonder if maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet,” he said. “I mean, you seem happy.”

  “Oh, it’s sunk in all right,” I said. “I’m in the worst pain of my adult life. I couldn’t have imagined sadness like this. But you’re right—I’m happy.”

  This was not at all paradoxical. It was Zen practice. We can’t avoid pain, ever, but our suffering is not caused by our pain—it’s caused by the ego’s preferences, by the stories we tell ourselves about the pain. In fact, it’s all one story—that not getting what we want is bad and will make us unhappy, and that getting what we want is good because it will make us happy.

  Your happiness is up to you.

  I certainly could have been unhappy when that relationship ended—if I’d told myself a story, tried to escape the pain, or tried to deny the reality that the relationship was destructive and needed to be over. I could have been unhappy if I’d viewed myself as a victim or martyr, heartbroken and tormented by the world. I could certainly have been unhappy if I’d compared the state of my life to something else, something I might like better.