from a talk given by John Genyo Sprague on Oct. 4, 2016
 
     Vast is the robe of liberation / a formless field of benefaction.
 
What is liberation anyway? Each of us might answer differently, and all these answers could be valid.  But for my purposes here I will describe liberation as freedom from the patterns of our minds, freedom from our conditioned existence. 
 
Yet here we are in the midst of our conditioned existence, and our own mind. There are so many limitations, so many troublesome conditions:  health and other physical limitations; conditioned mental states; family attachments and conflicts; the economic and class context we find ourselves in; our dependency on our society’s cultural frameworks. We live in limitation all the time. Perhaps the biggest and closest experience we have of limitation is our self, our ego and the feelings of how limited and boxed in we actually are.
 
How then can we relate to dharma affirmations like the verse which evokes the robe of liberation? And what about all the stories of practitioners who realize a state of liberation?  Perhaps all that liberation talk only really makes sense for monastics whose lives have been set-up to focus solely on the dharma.  But what can liberation really mean for lay people like us, who are practicing right in the middle of a complex web of limitations, attachments and worldly conditions? 
 
Let’s consider Dogen’s famous advice to his lay student?  “To study the Dharma is to study the self” — in other words, study the limitations. But we don’t want to stay there, going to therapy our entire lives!  “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.”   Thus, in applying this teaching to our own lives, we might consider that liberation arises when we have forgotten the self, when we are simply engaged with what is manifesting in the flow of our lives — our daily chores, connecting with our partners, dealing with dying parents.  Then, every experience, even the most challenging situation or conflict, teaches us, shows us the dharma, enlightens us.
 
There is passage in a Tibetan prayer I recite sometimes:   “May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night, and instantly awaken to perceive the pure wisdom display in the arising of every phenomenon.”  The linguistic style is very different, but the meaning here dovetails well with Dogen’s teaching.  All experiences and phenomena are transitory, like moments in a dance . . .  yet as we awaken, we experience how each phenomenon enlightens us, how it displays wisdom, and teaches us the dharma.
 
Thus our liberation must be in the midst of daily life; it has to be, even in the midst of our experience of self. Dogen says we forget the self. Yes, this happens, and it is wonderful to let go and forget ourselves.  And then we are confronted with the experience of self again, and again, confronted with limitation again and again.  In fact we are responsible for ourselves. Who else can be?  We see how we treat others. We notice how we are functioning in our work. Yes, we want to learn from our experiences, and become more clear and compassionate. But we can only do that right where we are, in the conditions we are in.  The study goes on.  We have both self, and no self.  Limitation and liberation.
 
 

[from a talk given by Sally Sonen Kealy for Sesshin, August 2016]

​Return yourself to yourself
Discover the meaning that is already seeded within you
~Gavin Harrison~
 
Good Evening everyone.  At the end of this day of meditation you may be experiencing a sense of what it is to “return yourself to yourself.”  Whatever preoccupations you came through the door with may be fading, and moment-by-moment awareness may be emerging as foreground.  There are several references in Zen that express these aspects of self as Guest and Host.  So, for a moment imagine having a guest in your home that moves in and refuses to leave.  This is symbolic of all our attachments.  They are tenacious and stubborn, however, when we return to the Host, then all of our guests are no problem and we can serve them.  This reminds me of the spirit of the Gate of Sweet Nectar.   In this chant, all beings are invited to a Meal with NO exception, and the Host is free and available to serve them, be with them, hang out, laugh, cry, feed, embrace or do whatever is needed.  Actually, the Host and Guests become One.  In returning “yourself to yourself”, one stops losing oneself to fixed ideas and opinions, and one can, as the Bible says, “be in the world but not of it.” 
    
Case 30 of the Mumonkan, “Mind is Buddha” points to this:  Taibai once asked Baso, “What is Buddha?”  Baso answered “Mind is Buddha.”
I like to use the word Mind for Self.  If you get a mental image of a historical Buddha, then you are robbing yourself of the wonderful opportunity to see your life as Buddha’s life; to see Buddha’s life as YOUR life.  Dogen Zenji speaks of zazen as the magnificent Buddha Mudra.  Again, if you hear this, and mentally see the historical Buddha, you are missing your life!  As you sit on your cushion or chair now, please mentally say your name and add “Mudra”.  YOU are the Buddha Mudra having been given this body; this life.
 
One Zen Master wrote a poem as his answer to “Mind is Buddha”.  I love the first two lines:
        In winter I long for warmth
        In rain I look for a fine day.
 
Mind is the warmth of a blanket, and evening walks or being able to complete one’s work outdoors under a clear sky.  It is walking with your family to another country for food and shelter.  There is no complaint in these two lines about the cold or the rain.  So your life and my life are this Mind, and the Mind of compassion may arise spontaneously from this kind of intimacy with longing.  One can understand the hardship and confusion of others as so many of us feel in today’s world conflict.  Dogen says that once you have found your Treasure House (Mind), then you will know how to use it. 
 
Please savor, relish and use the rest of this retreat; the rest of your life!  Discover that which is already seeded within you.  The plowing and planting is already done.  Savor this life.  Joseph Campbell spoke of  ”following your bliss.” I used to feel a pressure to find my personal bliss, but Zen practice has shown me that walking, breathing, chopping vegetables with a friend, feeling the air on my skin, picking up a piece of discarded trash, and countless actions are all expressions of the bliss of my life as Sally Sonen.  Yes, I miss it over and over again, but it is unceasingly present and available to me as it is to you. 
 
It just takes heart to return the self to the self.  It is said that in the Kentucky Derby, the winning horse effectively runs out of oxygen after the first half mile, and do you know what he goes the rest of the way on to win the race?
​
Heart!  Your heart, your life!  This very life just as it is.  What a gift to be here, together.  Thank you.
 

[From a talk by Sensei John Genyo Sprague on March 18, 2016]
 
Guarding the One is a term which originated with Taoist masters in ancient China.  The One referred to the universal energy (chi) from which all forms arise— Tao, the Great Way as it manifests in the energy of Chi.  Guarding the one was a meditative approach, involving deep concentration, and building inner energy, cultivating and keeping the chi within the body.
 
When Buddhist masters came to China, they were exposed to the native Taoist traditions, and the result was a new style of Buddhism known as Chan (later Zen in Japan). Early Chan masters borrowed the idea of Guarding the One from Taoists and used it to mean focusing the mind single-pointedly, stabilizing and calming the mind.  Tao-hsin and Hung-Jen (the 4th &5th patriarchs) used the phrase “guarding the one without moving.”  This is a one-pointed meditative technique.  As we sit, I offer you this theme, and urge you to use this opportunity to really practice your focus and concentration.  You can focus on the breath, on the hara in the lower belly, on a koan.  If you practice shikantaza your focus can be more expansive, but this requires even greater depth of concentration. 
 
The early Taoist version of this practice meant much the same, except that they emphasized more the building and preserving of energy.  The One was not just a focus in meditative practice, but the One itself, ‘the primordial vital energy underlying all . . . the pure power of life.”  (Livia Kohn, “The Taoist Experience” p. 192)   Guarding the One was seen as a foundation of health and long-life.  In Zen we don’t traditionally talk much about energy.  However it is there.  When we practice focused meditation, our inner energy builds.  When we come out of retreat, we typically feel a sense of stable, nourishing energy, which is called joriki in Japanese Zen. This is the chi.   In fact in our lineage Maezumi Roshi had a period during his career when he explored the Taoist roots of the teachings, and particularly the teachings on chi, and how we can build and channel it throughout our body.  We are blessed to have this day to practice in this way.  Take this time to develop your concentration and nourish yourselves inwardly.
 
At the same time in considering your life beyond sitting meditation, there are also methods for how this approach can be practiced throughout one’s days by being present and focused in whatever you are doing and saying, such that the distinction between doing, saying, and thinking disappear, and an increased experience of harmony and oneness manifests. In this way we can stay centered, and “guard the one” in whatever we are doing.
 
 
To summarize, “guarding the one” gives stability to the mind, but also supports health and longevity.  The idea is through quiet inner concentration, we nourish and build inner energy, keeping it in the body, maintaining the integrity of ones being.  Today our one-day retreat is a perfect opportunity to work with this idea of guarding the one— practicing meditative focus, and nourishing our inner energies.  In doing so, we can also recognize ways we can bring this concentrative presence into our lives outside of retreat.
 
Along that line, before we go back into our sitting meditation, I want to share some further thoughts that have been with me recently as I have contemplated the notion of guarding the one.  I see this as having profound implications, not just for oneself but for the world.  Yes, we find the One within ourselves, and we concentrate inwardly in our meditation.  At the same time, the One is present in all beings and all things.   Thus “Guarding the One” is a peacemaking mission — guarding and protecting that which unites us, that which is most important — the universality of life itself, the energy at the heart of all beings, which everyone is an expression of.  In this sense, all of our practices:  precepts, peacemaking, ritual, council, along with meditation, are forms of “guarding the one”.  Let’s dedicate this day and our ongoing practice to Guarding the One, protecting and nourishing the very heart of life, not only in ourselves, but in all beings.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

[From a talk given by Eve Marko on January 13, 2015]

     Zhaozhou once asked Nanquan, ‘What is Tao?’ Nanquan answered, ‘Ordinary mind is Tao.’         ‘Then should we direct ourselves toward it or not?’ asked Zhaozhou. ‘If you try to direct                yourself toward it, you go away from it,’ answered Nanquan. Zhaozhou continued, ‘If we do          not try, how can we know that it is Tao?’ Nanquan replied, ‘Tao does not belong to knowing        or to not-knowing. Knowing is illusion; not-knowing is blankness. If you really attain to Tao of      no-doubt, it is like the great void, so vast and boundless. How then can there be right and            wrong in the Tao?’ At these words, Zhaozhou was suddenly enlightened.

It’s easy to conclude that it was Nanquan’s sterling words that brought on Zhaozhou’s breakthrough, but in doing so you’d be ignoring the years of practice that Zhaozhou did both before this famous dialogue and after. Zhaozhou stayed with Nanquan even after his major realization till Nanquan’s death, then wandered from monastery to monastery and didn’t begin to teach till he was 80, becoming one of the greatest of all Chan masters.

So what was Zhaozhou practicing all these years? You might call it the practice of paradox.

Do I direct myself towards it or not? Yes or no? This way or that way? These are all examples of an either/or type of reasoning. This kind of reasoning is useful in making everyday decisions: Should I go to the post office today or should I go tomorrow? Do I read this book or do I read that book? But that kind of reasoning is also very limited.

You are probably aware of the hypothesis of multiverses, according to which, when I wonder whether to go to the post office today or tomorrow, a universe unfolds in which I go to the post office today and simultaneously a second universe unfolds in which I go to the post office tomorrow. In other words, both eventualities co-exist, only in separate universes.

The paradigm of Indra’s Net of pearls brings both eventualities together. Here, every thought, concept, feeling, or being is a pearl. Each pearl lies in a node of the Net, thus connected to all the other pearls, and each pearl reflects all the other pearls. I can go to the post office today is one pearl. I’ll go to the post office tomorrow is another pearl. One doesn’t nullify the other; both co-exist in this infinite Net.

Here’s another situation that doesn’t lend itself to either/or thinking: I love him and I hate him at the same time. Two opposite feelings, but still two pearls existing in the same net. Temple Grandin, the autistic expert on animal science, has written that the reason she won’t marry is because she can’t love and hate at the same time. She explains that the frontal part of the brain of severely autistic people like her, which deals with integration of contrasts and opposites, is different from its counterpart in people who are not severely autistic. Those of us who are not autistic people instantly get that one can love and hate a person at the same time, while Grandin wrote that in her case, the minute her partner gets angry or upset or withdraws, she’ll be convinced that there’s no more love in the relationship. In her case, it’s either-or. In our case, it’s both-and.

Parker Palmer, the educator, has written: “Paradoxical thinking . . . comes from the capacity to entertain apparently contradictory ideas in a way that stretches the mind and opens the heart to something new. Paradox is also a way of being that’s key to wholeness, which does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” He talked about the depressions he’s coped with in his life, and then added: “Eventually I was able to see that the closer I move to the source of light, the deeper my shadow becomes. To be whole I have to be able to say I am both shadow and light.”

We often think that practicing will keep us in the light, or at least bring us closer. And we want that, don’t we? Like Zhaozhou, we want to direct towards something, light rather than dark, wholeness rather than fragmentation. And yet, “[t]he closer I move to the source of light, the deeper my shadow becomes.” That’s been my experience, too. The greater the light, the more corners it reveals that are in shadow. Do I disown those parts of me?

“Embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” Embracing brokenness for me means embracing myself as I am. The Hasidic version of the start of life is that God created a holy vessel, which then shattered into pieces, and we are all shards of that holy vessel trying to come back together again. According to the Big Bang Theory, a singularity expanded to become gases and eventually infinite particles, to which we then gave names: planet, comet, sun. In some ways they both come to the same thing: We are fragments, each shaped differently from the other. One has concave sides, another has convex. One’s corners are sharp and another’s are round. One is shy and the other likes to brag; one is socially adaptable and the other wants to hide. We call some aspects shortcomings and others virtues, not very different from how we label some people autistic and others normal. Basically, we’re like serrated rocks that are never the same. But keep in mind that we’re not just unique, each of us is whole as we are, in our respective uniqueness.

If that is the case, then is our objective to become smooth? To get rid of my brokenness, my jaggedness and unevenness, the surfaces that are fine as they are except for my judgments of them?

I am both shadow and light. In beginning the 108 Days of Practice, Genyo quoted the great Chan master Linchi: “You must right now turn your light around and shine it on yourselves, not go seeking somewhere else.  Then you will understand that in body and mind you are no different from the Ancestors and Buddhas, and that there is nothing to do.”

This is very poignant for me. We’re broken vessels and we want to be whole. Many of us come to practice because we want to go after the light. We want to do what Zhaozhou suggested, go towards something. It could be a career, a lover, a zendo or a teacher or guru. Linchi says not to go out to seek wholeness but to go in. Turn your attention inwards and rest there. Does everything get lit up? I doubt it. The deeper I go to the source of light, the more shadows I find. So is the work to go further and further into light till I get rid of all shadows, or is it to find the light in the shadows? To find that I’m both light and shadow.

[From a talk given by Eve on December 2, 2014]

In the Record of Transmitting the Light, Zen Master Keizan presents the following account of the enlightenment of the Indian teacher, Aryasimha:

            The twenty-fourth patriarch was the Venerable Simha. He asked the twenty-third                             patriarch, “I want to seek the Way. What concerns should I have?” The Patriarch said, “If             you want to seek the Way, there is nothing to be concerned about.” The master said, “If I            have no concerns, who carries out Buddha activities?” The Patriarch said, “If you have                some business, these are not merits. If you do nothing, this is Buddha activity. A                            scripture says, ‘The merits I have achieved are not mine.’” Hearing these words, the                      master entered the wisdom of the Buddhas.


If you want to seek the Way, there is nothing to be concerned about. But how do you seek the Way if you have no concerns about it? That’s the same question posed by Joshu to Nansen, in the famous koan that appears in the Gateless Gate:

Joshu earnestly asked Nansen, "What is the Way?" Nansen answered: "Ordinary Mind is the Way." Joshu asked: "Should I direct myself towards it, or not?" Nansen said: "If you try to turn toward it, you go against it." Joshu asked: "If I do not try to turn toward it, how can I know that it is the Way?"

Indeed, the Venerable Simha then asks, If I have no concerns, who carries out Buddha activities? This question is so resonant. We frequently identify ourselves with our concerns. Who am I? I’m the mother who’s concerned about her children. I’m the son concerned about his parents. I’m the manager who worries about problems at work, the teacher who frets about his students or the doctor about her patients.  If I have no concerns, who am I?

If you do nothing, this is Buddha activity. But isn’t Buddha activity everything? Shakyamuni Buddha said, upon his enlightenment, that the entire earth and all beings have simultaneously achieved the Way. Why? Because we’re all Buddha nature, it’s all one thing. So all activity, without exception, is Buddha activity, the functioning of the one thing.

 Another way of seeing it is that Buddha activity is the activity of everything that we experience as Buddha, as the one thing. That, usually, is a much smaller world. In other words, what we experience as Buddha activity is a very small subset of actual Buddha activity.


How we experience ourselves and all beings, sentient and non-sentient, determines how we experience Buddha activity. For example, I usually take for granted that this body-mind, this system called Eve, is one thing. If my mind wants an apple, my arm reaches for it, my hand grabs a hold of it and brings it to my mouth, which takes it in, my teeth chew it, the tongue tastes it, and finally the apple’s remains go down my throat to my stomach, where the work continues. Any biologist can tell you that eating an apple demands the most sophisticated and complex labor, communication, and coordination. Our bodies comprise gazillions of cells working out such operations moment by moment, operations of such complexity that scientists are still far from understanding them, yet we pretty casually assume that this amazing body-mind, which we can’t fully grasp, is one thing and operates as one thing. I don’t even think about the activity of reaching, picking up and eating an apple, I just do it. So Buddha activity, for me, is an activity that is so unified, so integrated, so me, that I don’t even think about it.


Now let’s open things up. Are a parent and child one thing? In the early years, do parents wonder whether to get up in the morning and make breakfast for their children? They do it regardless of fatigue or distraction because they and their young children are one thing, they can’t imagine them as separate. The separation grows as children grow. By the time your child is a teenager or even an adult, you might wake up one morning and say, I’m too tired to make breakfast, he is old enough to do this for himself. You could still choose to make breakfast, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore, some separation has come up.

 What about a couple? When Bernie and I have dinner, one person cooks and the other washes. We don’t think about it or discuss it, it’s just what happens. I call it Buddha activity. The minute we have any feelings around it at all—even good ones—it’s a sign that separation has come in. Or if someone asks me if I would come to a party, I check what Bernie’s doing, not because his activities determine what I will do, but just naturally, as a way of seeing how it works for both of us. I do that without thinking about it. When I start wondering if this is the right or wrong thing to do, when I recall how free I was when I was single, those all reflect some kind of separation.

 If you do nothing, that is Buddha activity. Nothing? Eating an apple requires enormous activity. Taking care of a child, of a lover, is a lot of activity. Taking care of a family, a community, the world, is inconceivable activity. But if it’s done out of the understanding and experience that it’s the one thing taking care of itself, then it’s really nothing, and then it’s Buddha activity.

 

[From a talk given by Eve Myonen Marko on August 12, 2014]





Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

                                                Galway Kinnell

 

            I love this poem because it makes such a good effort at capturing the small, suble preciousness of life. Sitting meditation does the same. I didn’t feel that way at first about zazen. Instructions were impersonal, even tough. In sesshins I recall people glowering at me if I made eye contact, reminders about waking up, sitting straight, don’t move, don’t do this or that. I am aware that that hard disciplined tone is my own internal voice, too. And there are the images you hear: sit like your hair’s on fire, or sit as if a hungry tiger is about to leap into the room.

            Outside my office a bird nest lies between the wall and a large drain pipe. I can’t quite see the nest but I’m aware it’s there—it’s been built and rebuilt for years—and when I really do zazen, when I’m deep in sitting practice, I can almost sense the stirrings of life there in summer time, the parents’ comings and goings, the open-throated cries of new chicks. In meditation there is discipline, but also equal receptivity to every single thing that arises, based on the perception that every single thing is equally important: the itch in my knee, the phone ringing, the ladybug crawling on the window sill, the dry upper palate of my mouth. Everything is equally life, and equally death as well for that nest could fall down in big gusts or a storm. And even as I say that zazen makes everything equally important, I don’t mean that it makes us dull or that it makes life single-hued. The personal is all different; the impersonal is the same, and we experience both at the same time.

            We often talk of the differences and the oneness, but lately I have been thinking a lot about opposites, or contrasts. When we were in Rwanda life often presented itself not just as differences, but as opposite poles: Tutsi and Hutu; victim and perpetrator; those who forgive and those who don’t; the dead and the living. I often felt like I was hopping from bearing witness to one and then bearing witness to its very opposite.

            I felt similarly when I was in Israel during its war with Gaza a month ago. I tried to write a straight narrative about my experience and encounters, and couldn’t. The only thing I could do was make a list of contrasts, or opposites. It looked something like this:

Bombs into Gaza                                          Rockets into Israel
Gorgeous weekend at the beach                Signs telling you where is the nearest                                                                                  shelter
Gazans have no bunkers in which to        Israelis have great shelter system
     seek shelter
Hamas tells its people not to leave           Israelis warn Gazans to leave
“I hate what I do on the West Bank; at     It’s not at all clear that Hamas was         
     the same time you have to stop                             behind the killing of the 3 Jewish
     terrorists.”                                                     young men.
They kill women and children                   They leave armaments in homes,                                                                                                      mosques and hospitals
Children scream when the bombs hit.      Children hear the tunnels built                                                                                             underground
Our survival is at stake                               Our survival is at stake

            The list was longer than this. Bearing witness to these opposites as they played out during the war was one of the hardest practices I ever did. It’s a lot easier to listen to loud, certain voices of politicians or commentators on TV, to self-righteous harangues on Facebook, or indignant newspaper editorials. At least one result of bearing witness to all these voices is the realization that they are very similar to my own inside voices, that fear, anger, ignorance, and blame underlie almost all these actions. I am familiar with those sources of harm and suffering and am aware that given even slight changes in karma, I am capable of perpetrating the same kind of suffering as the very people who are dubbed occupying armies or terrorists.

            For me, the question finally is: How do I bring everything and everyone to the table? Not to shame them, blame them, and help them change, but in full acknowledgment and acceptance of their differences from me and each other. This is taking care of it all, taking care of the One. Whoever I leave out of the conversation—terrorists, Muslims, Jews, settlers—will find their way of reminding me that they, too, are this One. Every dharma brings into being its opposite, which is another dharma. This is what I wish to be fully present to. Not serve, which sounds dualistic, but to show up for everything with a strong back and a soft front, with meticulousness, integrity, and yes, courage. 

[From a talk given by Eve Marko on May 11, 2014]

             The founder of Japanese Soto Zen, Eihei Dogen, said: 
            “What is practice?”
            “Everywhere, nothing is hidden.”

            I keep going back to these words when I think about the Zen Peacemakers’ retreat in Rwanda a month ago. What was it that struck me so poignantly about Rwandans and how they have worked with the genocide of 20 years ago, in which 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days? What caused me to feel such admiration for them? My roots lie in the European Holocaust. Both my parents did what most East European Jewish survivors did, they left Europe as refugees after World War II. People ended up in Israel, the United States, Latin America, and Canada.
            But Rwandans can’t leave. In Rwanda, I was told, every person over 20 years old falls in one of three categories: Perpetrator, Survivor, Rescuer. Those younger than 20 are children of people who fall into those categories. There are no secrets here. Among the retreat participants were a mother and daughter. The mother was raped in 1994; the daughter was born out of that rape and knows  it, it’s no secret. We heard of a group of women who’d been raped, a group of the men who raped them, and after much separate therapy and work the women are beginning to talk to their rapists because, after all, they are the fathers of their children.
             There is Juliette and her daughter, Pauline, who was a one-month infant 20 years ago held by her mother who promised Jesus to serve him all her days if he would preserve her daughter. How does the young woman feel about that prayer, knowing that her father and two brothers were massacred that same night?
             There is the Hutu mother who rescued Tutsis, including a young boy who now, at the age of 26, is still looking for his own parents whose bodies were never recovered. And there is the woman who lost her arm, and the man who hacked it off—all there in the retreat, in one broken circle.

             “What is practice?”
            “Everywhere, nothing is hidden.”

            What is this place where there are no secrets, no escape, not even exile? This, Dogen says, is the place of practice. In actuality, nothing is ever hidden, everything manifests openly all the time, only due to our own preferences, our likes and dislikes, we don’t recognize it. In the Rwanda retreat we created a field in which many truths were spoken. People talked of what they did, what they didn’t do, what they suffered, what harm they caused others, what they rescued and what they couldn’t rescue. Did I take everyone at his or her word? I didn’t have to; what I wished for was a space in which all things could be expressed openly.
            Survivor, Perpetrator, Rescuer. Given any situation, I could fit into any one of those three categories. How do I know this? Because I’ve watched the violence I aim at myself, the voices I send into exile, and the silence. Before a genocide there is almost always dehumanization. We, too, dehumanize ourselves whenever we banish any of our own voices (Am I a good enough mother? A good enough sister, wife?), whenever we deprive them of attention and care, whenever we roll up our eyes, get angry, turn our head away, get disengaged. One day I look at the mirror and wonder where all that weight came from, where that self-hate came from.

             “What is practice?”
            “Everywhere, nothing is hidden.”

             More and more, this practice is about being in peace with myself. Living heartfully and attentively—not in pieces—in peace. I hurt the right side of my head and arthritis is acting up in my knee this morning, and concurrently the sun comes in between the window slats and the dog emits high-pitched snores. It’s not about escaping the day’s compartment of sorrow or misery, it’s about seeing it as part of limitless awareness, perceiving the field rather than staying in my head about things.
             During the retreat’s morning councils participants were often restrained and low in spirits. But as they walked to Murambi, where we spent most of the day, their faces lit up as they passed a poor village where children played joyfully spattered in mud and the women smiled in their cheap, colorful dresses. And I start crying at how everything co-exists and co-arises; the vastness of it all humbles me. My contentment no longer relies on whether life goes my way, but on experiencing the unbelievable sanctity and mystery of all life, on bringing deep presence to everything that is offered.

[From a talk given by Eve Marko on March 11, 2014.]

The theme of this winter intensive is not-knowing, and the way we’ve practiced it is sharing personal koans from our lives. To what goal? What have we been doing here?

I’m reminded of the first bearing witness retreat at Auschwitz in 1996. Every evening 150 of us would get together in a big group. One evening Claude Anshin Thomas stood up to speak. Claude is a Vietnam veteran who killed many people during that war. After coming home and going through a period of drugs, instability and homelessness, he started meditating with Thich Nhat Hanh, ordained as a Zen Peacemaker Priest, and has been out working in the world, especially with war veterans. That evening Claude said that while most people seemed to identify with the suffering of the victims, he was trying to bear witness to the guards, looking up at the guard towers where they stood aiming their big guns at the people at the Selection Site. He added that while we may feel very different from them, we’re not, and that if the circumstances and situation warrant it, any of us could be a guard at Auschwitz doing those things.

At the end of the evening a friend of ours, a German man and a social activist, approached, very upset. He didn’t think that such general statements weren’t right or fair; more to the point, he felt that no matter what happened, how things evolved, he could never do what those guards did in that camp.

What this exchange highlights for me is how hard it is for us to grasp what is meant by the words we are everything or we are empty. In my opinion, we are everything because we are empty. There is no I or me to which things happen and which make me change. There are no external experiences that are gained or lost, everything is one thing. Animals seem to feel more at ease with that, while we have a mind that postulates an artificial I that is separate from everything else, especially from a life that we can’t control, so what inevitably follows are feelings of wrongness, insecurity, and lack.

Tara Brach has pointed out that this is probably what Shakyamuni meant when he said that life is suffering. That separate I contemplates life as something external to it and a force it can’t control, so feelings of alienation and isolation are inevitable and we react with anger, depression, frustration, and envy. I would also add that since our brain is a machine that thinks dualistically, that means there is no A without B, nothing without its opposite. A strong arm inevitably comes with a weak arm, health comes with illness, cleanliness with dirt, life with death. There is no up without down. Do you realize what anxiety that could provoke?

Barry Magid said of the Mu Koan that Mu is a negation of opposites. In some way that’s what koan study is about, for koan study dissolves boundaries and collapses everything into this, now. It’s never about commenting or discussing, but becoming this, now.

That is why when we work with all the different situations in our lives, we try to become every single voice in that situation, including voices that we experience as angry, threatening and very painful, such as: You’re no good, your art (or writing or music) is terrible, what a loser you are, you made bad choices in the past and your life is a dead end, etc. There is no me that is separate from that voice, but neither does that voice characterize me. I am many voices--I could have been a guard at Auschwitz, I’d never have been a guard at Auschwitz—that come up in different circumstances. While our brain may say that one voice conflicts with another, our practice is to experience that no voice is right or wrong, no voice comes at the expense of the other, they all co-exist simultaneously as me.

Can I listen to all these voices without trying to escape? Can I find ease as each comes up and then glides away without identifying with one or the other?