All Shall Be Well (?)
This talk was given at the North Carolina Zen Center. In an expression of Zen's "great doubt," the talk considers how the suffering we experience sqaures with ideas such as "just this moment is enough," and "all is well."
Transcript
The title of this talk,
If it had one,
Is All Shall Be Well,
Parentheses,
Question mark,
Parentheses.
Great faith,
Great doubt,
Great determination.
This talk is born from my own great doubt,
Which means I fear in the end it will be somewhat unresolved.
Now remember,
Great doubt in a Zen tradition,
It's not what we normally think of as doubt,
Which is to be skeptical,
Which is to be engaging in a process of reasoning,
Of thought,
Evaluation,
Deciding that something maybe isn't correct,
That something maybe isn't true.
Great doubt,
On the other hand,
Is just a recognition of,
I don't know,
I don't know.
Zen,
Great doubt is something that we can't think our ways through,
And a lot of us may not like that.
We're used to using our reasoning minds,
We're used to using our discursive thinking to figure things out,
But questions like,
What is mu?
What happens when we die?
From where do we come?
We can't answer these questions.
But instead,
They're in the realm of great doubt,
Not skepticism,
But a sense of wonder,
Of wondering,
Of curiosity.
Ordinary doubt can cause us to waver,
To consider,
To choose.
Great doubt is rooted in the openness of not knowing.
There's a Zen story that I only partially remember,
But a curious student who had queried the teacher on a point of dharma was given in response,
It's enough to ask the question.
Now,
Go back and sit.
A practice of great doubt,
Asking the question and holding the willingness to experience what arises.
And so,
This talk is rooted in some of my own great doubt,
Related to ideas that have come up recently in our Tuesday night book discussions.
In some of Teshin's teishos,
And in the dharma dialogues that Teshin sometimes does with us on Sunday mornings.
Ideas such as thusness,
Or suchness,
And relative and absolute perspectives,
Especially as they relate to the suffering we experience in our lives,
And that we observe in the lives of others.
The horrors that are unfolding for the people of Gaza.
The loss that so many families in Russia must be feeling after that recent terrorist attack there.
The uncertainty that many around the world,
And here in the US,
Here right in this country,
That many around the world,
And here in the US,
Here right in this room,
That we may be feeling about political and social climates that feel increasingly unstable.
And yet we hear in our Zen practice that this moment,
This experience,
Justice is enough.
Justice is enough.
And Tangen Roshi,
In our Tuesday night book,
Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha,
Tells us about using the phrase,
In this life,
All is well.
And he uses that phrase,
Even in the face of a story he tells about a couple murdered in their home by a teenage boy who told police later that he just wanted to find out what it would feel like to kill somebody.
So much suffering.
And yet we hear justice is enough.
All is well.
And I am trying to find my way with this.
Now,
Early in his teaching career,
Gautama Buddha said,
I teach two things,
Suffering and the end of suffering.
And he shared teachings like mindful awareness and the Eightfold Path to help us manage the suffering we have in our lives.
But there's something bigger here,
Something less tangible,
Something deeply profound in the face of tragic suffering.
So I'd like to tell you a story of suffering by speaking again about my father and my mother.
My father,
Forrest,
Served in World War II,
And he contracted tuberculosis in North Africa.
In the late 1940s,
He spent 17 months in a sanatorium.
And then he had a recurrence of TB in the early 1950s,
Which caused him to lose a third of one of his lungs.
And soon after,
He developed a deep,
Profound bipolar disorder.
Due,
We found out later,
To tubercular lesions on his brain.
By the late 1950s,
His mental health was unraveling for reasons my parents did not then understand.
I've had the opportunity to read letters that my mother wrote at the time,
Desperate letters to the Bishop of Northern Indiana,
Where they lived,
To the Veterans Administration,
And a variety of other people,
Pleading for help as her husband sank deeper and deeper into mental illness.
In the early 1960s,
My father had 21 electric shock therapy sessions.
In the mid-60s,
He was in a VA pilot program for the testing of lithium as a treatment for manic depression.
My mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis in the early 1970s.
As a treatment for manic depression.
And as the 1960s,
The 70s,
And 80s unfolded,
He went on to develop diabetes,
Nearly unmanageable hypertension,
Congestive heart failure,
Episodes of lithium poisoning,
And the ongoing effects of his manic depressive cycle,
Which could swing from anxiety and despair to euphoria in just a matter of days or weeks.
And all of this brought frequent hospitalizations and a decades-long uncertainty,
As my mother took on the role of both observing and managing my father's health and sanity.
And she,
All the while,
A high school English teacher with five children.
And yet,
My mother is and has been perhaps the most gracious person I've ever known.
With a smile that is as broad almost as her heart.
A person willing and able to step forward with care and compassion.
Now,
My mother is a deeply spiritual Christian.
And she takes much of her spiritual direction from Julian of Norwich,
Who was a 14th-century Christian mystic.
Julian is known to us from her book,
The Revelation of Divine Love.
And her writing was based on a series of visions that she said she had of Jesus in 1373,
As Julian was lying on what,
At the time,
They thought was her deathbed.
In relaying her visions,
Julian wrote,
Julian's visions led her to an abounding optimism of spirit.
Based in her own words,
She said,
You shall not be distressed.
Rather,
He said,
You shall not be overcome.
Julian's visions led her to an abounding optimism of spirit.
Based in her understanding of the love of God.
Not in the idea that God would save her,
But rather,
And simply,
Her belief that God's love is constant.
That it offered her an encompassing support as she faced the sufferings of life in plague-ravaged Europe.
In her writing,
Dame Julian gave an assurance to Christians that has inspired people for more than 600 years.
An assurance that shaped my mother's early spirituality and resounds for her,
Even to this day,
As she nears her 99th birthday this coming May.
And what was that assurance?
You may have heard it.
All shall be well.
And all shall be well.
And all manner of things shall be well.
And all manner of things shall be well.
Now,
My mother never thought this meant she and my father would not suffer.
But that an acceptance of divine love,
To be in loving relationship with the divine,
Offered her a way to see her suffering,
My father's suffering,
In a different way.
The presence of suffering,
But within something larger.
Something unchanging.
Something ultimately uplifting.
Now,
If I were a Christian,
I would feel assured too.
But I'm not a Christian.
And as beautiful in spirit as Julian's words are,
They don't speak to me.
So let's come back to Thangyiroshi,
Who says something remarkably similar in this life,
All is well.
And back to the idea of just this is enough.
Just this moment.
Just this moment.
Just this experience.
Just this beauty.
Just this trauma.
So let's look at these two phrases for a moment.
I dug in my mind and played dictionary with myself.
Just this.
Just this.
Being with a thought,
Feeling,
And experience without bringing our discursive mind to it.
Letting something just be in its true nature,
Its suchness,
Complete,
Whole,
Lacking nothing.
Not dependent on our judgment and our evaluation for its reality.
Just this.
Experiencing things just as they are.
Allowing each thing to reveal itself as it is.
Because when we label things,
When we interpret and name them,
We set boundaries around them.
Which precludes our ability to experience them directly.
To experience them fully.
And zen,
Experiencing things just as they are,
Is the gift of zazen mind.
All is well.
And understanding that no matter what happens,
The essence of life is not touched by happiness,
Fear,
Tragedy,
Good fortune.
The essence of life,
Regardless of our perception of events,
The essence of life is unchanged.
All things,
And what Tang and Roshi call the beginningless beginning,
All is well.
Though we certainly do our best to convince ourselves otherwise.
Though we certainly do our best to convince ourselves otherwise.
How often do we feel that there's something we should be doing and won't let ourselves just sit in peace.
So often we mourn the loss of people,
Of the past,
The loss of tradition,
Because the present feels unknown,
Feels unsafe.
We think about what's to come,
As if it's somehow not enough to just focus on what's right in front of us.
We look to improve ourselves or to improve others,
As if we're not good enough.
That we're not enough as we are.
Let me offer you a few thoughts from others.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said,
As long as you seek for something,
You will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.
Zen priest Zenkei Blanche Hartman said,
There's nothing we need to get that is not already right here,
Right now,
In this very body and mind as it is.
And Taigen Dan Leighton said,
Our practice is not about getting something new,
But about taking care of something that we already have.
Our practice is,
How do we take care of this?
And this?
And just this?
How do we take care of this?
This?
And just this?
Making our best effort in the moment.
And what is our best effort?
In a stressful job.
In an uncertain marriage.
In the face of illness.
And how is it that all is well when we find ourselves in a time of grief?
How is trauma just enough?
The Tibetan teacher Trungpa Rinpoche said,
We must begin by facing the reality of our living situations.
Open to each situation in its true nature,
Its suchness,
Complete,
Whole,
And lacking nothing.
Allowing each thing to reveal itself as it is,
Because it's here where we experience things with clarity.
It's here where we let go of emotional discrimination.
Where we let go of our prejudices.
Each moment,
The enactment of a renunciation of preference.
When instead of our reaching out to the world to understand,
We find the world coming forward to teach us.
Because we're open to not knowing how things have come to be as they are.
We're open to not knowing how to respond.
Open to not knowing what to do.
And this,
I think,
Is our encompassing support.
Our assurance that all matter of things shall do well.
Because in our not knowing,
The essence of life remains unchanged.
And each moment,
Each experience brings an opening to compassion and care.
All is well doesn't mean that there isn't suffering.
There is.
Or that we shouldn't take action in the face of injustice.
Or take steps to heal our suffering.
To reach out with the hands of a bodhisattva to heal the suffering of others.
We can and we should.
But it's not always clear how.
Or perhaps more importantly,
Our own feelings,
Our own beliefs,
Get in the way of seeing the right path.
But when we open ourselves to what each time and place reveals clearly in its own suchness,
Its own just this,
Just this helps us to find how to answer the cries of the world.
Now,
Of course,
These are just words.
I thought about it.
I typed this talk down.
I checked it to see if it made sense.
But that's all just my intellect at work.
I don't yet feel this in my flesh and in my bones.
My great doubt remains.
My wondering.
So I spoke with Teshin about all this recently.
He gave me an answer that you might expect.
He said,
You have to bring this into your practice.
You have to bring this into your mood,
Into your breath.
Into your body.
Your thoughts won't bring you the answer,
He said.
And I left our discussion.
And that old Zen master's response ran back through me.
It's enough to ask the question.
And I'll go back and sit.
It's a bit unresolved.
