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Five Hindrances – Laziness, Worry, Doubt – Talk 3 Loon Lake 2011

Norman gives the third talk of the Loon Lake Sesshin 2011 on the remaining three of the Five Hindrances – Laziness, Worry, Doubt.

 

Five Hindrances – Laziness, Worry, Doubt
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | Nov 08, 2011

Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum

Let me continue today with my discussion of the hindrances. Yesterday we were talking about sense desire and ill will. Today I will discuss laziness, worry and anxiety, and doubt.

To practice at all takes a certain amount of energy. Just to show up is already a huge amount of energy. Then, once you are here, you have to pay attention, not only some of the time, but all of the time. The practice is not just in the meditation, with breaks for meals and work. The practice is all the time: during the meal, during the work, during the rest. You have to pay attention, which requires a certain amount of zest and liveliness.

In the various lists of positive qualities that need to be cultivated, energy, or enthusiasm, always appears on all those lists. This means steady, sustained, bright energy. Too much raging enthusiasm is no good, because it burns out. It usually creates havoc and then disappears, leaving you depressed and discouraged. So this is not what is meant by energy or virya. It means “Bright, steady, alert, strong, sustained” energy.

Laziness is exactly the opposite of this. The word “laziness” is maybe not a good word. It implies, in our language, a moral failing. But here it means that you are just worn out. You are drowsy, sleepy. The actual, exact translation of this hindrance is “sloth and torpor.” Very descriptive! You just can’t get going. So it is more physical than laziness. Your very bones are resisting. You just can’t keep your eyes open. You can’t be alert, and you can’t help it. It’s not like you decided to be lazy, and you could be otherwise.

We all want to practice; otherwise, we wouldn’t be here at sesshin in the first place. But, also, we don’t want to practice. We actually have a love affair going with our unhappiness and our misery and our chaos. We are quite enamored of it. As much as we want to give it up, we don’t want to give it up. Or maybe we are just in love with the idea of our self as a person, who has always had a lot of problems and just can’t overcome them.

Also, we are absolutely scared of the idea, which has a tremendous amount of truth to it, that in actuality we are buddhas. We are strong, dignified, solid, loving, compassionate people, who were born with a destiny to become awakened and to sustain others in love. This idea of our life terrifies us. I think it’s true. We are scared of running into our best self. It’s as if we were shy around that person. We would just as soon not encounter her.

This struggle between wanting to practice and not wanting to practice, between being stuck on our feeble self, and scared of our powerful, compassionate, awakened self, is really, really exhausting. So it looks like fatigue, or maybe it looks like some kind of inner turmoil. I think this is the deep, deep root of our laziness. When we are not clear about what we are doing with our lives, when we are doing one thing after another, reflexively, without much sense of a bigger purpose to our life. Or maybe we have a glimpse of a bigger purpose, but we feel that we don’t have enough courage to really engage that, and we get tired out.

I have spent my whole life thinking about truth and religion and what is this thing about being a human being. This has been the main pursuit of my lifetime, which may seem unusual, but, actually, is not at all unusual. We all have these deep, human questions. We all have to engage them. When we do engage them, energy comes up. When we engage our highest purpose and our deepest questions, we have plenty of energy, even if we are old, even if our body doesn’t work 100% right. There’s plenty of energy to live and do what we need to do in this life. When we don’t engage our deepest questions, it feels like our body is not strong, our spirit is not strong. We get worn out, and we are just plain tired. As time goes by, you can feel just bone weary with life’s demands.

The Buddha said that if we embrace impermanence, instead of resisting it, then things are always looking up, because impermanence is the one thing that is not impermanent. And permanence continues on and on and on, spiraling ever upward. The one thing that is totally and utterly reliable and always beautiful is impermanence, which means change and development and growth. Dogen calls impermanence buddha-nature. We could also call it love. When we shift our sense of identity and purpose from the preservation of that which cannot be preserved, to the ongoing process of love itself, we have a buoyant spirit, and we have energy.

So the next hindrance on the list of popular hindrances is the opposite of laziness. Energy is the wholesome opposite of laziness, and anxiety and worry is the unwholesome opposite. If laziness makes us worn out and sleepy and groggy, anxiety makes us wide awake, but now we are jumpy and anxious. Instead of the mind being dark and groggy, it is constantly flitting in and out of thoughts and feelings, with a disturbed and worried energy.

Worry is very compelling. It’s very convincing. If somebody says, Don’t worry, we say, Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. You don’t have this going on that I do. Maybe we have important decisions to make. Maybe we have serious problems brewing. We have things to worry about. These days, a lot of people are worried about finances, worried about the future, worried about the dire state of the world, worried about the environment. We can worry about our health. We can worry about our loneliness. We can worry about our aging. We can worry about our children, if we have any children. We can worry about the fate of our grandchildren, if we have any grandchildren. What I am saying is that worry does seem quite reasonable and quite compelling. Maybe we could say that worry is the content, the worried thoughts and anxiety are the energy, the jumpiness in the body and the mind.

When you think about it, it is quite obvious that worry is not helping any of these situations. Concern, yes, maybe it is good to be concerned. Caring, maybe it is good to care. But worry and anxiety don’t help. They just make things worse. They actually make things worse. When you are worried and anxious at the same time, this doesn’t promise a good result. It promises a worse result, because worry and anxiety cloud the mind, and they reduce one’s effectiveness in dealing with actual problems. Worry is something extra.

Things are so much simpler than we make them out to be. We make things a lot worse. A situation is as it is. It is not as it is not. Right? It is as it is. We like a situation. Good things happen. We enjoy them. We try to encourage more good things to happen. Also, bad things happen. We endure them with as much equanimity that we can muster. We try to act so as to prevent more bad things from happening. This is true no matter what the situation is, who we are, what the circumstances are, whether they are good times or bad times. Good things happen; bad things happen. We see them with enjoyment or some equanimity. We try to create the best situations possible.

So, what do we do when worry appears? We understand, Oh, yeah, this is worry. It’s not helping. It’s not a benefit. Good conditions come, bad conditions come. That’s life. Worry is extra. We have to have a good teacher inside of ourselves, who knows the dharma and talks to us, and says to us, Yeah, okay, that’s what is going on. This is worry. This is not helping. Or we can take a breath and say to ourselves, Worried thoughts. Worried thinking. In saying that, we can let go. Maybe in the next moment another worried thought comes. Then we do the same thing again. Maybe we have to do this many, many times. But that is what we do; otherwise, the mind is off and running, with more and more confusion.

This does not mean that one cannot plan. Planning and worrying is not the same thing. Planning turns into worrying when one starts thinking whether the plan is actually going to happen. Planning is fine, without being concerned about the future results.

My wife, Kathie, used to negotiate on behalf of her local teachers’ union. She once told me about a brilliant, negotiation technique. When the teachers negotiate, they have the professional union people come in and coach them. So she would take workshops on how to negotiate. They taught her this wonderful concept called BATNA. It means: the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So here is the way they worked with this. The negotiators would get together before they started a negotiation, and they would think, What are we going to do if the negotiations completely fail, and we do not get an agreement at all? What will happen? What are we going to do then? Then they think about what they are going to do, and then they make their peace with that. They settle with that in their hearts. They don’t talk to the other side about it, but they do that among themselves. The reason why they do that is that then they are free to go into the negotiations without fear. They can then make whatever compromises that seem necessary, but they don’t need to be driven by fear and worry and anxiety. This means they cannot be coerced into any settlement that is not good for them. They can’t be coerced into something that they really don’t want, because they have made their peace with the best alternative to a negotiated settlement. So they are okay with that, and they are confident.

This is a great practice for dealing with worry. This is what I always do. Whatever the situation you are facing, just think, What happens if everything fails? What’s the worst possible thing? Then think about that, meditate on that, and get used to it. Have some acceptance of it. Probably it won’t happen, but just in case it did, you are ready. You accept it. Then, no matter how things turn out, it is always going to be better than that. So it’s fine. You don’t need to worry.

If course, the ultimate BATNA, the BATNA to end all BATNAs. I will get sick and die and lose everything. Right? That’s pretty much the ultimate BATNA. So if you want to worry about something, why don’t you worry about that? [Laughter] But, of course, it will do you no good to worry about that. That is going to happen. For sure! So if you meditate on this, which, of course, you are doing every time you breathe in and you breathe out, and tolerate that situation, you are meditating on that, right? You can see the beauty in it. Instead of a terrifying outcome, there is something beautiful about that. In fact, there is no inhale, unless there is an exhale. It’s beautiful. Did you ever think of that? It is so perfect: the inhale and the exhale perfectly match one another. There is a beauty to it. There is a kind of rhythm of living that has to do with dying.

When you have meditated on this ultimate BATNA, then all other worries and anxieties appear superficial. They may come, but they also go, and you have no need to be entangled in them. They will not be so compelling anymore. Maybe you won’t even worry so much anymore. Maybe you won’t worry at all.

The last hindrance is called doubt, usually referred to as “corrosive doubt,” or “skeptical doubt.” Doubt itself, ordinary doubt, having a healthy skepticism, is necessary for practice. Especially in Zen, it is very much encouraged not to entirely believe the teachings. This does not mean that you should dismiss them out of hand and say, That’s stupid. I quit. No, it means believe them just enough to spend some time investigating for yourself. Then, when you understand for yourself, in your own way, you will have faith in the teachings, but not until then. You shouldn’t have faith, until you see for yourself, until you know for yourself, through your own simple, ordinary, and concrete experience. It’s a pragmatic truth that works in your actual living. It gives you hope and energy and a very distinct path forward in life. It doesn’t really matter what words you use to describe it. There is no doubt about it. You know what you know. Your life is what it is.

Corrosive doubt is something other than this necessary doubt. Corrosive doubt is, maybe we could say, two things. First of all, a lack of basic self confidence. Second, a kind of despair about life in general. This is actually itself a kind of faith or belief, a faith that nothing is possible, a faith that nothing will work, that nothing will stand up to scrutiny. Also, this corrosive doubt is a strong sense of oneself as being unable to practice and to find strength. I see that it can be done. I admire other people who do it. I wish I was like them, but I can never do it, it’s too hard for me. It’s really painful to feel that way, about oneself and about life. Sometimes we have that despair, when nothing seems possible, especially when nothing seems possible for oneself.

This kind of doubt does come along from time to time. As a practitioner, sometimes we know that there is nothing we can do about it. We just keep going on with our practice. The practice itself, and our dharma friends, will eventually help us find a way out of that hole. If we can manage to stay with our practice in those dark times, the process itself, and the warmth of others, eventually helps us through. Usually that is the time when we don’t want to show up. So the challenge is, can we show up? Will our friends call us on the phone and say, Hey where are you? And you say, Oh, man, I just can’t do it. They say, Okay, maybe I will call you next week.

The Buddha taught that all beings, without exception, are capable of the wisdom and peace that he promised. In Zen practice we say that all beings are Buddha. That is their nature. This is not something personal about you or me. It is about life itself. Life has this liberating quality built into it.

Sometimes when somebody complains to me that they feel that they can’t do the practice because they are too ill, or because their past is too painful and tragic, or because they can’t shake some basic feeling of unworthiness, I say to them, All beings are Buddha. However there is one exception to this universal rule: you! I guess you are a special person. I feel honored to be sitting across from you. [Laughter]

No matter what the circumstances, no matter who the person, there is always a way to practice. Everyone can practice, and in reality, there are no exceptions to this.

So, these are the five hindrances, which are a good lens through which to view our moment to moment experience. Sense desire, ill will, laziness, worry, and doubt – we all have them. They are just the other side of the positive qualities that we need to cultivate in our lives: loving-kindness, energy, wisdom, faith. Each one of us will have them in some combination. We will all have our personal favorite.

All of our lives, we have been taught to see the world through the lens of self. We have been taught by everyone around us, and there is a good reason for this. It is built into our biology. Everything revolves around, What’s in it for me? What’s good for me? What’s bad for me? Even our ideals and values end up being all about ourselves. But this is too small a scope for our living. That confinement, in the end, proves to be too painful to be sustainable. To practice is to open the field of our vision. It is giving ourselves over in full engagement to our life.

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Five Hindrances – Sense Desire, Ill Will – Talk 2 Loon Lake 2011

Norman gives the second talk of the Loon Lake 2011 Sesshin on the first two of the Five Hindrances – Sense Desire and Ill Will.

Five Hindrances – Sense Desire, Ill Will

By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | Nov 07, 2011

Edited and abridged by Barbara Byrum and Cynthia Schrager

Probably you have all had this experience: you go for a walk in the forest, and it’s really nice. It feels good to be there – the trees and the atmosphere. Then later on, you decide that you want to learn something, so you learn about the trees. You learn to identify the incense cedars, ponderosa pines, jeffrey pines, lodgepole pines. Then you go for a walk in the forest again, and all of a sudden, you see all these lodgepole pines and incense cedars and ponderosa pines, and they weren’t there before. Before there were a lot of nice trees, but you didn’t really see any incense cedars and ponderosa pines, and now they are everywhere! It is kind of astonishing. Where were they before?

Maybe you just bought a new Honda Civic. You go out the first time, and you commute to work. And all of a sudden, it seems like since you bought yours, everybody else bought one too! You are driving along, and there are all these Honda Civics. Just in the space of a few days, people have gone out and bought enormous numbers of Honda Civics. Before, you were aware that there were a few Honda Civics, but not this many. Did you ever have that experience?

It’s a stunning thing. It is almost magical when you have that experience. What happened there? You have eyes and ears, but somehow you weren’t seeing before. You weren’t seeing, until your attention was brought to something in a particular way. Then, what was there all along, but might have been invisible, suddenly becomes visible.

It is just like this with meditation practice. Sitting on the cushion gives you a very intense and focused perspective on your mind: your thoughts, your emotions, your attitudes, your tendencies. Oddly, paying attention to breathing–not necessarily looking at your mind or analyzing your mind, but just paying attention to being present–gives you a perspective on how your mind and heart are operating. Of course, you knew quite a bit about this before, because you are a thoughtful person, a perceptive person. So it is not that you have no concept of what is going on in your mind and heart. You knew a lot, but somehow with the meditation practice, it’s different. You see a lot more, and you see differently.

It is often the case that you begin to see a lot more of your dissatisfaction and your pain. There is more of it than you thought. You may have realized that you are not the happiest person in the world. Maybe you already knew that, but now there seem to be Honda Civics everywhere. It’s nothing but dissatisfaction, anxiety, despair, grumpiness, jealousy, anger. Wherever you look, there it is again.

Part of the task of meditation is to begin to notice all of this and begin to sort it out, because that is how you overcome it, and that’s how you will become more cheerful. Really cheerful. You begin to notice that previously a good deal of your cheerfulness was a kind of a cover- up. Underneath your previous cheerfulness, there was actually a lot of angst that you didn’t necessarily know was lurking there. You were coating your angst with a nice patina of cheerfulness – a nice, pink, glossy cheerfulness. You thought it was really cheerfulness, but now you realize it was just a coating. With some meditation practice there can be actual cheerfulness, because you see the angst for what it is, and in doing that, you can deal with it in a forthright and effective manner.

A traditional Buddhist way of talking about this is The Five Hindrances – features of the defiled, confused mind. Defiled here doesn’t mean evil or somehow wrong. It just means unwise, unhappy, angst-ridden, and a default habit of making matters worse.

The Five Hindrances are a very effective way to experience how the mind is defiled and how to straighten it out. I am sure that many of you have studied The Five Hindrances before: sense desire, ill will or anger, laziness, anxiety or worry, and doubt. So if you observe your mind and emotions through the lens of these five hindrances, you will begin to see patterns in a way that you were not able to see before. Once you see these patterns, and you understand how they operate, it now becomes possible for you to do something about them.

The first one: sense desire. Sense desire isn’t a defilement in and of itself. The defilement arises because for most of us, most of the time, it is impossible for us to simply enjoy the enjoyable and endure the unpleasant. Instead, we want to hang on to the enjoyable, and we want to get rid of the unpleasant. We can’t just experience what’s going on; we have to improve it. If you look at your mind closely, you will see this. It is kind of a stunning thing to notice. Right in the middle of something pleasant, that you really wanted, and that you are really enjoying, the mind is suddenly murmuring, often just below the level of your awareness, Oh this is good. This is really good. I want more and more and more of this. How can I keep this going forever? How can I make it even stronger and even better? Simultaneously with your saying this to yourself, you are also saying, at the same time, Oh boy, this is really great. Probably I don’t deserve it. Probably I shouldn’t be having this. Probably someone is going to take it away. For sure, I am going to lose it right now. I know that I am going to lose this. It’s not going to last. I just know it. All of which, of course, is true. No wonder you are saying it. It is going on right at the moment when you are enjoying this wonderful thing.

I am not saying that you are necessarily having this train of thought, although you might be. Whether or not you are conscious of thinking this, those thoughts and those impulses are there right in the middle of this wonderful experience that you are having. So the actual enjoyment is painful and problematic, even though it is still enjoyment. This is a weird thing, but it’s true if you look. You’ll see that it’s true. There is something painful and anxious in your enjoyment. Maybe you know what I am talking about. Maybe you have noticed this.

I remember a time when I was young and living in the monastery. We used to eat the meal oryoki style – every single meal, day after day, month after month, year after year. There were breaks, but basically that was our life. We would eat and be served in the zendo, so it was just a continuation of the meditation practice. I remember that once I noticed, for the first time, what a lunatic I was being in the middle of every meal. Something good would come along in the first bowl or the second bowl or third bowl, and I would say, Oh boy, oh boy. I would get really excited, and I would immediately start scheming about how I could make sure that it would work out that I could get seconds. This was an intricate problem, because you had to take enough so that you could get a lot, but if you took too much, and you couldn’t finish before the seconds came around, then you wouldn’t get seconds. So you had to take the maximum amount that you could finish eating, so that then you could get the maximum amount for seconds. Then you would have to gobble up the first bowl and time it, so that when the servers came for seconds, you were ready.

This is how I ate for years! Every meal I was strategizing. I was like a general of food, figuring out how I could make this work out. Then one day I realized, This is really crazy. Because I was so anxious and greedy about the enjoyable, there was no enjoyment. There was only scheming. Based on my attachment to the idea of enjoyment, I was actually creating, on a daily basis, three meals a day, a low-level misery and thinking it was enjoyment. This is stunning, but I was doing this. It took awhile, but I realized, This is really stupid. I realized it so strongly that I stopped doing it. Of course, the result was that I enjoyed my food much more. When it worked out to have seconds, I could have seconds. When it wasn’t working out to have seconds, I wouldn’t have to freak out over that. What I had was enough.

This is pretty much what we do, and it is true of anything. If you could just enjoy what is present, just allow yourself to accept it and appreciate it and be grateful for it, and then let it go when it is over, you could live with the six senses without being entangled and without misery. This is true not only for food and other pleasant things that we could see or hear or taste or touch; it also goes for pleasant inner feelings as well: feeling loved or respected, or feeling good about what you have accomplished. If you get entangled in these feelings, there is literally anxiety and pain, even when there are these pleasant feelings. But if you recognize that there is no way you could hold on to these feelings, no way that you could scheme to get more of them, or to make them stay longer than they are going to stay, you could realize that it is a gift to have these pleasant feelings in this moment. And then you can let go, and then, maybe, they come again. And then you let go again.

When you appreciate this, you can really enjoy these inner feelings, without getting entangled in them. If through your practice you become aware enough, you can actually feel the entanglement arising in the moment of something pleasant or positive. It actually feels just like that. It feels like entanglement. It feels like you are beginning to be bound up by threads and cords and knots. You can feel that. You can notice it, and when you notice it, it’s not pleasant, and you can let go. You can release. You can know the feeling, not reacting with grasping or pushing away, and then let go.

If you practice this way carefully and intentionally for awhile, it becomes quite natural, and you don’t have to make a big deal out of it or make intentional effort. Of course, once you notice that something is painful, when you thought that it wasn’t, who wants the pain? Who wants more pain? So you can naturally live this way and practice this way—letting go when entanglement arises—once you train for awhile.

It is the same with unpleasant things too. Sitting is very helpful. You can notice when you are sitting and you don’t like it anymore. It’s becoming uncomfortable. Immediately, along with the sensation of the discomfort, comes the thought, I really don’t like this. I really want this to be gone. What’s wrong here? I must be sitting wrong. They forgot to ring the bell. Surely they are a little spaced out. This should be over by now. What’s going on? With these thoughts, and with your entanglement with the succession of thoughts, you have now taken basic discomfort and doubled and tripled and quadrupled it, so that now it has a more complicated life within you

If, instead, you notice what is going on, and you see these thoughts as thoughts – unwise thoughts that are creating a more painful situation – you can, little by little, pick through and let go of all those thoughts. You can just sit there and feel the discomfort, which you are probably afraid to feel. When you just sit there and feel it, it isn’t actually so bad. It’s a sensation. You can breathe with it. You can be with it. Sometimes it even happens that it completely disappears, because all unpleasant sensations will do that, won’t they? They will all completely disappear.

All this seems very reasonable, right? I think you understand that this is a really good idea. But the idea of it is insufficient. You really have to experience it for yourself more than once. You have to experience it for yourself at some depth. When you do, you find that meditation is actually a tremendous pleasure. It is really a special kind of pleasure that is not really available in any other way.

Dogen calls zazen “the dharma gate of repose and bliss.” That’s a good way of putting it, because there is nothing better than just enjoying whatever is there. It doesn’t take so much for there to be enjoyment. The cookies are very good. The tea is very good. All the sounds are good. The silence is excellent. Just the breath is enough to make you happy. Think of that! Think of how much money you could save on that theory. Just the breath in and out. Taking a breath, what a great thing.

Even the unpleasant sensations in the body are good, once you are really there for them, and you have stopped resisting and hoping for a better life in this moment. Even your habitual cock-eyed thoughts are fine. They are fine, when you can let them come, and you can let them go, and you can let them float through. What’s the difference whether they are positive or negative thoughts? If a ridiculous, self-defeating, self-flagellating thought comes through – fine! Who cares? It’s okay. It can come. It can go. It is really no different from any other thought. It’s all about your feeling about it, holding on to it, or not wanting it to be there. That part is problematic. But if you are just paying attention, it can come, it can go, and it’s fine. It doesn’t really matter. To accept the coming and going of everything, as it comes and goes, is the best thing. You realize that everything has its charm.

If you keep doing this over time, it becomes something that you do not only on your cushion, but in your daily life. What happens on the meditation cushion is just an intensification, a super-focus on what is going on all the time. There is no difference: consciousness comes and goes. Things happen. It is no different. When you develop the vision and the training on the cushion, it just happens in your daily life

The second of the five hindrances, anger or ill will, is quite intimately connected to sense desire, because when you can’t get rid of the bad feeling, or you can’t keep the good one, you can get very irritable about it. You can get crabby. You can get frustrated, and, eventually, you can get pretty angry.

Fundamentally, we are always angry with only one thing: we don’t accept this moment of reality as it is. Since this moment of reality is what it is, and we are absolutely powerless in this moment to make it be otherwise, we become enraged, because we are completely impotent and very frustrated.

I always maintain that this is a primal experience that we have all had, when we were tiny infants. The moment comes, and we absolutely can’t believe that mother is not here. Where is she? She’s supposed to be here! I need her now! Why isn’t she here? This is shocking. It is really upsetting to realize that this is the way the world is. It is not the way we want it to be. It is the way it is. When you first realize that, it is really shocking and completely unacceptable. Then right away there is pain, grief, and then, anger. Although we are all grown up now, we have not really gotten over this.

Or the opposite: I had something I wanted. I was perfectly happy, and now it’s gone. This is outrageous! And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. It’s a simple thing. Why can’t I get what I want and just keep it? It’s not that big a deal. Why can’t I get it? It’s outrageous.

Since this basic cause of our anger is absolutely impossible for us to accept, we usually interpret it down to some more manageable object. It is a little too much to say, The nature of reality makes me angry. [Laughter] It’s a little bit much for us. So we say, It’s her fault! It’s his fault! It is this screwy world’s fault. It’s God’s fault. Or maybe it is my fault: my stupidity, my bad character, my woundedness, that I have never been able to overcome. Somebody is to blame, somebody more manageable than reality itself is at fault here. So we fixate on that object of anger – the blameworthy one. Often our many arguments about why he or she or they or it or I am at fault are quite convincing arguments. They might even be true. But ultimately, they are never true. Ultimately we are angry because reality is the way it is: impermanent, non-graspable, and definitely not organized around my personal needs and desires.

The Buddha compared getting angry at someone to throwing hot coals. In order to throw hot coals on somebody else, first you need to pick them up. Depending how far away the person is and how good your aim is, you may or may not hit the person with the hot coals, and even if you do, as the coals fly through the air, they cool off somewhat. But you yourself will definitely be burned. It’s a painful thing. You know what happens when you get burned: the flesh keeps burning. The hot temperature maintains itself. So a burn, after the removal of the source, continues to burn and damage and wound. When you pick up a hot coal and grasp it firmly, as you need to do in order to throw it at somebody else, you give yourself a nasty burn.

So there is no good in anger for you. It’s just pain. It makes no difference if you are right. You can be right. Maybe you are right. Still, you are going to be engulfed in pain, and you can go on being right forever and ever, and go on being in pain forever and ever.

So we know at least three things. One, anger is going to arise. Two, when anger arises, this is the anger that everyone has felt – this feeling we are feeling right now and will feel in the future. So in our very anger, we are close to others. Our deep emotions, even our negative ones, have that beautiful effect, if we think of it. I am now in solidarity with everyone who has ever felt this painful feeling. And that’s good. Third, when we know anger as anger; when we know how painful it is; when we recall our strong commitment to learn from our anger, not to get entangled in it; we can turn around, and we can be patient. We can endure the difficult outer and inner conditions. We can stay present. We can stay with the breath. We can stay with our practice, and because of that, the situation within and without will change. Maybe, eventually, if we practice this way for a long time, we will get to the place where it’s unusual that anger will arise. We won’t have to go through that again and again and again

In this way, our anger, our frustration, can actually be useful to us. It can be a powerful and important teacher. It can be good for us to feel anger in relation to other people and to the world, and even anger at ourselves, when we need to straighten ourselves out. Anger shows us our own pain, and it shows us justice and injustice. Sometimes the anger, when we know how to work with it, can spur us on to positive action. But it is clear that corrosive, obsessive anger, that causes us to have sleepless nights that can literally ruin our health and kill us, is no good. Ill will toward others, even people we know are our enemies and have determined to do battle with, even then, ill will toward those people is no good. It is painful to us, and it is not effective. It’s not sustainable. And we know this, so we are not fooled by the various dumb thoughts that come into our mind and heart. When we get angry, we realize that these kinds of thoughts come in anger. They are not to be validated. They are not to be believed. We know what they are. We know how to take ourselves in hand, as we would take our child in hand and calm down the child who is throwing a fit.

Just in case we don’t yet know how to do this for ourselves, we’re in luck, because we have good dharma friends, who can help us, and who can remind us. Sometimes we have to depend on our friends, and we know to go to them and talk to them. They will remind us, and we think, That’s right. You’re right. I forgot. Thank you for reminding me. Sometimes we ourselves are the good dharma friends, who help others remember this, even though we have to admit that we ourselves forget it once in awhile. But it helps to remind others. It helps us to remember ourselves. It helps to keep us humble.

Of all the antidotes to the five hindrances that the Buddha provided throughout the course of his teaching, the one that he said is the most important in dealing with all the five hindrances is having good dharma friends. This is something that we don’t think of. But this is the most important thing, having good dharma friends, and good dharma conversation. In other words, friends we can count on to remind us of what we intend and forget. Very, very important.

There is a famous little detail in the story of the Buddha’s awakening, just as he is about to sit under the Bodhi tree, not knowing what is going to happen. He has been working on this project quite awhile, and he doesn’t know if it is going to work. This is the last stand, to sit under the tree. So someone offers him food, and he throws the empty bowl into the stream. He says, If the bowl floats downstream, I don’t think it is going to work. But if the bowl floats upstream, against the current, I am sure that I will be awakened. So he throws the bowl on the water, and it floats upstream. So he sits down with confidence.

On the one hand, as we know, practice is very natural to the best impulses in our hearts. We don’t have to impose practice on ourselves. There is something in our hearts that understands it already, and that wants to go that way. That is true of us, and true of everyone. But on the other hand, dharma practice is going against the current. Although these days there are so many people who understand the virtue of some spiritual practice, it does feel that the world at large is somehow swimming in the opposite direction, doesn’t it? Dharma practice does feel like swimming upstream sometimes.

Unwise messages and bad influences are easy to find. They are everywhere. So, all the more reason why we need our good dharma friends, our good, dharma conversation, to keep us encouraged. We need the support of our sanghas at home, and we realize that when we support the sangha, it is supporting us. So we are showing up not just because we get some good out of being there that evening, but it is a bigger question than that. It’s very, very important, because no person can practice alone. No person has ever practiced alone. No-one can do it. It’s impossible. We need one another.

So I hope all of this makes sense to you. It’s very reasonable, after all, isn’t it? I think that we all know that it’s true, but, of course, this is just the beginning. We have to find out this truth for ourselves, at the depth of our experience and in the intimacy of our living. We have to see it again and again and again, from many, many angles – on the cushion and off the cushion.

I often say that Zen practice is not retreat practice. It is not about doing sesshins. It is about everyday life. But we won’t be able to do everyday life practice effectively without the experience of intense meditation practice, as we are doing this week. So this is an important week for all of us. For those of us who are new to this, it is an important week to discover within ourselves these true things. For those of us who have been doing it awhile, it is an important week to rediscover this truth, to see it again and again, from many angles, repeatedly, and to bring it deeper into our hearts and to strengthen our commitment to it and our training in it. There is literally no limit to how we can understand this truth at a deeper and deeper level. It opens out like a jewel, and it shines in all directions, beautifully, as time goes on.

edz

What is Zen – Dharma Heart November 5, 2011

Chris Fortin speaks on “What is Zen? to the Montara Mountain Zendo group.

"What is Zen?"

~ talk by Chris Fortin at Montara Mountain Zendo, November 5, 2011

 

Hi everybody! What a nice day to sit! Kind of cozy and warm. A great lunch.

Brad and Barbara asked me to talk about the topic, "What is Zen?" When they asked me, it made me laugh! It is sort of like saying, "What is your heart?" or "What is the sun and the moon and the stars?" or "What is that amazing soup that we had today?" I suppose the good news is that you can come in any door you want, and just start where you are, and figure out what happens next.

The first story I wanted to tell you was something that I experienced last week. I work in Santa Rosa. If you have been there, it is a nice, safe little town. I was out on my lunch hour, and the streets were kind of full. I crossed a busy intersection, and I saw that a man had stepped into the intersection in front of the moving cars.

It wasn't what I expected – maybe in a bigger city, but in little Santa Rosa? He was defiantly and completely exposed and vulnerably throwing himself into the stream of traffic. Almost before I knew it, my body had turned around, and I was standing on the corner calling to him to come out of the street. He came out of the street, and at that point my brain was catching up with me, and I could hear the voice in my head saying, "Uh, oh, what have you done now?" because clearly I had made contact with this person who was in a lot of pain, and who was clutching a 7-up bottle to himself with a clear liquid in it, that probably wasn't 7-up.

So energetically we moved away from the street. He said, "I'm Steve. What's your name?" I said, "I'm Chris." Throughout our exchange, he was putting his hand out. I felt what he wanted was human contact. He made contact with his eyes, even though he was clearly quite drunk, and in his eyes there was enormous pain and sadness.

I said to him, "Why don't you stay over here out of the street? It is safer over here." He looked me dead in the eye and said, "Is there any place that is safe?" I said, "No, there is no place that's safe." It felt like that's where he was. He said "Thank you for not lying to me." And then he said, "You don't know what happened to me."

It was a simple question, but Steve was also asking a big question that came out in that moment. His experience was that there was no place whole. His life was shattered. The bottom of the bucket had dropped out of Steve's life.

I remember when I first started practicing Buddhism in my twenties. I went to Green Gulch and Zen Center. One of the things that I loved about Buddhism is that are four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth is, "There is suffering." Not that life is suffering, not that life is a bummer. This isn't nihilism, but just the acknowledgement that there is suffering in being a human being. I felt the same way that Steve must have felt in that moment. "Oh, somebody is willing to meet me heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye, and just acknowledge what I have known since a child. Of course there is suffering."

Although the Buddha said that fundamentally sickness, aging, and death are a cause of suffering, there is something about having a human body and being born into a human life that is extraordinarily beautiful and wondrous. In fact, we are told in Buddhism that it is a rare and precious gift to be given a human body, because we can wake up in this body, and we can ask these questions.

So the first Nobel Truth that there is suffering is where Steve and I met in that moment. The second Noble Truth is there is a cause of suffering. In the simplest way, the cause of suffering, you could say, is that we are basically always fighting and struggling with life as it is. If it is something we want, we want to hold onto it, and we are afraid somebody is going to take it away from us. If it is something we don't want, we are pushing it away. There is a kind of push-pull, with maybe a few moments of presence and rest and acceptance. So the cause of suffering is that we have resistance to life as it is each moment.

The third Noble Truth is that there is a way out of suffering. There is a way to be free in this lifetime, and it is actually what we are all here for, to wake up and become who we truly are. To answer Steve's question "Is there any place that's safe?" is to know that everything is whole and complete in each moment – even when it doesn't look that way, and it doesn't feel that way. There is another ground that we can sit down in, that is here all the time.

The fourth Noble Truth is there is a way to live this. There is a way to actualize it. There is a way to bring alive this wholeness that is inherent in our very nature. To go a step further, our very nature is the nature of everything, which is, to give a name to it, love or goodness or kindness. In some way, this was woven into Steve's and my encounter – brief, but a moment of meeting there.

This is a Zen story, and like many stories, is a story about a woman, Chiyono. She was the first woman in Japan whose enlightenment was certified by a Zen teacher, and who founded the first Zen nunnery in Japan. Her Buddhist name was Muchaku. There are two versions of this story. In one she is a noble woman, and in the other, she is a humble servant. In the version that I will read first, she was a woman of a high ranking family who married and had one daughter. In 1277, when she was thirty-four, her husband died, and she couldn't get over the grief. So she became a nun and trained under Zen master Bukko.

Here is the first part of the story:

Muchaku the nun came to Zen master Bukko, and said, "What is Zen?"

I was really happy to find this koan! Off the hook! (Laughter)

The teacher said, "The heart of the one who asks is Zen. It is not to be got from the words of another."

So Steve asked a question, and it was his heart asking, deeply, "Is there some place safe? Is there some place whole?" I think that each one of our hearts asks these questions, these deep questions that may be part of what you wrote about today in Barbara's question, "How do we want to live?" That deep part of us wants to understand life and living and how to be here. How do we manifest that which our heart does know? How do we make sense out of all of this?

Zen master Bukko's response was, "The heart of the one who asks is Zen. It is not to be got from the words of another." People can tell you things, and people can really help each other. We can read sutras in Buddhism, and we can read parables and stories from the Bible. They all help, but fundamentally it has to be something that becomes your own experience. It can happen in a moment or in a meeting. You just never know when or where. Suddenly something in your heart opens. There is the experience of knowing something that you have always known.

In the second version of the story she is a servant in a Zen convent.

One of the nuns in the convent was an elderly woman, an elderly nun, who had come to rest in her deeply compassionate nature. One day Chiyono approached her and said, "I'm of humble birth. I can't read or write, and I must work all the time. If I set an intention, is it possible that I too might attain the Way of the Buddha, even though I have no skills?"

Again, a question. Chiyono is asking, "I'm not smart, I'm not clever, but if I set an intention, if I stay with this deep question in my heart, can I too wake up and know Buddha's Way?

The elderly nun answered her [meeting her fully and completely in that moment] and says, "This is wonderful, my dear! In fact, what is there to attain? Listen carefully. The teachers of the past have said that people are complete as they are, whole as they are. Each one is perfected. Not even the width of one eyebrow hair separates them from this perfection. In Buddhism, there is no distinction between a man and a woman, a lay person, and a renunciant. There is also no separation between noble and humble, between old and young."

Of course there are men and women; and of course there are old and young; and of course there are lay people and monastics. But in the most fundamental level – whatever it is – there is no separation. We are all of the same part. We are all already fully and completely whole and perfect. And we get this amazing human body heart mind – to wake up and to know this!

Then she says:

There is only this. Each person must hold fast to his or her aspiration. Each person must hold fast to the aspiration [which actually is the root word of breath], the deep breathing of the heart, the deepest heart's desire, and proceed along the way of the bodhisattva.

In Buddhism the bodhisattva path is manifesting the deepest heart's innate and intuitive wisdom that we are of the same heart. It is dedicating your life to the benefit of all beings.

There is no higher way than this. Just hold fast, return over and over to the call of your heart, the one heart of the world. This is the way. This is the path.

If you know your heart-mind, if you know this, what teachings about the scriptures do you need? What words do you need? The teachings of the sutras are like a finger pointing to the moon. If one looks directly toward the moon, there is no need for a finger. In entering the Way, we rely on our bodies.

I love this part. It brings it right here! This is it. Zen and zazen is a body practice. You sit down on a particular place on the earth, in a particular moment, in a particular body, in the midst of happy, sad, painful – just sit down right here in this body. This is actually a physical path – just simple breath and posture.

Then she said:

Chiyono received these teachings with faith and happiness.

It's like some part of her just went "Wow! This is the truth!" Zen is a practice of faith, and it is a practice of devotion. Not faith in something else, but just a deep faith in the resonance of your own heart. We just keep following it. You just sit down in a body and trust. It opens and opens way beyond anything you could figure out.

Chiyono said:

With this practice as my companion, I have only to go about my daily life, practicing whole-heartedly day and night.

She got it. It's that simple. It's really that simple. It's not something over there. It is completely ordinary. It is completely every day, and it completely happens on the cushion, and it happens everywhere, each moment. Going home taking care of your kids. Being at work. Taking care of your car. Whatever you are doing, we bring this beautiful spirit of whole-heartedness and presence and meeting to ourselves and to everyone.

So the final part of this story:

In the eighth lunar month of the following year, the full moon was shining. Chiyono went to draw some water from the well. The bottom of her old bucket, held together by bamboo strips, suddenly gave way, and the bottom fell out of the bucket. At that moment, she was set free, and in commemoration, she wrote this poem:

In this way and that

I tried to save the old pail,

since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break,

until at last, the bottom fell out.

No more water in the pail,

no more moon in the water.

The bottom drops out at last. No more moon, no more water, no more separation, no more ideas and thoughts. Suddenly she was free. Just Chiyono in that moment, right there at the well.

I thought that if we take this story, and turn it with the question, "What is Zen?" – I can't usually do the points, one, two, three, four, but l will try – and let's see what happens.

First: whole-hearted question. What is the deepest question of your heart? How do you want to live?

Then being open to intimate meeting. Each moment is intimate meeting. Actually the whole world is responding to your question all the time. It is mirror of the deepest heart question that we all have. What we realize in that meeting of each moment, and practicing with the deep-hearted question, is that we are not outside of some truth that is someplace over there. It is everywhere, and it beyond discriminations. It doesn't matter what you are, or what you think that you are, or what you think your problems are, or what you have figured out. The whole world is a manifestation of love. We each are called to take responsibility to manifest that.

Hold fast. Follow your deepest heart's question. Listen deeply. Everything is perfect and complete, beyond what we can see and know. I do not say that glibly or without the awareness that Steve was suffering, and that there are huge amounts of suffering. But if we can breathe in and out with each moment, and breathe in and out with and through this deep heart body mind, the bottom of the bucket of our ideas of limited conception will fall away. And the world opens and opens and opens. What is right there at the center is kindness and compassion.

We sit down; we return to silence; we align our bodies and hearts and minds; we don't turn away; we don't hold back. The body awakens itself to what it has always known and to what it already is and everything is. It is ordinary. It is every day. It is not something special or holy. It is right here. Whole-hearted living forever.

In the end, I think we become what we have always been, a true human being. We remember our humanity and our place in things. We get to practice kindness, because kindness is practicing us.

To close, here is a quote from the Dalai Lama: "Our prime purpose in this life is to help others, and if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them." We are human, and we will hurt others. We try not to hurt, and we use whatever our experiences are to wake up. To soften our hearts over and over and over.

Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum

edz

Forgiveness – Green Gulch October 2011

Norman gives the Dharma talk at Green Gulch Zen Center on Forgiveness. This is part of the 2011 Everyday Zen practice period and there is a supplement to this talk at the Practice Period meeting the same day entitled “Practice Period Meeting 2011”.

Forgiveness – Green Gulch October 2011

By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | October 2, 2011

Abridged and edited by Barbara Byrum

I think that most Western people who come with an interest to practice Zen, or any other kind of Buddhist practice, come because they are burned out on sin and guilt and confession. We have his feeling that we have somehow caught in the wind, or gotten more directly from our parents or our churches or synagogues, that somehow we have done something wrong. We are not even sure what. Sometimes we do know what, but sometimes we're not sure. So we have burned out on these bad feelings. We think this is a Christian or Jewish obsession, and we can escape from it by going to Buddhism.

It seems like we don't find all that in Buddhism. But, actually, you do. This great inspiring conception that Buddhism has of liberation, of awakening, of freedom, might sound like an escape from all that, but it isn't really an escape into some kind of immunity or irresponsibility or freedom from right and wrong. That is not the freedom that liberation promises. In fact, in all schools of Buddhism, Zen included, liberation depends on purity of heart. Taking precepts and keeping precepts is a basic part of the practice in all the schools of Buddhism, as is confession and repentance and remorse and forgiveness.

In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other theistic religions, morality is ordained by God. In other words, morality comes from a source greater than ourselves. It comes from something more than our self-interest or our understanding. But this is also true in Buddhism, even though Buddhism does not have an idea of God or a Supreme Being. Buddhism does have the Triple Treasure at its center – the Buddha, dharma, and sangha.

The Triple Treasure in Zen and Mahayana Buddhist understanding is identical to cause and effect – to karma. Karma is a force, a dynamic, which is greater than ourselves and larger than our understanding or our interests. Having deep faith in karma, deep faith in cause and effect, deep faith in the Triple Treasure, is actually just as important in Buddhist practice as having deep faith in God in theistic practices. Now, to be sure, you can certainly begin Buddhist practice without this faith, and most of us in the West who are not born into a Buddhist understanding or faith do begin this way, without having that faith in the beginning. We can effectively practice meditation for a long time without that faith. But eventually, if you continue your practice, and you pay close attention to what is going on, and you have honest observation of your own heart and mind, this practice will cast a soft but persistent light on your heart.

You do develop this faith, whatever language you use for it, because your direct experience will show you that when you do say or think something harmful or hurtful, your heart gets twisted and occluded. It's painful. When you behave like that in thought, word, or deed, the liberation that you are seeking becomes more distant from you. Instead of liberation, you feel pain, inner distortion, stubbornness, clinging, and unhappiness. And you notice that when you do the opposite, when your speech, deeds, and thoughts have their source in compassion, loving-kindness, and concern for others, then you feel good, you feel happy. You feel like liberation is right there.

So freedom in dharma doesn't mean being free of moral constraint. It turns out that freedom exactly is morality. To live in a relaxed and happy manner, free and easy, it turns out, is to live in goodness and kindness.

Your meditation cushion will show you that your conduct is probably not as good as you thought it was. Sitting and breathing steadily over time, it becomes more difficult to be dishonest with yourself, much more difficult to believe in the various self-defensive rationalizations and self-serving perspectives that we all have, and that we usually deny that we have.

A meditation practice has the effect of making us pretty humble and realistic about ourselves and about one another. But also, I hope, at the same time, exactly because of this, it makes us a lot more forgiving of ourselves and of others, because human beings are human beings, and we will always be human beings, which means imperfect beings, who can imagine and long for perfection.

As long as we are alive, we need to practice forgiveness. We need to forgive ourselves, we need to forgive others, we need to forgive cause and effect, and we need to forgive the world for being what it is and not what we would like it to be.

This is not so easy, forgiving ourselves. I have thought about this a lot, and I have come to the conclusion that not only is it not easy to forgive ourselves, it's actually impossible. When it comes to ourselves, I think that we are all quite unforgiving.

It seems to me that there is a built-in suffering of self. This is something that Buddha noticed right at the beginning of his life of practice. No matter how much you protect and justify the self, it never quite works. The self always comes out suffering in the end, because the isolated, self-protected self is inherently lonely and desperate.

So on a profound level, we have to forgive ourselves for being ourselves; and since this is completely impossible, we have to rely on others to forgive us for being ourselves. You can go and offer incense to the Buddha and confess to the Buddha, "Please, Buddha, forgive me." The Buddha will always forgive you, because that is the Buddha's practice. It is just the same in our great theistic religions. God forgives you, because God is inherently forgiving. Forgiven by God, you can then forgive yourself.

Now forgiving yourself is not quite the same thing as excusing yourself. You can, by yourself, excuse yourself. You can say, "Well, yes I did this, but it is not so bad after all. It's okay." But to really forgive yourself, which is to say to be profoundly forgiven, is to know that I am not so good after all, and I will never stop addressing that imperfection in my life, but with the help of others, I can do it, and I can be happy anyway, every minute.

So a certain amount of bad feeling or remorse is necessary in this process. If we hurt someone else, we can't just go up to them and say, "Forgive me so that I can feel better." We have to suffer some remorse for what we have done, and when we approach the other person with the weight of that remorse on our shoulders, and with the understanding that we can't expect them to forgive us, and that is honest and real, then maybe the person can forgive us. If they don't forgive us, we can still cherish the remorse itself, because it makes us stronger and deeper human beings. It helps keep us straightened out and, after awhile, we appreciate it as a kind of treasure.

I have some things that I did long, long ago, and I still feel painful remorse for these things. I don't expect that I am going to get over this. Probably when I am dying, I will be thinking about these things, if I can still think straight. But I don't mind, because these are the deeds, and these are the feelings, that connect me with others and connect me with an essential part of myself. And I think that is a good thing. It took me awhile to come to this feeling about it, but that's how I feel now.

So it is hard to forgive yourself. Also not so easy to forgive someone else when they have hurt you. Everybody in this room has been hurt. If you are human, it's normal to have been hurt deeply. We are living in a world in which everyone is running around having been deeply hurt. They are confused by that and acting out of that wound. It is this scar in the human heart that is the reason why, whenever you find a human community from any time, you always find some form of religious life. And religious life, once it develops and articulates itself, always has some form of forgiveness practice. It is always part of any religious culture.

The opposite of forgiveness is resentment. Resentment means to re-feel – to feel again and again and again and again. So someone hurts us, and naturally we feel the pain, but then long after the event, we feel it again and again and again, and that is resentment. Sometimes we are aware that we feel this resentment, and sometimes we don't even know that we are feeling it. Sometimes the hurt and the subsequent resentment goes deep underground and blends into our general attitude toward life, so without even realizing it, we become generally resentful, easily offended, suspicious, disappointed people, constantly expecting things not to work out. When it turns out that they don't work out, or sometimes even when they do work out, we continue to feel this underground resentment.

It is possible that most people are like this almost all the time. In this case, forgiveness goes beyond, "I forgive you for what you did to me last week." It is much deeper than that. Maybe the person who originally hurt us is long gone from our lives, but the resentment is still in our hearts, so forgiveness is something that we need to do for ourselves. It actually doesn't have to do with the other person so much. It is really something that we need to do for ourselves, to free ourselves, to release our heart from the hurt that is making us so hard-hearted and preventing us from loving.

So liberation is becoming free of this deep habit of heart and mind, so that our heart can be open and soft instead of hard. We can have a general feeling of gratitude and appreciation even if things don't work out.

When you think about it in a completely dispassionate way, think about life, what a fantastic thing it is to be alive in this world! It's a beautiful world. The sun shines. What could be better? The trees, sky. We couldn't have designed this so well. It is just fantastic. All these little details that are so bright and pure and beautiful.

Of course, there are problems, and things happen that we don't like, but at least we are alive to feel all that. That in itself is a fantastic thing, that we could feel joy and sorrow. We could feel happiness and sadness. We could feel love, and we could feel alone. This is a fantastic thing, that if any one of us thought about it reasonably, we would be celebrating every minute. That we could smell, that we could see, that we could hear.

The alternative to this – that we are not here; that we're not alive; that we don't hear and see and feel and think and experience anything – is not that great. Right? The alternative? In fact, it is exactly nothing. The alternative to this is nothing. So, in other words, instead of nothing, we have something. This incredible something.

So how come we are not falling all over ourselves constantly with gratitude and delight and joy? Because it would really make sense that we would feel this way. But usually we don't feel this way. It is very unusual. To have a day where we say, "I am so happy to be alive today, I can't believe it!" We might have experienced that, but not every day. I don't think once a week, even. I don't think once a month. Maybe once a year, but maybe decades have gone by, and you haven't had a day like that. But why wouldn't you feel that way every single day?

So we have to practice forgiveness, because the reason that we don't feel like that when it makes sense that we would, is because our hearts have been occluded, wounded, hardened, and scarred in all kinds of ways.

The antidote to our occluded, scarred hearts is forgiveness. It starts locally with forgiving the person or persons who have hurt us, and then we go beyond the local to the universal. When we profoundly practice forgiveness, we will have a feeling of gratitude for our life, whatever it is today. That is liberation, being happy and grateful for our life. Resentment is replaced by gratitude, and that is the fruit of the religious life, a life of gratitude and appreciation for this day, for this life.