“Consider our life as it is with its crying and its laughing. There is in each case a trace left; of crying it is a trace of the crying, and of laughing the trace of that laughter. Our living leaves these traces. What I emphasize always is that even when it is laughter, we should laugh with a truly empty heart.”
— Zen Abbott Obora
As human beings, we all struggle to come to terms with who we are and how to move through our life with some kind of ease. No matter what our spiritual practice or faith, we find our life includes both tears and laughter. We all have known moments of peace and clarity, but these moments seem disappointingly brief in the context of our daily cares and responsibilities. We long for some release from the cycle of this human drama.
Many of us look for release through diversion. We do things that make us feel good – we go for walks in the woods, we throw ourselves into our work, we watch TV, we drink beer, we spend time with friends. Or we seek release through self-improvement. We read wisdom books, we meditate, we resolve to be more centered. These activities may offer some momentary or even more lasting relief. But none of them release us from being human.
We always find ourselves back in this world of ten thousand joys and sorrows. Daily life is the place we start from and return to. Success, power, and status come and go: they do not save us from loneliness, failure, loss, sickness and, ultimately, death. Even great spiritual realization does not save us from the ups and downs of our lives. No matter how deep and glorious, the experience of realization is cannot be held. Today’s enlightenment becomes tomorrow’s delusion – just another idea. Trying to hold onto it or recreate what we had only brings suffering.
But the primary way we try to navigate our way through the ups and downs of our life is through telling stories to ourselves about who we are and what is happening. Through these stories we make connections between events, allowing us to live in a predictable world. This capacity to make meaning and see causal connections is an essential and valuable human trait. Our shared stories allow us to effectively move through the world with other human beings – to pay our bills and plan our vacations.
On the individual level, these stories we are constantly creating are a kind of ongoing mental autobiography – moment-to-moment description and analysis of our lives. All our stories, whatever the content, share a common structure of ‘me’ as subject interacting with everything that is ‘not me’ – the world and other people and situations I encounter. We conceive ourselves as distinct agents acting within the larger external context of the world around us. Sometimes we get what we want and sometimes we don’t, but our world is clearly divided into what is ‘out there’ and what is ‘in here’ – what is ‘the world’ and what is ‘me.’
From the point of view of our ordinary mind, this dualistic story of inside and outside – of me and the world – of subject and object – appears to be so obvious that we don’t even question it. Sometimes we think we are doing quite well and other times we are miserable, but we are very clear that we are someone acting in some context. But when we look closely at our actual experience of being alive, this ‘self’ that is the central character in all our stories is actually very difficult to find.
These stories we construct are tools for living in the world and are only problematic when we mistake them for reality. What we call external reality and what appears to be something outside of us, is in fact something we participate in creating. But our part in creating this reality is invisible to us.
We participate in creating the world through the meaning and stories we tell ourselves about events that happen. We only know the world as it is filtered through our sense apparatus and through the concepts we have learned over time. A hundred dollar bill has no meaning outside the shared stories we have of what it is. A dog doesn’t go around saying: “I’m a dog.” It just barks and wants to be fed. The tree has no idea of spring, summer, fall and winter. Buds turn to green leaves. Green leaves turn color and drop to the ground. The patterns we see and the names we give are all extra.
Physicist and philosopher David Bohm put it this way: “The mind creates the world and then says ‘I didn’t do it.’” We imagine that the world exists independently of us because our part in the creation remains hidden from our awareness. But the world is not something ‘out there’ – it is something we participate in creating. The Buddha called this phenomena ‘dependent co-arising.’ The self and the world create each other.
The passage at the beginning of this essay comes from a brief commentary on the classic Zen text “The Heart Sutra,” written by an obscure 20th century Soto Zen priest, Abbot Obora. He refers to this act of creating stories as the ‘trace’ that keeps us from living our life fully. The ‘trace’ is our story of our ‘self’ – the imaginary one who is experiencing our life. We experience the weather of the day – the sun, the clouds, the wind, or the rain – then, almost immediately, we add concepts and opinions about the weather: “It’s sunny and I like it.” “It’s cloudy and I wish it were different.” This labeling and this evaluation is the trace that we carry with us. Abbot Obora points out that these ‘traces’ of our opinion are extra and are what keeps us separated from the true richness of our life.
From the story of my self living in a world that is essentially separate from me, I am constantly working to create the external conditions I think will allow me to achieve the inner peace and happiness I seek. But whatever I create, whatever I buy, whatever new relationship I enter – only satisfies me for a short time. Then my feelings change – the new wall sized flat screen TV no longer excites me, my new partner starts doing things that annoy me, my boss get transferred and my great job becomes drudgery. Once again I am disappointed and then have to work all the harder to create new circumstances that will make me happy.
The way out of this dilemma is not finding some inner peace that is separate from the ups and downs, but rather by letting ourselves fully experience each moment. This is laughing and crying with an empty heart. An empty heart is not a heart that is void or cold, but a heart that is open to what is here in this moment. It is empty of the idea of how things should be and is therefore able to receive the vividness of the moment.
Rather than trying to protect ourselves or control our emotions, we move toward giving ourselves fully to whatever situation presents itself. Rather than holding back and playing the angles for our maximum benefit, we meet the circumstances of our life as they are – making our home in this moment. We enter the situation not for what it can give to us but rather simply to be present with what is so. We open our heart to the circumstance we encounter – the experience of the moment and whether it is the tears or the laughter, we allow it to penetrate us.
Whatever we hold onto, whether in our tears or our laughter, is what keeps us stuck. I have heard of an ingeniously simple monkey trap used in India that operates on this principle. The trap is just a woven basket anchored to a tree. The basket has only one small opening, just big enough for a monkey’s hand to squeeze through. Inside the trap is a ripe and juicy banana. A monkey wanders by, reaches in, and grabs the banana. So far, so good. But the opening is not large enough for the monkey to hold onto the banana and remove its hand. Apparently the monkey will stay stuck, holding onto the banana, rather than get free from the trap.
So we humans are stuck by what we try to defend. If I hold onto the story of myself as a calm and centered person, then I will resist any and all challenges to this image of myself. I will go to all kinds of lengths to deny the parts of me and my experience that do not match this story. I will begin to hide things from others and from myself. The story is the trap and rather than be free to be who we are, we remain stuck like the monkey.
Or if we see ourselves as fundamentally not good enough, we will defend this ‘not good enough’ story against all comers. All successes get discounted and any criticism is taken to heart. ‘Not good enough’ becomes our identity and rather than grow and learn, we simply use it as a lens to interpret whatever comes our way. We are amazingly and touchingly committed to whatever opinion we have of ourselves. Whether we think we are competent or incompetent, have high or low self-esteem makes little difference. Whatever story we have about who we are is the trace that keeps us from being with the present aliveness of our life.
The empty heart is a heart that is open to the world, a great and loving heart that does not tell stories – a heart willing to experience the world as it truly is rather than as we wish it were. To live from this place requires great courage and determination, because the tears we encounter in our lives are not make-believe tears. They are not someone else’s tears. They are the pain of our own hearts breaking. Someone we love is diagnosed with cancer. We don’t get the promotion we think we deserve. We act in ways that betray what we love most.
Laughing and crying with an empty heart requires not getting stuck in our ideas of the moment. It’s not that we have to stop our thoughts and opinions. Our brains seem to secrete thoughts and stories and trying to stop them simply strengthens our attachment to them. Rather than trying not to have opinions, we allow all our stories to come and go – not stopping them and not getting seduced into following them. We turn our attention, again and again to just the matter at hand.
We are called to a fuller engagement with our lives – to allow ourselves to fully experience the tears and the laughter. The empty heart is the heart that is open to the possibility of each moment and each encounter. Giving up the trace of our self-referential stories, we encounter our life fully in every situation. We laugh and we cry fully, without holding back, and then we move on to the next moment. In this manner we find release in each moment, regardless of the circumstances. We manifest our true love in whatever form is called for and let it go fully to pass on to whatever is next.
David Rynick is leading a workshop Feb 1-3. Click for more details.
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