Joko Beck--part 2

 Continuing from the previous blog.  

When the Joko book was read aloud, its practice seemed to lack any heart or emotional connection.  I mean, sure its good to learn piano, but if you are so focused on technique and you can't appreciate the music, what good is it?  And when I used to go to sesshins at the Champaign Zen center, I remember looking around and seeing how lifeless the place was--everybody acting like mindless automatons.  It hurt.  And when I helped the teacher pack his possessions and saw how frightfully anal he was, it hurt.  

I'm not saying there isn't value to the process.  But the connection to something has to be there. That's what I find so enlivening about feeling connections with entities or spirits or whatever.  I'm sure this exists in zen at some level, and its all good, every practice, but this is what I must say now.

And last night I had a dream.  I was outside, I think near a river with a group of people.  And I was completely enmeshed with another woman--much younger woman.  Indeed, I think I was also much younger than I am now.   It wasn't really sexual, but it was comforting.   We were making out, and in doing so we were insulated from the activities around us.  Eventually we were traveling on a train, and I knew we didn't have tickets so we when into a storage space, still making out the whole time. Now that is a practice I can get into, making out with life.    lol

Joko Beck and Robert Anton Wilson

 So at the Zen Group yesterday they read one of the passages from Charlotte Joko Beck's work and I felt it viscerally.  It hurt.  It was suffocating.  But I'm sure that wasn't her intent.  And perhaps if she was relating Zen practice conversationally to me it might have had a different effect than the words that seemed to be nothing but rigid commands.  In the book, she related her zen practice to her childhood piano lessons, not really understanding the scales but necessary in the long run.  But it was more a formulaic series of commands that one "must" do to achieve "enlightenment" or whatever.  And it hurt.  It was interesting that my therapist friend L. felt the same way.  The rest of the room was still in the follower mode to Joko's lead.  In the conversation that followed, I related my experience and how it might be easier to make friends with something than to control it.  Especially when you are trying to control your mind through rigid zen practice.  Of course, most of them were then going to the Capital protests later in the day.   The best way to fight control is a different type of control, right?  lol

Then later in the day I was reading Robert Anton Wilson.  It was a delight.  So much more fun than Joko.  And especially his elucidation about general semantics and how he tries to avoid the word "is" in his writing.  Zen is this or that.  You should do this or that because that is what zen "is". 

I think what he was pointing to was  almost like explaining something in the negative.  Or to have a relationship with it instead of defining it.  For example, in quantum physics, matter "is" not a wave or a particle.  Sometimes it acts like a wave, and sometimes a particle. It exists as part of a relationship, not a concrete "this" or "that"  Then there was the synchronistic discussion in Wilson of the Zen koan where the Zen master is asked what is the most valuable thing (he could have asked was is the most valuable zen practice) and the master replied, "The head of a dead cat."  Again, there "is" not the most or the best this or that. Its a relationship, and open ended answer, an invitation to the journey to connect with the mystery of the cat head.  

Of course, the real mystery, and the real thing that is inviting me into "friendship" is all the pain I have been feeling in my legs and calves, and why I am sensitive to Joko's words to begin with.  I have an inner dictator I am rebelling against, I fear:-).