Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

Norman Fischer, a former Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, has emphasized our resistance to leaving everything alone, and the temptation to turn zazen into a technique: “The problem is that we actually are incapable of seeing zazen as useless because our minds cannot accept the fundamental genuineness, the alrightness of our lives. We are act

Every insight is partial, requires long years of integration into our lives, and is liable itself to be incorporated into our narcissistic fantasies of specialness or into one or another of our secret practices.

We practice leaving ourselves alone and just being this moment. Fully being in the moment entails, psychologically, re-owning those parts of ourselves that we’ve split-off or dissociated from and, spiritually, reconnecting with the whole of life.

The Skeptics were particularly concerned with the sort of suffering that arises from being entangled in beliefs and judgments. Their technique was to engage any particular belief in a kind of cross-examination, and they practiced showing that, whatever reasons we might have for holding on to a particular belief, there were equally plausible and wei

when we are starting out, we’re experiencing them in the context of an essentially self-centered practice—a practice pre-occupied with the quality or feel of our own moment-to-moment experience. At this stage, we may feel that our secret practice is actually working and that we’re beginning to get from practice all the things we came to it to find.

Everybody knows it, but almost everybody is deluded into thinking there’s something more to learn, something hidden and esoteric that is revealed only to a special few. Only after years of searching do we find that there’s nothing more to find. Will we be relieved or disappointed? What is there to gain from practice, after all? We realize that our

Our discomfort with our mind as it is, is displayed to us by the kinds of thoughts I call “meta-thoughts.” These are our thoughts about our thoughts. These take the form of judgments or comments on the whole process. These are the “how am I doing?” or “am I doing this right?” thoughts. When we label our ordinary thoughts about lunch or planning or

assimilate meditation into one or another self-centered project. With a Zen of “no gain,” we step outside of our usual realm of questions and answers, problems and solutions, off the endless treadmill of self-improvement and instead experience the completeness of our life as it already is.

So our practice of just sitting is designed to bring us back, over and over, to where we already are, rather than helping us get somewhere we imagine we ought to be going. But it can take a long time to recognize that practice is the donkey we’ve been riding on all along.

As an analyst, I know that therapy can help solve problems, but it can also have the unintended consequence of perpetuating a person’s idea that there is something basically wrong with him