good morning as you may know I'm a psychoanalyst and teacher visiting here from New York City and the center I teach in comes in a different lineage and has very different forms So I'm just getting used to some of the ways you do things here as well. Is the mic on? Can you hear me? Yes? How does this work? Can anybody hear me? Is that better? Yes? Okay. All right. A whole series of events led me to be here today, and sometimes we speak of mysterious karmic connections that bring about some event or another.

[01:20]

But in this case, I think it was pretty clear that the reason I'm here was the vicissitudes of the New York State real estate market. Things there are very expensive, and when we established our center in Manhattan, we needed help paying the rent. And a small affiliate of San Francisco Zen Center was looking for a place to sit. So we merged the two groups and sat under the same roof for a few years. And as a result, there was a fair amount of dialogue between the two groups. And in particular, we had the pleasure of host of Michael Wenger and Norman Fisher, Blanche Hartman, Nick Darlene Cohn came to one of the Sashins. And so we got these two different groups together from different liturgies to listen to talks by teachers coming from somewhat different places.

[02:27]

I'm a student of Charlotte Joko Beck, and as I'll talk about a little bit here, it was a very, it's a mixed lineage with both Rinzai and Soto Elements. And getting together with the teachers from San Francisco in some ways helped return me to my Soto roots, so to speak. And I think always in dialogue, when you're talking to someone about your practice, when these differences help you really clarify what you think is essential in your way of doing things. And I think that as I thought more about what was essential in practice, and particularly what was essentially soto about practice, I thought the main core idea was that zazen is not a means to an end.

[03:30]

And that as we sit, we sit to fully express who we are, not to become something else or transform ourselves into something else. And that at every stage of our practice, from the first day onward, we're fully expressing who we are. In the same way that we think that You know, when you're 20 years old, you want to be 20 years old. It's not just, well, I'm on the way to being 40, right? When you're 40, you've got to be 40. You're not, well, I'm on my way to being a perfect 80-year-old, right? So at every step of the way, we are who we are, and we want to fully occupy the experience of that without seeing it merely as a stepping stone to something else or as an incomplete version of where we're going to be someday, right?

[04:35]

And one of the things that I tried to do in terms of beginner's instructions for students to convey some of that feeling was to say that when we sit down and face the wall, it's as if we sit down and face a mirror. our face automatically appears. We don't have to do any of the work. The mirror has done the whole job for us, right? There's our face. And that's sort of the good news and the bad news, you see. It shows us immediately who and what we are. It just displays it completely. The hard part is really looking and not flinching. It can be very uncomfortable sometimes to look in that mirror, particularly the mirror of our minds, and see everything that's there. And so I think inevitably we start using that mirror as a touch-up mirror. We want to start fixing and tinkering with our image.

[05:43]

And so we don't know how to really sit still and just look in that mirror. We think... almost inevitably that we're going to change or fix something about ourselves and our practice. There is, I guess, an old, probably apocryphal story that Michelangelo was asked, how do you manage to carve the beautiful figure of David from that rough block of marvel? And he said, well, I just take the stone and I cut away everything that doesn't look like David. And I think that in some way we imagine practice is going to be like that. We're going to start with something rough and unfinished and we're going to cut away all the parts that we don't like and we're going to be left with something beautiful.

[06:45]

The problem is what to do with all the rubble and dust. you know, on the floor after the carpet, right? Because that unfortunately stays with us. And who we are as much as all of that as the statue we're trying to make. Now, what I'm going to do this morning is, I'm afraid, read you something a little bit of a formal lecture. what I tried to do was edit some parts of a book I just wrote on ending the pursuit of happiness and put them together for you here. And because I'm a psychoanalyst as well as a Zen teacher, I try to integrate those two in how I teach. And

[07:48]

As a result, a lot of what you're going to hear is not exactly what Zazen is, but more about what it isn't. Because you can say that there are two kinds of ways about approaching just sitting, just trying to be in the moment. You can look at, you can try to concentrate and be attentive and stay very focused on the moment. and then just do that, right? And then zero in on something. But the other path is to look at all the ways you don't do that and what you add on to it, right? What you pile on top of just sitting, right? Why we can't keep it simple, what happens? So this is going to begin by looking at What are we really doing when we're sitting?

[08:48]

When I ask someone what his or her practice is, I'll usually be told something like, counting my breath or just sitting. But what is that person really doing? Whatever form or method of meditation we adopt, we are inevitably going to try to enlist that practice in the service of one or more of our curative fantasies. By curative fantasy, I mean our own personal myth that we use to explain what we think is wrong with us and our lives and what we imagine is going to make it all better. And sometimes these fantasies are quite explicit. We're sure we know what's wrong, and we're sure we know what we're after. Of course, feeling sure is no guarantee of being right. And indeed, as we go along in our practice, we come to radically question our initial definition of what counts as a problem and a solution.

[09:57]

Sometimes these fantasies lurk behind the scenes, operating more or less unconsciously, and the teacher and student together must work out a way to bring them out of the open and make their assumptions explicit before they can be challenged. Curative fantasies take many forms, and when you know where to look, they can be seen in all sorts of places. One classic curative fantasy about being cured by love can be found in Plato. Aristophanes, cast as a character in Plato's Symposium, Symposium right now means drinking party. That's how they did philosophy in the old days. Tells a parable about the nature of love in which ancestors of mankind have been punished by the gods by literally being cut in half, so that we as their descendants are destined to be searching forever for our missing half.

[11:01]

What we call love, Aristophanes says... is the desire and pursuit of that lost wholeness. It seems mankind has been searching forever for some version of that lost wholeness. Buddhism and Plato, however, seem to offer very different accounts of the loss of that wholeness and the role of desire in its original disruption and possible repair. For Plato, Desire and love are what overcome our experience of separation. They are what glue us back together when we can cut in half. Buddhism offers us a vision of a life in which originally nothing is lacking. Desire, on the other hand, always seems to arise from an experience of something missing. Does fulfilling our desires genuinely restore us to wholeness? or does it send us on an endless, frustrating quest for what we can never have?

[12:05]

Buddhism is a word that we Buddhists use to describe the experience of being cut off from what's vital in life. Wherever we are, we feel that what we want or need is somewhere else. We may feel isolated and alienated from life, as if a curtain has come down. and separated us from being fully present and engaged with other people, and with the life going on all around us. We imagine in our curative fantasies what we're missing, and at the same time we assign blame for why we don't have it. We can blame ourselves, or blame others, or blame fate. Sometimes we imagine someone else really has what we have, of listening, and we try to attach ourselves to that person. We can attach ourselves as a lover, a student, a disciple, or a therapy client.

[13:11]

But as long as we approach people from a feeling of deficiency and longing, we cannot approach them as equals. And by definition, it's only as an equal that we will have what they have. No matter how much we look outside of ourselves for what's missing, we always have to come back to the question of how we define what's missing in the first place and why we think we don't have it. What has stood in our way? Almost always we conclude there's something wrong with us as we are. That's why we've been unable to achieve what we want or haven't been given the love or attention we need. Our curative fantasies always contain within them a corresponding fantasy of what's wrong with us. a private explanation of the way in which we've been damaged, deficient, or unworthy. So in looking to overcome our suffering, we have to look at the ways we've come to blame ourselves for suffering in the first place.

[14:15]

And if we practice Buddhism, we may be tempted to blame our desires or our self-centeredness for our suffering, giving the Four Noble Truths our own self-critical spins. The fundamental dualism we face on the cushion is not some metaphysical abstraction. It's the all-too-down-to-earth experience of a person divided against herself in the pursuit of a curative fantasy. And all too often, or perhaps I should say inevitably, one side of the person takes up arms against another side and enlists practice itself as the weapon of choice. We do this, of course, in very high-minded terms, telling ourselves we want to be spiritual, not materialistic, compassionate, not self-centered, self-contained instead of needy, calm instead of anxious, and so on and on and on.

[15:23]

And while these are seemingly worthwhile goals, our so-called aspiration is a mask our self-hate can put on for the world, putting a spiritual face on our inner conflict. Over and over, as both a psychoanalyst and as a teacher, I see students whose secret goal in practice is the extirpation of some hated part of themselves. Sometimes it is their anger, sometimes their sexuality, their emotional vulnerability, their bodies, sometimes their very minds which are blamed for the source of suffering. If only I could just once and for all get rid of... Try filling in that blank for yourself. This attitude towards practice, if unchallenged, turns students into spiritual and sometimes quite literal anorectics.

[16:29]

Practice becomes a sophisticated vehicle for purging ourselves of aspects of ourselves we hate. Our hatred for our own physical mortality and imperfection fuels a war against our bodies, a war in which we may strive to turn our bodies into invulnerable machines that can endure any fate. And I certainly remember early days of Zen training when endurance and invulnerability seemed to be what was taught. Or we can go in the other direction. I think we will discard our bodies as irrelevant husks that merely clothe some true inner idealized self. As is perhaps more of a Christian ideal than a Buddhist ideal, but I find that psychologically permeating all kinds of spiritual practice. We may go to war against our own minds, trying to cut off emotion or thought altogether, as if we could rest once and for all in an untroubled blankness.

[17:40]

We want practice to be a kind of mental lobotomy, cutting out everything that scares or shames us, perhaps even cutting out thinking itself. When I was a young boy going to elementary school, my mother, along with some of the other mothers in the neighborhood, would take turns driving us in a carpool. And four or five rambunctious kids would get squeezed into a car for the ride, go in the morning and then home again in the afternoon. And I was a shy, skinny, bookish kid and often felt bullied by the other tougher kids. And when they teased me or got too wild in the car or wouldn't listen to the mom doing the driving, shouting to them all to be quiet, I remember simply closing my eyes and making them all disappear. I just blanked them out. This is the birth of a spiritual practice for me.

[18:48]

Unfortunately, it's not a joke. And it worked well up to a point, but if they noticed what I was doing, It just provoked them to try to get a rise out of me. And they always could if they tried hard enough. And that memory came back to me the other day when I was trying to send zazen at home with my son shouting and playing in another room while I tried to meditate. And as I sat, I realized I simply wanted to shut everything out just as I did all those years ago in the back suit of that car. My own secret practice at that moment was was a fantasy of imperturbable calm. And now, as then, I knew it wouldn't work for long. My old teacher, Junko Beck, used to hate it when anyone called our intensive practice periods retreats. What are you retreating from, she would say. Unfortunately, sometimes the answer is painfully obvious.

[19:50]

It takes a long time to give up on our secret practice and to accept that we're not sitting here to get away from anything, but we're here precisely to face all the things we want to avoid. A regular sitting practice should make all those aspects of life, of our body and mind, all the things we ordinarily want to keep at arm's length, increasingly unavoidable. It's not what we might have in mind when we sign up, but it's what we get or should get. After all our efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized spiritual minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative. We're not here to infix or improve ourselves. I like to say practice actually puts an end to self-improvement or the pursuit of happiness.

[20:57]

But it's very hard for us to stay with that sense of not needing to do anything. Not to turn the Zendo into a spiritual gymnasium or health club where we come to get ourselves in shape. It's hard to do nothing at all. Over and over we watch our mind trying to avoid or fix fix or avoid, to either not look at it or to change it. And leaving the mind just as it is, is the hardest thing to do. And we will even leave all those tendencies to avoid and fix alone, when we can really just see them as repetitive thoughts, just coming back and forth over and over and over again. We don't have to turn them into the thing that we're going to cut out, right? That's just... Just our mind doing its thing. That's the background noise of the brain. Learning to really leave ourself alone and identify our secret practice is one way in which I've found therapy dumps tales with this Zen practice.

[22:05]

Because we can't just sit as long as we're unconsciously using Zazen in the service of a curative fantasy. So one of the ways I try to help students learn to just sit is to get them to see all the ways they're not just sitting and gradually explore and work through the needs underlying all those individual fantasies. And in doing so, playing both sides of the aisle, the therapy and the Zen side, I think I'm taking part in a ongoing integration of Zen and Western psychology, and particularly psychoanalysis, that I think is really how Zen is coming to be at home in the West, by coming to terms with our psychology here. Zen and psychoanalysis in particular have been entwined for about half a century now. If we go back to the pioneering dialogues

[23:09]

between D.T. Suzuki, Eric Fromm, Richard Martino, and Karen Horney. And in my student days, when I was training both as a, first as a psychiatrist and then as a psychoanalyst, I'm just starting to sit, it was back in the early 70s. I trained with some of Karen Horney's students who talked about receiving Zazen instruction from D.T. Suzuki. And my own analyst in those days was a follower of Krishnamurti, and I participated with him in a series of dialogue groups with other therapists and scientists, notably the physicist David Bohm. However, in those early days, the dialogue was really very one-sided, or perhaps I should say one-directional. We analysts were eager to talk to Asian teachers primarily because we saw in their teaching a whole new window into the mind, into the nature of the self, and offering a challenging new path for personal transformation.

[24:20]

Eric Frohm and Karen Horney in particular saw in D.T. Suzuki Zen a validation of their own criticism of classical Freudian theory. and a model of the self not reducible to sexual and aggressive drives, like in Freud. However, in those early days, it never seemed that Suzuki or Sohn Roshi or Yasutani Moshi, who were here meeting the first machines for Americans in the 60s and early 70s, they didn't seem to think they had any need of psychoanalysis to clarify their vision of the self or mind. And my impression talking to Krishnamurti was that he was convinced that his own vision was complete and unobstructed. I remember in particular there was one group in which he was talking about that mankind absolutely must put an end to anger and hatred and war.

[25:26]

This was an imperative. We must do this. And I suggested to him that from a psychoanalytic perspective, you might as well try breeding vegetarian tigers. And you just would have none of that. There was just no possibility that his vision of the mind had anything he needed to incorporate from the psychoanalytic world. The analysts and scientists were there to sit at his feet and really try to understand his deeper vision. Now, that changed. But I'm afraid the next section about that is not going to be nice. I apologize in advance. But my job, I think, as a psychoanalyst usually is talking about people looking at unpleasant truths, and particularly the truths of the results of past trauma.

[26:31]

And I think what got contemporary Zen teachers and other meditation teachers to really pay attention to Western psychology was that they had to own up to what was finally seen as widespread teacher misconduct, particularly sexual conduct. And, you know... It's a shame you have to hit the wheel over the head with a two-by-four to get its attention, but in a sense, that's really what happened. It was only through crises in a number of centers that we really had to pay attention to what Zen wasn't doing and how... Lots of issues weren't getting worked through the way we imagined when we had this wonderful idealized picture of being that first generation of teachers.

[27:32]

Some of you may have read James Ford's history of Zen in America called Zen Master Who? And he does that because now there's so many you can hardly keep track of them. And that book is remarkable for its honesty about the scandals that have plagued Americans then since its inception. And yet those of us who've been around know that he could tell many more stories if he had not confined himself to the first generation of teachers in that history. I'm going to read... something about how Ford described the founding teacher in my lineage, my teacher's teacher. Maizumi Roshi was a skillful teacher, truly a teacher of teachers. He established the White Plum Sangha, which continues as one of the most important of contemporary Western Zen lineages.

[28:37]

He also suffered from alcoholism, a disease that eventually killed him, and he engaged in several inappropriate sexual relationships with students. These two truths sit closely side by side, and I feel contain all the difficulties and possibilities of our humanity and Zen way. From my psychoanalytic perspective, what Ford describes is the two aspects of Maizumi's character, the masterful teacher and the abusive alcoholic. sitting side by side, is a textbook illustration on dissociation. Dissociation is a defense mechanism in which unacceptable or painful feelings are kept emotionally compartmentalized, and though at different times we're conscious of both aspects of ourselves, we keep them separate so as not to experience their inherent contradiction.

[29:38]

which in Maizumi's case could be summed up by the question, if I'm a teacher, how can I also behave this way to my students? Philip Bromberg, a contemporary psychoanalytic expert on treating the symptoms of dissociation, said that simply the goal of the therapy is to replace dissociation with conflict. That is, the person must cease to compartmentalize all his various self-states, and must remain in awareness. And they must all remain in awareness at the same time, and the tensions between them acknowledged and worked through. And clearly no equivalent process took place within the formal Zen practice of teachers with difficulties like Maizumi Roshi. And I think that we should look at that not so much in terms of some parable transgression or scandal, but really try to look at that as dispassionately as we can as data.

[30:45]

And really look at what practice does and doesn't do. Because obviously it does wonderful transformative things in people's lives. But when you idealize that transformation, then you simply overlook everything else that it doesn't do. Over the years, I interviewed many Zen teachers about this issue. And many, I suppose the more traditionally minded ones, expressed the belief that it was incomplete, inadequate, or inauthentic training that was the cause of such lapses. And I've often heard it said that transgressing teachers simply didn't spend enough time in the monastery. And yet the inescapable fact remains that it was often teachers with the most impeccable credentials and long years of training that exhibited these psychological and ethical problems.

[31:58]

It has become clear to many members of my generation of American teachers that many serious psychological problems can be bypassed or not resolved by our traditional training. And because of this, my own teacher, Joko Beck, who herself was the Dharma heir of Maizuli Roshi, became deeply disillusioned with the traditional forms of koan study, which Maizuli was a master, and which was the basis of her own training. Clearly, she concluded Cohen's study had done nothing to resolve her own teacher's psychological and addictive issues. And I think that was an enormously disillusioning experience for her and caused her to essentially throw out so much of her own training and try to reinvent it from the ground up. In doing so, she became one of the pioneers of integrating psychological work with Zen practice.

[33:08]

But, you know, she may have also thrown out some baby with the bathwater and really wanted to have nothing to do again with Cohen's study. I think also she... because of working with a teacher like that, who in the end she couldn't trust as a person, I think it caused her to privilege self-sufficiency in herself and students. And that it became a blind spot for her how to deal with real needs of idealization and dependency. Because I don't think those go away. But when you get traumatized by someone who you put your whole faith in and you recoil from that and you say, I have to completely stand my own ground, then part of what gets pushed away is any coming to terms with what can be healthy about idealization and needs.

[34:15]

I believe... You may have read John Wellwood, who I think was one of the first to describe what he called spiritual bypassing, how it's possible for individuals to have profound insights into emptiness and oneness while continuing to operate on their everyday life of ingrained holistic habits. And that there are a number of factors that work in this defense of bypassing, and I think dissociation is one umbrella term for a lot of what goes on. But another is that it just turns out that we don't have to deal with a lot of emotional problems in order to have some kind of Kensho or awakening experience. Jack Engler famously said, you have to be somebody before you can be nobody. But the fact is, a very compromised, defensive, and dissociated somebody seems to be all it takes. And I think that there was a thought, certainly as I was growing up in these two practices, that somehow the psychological and spiritual would be sequential, that you would sort of work through problems at the psychological level first to the therapist, and then you would go on up this ladder and deal with your Zen teacher who wouldn't...

[35:50]

deal with something higher. But in fact, many people would be having these experiences that they were thinking of as higher, but in fact, all the psychological stuff got bypassed, and in fact, the experience themselves became a justification for bypassing it. See, Rob Hackers, when I think you've sat for a while and get some of the benefits of sitting, particularly if you have one of these little magic moments, the inevitable tendency is to conclude that working through all that messy psychological stuff wasn't necessary after all. See, any one of these little experiences is just so wonderful that they're very self-validating and self-justifying. And we say to ourselves, well, whatever got me to this point, this experience, must be true practice.

[36:55]

And anything I didn't have to deal with to get here, well, that's beside the point, you know. The disturbing reality is that Zen not only doesn't deal with certain psychological issues, but may actually create or exacerbate them. And this may happen both on the level of immediate experience and curative fantasies and at the level of ongoing training. Because I'm sorry, you know, for all this. I don't really want a bad nap to do this practice. I love it. But I mean, really, I think it's just so important to understand how things go awry as well as how they work well. See, traditional Zen training may actually foster repressive and dissociative defenses. And what I call our secret practice, the way we make practice collude with our personal defenses, may actually be promoted or affirmed as true practice itself, especially in traditional authoritarian settings where obedience and compliance are seen as the path to selflessness.

[38:11]

See, then practice in all its forms, on and off the cushion, can become a way not only of suppressing individuality, in the name of overcoming egotism, but of denying or suppressing sexual feelings in the name of extinguishing desire or attachment, of denying or repressing anger in the name of compassion or non-attachment. In Japan, I'm told, there's a saying that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, and that's a theme that I think, for better and worse, has been imported into some American Zen-tronic. The cultural tendency in Japan to suppress difference in the service of social harmony may all too easily become a formula for psychological repression. And one person's or culture's harmony may just be another's conformity. Monastery life, a less formal communal residential training, or to a lesser extent intensive group experience of sashim,

[39:21]

all provide valuable lessons in allowing the form of daily practice to wear down our self-centered likes and dislikes. But sometimes, and perhaps too often, what gets worn down isn't just neurotic self-centeredness, but genuine individuality and true feeling. Then compliance masquerades as no self. There's a Zen teacher who's also known to be a psychoanalyst. I've often been sought out professionally by students and former monastics for whom the process has gone awry. And often my job in helping these individuals can be summed up by helping them learn not to be good Zen students anymore. When they come to me, they're... Life and their practice has often reached some kind of breaking point. And the tension between their idealized Zen persona and their emotional reality has become unsustainable.

[40:27]

And sometimes it takes the form of an addictive or sexual obsession they can no longer control. Sometimes it takes the form of an eating disorder or a chronic depression. And only rarely in these cases is their teacher seeing how practice itself has fueled the problem. Sometimes the teachers encourage them to come to meet for therapy as a way to remove the symptom which is seen as an obstacle but not a byproduct of practice. Sometimes the teacher acknowledges practice isn't working for the student but unfortunately may attribute this to a lack of vocation or commitment on the part of the student. The problem gets defined as an unresolved form of attachment. If the student is unwilling or unable to submit to even more of the same practice that has gotten them into trouble in the first place, the therapy may be suggested as a way of transitioning them out of the community when the difficulties have become a problem.

[41:34]

as well as poor advertisement for the benefits of the center or the wisdom of the teacher. I think that one of the main trends in psychoanalysis that I think is very slow to come over into Zen training, which I hope to see happen, is that classical Freudian analysis the patient was seen as projecting or fantasizing, displacing fantasies of their own onto the analyst. And experiences of being hurt or misunderstood by the analyst were traditionally attributed to the student's own resistance to unpleasant truth, right?

[42:38]

That the interpretation wasn't wrong, you just don't want to face it, right? Or if you think that the analyst is being unresponsive or harsh, the analyst would think, well, you're just seeing, you know, your father in me. I know I'm a nice, responsive, warm person. I can't be doing any of those things, so you must be projecting your old memories of your punitive father on me, right? So the big trend in analysis since those days has been for analysts to recognize all the ways in which they've actually traumatized their patients, to really admit their empathic failures, to admit the place where what they've done for all their good intentions can hurt sometimes, right? So that kind of acknowledgement of disruption is the way that you can repair it. The analyst has to recognize that what they've done inadvertently is recapitulating an old trauma, that the trauma isn't just in the patient's fantasy life.

[43:46]

And I think that's been very slow to seep into Zen practice, where we have to be able to acknowledge that it's not just a student's attachment that is the problem. It's that we may be doing things that genuinely are experienced as repressive or un-understanding, that some people need a whole different kind of responsiveness or holding environment. You know, I think people need a great deal of varying amounts of just face time with a teacher in order to feel connected or understood. Some people are very good at using the form and the setting of practice as their teacher, and some people just get completely lost and go off in a career to fantasy, and they get very disconnected, and they have a lot of trouble figuring out what the relationship to the teacher is. And the teachers have to really figure out how to acknowledge

[44:52]

what they're doing that can contribute to this. Not just put it all back into the image of a student's attachment. I don't think it's yet clear at this stage of things in America how Zen is going to become emotionally as well as spiritually mature. And personally, I don't believe it'll come by the transplanting of a more authentic or more Japanese monastic training monastery to these shores. But whether Zen in America is going to be defined primarily by a continually evolving residential and monastic training or a psychologically minded lay practice, which is more of what I'm doing these days, I think that's still an open question. I just hope our two forms of life will continue to interpenetrate and enrich another.

[45:54]

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