To “Be With” Fears

What I most benefit from in the Living Chan workshop this weekend was the opportunity to be with certain fears I have encountered related to public speaking. But these kinds of fears are not just unique to public speaking. I think they relate to how people treat interactions with other people. And here I am treading into the kinds of territory I was exploring in the workshop itself.

“Be with” fears? What does that mean?  I should clarify what this means before anything else. One point is that helping to organize an event like this put me face to face with the stock fears I have, such as fear of not having a good enough presentation. I think this happened because I was combining huatou method with the principles being described, and I found myself seeing that the critical thoughts don’t come from others at all. They are triggered by my reactions to forms. How do I experience this? I experience it almost like this: sometimes, you might find a radio that has the dial between two stations. And at that time, you hear static for the most part, punctuated with some notes here and there. Turning the dial very gently induces even more randomized noises. Now, if I were to hear certain random sentences there, would I join them to something prior to it? Not really, because I would recognize that it is just a noise or a sound. I think, similarly, I start to treat the words in my mind as ‘sounds’ rather than as actual entities that are out there. I see the face that looks bored or disapproving, and the thought “you’re not doing a good job” comes to memory. Where did that one come from? Is it true? I connect the image of the person with some old memory of someone who might have said the same things in a different situation. And then I couple this with a feeling that arises as a result of what I think is missing in the presentation.

As long as I am on the huatou (albeit gently) and I am aware of the thought-nature of what I experience, it starts to become a little bit funny. It is as though I am using my old thought to punish my present experience, but then fooling myself into thinking that the thought comes from some form outside ‘me’. Another analogy: it’s like a ventriloquist throwing her voice into a puppet, and then forgetting that the puppet’s voice is her own voice. This is crazy, but this is the way suffering works. But if I don’t have the method or the viewpoint, simply having the concept won’t replace the suffering thought. Now I start to feel it is so important to use the principle to see the thought for what it truly is rather than to suppress or ‘replace’ the thought itself. Why doesn’t ‘thought replacement’ work? I have two answers. One reason is that the past thought has already gone, so there is nothing to replace or connect to the present thought. The other reason is that replacing the thought with another one assumes that the two thoughts could connect, and they don’t. The ‘connection’ is just another thought we make.

I am able to be with fear only when I recognize that its source is in delusion. As long as I think the fear has a validity in something external, I continue to feed the fear. That is why ‘replacement’ doesn’t work. Replacement is just one thought arguing with the other thought as to which is the better thought. In fact, all thoughts are the same. As the Venerable remarked this past weekend,  the thought “A” contains “not-A”, which is the background of that thought. The “not-A” and the A is the mind. Another way is to say that A is the wave in an ocean. It appears that “B” wave replaces “A” wave, but is the water not the same? I start to see the nature of the thoughts as equal.

I heard one Korean Zen teacher, Ven. Seung Sahn, compare it to something like animal crackers. The crackers have different shapes, but they taste the same. In this way, I don’t need to pick and choose the thoughts. I let them be and ripen on their own without agitating them or trying to subdue them.