..續本文上一頁 backhanded Zen compliments, was quite open about the dingo-like trickery of the Dharma in this regard. He said, "The koan has the flavour of something that can be resolved by the intellect, but it cannot. So it keeps the intellect busy while something else happens. Then the real change occurs." So the magician is doing something with one hand while we don”t notice what is happening in the other hand.

　　So, what kind of changes go on in us

　　 Someone gave me one of those lovely fourfold processes recently. She came and said, "I felt very angry and I wondered what the anger was about, and then I realised I felt envy. I noticed other people changing around me and I felt shut out and envious. And then I wondered what the envy was about and I realised I felt shame because I felt envy and then I wondered what the shame was about and I realised I felt longing - longing for the Tao. And then I realised I was quite happy, longing for the Tao." It”s very beautiful, isn”t it

　　 And she realised that that was her treasure.

　　Shame is something we do feel often in the character work. It starts down deep and is subtle at first and then seems to spread up and out through the body until it”s not subtle at all. And that”s when we look and say, "Damn, I thought nobody knew that I did that and here I realise everybody can see. Or I can see, which is even worse. I really did that." And we must value it and we can”t do without it, even if we can”t sit still when it is upon us. It”s evidence of sincerity, and so we begin to value things that normally we would have fled. We begin even to steer by them. So, when something really difficult comes up, we can have this attitude - "Well, this is really interesting, I wonder how the practice works here

　　 Well, I guess I don”t know how the practice works here. I shall have to find out." So something new is born, something unique enters the world, and we are stretched in ways where we did not expect to be stretched.

　　Somebody gave me a good example of this stretching some time ago. He had one of the fairly typical paths in Zen. He was a talented and perhaps charismatic person who had studied Zen with a number of good teachers and had rather neglected his inner life, although this wasn”t apparent because he meditated a lot and was quite creative. But then, as will happen when we neglect our inner life, it came crashing around him.

　　Everybody basically got sick of him. He made a mess of his domestic life and his marriage broke up. He experienced a kind of pain he had never experienced before, the kind of pain he couldn”t get away from. None of his brilliance could help him with it, and he began to go downwards, become depressed and think of suicide. A familiar path, I think. And he thought maybe he didn”t need to do zazen, because zazen didn”t really seem at all related to this pain. And then eventually the pain took him over, so that for the first time he was in difficulty in his life, and he could find no way to flee it. And so for the first time he had the possibility of a real practice and a deep level of experience.

　　Some pain forces us inwards when we are not willing to go inwards, forces us to experience who we are, when everybody else had merely suffered it before, but we had not experienced it. Sickness will do this too. There”s nothing like getting a cancer diagnosis to realise it”s not important who takes out the garbage. Who really gives a damn

　　 So pain has a beneficent quality as well as its dark side. We are very aware of the dark side, but the shadow of pain is the brightness and the healing quality that it can bring with it. So we go down and we go further into things in our zazen.

　　Sometimes we sit in zazen and things appear to get worse. Many people come to me and say, "My mind was actually much calmer…

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