What Is Bothering Me?

From John Tarrant's

The Light Inside the Dark

Doubt and Struggle

Traditional Zen practice is thought of as resting like an iron cauldron on three legs -- one leg is doubt,  one is effort,  and the last is faith.  Doubt is the first,  and usually freely available in our culture.  The contribution of the Zen tradition here is to point out that for the growth of awareness we must not ignore our doubts -- they have great value,  they allow us to penetrate,  to see through the human situation.

To give attention to our current situation,  including everything dubious and unresolved,  is an act of integrity.  In the later stages of the inner work,  there is a temptation to ignore doubt,  since so much seems clear.  But fogginess is always with us,  and to have integrity is to notice this.  the story of Jacob wrestling with a being out of Heaven refers to such a moment of uncertainty.  His life was in danger and everything depended  on his presence of mind in the coming time.  In the night an angel came and Jacob struggled with him.  as the dawn came on,  the man held on fast,  and though he was injured in the hip,  he would not let the angel leave until he had received a blessing.  Integrity depends on our connection to the spiritual,   but that relationship is not a simple or passive one. to earn spirit's blessing we have to be willing to struggle through on our own.  

An example of staying with,  struggling with,  doubt and unease was given by an old Zen teacher,  speaking about his own process:

I ask myself, "What is bothering me?"  And something pops up.  Then I ask myself, "What is really bothering me?"  Something else pops up.
Then I ask,  "What about underneath that?"  What's really,  really bothering us is always mortality,  the fragility of life.

Here, integrity is doubt pursued.  Integrity asks what is real and keeps our noses to the grindstone.  Its revelations come after inner conflict and hard work.  Integrity embraces our natural qualms and the power of refusal -- it leads us to reject everything comforting and offensive to reason,  until the bottom of our inquiry is reached.

In this way questions become a treasure in themselves;  they endure,  and they are always fresh.  great questions get passed down as a sort of legacy, gifts for succeeding generations.  In one of his Polynesian paintings,  full of his languid amazement in the South Pacific,  Gauguin raises up for our admiration and disturbance his eternal curiosity.  He writes on the painting itself "Who are we?  Where do we come from?  Where are we going?" asking us,  who witness and share his fate.  We can respond to his questions only by holding them,  pursuing them,  living them through.  Our questions keep company with our grief and happiness:  we carry them along with us.

Bringing attention to our questions constructs the interior container of our character.  But this work is not easy.  We do not always pursue our question into its depth -- we may accept a lesser question,  yawn and distract ourselves,  sink into oblivion.

In Zen,  the student takes up a great question and perseveres with it,  actively and incessantly,  day and night.  the question itself composes the subject of meditation,  becomes the knot in the current of time.  the student sometimes begins with a form of the question that has every appearance of absurdity -- a koan such as "What is the sound made by a single hand?"  That very absurdity contains the dark with the bright -- the contradictions of being human.  Or else the student may be given a naturally arising question,  such as "Who is hearing that sound?"  -- the bird call,  the truck passing,  the voice of the world at this moment.

These great questions are full of night and cannot be answered in comfortable fashion.  Preliminary,  intellectual responses are rejected by the teacher until the student is drawn down to the bottom of the world.  Persistent questioning takes away everything that merely seems solid until we are left with the underneath,  the emptiness.

Using this method of deepening our attention,  we sacrifice a certain complacency,  but find a path composed of the questions that the universe has given us.  this is deeply satisfying to our integrity,  which does not want to gloss over the difficulties of leading a life of awareness.  We enter our anxiety as if on a quest,  learning to be attuned to our own uneasiness and even to doubt it,  too.  Doubt pursued to its ends,  pursued beyond itself,  strengthens character because it is something real.  The method of questioning is full of beauty and terror.  It does not pretend that the work of spirit and soul is pretty or easy,  but it trusts the greatness of our human capacity to look life in the face.  when we follow our doubt to the bottom,  we are like Jacob;  we hold fast to the angel until it bestows its blessing.

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