Read Online Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life by Ezra Bayda - Free Book Online

the child develops certain pictures and begins to make certain decisions about how life is. Maybe she decides that life isn’t safe somehow. Based on this belief, the child develops particular behavioral strategies. Maybe the strategy is to withdraw in order to feel safe. Or maybe the decision is that life is too difficult, and the child develops the strategy of trying harder, of doing whatever it takes to cover the inadequacy he feels. Another strategy could be to seek oblivion or to seek love. It could be a strategy of control or aggression or cheerfulness.
    In any case, we weave together these core decisions and strategies into a seemingly solid construct that becomes our substitute life. We believe that this thought-based picture of reality is who we are and what life is. The more we believe in this artificial life, the more we move away from “life as it is.”
     
    We live in a psychologically sophisticated age, and given our tendency to psychologize, we are naturally drawn to analyze ourselves, to think about ourselves. But as many, many seekers have found, analyzing in itself does not bring us that basic something we’re looking for.
    Analyzing is not the solution to the basic human problem. Instead, living the practice life means we’re willing to look at the extent to which decisions that we made long ago have created a substitute life. We can practice seeing the extent to which the decisions about who we are and how life is color and filter our present experience. We can see how they still hone in on our experience, picking out like radar those aspects of the environment that will confirm the decisions that we have already made.
    For example, suppose we’ve made the decision, very early on, that no one can be trusted. At some point long after making this decision, we find a partner who is pretty trustworthy, someone who demonstrates time and time again how trustworthy he is. But one time our partner does something that suggests that he can’t be trusted. With deadly aim we hone in on this instance, saying, “See! I knew you could never be trusted! No one can ever be trusted!” This single experience far outweighs all our positive experiences with our partner, because it’s what we’ve been expecting to see. This is how the decisions that we’ve made literally shape our experience. They don’t just reflect our experience; they color what we take in.
    Once we become aware of the core decisions that are running our substitute life, we begin to see how they manifest through every aspect of our experience. If, for example, you see a decision operating in one of your relationships, you can be sure that this decision is also playing some part in your work and probably even in your perception about practice. I was recently with a student to whom I’ve been talking for a couple of years. She was telling me about some relationship difficulties she was having. After listening to her speak, one sentence after another, I said to her, “Why don’t you write these down?” So she wrote them down. Then I said, “Why don’t you write down how you perceive your situation at work?” And she wrote that down. Then I said, “How do you look at your situation in practice? What are your basic thoughts about practice?” So she wrote those down. I read what she had written, then handed the papers to her. Her eyes opened wide. Even though she had used different words for each of these three categories, her core beliefs were essentially the same: “I’ll never be good enough. Things will never change. What’s the point anyway?”
    This woman was believing her thoughts as the truth about reality: relationships are like this, work is like this, practice is like this. It was obvious that her core beliefs were coloring and shaping her whole experience. It wasn’t work that was impossible, it wasn’t this guy who was doing all these things to her, it wasn’t practice—it was her preprogrammed beliefs.
    The interesting