One Time, One Meeting

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 10:30 at night, and you are dog-tired after a long and stressful day. Climbing the stairs to your second-story bedroom, bearing your glass of water, you feel the fatigue in your legs, ankles, and feet. Reaching the landing, you are about to enter your bedroom when you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that something is amiss. You have left a living-room light on. The glow is unmistakable. There is only one thing to do: go back downstairs and turn off the light. But something impedes you from taking this immediate, appropriate action.

The Zen teacher Christian Dillo has coined a name for that impediment. He calls it the “friction of self.” Like the friction in an unoiled hinge, a knee joint, or a complex engine, the “friction of self” obstructs, delays, and sometimes precludes our responses to the situations we encounter in everyday life. It generates heat; it causes unnecessary wear. A subtle form of suffering, this obstruction in the flow of life can be minor, as in the present case, but it can also have serious consequences. To understand it, and to meliorate its effects, it can be helpful to examine its multiple layers.

At the most obvious level, the “friction of self” can take the form of a spontaneous, involuntary utterance. Depending on the circumstances, that utterance may be as innocuous as “Oops!” At other times, it may be an unprintable, four-letter expletive. For the most part, such utterances are not in our conscious control, springing as they do from our earliest conditioning. Years ago, my then Zen teacher, who was raised a Roman Catholic and later took up Zen practice, visited a religion class at Alfred University, where he engaged with students in an informal question-and-answer session. No sooner had he sat down at the front desk when an earnest student in the front row eagerly raised her hand. “When,” she pointedly asked, “was your first satori?” “Oh, Jesus!” he replied. Despise decades of training in silence, stillness, and non-reactivity, this honest, unfiltered reaction had arisen from the depths of his early experience.

Such reactions are often colorful, amusing, and revealing, especially when they are hopelessly anachronistic. (“Jeepers Creepers!” my wife is fond of exclaiming). Of more consequence, however, is our emotional resistance to unwelcome situations. Confronted with conditions we wish were otherwise, we resist them with various forms of denial, literal or rhetorical (“I can’t believe I left that light on—again.”). But even when we remain, however tentatively, in touch with unpalatable realities, we may busy our minds with constructing alternative scenarios, in which we made the wiser or more intelligent choice or paid attention to the factors we have unfortunately overlooked. “If only I’d been more mindful,” we might complain, “and noticed that the light was still on.” Or, if our minds are operating more fancifully, we might refuse to take responsibility for what has occurred, as if our latest misfortune had just happened to us, and we were not the immediate cause. As a last redoubt, we might mount our ego-defenses and adamantly refuse to act. “Oh, ____ it,” we might declare, silently or out loud.  “Let the____ light stay on. It will only cost a few pennies, at most. What difference does it make?”

If this last response seems rather on the risible side, it may be because it so clearly illustrates the machinations of the ordinary, egocentric mind—the one that places the fiction as well as the friction of self at the center of every situation, impeding what Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Soto Zen tradition, calls the “undivided activity” of the universe. Rather than assume our natural, dynamic place in that activity, we elect to set ourselves apart from and against it. We become the stone in the stream. Whether we choose to berate ourselves (“What an idiot I am”) or, in a healthier manner, laugh at our human foibles, we devote our energies to dramatizing our imperfect selves. Rather than attend to the situation at hand, we play out our internal dramas. Meanwhile, we stand on the landing, and the offending light stays on.

An integral aspect of Zen practice is becoming aware, gradually or suddenly, of the “undivided activity” of which Dogen speaks and our human tendency to deny it, resist it, or construct in its place an alternative reality, creating strife for ourselves and everyone around us. With diligent, daily meditative practice, however, we may come to acknowledge and accept the “friction of self” as native to the human condition. Like a faithful but annoying companion, it will ever be with us, reflecting, moment by moment, our intractable human nature. “Hello, Reactivity,” we might say, or “Good evening, Resistance”—and do what needs to be done.

________

Christian Dillo, The Path of Aliveness: A Contemporary Zen Approach to Awakening Body and Mind (Shambhala 2022), 207.

Image: Katy Tresedder, Coefficient of Friction (CC)