Can Zen make me happier?

I hear all of this talk about enlightenment. Honestly, I’m not interested. My goal is more modest: I want to wake-up feeling good about my life every day. That’s it. Can Zen help?

A few years back, mindfulness programs were all the rage.  The benefits touted were huge: less sick leave, higher productivity, less turnover, better sales, etc.  It was a panacea.  Even Amazon got on board with their mindfulness coffins, I mean boxes, that offered guided meditations of the employee’s choosing.  The irony was that Amazon employees, like a lot of other corporate employees, were closely monitored, worked grueling hours, performed mind-numbing labor, and usually lasted no longer than 9 months under its soul crushing system.  The mindfulness box was an insult to the real cause of suffering in their life: a soul-crushing workplace.

You can argue that if they were enlightened, if they were Zen masters, they’d be content and find joy even in that hell realm of Amazon.  Fair enough.  But they aren’t Zen masters and they don’t have the time to become Zen masters because they’re so busy just trying to pay for their kids’ new school books and their parents’ skyrocketing insurance.  Can Zen help them?  Yes, definitely.  Some, I would hope, might even find working for Amazon fun with Zen training.  But for a vast majority, the best thing for their well-being is to find a better job or raise hell and get shit changed.

I say this first because this is where most people are at.  They take on too much in their life.  They busy themselves with endless projects and responsibilities.  They work too hard.  They watch series a few hours a day.  They spend almost all of their time glued to a screen.  When they do finally go out, they hang out with friends that are as stressed out, anxious, and lusty as they are.  Then they come to Zen hoping they can lead the life basically the same way with few sacrifices but maximum happiness. That’s not how Zen works. Morality. Concentration. Wisdom. That’s the training.

Zen isn’t just sitting down in a room with your eyes closed or taking on some utterly transcendent attitude that gives you license to do whatever you want-just so long as you abide in oneness.  It includes that, but there’s more to it than that.  There’s morality.

Morality doesn’t mean just following a list of do’s and don’ts.  Morality’s about how we live in the world physically and socially.  What do we watch?  Who do we hang out with?  Are we honest with others or not? Do we eat properly?  How many hours do we spend at work?  Are we loving towards our family?  Do we give to and serve those in need?  Are we addicted to Instagram and Twitter? If your morality’s not in order, it’s going to be difficult to make much progress in the areas of concentration and wisdom.

Let’s look at a concrete example. Imagine you’re meditating thirty minutes a day and living a hectic, cut-throat life the other 18 hours in a day.  Your meditation might just keep you from veering off the cliff, but it probably won’t help you beyond that.

Let’s take another scenario. You’re living a quiet life in the countryside. You work with your hands in the fields just a few hours a day. There’s no electricity, so in your free time you sing songs with your wife and kids, play checkers, and have a carpentry hobby.  You rise and sleep with the sun.  And, by the way, you don’t meditate at all. What would your mind be like if you lived like that for 20 years? Would you be more satisfied, more mindful, more serene than in the former situation?

I don’t know if I could even live like that now, but if I grew up like that, sure. My heart would be much more serene than it is now.

So what’s more important-making sure you get those 30 minutes of meditation in or getting your life in order and finding a lifestyle that uplifts your spirit rather than crushes it?

The latter, obviously.

Exactly. When Amazon put in those meditation coffins, people exploded, but I think Amazon’s not so different from most people who come to Zen initially. They’re unsatisfied and desperate, but they hope that with 30 minutes of meditation a day they can suddenly turn things around. It’s possible, but unlikely. Like Amazon, we need to focus on the other 18 hours of waking life rather than putting too much importance on the 30 minutes in the morning.

But like a lot of the workers there, they know that it’s soul-crushing and want to leave but they can’t. They need to survive and so they endure it.

That’s fair enough, but what about the other hours of the day? Are they drinking heavily? Are they frittering away their time on YouTube and TikTok? Are they gossiping with their friends or moaning about their life? How are they using those hours? Are they strengthening their spirit while building a better future for themselves, or are they just coping? Reality doesn’t reward cowards, victims, and the weak. It crushes them.

Things take time. I get that. But I’m warning you, don’t put all of your hopes on meditation, especially when it’s just a sliver of your day. Focus on making your 24 hours awesome and make meditation just a part of that goal. Then it’ll be effective and powerful. Otherwise, it’s just a band-aid on a severed limb.

Got that. And if I’m doing that and want to meditate to see some serious results, what’s a good number to aim for?

Depends on what you mean by results.

More happiness, more satisfaction in life.  That feeling when the pressure of deadlines and bills briefly falls away.  You’re with your friends, reading the books you’ve always wanted to read, enjoying the beauty of the mountains and the wonders that silence brings to your attention.  That feeling of, “Yes, life’s good.”

Some people are born like that.  At my old work, there was a security guard who radiated happiness.  He was a hundred times poorer than me and hardly meditated his entire life, yet he was far happier than most of my co-workers who were serious Buddhists, meditating an hour or more a day, doing retreats, upholding the precepts, washing the dishes mindfully, blah-blah-blah.

If you want to feel “mmmmm, life’s awesome” on the daily, you have to follow the three-fold training.  The more you train, the fitter you become.  The time it takes depends on where your fitness level is at. A person who has serious psychological issues might not be able to realistically achieve that level of satisfaction in their lifetime. Just being ok most days might be their threshold.  A person with moderate level of psychological distress might be able to achieve it after a few years or decades of dedicated practice.  Someone with a solid mental base might be able to do it with little formal practice and lifestyle changes over a few years.  It depends on where you are and how much effort you put into it.

I’d break it down into four categories of people: 1) very low mental stability, 2) low mental stability, 3) mentally stable, and 4) rock solid mental stability.

1: Very low mental stability: get professional help and work in tandem with your therapist. If you can’t afford one, here are some rough guidelines: focus on developing morality. Join some charities. Spend time with good friends. Find some simple pleasures to replace the addiction to digital media. Study a little. Exercise daily, sports especially. Try to be honest and charitable every day. Be moderate with or abstain from intoxicants. Don’t meditate or, if you do, do so for very short periods, like 15-20 minutes.

Meditation can exacerbate mental illnesses. Some people with very low mental stability are strong meditators, but that’s even more of a reason to keep away. Deep meditation can precipitate disorienting mental states which, when combined with an already unstable mind, can be disastrous. Be very careful. It’s best if you join a sangha and have a teacher that you trust to keep an eye on you and ground you.

If you’d excuse me to go on a bit of a tangent, there’s a story that one of my teachers, Ajahn Jayasaro, told years back about the importance of morality. When he was a young monk, he traveled to England to help establish a new monastery in England. While there, he and his fellow monks met one of the leading researchers and practicing psychologists in England at the time. She also happened to be a devout Buddhist. As they were talking, Ajahn Jayasaro asked her, “What’s the most effective technique for helping people with depression?” She instantly replied with, “The Five Precepts.”  She explained that if a patient could uphold these, it gave them a confidence, strength, and inner goodness that laid the foundation for a new, more wholesome life.

I often think about this story when people come to me telling me about their problems and how out-of-sorts they are. I don’t believe it 100%, but it does speak to the power of living a life of integrity. It’s far more powerful than throwing together a 20-minute morning meditation routine.

2: Low mental stability: Similar to #1, focus on lifestyle changes and minimize formal practice. Uphold the Five Precepts. Be generous. Exercise regularly. Eat well. Blah-blah-blah. The only thing I’d add here is that they can ramp-up their formal practice times with the condition that they proceed slowly and cautiously. Meditation’s potent medicine and for someone not in a good head space, it can do more harm than good if they’re unfortunate enough to have negative side-effects.

3: Mentally stable. Even if you’re in a good space, don’t take it for granted. Build strong foundations through a life of integrity. Cut out distractions that don’t add any real value to you or others’ life: fewer entertainments, intoxicants, indulgent food. Focus instead on a simple life. This alone will help immensely with stilling the mind.

For concentration, a serious beginner student should aim for an hour a day of formal meditation.  Once you have the practice down, you should do formal retreats for 2-weeks per year.  That might mean not going on holiday to Thailand or Japan.  So be it.  If you want to gain some mastery in this area, you’re going to have to commit the time.

For wisdom, let’s first break it up into the three main categories of wisdom:

1. Conventional wisdom: Conventional wisdom is the combination of knowledge, intellectual skills, and attitudes used in the world. For example, if you’re an engineer, knowing what the properties of aluminum are, the ability to calculate the load-bearing capacity of different materials, and having a meticulous, logical mind when designing systems. It’s also knowing how to invest your money or calculate exchange fees. I won’t go into this as this is largely out of Zen’s purview.
2. Theory of view and practice: The term view and practice here encapsulates all three trainings. Understanding at this level is purely intellectual. For example, you know what the three trainings are and how they relate to each other. You know the Two Truths and how they relate to each other. You know the Five Precepts, the details of the rules, and their importance. You know the different negative states that arise in the mind and their antidotes. You understand the history and culture of the lineage in which your practicing and the reasons for its various practices and values.
3. Application of view and practice: This is the wisdom that comes from the application of the theory. Some might be able to say by heart the Five Precepts, yet they haven’t consistently put them into practice and, thus, don’t directly know for themselves the true value of the Five Precepts and lack the ability to uphold them in their daily lives. You might also know by heart all of the different negative emotions that ravage your life, yet because you aren’t trying to manage them, you lack the practical wisdom that comes from actually struggling to keep them under control. For oneness, you directly see oneness in your own experience rather than merely thinking about it in the abstract.

Conventional wisdom is irrelevant. There are plenty of other better resources to explain that, so I won’t bother. For the theory of view and practice, I recommend reading through the a mixture of modern and classical Zen, acquainting yourself with the history, culture, and philosophy. Zen often claims to be “beyond words” and relishes in its anti-intellectual, iconoclastic image, but I know of no actual Zen master who didn’t also formally study for years.

Practice is more important than theory, but study is still important, especially at the beginning of the practice. Think of study as the map and applied wisdom as the journey. If you try to travel without understanding the terrain and the directions, you might miss a turn and go 30km in the wrong direction. Then you have to double-track and still risk missing it again. If, on the other hand, you’ve thought it through carefully, have a clear understanding of where you are, where you’re going, and how to get there, you don’t have to waste much time checking over to see where you are, what you’re doing, if you’re going in the right direction. You just know. Same applies to the theoretical knowledge.

That said, practice informs theory. Just sitting around comparing maps for decades will get you nowhere and, worse, the abstract understanding you concoct from those maps will be inaccurate and distorted. Actually moving around and seeing things for yourself makes the theory clearer, and vis versa.
For the applied wisdom, most of that will come from living a moral life and practicing meditation regularly. However, do an insight practice. If you’re meditating for 1 hour, then try 10-20 minutes of insight practice to recognize oneness. I’ll explain what this entails later.

4. Rock solid mental stability. For these people, the path doesn’t differ much from #3. Most of these folks have already done a lot of formal practice in other traditions or just hit the genetic jackpot. Whatever the case, you might not need to spend as much time doing formal practice and probably no need for retreats unless you aiming for total meditative mastery. However, there’s no excuse to not lead a life of integrity, so they get no breaks in the morality department.

I’d say I hover between #2 and 3, depending on what week it is, really. But I didn’t know I’d have to give up that much time.

You don’t, but I’m honest about what level of dedication most need for that “mmmmmm, life’s good” level as a baseline.  Being an expert takes time.  If you want to be a skilled guitarist, it’s not enough to play the guitar for thirty minutes a few days a week.  You need to play for at least an hour and you need to start listening to music everyday to train your ear.  You’ll also spend some time playing with others, reading, learning different specific techniques.  It’s a commitment to get skilled at guitar. Zen’s no different.

There’s some hope in that once you get to a certain level, you can lower the input.  Many of my senior teachers meditated 30 minutes or an hour a day.  One of them, an international businessman, almost never meditated.  Another teacher, Luang Por Sudhiro, sat throughout the night for 6-7 hours straight.  He slept once every few days.

Achieving that level, though, requires not only regular practice, but also commitment.  Mastering the guitar doesn’t come after a year or two years or three years of play, unless you’re diving head-deep in.  It comes after five or ten years of immersion.  The same is true of Zen.  If you don’t want to be a skilled guitar player or a Zen practitioner, that’s fine, that’s your decision. But if your goal is to have a baseline deep contentment with your life, you have to work for it via morality, concentration, and wisdom.