---

Guy Spiro: Cheri, I know you’ve been studying and teaching Zen for thirty years. How did you come to the practice?

Cheri Huber: The Buddha taught ... how much do we know actually of what the Buddha taught, but this is one version of it, that we come to a desire for awareness practice by one of two routes. One is intelligence, just looking around and saying, there has to be more to this. The other is having suffered enough. I picked choice two, door B.

GS: Desperation.

CH: Yes, desperation. I just got to the place of saying I can’t do this anymore. And I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had that happen. I consider myself blessed that I couldn’t deal with the amount of suffering I encountered in life. I wasn’t raised with religion, so I went through every type of religion and philosophy that I could lay my hands on trying to find one that spoke to me and seemed to answer the questions that I had. When I read D.T. Suzuki, What is Zen, I said, “Ah-ha. OK, well, I don’t know what he’s talking about but clearly he does. And he knows what I want to know, so let’s try Zen.” I tried it and never strayed.

GS: This is a question that I’ve been kicking around for a while now. You achieve silence. Then what? I mean, you break the hold that the world has on you. But then what?

CH: The silence is actually like a doorway. The world most of us live in is what we call the Conditioned Reality. What most people consider reality is simply illusion. It’s conditioned. We experience the world that we experience because we’ve been taught to experience it.

GS: Consensus reality.

CH: Once we come into silence, once that is stilled, even if it’s just for a moment, we get a glimpse of what else there is. And of course, it’s vast, it’s everything. So the reason that people have such a hard time doing that is that our individual identity, that Self that we believe ourselves to be after we are conditioned, doesn’t want to let go into a greater reality. It wants it’s reality, setting up that constant struggle that people run into with Ego fighting to maintain its grip on its conditioned view. Zen doesn’t have a large vocabulary because we hesitate to put words on that which cannot be conceptualized. One of our books is called That Which You Are Seeking Is Causing You To Seek, so the heart, the essential nature, the inherent enlightened state longs for itself.

GS: The Ego will fight for its life, certainly, and it fights dirty.

CH: As we all do when we’re fighting for our lives.

GS: Would you say, that when you’ve had your moment of silence for the first time, that that is more or less your first introduction to who you are?

CH: Yes, although there are probably very few people that would experience it that way. It takes a long time.

GS: But when silence is achieved, consciousness remains.

CH: Correct.

GS: So who is that?

CH: Well, that’s the whole thing isn’t it? It’s not a who. That’s what is so hard for people to get. It’s not that I am having that experience. That experience is me. Then people struggle with that. “I want to be a higher self.” Well, it doesn’t work that way. So what we’re seeking is what’s there when everything else falls away.

GS: The physical plane is Maya, illusion. But when you stub your toe it hurts.

CH: It’s illusion, it’s not that it doesn’t exist.

GS: The pain seems not to be illusory.

CH: If you’re lying in your bed at night, dreaming that somebody is sneaking down the hall and they’re going to kill you, you feel terror. Is there anybody sneaking down the hall? Probably not. You wake up. Oh, it was a dream. But while you’re in that dream your heart is pounding, you’re trying to scream. So the fact that it’s a dream, or illusion, doesn’t mean that we don’t experience it as real. Because we do.

GS: Talk about your latest book.

CH: When You’re Falling, Dive. Acceptance, Freedom and Possibility. Here is what we talk about in that book. First there’s movement, then there’s sensation. We have a thought about that and a label that goes with it. An emotional reaction to that label and a conditioned pattern of behavior goes with that sequence.

The Universe is in flux, everything is moving all of the time, which physicists help us to understand. That movement encounters this form that we are in. When that happens it produces a sensation. That could be anything, it could be the wind blowing or food that your body is trying to digest. It could be somebody’s creeping down the hallway, a heart-pounding kind of thing. So that’s the sensation. Then the label that gets put on it, how that gets attached to a sensation in a long ago far away place that we don’t remember any longer. If the sensation happened to us today, it’s unlikely that we would put any label on it. But if we did, it certainly wouldn’t be the one that we put on way back when, when we were six months, or a year or two years old. Then there’s the emotional reaction. What happens to most of us at this point, when we get to the label and the emotional reaction, is that we’re in story. Now we’re telling ourselves a story about what’s going on, and how I feel and what this means, and what’s going to happen next. Then the story leads us to and is a part of the conditioned behavior. What am I going to do? I need to get out of here. I need to end this relationship. I need to quit this job. I need to move across country. I need to get a grip. I need to go on a diet ... so, the behavior. Most conditioned human beings are just simply cycling around in that all of the time. With most of the time being spent in story. Which is the argument, of course, for meditation. It’s meditation that gives us the greatest opportunity to have a break in the story and have a chance of seeing what else is possible for us.

GS: That brings me back to my original question. To rephrase, what can be possible for us?

CH: Everything. Authenticity. Genuine life. Life living us. All our hopes and dreams. All of the goodness of life. Everything we’ve always wanted and intuitively suspected was possible. All we need to do is get out of that horror story of conditioned mind and life is available.

GS: Then one actually has choice.

CH: One no longer cares about choice, because life is so busy providing us with more than we can ever imagine is available to us. Choice, who cares. Like they say about weather in Chicago, you don’t like it now, wait fifteen minutes. Life is that way. Don’t like what’s going on? Well, fifteen minutes from now it’s going to be different.

GS: An endless parade of nows in front of us.

CH: Exactly so. To have an opportunity to be present for that is just as joyful as a human being can be. Wonderful.

GS: So what is this drama that we get locked in?

CH: If somebody gave me the assignment of making up life and I were intelligent enough to do such a thing, I would make up exactly what is. Here’s the way it is. We can live in ignorance and delusion for as long as we like and when we want to end suffering we can simply wake up and end suffering. We can walk around thinking we’re somebody going somewhere and that we’re going to get something and that we’re important and this is meaningful. When we get tired of that, we can wake up, find out who we really are and live joyfully. What a deal! You don’t have to. Nobody makes you. You do it when you’re ready. If you want to whine and say “Oh, it’s too hard, I can’t,” that’s OK, too. There are plenty of opportunities.

GS: Do you think that it’s necessary to have, say, an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, a sitting kind of practice, or can you find the silence at any given moment at any time of the day?

CH: In truth, the question that you’re actually asking is what does it take to get to this point that we’re talking about? If you like to swim, you can swim on all kinds of levels. You can go four times a year to the lake and you can join the local YMCA and swim a couple of times a week. But if you want a gold medal in the Olympics, you better find the best coach that you can find, get to where that coach can coach you and devote all of your time and energy to your swimming. Awareness practice is exactly the same.

GS: It’s interesting that you bring up a sports analogy, because the way I see it is that all of sport is about getting into the zone on purpose. It’s all about getting into the moment.

CH: And it’s all about letting go of the person who cares, who wants it for Me. When that happens it’s like shooting that basket in basketball.

GS: In terms of sport being used, I think it’s a good way of reaching people that may not be as interested otherwise.

CH: A sports analogy is great, but I could just as easily say that you wash the car for the car. Wash the dishes for the dishes. Not because it’s my house and they’re my dishes and it’s going to reflect on me and it’s my job and how’s it going to look if I’m not doing it well. Just wash the dishes for the dishes, because we’re in this together.

GS: What are you going to be doing in Chicago?

CH: It’s really funny because I do exactly the same thing everywhere.

GS: You just call it different things. That’s quite an admission. I probably shouldn’t put that in print.

CH: Oh, sure you should. It’s no secret. I tell people straight up.

GS: I think that’s one of the most fascinating things ... about how simple it all really is.

CH: Oh, yeah and how difficult we can make it. How much we can suffer unnecessarily.

GS: My favorite bumper sticker is Eschew Obfuscation. Have you seen that? That’s what’s been done to metaphysics, the truth, perennial wisdom ... people think that they have to read a thousand thousand-word books. Which is exactly what we’re trying to get away from.

CH: Exactly. That’s why we make it so complex. Because then this little subtle point has to be explained by me. Rather than let’s all just lay it out there and say the same thing over and over. In saying the same thing over and over we say, yes, of course we all know it. Yes we know it ... now practice it. Knowing it is not the challenge, living it is the challenge.

GS: The intellectual knowledge comes pretty easy.

CH: Surely, because intellectuals are attracted to it. In fact, I think that’s an old Confucius saying, a three-year-old child knows this but an 83-year-old person can’t live it.

GS: I oftentimes ask people in interviews, what’s cutting edge for you now, what are you working on now? And I know you’re going to come back and say that you’re working on the same thing you’re always working on.

CH: Yeah. And I quite frankly don’t consider it work. I consider it being.

GS: Lay out the essence of the teaching, of what it is that people need to get.

CH: You want me to do that now? I think I just did.

GS: (laughs) That’s great!

CH: Just be here in the moment and go where life takes you and enjoy the journey, enjoy the process. We are such a privileged country full of people. We have everything that everybody has ever wanted and we manage to make it miserable. So the Buddha, when he looked at this said, “Old age, sickness and death, how can a person be happy when it’s always leading to that?” My take on that is that we are a nation of people who in youth, health and life can be miserable. We need to just stop it. Come back to the breath. Get into this moment. Realize there’s nothing wrong and have a good time. It leads to great kindness.

Cheri Huber has been a student and teacher of Zen for 30 years. She is the author of 17 books including There Is Nothing Wrong with You, The Fear Book, The Depression Book and, available in May 2003, When You're Falling, Dive. She has been acknowledged as the country's foremost expert on depression and spirituality. Cheri is the founder of a Zen center and a monastery in California. She leads workshops throughout the U.S. Visit http://www.cherihuber.com

---

Next Article