Originally Posted by
Keith
... I was listening to it as I was driving to work this morning, and Joko offers an equation:
"Being zero = a life of freedom and compassion"
As she explains, zero equals "this very moment," stripped of any baggage or other stuff we may bring to it. Simply living "just this." She said that this is all Zen students really need to know, and I thought this was a nice way of expressing this. Then she said that if we truly lived this equation there would be no way to be unhappy. Okay, I thought, perhaps. But then she said something like since we don't live this equation, since we don’t truly live in this very moment, this is the very cause of every human ill and suffering. If we lived this very moment there would be no ills and suffering. I’m very skeptical of this. Her idea here leaves no room for, for example, child abuse, famine, various forms of oppression, etc.