This Saturday during the second period of zazen, I had to get up from my seat to tell some folks that they could get up and slip out to the beginner's orientation across the street. While up and walking as quietly as I could in the zendo, I thought I'd take a look around and see what folks were doing. I noticed that a lot of folks had their eyes closed. Like, a lot of them. Now, I'm the "ino," the head of the meditation hall. It's my job to maintain a sense of proper decorum in the zendo. I pondered whether or not I should say something. Should I say something after the meditation period is over? During the meditation period? Just forget about it?
After some thought, I decided to say something, figuring that folks who come to a Zen temple might have some interest in the Zen style of meditation. I took my seat, and said, "Excuse me, everyone. It is customary in our style of meditation to keep the eyes about halfway open, so please experiment with this." As soon as I was finished, my heart started beating really fast and my breath got much heavier! I think I had that kind of reaction because for over six years now, I've never said anything during meditation! Really wild stuff. Before I spoke, I had no idea I would have such a strong reaction. Oh, and know that my teacher was up in his room, conducting dokusan (private interview). If he were in the zendo, I would not have said anything, deferring to his judgement.
Rev. Greg Fain of the San Francisco Zen Center gave me a copy of a book called "Sodo No Gyoji: Practicing the Buddha Way - clothing, eating, and housing being in harmony with the Dharma." It's a kind of handbook for a monk's life in the sodo, the traditional Japanese Zen training hall. Now, I've never done sodo training, and I probably never will, but it's still an interesting and helpful book for me because it explains the origins and meanings behind the customs of our Zen practice.
On keeping the eyes open, it says this:
"If someone has grown fully accustomed to zazen by putting in forty or fifty years of practice and has got to the point where they never drop their head in a doze, it is all right for them to close their eyes when they do zazen. For the beginner, not yet accustomed to zazen, sitting should be done with the eyes open. Should they feel tired of sitting for a long time, it is all right for him to alternate the position in which his legs are crossed. This is the authentic transmission that has passed directly down from the Buddha himself."
I think this is neat, and kind of funny. So, I've been doing zazen for about six years. This means, I have at least thirty four years, and possibly even forty four years, before I can even consider keeping my eyes open! Of course, this is all assuming that I never doze off! And I will be a beginner and unaccustomed to zazen until the age of sixty four or seventy four!
How nice! I don't have to be some kind of expert!
I wonder, what other activities are there where one is considered a beginner unless one has done it for forty or fifty years?!
Katagiri Roshi died in the early morning hours of March 1, 1990. Tomorrow morning we'll be doing a memorial ceremony after morning zazen. It'll be much like last year's commemoration - click here for that.
"Rely on the teaching not the teacher" says the first of the four reliances. Indeed, every teacher is unreliable at least in death. What was Katagiri Roshi's teaching?
One of the Katagiri-inspired reflections that I've been doing lately has to do with enlightenment, the central issue of Buddhist practice, imho.
Reading Two Shores of Zen I was reminded about how in some lineages, enlightenment is the only thing. Reading a yet-to-be published manuscript from another line, I was reminded how in some lineages, there is no enlightenment. Or nonenlightenment is enlightenment.
I've got a few things to say about this that don't fit well in this post so I may return to this theme in the near future.
Anyway, in terms of commemorating Roshi and relying on the teaching, it seems to me that in this regard he had a balanced view.
"Of course, enlightenment is important for us," Roshi often said, and because it is important he often focused on daily life as an antidote to spiritual intoxication and to encourage the activity of enlightenment, bringing peace and harmony to our little corner of the world.
In the context of the rampant spiritual fascination of 70's and 80's, this makes sense to me. Maybe if he had lived to this day where enlightenment is mostly poo-poo-ed in Zen circles, he'd emphasize it more.
So here's a memorial story about Katagiri Roshi's attitude toward enlightenment from the first book I wrote and didn't publish. I searched for the recording of these events but found that none existed. Well, the visiting teacher refused to allow recordings but we recorded nearly everything Roshi ever said. The tape for this talk cut off just before the question below was asked.
I did check with the person who asked the questions and he remembered it very much like I did.
In about 1981, Minnesota Zen Center hosted an important teacher, one of the few Americans at the time who had received dharma transmission. He and Katagiri-roshi led a workshop together. Our guest was big in body and charisma. He walked steadily with his head slightly tilted toward the floor, seemingly pushing the floor like a rolling pin.
During a discussion period with him, Katagiri-roshi absent, a new student asked, “Are you enlightened?”
The room tensed as if a taboo had been violated. The teacher’s chest seemed to contract. His face flushed. “That’s a meaningless question,” he snapped, “don’t ask me such things.”
Why be defensive, I wondered?
The next day it was Katagiri-roshi’s turn to lead the discussion. The visiting teacher was absent. Again, the same man asked, “Are you enlightened?”
“Oh, enlightenment,” said Katagiri-roshi, completely nonplussed. “You know, one day I was at monastery [Tassajara]. So hot. So hot. Almost nobody else came to zazen. Anyway, I went. Sweating. Thinking, ‘How stupid you are.’ Suddenly, just like Dogen-zenji say, body and mind dropped off completely. Then after a while, ‘I’ came back. Ahhh! Then I feel as if I am floating up into the sky, thinking, ‘Now you are a saint.’”
With this Katagiri-roshi flung back his head and laughed at himself, as if to say, “How stupid I am!”
Subhuti said to the Buddha, "World Honored One, in the future will there be living beings, who, when they hear such phrases spoken will truly believe?"
The Buddha told Subhuti, "Do not speak in such a way! After the Tathagata's extinction, in the last five hundred years, there will be those who hold the precepts and cultivate blessings who will believe such phrases and accept them as true.
"You should know that such people will have planted good roots with not just one Buddha, two Buddhas, three, four or five Buddhas, but will have planted good roots with measureless millions of Buddhas. All who hear such phrases and produce even one thought of pure faith are completely known and completely seen by the Tathagata. Such living beings thus obtain measureless blessings and virtue.
From Chapter 6 of the Diamond Sutra
I read these lines this morning to open a seven hour board retreat for our zen center. In terms of working with issues of institutional sustainability, these words spoke deeply to me. However, looking at them now, what stands out is the emphasis on having faith.
Faith doesn't seem, on the surface, to be a heavy teaching in Buddhism. Partly, it's the word, faith, which is probably associated (in many North American minds anyway) with monotheistic traditions. However, I think if you replace "faith" with languaging like "radical trust," then you can certainly find the Buddha lurking about.
I think it's really hard, in this high paced, violent, heavily materialistic world of ours to develop radical trust. All that talk we do about everything having Buddha-nature and how everything is dynamically functioning together sounds great, but often feels like just nice talk when you spend any time reflecting on the relative world of our everyday lives.
The selection above from the Diamond Sutra above points to, among other things, a quality of time beyond the regular notions of time we have. In others words, it's calling for us to develop a radical patience along with that radical trust, while at the same time doing the work to "plant good roots."
At our retreat today, I felt we did a bit of root planting. And I feel like our sangha is at a point now where we can place some sustained work into enhancing and refining our organization for the long term (instead of simply the year to year way we've functioned for the past several years). A wonderful place, filled with potential.
At the same time, the largeness of some of the topics, and the level of effort required to bring about fruition of some of the projects discussed, is calling for us (I believe) to develop both a radical trust and radical patience. Radical trust that we will find the ways we need to go and be able to come together to do what needs to be done. And radical patience in that we need to renounce completely any attachments to outcome.
I must admit that towards the end of the meeting, taking in the whole of what had been proposed, I, as board chair, felt a deep panic. Just an hour earlier, our guiding teacher experienced something similar, and we both had a little laugh about our shared experience there. Together, we resolved to let it go for the evening - to not fixate on what needed to be done next. I didn't completely drop it, as this post probably shows, but I don't feel panic or anxiety at all right now - only interest (curiousness) in the process unfolding as a whole.
My Dharma Brother Uku posted My Buddhist home altaron his blog today and it reminded me of an old story about plastic flowers and Zen Master Seung Sahn. I posted this as a comment on his blog and offer to those who have never read this story before. I have always favored imitation flowers for daily altar use, and have electric candles on my altar, for ceremonies I like real flowers which then go home with participants and guests.
One Sunday, while Zen Master Seung Sahn, who was called Daesŏnsa-nim by his students, was staying at the Chogye International Zen Center of New York. At that time there was a formal ceremony marking the end of one hundred days of chanting Kwanseum Bosal and many Korean women arrived before the ceremony to help with decorations and goodies for after the ceremony, so they had brought with them shopping bags full of food and presents.
One woman had brought a large bouquet of plastic flowers, which she presented smilingly to an American student of Daesŏnsa-nim’s. As soon as he was un-noticed by the mingling group, the student hid the flowers under a pile of coats in one of the guest rooms. Soon after that another woman found them and, with the greatest delight, walked into the Dharma Room and put them in a vase and placed them on the altar.
The student became upset and went to Daesŏnsa-nim and said, “Those plastic flowers are awful. May I take them off the altar and dump them somewhere?”
Daesŏnsa-nim said, “It is your mind that is plastic. The whole universe is plastic.” The student said, “What do you mean?” Daesŏnsa-nim said, “Buddha said, ‘When one mind is pure, the whole universe is pure; when one mind is tainted, the whole universe is tainted.’ Every day we meet people who are unhappy. When their minds are sad, everything that they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is sad, the whole universe is sad. When the mind is happy, the whole universe is happy. If you desire something, then you are attached to it. If you reject it, you are just as attached to it. Being attached to a thing means that it becomes a hindrance in your mind. So ‘I don’t like plastic’ is the same as ‘I like plastic’—both are attachments. You do not like plastic flowers, so your mind has become plastic, and the whole universe becomes plastic. Relinquish your opinion and you won’t be hindered by anything. You will not care whether the flowers are real or plastic, whether they are on the altar or in the garbage pail. This is true freedom. A plastic flower is just a plastic flower. A real flower is just a real flower. You mustn’t be attached to name and form.”
The student said, “But we are trying to make a beautiful Zen center here, for all people. How can I not care? Those flowers spoil the whole room.”
Daesŏnsa-nim said, “If somebody gives real flowers to Buddha, Buddha is happy. If somebody else likes plastic flowers and gives them to Buddha, Buddha is also happy. Buddha is not attached to name and form, he does not care whether the flowers are real or plastic, and he only cares about the person’s mind. Those women who are offering plastic flowers have very pure minds, and their action is Bodhisattva action. Your mind rejects plastic flowers, so you have separated the universe into good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Therefore, your action is not Bodhisattva action.
Only keep Buddha’s mind. Then you will have no hindrance. Real flowers are no problem; plastic flowers are no problem. This mind is like the great ocean, into which all waters flow—the Hudson River, the Charles River, the Yellow River, Chinese water, American water, clean water, dirty water, salt water, clear water. The sea does not say, ‘Your water is dirty, you can’t flow into me.’ It accepts all waters and mixes them and all become ocean. Therefore, if you keep the Buddha mind, your mind will be like the great ocean. This is the great ocean of enlightenment.”
The student bowed and said, “I am very grateful for your teaching.”
. As a means of placating the tax man, I just went through the check stubs I had tossed rather carelessly into a box on the shelf. What I needed was the last stub received before I retired after some 20 years at the newspaper.
There were a LOT of stubs ... some running back to 2006. There were others elsewhere.
And when I had finished and found what I wanted, I took the remaining stubs and put them in a manila envelope -- a big one. It was stuffed to the breaking point.
And as I picked it up and marked it for future reference and then looked for space in the filing cabinet in which to place it it occurred to me:
"Here is a sum total of the amount of time I did not spend with my family." .
Look at the caravan, O guide, all the camels are lined up drunk King drunk, teacher drunk, friend drunk, all else drunk O Gardener, the musician’s thunder brought forth the cloud of the wine-bearer Garden drunk, meadow drunk, rose drunk and thorn drunk O revolving skies how many times upon this path are wayfarer Dust drunk, water drunk, wind drunk, fire drunk The visible is in such state, questioning the invisible yourself spare Soul drunk, and mind drunk, imagination and thoughts drunk I cry out and sing for Beloved; for the Beloved much I care Voice drunk, and harp drunk, plectrum and strings drunk The lone spiritual monk and the wise mendicant Sufi dare Robes and gown tear, through the market place pass drunk Each drunk in his own way, in the limits of his own share O awake and observe how even every cloud is drunk.
Jalaladdin Rumi in the Divan-e Shams translated by Shahriar Shahriari
Okay, here’s my thesis: We were born for joy. I repeat. We were born for joy, that state of happiness, felicity and delight which, often contrary to what may seem obvious, is our common birthright. I know how it can seem contrary to what we may have experienced in our sense of separateness, of isolation, in the face of such sadness as many of us have had to endure. However, even within our isolation we can almost always feel a seed of knowing there’s something more. We find it in our longing for another. We glimpse it in all our desires. The longing itself suggests something we might yet find.
Of course we too often confuse the matter. We have a thirst and we think if we get that object of our desire, our thirst will be quenched. But, it rarely turns out so. Too often, we can’t put a stopper on the desire and it becomes compulsion, either for one thing after another, or for one thing that we return to and return to, even though it never satisfies. Instead of joy we find frustration, and sadness, our sense of isolation confirmed.
Compulsion and addiction are those irresistible and persistent impulses to some action. Those who’ve been caught up in this experience know it can feel like it comes from outside of us. And it can be overwhelming. Much hurt follows when we confuse this longing for joy, for connection, for knowing our true selves with some object outside of us; say sex, or drink, or drugs, or, well, I suspect you can name it for yourself.
But here’s the rub. Those places, sex and drink and drugs and, well, I suspect you can name it for yourself; they can also be gates to the great joy, a leap beyond obsession with ourselves, and through that outside to a place beyond that outside, to a place which is our experience of connection to each other and the great world. This joy is fluid and a constantly renewed discovery that what we should call ourselves does not end with our skin. A persistent metaphor for this knowing is intoxication, a divine intoxication. This encounter is the pearl of great price; it is our own personal discovery of that joy for which we were born.
So, while knowing there are dangers involved, considerable dangers, my own family and the hurt and death which followed depression and addiction bare witness to the dangers; still, I know considering intoxication as a key to a deeper knowing can be worth reflecting on. In fact, I think, we need to.
Every culture knows intoxication, both the sad kind and the joyful kind. And that’s why in some, in fact most spiritual traditions we find cautions and simultaneously calls to our fundamental joy as a kind of divine intoxication. Among the Sufis in particular we find this divine drunkenness as a persistent image. But there are Jewish and Christian and Hindu and Taoist allusions to this, as well. The earth-centered traditions make much of this. Only the Buddhists seem for the most part wary of the use of intoxication as an image of that gateway. A caution we should be aware of. Particularly as some traditions use that smaller intoxication as a vehicle to the larger.
The phrase divine intoxication describes the experience we all can have when we bring our separateness and our unity into our hearts, and it becomes how we see the world. Part of the power of the image of intoxication, is that we have all seen what can go wrong, how dangerous intoxication might be, can be, is. And so, we who have committed our lives to this spiritual enterprise, we all have our stories. Some are helpful, direct pointers. Others, well, perhaps they’re more cautionary.
So, for instance, as most know, I came of age in the nineteen sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area. This all by itself says a great deal about me, more than I can comfortably describe. One area at that uncomfortable edge was how those of us caught up with spiritual questions were as a group enticed toward drugs and religion, and particularly what I like to call techno-shamanism, reconstruction of the shamanic quest as a spiritual discipline. Or, without the gilding, getting high as a spiritual practice.
I was very much aware of what alcohol could do to people. My father’s drunken haze throughout my childhood and the dark consequences for us as a family was something of a caution. But I was on the dumber side of the human intelligence spectrum and I bought the fashionable rhetoric that while alcohol was stupid, pot was delightful, and LSD was sacramental.
It was all very spiritual. The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour was background music, Timothy Leary was in full hedonic swing, and backyard shamans everywhere were mixing up and offering shortcuts to mystical experience at very reasonable prices. There was even a whole literature emerging. In particular I’d read a lot of Aldous Huxley, including his two small treatises on psychedelics, the Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.
I was maybe eighteen when with a small band of friends I dropped acid for the first time. Within twenty minutes the world had taken on some very strange shapes indeed as we wandered through the Anthony Chabot Regional Park in the East Bay’s Oakland Hills. I may not have been the sharpest tack in the box, but I quickly noticed the world was not as I’d previously thought. The wind sang, trees bowed and the grass whispered. Instead of a walk along the surface of things I noticed how I’d fallen through the Rabbit’s hole into some strange, very strange wonderland.
All went pretty well until I looked up into the sky, and felt it open, and open. I peered into the dark night, even though it was a full on California summer afternoon. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Ray Milland in the Man With the X-Ray Eyes. It comes to a bad end when Milland’s character sees into the center of the universe and finds an all seeing eye. If I recall the film correctly, it doesn’t actually say the eye was malign, but as I began to see that eye, I picked up it wasn’t friendly. And I felt that wasn’t a good thing. I peered ever more deeply, beginning to fall into the eye, despair began to envelop me, a smothering cloak.
And then a hand rested on my shoulder and a friend said, “Whoa, James. Look at this.” I turned my attention from the sky, a twirl of light, and saw he was holding a small pebble resting on his open palm. I was entranced with its beauty. As Blake sang, “to see a world in a grain of sand/and a heaven in a wild flower.” Then the kaleidoscope shifted to something else. The next hours were a hobbit adventure wandering through the Shire until the effects of the drug passed away together with the afternoon.
Who knows why things turn out the way they do? For me this psychedelic adventure, although intense, was brief. I had persistent suspicions that chemicals weren’t what it was about. What, after all, does a hobbit walk, or even a malevolent eye watching all, have to do with melding into God, with finding the truth? I suspected strongly what the mystics were describing, which I read voraciously, despite Huxley’s guidance, weren’t the same thing as I was finding in psychedelics. And, so, as most here know, I ended up entering a Zen monastery. The people not strong on intoxication as a metaphor for awakening to who we really are.
A couple of years later when I returned to the world, as it were, the psychedelic era had disintegrated, Haight-Ashbury, the cosmic center, had become a denizen for speed freaks and heroin addicts, and a very dangerous place to visit. The whole enterprise appeared to have fallen into madness, and as far as I was concerned the techno-shaman experiment had failed. I admit I have friends who beg to differ. And, to be honest there was one legitimate lesson I learned from the spiritual use of drugs, and that was the world, indeed, is not how we normally think it is. That is an important lesson. But that’s, near as I can tell, pretty much all the spiritual teachings drugs offered me, and I suspect, offer. And, truthfully, you can find the same lesson by just sitting down, shutting up, and paying a little attention to what’s going on.
We were born for joy. I repeat. We were born for joy, that state of happiness, felicity and delight which, often contrary to what may seem obvious, is our common birthright. And, everything is an intoxicant. Everything. Whether it be a pebble or grain of sand or a friend or a lover or a bottle of wine. However, there are those two kinds of intoxicants, those that diminish us, and those that expand us.
And, this world is so complicated in some ways; the truth is each thing may be either. And sometimes both. So caution. Be careful. We need to live our lives in a dangerous world. But, if we are careful, and if we are just a little lucky, as we give our attention to what is in front of us, strange and beautiful things can happen.
May I suggest, for us, for you and me at this time and this place, the best way to throw ourselves wide, to find that divine intoxication, that joy which the universe has promised us from before when our parents were born is, really, simple enough.
Our guide on this way can be the belle of Amherst, who lived a narrow life, but had a gigantic soul. Her narrow shoulders fit just right through the gate. And she points the way for us.
Look at the caravan, O guide, all the camels are lined up drunk King drunk, teacher drunk, friend drunk, all else drunk O Gardener, the musician’s thunder brought forth the cloud of the wine-bearer Garden drunk, meadow drunk, rose drunk and thorn drunk O revolving skies how many times upon this path are wayfarer Dust drunk, water drunk, wind drunk, fire drunk The visible is in such state, questioning the invisible yourself spare Soul drunk, and mind drunk, imagination and thoughts drunk I cry out and sing for Beloved; for the Beloved much I care Voice drunk, and harp drunk, plectrum and strings drunk The lone spiritual monk and the wise mendicant Sufi dare Robes and gown tear, through the market place pass drunk Each drunk in his own way, in the limits of his own share O awake and observe how even every cloud is drunk.
Jalaladdin Rumi in the Divan-e Shams translated by Shahriar Shahriari
Okay, here’s my thesis: We were born for joy. I repeat. We were born for joy, that state of happiness, felicity and delight which, often contrary to what may seem obvious, is our common birthright. I know how it can seem contrary to what we may have experienced in our sense of separateness, of isolation, in the face of such sadness as many of us have had to endure. However, even within our isolation we can almost always feel a seed of knowing there’s something more. We find it in our longing for another. We glimpse it in all our desires. The longing itself suggests something we might yet find.
Of course we too often confuse the matter. We have a thirst and we think if we get that object of our desire, our thirst will be quenched. But, it rarely turns out so. Too often, we can’t put a stopper on the desire and it becomes compulsion, either for one thing after another, or for one thing that we return to and return to, even though it never satisfies. Instead of joy we find frustration, and sadness, our sense of isolation confirmed.
Compulsion and addiction are those irresistible and persistent impulses to some action. Those who’ve been caught up in this experience know it can feel like it comes from outside of us. And it can be overwhelming. Much hurt follows when we confuse this longing for joy, for connection, for knowing our true selves with some object outside of us; say sex, or drink, or drugs, or, well, I suspect you can name it for yourself.
But here’s the rub. Those places, sex and drink and drugs and, well, I suspect you can name it for yourself; they can also be gates to the great joy, a leap beyond obsession with ourselves, and through that outside to a place beyond that outside, to a place which is our experience of connection to each other and the great world. This joy is fluid and a constantly renewed discovery that what we should call ourselves does not end with our skin. A persistent metaphor for this knowing is intoxication, a divine intoxication. This encounter is the pearl of great price; it is our own personal discovery of that joy for which we were born.
So, while knowing there are dangers involved, considerable dangers, my own family and the hurt and death which followed depression and addiction bare witness to the dangers; still, I know considering intoxication as a key to a deeper knowing can be worth reflecting on. In fact, I think, we need to.
Every culture knows intoxication, both the sad kind and the joyful kind. And that’s why in some, in fact most spiritual traditions we find cautions and simultaneously calls to our fundamental joy as a kind of divine intoxication. Among the Sufis in particular we find this divine drunkenness as a persistent image. But there are Jewish and Christian and Hindu and Taoist allusions to this, as well. The earth-centered traditions make much of this. Only the Buddhists seem for the most part wary of the use of intoxication as an image of that gateway. A caution we should be aware of. Particularly as some traditions use that smaller intoxication as a vehicle to the larger.
The phrase divine intoxication describes the experience we all can have when we bring our separateness and our unity into our hearts, and it becomes how we see the world. Part of the power of the image of intoxication, is that we have all seen what can go wrong, how dangerous intoxication might be, can be, is. And so, we who have committed our lives to this spiritual enterprise, we all have our stories. Some are helpful, direct pointers. Others, well, perhaps they’re more cautionary.
So, for instance, as most know, I came of age in the nineteen sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area. This all by itself says a great deal about me, more than I can comfortably describe. One area at that uncomfortable edge was how those of us caught up with spiritual questions were as a group enticed toward drugs and religion, and particularly what I like to call techno-shamanism, reconstruction of the shamanic quest as a spiritual discipline. Or, without the gilding, getting high as a spiritual practice.
I was very much aware of what alcohol could do to people. My father’s drunken haze throughout my childhood and the dark consequences for us as a family was something of a caution. But I was on the dumber side of the human intelligence spectrum and I bought the fashionable rhetoric that while alcohol was stupid, pot was delightful, and LSD was sacramental.
It was all very spiritual. The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour was background music, Timothy Leary was in full hedonic swing, and backyard shamans everywhere were mixing up and offering shortcuts to mystical experience at very reasonable prices. There was even a whole literature emerging. In particular I’d read a lot of Aldous Huxley, including his two small treatises on psychedelics, the Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.
I was maybe eighteen when with a small band of friends I dropped acid for the first time. Within twenty minutes the world had taken on some very strange shapes indeed as we wandered through the Anthony Chabot Regional Park in the East Bay’s Oakland Hills. I may not have been the sharpest tack in the box, but I quickly noticed the world was not as I’d previously thought. The wind sang, trees bowed and the grass whispered. Instead of a walk along the surface of things I noticed how I’d fallen through the Rabbit’s hole into some strange, very strange wonderland.
All went pretty well until I looked up into the sky, and felt it open, and open. I peered into the dark night, even though it was a full on California summer afternoon. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Ray Milland in the Man With the X-Ray Eyes. It comes to a bad end when Milland’s character sees into the center of the universe and finds an all seeing eye. If I recall the film correctly, it doesn’t actually say the eye was malign, but as I began to see that eye, I picked up it wasn’t friendly. And I felt that wasn’t a good thing. I peered ever more deeply, beginning to fall into the eye, despair began to envelop me, a smothering cloak.
And then a hand rested on my shoulder and a friend said, “Whoa, James. Look at this.” I turned my attention from the sky, a twirl of light, and saw he was holding a small pebble resting on his open palm. I was entranced with its beauty. As Blake sang, “to see a world in a grain of sand/and a heaven in a wild flower.” Then the kaleidoscope shifted to something else. The next hours were a hobbit adventure wandering through the Shire until the effects of the drug passed away together with the afternoon.
Who knows why things turn out the way they do? For me this psychedelic adventure, although intense, was brief. I had persistent suspicions that chemicals weren’t what it was about. What, after all, does a hobbit walk, or even a malevolent eye watching all, have to do with melding into God, with finding the truth? I suspected strongly what the mystics were describing, which I read voraciously, despite Huxley’s guidance, weren’t the same thing as I was finding in psychedelics. And, so, as most here know, I ended up entering a Zen monastery. The people not strong on intoxication as a metaphor for awakening to who we really are.
A couple of years later when I returned to the world, as it were, the psychedelic era had disintegrated, Haight-Ashbury, the cosmic center, had become a denizen for speed freaks and heroin addicts, and a very dangerous place to visit. The whole enterprise appeared to have fallen into madness, and as far as I was concerned the techno-shaman experiment had failed. I admit I have friends who beg to differ. And, to be honest there was one legitimate lesson I learned from the spiritual use of drugs, and that was the world, indeed, is not how we normally think it is. That is an important lesson. But that’s, near as I can tell, pretty much all the spiritual teachings drugs offered me, and I suspect, offer. And, truthfully, you can find the same lesson by just sitting down, shutting up, and paying a little attention to what’s going on.
We were born for joy. I repeat. We were born for joy, that state of happiness, felicity and delight which, often contrary to what may seem obvious, is our common birthright. And, everything is an intoxicant. Everything. Whether it be a pebble or grain of sand or a friend or a lover or a bottle of wine. However, there are those two kinds of intoxicants, those that diminish us, and those that expand us.
And, this world is so complicated in some ways; the truth is each thing may be either. And sometimes both. So caution. Be careful. We need to live our lives in a dangerous world. But, if we are careful, and if we are just a little lucky, as we give our attention to what is in front of us, strange and beautiful things can happen.
May I suggest, for us, for you and me at this time and this place, the best way to throw ourselves wide, to find that divine intoxication, that joy which the universe has promised us from before when our parents were born is, really, simple enough.
Our guide on this way can be the belle of Amherst, who lived a narrow life, but had a gigantic soul. Her narrow shoulders fit just right through the gate. And she points the way for us.
Today is the day I start making my epic journey via PT Cruiser across the United States. Most of my stuff has already been sent ahead. I still have to get together the junk that remains in the house and figure out how to shove it all in the car. Suffice it to say, I really, seriously do not have the time today to write a blog post and really, serously should be doing a whole butt-load of other far more pressing things.
BUT there were 279 comments last time I looked under a posting about a couple clips from a movie shot in Akron in the early 80s. Those of you looking at this on Facebook can go to http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com if you want to see what I'm referring to. Personally, I think it's a big waste of time, so I don't recommend bothering with it.
But in the midst of all this, Gniz, a frequent and often contentious contributor to the comments section, asked the following question:
"People like watching the drama, the soap operas (including me, I'm sorry to admit). I would be curious about your take on why we are SO drawn to these things....I've written about it from my perspective, but it might make a good blog post sometime when you get a free minute!"
This is, of course, the real key question. The specifics of the various arguments going on in the comments section are incredibly trivial. I'm not even sure precisely what is under dispute. But, then again, I have not had the time or the inclination to read the comments in detail. I made a single observation somewhere around comment 210 or so that the whole thing was utterly inappropriate for this blog, though it would be very appropriate on a different internet forum where such things are apparently not permissible to discuss. That is all I have to say about the specifics of the arguments.
But gossip itself is very interesting. If I had time I'd go look this up. But I don't, so I won't. But there is a piece of writing by Dogen that I was introduced to very early on in my practice that gives a list of rules for monks. I was fascinated by the fact that one of the rules was not to gossip. This was right up there with don't kill and don't steal and all that -- if memory serves (and it probably does not). (I may even have included this in Sit Down And Shut Up, I can't remember)
I just finished this very interesting book called The Red Queen, all about the evolution of human sexuality. Or, more specifically, how sexuality has influenced our evolution. Among other things, the author postulates that the human brain may have developed in part as a very efficient gossip processing machine. Meaning, there are areas of the brain that may be specifically geared towards receiving and creating gossip.
The reason for this is that we are highly social animals. Our interaction with our society is key to our survival. Those among our ancestors who were among the biggest gossip-mongers left more descendants and we have inherited this. That's why we love all those magazines and TV shows about celebrity scandals, and also why we are such avid consumers of fiction. Fiction satisfies our need for gossip to a great degree (though, obviously not completely).
From a Buddhist standpoint, following various soap operas and what not that involve other people is a terrific way to ignore what's going on within ourselves. We ignore the crucial matter of examining our own shit by examining and commenting upon other people's shit. In terms of practice, this is a shameful waste of precious time and energy, of which we do not have infinite amounts to waste (sorry, bad grammar, writing fast).
Ultimately what all of this gossip is, is just our brains running through their various programs. That's what they're built to do, so it can't really be helped all that much. But we don't need to play with it and wallow in it. To do so is a bit like scratching a wound instead of leaving it alone to heal as it should. This, I suspect, is why Dogen thought it was so important to avoid.
And that's all I got time for. I suspect the drama in the comments section will not subside for a while. But for the time being I am sticking with my policy of not censoring anything or even screening the comments before they go up. You're free to discuss whatever you like in whatever tone you wish. I'll be on the road for the coming week and unable to even look in on them very often even if I were interested.
New post from yours truly over at Elephant Journal concerning the fact that Bill Maher needs to be either funny or factual when he rants on shit. In this case he fell far short on both accounts and probably should hire a new crack team of douchebags. That being said, “Religilous” was a medicore movie and Bill Maher isn’t even close to the pure sardonic Pure Land bliss that George Carlin (The Bodhisttava of Sarcasm) embodied. Anywho please go check out … and comment on …
