Street Level Zen: Effect

"It's not that the wind is blowing. It's what the wind is blowing."

My friend Brent.

[Who informs me now that he originally got this mot d'ordre from comic Ron White.]


(Photo of dust storm swallowing Phoenix, AZ courtesy of Wikipedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Street Level Zen: Passive Karma

“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.”

Jonathan Safran Foer


(Photo courtesy of Greg Rosenke and Unsplash.com.)

Good Video: A Disquistion On The Nature Of Idiocy

"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?', and if they would, I do not do that thing."

This is the opening statement in the above-embedded excerpt from a Northwestern commencement address by Illinois governor JB Pritzer. It caught my ear because it reminded me of my own rule of thumb: Nothing stupid is Buddhist. Listening further, I found similar agreement with several more of the governor's insights. Take this one:

"The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel."

Been relying on this one since childhood. Beware: it's not just for those you dislike. For example, though I long binned ideology as the only thing dumber than dogma, I live mostly on the left. And these days, I'm surrounded by fellow travellers who believe focussed cruelty is an effective retort to racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, sexual predation, a catch-all crime called "insensitivity", and literally any other arrogance conceivable by monkeys. And so they ramp about, rightwinging anybody they can spin into a target.

Which is why I'm uneasy in their company. Because without you're an idiot, you know that sooner or later, by that standard, we all hang.

The governor does have a somewhat outdated view of our evolution, however. As I recently explained, far from securing our survival, we had to skim our ancestors' reptilian instincts off the gene pool to avoid them scrubbing us. But Pritzer is exact when he points out that empathy and compassion are evolved states. They are in fact seminal to our extraordinary run on this planet.

So the cruelty so fashionable to this era can't be forgiven as innate. The vicious make a conscious human choice.

No natural selection there. Just a mountain of karma.

Anyhow, I won't spoil the rest of the video for you. It's an excellent – one might say, prophetic – 3 minutes, that quite stands on its own.

Be sure to note Governor Pritzer's closing declaration. That we've so long allowed cultural authorities to teach us and our children the opposite reflects poorly on our own selective fitness.

I respectfully propose that reversing this trend is the essence of engaged Zen.

Hermit Nation

For some years I've enjoyed sporadic correspondence with a fellow Zenner in England. After a few less-than-uplifting experiences with her Zen teacher, she's decided to try the hermit path, and asked me for a little sanghic perspective. Inevitably, the exchange ended up clarifying some things in my own mind as well. (Hence the value of sangha. As any teacher will tell you, helping others helps the helper.) So I thought I'd excerpt a bit of that conversation here, to spread the support around.

The sister in question is feeling the pull of her nature, though uncertain she can sustain a solitary practice, or that it will prove as fulfilling as the organised model. At the same time she feels like the institution doesn't respect her – that it views her as an isolated failure that must be repaired, or in extremis, rejected. That has led her to question her teacher's "never hermit" stance on alternatives.

As always, I didn't advocate any path to her, since I lack comprehensive knowledge of the facts and entities in play, and anyway, it ain't my karma at risk. But on this issue of only-ness, I felt compelled to give witness.

And so I wrote the following, with allowance for judicious editing:

As is frequently the case, I've been struck by the similarity of our life paths. We are, as I often say, a nation. This is very hard for the gregarious to grasp.

Although the neo-traditional Zen institution views people of our nature as unevolved or learning disabled, the fact is we are and always have been a demographic. One unserved by the innovated monastery model.

The same one that gave us the Buddha and Bodhidharma, to name just two.

And we seem to be coming out of the closet in greater numbers since the Boomers – great believers in authority, their market stance notwithstanding – began their slide into irrelevance.

Hermits don't necessarily seek isolation from others – I don't – but most of my adult life I've lived in rural areas; was raised in one, and have chosen to live in others when choice was mine.

But we live in a time when the rural areas that used to be despised by the urban and urbane have become chic, and they're clearing us rednecks away so they can take our land. It's a big topic, and for me, a painful one. Reminds me of the age of enclosure, and the segmenting of the European countryside into landed estates, which was the driving force that colonised the New World. 'Cept there's no place for us peasants to go this time.

From a practice perspective it doesn't matter much; you can be a hermit anywhere. But my preference is to be comfortably buffered from the rest of my species, and to be in daily contact with what remains. And that's harder to achieve in town.

As for your musings on Zen, I quite agree on all of them. Most of us find, when we encounter each other, that we've had similar experiences, received similar openings, and have much to offer each other in the way of teaching and support. We're the Buddha's only given monastic model, but formal Zen teachers (as well as those of other faiths) are great ones for saying that an unsupervised monk will quickly go off the rails and begin spouting bizarre, self-serving nonsense.

Which happens, of course, but not more often than it does in the Institution. And the result isn't crazier or more dangerous. From where I'm standing, it's clear that ordination is a risky state that few survive. Whereas my formal eremitical practice of assuming I understand nothing, mixed with a disciplining lack of social acceptance, has done a pretty good job of keeping me in my lane.

Anyway, when you mention Zen masters who run their monks as servants, that's my immediate thought. As a hermit, I can't imagine anybody cleaning up after me. Aside from the presumption, there's the fact that cleaning up my own messes is central to my practice; confronting chaos, accepting the necessity of soiling and breaking things, understanding how entirely I participate in universal entropy.

I suspect teachers who don't settle their own accounts have forgotten how unimpressive they are; given their working conditions, they can't help it.

As for me, "I'm nobody" has been my breathing mantra for twenty years. And I still think I'm the lead character in a movie from time to time; that tells you how much harder ordained types must have it.

Any road, society creates us, through a sort of petty terrorism, and at some point we just shrug and pull on the robe, to its great indignation. It's one reason I won't accept spiritual authority from other humans. I'm sometimes asked to address groups about Zen, and I always start by pointing out that I've never been ordained by anyone but my mother, that I have no unique understanding of anything, and that the next Zenner they meet will probably tell them I'm wrong about everything.

And I finish by telling them that anyone who says different about themselves is lying.

We hermits are a very diverse crowd – if we can be said to be a crowd – but I suspect all of us would agree with that last statement, at least.


Robin

(Photo courtesy of Matt Sclarandis and Unsplash.com.)

Good Movie: An American Christmas Carol

"Life is cause and effect. And you certainly are no stranger to the cause."

So says the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, aka the Quartermaster of Karma, in 1979's An American Christmas Carol.

As a Dickens scholar, this made-for-television movie – currently available "free with ads" from YouTube, as well as on DVD – puts me in an awkward position. It's from the 70s. It's American (more or less; we'll come to that). It's inspired by, though not entirely based on, a Dickens story that was already fine to begin with.

And it's also better than the source material in several important ways.

That's right, I said it.

From the top, let's put away one common fallacy: AACC is not a version, adaptation, or update of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It's written as if the writers had never heard the Dickens story, were handed a one-paragraph synopsis of the plot, and told "Go!'. And everything about it works, from the concept, to the casting, to the wintry grey Canadian locations.

In it, Henry Winkler is one Benedict Slade, American boy, grown up through a harsh if unexplicated late 19th century childhood into wealth and bitterness. And now he's floating in the sea of suffering known as the Great Depression, and hogging the lifeboat all to himself. And damned sure he has every right.

The plot's rural New Hampshire setting is brilliant; a small town works much better for this than London, which may come off like a small town in Dickens, but it's not. A provincial miser is not only more conspicuous than an urban one, he's also in a stronger position to influence outcomes, for good or ill. And as a stage for rationalised selfishness in the face of full-spectrum need, the Dirty Thirties are a no-brainer.

Even more gratifying is the way the film's writers have amended certain shortcomings of the Dickens story. Slade quotes economic theory as if it were God's (or even science's) word. And after conversion he remains gruff, laconic, socially awkward, and highly competent, rather than becoming a loony old fool. Finally, the changes he makes are much more realistic and uplifting.

For our Mr. Slade doesn't wait for the new year, or even Boxing Day, to pitch in to the possible. He's out there in the piercing Christmas morning cold, rousting Thatcher, his much-abused clerk, out of his own heartbroken home and forcing him back to work.

Yet somehow Thatcher – whom Slade promises a tidy overtime – doesn't seem to mind, as he drives his employer, Grinch-fashion, from house to blighted house across a bleak landscape, returning and refinancing repossessions. One of which includes a family's freakin' woodstove!

In the midst of a New England winter!

In sum, Benedict Slade is simply much more interesting, and more believable, than Ebenezer Scrooge. (Sorry, Chuck!)

The cast, all but three of whom are Canadian with accents intact, is brilliant. The other two Yanks – David Wayne and Dorian Harwood – are particularly solid in their respective pivotal dual roles. In the Canadian box we have R.H. Thomson's sensitive turn as Thatcher (who apparently has no first name), Friday the 13th's Chris Wiggins as the man who saves young Benedict from an even grimmer future, and, in a rare early appearance… Luba Goy! Look for her in the bonfire scene at about the 1:14:30 mark. Fifteen seconds later she will shout "Eighty-five!"

And, gosh Henry Winkler is outstanding! Young actor, playing a character aging through multiple eras, giving as nuanced a performance as you'll see anywhere. I particularly like his take on Slade's soul. The complex old codger is neither stupid nor ultimately a coward; even in petulance you see a glimmer of irony in his eyes. He knows he's running a scam. On himself as much as the others.

For all this, AACC suffers surprisingly in some corners of the Reviloverse, usually at the hands of people who know little or nothing about Dickens or the original they claim to prefer. Some are offended that the lead appeared in a sitcom. Should any of them stumble in here, perhaps they might meditate on the difference between an actor and his character. As a Zenner might put it, "Whose name is in the credits?"

Not that there aren't some bona fide holes, of course. Of these the worst is the protagonist's age. As we learn, Slade was in his 30s during the Great War, so he couldn't be much more than 55 in the Depression. Yet Winkler's made up twenty years older than that.

And that's a shame, because a Slade just starting to anticipate the last act of his life would have been a richer premise.

There are smaller humbugs. The writers didn't grok inflation. The sum raised at a war bond drive is breathtakingly high in-world, to say nothing of the bids offered at a Depression auction. And for this country boy, the sight of workmen wrestling a hot iron stove – still smoking! – out the door in their leather gloves was not only surrealistic, it amounted to another missed opportunity. How much more dramatic to use 2X4s – the way that's really done – to carry a family's warm literal hearth away over Ontario's frozen December snowfields.

But none of that depreciates the work. I'm astonished to hear commentators sneer down this truly worthwhile experiment as "the dumbest Dickens adaptation ever".

First of all, it's not; I could write a book about the total crap passing for Dickens out there.

And second, it's not. As in not Dickens. It's a little different, and a little better.

So this holiday season, give An American Christmas Carol a stream. Unless you're as bitter as Benedict Slade, you'll be glad you did.

The Final Precept

In the early days of my monastic practice, a Franciscan friend shared a bit of his acquired wisdom with me:

"You should only ever take a vow if you're already doing that anyway."

Sounded a bit paradoxical at the time, but as I've since learned it's exact.

People tend to take vows (or precepts, as we call them in Zen) as a declaration of intent – generally, to abstain from some urge they would otherwise indulge. And this negative emphasis – "I will forgo", rather than "I will accept" – won't convince your impulses to stand down.

"All you're doing is setting yourself up for failure," according to the friar. "And a vow you don't keep just creates greater discontent, more suffering, and more doubt that you'll have to overcome."

Instead, he suggested, you should vow to do something you've already come to do naturally; a principle you've resolved, if unconsciously, to refer to in future decisions. Then the vow is conscious confirmation of insight, instead of a promise to behave as if you already have insight you don't in fact have.

It took me years to grasp fully the truth of this teaching, but like all good resolutions, it came when needed.

In my case, the precept in question was the one governing my sexual life. I should state up front that I have serious problems with the role sex plays in my culture, the importance it's conceded in our ethical and spiritual domains, and the superstitions we weaponise to enforce them.

Thus I was reluctant to address the issue at all, as a red herring, when I was working to found an authentic Zen practice to free myself from such delusions.

There's also the fact that for me, conduct toward members of the opposite sex has always been governed by my desire for companionship, with the sexual component solidly subservient to that; since puberty I've had zero interest in sex before or in absence of a relationship.

So the very nature of a sexual conduct vow struck me as beside the point – something that doesn't address my problem, and therefore a waste of time.

Finally, the second dependent vow of my Rule clearly states,

I will honour my karma.

And contrary to common Western misconception, karma isn't just the bad stuff that happens to you. So at that time I reckoned that to deny true love, if fell from the sky, would have, to quote the catechism of my youth, "almost the nature of sin".

Therefore, the precept I took was, "I will not initiate courtship." And I gave myself leave to lay even that aside if a solid case for it could be made.

I believe that was wise on my part, especially since adapting that precept to circumstances proved extremely instructive. And particularly because some of those circumstances were ultimately painful and regressive.

Which led me a few years ago to the Final Precept – the big one, the one everybody thinks of when you say "monk".

And by that time, like the friar said, it was really academic.

Because by then I'd meditated for years on my lifelong search for love and belonging, and especially on the sustained train wreck that pursuit of same has been over my lifetime.

I came to the conclusion that the investment was underperforming, and speculated on what might have been gained had I directed those resources elsewhere.

Toward my karma, for example. (If women wanted me, they'd've come looking for me.)

Toward things that have in fact brought peace and purpose. (My relationship with the planet, my Zen practice, the slow but steady opening of my mind and heart to The Great Not-Me.)

And especially, toward my monastic vocation. Of every angle I've worked since birth, it's the one that has consistently performed, without making anything worse. Had I initiated this practice at 16, where might I be today?

Somewhere, that's where.

So I married my Path.

And just like my Christian comrade told me, when at last I took the Final Precept, it was positive – "I will cleave to the path that works" – and not simply "I will refrain from sex", which vow, taken in a vacuum and without clarity, would probably not even stick.

Most importantly, it was moot. I no longer required convincing, and no deep existential temptation threatened my acceptance of it.

Now, when the possibility of courtship flickers, I remind myself that I'm otherwise committed. And that the partner in question is unfailingly faithful.

And there is zero cause to fear either will change.

(Photo courtesy of Chris Yang and Unsplash.com.)

Keeping Up

We're catching a lot of reality these days.

First a plague swept the planet, laying waste to technocratic pretentions of invulnerability.

And now, the global stampede to busted old right-wing pipe dreams has metastacised in the States into an actual overthrow of constitutional governance, complete with federal troops moving on citizens.

It's not just the National Guard (which would be dystopian enough). We're talking the straight-up foreign-country-occupying US Army. Which has already put boots on the ground to occupy its own.

To me, the most telling point in all of this is the fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on it.

Some of those men might have had reservations. One hopes that at least one heart under that oppressive weight of medals was deeply conflicted.

But not enough.

Even Communist China has produced one general who wouldn't march, under identical circumstances, against the civilians he'd sworn to protect.

“I’d rather be beheaded," he said, "than be a criminal in the eyes of history."

And yet the Americans, who love a uniformed sound-bite as much as anybody, have yet to present such an officer.

At times like this, I'm always taken aback by my own disappointment. I like to think I'm over the human race. I've witnessed so much empty posturing, so much crass and conspicuous hypocrisy, that I cannot, in good faith, pretend to have any faith in my species.

And yet.

The fact is, these things go deep. The beliefs you were taught as a small child, the history your elders spun into your bones, are pernicious. You can outlearn them, but you can't unlearn them. Not at the endocrinal level.

In such moments, I meditate on the words of Lily Tomlin:

"No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up."

The call to activism is one I don't feel qualified to discuss; I'm torn between two valid positions on that. However, on another point I rest solid.

When we sin, human beings tell each other "such is the way of the world".

That's a lie. The world is faultless. Such is the way of people, who remain in full possession of their moral autonomy and the necessity of applying it.

We're not like other animals. We're not mindless slaves to nature or instinct, and therefore each of us is empowered to "be another way" at any time.

Which is the flywheel of karma.

As we enter this era of radical – if ironic – unmasking, I would ask the Sangha to consider the following suggestions:

Live in the light of things as they are, as they really are, now and for the rest of your life, and refuse all stories.

Look deeply – and courageously – with every breath.

Remember what you see, permanently, after everyone else has moved on.

This is what you owe yourself.


(Photo courtesy of Vasil Šelechaŭ and Wikimedia Commons.)

Makers Make Makers

So I'm reading Adam Savage's Every Tool's a Hammer, an elaborated meditation on "making", that thing that makers do. (I only recently found out I'm one of these. Before that I was just, you know, making things.)

It's an engaging read; Adam's a philosopher of creativity, and his thoughts on the process of bringing inspiration from concept to object are sangha at its best. Scattered amongst the useful bits of shop protocol, such as the necessity of clamping your work securely so it doesn't kill you, are mindful contemplations on more fundamental topics. Of these, the one that struck deepest is his misdoubt of the "scarcity model".

I've touched on this subject before, but Adam's understanding of it is more concrete. Essentially, he says, some makers work in the assumption that resources are inherently scarce. Therefore, a prudent person hoards them, restricts their distribution, declines to admit surplus or divulge where it is. Adam suggests such people do this from fear that they will run out of whatever they need unless they stop others from getting some.

Nor does he limit his definition to the material. In fact, he scarcely – see what I did there? – mentions physical wealth at all. What mostly aggravates him is spiritual avarice: refusing to help, teach, respect, credit.

I too have often smacked up against this. A classic example is the person who won't share a recipe, on the belief that equipping others to prepare the same dish will steal his thunder. (Note that this excuse rests on two fallacies: that such people won't change the recipe, thereby protecting the author's "patent", and that a cook incapable of outdoing himself is master of anything.) You run into these blocked heads rather often in the work world, were they refuse to teach you their profession, or share trade secrets, or defend your beginnerhood from critics, on the alibi that they're nipping competition that would complicate their lives.

Not that competition doesn't result from a more generous view. But I've yet to see a situation where you can really quash it by cynical means. Childishness on that level, though our culture implicitly endorses it, fences you off from the very resources you yourself must have to compete successfully.

At base, this scarcity model is the origin of the transmission hang-up in institutional Zen. That's the policy whereby only certified "dharma transmitted" gurus are allowed to teach Zen. By extension, all talking about Zen then becomes "teaching", so the rest of us just have to shut up.

To be honest, if it weren't for that second assertion, I'd have no problem with it. "Teaching Zen" puts others at risk, while endangering the teacher's own karma, which is why I'd advise anyone considering it to stop considering it. (And while we're up, if anybody out there takes this blog for "teaching", knock it the hell off before we both get hurt. )

Basically, the fear is that free agents would muddy the water, obscuring access to enlightenment. Trouble is, this scarcity dogma bulldozes 99% of our wealth into a big pile and sets it on fire. So Adam's right: such "scarcity" is manufactured.

It also undervalues sangha, as it posits that without certified instruction, students will fall willy-nilly for false and/or abusive authority. I'll see that and raise you this: when the Sangha replaces blind faith with caveat emptor, fools and scoundrels will find us barren ground indeed. Because dharma-transmitted fools and scoundrels abound, shielded by the Confucianism that's crept into our religion over the centuries.

Adam further suggests that far from establishing security, such attitudes actually impoverish. He's right. There is no scarcity of wisdom, insight, or compassion in Zen. We enjoy boundless wealth, in the millions who have trod and are treading the Path in earnest determination. What mind could reject such a windfall?

The essential quandary is not simply that no-one has a patent on the Dharma; it's that all of us are still not enough. We must have what everybody brings to the zendo. Bare minimum.

In biographical passages, Adam recounts many mentors, of various walks and origins, who put up with his beginner pestering, or calmly watched him make mistakes and then told him why his stuff didn't work, and one senior technician whose elliptical teaching method, by Adam's telling, was as koanic as any Ancestor's. All of which has inspired him to give in kind, now that he's a lion of the maker world.

The fact is, the most important thing makers make is makers.

(Photo courtesy of Richard Greenhill, Hugo Eliasand, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Lynch's Law

An old friend last week posted a link to The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture: How Not To Do Social Change, David Brook's timely and incisive denunciation of our current lynch-mob fad. (The link goes to the original NYT post, which may not be available to all. Sadly I was unable to find an unregulated source.)

In it, Brooks relates a recent NPR segment on two members of the punk scene who were tarred and feathered (virtually, so far), then shunned, utterly and irrevocably, by their erstwhile comrades.

The first target, best friend of one Emily, was accused of "sending […] an unwelcome sexually explicit photograph" to a woman Emily apparently didn't know. Emily instantly turned on him, intentionally busted up the man's circle of friends, and effectively destroyed his life. She's had no further contact with this professed "best friend" since.

And then Emily herself was called out, in her case as a one-time cyber bully, having among other things posted a piling-on emoji to an Internet thread mocking a classmate. More than ten years previous. When she was in high school.

She instantly came in for the Adulterer's Special in her own right and was shunned in turn, as deeply and implacably as her apparently irredeemable former friend, by the same crowd she too regarded and depended upon as family.

At this point some may repress a smirk, but it turns out putting folks' eyes out ain't all that tidy, droogies. Witness:

"[Emily's accuser said the act of denouncing her] gave him a rush of pleasure, like an orgasm. He was asked if he cared about the pain Emily endured. 'No, I don’t care,” he replied. […] I literally do not care about what happens to you after the situation. I don’t care if she’s dead, alive, whatever.'"

Let's be clear. In this man's view, death is a reasonable punishment for flippancy. I think the moral here is, vet your allies carefully.

In further justification of his aggression, this individual declares that he was physically and emotionally abused in the past. In response to which my Zen training has taught me to ask: "By her?"

I'll warrant the reply to that one is less erotic.

Although by Emily's figuring she made moral progress between her bitchy teenage years and conscientious adulthood, let's note that her actions at both ages were identical: flush a pariah and move in for the kill.

Perhaps most frightening of all, she even condones her own attackers' behaviour, accepting the Gandhic hotbox she helped build as a righteous reaction to her ostensibly inexpungeable crimes. In other words, it seems she has gained little insight from all of this. She's suffered, deeply and grievously, for nothing.

Which is my definition of hell.

As for her tormentor's delusions, let's crack those right now: victims of injustice are more responsible for their actions, not less. Far from green-lighting cruelty, survival obliges you to stand firmly and publicly against the megalomania and mindless brutality that brutalised you. Particularly when it metasticises into an untargetted orgy.

Some commenters to the article claimed that vigilantism is righteous because duly constituted authority has long ignored, condescended to, even criminalised the victims of social crimes. Basically, "bullies must be bullied because bullies won't bully the bullies who bully the bullies I bully."

Now there's a koan. But the Buddha already solved this one for us, 2500 years ago:

"Blood stains cannot be removed by more blood. Resentment cannot be removed by more resentment."

That there's a paucity of justice in this lazy world is woefully clear. That we can secure it by further injustice is the con of a grifter.

Due process and calm analysis – of everything, including intent and context – are the right and left hands of justice. And empathy is its brain. If after patient and thorough investigation a case turns up weak, the accused is usually innocent, at very least of the precise charge or degree. As unsatisfying as that is to those who burn for payback, there is no other route to a just society.

If justice is truly your goal, you have to get off the sofa and build a system that values and compels it. Which is exceedingly difficult to do. But anything less just triples the injustice.

Bottom line: the karmic benchmark here remains the same it's always been: "Am I different from my enemies? Do I eliminate suffering, or create it?"

It's a tough inquisition, and one I freely own I fail on a regular basis.

But it simply will not do to skip it.


(Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

The Jutting Jaw

Some years ago I heard a story from the Bhagavad-Gita, in which a great warrior is called to battle, only to find himself facing his mother, his father, his best friend, his kindergarten teacher… in fact, everyone he ever knew.

It's one of the most fundamental koans in scripture, drilling into the heart of striving, dependent co-arising, enlightenment practice, and just plain existence.

But today I'm not contemplating the teaching itself. What's rendered me thoughtful for the moment is the reaction I often get when I share it with others:

"So what do you suggest we do, Mr. Sensitive Zen Hippie Guy?"

Such interlocutors are offended I've brought up the fact that everything we have was taken from someone else, and therefore living itself entails constant karmic consequences. Their reflexive response is to shut down discussion of this troubling, muddling scientific principle, before it jeopardises comfortable assumptions.

I often want to respond, "Well, Mr. Jutting Jaw, I've already got my hands full just dealing with my own karma. Suppose you get off your lazy arse and find your own answers."

And I sometimes do.

Because truth be told, jaws jut everywhere. In fact, the entire conservative impulse is nothing but jut. (I'm not just talking about political conservatism, although that is nothing but hammer-headed denial repackaged as ideology. But Conservatives aren't the only conservatives. We all angrily protect our sloth and cowardice.)

The Jutting Jaw has no truck with challenges. It has no time for uncontrolled variables or human complexity, which is why it hasn't either any relationship with logic, justice, or ethics.

The Jutting Jaw doesn't wait for facts or elaboration. Its motto is, "Bitch first, and if anybody asks questions, bitch louder."

It is a convicted advocate of Lynch's Law.

The Jutting Jaw is in you, and it's in me. It flounces out whenever I hear something I don't like, stomps in every time I'm accused of insufficiency or insensitivity or an ulterior motive I don't actually have. (And sometimes one I do.)

The Jutting Jaw generally signals itself with a distinct nervous tic: it begins most sentences with "Well" or "So". "Well, if that's the way you feel about it...", "Well, then, why don't you just...", "So, I guess you'd rather...". When you hear that, lay a quick wager. 'Cos jaws gonna jut.

It's the sarcasm that tells you your opponent isn't actually talking to you, or that you're not talking to her, or both. Because the argument – such as it is – addresses a point that hasn't been made.

So you're arguing with someone who's not there.

Which'll get you arrested on any street corner.

Insofar as this chip-on-the-shoulder brittleness opposes clear-seeing – and for that matter reason, morality, and sanity – I move we each weave dejutification into our practice. Let's engage to make reasoned, nonreactionary arguments, when we make any at all. Further, let us take a precept not to put words in others' mouths.

It's unsanitary.


(Photo of Gustav Vigeland's Sinnataggen courtesy of Lisabeth Wasp and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Brick

Throw up a brick. Christians will try to pray it away, but it will still come down. A Buddhist can decide he's no longer a brick-thrower, but that one will still come down.

Practice is not about precepts. It's about skilful action.



(Adapted from 100 Days on the Mountain, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)

Tough Love

Once, when I was in Grade 2, my teacher had all of us save our milk carton from lunch. Afterward we folded it into a flower pot, filled it with dirt, and planted a single bean in it. Then we lined up our little pots on the windowsill and waited.

To nobody's surprise, within a week each had produced a shoot. Our teacher then divided us into groups and issued new orders. Group Number 1 got to leave their bean plants in the sun and care for them as usual, but everyone else had to stop watering theirs, relocate it to a closet, sit it on the radiator, or the like.

I was ordered to put mine in the refrigerator.

What happened next remains as vivid to me as this morning.

I have a loving, if independent, nature, and in the few days I'd been tending it I'd conceived an affection for the bright green tendril striving upward. I also wasn't a moron. What seven-year-old doesn't know what happens to a living thing in the faculty room fridge? Years later, as a teacher myself, I could have prepared a better lesson plan than that during passing period. Using nothing more than what I had in my desk.

On a Friday afternoon.

I hung back as the rest of my group came forward, hoping she wouldn't tally us. But she did.

"Robert?" she demanded. "Where's Robert? Don't you have a plant?"

I mumbled the affirmative.

"Bring it here."

I hesitated, carton in hand.

"Do you hear me? Bring it here."

"But…" I stammered, barely audible. "I don't want to kill it."

"What?" she snapped, incredulous.

I raised my eyes.

"I don't want to kill it."

At this point my teacher pitched what can only be called a power tantrum. "Oh, I see!" she snarked, enraged beyond self-respect. "Everyone else is participating, everyone else has to do what they're supposed to, but Robert (her voice dripped) doesn't want to kill his!

"Everybody look at Robert! He's not like us! He's special!"

I began to sob, and she continued to demonstrate why I have so little respect for authority. (And possibly why my attitude toward women was for so long uncharacteristically hostile.)

"You put that bean plant on the cart THIS INSTANT!" she commanded.

I did. But I didn't stop crying for some time.


Half a century later, I'm just starting to catch a whisper of public commentary about the state of empathy on this backwater planet. Not much. Not enough. But a few writers, here and there, are beginning to question the fitness of our souls to ensure our continued survival.

Empathy is the defining human strength, the single advantage that pushed our fangless, clawless arse to the top of this heap.

But we have a knotty relationship with the stuff of our success. The "toughness" and "courage" we admire in leaders and ourselves amounts most often to cruelty, self-centredness, and indifference. Those who betray a glimmer of "weakness" – empathy, compassion, sophistication, humanity, evolutionary superiority – are abused and ridiculed. The rest of us are conditioned to look on silently.

Which is why empathy needs claws and fangs.

In my life I've consistently been punished more severely for empathy than for cruelty. When guilty of the latter, I've been disciplined; when the former, I've been humiliated, ejected, and blacklisted.

Therefore, it's increasingly critical that decent, fully-evolved human beings learn the difference between insensitivity and just pissing others off. We must refuse to pipe down when advocating forgiveness, generosity, and the objective analysis of karma, regardless of sneers and threats. The alternative is what we already have, what's killing us progressively faster: government by the least human. Whether national, local, or in some grade school classroom.

Most importantly, we must actively patrol the state of empathy in our communities, and teach future generations to honour and protect their own evolved souls and defend those of others.

So check it out, bitch: this entire species depends on the beans we produce.

Stand aside, please.



(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson. New Life [photo] courtesy of Juanita Mulder and Pixabay.com.)

Sufi Tale

A traveller paused in a forest clearing beside a stream, where a dervish sat meditating.

Sipping from his waterskin, he saw the dervish rouse and scoop a wasp from the stream's surface. But as the holy man transferred the insect to the bank it stung him; flinching, he shook it back into the water.

Taking a breath, the dervish reached for the wasp again; again it stung him before he could get it to the bank.

The traveller watched this scenario repeat itself several times. At last, seeing the holy man reach into the stream another time, he could contain himself no longer.

"Baba!" he exclaimed. "Don't do that! It will only sting you again!"

The dervish raised an eyebrow.

"It's the wasp's nature to sting me," he said. "And it's my nature to save it."


(Painting by unknown Indian artist, circa 1630, courtesy of the British Museum and Wikimedia Commons.)

Getting To The Point

Like most Western Zenners, I come to this practice from a life of emotional trauma. More than once, I've stood at that point where you realise, after a long, desperate march, that the cause is lost; there's no going back, or even holding on. You can only let go, and let karma happen.

What comes next, if you practice attentively, is insight and growth, but that instant of acceptance, when you see it's all been delusion, is sacred. (If only in hindsight.)

ELO's Getting To The Point expresses that state perfectly. Founder Jeff Lynne's goal for his appropriately-named Electric Light Orchestra was to bring classical music sensibilities to pop – which is why the execution here is so reminiscent of Beethoven. His song texts, tolerated largely to carry the melody, were correspondingly fatuous for the most part. But this one reads like Japanese poetry, riding a dramatic score to devastating effect. Throw in a masterful flourish of wailing sax, so emblematic of the power balladeers (Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Mark Knopfler, Gerry Rafferty, Don Henley) of the late 70s and 80s, and you've got ELO's most moving song.

Which is either ironic or prescient, given that, in eerie echo of another revolutionary British band, it was also the last single they ever released. Sadly, an untimely distribution glitch prevented most people from hearing it, leaving one of pop music's most seminal groups to slip unmemorialised over the horizon.

Until today. Give it a spin.


GETTING TO THE POINT
by Jeff Lynne

It's out of control
Out of control
And there's nothing I can do now
Out of control
Out of control
Spinning softly through the blue now
And look beyond these walls
As the meaning starts to dawn
It's getting to the point
Getting to the point

It's out of control
Nothing I can do
Like a fire that keeps on burning
And nobody knows
What I'm going through
And the thoughts just keep returning
And all you had to say
Was that you were gonna stay
It's getting to the point
Getting to the point
It's getting to the point

It's getting to the point
Where nobody can stop it now
It's getting to the point
Of no return
And all that I can do
Is stand and watch it now
Watch it burn, burn, burn

It's getting to the point
Where reasons are forgotten
It's getting to the point
Where no one knows
And all that I can do
Is say I'm sorry
But that's the way it goes
Getting to the point

Forever is a long way
Forever takes your breath away
I'd like to talk about it
Try to understand
It's getting to the point
Getting to the point
Getting to the point

It's getting to the point
Where nobody can stop it now
It's getting to the point
Of no return
And all that I can do
Is stand and watch it now
Watch it burn, burn, burn

It's getting to the point
Where reasons are forgotten
It's getting to the point
Where no one knows
And all that I can do
Is say I'm sorry
That's the way it goes

It's getting to the point
Getting to the point

The Heart of Karma

Three things you must always say when they are true, and must never say when they are not true:

I'm sorry.
I love you.
You can count on me.

Street Level Zen: Acceptance

"No man can walk out on his own story."

The Spirit of Clint Eastwood...
I mean, the West.





(Photo of real-life Rango courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and
a generous photographer.)

St. Valentine's Kyôsaku 2013

...and in the end
  the love you take
  is equal to the love
  you make.

Lennon-McCartney







(Last line of the last song on the last album the Beatles ever released. Image courtesy of Beatles 4ever Facebook page.)

Suicide: The Cause

(See also Suicide: The Cure.)

A former student of mine recently committed suicide. He was a truly exceptional young man, still in his college years, with a powerful soul that blazed a phosphorescent trail through his community and left a persistent retinal impression.

When I was a teacher there was much talk about suicide and how to prevent it. But I was amazed at the utter lack of insight into the core causes of suicide, and truly alarmed at the rank incompetence of official responses. Virtually all anti-suicide programmes for young people can be summed up by a poster I saw in a middle school counselling centre: a big yellow sun with a smiling cartoon character beneath, and the caption: "Life is beautiful! Don't throw it away!"

I wonder how many kids that poster killed.

For the record, people don't commit suicide because life sucks. They do it because people deny that life sucks. They're in pain, and everything they see and hear defines that as failure. Suicide is not an act of sadness or disillusionment; it's an act of loneliness and alienation.

The fact is, even concentrated individual treatment of suicidal persons is often embarrassingly nugatory. Know why? Because when it's over, we dump these unfashionably-perceptive people back into the same abusive, self-satisfied population that almost killed them in the first place.

So take a deep breath, brothers and sisters, because things are gonna get real.

It's not suicidal people who need treatment. It's you.

Your eternal War on Humans makes this life an unendurable hell. The practice of identifying humanity itself as weakness, and advancing shallow, half-baked ideologies, political, social, and religious, over decency, is deadly to human life.

When you brand someone a "felon" for life and deny her a job, a place to live, the vote, you fill this fishbowl with mustard gas. And it kills, liberally and indiscriminately. Because that's what mustard gas does.

When you meet poverty, sickness, and injustice with pat excuses, employ dehumanising rhetoric to smear their victims, preach and screech about this group and that group, value trophies over solutions and money over morality, you burn up all the oxygen in this Mason jar.

When you make an individual anathema, on any grounds, hold him up to ridicule, mock, bait, and blacklist him, you kill legions of faceless bystanders, though they be far removed from your victim-du-jour.

The suicide epidemic can't be addressed with the simplistic one-to-one arithmetic our plodding culture calls data. But whether or not the link can be easily demonstrated, every time you withhold basic dignity, respect, and forgiveness, you chop up the ties that connect us all. Fear and resentment and hopelessness drive the most human of us out of the herd, where they perish. And sometimes, every so often, what goes around comes home, and someone you love dies.

As for me, I wrote this world off a long time ago, and dedicated the remainder of my time here to transcending it. So today I am commemorating my brilliant young brother's life and death in accordance with my vows, by sitting sesshin on a small uninhabited island. In the course of this day I will perform acts of atonement, renew my commitment to the Dharma, and sit metta meditation for us all.

I'm inviting you personally to join me, by whatever path you walk. Please undertake the struggle to change your heart, and so change your species. Please find the courage to remain calm. Please abandon the wisdom of this world. Please cleave to truth.

And please stop being a mass-murderer.

So here's to you, brave Uncle Francis
When the snowflakes fall, I will sing the blues
And when I think on how you left this world
I will remember how the world left you

Michael Marra

Street Level Zen: Karma

"Time wounds all heels."

Groucho Marx


(Photo courtesy of Mykl Roventine and Wikimedia Commons.)

Birds Know It

Karma is only a bitch if you are.