Work or Play

Effort or Effortless

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

—James Joyce

If you only realized what it takes, what a person has to go through to reach the point of disobedience.

—Jean Genet

You are perfect just as you are, and there’s room for improvement.

— Shunryu Suzuki

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

— Carl Rogers

When you’re free to smoke, you’re free to quit.

—Gangaji

Is spirituality a self-improvement project or is it the end of the whole quest for self-improvement?

Is it about transformation or acceptance or both?

Is there anything to do to awaken from our human suffering or is it simply about suffering fully?

Is there a path, or no path, or is it a pathless path through a gateless gate?

Are we going somewhere else or are we going nowhere (now/here)?

Is the path work or play or both?

Does it involve effort or effortlessness or both?

Is it hard or enjoyable or both?

Is there just one path for everyone? Does it always stay the same? Or is it ever-changing and requiring moment-to-moment sensitivity and listening presence?

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Let me start today by saying that I deleted my recent post expressing my opinion that Biden appears to have dementia and calling on him to step down. As a result, I made a few small changes in the opening paragraph of the next post, What Is Spiritual?, so that it would make sense to future readers. (Those changes obviously appear only in the online version, not in the versions already emailed out.)

I deleted the post about Biden because I realized (once again) that I really don't know the truth of this (or any other) situation. I don't know for sure that Biden has dementia or that he is cognitively incapable of being the president, nor do I know what motivates him, his family, staff or other powerful Democrats to insist that he stay in the race. I don't know if replacing him at this late date would increase or decrease Trump's chances of winning. I also don't know if Biden would be better for the country or the world than Trump.

I have opinions on all of these things, but those opinions are inevitably based on my own limited perspective. I don't really know how the universe "should be" or what "should" happen next. And I realized (again) that my deepest calling is to point beyond partialized perspectives rather than further solidifying and enflaming them.

And although I implied otherwise in my "What Is Spiritual?" post; in fact, I don't feel good about being unkind, nasty or reactive in response to people. Yes, it's ALL part of what is; and yes, it can sometimes shake things up in a good way; and yes, I do enjoy poking holes in the notion that spirituality must always be gentle and soft-spoken and that spiritual teachers should be perfectly behaved, unperturbable, “nice” and never fiery or upset or ill-tempered; and yes, I do still find an important bit of reality in my wild and unruly Charles Bukowski side that flies in the face of convention and upsets the spiritual status quo—but I can feel that my desire to contribute to open listening, healing and love comes from a deeper and truer place than my desire to throw verbal grenades.

Like all of us, I'm very much a work in progress. I'm not perfect, except in the sense that everything is perfect (or complete, or whole) just as it is. And in my work, I endeavor to live and express both sides of this polarity.

Trump getting shot at his rally yesterday highlights the danger in the inflammatory rhetoric on both the left and the right. No doubt Trump played a big part in stirring up that kind of inflammatory rhetoric, but he's also been the target of a great deal of it, and I find liberal leftists often completely oblivious to the ways they participate in this. (And yes, I hear people on the right being equally oblivious to their participation). I see this demonizing of the other on both sides, and I find it in myself. It’s one thing to disagree and to call out what we think are bad policies or dangerous directions, but it’s another to exaggerate, hyperbolize and demonize. The shooting incident left me wanting to turn my attention ever more fully to my deepest calling.

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(Charlotte) Joko Beck was one of my Zen teachers. What follows are selections from several different chapters in her first book, Everyday Zen:

My dog doesn’t worry about the meaning of life. She may worry if she doesn’t get her breakfast, but she doesn’t sit around worrying about whether she will get fulfilled or liberated or enlightened... But we human beings are not like dogs. We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble. If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.

To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won’t keep on that way... If I were to tell you that your life is already perfect, whole, and complete just as it is, you would think I was crazy... And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless. We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life. So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle...

In a way we sit [in meditation] for no purpose; that’s one side of practice. But the other side is that we want to be free from suffering. Not only that, but we want others to be free from suffering. So a key point in our practice is to understand what suffering is. If we really understand suffering we see how to practice, not just while sitting, but in the rest of our life. We can understand our daily life and see that it’s really not a problem...

Complete openness, complete vulnerability to life, is (surprisingly enough) the only satisfactory way of living our life...

We human beings all think there is something to accomplish, something to realize, some place we have to get to. And this very illusion, which is born out of having a human mind, is the problem. Life is actually a very simple matter...

When we are embedded in life there is simply seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, thinking (and I don’t mean self-centered thinking). When we live this way there is no problem; there couldn’t be. We are just that... we are not separate from life... There is nothing to realize because when we are life itself, we have no questions about life. But...

[We] don’t always feel embedded because—while life is just life—when it seems to threaten our personal viewpoint we become upset, and withdraw from it. For instance, something happens that we don’t like, or somebody does something to us we don’t like, or our partner isn’t the way we like: there are a million things that can upset human beings. They are based on the fact that suddenly life isn’t just life (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, thinking) anymore; we have separated ourselves and broken the seamless whole because we feel threatened. Now life is over there, and I am over here thinking about it. I’m not embedded in it anymore; the painful event has happened over there and I want to think about it over here so I can figure a way out of my suffering.

So now we have split life into two divisions—over here and over there. In the Bible this is called “being banished from the Garden of Eden.” The Garden of Eden is a life of unbroken simplicity...

But most of the time we have an illusion that life over there is presenting us with a problem over here. The seamless unity is split (or seems to be)... We seem surrounded by people and events that we must control and fix because we feel separate. When we begin to analyze life, think about it, fuss and worry about it, try to be one with it, we get into all sorts of artificial solutions—when the fact of the matter is that from the very beginning, there is nothing that needs to be solved. But we can’t see this perfect unity because our separateness veils it from us...

That is when we need to understand the practice of walking the razor’s edge. The point at which we need to understand it is whenever we begin to be upset (angry, irritated, resentful, jealous). First, we need to know we’re upset. Many people don’t even know this when it happens. So step number one is, be aware that upset is taking place..

That’s the first step, but it’s not the razor’s edge. We’re still separate, but now we know it. How do we bring our separated life together? To walk the razor’s edge is to do that; we have once again to be what we basically are, which is seeing, touching, hearing, smelling; we have to experience whatever our life is, right this second. If we’re upset we have to experience being upset. If we’re frightened, we have to experience being frightened. If we’re jealous we have to experience being jealous. And such experiencing is physical; it has nothing to do with the thoughts going on about the upset.

When we are experiencing nonverbally we are walking the razor’s edge—we are the present moment. When we walk the edge the agonizing states of separateness are pulled together, and we experience perhaps not happiness but joy. Understanding the razor’s edge (and not just understanding it, but doing it) is what Zen practice is. The reason it’s difficult is that we don’t want to do it... We want to escape from it.

If I feel that I’ve been hurt by you, I want to stay with my thoughts about the hurt. I want to increase my separation; it feels good to be consumed by those fiery, self-righteous thoughts. By thinking, I try to avoid feeling the pain. The more sophisticated my practice becomes, the more quickly I see this trap and return to experiencing the pain, the razor’s edge. And where I might once have stayed upset for two years, the upset shrinks to two months, two weeks, two minutes. Eventually I can experience an upset as it happens and stay right on the razor’s edge.

— Charlotte Joko Beck from Everyday Zen: Love and Work, a book I very highly recommend.

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Love to all…