Occupy SF, Judgment, and Zazen

Today at noon, there was public meditation at Occupy SF.  I couldn’t make it until 1, and so ended up missing it – but in the hopes of catching the tail end, or meeting some people who might want to meditate a little bit more, I donned a business suit, stuffed my zafu into my bike bag, and biked over. 

I donned the suit because this is about business, and changing the way the country does business.  People who do business could clearly be key players in altering business and banking practices.    If business people got involved in the Occupy movement – movement perhaps being too large a word for this - I think that would make a very big difference.  A collaboration between blue and white collar workers could potentially turn this into a movement.  The biggest goal to shoot for, in my opinion, would be to legitimize the movement as much as possible in order to get to the democratic party and pressurize them, and having business become more of a face in the movement would go a long way in the legitimization game.  

I’ve been sitting on the sidelines of this… hardly following it actually.  However, my political and ethical perspective is that the inequality in wealth in this country, and across the world, is simply one of the ugliest, most detrimental things confronting happiness and prosperity.  With that deeply held perspective, I may seem like someone who would join this struggle, or contribute my energies towards making this a movement.  But when it comes to activism, I feel jaded – I would like to discover a way to facilitate change, but the activism route, at this point in my life, feels off to me.  But that’s a tangent… 

I park my bike and walk into the crowd.  I don’t see anyone meditating anymore.  What I do see are a hundred anarcho-punks and rainbow kids.  As I walk into the crowd, wearing my business suit, many of them look at me and then avert their eyes.  The suit makes me a bad guy instead of someone to collaborate with.

Before arriving, I thought to myself, “even if everyone has dispersed, I’m here, so I’ll meditate for a while on my own.”  But now my judgment kicked in pretty hard: I felt gross in that crowd.  I would have sat down and meditated if I were surrounded by blue collar workers, fellow suits, young adults dabbling in socialism, and practically anyone else…. But this, not only did I have absolutely no interest in, but I had a visceral reaction against.  Not only would it be pointless to sit here, I would feel foolish, even gross… even if a dozen others joined me. 

Sitting zazen, my belief that no one will take a bunch of anarcho-punks and rainbow kids seriously will not change.  My understanding that they don’t have the slightest clue as to how to address this most serious of problems will not change, nor will my feeling that although their political beliefs are sincere, that this is largely a social gathering for them.  I would love to see this group open up and learn how to collaborate with other segments of society, but I also don’t see that happening.  Talking with a few of them, I asked what they considered the demographics of this occupation to be – the response in all three cases was that it was a pretty diverse crowd.  Zazen would not change my perspective that this group has a judgment problem and a hard time looking outside of themselves.  Zazen does help me think better – sometimes far better – and so it contributes to my intellectual understandings.  But it typically doesn’t alter my intellectual grasp of the way the world works, and of how this subculture works.        

But zazen would melt away my judgments against them: that visceral sensation of feeling gross, or foolish, would vanish.  I would feel more openness to sit with them, to spend time with them, to discuss the issues with them.  I may choose not to do this out a belief that my efforts would be better spent elsewhere, but I would have no aversion.  I would still see them as largely naïve, among other negative qualities, but I would not have any negative emotions tied to that.  Rather than feeling pushed away by negative emotions, I would enjoy them as human beings.  This is what I seek: to see things clearly, to love what is, and to offer support to any human being.  I would like to sit zazen more often to develop these qualities.

I think it's important to distance oneself from the scene, in order to make a presence of a different variety felt:  I like this - a meditation on business ethics in Union Square next Tuesday :)

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Hurting

Just a quick post.  Tonight, I hurt someone I care a great deal for.  I lied about something of great importance.  And it may change the special connection we have.  Perhaps trust can be mended, but perhaps not.

My stomach in knots, pacing up and down my room, my impulse is towards zazen.  My God, I want to sit right now.  Please, Lord, let me reorient myself!  Please let me begin to eat more healthily, to develop more healthy habits and desires.  I want so badly to practice right now.  Writing this, I am almost crying, and would be crying if I didn’t harbor emotional blockages I’ve developed to deal with emotional pain.  Certainly crying in my heart, out of shame, and heartache, but also because living a life of strong practice just feels like a fantasy. 

Slowly pacing.  I think of myself as the type of person who would not lie to another, or hurt another.  But this self-concept is not in accordance with reality. 

I do not see myself as clearly as I would like to believe.  I have so many attachments I am not aware of.  I have self-concepts that delude me.  Perhaps I am not even as good a man as I would like to believe.  Zazen and friendship is the best way to revaluate myself.  The first physical tear has finally fallen.  I hope anyone reading this may be filled with a calm love for all that is.      

Not Practicing, Part One

Part one, because not practicing describes my practice more than practice does.  Not practicing is a continuous source of reflection as well as frustration for me.  It’s important to talk about because so many people experience either not-practicing or desiring-practicing.  It seems a particularly pertinent subject for a bodhisattva – not in the sense of a deity, but of a person wanting to support all people in their enlightenment – to consider.

This blog arose partly because I wanted to put a story out there about what it’s like to be young, living in an urban setting, and wanting to practice.  My individual experience is not important, but if it in any way is representative of the experiences of many others, it gains importance.  I’m thirty.  There are many people roughly my age who succeed in practicing.  I know there are far more people such as myself, who very much want to practice, but who have trouble doing so even when every opportunity is given them, as it has been given to me.  And I also know there are even more people who desire to practice, but have never figured out how to do so at all.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that over the years, I have had hundreds of conversations, where at some point, the desire to practice, to have a spiritual path, is raised – by a person who has never been able to figure out even the beginning steps of how to do this.  It is not enough to tell these people, “just go to the Zen Center, they’ll help you.”  It’s truly important to consider how to support this often subterranean, invisible impulse that exists in so many people.  A certain energy needs to be given.  One of the reasons why I feel it’s so important for me to practice is because through my own practice, I can see far more clearly this desire in others, and see how to support them.  It is also fascinating that when my practice is strong, people naturally awaken to and express to me their own desire to practice – even if they have never met me before, and even if I have said nothing.  So our duty to these people is to practice. 

I sincerely believe that, for the sake of all being, I should practice.  (Supporting all being feels stronger to me than supporting all beings.)  I should practice so that others can practice.  As I write this, I realize that many people may consider practice a rather dry word – but it’s deeper than love.  We might seek to cultivate love, and know that our love facilitates the love of others.   But we practice, in part, so that we can deepen our love, and seek to help others practice so that they can deepen theirs.   

Tonight, like most nights, I imagine that I’ll wake up at 4:30, get a cup of coffee, and walk over to the Zen Center.  A few nights a week, I set my alarm.  Midnight rolls around, and I turn it off.  I’m writing this entry at 1am because I have trouble getting to sleep.  My social life is at night, and in addition, night is when I experience the highest degree of lucidity, and get my best work done.   (Early morning – 3-5 AM – also seems to be the time when I naturally experience the highest degree of lucidity in zazen.  I’m not sure why it’s such a special time for my body.)

Two weeks ago, knowing that a friend of mine would be at morning zazen, and having promised her I would come, I was sure I would finally make it – I woke up after sleeping for three hours and decided against it.  The last time I made it was because I had scheduled docusan – a student teacher meeting to discuss practice – which I had scheduled in the morning knowing that it would force me out of bed.  The whole experience was beautiful, but that same night, I was staying up late again.  I an try hard to go to bed early, but it just doesn’t work.  (My mother knows this better than anyone: I’ve never gone right to sleep.)   In the past year, aside from guest student stays, I have only made it to morning zazen a dozen times, and a few of those were when I had simply stayed up all night.  However, zazen in the morning is so special because it’s a great way to start the day – I experience as starting the day on path.  Sitting zazen late into the night is wonderful, but sitting in the morning after having worked all night has always felt a bit off – like I’m bringing the wrong energy to the practice.

Over the summer, I even inquired at the office about staying the night.  As a guest student it felt completely natural to wake up with the community, and I knew that if I slept there, I would flow right into morning zazen.   I sent an email asking if I could come over one night and throw a sleeping bag down on the floor, so no one would have to deal with getting me blankets or washing sheets for me.  I doubted it was a possibility and felt somewhat foolish asking, but I really wanted to sit morning zazen and so I somewhat embarrassedly sent the email, which was replied to in the negative.  I fantasized about trying to secretly camp out on the roof but never seriously entertained that clearly bad, trust-breaking idea.     

In this way, I actually feel closer to Green Gulch.  Last spring I hiked to Green Gulch from the Marin Headlands four times.  The first two times, I arrived for dinner, had lovely conversations with friends, and then surreptitiously hid myself away on the farm and camped out.  Even though I couldn’t hear the wake up bell in the morning, I had no problem waking up.  Folks in the community laughed when I told the story and said that there was no need to be secretive.  "What's the difference between driving in early in the morning and camping out?" And so the following two times, I simply slept out on the deck as I did when I was a guest student there, and woke up with the wake up bell.  On a few occasions since then, when I was aching to sit morning zazen, I’ve ridden my bike up to Green Gulch in the evening knowing that once there I would have no problem waking up and flowing into morning zazen with the rest of the community.  In this way Green Gulch feels more like a spiritual home for me than City Center, and reminds me a bit more of the many Buddhist stories of monks bringing travelers in from the rain or expressing their joy in supporting guests.  And unfortunately, at the same time, part of me doubts whether making this public is even a good idea, as if I still need to act clandestinely in some way, and that feeling makes me feel distant from the sangha.       

Calm, Loving, With Clear Insight

I woke up this morning wanting to write.  I realize that part of writing this blog is developing my identity as a Buddhist – which means to develop my identity in general, really.  So the desire to write is really the desire to develop. 

I have a way of summarizing my spiritual identity.  It used to be, “Seek to be calm and loving,” but it’s evolved to “calm and loving, with clear insight.”  I’m curious to know if other people have ways of encapsulating their paths like this? 

Calm, loving, with clear insight: really, each term encapsulates the others.  In zazen, I become calm: but why is being calm important?  For me, love arises when I am calm, and so I sit zazen to be loving.  When I am calm, or when I am loving, I also see and love what really is – so being calm is important because it facilitates clear insight.  When I have clear insight I love what presents itself.  So there is a strong link between detachment and love – when I don’t desire something to be a certain way, but rather see it for what it is, that opens up the space for love.  This is why that scary word detachment makes sense to me, and why I would seek to cultivate detachment. 

In zazen, when I am involved in the act of noticing, I am often noticing something about one of these three: my attention very naturally moves to noticing outside phenomena and my internal reactions that lead to varieties of calm/not calm, loving/not so loving, and clarity/delusion.  I didn’t realize my zazen was at all ‘focused’ like this until writing.  Perhaps these three features constitute major portions of my internal movement, hence, they would simply constitute what was there to notice.   

Love is something I would hope to talk more about in the sangha.  Do other people also feel love arising from zazen?  Do others also draw these personal connections, from their direct experience, between being calm, loving, and having clear insight?  What does it look like to develop ourselves as loving beings?   To develop love within the sangha?  I suppose that is my real dream, to work together in such a way that we come to love each other. 

As someone whose Buddhism is unconcerned with nirvana, reincarnations, or notions of afterlife and soul, it may seem that bodhisattvahood would hold no meaning for me.  However, I hold it as the ultimate symbol of detached love, of loving with clear insight.  The bodhisattva is the image I hold in my mind when I bring my focus to the matter of loving all being.  Saving all beings drops by the wayside for me.  But loving all beings – and all being – is within our power.  What could be more wonderful than spending a life discovering how to do this, within oneself, but especially with a community? 

The Poles of Writing and Zazen

I have a feeling this evening, a somewhat mystical feeling, that what I need to do right now is to start writing, and just keep writing – about my practice, my life, my academic inclinations.  Like zazen, when I begin to write, everything opens up.  And when I stop writing, like when I stop zazen, everything closes. 

I was thinking of my parents earlier today, because I shared my blog with them.  I wasn’t sure that it would make sense outside of a Buddhist context, but I figured I would share myself.  Thinking of my parents, and thinking about writing, something special happened: I remembered writing as a child, and how much it meant to me, how freeing it was.  I remembered writing as a teenager, and what a powerful emotional outlet it was.  I thought of my late teenage years and my first intellectual explorations, fervently exploring philosophy and religion, filling notebooks with all manner of notes and quotes, mixed with poetry and sketches for performance art pieces and plays I fantasized about performing. 

Thinking of my parents and of myself writing brought me to this feeling of writing as a real home for me, like zazen is a home for me.  Anywhere on the planet, writing and zazen serve as home.  As different forms of home, of spaces of freedom and development, writing and zazen serve as two complementary poles for me.  The pole of writing is that space where I let myself chase down everything, where I pursue and develop all my thoughts.   The pole of zazen is the space, not necessarily of stillness, but of allowing myself not to pursue, not to develop, not to desire.  Zazen is the space where I need do nothing but be with what I already happen to be.  There’s a dialectic between these two poles; going back and forth between them feels like a good way for me to live. 

There’s more that I want to say about both opening and closing in relation to the poles of writing and zazen.  When I wrote my post on dukkha, I had a feeling of opening, of growth, of expansion.  Regardless of how it reads as a post… as a post perhaps it is trivial… that writing, re-written many times, meant for me a small step forward, and that small step was experienced as an expansion that I haven’t had from simply reading about dukkha, or even from talking about it.  Now I know it in some way, I’ve gained some closeness with dukkha via the intimate act of writing, of re-working certain thoughts over and over again. 

When I don’t engage in this process, there is a feeling of being closed, or better, of lacking a feeling of aliveness – like a flower closing when there is no sun.  This feeling of being closed, like my light has faded, is a powerful but also common experience for me – a definitive experience.  The feeling that my light is dim is a major part of how I experience life, a part that I accept, but that I also believe to be an essentially tragic part of life – but a tragedy that can most certainly be solved, although how to do so is not obvious.  My strongest desire in life is to alleviate this feeling and live with vitality – to have relationships, conversations, occupations, to act in ways that produce this growth and expansion that writing brings me.  I have rarely – personally – felt this kind of dynamic growth at the zen center, because I have not had sustained conversations or sustained studies geared towards really fleshing out an idea and making it one’s own.  Many good conversations, yes, and many people I care for… I truly honor the space as one fully dedicated to supporting all members of the sangha in their growth… but this is one thing the classes at the zen center have failed to bring me.  The pole of zazen is strong there, of the creative, intellectual pole exemplified here by writing, I am not so sure.  Both poles are utterly important in order to understand, for example, Dogen. 

It has been for me surrealistically difficult to grow in this way, in this world, regardless of all the institutions whose purpose it is to support us in vital growth and understanding.  Thinking back to all my academic experiences, in which I always passionately desired to learn, I have had only one experience of truly vital learning, and that was in the living room of my first philosophy teacher.  Yes, we drank and talked late into the night, but I have done that a thousand times with a thousand people – what stood out was that he was able to help us really play with, engage, and absorb thinkers like Heidegger.  I truly hope to find a way to learn in such a vital way about Buddhism.  I harbor a hope that, someday soon, I will be able to engage in vital pursuits of learning, with others, as a sangha, in the same way that I engage myself when I write… exploring the nuances over and over again, and thus coming to live and breath and embody an understanding. When people succeed in developing that way together, some form of love tends to occur.  

The complimentary pole of zazen is another variety of opening and expansion.  And the closing that occurs when I don’t sit zazen is another kind of closing.  But enough for now. 

My First Steps Towards Understanding Dukkha

Two weeks ago at Young Urban Zen we read Chogyam Trungpa’s description of dukkha, and discussed the translation of the word as “suffering”, “dissatisfaction,” “a sense of being off, or not at ease with oneself.”  Much of the conversation afterward centered on how striving is connected to suffering, how non-striving is connected to the cessation of suffering, and what “non-striving” means.   

During this last week, while down with the flu, I’ve been considering dukkha. 

I’m usually concerned with historical contextualization: In an academic paper, I wouldn’t assume that dukkha means the same thing from one century to the next, from one land to the next, or from one Buddhist thinker to the next.  But for this, I’m only concerned with my personal relationship to dukkha. What do I feel it to be when I turn inward?

The first two things I notice: first, in zazen I naturally feel dukkha, the feeling pervades my body: I know dukkha through my body.  Second, I have total faith in the fact of dukkha because I experience it as my body.  And third, I have yet no words to describe what I feel dukkha to be, but I think I may make some progress here.  I find it interesting that, despite not accepting any general translation of dukkha, I still feel that my body knows what it is.  Perhaps this is what often occurs in religion – people end up describing their own somatic experiences of various religious categories, reading heaven and hell, spirits, soul (and even body) through body.  And in turn the categories we utilize shape our somatic experiences.  This brings up all manner of hermeneutical questions for me. 

But before the dukkha I know through zazen, that I feel in my body, the dukkha that I do not feel: not only the standard translation as “suffering,” but the way suffering is typically described.   I’ve been lucky to know Buddhism first hand rather than through text, because text alone may have led me to some serious misunderstandings.  I have also been lucky to have encountered the texts I have encountered early on – Gary Snyder first, then Suzuki Roshi, Dogen, and various Zen texts.  I count myself lucky because the way dukkha  is typically described in many contemporary, popular Buddhist books may have pushed me away rather than pulled me in. 

Even Trungpa, who we read at YUZ: “Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do, life contains dukkha, dissatisfaction, pain.  If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it.  If we suffer in pain, we want to escape it.  We experience dissatisfaction all the time.”  Etc, etc.  If this was my first encounter with Buddhism, I would get the impression that Buddhism was created by unfortunate people who walked around the world in a constant state of anxiety, constantly worried that any pleasure they had would cause them to suffer in the future. 

I imagine a common line-by-line reaction to this description of dukkha would be something like this: “Life contains suffering?  Of course!  But if I have pleasure, I enjoy it, I don’t fear losing it.   I know pleasure is momentary.  And if I’m in pain, I accept it, I deal with it like everyone else.  I don’t try to run from it.  Why obsess over suffering like this?” 

So now back to what I feel in my body – to what I trust – and to what I feel may be a misunderstanding of what is meant by these various translations of dukkha that just never seem to hit the mark.  I know that dukkha is a core part of my being, and of human being, but this core part of human being is not a sense of suffering, or the sense that life is not quite right. It is not the sense that things are slightly off, like an imperfect wheel.  If that was dukkha, human beings would be walking around in a state of existential crisis all the time, but we’re not. 

Dukkha as suffering is not the sense of or experience of suffering.  It is not the sense of things not being quite right.  Dukkha is not an experience of suffering, but as a massive, omnipresent, subterranean fact of human life: that our actions, almost in general, facilitate suffering.  It is a fact that underlies all of our activity.  This suffering is not something we are present to, it is not the suffering that is obvious to all.  Rather, it is the insight that every breath I take – a calm breath, an anxious breath – shapes my organism in some way, as does every thought, every feeling, every perception.  And often this “shaping” is in the form of suffering.  Everything – every activity, such as processing a sound, looking at a bird in a tree, or taking a walk – leaves an impression, on the mind, yes, but also in the organism as a whole.  And dukkha is created, enforced in some particular way, by every subtle action. 

Every subtle action in the orchestra of our lives has some effect on our ease or lack of ease in the world.  Dukkha is the fact that most often, our every action enforces some form of lack of ease, some variety of suffering.  And Buddhism is a way of addressing that fact.   

I rewrote this many times before posting it, and feel I have taken one simple but important step: away from dukkha as any kind of sense or experience of suffering, and towards dukkha as the general fact that our actions, in general, facilitate suffering.  This differentiation is enormously helpful to me, although I imagine it sounds rather underwhelming.  But I feel I know have a better grasp of what is meant by 'suffering,' why that term makes sense, and I feel closer to Buddhism for having thought this out.  

On Not Writing

A few weeks, two posts.  It would seem I don’t care too much about the blog, but this is not true.  Tonight, listening to falls first rain, just having fully healed from a week of illness, I reflect on why I haven’t written.  It goes deep.  What is it that keeps me from doing?  Something keeps me from everything from zazen to cooking nice meals for myself and others to working on school projects.  All that I know is that I have trouble doing, in general, and that I have not written because of this more general problem.

I also know this:  When I do succeed at sitting zazen regularly, then it becomes easy to do, to act.  I am curious about why I have trouble acting when I do not sit zazen, and why actions flow effortlessly from me when I do sit zazen. 

I also know that, for me, there is some important relationship between my writing and zazen.  I would like to explore that.  I feel as if writing helps me let go.  Writing actually helps me not be intellectual.  I find that I only feel intellectual when I have not given something my full consideration.  When I give something my full consideration, I just enjoy it and am present with it, I don’t want anything from it.  What I take the time to consider will find a peaceful place in my body, what I do not consider will stay thrashing around on the surface of my mind – in that intellectual place.   So the intellectual feeling, for me, is actually a state of not thinking well, of chatter but not of consideration.  Writing helps me let go of being intellectual, and gives me the freedom to be calm…

Writing and zazen: both help me to process and make peace with the enormous amount of activity in my mind. I think I have trouble acting when loads of unprocessed material pile up, so that is why I have not written!