When enough is enough? And the tragedy of perfection.

The surface and the deep

The idea of life as a journey has merit and deserves thoughtful consideration. A journey begins and proceeds step by step: one step begins, ends, and is followed by the next, which likewise leads to the next until the journey ends. 

Each moment proceeds in the same fashion. With foresight, patience, and endurance achievement is possible. The great tragedy is expecting perfection with each and every step. In a way each step is perfect; it is enough (for that moment).

The Buddha said, “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”  The starting has much to say about the motivation to go at all. Many have no hope. Others become complacent with their bird in hand. Some expect magic of the divine, and still, others lack confidence and fear the risk of the unknown.

It is indeed somewhat terrifying to leap into the unknown when all seems well; when we have ours and others don’t. It is human nature (unfortunately) to take the unexpected treasure we’ve found and run, leaving others to find their own. However, if we are the one who lives in misery and have not yet found that treasure, the story is different. Then the motivation changes from satisfaction to a desire for the hidden treasure others have found, and we have not. 

For most of human history the masses have lived in misery without ever having leaped into the great sea of the unknown; the sea where “things” morph into “no-things:” the only realm where true satisfaction exists, ultimate wisdom and truth reside. The two realms of things and no-things coexist, one upon the other, yet the misery of conditional life remains the province of the known, where truth is a variable bouncing like a ball on the waves of that great ocean. Beneath; deep beneath the waves of adversity is the calm, the tranquil, the root of all that exists above.

“All mortal things have a beginning, and an ending.” Each step, each moment, every-thing; All things are enough; all things are perfect, and yet all things exist together, resting upon the deep of a nothing, which is no mere nothing; It is everything.

Who the heck am I?

The sky of mind

If you’ve been reading my blog, more than likely you’ve come to realize that I’m an outlier. I don’t fit the ordinary categories, and that disturbs some people, but the truth is neither do you. 

What people believe overrides truth nearly every time. I haven’t always been so unorthodox, in fact, most of my life I was just like everyone else: screwed up but not aware there was any other way. So I want to tell you a little bit how I went from normal (and screwed up) to abnormal and at peace.

In 1964 I did a terrible thing: I went to Vietnam as a Marine and killed a lot of people. What I hadn’t bargained for was that it killed me—spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. For years following my two years perpetuating socially acceptable mayhem on my own human family, I suffered greatly and was eventually brought to my knees, so full of despair that on a morning 16 years later I made a decision to either commit suicide or get to the bottom of my unexplained dilemma. Obviously, I made the choice of getting to the bottom of my suffering and this took me into strange lands.

I then went to live in a Zen monastery and subsequently experienced a profound awakening, within both the framework of Zen and Christianity. The result of that dual experience of non-duality opened up a doorway into a realm I didn’t know existed and allowed me to live with peace. I then made a pledge to spend the rest of my mortal life passing on the lessons I had learned. So now I share my hybrid and unorthodox strangeness with whoever has ears to hear and a receptive eye.

I have now honored this commitment by teaching, leading meditation groups, writing (this blog), and thus far six books, the latest of which is Impostor—Living in a world of Alternate Facts, which is available free of charge by clicking here. This is a part of my pledge: To give back what I’ve learned. There are many things I don’t know about and I steer clear of speaking and writing about such things. But I know a lot about transforming your mind, leaving behind a life of sorrow and discovering the wellspring of joy that lives within all people. I write about that, only. If I can pass on that, it’s enough because that can change your life and leave this world a better place.

Bipolar

Manic depression; Bipolar affective disorder is a certifiable mental illness that can mimic something akin to phases of awakening. 

The principle of dependent origination says that everything in life is a reflection of this fundamental principle, and this is illustrated with the broadly known relationship between suffering and enlightenment. 

Bodhidharma said that without afflictions, there could be no enlightenment. The two are linked by the principle of dependent origination. A famous Zen saying is, “No suffering. No enlightenment. Little suffering. Little enlightenment. Great suffering. Great enlightenment.”

In his commentary on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, Chan Master Sheng Yen said that nobody having good dreams wants to wake up. Only when they have nightmares are they eager to do so. The point is that there is a correspondence between the magnitude of both suffering and awakening. The entirety of Buddhism concerns the alleviation of suffering. There is no other purpose for this quest than that. So some reading this may think to themselves, “I don’t suffer so Zen isn’t right for me.”

I have two rejoinders to this observation: (1) not yet, (2) and denial. The “not yet” part realizes that it is impossible to live and not suffer because the fundamental nature of conditional life is suffering. The “denial” part concerns resistance (a form of attachment which creates more suffering). And I am not throwing stones of blame. I too remained in denial too long and paid the price. I wrote about this in another post: The Four Horses of Zen.

Nobody wants to suffer and unfortunately this motivates many to stay in states of denial. The pain is too sharp to bear so we stuff it down and try to go on with life and this can eventually be a large problem because it isn’t possible to keep suffering locked away forever. Sooner or later it seeps out and corrodes our sense of wellbeing.

When you learn to mediate (and practice it) all of that suppressed mental poison gets released, you clean out the pipes and move on toward wholeness. It isn’t fun to lance that boil but it beats living with the compacted aftermath of suppressed suffering. Along the way toward restored mental health there can be wide swings from one depth to the opposite, but this is the necessary result of mental house cleaning. Zen is not a practice for the faint of heart. It’s only for the most desperate and those who exhibit the necessary courage to go through the anguish required to have a life worth living.

Occupy Wall Street expanding to Main Street

The American Spring

What at first seemed like a small and isolated fringe movement in New York City is now popping up across our nation, even in the conservative heartland of Kansas City.

Meghan Whalen, a 30-year-old single mother, said she got involved with Occupy KC because of inequality. “We’re not going to come out of here tonight and say, ‘Okay, guys, we figured it out. This is the one thing why we’re here.’ Because there isn’t one reason. That’s just the truth. People who can’t swallow that and handle that, I’m sorry. There isn’t one reason. There just isn’t.”

She is right. Many overlapping reasons seem so convoluted and twisted together that making sense almost seems impossible. But as Whalen stated so well, it isn’t necessary to figure it all out to realize that something is very wrong, not only in Kansas City but across the globe. What began with the Arab Spring is now metastasizing to everyone’s spring and what is common to all of these is greed, anger, and an unwillingness to just grin and bear it any longer.

The “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra has become a clarion call for survival falling on deaf ears of politicians and captains of industry who are immune to the suffering of those impacted by their own bad decisions. The world’s wealth is progressively more and more concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer; simultaneously, the chronically poor ranks are expanding. These two trends are not unrelated. The sucking machine of greed is depleting the lifeblood required for meaningful solutions.

The pathway to economic contraction is creating a worldwide imbalance with fewer and fewer able to meet nations’ financial needs and more and more in need. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater in the modern era than today. The middle class has been the tax revenue backbone of contemporary societies, which has enabled stability and economic expansion and is rapidly becoming an artifact of the past. The chronic poor’s ranks are expanding, and wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top of the socio/economic pyramid.

No economic system can continue for very long with such imbalance. This disparity is clearly illustrated by looking at the distribution of assets in the United States. Four years ago, 62% of business equity and 61% of financial securities were held by the top 1% of the population. In the same timeframe, 73% of the debt was owed by the bottom 90% of the population, leaving just 5% of the top 1% debt.

This imbalance has resulted in close to 85% of total wealth in our country concentrated in the top 20%’ hands and so little owned by the bottom 20% that it is nearly impossible to measure (.1%). When the gap between compensation for heads of industry is compared to compensation for the people they employ, it is understandable how much concentration is happening. This is not unexpected when you consider the following—In 1950, the average executive’s paycheck ratio compared to the average worker’s paycheck stood at 30 to 1. Since 2000 that ratio has exploded to 300-500 to 1. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the Middle Class is gradually sinking into the abyss.

These conditions of imbalance and injustice have profound effects across the economic and political landscape. It is blatantly obvious that some groups must meet the financial needs of our country. The tax base is disappearing, needs are expanding rapidly due to financing continuing war, growing costs associated with the justice system, costs of entitlement programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, etc.) are about to leap into the stratosphere as the baby boomers reach the age of qualification, natural disasters are coming one after another in rapid succession, unemployment compensation, and other contributing factors too many to identify. In the meantime, vast amounts of money are needed to finance new technologies which would ensure our competitive edge in the world market place, pay for the education and training of our population to compete in that market place and slow down (and hopefully stop) global climate devastation which is making this entire scenario worse.

Washington’s political climate has become so divisive that any clear-headed reconciliation seems beyond the pale of possibility. The population segment who can meet these burgeoning financial needs refuses to do so, and the traditional source (the middle class) can no longer. To counter this rising tide, the wealthy, in ever-growing numbers, are moving their assets off-shore and playing other financial shell games to avoid paying more taxes. To avert financial meltdown by defaulting on our federal obligations, our elected officials have chosen, as they always have, to delay, procrastinate and push the dirty decision making down the road onto someone else’s plate. In the meantime, the opposing forces have both pledged to not cooperate but instead play Russian Roulette with our heads as the target.

Taken as a whole, these intertwined conditions have metastasized to the point that no person, however intelligent or clever, can ever hope to unwind them. This complex perspective is what Meghan Whalen and millions of others sense, but can’t define. And unless we find the source leading to this entangled Gordian Knot, there is little reason for hope. What is that source, and how can we find it? Without being evasive or coy, I am now in the final phases of publishing my next book, which lays out the case. It will be available for sale sometime in the next couple of months. The title is “The Non-identity Crisis: The crisis that endangers our world.”