Small steps.

Often, I’ve found myself faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges and felt as if I needed to swallow the entire ocean in a single gulp. The only result of that approach was fear, inaction, and coughing up the imagined impossibility. 

But after failing, I came to my senses and remembered an ancient bit of wisdom offered by the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, roughly 2,600 hence. 

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” 

The words of Lao Tzu are as useful today as they were a long time ago.

A friend sent me a link to words of wisdom offered by the oldest living person. He just happens to be a Zen man and offered similar thoughts concerning a healthy life. They are worth your time reading. I confess to having a problem with one of his tips: to have no choices but rather accept everything as it comes. 

Like everything, the tip has two sides. One side is the peace that comes with feeling the smooth caress of the winds of change on your face in the coolness of the morning breeze. The other side is to get out of the hurricanes of life before devastation occurs. Those are the two sides spoken of by Lao Tzu in the first sentence of the above quote.

Knowing when to stay and when to leave takes art and experience, and both this ancient sage and the world’s oldest man agree, as I do, that breaking down giant challenges into small pieces makes for manageable tasks. Importantly is that first assessment of staying or moving. To inform that assessment, we can turn, not to an ancient sage, but rather to Mark Cane, the contemporary American climate scientist who advises, 

“The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.”

Regardless, there is always the first, small step or sip of water. Picking and choosing, as well as the wisdom of recognizing our self-imposed captivity, are seeming contradictions, but that is the true nature of Zen: To hold no fixed perspectives but rather use expedient means—upaya-Kausalya, measured and dictated by unfolding and unanticipated circumstances. How very different such advice is from the embedded and rigid ideologies of today.

Crisis—Danger and Opportunity

Who am and who are you? To answer those questions, let’s go try a virtual experience. In your mind’s eye, I want you to see yourself in a movie theater.  You are there sitting next to your favorite movie-going buddy, and the main attraction begins. Make it your favorite of all time. Wow! This is a great movie. You are really engrossed, almost like you are in the film, except for one thing: You aren’t (in the movie). As much as you might be enjoying the experience of watching, you always know you’re not “in the movie.” The film is on the big screen across the room, and you are there in your seat. Two separate things: you (the watcher of the film) and the movie (projected onto the big screen).

If you were to describe that experience to your therapist you’d probably be prudent to avoid saying that you were in the movie. If you did say such a thing your therapist might give you a new name, like nuts and start making out some papers with labels of “delusional.” Please avoid such a report.

Now prepare yourself because I’m going to tell you something too incredible for it to register and you’ll probably want to start making those papers out for me. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a Buddhist—at least as far as I know. Maybe he was. But he did say something very Buddhist. He said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” which paraphrases a statement by The Christ in The New Testament. Many very intelligent people say smart things regardless of affiliation and labels. The occasion was the Republican State Convention on June 16, 1858. The place was the statehouse in the Springfield, Illinois, and Lincoln had just been chosen as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate to run against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. The details of what, where, and when are not particularly germane to my point but I throw them out for you to get the picture. What is germane is what he said during his acceptance speech: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln was of course referring to the Union and the looming cessation by the Southern states. And his point is applicable to who we all are as people.

Many Buddhist sages have said pretty much the same thing but meant it as a definition of reality—all of reality, but in our case, applied to people. Our house—our beingness—also can’t stand when divided against itself. There is no division separating our nameless essence from our physical and psychic being. They are a single, indivisible thing. We are not some name or a nameless essence. We are not a function or a nameless essence. The division is a phantom. It doesn’t exist, except in our illusionary minds, but never in fact. 

The very moment (down to an unmeasurable dimension of time) there is a watcher and there is what is watched. The instant there is something watched, there is a watcher. Watched and watcher arise together. Instantly. Not one first and then the next. They are flip sides of the same coin. And the opposite is true. When one vanishes, so does the other.

Ladders and Walls come into being and cease from being in a flash. They are bonded eternally together as partners and can’t be separated. So what’s this got to do with movies and who we are? Simple—but actually not so simple to put our heads around. What we normally do is imagine our identities, as separate and independent things (rather than linked, interdependent things). We are thinkers thinking thoughts—illusions lost in illusions. We have all kinds of ideas about ourselves. We imagine and label ourselves with Lao Tzu’s “ten thousand things.” And all of these ideas come to be who we think we are. 

When we meet someone we may be asked to introduce ourselves and how do we respond? “I am so-and-so”—we provide a name. What we don’t say is “Oh I am Ms. Nameless.” Either named or a name we call “nameless” is not who we are. We are both—an indivisible house. We are ladders with walls and it can’t be otherwise. You are real. You are not a fleeting and vaporous thought. Vaporous thoughts are just that: thoughts that vaporize. But you are the indivisible Union (Lincoln’s term) of essence and non-essence, otherwise known (in Buddhist terminology) as emptiness and form. They arise and cease together instantly.

One of the central Sutras in Buddhist practice is the Heart Sutra which says “Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness.” Essence and form are glued together. Maybe you prefer to name essence as God. That’s okay so long as you don’t try to conceptualize God as an imaginary being. God is transcendent—beyond defining characteristics (meaning nameless), so whatever handle you use is irrelevant. What is transcendent is bonded together, not two but One. God doesn’t come and go. Coming and going implies movement from one place to another. If you are essence—God is essence—there is no place that you are not, so how can you come and go? 

You’re already here. It is an illusion to imagine these as separate matters like sitting in the movie theater with our movie-buddy, watching a movie. There is no watcher without what is being observed. Nor is there something watched without a watcher. And to watch at all is not possible without the animating spirit of essence. Otherwise, we’re just talking about flesh, bones, blood, and everything that comes along for the ride.

But what happens in normal “everyday life?” We get caught up in our home movies (buzzing brains) and stop being. We replace being with thinking about being. We don’t eat cake. We think about eating cake and eat the illusion. We don’t just sit. We think about sitting and sit on an illusion. We love to multitask and think we are efficient and productive. 

Actually, we are being distracted with no focus. We don’t work at our jobs (which we may hate), so we think about hating the job and think about where we wish we were. We don’t work with our spouses to manage difficulties; we think about everything that is wrong with them and why they don’t do what we want them to. 

Nothing is scared that way. While we are thinkers, we are not be-ers, and there is nobody at home. And because we do that, we experience fear and anxiety. At the deepest part of our essence, we experience separation and lack of intimacy. There is no way we can be intimate with someone we don’t even know, and I am speaking about our own identity—our real SELF, not the illusionary one.

What we need is integration and what we get is self-created division. We have a primordial knowing about our unity (and lack thereof). When our sense of being is based purely on a fabricated self (otherwise known as ego—home movies), we are rightly fearful because that is shifting sand with no stability, just like one-legged ladders without a wall.

When our identities are tied purely to the shifting sands of life, we know we are vulnerable; nobody has to tell us. We know, and it fills us with anxiety and fear. It can, and often does, paralyze us into inaction, like a deer fixated on the headlights of an oncoming car, frozen with fear, desiring to know the next moment and not able to be in the only moment we’ll ever have: The present one. When identity crises arise, there is both danger and opportunity. We can stay in trouble, like the deer, or we can come to our senses and grasp the opportunity. So how do we get out of this trap that has dominated all of humankind since we first arrived as a species? That’s a matter for my next post.