Zen, or Something Like It

May 6th, 2007

At the bot­tom of every­thing we do, there will always be this fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: Is it worth the effort?

Is it worth the effort to try and improve one­self, to learn some skill or gain some mea­sure of wis­dom? Is it worth the effort to get to know this per­son? Is it worth the effort to stick around — or to leave? Is it worth the effort to be strong and hope­ful when life can just seem so damn cruel some­times? And should I even get out of bed this morn­ing? After all, what’s it all for, anyway?

The haunt­ing real­ity is that we’re never really sure. We can ignore the ques­tion. We can give a group, nation state, or spir­i­tual leader the author­ity to answer the ques­tion for us. We can even con­front it directly, turn­ing our­selves into meta­phys­i­cal Don Quixotes, los­ing our­selves in a mad and roman­tic fan­tasy that one day we will grab hold of the secret, that once and for all, we will be certain!

But the mon­ster will always lurk some­where in the cor­ner of our minds, wait­ing for signs of weak­ness, wait­ing for us to ask the ques­tion again, this time with­out the pro­tec­tion of an answer. It’s a fran­chise hor­ror movie vil­lain like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. We can fight it off for a while, but it will never truly die. There will always be the pos­si­bil­ity of a sequel.

The next time some­one asks you whether or not you’re a spir­i­tual per­son, check your pulse. Is your heart still beat­ing? You just might find the truest, most gen­uine faith in that space between one beat and the next.

And if so, what sense is there in ask­ing whether you need to be more spir­i­tual or less spir­i­tual or whether you’ve cho­sen the right fla­vor of spir­i­tu­al­ity? Wouldn’t most gen­uinely spir­i­tual peo­ple agree that, so long as it keeps the mon­ster at bay, it is good enough?

If I could make one hum­ble sug­ges­tion, how­ever, it would be to mea­sure any sort of spir­i­tual growth by your capac­ity to feel joy rather than your capac­ity to endure pain.

It’s not that one way is any more cor­rect than the other. It’s just that there are more than enough gloomy lit­tle peo­ple run­ning around, pro­claim­ing that evil is abound, the end is near, and that you need to sac­ri­fice and purify your­self for what comes next. It’s great if such cyn­i­cism works for them, but you must always keep in mind that they really don’t know any bet­ter than you what it’s all about — no mat­ter what their cre­den­tials are or who they pre­tend to speak for. So why not fol­low a path that makes you happy?

Per­haps what­ever it is that cre­ated you requires noth­ing more from you than your will­ing­ness to just do your thing for as long as you can.

For those of us who seek the Truth, God, or Enlight­en­ment, do we seek these for their own sake, or do we seek them because seek­ing is just our thing? After all, the Truth is right in front of us, God is present in us and all around us, and what exactly is hold­ing us back from Enlightenment?

Maybe there is noth­ing to seek. If it makes life seem more worth­while, then seek­ing is, of course, a very impor­tant activ­ity — but the per­son who does not seek is no less spir­i­tual, no less aware of what’s actu­ally going on. Because none of us really knows what’s actu­ally going on. It’s all guesswork.

Could the prover­bial seeker learn a thing or two from the prover­bial couch potato? Sure, he may lack ambi­tion and finesse, but he’s fully absorbed in what he’s doing, and he makes no apolo­gies for it. There’s some­thing sort of heroic and noble about that. He’s fight­ing the mon­ster like every­one else, and he’s not even break­ing a sweat.

This whole thing we’re doing seems fun­da­men­tally odd. Why have any of it? For­get about try­ing to find the mean­ing of life. Rather, ask your­self: what pos­si­ble mean­ing could it have, in and of itself? And behind this ques­tion, you’ll find the mon­ster bar­ing its sharp, white teeth.

I walk along some ran­dom street and hear the splish-splash of rain drown­ing out every other sound. Hun­dreds of strange faces hus­tle about with the most sin­cere impor­tance, each hid­ing an entire uni­verse of mem­ory and long­ing. The street we’re stand­ing on turns upon this gigan­tic sphere orbit­ing around a huge ball of fire that orbits, along with other huge balls of fire, around some incred­i­bly mas­sive cen­ter. That cen­ter is one of many such cen­ters, all of them sus­pended in an incom­pre­hen­si­bly vast pool of noth­ing­ness. In this moment, I know all I need to know about the mean­ing of life. This is it. This, right here, is the answer. I know also that as soon as I try to put it into words, to use it to explain my past or to con­vince myself of any par­tic­u­lar future, that it will dis­ap­pear as quickly and mys­te­ri­ously as it came.

There is a spec­tac­u­lar dance going on here, and I am reminded that no one who really enjoys danc­ing does it for any par­tic­u­lar purpose.

As I look deep into the monster’s eyes, I dis­cover the soul of the sav­ior, for they are one in the same — yin and yang. I see that life springs from poetry as much as poetry springs from life, that there is a cer­tain seduc­tive cadence to it all. I breath in and I feel the begin­ning. I breath out and I feel the end. I see the end become the begin­ning even as the begin­ning becomes the end, and I know!

I know that it’s all mov­ing along as it should. There’s no urgent need for me to fix it, to tam­per with it, to some­how make it bet­ter than it is right now. So far, it has done an alright job on its own. It flows nat­u­rally from one per­fect moment to the next for any­one who cares to notice.

And now, if I sit very still and pay atten­tion to what’s going on around me, I might start to won­der where exactly it is that “I” begin and end. Am I my thoughts? Am I my body? Am I my future or past? Am I the per­son I think I am, or who oth­ers think I am? Am I all of these things? Or am I none of them?

If I dig down really deep to that core essence that has some­how stayed with me, unchanged, through twenty seven years of con­stant change, what will I find? How can it be so famil­iar and yet so elusive?

In silence, beyond words and thought, I touch this essence for the briefest moment, and I am at peace. My eyes open and I look upon the world with a new sense of wonder.

In every face, every tree, every stone, every brush of wind, in the sun­light and in the dark­ness, there is that same essence, unchang­ing and eter­nal, which is found in the depths of my own Self. It is in the rise and fall, in the cre­ation and destruc­tion. It is all things. And it is none of them.

Every now and then, I’m asked what I think heaven will be like, and I always find it to be a very dif­fi­cult ques­tion to answer. To be hon­est, I don’t worry too much about whether there is one or, if there is, whether I’ve been good enough to go there when I die. What I fear is that I won’t know I’m in heaven, that I could walk right through par­adise with­out even tak­ing a sec­ond glance at it. What a shame that would be.

And there’s a nag­ging sus­pi­cion that this is exactly what I’ve been doing for all this time.

So I some­times imag­ine that on some very ordi­nary day, I’ll be walk­ing along and be struck sud­denly by a strange feel­ing. There I’ll be, stand­ing in some famil­iar place, real­iz­ing that I had never rec­og­nized it for what it really was until now. And I will know that I am there.

When that moment arrives, I plan to have a good, long laugh at my igno­rance — and then, at last, to become for­ever lost in the dance.