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Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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Tuesday, September 11, 2007Flowers, in teeth-gnashing conditions Today was a day when life seemed to arrange itself strictly in the interests of promoting frustration. It took 2 1/2 hours to drive to work (it's usually an hour) and just about every annoying thing that can happen at work happened twice.
This is the kind of day when only a sound inner foundation can sustain one's sanity. Time and again I found myself neatly divided between the ordinary frustration, and consequent emotional reaction, of life, and the positive sustenance that a relationship with the inner flow of energy can produce. It reminds me of the remark Madame De Salzmann left us with before she died: "Be there in relation to a force. Then it doesn't matter so much, what happens." Like so many of Dogen's anti-dialectical constructions, which by being both true and not true transcend polarity through unity, the proposition allows us to inhabit two worlds simultaneously: the ordinary world, with its absolute, inevitable, and in fact entirely lawful manifestations, and an inner world that operates under a set of laws more independent of circumstance. There's no escaping conditions. There is no escaping the superficial, ordinary reaction to conditions. There is the opportunity to invest in conditions, to allow them, and our reactions to them, to feed us in a different way. As long as we are acquiring food from conditions, and are aware of that, by relationship to the organism, we are already not so identified with them. So there once again is the value of sensation--for me, in this case, writ large within the context of an ordinary business life. ...My wife Neal just asked, "what is the sound of one tooth gnashing?" I am tempted to try and say something poetically clever to wrap this up, but it's been a trying day, and the brain wants to flake. I think I'll let it. Let us wish together: may any clenched teeth we encounter tomorrow be adorned with the glorious flowers of inner work-! Wednesday, September 12, 2007Depth perception For a moment, writing within this present moment.
Now, perhaps, read within this moment. If you wish. When impressions penetrate into the organism in a different way, we discover what it means for life to acquire depth: not intellectual depth, but a depth born of the sensations that arise within the moment. In sleep, there is a flatness. We don't know that, because when we are contained within flatness, there is no awareness of depth, or even the existence of depth. Depth is love; depth is compassion; depth is sensitivity. Because we sincerely believe we are--at least in part--experiencers and perceivers of these qualities, we make no real attempt to acquire them. We are unable to discriminate between flat land, mountains, hills, and valleys, because we know only flat land, and mistake it for mountains, hills, and valleys. Depth is both within and without: there is only depth. In dividing within from without, we accidentally erase the dimension from our perception. It's only when we reside within and without, simultaneously, that we discover there is such a thing as depth. Depth is alive. If we can find it, depth will not let go of us so easily, because she is a jealous mistress. She has been lonely for so long that once company arrives, she does not want to let it leave. In fact a romance springs up quite readily between depth and Being; surprisingly, depth always keeps her toes in the pool one way or another, once we offer her some water. There is depth within breath; depth within sight; depth within the body and depth within the mind. A cultivation of the expression of depth within Being can begin anywhere. It can begin directly. It can begin now. This morning I came across a further remark in Dogen's Shobogenzo about perseverance which I find compelling: "The Buddha’s supreme and fine truth is to persevere for vast kalpas in difficult conduct and painful conduct, and to endure what it is hard to endure. How can one hope to seek the true vehicle with small virtue and small wisdom, and a trivial and conceited mind? On another occasion he says , "The Dharma seal of the Buddhas is not got from other people." "This right dharma-eye treasury has been passed on in face-to-face transmission by the raising of an eyebrow and the winking of an eye; it has been given with body, mind, bones, and marrow; it has been received with body, mind, bones, and marrow; it has been transmitted and received before the body and after the body; and it has been transmitted and received on the mind and outside of mind." (Nishijima and Cross translation, Book 3, page 53, Dogen Sangha press.) To expound the Dharma is to live within depth. You cannot get this from other people. It arises within, from wells to the roots of trees. Nourished by water, encouragement, and light, flowers bloom and fruits ripen. In this life, every aspect is necessary, every condition sufficient. Today, tomorrow, may we find our depth in togetherness.
confrontation Confrontation carries with it the meaning of conflict, of difficulty, of something to be avoided. Nonetheless, we all recognize that it is sometimes necessary. Perhaps we are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth about ourselves or our lives; we are required to confront an adversary who has a destructive wish; we confront our family members or friends when we disagree with them.
This is all outer confrontation. It pales in comparison to the need for inner confrontation: the moment when we really come up against how we are within, how confused and poverty-stricken our reactions and attitudes are, how saturated with fantasy our imaginations are. Inner confrontation is, in fact, almost constantly required. We need to develop enough presence to police the inner state, to examine each associative arising, to question it ruthlessly. This does not mean to examine ourselves like the Spanish Inquisition. Inner confrontation should never enlist that personal Torquemada each one of us nurses; no, he cannot be invited under any circumstances. The confrontation must instead be a compassionate confrontation, one in which we face our inner state with love, and discover a care-filled willingness to go against the destructive impulses--the immeasurable and unrelenting temptations--that flit through the emotional weather of our ordinary state. I say emotional weather, because what we so often find ourselves locked in struggle with is a powerful emotive impulse of one kind or another. Emotions breed identification. Identification prevents confrontation. If there's no separation from conditions, if we have tilled no soil and cultivated no depth that can offer us a refuge from the temptation of immediate conditions, then we become the conditions. Conditions cannot confront themselves. They require an opposing force--not, however, one that acts through force, which is what we usually deploy when resisting our impulses. Instead there needs to be a solidity, a sincerity. This doesn't have to be a powerful force; what it needs is to be intact. We need to be willing to look ourselves right in the whites of our inner eyes as we manifest. How are we? What are we doing right now? This is what Gurdjieff called the separation of the self from the self. This inner confrontation has an inestimable positive value, as long as it isn't conducted in a belligerent manner. It's very important to avoid the self-deprecation typical of so much of our introspection, to confront even that, and bring something more wholesome to the situation. In the end, we may find we can confront and oppose ourselves with honor, dignity, and respect. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.
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