Saturday, December 23, 2006

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Making an effort

For the last twenty years I have spent a great deal of time in China. I go there three or more times a year and spend weeks at a time working with manufacturers.

Generally speaking, the people there have a lot less than we do (compare the picture to the parking lot you park your car in at work and think it over for a second. This is their parking lot. Big difference, isn't there?) They don't have the privileges, freedoms, possessions and wealth that we take for granted here in the west. Because of this, I think, many of them have a better valuation of what they do and what they earn.

This is clear from their work ethic. They work hard. They work long hours. They work diligently. All of this is especially true of their young people. They are on the whole eager to achieve something real for themselves.

I contrast this to what I see in young Americans. The majority of them seem to me to be listless, lacking in effort. They see themselves as entitled and they feel they have the luxury of as much time as they want to pull themselves together. They are arrogant about the privilege they were born into, and their efforts in life are, sadly, weak.

There is an old saying in the Gurdjieff Work, "weak in life- weak in the work." Another way of putting this is that if one can't even manage to be ordinary, to do ordinary things, one cannot achieve any progress spiritually, because to be effective in an ordinary manner is a minimum requirement if one has any aspirations to being extraordinary. Gurdjieff called it being an Obyvatel, a "good householder." We see it in other practices, too: in Zen, over and over again, when the master points in a direction, it is in the direction of meeting ordinary responsibility: chop wood, carry water.

Just being completely ordinary is the heart of the path.

Our culture has produced a generation- or perhaps two or three- obsessed with the extraordinary. Every event has to be a bigger, better special effect than the one before it. Every car has to be larger, every house designed with more square footage and stuffed with more bigger stuff. Nothing escapes this disease of inflation. Go shopping for household goods: even our towels and potholders are bigger than they need to be.

Marching relentlessly along with it come the generations that that want to be extraordinary before they are ordinary. Chopping wood and carrying water are beneath them. The lie on the couch playing video games or surfing the web, dreaming of how utterly grand they are as they stumble along in real life doing little or nothing. I contrast this to the factories I visit in China, where 18 year olds are hunched over sewing machines making the towels and pillows we are stuffing our big houses with.

They work. We consume.

Perhaps this is nothing more than the standard conceit of youth, but I don't think so. Our media and our culture of outright materialism has manipulated values until life begins to present itself as some surreal form of lottery where everyone is already a winner. America has signed on to a cultural delusion which asserts that we are better than others and don't need to make the efforts they do, because we're so terrific and so special. And, chide the patriotic flags and slogans on our bumper stickers, don't you dare disagree with us!

It's a cult of specialness. Not only do we worship our own specialness but we publicly demand that everyone else recognize it.

Arrogance of this kind leads us into quagmires like Iraq, where we start out by aggressively misunderstanding everything and find ourselves in the midst of confusion and conflict that we measure with denial instead of humility.

Pride goeth before a fall.

This isn't just a cultural malaise. The cancer ultimately extends its crablike limbs into the muscle of our spiritual lives, convincing us that we are better than others. We sleep- we dream- and we do not do enough in an inner or an outer sense. Our essence- the heart of our inner life- becomes an Iraq, invaded and colonized by alien values. Our inner parts implode in tension and warfare.

To take a more active inner stance is needed. As individuals, we have to believe in ourselves, value ourselves, and be willing to work with humility, with diligence, on organizing our ordinary life. Of doing the laundry, washing the dishes, showing up for work on time. Getting the simple stuff done and getting it done effectively.

No one is special. Every last one of us is headed for the same sobering place, no matter how much noise we make and how many fireworks we shoot off on the way there.

It's best we roll up our sleeves, and get down to the daily business of remembering how to be effectively ordinary.

To me, that's making an effort.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

On Christmas Eve

From everything we can gather reading the gospels- an admittedly fragmentary record- we see that Christ, like Buddha, called on mankind to exercise compassion, intelligence, humility- to become aware of himself and his place in his community. To share his food and to meet others not with rejection, but with unconditional Love.

Christ was a revolutionary. He embraced elements of society who were considered beneath contempt- adulterers and lepers and prostitutes- and demanded that others treat them not like diseased pariahs, but like human beings.

Over the centuries mankind has stained and soiled this message of Love, compassion, and tolerance with collectively self-serving misinterpretations and an endless series of crimes which we refer to as "history."

Over time, people have come to blame Christianity for the misdeeds of its adherents. Instead of the adherents being seen as failed Christians, they see Christianity as a failed set of values. Christianity gets rejected- religion itself is rejected.

Think about the arrogance of this for a minute. For a lot of people, Jesus Christ just isn't good enough.

What are we going to replace Him with, I wonder? Our science? Our machines and bureaucracies? The secular values the UN offers us? We've all seen just how effective those things are. They all come from the same level- earth- and nothing from this level can effect a real transformation in humanity. If anything can do that, whatever it is, it will have to come from the level above us.

About two thousand years ago, a woman named Mary was offered an opportunity to help bring a Force down into the planet that actually could change something. She was afraid- but she said yes. She opened her heart, her soul, and her mind and agreed to serve as an intermediary to give birth to this Force which we now call Christ. A Force which offers mankind the opportunity to learn how to act through love. Not the narrow, self serving and egoistic love we batter ourselves and each other with but something much greater. Something imbued with the power to create an entire universe.

Something called Agape. Unconditional Love.

Agreed, we don't know much- if anything- about this thing called Agape, but we can all, if we wish, agree to become students. To try and learn to allow this greater Force, this Light, to act through us, which can only come through the gradual surrender of the cramped little creature we call ego.

Contact with and experience of this all-pervading cosmic Force of Love is the same enlightenment the Buddha called on us to participate in- the Liberation of the Yogis... the Divine Rapture of the Sufis.

Even now, Mary, in her astral presence, is still right here beside us offering to help us open our hearts if we are willing. This not conjecture- it is a certainty beyond faith itself. She lives quietly woven into every moment of the fabric of daily life.

As Jesus said,

Seek and ye shall find.