Like Ash

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Multi-tasking is the great illness of the contemporary world. This disease is a result of attempting to do more with less and not being aware of doing any specific thing at all. It is a prescription for automated sleepwalking.

As workplaces demand more, people rise to the task, or so they believe. They pride themselves in being able to work on several operations at once, believing this will increase productivity and bear fruit in their lives. At home we multitask and fail to be present, not enjoying, just doing more for less.

The value of multitasking is a lie just as sure as the one told by Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman.

In fact, people who multitask do not task at all. They are non sentient robots going through a set of motions and sometime they wake up to discover their lives have all but disappeared, their children are grown and their spouses have found love and comfort elsewhere. Just as Willie Loman did.

Multitasking kills awareness. It anesthetizes the present moment. We do not truly live in this world of splintered attention. We splinter with our attention and become fragments of the human beings we are capable of being.

An old Zen teaching: There is wood, there is combustion, there is ash. It is a mistake to think of these as the same thing or part of a process. Wood is not turned into ash. Wood is wood. Ash is ash. Fire is fire. When we see process, we fail to see what is there before us, just as when we balance a checkbook while washing the dishes and attending to the children fails us from each: we are doing neither of these.

Choose to do less and accomplish more. Be present in your meeting, attend to your child, wash the dish: in each case establish a full presence in the situation. If this requires you to adjust your life, then perhaps less is more again.

In the end, how do you wish to be remembered? The person who was really there or the blur that could not be still?

Be well.

Responsibility

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

The morning newspaper reports that the investigation of the drowning of a child in our apartment complex will be ruled an accident. This stops any criminal procedings. Eyes now shift from criminal prosecution to civil responsibilities and compensatory damages.

An event such as this can create an opportunity for reflection on the many aspects of living and dying, as well as our sense of ethics, its extent and limits.

I believe we are a responsibility-adverse culture. No one willingly assumes responsibility for much of anything from war to peace, from love to hate, from conspicuous consumption to poverty. And I have often wondered why.

My sense is that we have created this situation by refusing to use a balanced and broad enough understanding of cause and effect. Moreover, we have a primitive need to punish those responsible for their part in whatever. So, which turkey wants to raise their head at the turkey shoot?

One of the most valuable teachings I received in graduate school and in life as a social worker was the lesson that all things are connected within systems all interacting in some way and on some level with each other. Complexity is the very essence of life. Zen Buddhists understand this complexity on an experiential level through our practice.

Correction should not be synonomous with punishment. A punitive attitude coupled with a punitive course of action causes us not to accept, enables us to put up a wall, protecting ourselves from further assault. Rather than building more courthouses, more prisons, more armies and weapons, wouldn't it make more sense to invest in treating the conditions which give rise to the problems we face in the universe?

As a priest and former therapist my work is to assist people in coming to terms with their responsibilty in life's choices. Overcoming an individual's fear of punishment is the first and most challenging task. The walls must come down in order for the mind and heart to do its work.

Fear is not a healthy emotion.

Be well.

Good People, Bad Things

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Yesterday afternoon there were several police cars and emergency vehicles practically blocking the place. People were milling around talking and watching and waiting.

A five year old boy was found dead at the bottom of our complexes hot tub. There were lots of people swimmming in the pool adjacent to it. Attempts by several residents failed to recuscitate him and he was pronounced dead 45 minutes later at the hospital just a couple of minutes away.

The morning newspaper reports that there is a criminal investigation in progress.

My sense is that this investigation will focus on parental neglect as the mother was heard asking if anyone had seen her child and she was at the pool with him. We must, it seems, have someone to blame when such things happen.

My heart goes out to this family. Not only have they suffered the loss of a child, but now will suffer an investigation, public opinion, and possible criminal prosecution.

On one hand, this was a senseless and preventable death. Hot tubs are dangerous as the shift blood pressure and people can suffer injury in them as a result. Young children should not be allowed to "play" in them, and certainly not without close and immediate supervision.

On the other hand, holding a parent responsible for not watching a child every moment, or an apartment complex responsible for not having fences and signs and all manner of safeguards, is also a dangerous matter. Both create situations where someone must be held responsible always. Our legal system is flooded with such actions, both civil and criminal.

Left out of the equation often is the indivdual within situation, as well as a good and balanced sense of what the limitations are for us all in protecting each other from ourselves. Children are by their very nature curious and playful. They do not understand risk and have limited capacities for evaluating dangers. Many adults suffer the same or similar limitations. We do things without reading the labels, climb ladders with tons of stuff attached to out bodies, act as if we were flying squirrels and die, then our families sue. There should have been a warning about carrying two six packs, a hammer, a box of nails, a four 2x4s up an unopened step ladder braced against the wall of a house.

As faith based people, inclined toward a moral and spiritual path in life, we must focus our compassion on all concerned. Blame can be, but is not always, compassionate, although action to prevent further harm is. Shoulds and oughts are fine for the sake of discovering ways to prevent another injury, but do no real good in terms of correcting what has already happened. Judgement will not help us here. Good sense and an open heart will.

Our belief is, as insane as it is, that we should somehow be able to prevent every mis-step imaginable and if we don't then somehow we are remiss to the point of criminal culpability. When bad things happen to good people, and we are all good people, we must embrace each other with loving kindness and work hard at letting the judgements go.

Be well.

The One and the Many

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

As we each sit down on our cushions this morning, each of us drops away, the universe seems to enter, and all drops join the sea. The sea is constant, the drops are momentary. The sea is momentary, the drops are constant.

What this means is simple. Everything is both one and many, this one and many is nothing other than words in the theatre of our mind however.

No one, not even the most solitary mountain hermit priest can be separate from anything. No one, not even in the most dense crowd is with others.

We are in each moment and are not in any other.

What does all this cryptic crap mean?

Sit Zazen and discover the truth for yourself.

Be well.

Remembrance

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Some say we should never forget the bad things that happen. They inform us of what humanity is actually capable of, giving us a true sense of our power and a large look at our morality. Some say the past should be a testimony, victims of atrocity should be given a voice. That voice should echo through time.

I am not so sure.

While remembrance serves the above functions, I truly wonder to what end? I know that it has not been particularly useful or helpful for me to retain traumatic memories of combat. Images of killing and death that seem eternally there in technocolor, are easily tripped and like a trip-flare the explode in graphic sensory stereo. Like I really need this in a crowd at Disney World.

We bow our heads and pray. We recite blessings, or mantras, and become synchronous with all history. We sit on meditation cushions or pews in a church or Temple and commune with the Infinite, remembering what is possible, actually what is, just now in this moment. And do what?

Remembrance Days are sort of like Departments of War. Self-fulfilling agencies of tears. I would rather we spend our money and brains on waging peace, finding non-violent alternatives to killing so no other generations need Remembrance Days.

We spend so much effort on such yesterday, so little on today. Its as if our lives are only meaningful when we wrap them in the past. Yet that is like being stuck in the mud. Some of us these days seem to enjoy their old mud, but not me. I want new mud, or more precisely, no mud at all.

Be well.

Home Leaving

With palms together,
Good Morning Sangha,


Home Leaving or Shukke in the Japanese, is about many things but should mostly be understood in its pychological and emotional sense. When we leave home we are literaly leaving behind what we are comfortable with. All of our beliefs, our understandings, our connections near and dear, are left at our doorstep as we walk out into the desert. This preperatory act has been the same through millenia for those who are wishing to discover the deepest truths of existence. The Hebrews left Egypt, Moses left the Hebrews, Jesus went out in the desert for 40 days and nights, Buddha left his palace and wondered in the forests...when you think about it, every hero comtemporary or historical, spiritual or materialist, leaves what they know in order to receive that which they do not know.

There is a relatively new Zen story about this. An American comes to Japan and seeks the teaching of a Zen Master. The Master pours tea. As the cup overflows, the would be student shouts at the Master telling him that the cup is overflowing. The Master replies that the student must be empty to receive the teaching.

So home leaving is about this.

Zazen is home leaving in the present moment. Zazen asks us to sit down quietly and be in the moment, not in yesterday's moment, not in the appearance of being in the moment, not in tomorrow's moment, but this very moment as it is, purely and directly. We cannot do this if we are carrying around our assumptions, our beliefs, and our values for security, or as a blanket or light against the darkness and cold.

To be in the presence of the infinite one must drop away the known and take a cavernous step into the unknown.

Be well.

Transformation, eh?

With palms together,
Good Afternoon All,

Sitting in the Zendo this morning, I lit a stick of incense and sat with it. Some say the incense turns into ash through combustion. Maybe so. But when sitting, there is just sitting. I read this morning that meditation could be "transformational." No doubt, just as burning turns incense "into" ash. But sitting is just sitting.

Incense is incense, burning is burning, ash is ash. Transformation is a mistake. It presumes too much and takes away from the real pupose of meditation which is precisely nothing. So, then, why practice the art of doing nothing? So that we can learn to be present with what is. Perhaps that is, in itself,transformative. Only practice will tell us.

Be well.