Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordianism

Two posts I made to the Free Spirit Forum today, that may be of interest to FSA members who don't follow that list.

[name and address elided] writes:

> If one of the (reasonable) concerns about FSA and FSG leadership is
> transparency, it'd be valuable to have information like this posted/
> specified, rather than referred to.

I think that the concern with transparency and openness gets to the core of the idea of changing the rules for membership -- because it hits on why people choose to become or not to become members. If people feel that members are not being informed of what's going on and not being given a proper chance to participate in decision-making, why would they choose to become or stay members?

As you may know, the Free Spirit Alliance is considering a change to its Articles of Incorporation to make it easier for people to become members. I've had a chance to review the proposed changes. While I appreciate Cat's work on this, and support the general idea, I have a very serious concern with the following provision of the proposed amendments:

"Any voting member has the right to request that another individual be placed on a ban list and removed from the membership roll. This would be followed by a vote at a meeting after notice has been sent to the individual. A ⅔ majority of all members in attendance, either in person or
by proxy, at that meeting would be required to place an individual on the ban list. In addition, being ejected from one of the Corporation's events automatically places a person on the ban list."

As I read this, since ejection from an event is at the sole discretion of the event coordinator, the FSG and Beltane coordinators can -- without recourse or due process -- strip an FSA member of their membership. However much we may trust the folks who currently coordinate our events, I don't think this is a wise policy.

Unless someone can point out something I'm missing, I must vote "no" on the proposed change, and ask that other members do likewise.

A favorite Zen story about Hakuin:

A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near Hakuin. One day, without any warning, her parents discovered she was pregnant. This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.

A Facebook post by a friend reminded me of one of my favorite Zen stories. This comes from the Korean "Kwan Um" school of Master Seung Sahn, and is told in his books The Compass of Zen and Dropping Ashes on the Buddha. Like many Zen stories, I think that it also has relevance for students of the martial arts and many other disciplines. It goes something like this (this is my gloss on it, not a direct quote from Seung Sahn):

Three centuries ago there was a monk called Sok Du, which means “Rock-head.” As that name indicates, he was not
the most intellectually brilliant fellow. But he had a great determination, and so even though the sutras were beyond him and even sitting meditation was too intellectually challenging, he stayed at the temple doing “working Zen” – laboring in the fields and in the kitchen.

When the master of the temple tried to help him out and asked if he had any questions, Sok Du said, “Well, Master, you are always talking about Buddha. What is Buddha?”

The Zen master answered, “Buddha is mind,” which is a fairly stock Zen answer. But in Korean, “Buddha is mind” sounds a little bit like “Buddha is grass shoes.” And that’s what Sok
Du heard.

Of course this puzzled him, but he was confused by this Zen stuff most of the time anyway. So he stuck with it. “Buddha is grass shoes. Buddha is grass shoes. What’s that mean? I don’t
know, but that’s what the master said. So Buddha is grass shoes.” This was his thought, his meditation, all the time for three years. Buddha is grass shoes.

Then one day, he was out in the hills gathering firewood. As he walked down the path, he slipped and his straw sandals – his “grass shoes” – tore loose and flew up in the air! In that
instant, he had an enlightenment experience.

He went rushing back to the master. “Master! Master! I understand!”

“Oh? Well then, what is Buddha?”

And Sok Du smacked the master on the head with his broken sandal!

“Is that all?” said the master (who was probably used to uppity monks trying to show enlightenment with outrageous behavior).

“My grass shoes are all broken!”

“Ah! Wonderful!” said the master, and burst out laughing.

Knowing that intention and determination are more important than fine points of method, we don’t have to wait for a perfect teacher or perfect circumstances or perfect understanding of technique; we can begin, right now.

Something my friend Heather Kyle posted this morning: ‎"To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition." -- Elizabeth Gilbert

So, that hits me square in the heart right now on a personal level, for reasons some of my friends know.

But it also taps into a general concept that's been floating in my head for a while, at least since Starwood, which I'm filing under the phrase "the quiet side of magic."

Magic, according to crazy ol' Uncle Aleister, is "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." A similar definition is Dion Fortune’s one, oft quoted by Starhawk, that magic is "the art of changing consciousness at will."

The idea of active change is at the heart of these definitions. But lately I've begun to wonder if we're not neglecting the yin side of magic, if by a focus on active change we're missing the more subtle sort of transformation that comes from contemplation and from deep listening.

On the archetypical level, the Magician is the holder of the secret knowledge. How do you get secret knowledge? Ya gotta listen. Even the most active of the archetypes, the Warrior, knows the necessity of listening and observation. Sun Tzu tells of the importance of using spies to listen to the enemy, that "what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge", while Musashi tells us that we must "Nurture the ability to perceive the truth in all matters" and "Be aware of those things which cannot be easily seen with the eye."

But these still suggest that listening is a preparation for action. More and more I'm thinking of the ways that listening itself transforms us. (If we truly listened to the enemy...how long would they remain our enemy?)

And maybe sitting quietly with a yearning can also transform us.

So, I'm trying to listen better. (Yeah, I know: needs improvement!) And I'm trying -- I'm trying hard -- to sit patiently with this yearning, to trust that it's not merely an attachment-to-desire-that-leads-to-suffering, but instead an opening and a guiding.

I recently stumbled across a quote from Hermann Hesse: "[W]e have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness."

What a magic, then, it would be to learn to listen to that homesickness.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: from http://www.jacarandapress.org/writing/poetry/simile.shtml

part I: fill in the blanks of the similes provided

as blue as a saxophone solo
as rough as a rumble strip
as lonely as the first star of the evening
as tall as a basketball star
as talkative as a babbling brook
as eager as a new kid on the team
crying like a hawk
praying like an old Catholic woman
reliable as an American car from the 1980s
as expensive as designer sneakers
as mad as the latest know-nothing politics
milling around like gnats flying on a summer evening
common as sand
regular as someone who eats lots of fiber
as pretty as the last flower in a field
as reluctant as the groom at a shotgun wedding
as smooth as glass
as quick as a match catching fire
running like water down the gutter
creeping like a vine
[there are more in the original, we shortened the list for time]

part II: mix them up

regular as sand
common as someone who eats lots of fiber
as smooth as a match catching fire
as quick as glass
praying like an American car from the 1980s
reliable as an old Catholic woman
as rough as gnats flying on a summer evening
milling around like a rumble strip
running like the first star of the evening
as lonely as water down the gutter
running like a vine
creeping like water down the gutter
as pretty as the first star of the evening
as lonely as the last flower in a field
praying like a match catching fire
as quick as an old Catholic woman
as smooth as a saxophone solo
as blue as glass

part III: craft poem(s) from the mixed similes:

a composite portrait of several women I have known

as pretty as the first star of the evening and
as lonely as the last flower in a field
everyone turns to watch as she goes by
turning like a compass needle pulled by a magnet

she walks as smooth as a match catching fire
talks as smooth as a bebop saxophone solo
everybody digs her but almost no one really gets her
she just might be the first of her kind

There's an aikido group that meets over at the Baltimore Zen Center, Sword Mountain, that I've heard good things about. Since they train on Tuesday and Thursday nights -- the same nights I teach karate -- I've never been able to drop by and check them out in person. But their website has a very interesting description of the relationship between martial arts and Zen: "Aikido is Zen practice under duress, the study of one's self within the context of physical threat".

"Zen practice under duress." I think that we could very much apply that to Seido karate. For those who aren't familiar with Seido, our founder, Kaicho Tadashi Nakamura, very deliberately integrated Zen meditation into our practice.

Having "fallen off the cushion" many times over the years, I've found that some of us need something a little less subtle than shikantaza ("just sitting"). We hard-headed folks need that element of "duress", some literal smacks upside the head to help us wake up. It took me many years of practicing Karate Zen before I was prepared enough to develop a somewhat-reliable zazen (seated meditation) practice, as minimal as it is. Your mileage may vary, of course: I'm an exceptionally unsubtle guy.

On the other hand, perhaps training in "Zen under duress" has the advantage of a more robust result. It's one thing to sit on a cushion in a quiet zendo with incense burning, but how is your practice out in the noisy, stinky, always-pushing-your-buttons world? Karate Zen or Aikido Zen introduces that element of difficulty right from the start.

As an instructor, I'm now at the point where I'm often providing that "duress" for others. For example, last Saturday we had two students testing for promotion at my sensei's dojo, including one young lady testing for her advanced brown belt. This is the last test she'll take here in Maryland -- her shodan test will be at our Honbu (headquarters) in New York City -- so it's something of a big deal. My job, while sparring with her during the kumite portion of her test, was to push her out of her comfort zone, mentally as well as physically; not just to test her fighting ability, but to show her that she's stronger than she thinks, that she can keep her center even under difficult conditions.

That's a lesson she can, hopefully, carry into every aspect of her life.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem from one or more of the following random phrases (from the Urbanite, July 2011):

until the age of 21
a unique selection
white foam churns on the surface
spend less time in their cars

taking a class on sound
no boys allowed
appeals to and attracts the people
the summer of 1919

there is this big panoramic photo on the wall
from a company picnic or a community sports day or something
back in the summer of 1919 or 1929 or sometime back then
over eighty years ago

Sometimes I look at it and
I think "the odds are very good that
everyone in this photograph is dead now"

did some of those strong-thewed young men in their
       running uniforms die in one of the wars between then and now?
Or did they live the serene lives of sages, staying well away
      from history?

what of that girl-woman over on the right side
the one with the fiery look, direct into the camera
standing just in front of her friends
did she quietly marry and
become a dutiful mother?
trying to look through time I can't believe that, no,
I see her wild, an artist of some sort, of life if nothing else,
this world her canvas

a hundred pairs of eyes peer out of the past
at us, their unguessed-at inheritors

i am sure that we are not at all what they expected

According to some teachers, the most fundamental statement in Zen is "I don't know". For example, Zen Master Wu Kwang (Richard Shrobe) tells this tale:

Poep An came to a particular monastery and greeted Master Ji Jang, who was to become his final teacher. Ji Jang asked Peop An, "You're travelling all around China; what's the meaning of your pilgrimage?" Initially, Peop An felt stuck and momentarily all thinking stopped. Then he said, "don't know". Ji Jang responded, "Not knowing is most intimate". Sometimes you'll see this translated as: "Not knowing is closest to it." ...This one sentence, "don't know" or "Not knowing is most intimate", is very much at the heart of our practice.

This idea goes all the way back to the semi-mythical founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, and an interview he supposedly had with the Emperor of China. The Emperor, who had sponsored all sorts of temple-building and sutra-copying, was not pleased with this smart-assed barbarian telling him that this wasn't going to get him reborn in the Pure Land or whatever, and so challenged him by saying, "Who are you?" (I've always read the subtext of that as "Who are you to give me lip, monk?") Bodhidharma's amazing answer was, "I don't know."

Another way of expressing this idea comes from Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

There's a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Data expresses a similar idea: "Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is I do not know. I do not know what that is, sir."

The beginning of wisdom is, "I don't know." What an amazing idea.

Have you ever tried to teach someone something, only to be told, "I know, I know!" I've been on both sides of that one! If I know, then I'm closed off to learning, but if I'm not attached to "knowing," the possibilities are endless.

Let's juxtapose that with a Twitter post from the man behind the recent massacre in Norway. Anders Behring Breivik, the lunatic who killed at least 92 people in what seems to be a politically motivated attack, recent posted this: "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

If we didn't know the context, we might look at that and think it a positive statement about the value of strong belief and determination. But in order to go off and shoot scores of people, Breivik had to "know" that what he was doing was right.

Just a bit of "I don't know" could save a lot of lives.

Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" has the famous lines, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." While perhaps a situation where the best lack all conviction tilts too far, it will always be the case that the wise have doubts, while those who perpetrate violence lack them. You've got to be pretty damn sure of your ideas -- pretty damn attached to them -- to kill people over them.

Here's a Zen story for a hot day. This one is about Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen and one of the most important figures in Japanese religious history. He went to China to learn about Buddhism and Zen (they called it Ch'an over there), and after wandering around met an old monk on a hot day...

It was summer, and very hot. There was a very old monk there working, drying mushrooms. Old and frail as he was, he was spreading the mushrooms out in the sun. Master Dogen saw him and asked him, "Why are you working? You are an old monk and a superior of the temple. You should get younger people to do this work. It is not necessary for you to work. Besides, it is extremely hot today. Do that another day." Master Dogen was young then. The old monk's answer was most interesting and has become famous in the history of Soto Zen. It was a satori for Master Dogen. The monk said to him, "You have come from Japan, young man, you are intelligent and you understand Buddhism, but you do not understand the essence of Zen. If I do not do this, if I do not work here and now, who could understand? I am not you, I am not others. Others are not me. So others cannot have the experience. If I don't work, if I do not have this experience here and now, I cannot understand. If a young monk helped me to do the work, if I were to stand by and watch him, then I could not have the experience of drying these mushrooms. If I said, ``Do this, do that. Put them here or there,'' I could not have the experience. I could not understand the act that is here and now. "I am not others and others are not me." Master Dogen was startled, and he suddenly understood.