Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Happy?

Happy New Year! I know it’s still a couple days early. So happy end of the year. The end of the year is a big time for depression. And since someone asked me to write about depression, it seems like a pretty good time.

I spent most of my life being depressed pretty much all the time. As soon as I figured out what suicide was, I was planning ways to do it. I can remember having grim thoughts about taking my own life well before junior high school. So depression is something I know about.

I hate guys who tell you about how they cured their depression, alcoholism, lack of direction, bald patches, scurvy or whatever through some religion and then try to get you to sign up for it too. So whatever you get out of this column, please don’t think I’m doing that here. It’s no skin off my teeth if you’re not into zazen. That’s just your loss.

Anyway. By the time I finished high school, I was one super depressed dude. And, of course, I had every reason to be. I was an ugly, awkward, friendless loser with no future. And if that wasn’t bad enough, everyone knew Ronald Reagan was gonna lead us into full-scale global nuclear war before the end of the 80’s while a bunch of ex-hippy sell-outs snorted coke and got rich. This was not a joke. I was absolutely certain of it. So I figured it was just a matter of whether I offed myself now, or ended my days with my eyeballs melting in their sockets and my shadow stuck to the wall.

I was a pessimist of the first order. I think this is one of the first things that attracted me to Buddhism. It seemed like the ultimate in pessimism. I mean it starts off saying “All life is suffering.” What could be more appealing to a pessimist? The earliest attempts to explain Buddhism to Westerners often depicted it as both stringently pessimistic and thoroughly nihilistic. It was a big puzzle, though, how the followers of such a downer of a religion seemed so happy. Why were they running around smiling all the time instead of just jumping off a bridge somewhere? The fact is though, that Buddhism is not pessimistic in the least and has nothing at all in common with nihilism.

The supposedly pessimistic view of Buddhism is related to its assessment of the idealistic point of view. When looked at through the lens of thoughts and ideas, all of life is suffering, or to give a more strict translation of the original Pali word Buddha used — “dukkha” — all life is unsatisfactory experience. There is no way on Earth that your real life can ever match up to what you think it could be. Even your happiest experiences are shaded with the knowledge that they will end at some point. This is a really depressing sounding point of view.

But there’s a very easy way out. Buddha looked at his life and discovered something many of us live our whole lives without even noticing. We do not live in our thoughts and ideas. We live in reality, and reality is utterly beyond our thoughts and ideas. No matter how we characterize the life we’re living, that characterization is just a thought. No matter how bad you think your life is, your life is not your thoughts about your life. It's not about eradicating bad, depressing thoughts. It's about understanding what your thoughts actually are.

This sounds simple. But it’s really not. Just knowing this intellectually won’t do you a whole lot of good. You have to “learn it in practice” to borrow one of Dogen’s pet phrases.

Let me try an example of how this can work. Let’s say you’re spending the holidays with the family. If yours is like mine, there is no way you can ever find any activity that everyone can agree upon. So you end up going for the lowest common denominator and choosing to do something that, at the very least, not everyone hates completely. So there you are at the mall. It’s ugly and boring and they’re playing that stupid cheesy Christmas muzak you’ve been grinding your teeth over for the past two months. Everything in all those horrendous chain stores is overpriced and awful. Your nephew is bouncing off the walls, your niece is screeching, aunt Edna is waddling around pointing at tricycles and saying, “You used to like tricycles, didn’t you?” for the 57th time in a row. All around you are people having a holly jolly time but you feel like death warmed over. Your brain is turning into pink pudding. Anywhere would be better than this. You start to imagine all the things you could be doing with this day if only you weren’t stuck here. Fantasies start to fly. Staying home with a box of Kleenex and the SuicideGirls would be better.

That’s when you have to stop. Notice what’s really going on. You’re not in any of those places you could be or doing any of those things you might be doing. You’re here. This is your life. And you’re missing out on it. Your fantasies are never real, and they never can be, because nothing you can possibly imagine will ever be anything like the way you imagine it.

The same applies to anything you might get depressed about — the state of the world, the state of contemporary music, the state of your haircut.

The thing that always helps me is doing whatever little things I can do right now to improve my life. Like cleaning the toilet, or emptying out the litter box. Make someone laugh. There’s always something that needs done. Always. And it’s your job to do it. Contribute something to the world you live in. It doesn’t matter if it’s something big or small. In fact, small is better. We don’t live our lives for ourselves. That’s a huge mistake nearly everyone makes. You are a part of the continuum of life and it is your duty to make your own unique contribution. That’s what God put you on Earth for. When you go against that you feel unhappy.

Is your life balanced? Or do you envision it as a few peak experiences, big highs or big lows, interrupted by long stretches of nothing much going on? Drugs will mess you up too. Much as I hate sounding like Nancy Reagan, it’s damned true. They pull you up one way for a little while, but then there’s always the rebound. If you live your life as peak experiences interrupted by nothing happening, you might think that’s fine. But it’s not fine. The very reason today seems so bleak and grey is only because you’re comparing it to your memories of yesterday’s sunshine, or yesterday’s high, or yesterday’s orgasm. Or that great “if only” that would make everything fine if it wasn’t just out of reach. But that’s just your memories and ideas. Reality is the dishes in the sink. And the dishes in the sink today are always better that the rollercoaster ride last night — because today is real and yesterday and tomorrow are lies you tell yourself.

Depression is a thought. It’s a tough one to get rid of. But in the end, all thoughts, no matter what they are, are nothing but energy bouncing around in that lump of hamburger inside your skull.

Enjoy the holidays. Or enjoy not enjoying the holidays. It’s all up to you.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up! He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday — but not December 30, 2006 — in Santa Monica.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/all/19758/Brad-Warners-Hardcore-Zen-Happy/