Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Magic E-Mail and Other Miracles

This is a true story. The other day, Wednesday I think it was, I got an e-mail from a guy at another company with whom I’ve been working on a project for my real job (you think I get paid enough by Suicide Girls to quit my day job?). It was all pissy and annoying, insinuating I wasn’t holding up my end of the deal between our two companies and vaguely threatening contractually stipulated punishment. In fact, he was trying to rush through a whole crapload of changes in the project right at the last second giving me far less time to respond than any human being could ever respond to them.

I wrote back to him stating all the relevant facts and making clear that what he was saying was crossing the line, not bothering to hide my own pissiness at his pissiness. I hit send. A few minutes later my e-mail was back on my desktop with one of those statements in Computerese on top of it saying it hadn’t been sent due to Fatal Error XKG974.36/TX1138 or whatever. So I tried hitting send again. A few minutes later, same thing, the mail was back with the same incomprehensible error message.

So I went through my e-mail and took out about five or six words that indicated my emotional reaction upon receiving the other guy’s e-mail. Once this excision was made, only the very dry facts of the matter were left, with no emotional element. I hit send again. Whoosh! (Mac users will know the sound I’m referring to) Off it went.

I didn’t change the address. I didn’t change the attachment. I didn’t reformat. I did nothing at all except remove a single sentence from the body of the mail. It’s impossible to imagine how the removal of five or six words would have made any difference in its sendability or lack thereof. But off it went, no problem. A bit later the guy responded and was much, much calmer than he had been in his previous mail, even indicating he was going to make the concessions I’d demanded in the excised sentence (which he obviously had not seen).

I think I have a very kind computer. I will treat it nicely from now on.

This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened. In fact it’s become fairly routine lately. I’m pretty sure stuff like this happened before I started noticing it. But in those days my reaction probably would have been to get all upset and call the computer a piece of shit and complain about my server and whatever else you do when frustrated by computer weirdness. In my early days of working with computers, I once even gave myself a visible and very itchy rash after getting all cranky at my Power PC. Seriously. These days my reaction is different. When computers start acting funny I just sort of accept it as part of the kindness of the Universe.

It’s not just computer stuff either. Every day I’m exposed to all kinds of examples of the kindness of the Universe that I am at a complete loss to know how to explain. Like a couple months ago when I found out I’d been lucky the right front wheel of my car didn’t fly off while I was driving since the weird rattling noise I’d been putting off having checked out was due to it being literally held on by one very loose bolt. It’s gotten to where, even when bad things happen I try to view them as examples of the kindness of the Universe that I just haven’t come around to getting the point of yet.

This isn’t always easy to do, mind you. But I try. When I have trouble adopting the right point of view I remember a story I read about Shunryu Suzuki, the author of the great book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He had been diagnosed with Hepatitis. This was doubly troubling to him because he liked to eat ice cream with one of his students. The doctors told him to stop doing this, lest she contract the disease. A while later, the diagnosis was revised. Suzuki had cancer and it was likely terminal. When he told his student she didn’t understand why he was so happy about it. Then Suzuki said, “Don’t you see? This means we can share ice cream again!”

I don’t usually talk about my views on things like the kindness of the Universe because people always take them the wrong way. We have this really odd method of dealing with stuff we don’t understand, coming to all sorts of bizarre conclusions about what it means and what we ought to do about it. Like, the Universe does stuff we can’t understand, so let’s all go out and throw bombs at people who think it doesn’t. Or, the Universe behaves in ways we don’t understand, so let’s all obey whatever that guy in the pointy blue hat who told us so says to do. I don’t get the connection, I’m afraid. Maybe I’m dumb.

I just accept the fact that there are things beyond intellectual comprehension, that no matter how hard I, or anyone else, tries to work certain things out, they’re never going to make sense. In fact, I’d go further and say that no matter how hard anyone tries to work anything out it’ll never make sense completely. Our brains are super duper sharp. But we’re not infinitely smart. None of us.

We can do absolutely amazing things by putting our brains to work on some problem — like putting men on the moon, or shoving all those tiny little accountants into the computer so they can figure out your taxes wicked fast. But that doesn’t mean we can figure out everything. We can’t figure out the big questions of life, the universe and everything with our brains. We can’t even figure out how to live peacefully with one another just by setting our minds to it.

Yet pretty much all of our philosophies and religions fail to accept this startlingly obvious fact. For all their talk of being “spiritual” most religions are really just deeply intellectual. Some go further into the realm of intellect than others, yet fail to ever break out of the mental prisons they build for themselves. Unfortunately, even most of the meditative practices I’ve encountered go no further than engaging the brain’s power of imagination to create astounding fantasies. Our own dreams of Enlightenment can be made to seem so real and so beautiful their seductive power is nearly impossible to resist. Get a whole bunch of people believing in the same Enlightenment fantasy and you’ve got yourself a pretty powerful movement. But it don’t mean a damned thing.

My favorite depiction of the Buddha is the one where he’s meditating and his hand is touching the ground. This symbolizes his grounding himself in reality. We may not know just what reality is, but we know it’s real, and so we have to stay with it no matter how pretty our dreams might be.

Knowing that you don’t know is a really powerful thing. Knowing clearly that you don’t know, you can be certain that no one else knows either. With this understanding you become absolutely equal to everyone you encounter. With no one above you and no one below, you can find your true place in the Universe.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some e-mails from work I gotta go answer.

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 in Santa Monica.

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