When I am elected President of the World my first act will be to criminalize the song Careless Whisper. Playing it on any instrument will be punishable by summary execution by roving goon squads I will employ solely for that purpose. All records, tapes, CDs, downloads, sheet music and any other form of the song will be confiscated. If you turn the contraband over to my goon squads without resistance the punishment for possession may be less severe, say just a few decades chained to a post in an underground dungeon. Refusing to turn over recordings of the song will, of course, also be punishable by summary execution. George Michael and the other guy who nobody remembers will be sent to Antarctica dressed in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts with a box of Ritz crackers to sustain them. Whoever played that ridiculous trumpet line will be tortured in a manner unfit to speak of. It is a crap song. I honestly cannot see any reason anyone could possibly even tolerate exposure to it, let alone actively take enjoyment from it. The joyless grating “melody” is obnoxious and cloying like a fat, over perfumed, drunken aunt who can’t remember your name trying to give you a smothering blubbery hug that lasts half an hour cuz she thinks you might spot her some money for more booze.

My annoying upstairs neighbor has been playing Careless Whisper over and over and over and over at top volume on his grand piano for the past five hours. This is a man who has apparently not yet heard of a newfangled innovation called electronic keyboards and headphones. I’m certain he was an only child raised in some estate in Brentwood or wherever since he has no conception at all of what it means to have neighbors. He has the absolute worst taste in music imaginable and insists on inflicting it upon the entire building at all hours. The vibrations of his piano travel in such a way that it has to be eighteen times louder down here than it is in his place. My ceiling is rutted with holes from being pounded upon by mop handles in the middle of the night.

An often quoted though rarely understood Buddhist sound byte is the first line of the poem Shin Jin Mei (Faith Mind Inscription) by an old, dead Zen Master named Kanchi Sosan. It goes: It isn’t difficult to follow the Buddhist way, just avoid picking and choosing. Sometimes they translate it as “avoid preference.” Deshimaru translates it as “you must not love, hate, choose or reject.” So I’m sure there are already a few Buddha geeks out there in Suicide Girl Land who read the first two paragraphs of this piece and thought, “This guy’s no Zen teacher. He obviously has preferences!” Since those people have now moved on to some cheesy Buddhist chat room where they can entertain themselves by pretentiously quoting koans at each other, the rest of us can talk.

Buddhist practice isn’t about aiming for some fantastical state where you’re suddenly forever free from your own likes and dislikes due to your highly developed magic Zen Powers. Rather it’s about learning to see your personality — your “self” — for what it really is. When you get right down to it that thing we call “self” is just a collection of likes and dislikes. Nothing more.

We live in a society in which it’s become ridiculously easy to indulge in what we desire and avoid what we don’t. Our country was founded on the belief that we all had the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of desire, in other words. And yet no one is ever able to satisfy every desire or avoid everything unpleasant. Nor will there ever come a time when such a thing is possible for anyone. Not even you, when you're all Enlightened and shit.

The famous Four Noble Truths of Buddhism are often translated as 1) All life is suffering 2) The cause of suffering is desire 3) By cutting off desire we can cut off suffering and 4) To cut off desire, we must follow the Noble Eightfold Path which is Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Awareness, Right Concentration, Right Thought and Right Understanding. Buddha was an eminently practical guy and his philosophy is never unrealistic, but this version of the Noble Truths strikes me as both impractical and completely out of touch with reality. It asks us to do the impossible, to cut off all desire. It can never be done. You’ll always desire something. If you lost your desire to eat, drink and breathe you’d die. The other desires are just as difficult to tame.

There is, however, a different way of looking at the Four Noble Truths. The first refers to the idealistic outlook. When looked at in terms of ideals, all life is unsatisfactory since it can never possibly hope to match up to what we’d like it to be. The second noble truth refers to the materialistic outlook. Even though most of us are familiar with the “cause of suffering is desire” version, another way of translating the second noble truth is, “the truth of accumulation” (shu, the Chinese word for “accumulation” is the one often translated as “desire”). From the materialistic outlook, all things are an accumulation of smaller particles. And, also from the materialistic point of view, the way to happiness is to accumulate as much stuff as possible. He who dies with the most toys wins, right? But neither of these outlooks can ever lead to happiness or balance. The third noble truth refers to action in the present moment. In real action our idealistic or spiritual side and our physical, material side are fused into one. The fourth truth is the Buddhist Way in which we actualize the other three and live life according to the Rule of the Universe. In other words, we act from intuition and take right action at every moment.

This isn’t easy stuff to try and pare down to a single paragraph right here next to the bare-naked boobies and Star Wars tattoos on Suicide Girls. It takes a lifetime of practice to even begin to understand it (unless you pay $140 for my special seminar in which you can learn it in just 30 minutes!*). But let’s look at it in terms of that piece of shit “song” Careless Whisper and see how it pans out.

I work from home, which is a Munchkin sized apartment with nowhere to escape from the noise upstairs and still be in my place of business. While I could go up and ask Liberace Junior to stop, it is early afternoon and I do know how it is to be a musician and have to practice for a performance — although I wouldn’t inflict what he’s practicing upon Osama bin Laden. I’ll even admit that some of my more deranged, senile, hearing damaged neighbors might actually enjoy the abominable din of worthless 1980’s reject pop pap endlessly repeated in overblown cocktail lounge style. But the noise has forced me to get out of my stale apartment and take a walk through the California sunshine and Springtime flowers to the Beverly Hills Library where they have their own goon squads patrolling the aisles for noise-makers. It’s a nice place and I’m a lot happier working here than I would have been at my apartment even without the god awful racket from upstairs. The unpleasantness of gag-inducing ham fisted disco drek has forced me to find a more balanced environment.

Whenever you find yourself in a situation that either grates on you or seems a bit too exciting, that’s when your body/mind has lost balance. Whether that loss of balance is something you class as “bad,” like a neighbor who pounds out gloppy tuneless garbage when you’re trying to get some work done, or “good,” like when you’re in the middle of whatever you find particularly thrilling, it’s still a loss of balance. Hard as it may be to face up to it, the body and mind does not like unbalanced states of either kind. No matter how much you think you want bright lights, noise and excitement, the real fact is your body and mind are always more inclined to balance. This is why you always need a long rest after really wild experiences, and why the more such experiences a person racks up the more messed up they get (right, Britney?). This isn’t to say Buddhism is against anyone having fun. It’s just that when you examine it closely, the most truly fun state of body and mind is the state of equilibrium. I’m sorry. It just is.

It’s tough to find equilibrium, and we’ll always have a tendency to slide into preference. It’s also impossible to avoid being in unpleasant situations. But it is possible to understand that all unpleasantness is born from preference. As Sosan said all them years ago, the way to be happy in any situation is to throw away any idea you might have that wherever you are ought to be different. This doesn’t mean complacency. When things need to be changed, it’s your duty to change them. But you can only do that effectively when you throw away your fantasies about how things ought to be and work to improve how they actually are.

Real balance is hard to establish and even harder to sustain. Yet, even this need not be a problem. The here and now is always at its most basic, the real state of balance. It is only our own preferences that prevent us form seeing this fact. Put your preferences — your "self," in other words — aside and see for a fleeting instant the true state of things. Do this again and again until it becomes habit. There’s no bigger secret to it than that.

And burn your copies of Make It Big by Wham! before my goon squads arrive.


* That’s $10 and half an hour less than the other leading fake Buddhist scam!

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.