Don't Waste Your Life, OK?

I just spent two weeks in a meditation center up in the mountains. Everywhere you went there were wooden boards that said:

Listen up!
Great is the matter of birth and death
Lost time will not be found again
Do not waste your life!

In Zen temples they have a chant they do just before they clean the place up, part of which goes, “When this day is gone, your life thereby decreases.”

The day I got back from the retreat center I found myself sitting at a swanky-ass restaurant in Beverley Hills, talking to a couple high-powered movie business execs about a film project some folks I freelance for are trying to get off the ground. These guys had that manic, sun-drenched energy you find in Hollywood types. It was hard to tell if they were on coke or if they’re just super high-strung people. They’re young guys. They’re always young guys. You can’t sustain that kind of energy long before you burn out. They’ll char those bright young lights to a deep brown dead crisp making our movie. They’ve got big ambitions. Big, big, BIG.

Young movie-biz dudes have no hope of ever understanding how they’re wasting their lives. Society will provide them with all kinds of rewards for wasting their own time and ours. They’ll have money, power, sex, cars, everything a person can possibly desire. They’ll never even imagine that instead of owning some tawdry little piece of the world, the whole universe from beginning to end could be theirs — that the whole universe already is theirs. As they drive down Santa Monica Boulevard blasting bad hip-hop hits from their shiny, silver Beamer convertibles with their vanity plates they’ll never know that there are guys trudging through the gutters outside their mansions in tattered shoes who own them and everything they imagine they possess.

Right now I'm sitting where I can hear a spiritual master talking spiritual stuff to a lot of spiritual people. He’s bullshitting them. He hasn’t got a clue in the world. But he lulls them to half-sleep with a honey soaked voice and tells them that half-sleep is the Highest Enlightenment. So it goes.

“Boys be ambitious!” said William S. Clark when he left Japan after spending the last few years of the 19th century educating its children in Western ways. Everybody in Japan knows the phrase by heart. Ambition drives Japanese waste and Hollywood waste.

There’s ambition in Zen centers in the mountains too, and in Zen centers in the cities and suburbs. Not so much ambition for money, though that does exist in some; ambition for spiritual accomplishment, ambition for spiritual fame, ambition for the ubiquitous “spiritual merit” practitioners are primed to pile up. You can see it in the eyes of the young studs who’ve been devoting themselves to the rigors of practice intensives in the hopes of rising up the ladder to positions of power within the organization. You can hear it in the mellifluous tones of the wanna-be Zen Masters who pontificate on the finer points of the dharma to those they consider their spiritual inferiors, hoping that one day when they’re dead, gone and buried their names too will be etched in the list the Great Eternal Masters. It rides the wind in envy-drenched whispers when someone passes by in a coveted brown or orange or ochre robe indicating they’ve received the ultimate promotion the bosses of the sect have on offer. Anyone impressed by the color of a glorified bathrobe deserves whatever they get, if you ask me.

And yet retreat centers in the mountains are still better places to practice not wasting your life than swanky-ass restaurants in Beverly Hills. Most of us need some time away from society before we can see how truly fucked over we’ve been. Sure we know that society is shit. But we still cling to the notion that we ourselves are somehow above it, what with our rebel haircuts and tattoos, and all that metal stuck through our bodily extremities. We aren’t like those saps.

Sorry. But you’re not only like those saps, you’re exactly like them. Not a centimeter of separation. Too bad, huh?

You don’t think so? That’s only because you’ve never really taken a look.

When today is gone you’ll be one day closer to death. So what are you doing right now? Turn off your computer and go outside, for God’s sake. There’s nothing in that shiny little box of delights on your lap that’s going to do you any good at all. Not my bullshit, that’s for sure. (Hey, clever kids! Quote that line in your sarcastic comments!)

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. 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.

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

April 23rd at Malaprop’s Book Store in Asheville, North Carolina. Probably 7 PM-ish. Call for details.

April 25 - 27 leading a retreat at Southern Dharma Retreat Center in North Carolina.

April 29th at 7 PM, talk at Warren Wilson College’s Buddhist Studies Group.

May 3rd my band 0DFx will play at Pat’s in the Flats in Cleveland with This Moment in Black History and on May 4th, 0DFx will play at the Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio in commemoration of the 38th anniversary of the infamous shootings by the National Guard

Saturday May 10th at 7 PM at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Ohio’s Tremont neighborhood.

On May 17th and 18th leading a 2-day retreat at the Milwaukee Zen Center.

I'll be one of the teachers at this year's Great Sky Zen Sesshin August 9-16. Check out their webpage for details.

The annual Dogen Sangha retreat in Shizuoka, Japan will be September 20-23.