by Brad Warner

A few people have responded to my blog by comparing me to this or that teacher and saying those guys are much better because they encourage their followers to help others. One reader advised me to get over myself and, “learn to live for others.” It’s good advice, to be sure. But what exactly does it mean?

One of the complaints often lodged against Zen is that it’s a selfish philosophy and practice. Spiritual teachers of other schools are always talking about how we should give to others, help those in need, lend a hand to our brothers and so on. But when you take a look at Zen literature there’s not a whole lot of that. Oh, Dogen Zenji talks a bit about compassion and sometimes you hear the Metta Sutra, the Buddha’s words on kindness, chanted at Zen temples in America. Although elsewhere in the world this chant is more associated with the Theravada school than with Zen.

Zen, on the other hand, tends to seem self-centered. Rather that hearing a lot about how we should be of service to others, the standard canonical texts of Zen appear to focus on what we need to do to improve our own situation and state of mind. They do sometimes make reference to helping others and saving all beings. But these references are almost always a bit abstract. They say we need to help others, but don’t go very deeply into how that might be done. This focus on the self is ironic considering that Zen is often portrayed as a practice aimed at eradicating the self.

But have you ever glanced up randomly when you’re on an airplane ignoring the flight attendants safety instructions? When they tell you how to use those oxygen masks they say that you should first secure your own mask before helping others. There’s a good reason for this. If the plane is losing oxygen you’re going to be too woozy to be of service to anyone else until you first get your own stuff together. This is the way it is in life as well.



It sounds really sweet when someone tells you that you ought to be selflessly serving those less fortunate than you. It’s a beautiful and highly attractive idea. There’s no better way to make yourself seem really holy than to advocate selflessness. Religious leaders have known for centuries that the best way to cultivate a devoted following who’ll gratefully fill up the collection plate is to spread the word that a truly holy person gives to others until it hurts.

It’s always comforting to be told that the source of the world's troubles is out there, in other people, in our surroundings and circumstances and not in ourselves. Much of what passes for religion these days takes as its underlying unstated assumption and starting point that we ourselves are OK. It’s those other people that need fixing, not us. It’s painful when that assumption is challenged. I understand that because it was painful to me when I first came across the supposedly selfish aspects of Zen.

The underlying problem is the same as the problem with the emergency oxygen masks on airplanes. In our usual condition we are far too woozy to be of much service to anyone else. When our own condition is all messed up our attempts to be helpful are more likely to make things worse than to improve them.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t do anything when we see someone is in trouble. We always have to act from the state we’re in at this moment. It’s our duty to do what we can with what we have.

One of the greatest and most useful lessons I’ve learned from Zen practice is how not to help. Zen teachers are often seen as cold. Lots of times in this practice when you go to your teacher in times of distress, instead of being met with warm hugs and reassuring words you’re given the cold shoulder. You're told to take care of the problem yourself. This seems mean, heartless, even cruel.

But as Shakespeare and Nick Lowe noticed sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind (in the right measure). The best way to be truly helpful is often to leave things be. I used to find this all the time when I worked for Tsuburaya Productions. It was often best to allow a bad scheme to fail and then fix it. Jumping into the fray and try to fix things before they broke often was the worst idea. Because then the same thing just kept happening over and over. People learn best from their own mistakes and learn nothing when you fix things for them.

This is not always easy. We want to help. Our self-image is tied up in being a good person and a good person is a helpful person. It damages our ego when we have to let things be instead of jumping in to fix them. Sometimes the hardest thing you can do is to not be helpful. People resent it. They label you as a bad person. Because they don’t want to have to deal with their own shit, they want someone else to deal with it for them. They want Superman to rush in and save the day after they’ve messed things up.

On the other hand it’s important to be of service, to “learn to live for others.” We are not independent objects. We are part of an intimately connected network of sentient and non-sentient beings that stretches all the way to the end of the universe. We never really live just for ourselves, even when we try to do so. To try and live for yourself just causes pain. Not just to others, but to ourselves as well.

The problem is not whether we should live for others or not. The problem is how we should live for others. If our efforts to help end up doing more harm than good, then we aren’t truly living for others any more than the most selfish cad among us lives for himself. We’re just feeding our own egos, establishing a clearer and more fixed self image as a good person.

It’s important to discover how to truly help. And sometimes that means not helping.

***

Brad is on tour right now and may be in your area. To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

***

Related Posts:
Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Uninvited To The Buddhist Party
Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: Win A Date With Brad Warner!!!
Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: The End of the World As We Know It
Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: Meditation, Depression and the Sense of Self
Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: How To Make A Zen Monster
Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: Living Simply
Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: I Resent My High School

by Brad Warner

My friend John Graves sent me a photo of a billboard that's been appearing all over Los Angeles. The one he took a picture of was right near The Grove, in one of the highest rent districts in one of the highest rent cities in the whole world. The billboard says: "The Bible Guarantees Judgment Day May 21, 2011, ...Cry mightily unto God - Jonah 3:8, Mon-Fri 5:30 - 7PM, 1280 AM Radio FamilyRadio." Next to these words is a photo of a guy who is either kneeling to pray or in the throes of a painful bout of constipation.




According to friends of mine these billboards have also been spotted in the San Francisco Bay area, Minneapolis, Dallas and even here in Akron, Ohio. For those who want to know exactly how they worked this date out, there is a convenient website that explains it all. Frankly, I couldn't get past the second paragraph.

A little bit of research on the Internets reveals that the billboards are based upon the work of a Christian broadcaster by the name of Harold Camping, president of something called Family Stations, Inc. a religious broadcasting outfit based in California. Back in 1992, Camping published a book called 1994? in which he claimed that the End Times, in which the world will undergo severe tribulations in preparation for Christ’s Second Coming, would start in ’94.

He and his followers stood outside the Alameda Veteran's Memorial Building on September 6th of that year with their Bibles open heavenward to await Jesus' return. Jesus never showed up. Camping said he may have made a mathematical error. Now he says his new calculations are certain beyond a shadow of doubt. The folks at a website called The Thinking Atheist have produced this video explaining some more about Camping from their perspective.

All of these billboards had me wondering if the whole thing might be some kind of elaborate hoax, a promo for some big budget end-of-the-world thriller. I'm still a little skeptical. But unless whoever is behind the hoax is able to manipulate Wikipedia and Amazon with an impressive degree of skill, as well as post a whole lot of other stuff on the web that corroborates the existence of Camping and his church, this would appear to be for real.

Christianity is in part an apocalyptic religion. Some scholars have argued that Jesus himself was a preacher whose main stock in trade was predicting the coming end of the world. This seems to be borne out by the New Testament as it has come down to us.

One of the biggest problems the early church had was how to deal with Christ's prediction recorded in Luke 9:27 that "there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God." The "some standing here" would appear to refer to his original 12 apostles. When those apostles started dying off, guys who came along slightly later like St. Paul had a hard time explaining themselves since the kingdom of God had yet to appear.

And yet, somehow, they persevered and made their case quite successfully. Christianity has lasted for over 2000 years predicting that the end of the world is coming soon. This they have done mainly by making the definition of "soon" more and more vague. And although many mainstream Christians have switched over to viewing Christ's apocalyptic statements as some kind of metaphor, there are still some who take it literally and try to work out the exact day it's all supposed to happen.

The Jehovah's Witnesses famously predicted the end of time to begin in 1917, which they then revised to 1918, then to 1925, and finally to 1975. Yet although the Rapture did not come on any of those dates, the Jehovah's Witnesses continue to thrive and ring doorbells all over the world.

One would assume that if somebody prophesized the end of the world on a given date and that given date came and went without major incident, everyone who had once believed in the prophecy would lose interest and whoever made the prophesy wouldn't be listened to anymore. But this has not been the case. In fact, quite the opposite seems to be true. Prophecies of the end of the world do not have to work out for them to have power.

Camping has obviously got some money behind him. That billboard near The Grove in Los Angeles alone must have set him back a load of cash. This would indicate that he has a healthy following. I would not expect that following to decrease markedly after May 22nd. I'm sure they'll be just fine. I predict that Camping will come up with a justification for his seeming failure and the troops will rally behind him to await the next prophesy. Maybe he's working on that even now. It's a time-honored pattern and I see no reason why this one will be any different.

I'll assume most of you reading this probably share the belief of most people who have studied the New Testament. The consensus of contemporary scholars is that the New Testament is cobbled together from various sources. Many of its writers were not even who they claimed to be according to Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman in his new book Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. Most of us here, then, don't even give a second thought to the notion that Camping or any of the others who prophesize the destruction of the world based on Biblical calculations are correct. Yet obviously quite a few people believe it and maybe quite a few more, though not believers, still wonder if it just might be true.

Like you, I am at a loss to understand why anyone at all believes this stuff or even gives it a second thought. It's been pointed out by those who study organizations like this that their members are often people who would otherwise be regarded as having a high degree of intelligence. Although I know of no studies of Camping's group, I've seen studies of other religious organizations that believe similarly bat-shit crazy things and who have many members that are highly educated and seemingly sane. So one can't simply write off those who believe this stuff as merely stupid. Well, I would say that they're stupid to believe such things, but many of them are not stupid according to our usual methods of judging people's intelligence or lack thereof. They may well be college educated, socially adept and so forth.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth. Matters of belief, whatever those beliefs may be, are things by which we define our sense of self. Most of us hold our sense of self as the most precious thing we possess. We'll go to any lengths to defend it. We'll lie, we'll steal, we'll sometimes even kill to protect this sense of self.

Holding on to a set of beliefs is a great way to reinforce the sense of self. If that set of beliefs is an unpopular one, this can work even better. It really sets us off against everybody else. It's a tremendous way to establish your unique ego.

Plus, organizations like this often offer a tremendous sense of community to their membership. This is one of the things our contemporary society really has trouble with. I know I often feel alone and alienated. It's hard to find a community in the world we live in these days. But we so desperately want that sense of belonging that if it means believing in bat-shit crazy ideas, the trade-off doesn't seem so bad.

I just wonder what these guys are going to do on May 22nd.


***

Brad is on tour right now and may be in your area. To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

by Brad Warner

Zen Master Genpo Roshi has announced that he is disrobing. To “disrobe” as a Buddhist monk means that you formally quit the Buddhist order and give up your status as a priest and/or monk. Ironically, it was disrobing that got him into trouble in the first place. It seems that Genpo, who is married, had an affair with the woman he was grooming to be his successor.

I never even knew or cared about any of Genpo’s sex scandals (this is not his first) until this one broke. But I have been highly critical of a scam he’s been running for a number of years called Big Mind(r).

Big Mind(r) is a process wherein Genpo, whose real name is Dennis Merzel, promises that he can produce for his customers a Buddhist enlightenment experience in just a few short hours, even if you have no previous meditation experience. He has been known to charge as much as $50,000 for his personally led Big Mind(r) sessions. His upcoming session in Maui (yes, he is still at it in spite of everything) is a bargain at $15,000. My first article denouncing Big Mind(r) as a fraud appeared here on SuicideGirls in 2007.

As usual when a sex scandal hits the news, this one was accompanied by a series of other revelations. A former insider in Merzel’s organization stated on Facebook that this Roshi’s community “has given him (Merzel) enough money to have three houses, two new cars and a Harley Davidson, not to mention a couple hundred thou a year salary and all expenses.”

Now I get that the love affair was hidden. But are we to believe that Merzel’s community didn’t know he had three houses, two new cars and a Harley? Really? Even I have seen photos of him on the Harley. And yet nobody noticed any problem with this? Seriously? That’s your story?

I think something else is going on, entirely. Whenever a scandal like this comes to light, everybody is very quick to point at the villain in the center of the controversy and put the blame for everything on him. It’s very neat and tidy. And it pointedly absolves everyone else of responsibility.

But it takes a lot of people to make a Zen Monster. A Zen Monster is not one man. A Zen Monster is the product of a group of individuals working in concert.

I think too many of us take The Wizard of Oz as our model for how these things work. You’ll recall that before Dorothy’s arrival, the Land of Oz was ruled over by the Wicked Witch of the East. When Dorothy’s house squashed the witch, the Munchkins celebrated singing, “Ding dong the witch is dead.” From this scene we can infer that the Wicked Witch of the East somehow took over the Land of Oz and forced her rule upon the Munchkins who, being small and weak, had no choice but to submit.

But is this what actually happens in the real world? And more to the point, is this what actually happens in small spiritual communities within wealthy democratic nations?



Merzel himself used to talk a lot about submission. In a video placed on YouTube by EnlighteNext magazine, Merzel has a dialog with Andrew Cohen in which he compares a spiritual teacher to a faucet. As one’s kitchen faucet is connected to the source of the city’s water supply, the teacher is connected to the Source of All. The water is the Dharma. The student is a cup. If you put the cup under the faucet the water comes through and fills the cup. But if the cup is beside the faucet, or above the faucet, it doesn’t receive any water. “We have to find a way to actually submit,” Merzel declares, “to come under the teacher.” (I will forego my juvenile desire to make a really obvious joke here.)

It all reminds me a lot of the BDSM scene. I’ve seen so many of the same types of behaviors directed toward kinky sex as toward lofty matters of the spirit, it’s kinda scary. I’ve written about this in my book Sex, Sin and Zen.

The people in the BDSM community have investigated the dynamics of power exchange in ways that can be really useful in understanding how much of human society actually works. These people have a vested interest in understanding clearly how power exchanges operate. The reward for them, if they get it right, is very clear and tangible. They get to have great sex.

Spiritual communities, on the other hand, are often studiously ignorant, indeed willfully ignorant, of how power exchange operates. They would like to pretend that power exchange is not a part of what they do. But it is.

In the BDSM scene they often use the words “bottom” and “top.” In very general terms a top would be the one holding the riding crop, and the bottom would be the one who is tied up. You get the picture.

Moreover, in the BDSM scene there is a well-known and very common phenomenon called “topping from the bottom.” These are cases in which the person who is tied up and supposedly enduring whatever pain or abuse his “top” gives him is actually the one calling the shots. In these cases the so-called “master” is actually not in charge at all.

Spiritual communities in which the teacher plays the top to his submissive students, who act as bottoms, often operate in the same way as tops and bottoms in BDSM. The dominant master is dependent upon his students for whatever power he can obtain. They act as a team. The students must willingly give up their power in order for the master to have any authority over them. He is not a political figure with an army or police force to impose his rules. He does not have magical powers like the Wicked Witch of the East did. The only power he has over his students comes from the students themselves who must deliberately give it to him. This is the essence of power exchange.

Also, sometimes the students feed into the teacher’s grandiosity because they want some kind of tangible reward. In the case of spiritual communities, that reward is the institutional power granted, hierarchically, to students who submit to the institution. As I noted earlier, Merzel was a key figure in his lineage. That meant that he wielded a great deal of institutional power; many people around the world were beholden to him for the institutional authority Merzel could confer upon them or their teachers. In the Zen world it was dangerous to be openly critical of him. I know this first hand.

But Dennis Merzel was dead wrong about the student-teacher relationship in Zen. It actually is not about power exchange at all, or submission. That is the beauty of Zen. Zuiko Redding of the Cedar Rapids Zen Center puts it this way, “Submission was not what I learned from my teachers. They emphasized standing up straight on your own. Tsugen Roshi, the 84-year-old Japanese teacher from whom I received transmission, likens his role to that of a guide. If you’re from the remote countryside, he says, you’ll want a guide to show you the sights of Tokyo. When you’re exploring dharma you need a guide who, because of his or her experience, knows the way. You do not submit yourself to your guide, you follow because you feel she or he is wise.”

But we’re used to the model of the submissive student, so some of us try very sincerely to give power to our teachers. It is a mistake. What was wonderful about my relationship with my own Zen teachers was that whenever I tried to give my power to them, they always threw it right back at me like a hot potato.

Since I have become a teacher myself, I now understand just how difficult it must have been for my teachers to toss back the power I tried so hard to give them. People are constantly trying to give their personal power to me. It’s not easy to give it back. And that’s not because I have some burning desire to dominate them. I don’t. It’s because they desperately want to give up their power. Sometimes they get angry and abusive if I throw it back. They blame me for not being a good teacher because I refuse to accept responsibility for their lives.

I can’t say I know what Dennis Merzel went through. But I can guess what it was like, based on my own experiences. In spite of my dislike for Merzel, I have some sympathy for him. I understand that his usurpation of power wasn’t something he did solely on his own. I’m certain that the people from whom he received power gave it to him willingly, and perhaps even insisted that he take it from them.

It would seem that the easiest solution to this would be to simply not give power to our teachers. But this is not so simple at all. A tendency to fall into power exchange relationships seems to be built into the human psychological system. Our pre-human ancestors probably had hierarchical societies built around a powerful dominant individual. Furthermore hierarchies actually do work well when groups of people want to accomplish a task. It’s been said that dictatorships are generally far more efficient forms of government than democracies. Small spiritual organizations often appear to function better when one person calls the shots. Thus it may seem expedient for spiritual societies to function this way.

In spiritual societies, the teacher is more than just an ordinary leader. She is a person who is recognized for having some kind of unique understanding. She has done the practice for a long time, and can serve as a guide to those who are new to it. When such a person is the head of an organization it is reasonable for the community to want to give her the things she tells them are necessary for her to perform her work as a guide.

Somewhere, though, a line needs to be drawn. It is essential for students to understand how this dynamic works and to learn to step outside of it. Unfortunately, this is a skill that is not very widely taught in society in general. If I had an easy answer, believe me I’d spill it. But I don’t. Like many of the human difficulties Zen seeks to deal with, this one is deeply rooted in the human psyche. We all have these same inclinations, myself included. But it’s vital that we watch them carefully and be aware of how we operate in situations where we’re invisibly and silently asked to act as either a spiritual bottom, or spiritual top. We’re all tops, okay, that’s the true teaching of Zen.

***

Brad is on tour right now and may be in your area. To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

by Brad Warner

I’ve been included in a Facebook group made up of people who are trying to plan my high school class’s reunion. I’ve never gone to any of the others – if there even were any others. I was living in Japan when they would have happened.

So last week on this FB group someone posted: “It’s Friday night, what would you have been doing on a Friday night in January back when we were in high school?” And people are posting stuff like they would’ve been out at a party at someone’s house, or with a bunch of friends doing donuts in the school parking lot or cruising by McDonald’s, which was the closest thing Wadsworth, Ohio had to a hang-out spot after the local Red Barn closed down (a prize to anyone who knows what a Red Barn was).





[Bully Suicide in a Schooled]

In case you live in a place where the roads never ice up, “doing a donut” means driving your car real fast in an icy snow-covered parking lot or street then slamming on the brakes so that the car spins around leaving behind a donut shaped mark in the snow. It struck me then, and it strikes me now, as a stupid and unnecessarily dangerous thing to do. As for parties, I never enjoyed getting drunk or being around a lot of people who were. And I was already edging toward becoming a vegetarian so McDonald’s was not an exciting destination. The things most people in my school did for fun seemed either boring, pointless, stupid or potentially dangerous. Very often all of the above!

So what I would’ve been doing back then was pretty much what I was doing that Friday night a week or so ago, which was sitting at home alone practicing bass. I didn’t party when I was in high school. I was not invited to parties. I was not one of the in-crowd. I was not somebody anyone cool wanted to be seen with. I looked like a member of the trench coat mafia, standing around in front of the school, not even in the commons where the cool kids congregated, dressed in my army surplus trench coat (yes, really) complaining about stuff to the few other nerds I knew.

Although I didn’t like almost anything that the other kids at Wadsworth High liked, I still wanted to be included. I was not a loner because I enjoyed being alone. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to be cool. But in the high school I attended this was impossible for me.

I have a certain degree of lingering resentment about that even now. And this FB group is bringing all that back up to the surface lately. I told this to another friend who’d gone to my school and she said, “You were one of the most interesting people in school and that was kind of intimidating.” I never knew this.

I’m not sure that was what everyone felt. The football guys who decided I was a “faggot” and wanted to whip my ass did not seem to feel intimidated by me. The cute girls who turned down my awkward attempts at asking for dates didn’t seem to think I was interesting. But maybe I was wrong.

I am not above thinking that it would be fun to go to the reunion just to see those people and be all like, I’m a fabulous famous writer who travels around the world to speak to people, has done eight records and made a movie that was shown at film festivals. Oh, and some people are making a documentary about my incredible life and I’ve just gotten the lead role in a feature-length narrative film too. What have you been up to? Still beating up “faggots” in Wadsworth, Ohio? At which point I shall tilt my nose skyward and flick ashes off my cigarette, that I’ll be holding in a long ivory holder. I’ll take up smoking just so I can do this.

(And why if I’ve done all this am I still poor as shit? But anyway…)

Such juicy bitterness! Oh it’s all in there and more, folks! You don’t get over this stuff. And the folks in high school were sweethearts compared to what I dealt with in junior high and grade school. I was “Bucky Beaver” back then due to my massive overbite. I was the guy everybody made fun of. Even the worst losers could score points by coming up with new insults for me. I’m sure some of them will be at the reunion too.

But the truth is I should probably thank those people for treating me the way they did. I understand what happened a lot better now. How could they have treated me otherwise in high school? I probably wouldn’t have gone to their parties even if I had been invited. The only possible fun I might have potentially had at one was getting laid by some girl who was too drunk too realize how uncool I was. And even that idea didn’t seem very enticing.

I managed to find fun things to do. I formed my own band. I traveled around being a roadie for my friend Joe’s band (much more popular than mine, natch) whose drummer, another Wadworth High loner, went on to join the band Warrant and drummed on (She’s My) Cherry Pie. Mmmm. Cherries.

I also got into meditation. Granted, that was a little bit after high school. But the seeds were sown in the days when I didn’t have anything to do on weekends except play bass and read a lot of books. If I’d been more popular, then I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.

I feel kind of bad these days for kids who are popular and well-liked in school. Some of them will be all right. But a lot of them are missing out on what’s really important. They’re being fed lies by a system that wants to keep them stupid and un-creative. They buy into these lies because they’re sold so powerfully and nobody is around to tell them there’s any other way to have fun. In some ways things are far better now then they used to be, though. Nerds are cool. Kids now have access to a lot more options than I ever did at their age. So maybe there’s hope.

But what do I do with all of my lingering resentment? Even though I did just fine in spite of the torments I suffered, I still feel all this rage. What does one do about that?

One of the greatest myths about meditation practice is the idea that it will somehow erase all the bad stuff from your personality. It doesn’t. So how come a guy who has meditated for longer than he was even alive up until high school still feels anger about those four short years? All that stuff was over when people still thought stone-washed denim jeans were cool! Lots of people would wonder what the hell good all that meditation did me. Shouldn’t it have made me all serene and stuff?

Meditation practice will not eradicate your likes and dislikes. It won’t cure you of your past. Nor will it alter your basic personality. You’ll still be who you always were. But you might come to terms with what that really is. You will not become like one of caricature meditation-guy types you see in bad movies. The guys who pretend to be like that are acting. The mask comes off as soon as they’re out of camera range.

In my case, I still have all my old resentments. But I see them for what they are. Just a lot of thoughts that come and go. In case anyone from my school is reading this, you’re not hearing now what I really thought of you. I thought a lot of different things about a lot of people.

Along with all my resentments, I had a certain sneaking admiration for the football team and their athletic abilities and their confidence. I thought a lot of the popular girls were cute with their big hairsprayed hair and were wasting their lives on things that I could see even then didn’t make them happy. All of us had a lot more in common just by growing up in that sucky one-horse town than we ever knew at the time. And Wadsworth, Ohio was kind of pretty and quaint. I hated that at the time. I don’t anymore.

I don’t need to cling to any of these feelings, though. The good or the bad ones. I don’t need to try and replace all the negatives with positives. I don’t need to believe in any of them. I don’t need to add them to that long, convoluted list of items that I grasp tightly for fear that if they ever went away I wouldn’t be me anymore. I’ll be me no matter what thoughts flow through my head. I never understood that until I really reached deep into myself.

High school resentments are comparatively easy ones to let go of. Most folks manage to drop them when they get a little past those years, even if they don’t meditate. But we all carry around a lot of other stuff that’s a hell of a lot harder to dig out.

It’s in getting to these hard-to-reach places that meditation really helps. If you can come to terms with the fact that all your thoughts, no matter how juicy they are or how important they seem are just thoughts, you can experience a tremendous sense of freedom that too few people ever get to experience.

***

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

Brad Warner’s hardcore band Zero Defex is playing a gig on February 9th at the Matinee in Akron, Ohio.



Brad is also on a book tour right now and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.

by Brad Warner

I received two closely related questions via email this week, and I’d like to share my answers. I’ve rewritten these, so they’re not word-for-word the responses I sent.

The first person asked me a general question about how to deal with depression. So I wrote back something like the following:

I am a depression sufferer. I really don’t know how mine scales up next to anyone else’s. My one suicide attempt was half-assed (you can read about it in my book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate). Although I’m not as suicidal as I used to be, even now I go through troughs of depression and inevitably start thinking of doing myself in. This seems to be a deeply ingrained mental response to depression.



My bouts of depression don’t always have any discernable cause. Sometimes there’s an easy chain of events I can trace that leads to them. Sometimes they just seem to come out of nowhere. Perhaps there are causes to these too, but I can’t tell what they are. I suspect diet and general physical condition are major factors. Over-consumption of sugar seems to lead to rebound depression, I’ve noticed. But the cause and effect are so widely separated it’s often hard to be certain, and are also often too complex to work out. Cause and effect relationships are often like this. Dogen pointed that out in his writing.



[SG's LisaRose in a zazen pose / photo: Svetlana Dekic]

Daily zazen meditation has helped tremendously. But it doesn’t do magic. Sometimes it even makes you more aware of your depression. But then you start to get clues as to why you’re depressed and what depression actually is.

Depression is all about thought. The initial depression doesn’t always have a clear relationship to thought. But the thinking mind tends to seize upon depression and try to make something of it.

The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop. That initial seemingly causeless wave of depression can be endlessly amplified by being reinforced by the thoughts it tends to trigger. In turn the thoughts you create based on it will influence the body to produce more of the chemicals that caused it in the first place and you can keep spiraling down and down and down.

You can’t just will yourself not to have depressing thoughts. People have been trying this forever and it never works. Nor can you replace “bad” thoughts with “good” ones. This kind of process is the basis for a lot of popular depression cures. A million self-help books are sold every day based on this seemingly reasonable idea. But I don’t believe in it. This is because thoughts are all kind of the same thing. “Good” thoughts are good because they stand in contrast to “bad” thoughts.

Because of this, thoughts act in pairs, like the heads and tails sides of coins. You only see one side of the coin, but the other side is always there. Behind every “good” thought are all the unconscious “bad” thoughts that contrast with it. By concentrating on “good” thoughts you have to bring up the “bad” ones as well, even if you are unaware of them. This is just the way thought works. Eventually the entire thing falls to pieces.

What you can do to circumvent this is to learn to sort of side-step your thoughts, so that no matter what you’re thinking it has little real effect. This is what the daily zazen practice has helped me with.

This is far easier said than done. It takes years of practice to really get it rolling. But even from your very first round of zazen you can start to see the way to do it. It’s a natural side-effect of zazen itself. Sit in the zazen posture, go HERE to see it demonstrated by sexy Suicide Girl LizaRose (who heads up SG’s Buddhism group). The posture is important. Don’t ignore it and just try to do the mental part without the physical. They are tightly linked. It’s like yoga. You don’t get the full benefit of yoga if you just do the breathing part without the stretches.

Once you’re settled into sitting, don’t try to stop thinking or manipulate your thoughts in any way. Just allow them to be as they are, but stop giving your attention to them. This is what Dogen called “thinking the thought of non-thinking.” Again, it takes a bit of practice to get it going. But hang in there and you’ll get it.

Here is the second email (I have removed or changed anything that might identify the writer):

My answer went something like this:

You and I have the same script! I always imagine things ending in disastrous failure. But when I look at my life it’s not that way at all. A tremendous amount of great things have happened in my life. I’m a successful writer, I travel all over the world, I’m living pretty much the life I dreamed of when I was younger. Although I’ll admit, in my dreams I actually earned decent money doing it (which I definitely do not, by anyone’s standards). But still, it’s pretty good. And yet I have a strong habit of focusing only on the negative aspects of my life and projecting a disastrous future.

I imagine that if I learned to create a different story for my life, I might feel differently about things. Maybe. I might even be more “successful” in the ways ordinary people conceive of success. But I’m not sure I’m really capable of the level of sustained practice that would involve. Plus I’m not sure I’d care for the outcome.

Because change like that would hit a lot of other things, y’know? You can’t just overhaul your way of thinking in such a drastic way and expect it not to impact every aspect of your life. If I did this, I think I’d change my basic personality. I’m not sure that’s even possible, nor do I believe it would be a good thing if it were.

Instead, zazen practice has shown me that my depressing story is not real. It’s the product of thought. It’s an image I carry around in my head. It’s the result of neural pathways that have been built up in my brain that tend to cause energy patterns up there in my head to repeat themselves. Zazen practice didn’t get rid of this stuff. But seeing its unreality enables me to ignore it like background noise much of the time. The less attention I give it, the more those neural pathways become less well-traveled and the fewer of those repetitive thoughts I have.

I don’t claim I can ignore it completely. My habitual ways of thinking still affect a lot of my day-to-day actions. But when they do, I’m far more cognizant of what’s happening than I was in the past. By being aware of what’s happening I can see that I have a clear choice to ignore my persistent patterns and behave in a different way.

Zazen practice does more than make you consciously aware of these things, though. If conscious awareness was all that was required, you could just read a book or a piece of writing on SuicideGirls about it and be done with it. But conscious awareness is not enough.

This is because these processes begin much deeper than conscious awareness can ever hope to penetrate. By the time they bubble up to the surface of your thinking mind, it’s probably too late to do anything much about it.

Having a clear vision of your life means having a tight grip on your ego structure, it means holding on to a rigid sense of who you are. But that sense of who you are is always an illusion. Eventually it’ll bite you on the ass. Sooner or later you will be forced to come to terms with the discontinuity between who you really are and who you imagine you are. If your grip on your imaginary self is too tight this will be extremely painful. If your grip is not so tight it will be a whole lot easier.

***

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

http://suicidegirlsblog.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=4648

by Brad Warner

Only a few more days before the annual War On Christmas ends! So get your shots in quick!

Ever since returning to the United States after spending eleven years of my life in Japan, the furor over Christmas has been especially amusing to me. Add to this the fact that I’m a Buddhist and not a Christian or an atheist – those being the two groups who are most upset about the matter – and I find it extra double-double hilarious (with whipped cream on top).





[Elora in Naughty Santa]

SuicideGirls recently ran a piece about rival billboards on either end of the Lincoln Tunnel, one purchased by a Christian group and one by an atheist group with pro and anti-Christmas messages respectively and all the resulting hub-bub that caused. I live in New York now, but I haven’t been near the Lincoln Tunnel so I’ve missed all the fun, but it’s yet another example of the seasonal silliness.

These days even devout Christians will admit that there’s no real reason to believe that Jesus was born on December 25th. That day was originally a Pagan holiday to celebrate the winter solstice, their calendars being a couple days off from the actual date. This celebration was co-opted in the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church as a way to spread their influence. Even those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible admit that it says nothing to indicate Our Lord and Savior was born in late December.

Oddly enough, it is the fact that the two birth stories presented in the New Testament are so contradictory that has led most serious Biblical scholars to conclude that there really was an actual guy named Jesus, or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer, upon whom the stories in the Bible were based.

For a time there was some serious speculation that Jesus was an entirely fictional creation. Now it seems more reasonable to believe that he actually existed and that he was born and raised in Nazareth. Later on it became important to establish that he was born in Bethlehem in order to fulfill Old Testament prophecy. So stories had to be constructed to account for how he could have been born in Bethlehem when he was known to be from Nazareth, some 80 miles away with a few hostile towns between them.

The familiar Nativity scenes that cause so much furor when they’re erected in certain public spaces are actually a composite of elements from the conflicting accounts in the gospels of Luke and Matthew. Luke talks about shepherds coming to worship the baby, but says nothing about the wise men or about Herod’s slaughter of all male children in Bethlehem, these elements appearing only in Matthew’s account. It’s the slaughter of the innocents that really gives the game away. It’s impossible to believe that such a heinous and terrible event would go unrecorded in any history of the time apart from the New Testament. But we have no other records of it. That even Luke fails to mention it pretty much seals the case. The gospels of Mark and John say nothing about Christ’s birth at all.

Christmas is a big deal these days in many parts of the world where Christianity is a very small minority religion. It’s huge in Japan. It’s not a national holiday. But people love all the iconography. So the streets of Tokyo are almost as loaded with Christmas decorations every year as those of New York. The way you celebrate Christmas in Japan is you order a big bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Christmas cake from your local bakery. Then you go out and have a big drunken party.

I spent one Christmas in Hong Kong where I was supervising a holiday themed Ultraman live stage show. The hotel across the street from where I stayed has a three-story neon display of Santa Claus swinging a baseball bat. I have no idea what that means either. In the park nearby I watched a group of children performing a pageant based on the story of Noah’s Ark.

Buddhism doesn’t have anything equivalent to Christmas. Though there are a few festival days associated with events in Buddha’s life, they tend not to be such a big deal. At least they aren’t in Japan. Last weekend I spent three days staring at a wall in celebration – if the word “celebration” is appropriate – of the day Buddha’ supposedly attained his enlightenment. Commonly this is commemorated on December 8th. That also happens to be the day in 1980 that John Lennon was assassinated and the day that the Japanese think of as Pearl Harbor Day. Americans say it was December 7th, but in Japan it was already the 8th when the attack happened, due to the fact that the International Date Line lies between Hawaii and Japan.

As in the case of Jesus, there are some myths surrounding Buddha’s birth. A bull elephant is said to have somehow walked into the right side of Buddha’s mother. The little tyke emerged from a slit in that same area several months later. He took seven steps and said, “I alone am the World Honored One!”

Unlike in Christianity there have never been any strong attempts by the Buddhist clergy to make the general populace accept these legends as literal truths. Some scholars these days even speculate that these birth stories only came into being when Christian missionaries began to show up in India. The Buddhists heard the stories of Christ’s miraculous birth and countered by making up miraculous birth stories for their guy too.

The insistence that the stories in the Bible must be accepted as literal truths has never made a whole lot of sense to me. The folks who insist on such beliefs seem to fear that their entire religion stands or falls on whether the stories in their book are historically true or not. But I always figured that if the lessons Christ taught were valuable it doesn’t really matter if he was actually capable of miracles or not. It doesn’t even matter if he actually existed. The lessons would be just as true if he was a fictional character. And anyway you can never hope to prove this stuff one way or another, so why waste your time and effort trying?

The whole War on Christmas is a complete joke. So what if a few atheists protest nativity scenes and insist on saying “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas?” It’s not going to change anything in any major way. Apparently Best Buy, Home Depot and Dick’s Sporting Goods employees aren’t allowed to say “Merry Christmas” while the folks who work for Macy’s, K-Mart and In-N-Out Burger are. You can find a more comprehensive list HERE, though I think it may be a couple years out of date. But even if that’s true, so what? These major retail chains know they have a lot of Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and atheists customers as well as customers of Christian denominations like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who don’t celebrate Christmas.

Me, I like Christmas. I like the songs. I like the lights. I like the trees and the presents. It’s fun. I like A Christmas Story and Bad Santa on TV. I like the old Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer special. I don’t really care if Jesus is the reason for the season or not.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas this year, whether you believe in it or not!

***

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

And remember, Brad’s books, apparel and CDs make great Christmas gifts!!

by Brad Warner

I first got interested in spiritual practice when I was a teenager and my parents sat me down and told me about the horrible disease that runs in our family. It was, at the time, killing two of my aunts. This disease, they told me, usually begins to manifest when a person gets to be in his mid-thirties. The symptoms get progressively worse and after a while you lose your ability to physically function, your brain deteriorates, you go crazy and then you die.

As if my life weren’t already shitty enough, being an uncoordinated nerd who couldn’t play sports, was shy around girls, and had zits and braces. Now I was going to die a horrendous death before I had time enough to get over this stuff.

Wonderful. Just super.



I became obsessed at that time with figuring out what life was before it got taken away. The first place I turned to was religion. Being that I was in rural Ohio, religion meant the Christian church. And not just any kind of Christianity. No sirree, Bob. The kind of Christianity I was exposed to in Ohio was among the most conservative, Bible-thumping, evolution-denying, fear-mongering Christianity the world has yet produced.

Those guys were just as obsessed with death as I was, though. So at least we had that in common. Their idea was that we only get a few decades of life on Earth after which we die and then there’s an afterlife, and the afterlife goes on forever. Quite logically, then, we should be far more concerned with the eternal afterlife than with the temporary condition we were living in now.

They said that this life was a testing ground that would decide where we would spend eternity. If we made the correct decisions in this life, we would be rewarded with eternal life in Paradise. If we made the incorrect decisions, we would spend eternity in torment. There were only two possible outcomes. What’s more, God decided our fate by tallying up all the right things and wrong things we did in life. A single act of right or wrong could tip the balance. And God’s mind was mysterious, so you could never be quite sure if any given act was right by him or wrong. So I was supposed to walk on eggs and live a bland, boring, restricted, white bread and mayonnaise life now in the hopes of a really super terrific future in the afterlife that would last forever.



[Bow Suicide "Living Simply" in Against The Grain]

Or maybe it wasn’t like that. Many of the preachers I listened to argued that it didn’t matter at all what works we did. What actually mattered was what we believed in our hearts. A true believer could get away with all kinds of stuff whereas an unbeliever could do all the good he could manage and still get sent to Hell for not believing. Mother Theresa and Gandhi, I was told, were on their way to eternal damnation for believing in the wrong things.

I had a lot of difficulty swallowing this stuff. But the biggest problem for me with all of this was that in order for it to work there had to be an afterlife. Yet there wasn’t any compelling evidence for an afterlife. I watched all those stupid movies about people’s near-death experiences when they went through that tunnel with the light at the end and all that stuff. But I couldn’t really believe in them. I read a bunch of books about out-of-body travel and reincarnation, but nothing in them was very convincing.

What I did know was that I was alive now. This I could confirm. In fact I toyed with denying that I was alive now, but that didn’t work. This life is undeniably real. So I threw away any interest I might have had in what happens after you die and concentrated on what I could do to make this life better.

It seems like most people when they search for a way to make this life better turn to the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure. Drugs, sex, money, material goods… these things seem to be the way to Earthly happiness without regard to any belief in life after death.

This didn’t work for me either, for much the same reason as the whole afterlife deal didn’t work for me. There isn’t a whole lot of evidence that money, power, sex and all that really lead to happiness. Seriously. Think about it for a second.

I was already well aware of the excessive lives of people like Elvis Presley or Howard Hughes, who had all they could possibly want and were still miserable. Later on there was Kurt Cobain who did exactly what I’d been hoping I could do, parlay a shitty-paying career as an indie rocker into superstardom. What did it get him? Sure, some rich people looked like they were having a good time. But there was no more reason to believe that was actually true than there was to believe those people who claimed to have seen a white light when they almost died in a car crash weren’t just hallucinating.

Then I started working in the movie industry, where I routinely associated with famous and powerful people who were absolutely loaded with cash and had access to as much sex as they could possibly manage. Yet I could see clearly that they were just as unhappy as anyone else. I was working for a while with this guy who was a big deal in the Hollywood scene, a tanned and toned mover and shaker who wheeled and dealed with mountains of cash and crazy amounts of power and influence. I was a little pipsqueak who’d just entered the business. Yet I watched in a kind of stupefied awe as he made tremendous efforts to impress me with all this. I had believed that one acquired money and power in order to become secure and contented. Yet here he was with all kinds of money and power, and he was more insecure and discontented than me.

I’d already been doing the Zen thing for a while by then. But it was at that moment that I think I really became committed to it. Zen practice was all about this life and how to make it better. It didn’t offer any magic solutions, which was appealing because I didn’t believe in those. It never got into questions of the afterlife, which was great because I didn’t believe in that either.

Zen demanded a moderate degree of austerity, but not because you were trading austerity today for a future of wonders in Paradise. It recommended a certain degree of austerity because it said that chasing after money, fame, sex, material goods and power just added unnecessary stress to your life that would not be rewarded even if you got those things. I knew this was true. I could see it for myself.

Living simply is one of the cornerstones of lots of religions. But it seemed to me that for most religions I encountered, you lived simply in this life because it insured you a good time after you died. Catholicism seemed to preach that. And even the Hare Krishnas, as examples of so-called “Eastern spirituality,” appeared to me to be all about forgoing pleasure in this life in order to have a chance at reincarnating somewhere cooler.

The Zen approach to simple living was different. I could see for myself the kind of stress and hassles involved in trying to acquire those things that materialistic people claimed would make life better. That Hollywood business tycoon I was associated with was so driven for success that it affected every waking moment of his life and every association he had with anyone he encountered. The fact that he would waste any energy and effort at all, let alone a lot of energy and effort, on trying to impress someone who mattered as little as me told me everything I needed to know about that.

So how simply do we need to live? It depends on how happy you want to be. Traditionally, Zen monks gave up everything except what they needed to survive. The ideal was to have one bowl and one robe. You lived off the charity of others and slept wherever you could manage to sleep.

In the India of 2500 years ago this worked pretty well. There was an established tradition of giving to begging monks and there were communities of spiritual seekers who looked after each other. In Western societies today this system doesn’t work the same way. There is no tradition of giving to begging monks. And communities of spiritual seekers are forced to play the capitalist game to such an extent that they can quickly lose focus and almost always end up as either corporations or cults.

So what do you do? I have not reached any definite conclusions on this. I doubt I ever will. But that’s OK because definite conclusions aren’t the Zen way either. For now, I live pretty simply and unambitiously. To the extent that I have ambitions and desires to live better than I do — and I do have such ambitions, everyone does — I suffer. By this I mean that if I compare my life now to what it should be or what it could be or what it ought to be, inevitably the life I’m living at this moment pales by comparison.

But what am I actually comparing my life to when I do that? I’m comparing real life to something imaginary. Either I’m comparing it to the vague idea of what my life should be, or I’m comparing it to my imaginary construct of what other people’s lives are like. But even if I choose a real person’s life for comparison, I’m not that person. I don’t know what his life is actually like.

I might desire a big apartment of my own in Manhattan with a nice view of the skyline instead of the one I now share with two roommates in the least trendy part of Brooklyn with a view of the Phat Albert Warehouse. But in order to afford such a place I’d have to work very hard and be extremely driven. And, honestly, I don’t want to work that hard. It’s too much stress. If I want to see the Manhattan skyline, I can go see it. It’s just a $2.25 subway ride to Times Square. Things are pretty good.

It’s not necessary to have a lot of what the world calls “success.” The more stuff you own, the more responsibilities you take upon yourself. It’s also not necessary to give up everything and live with one bowl and one robe. You can find a middle ground between austerity and affluence that’s pretty good.

When you seek abundance and success outside of what you already have you just make yourself miserable. It’s quite all right to try to improve your situation. I am always trying to improve my situation. But I’ve found that it pays to be careful what you believe about the ways others might characterize the way you live. What society tells you about what’s best is a collective illusion. Just because most people believe something doesn’t make that thing true. In the past most people believed the world was flat too.

Living simply means making the life you have into the life you want to have. It means seeing the ways in which the life you’re living now is exactly what you want, or at least exactly what you need. No one can tell you whether you’re right or wrong in this. It’s up to you to form your own opinions about your life.

***

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

I went and got hugged by Amma, India’s world-famous hugging saint, when she was in Los Angeles last month. She shoved my head into her fluffy right boob and whispered something that sounded like “Magilla, Magilla, Magilla, Magilla,” into my ear. Or maybe it was “Medula, Medula, Medula, Medula.” It was hard to tell.

Her hot breath was kind of a turn-on. I didn’t expect that. But I have kind of a weakness for women whispering in my ear. Then she mashed a Hershey’s Kiss into my hand, after which two of her people grabbed me from behind, kind of spun me around and sent me off into the crowd.

It took me a while to get the whole “hug and kiss” pun.

I felt a little dizzy as they shoved me out of the way to make room for the next customer. Was that the shaktipat everybody was getting so excited about? Shaktipat is supposed to be a direct transference of spiritual energy from an enlightened being. It felt to me more like that druggy, disorientated sensation you have when you get off a rollercoaster or when you take a hardy toke of some very good weed.

In case you don’t know, Amma is a cute, short, chubby Indian lady who a lot of people believe is an Enlightened Being. She was born in 1953 in a tiny fishing village in South India. During her childhood, they say, she spent much of her time absorbed in a deep meditative state of Samadhi. By the time she was 21 she’d begun to attract followers. In the early '80s she consolidated this following into an ashram and began traveling the world offering darshan, a Sanskrit word meaning “encounter with a saintly person,” to spiritual seekers around the world.

There’s a lot to like about Amma. So I’m going to start by saying some of that, because I know that no matter what I do people are gonna say this article trashes poor sweet Amma. But she seems like a genuinely decent person and I’m sure her charitable work does a lot of people a lot of good. She’s not a hate monger. She doesn’t put down anyone regardless of race, creed or religion. She seems to be a very nice lady who wants to do some good in the world. Her charities run educational programs, distribute free food, run hospitals and hospices, build free homes for the poor and provide lifetime stipends for mentally and physically challenged adults. It is all wonderful stuff.

What worried me was what surrounded all of this niceness and how some of it wasn't really all that nice.

The set up has been psychologically and theatrically designed for the maximum build-up just before you get the big pay off. When you arrive at the Radisson Hotel near LAX you take a number. Or in my case, you arrive really late after taking your friend to the airport and you get a little pink card. After Amma gets through hugging all the people with numbers, if she’s still up to hugging some more, they allow the folks with the pink cards to get a number.

The second floor of the hotel has been re-imagined as a spiritual wonderland, sort of a Hindu themed fairground complete with uniformed Mousekateers to guide you through. After you get your number you stand in a long line, drawing slowly ever nearer to the saint herself. “Have your ticket visible,” I was told several times. Can’t have any line jumpers! And you’d be amazed how many of these “spiritual seekers” will elbow the next guy out of the way to get their shaktipat first.

As you get closer you see that Amma is surrounded by concentric circles of ever more devoted disciples. There are three or four guys right next to her watching her the way a dog watches its master as she speaks what I assume are beautiful spiritual messages to them, to which they dare not reply or in any way engage in conversation with someone so divine. After that are rings of worshippers swooning just to be in the Amma’s presence. When they remove Amma’s chair many of these will run up to lay prostrate and kiss the ground upon which it had sat.

As you move closer to Amma you gradually surrender more and more of your own will. First your shoes come off. Then you’re directed in a line by authoritative people who instruct you to move from chair to chair. Then you are pushed into a kneeling position such that you are crawling for the last ten feet or so. Then they remove your jewelry and glasses and wipe off your face like you’re a three year old child. Finally you are pushed powerlessly into Amma’s -- they call her “Mother” -- waiting embrace.

The stage is set up with Hollywood style lighting full of vibrant orange, pink and gold. On the wall is a ten-foot high photo of Amma with a half dozen spotlights trained upon her face to make it glow even more ethereally, just in case you forgot what she looks like. Backlit streamers and flags hang all around the Radisson Hotel’s conference room to create the image of a blissful Hindu heaven. The color scheme seems intended to generate a feeling of womblike security. The scent of incense and perfume hangs heavy in the air.

Beyond the inner circle is the marketplace. Here you can buy Amma jewelry, Amma T-shirts, Amma bumper stickers, Amma dolls, Amma coffee mugs, Amma iPods pre-filled with MP3’s of Amma singing and a whole range of other such goodies and trinkets. On the walls are advertisements for other spiritual healers personally endorsed by Amma, such as Dr. Weng’s acupuncture, Effective Vedic Astrology, Banyan Botanicals and much, much more. If that’s not enough for you, you can buy all sorts of items personally used by Amma including discarded clothing, chairs, rugs, and even Amma’s Lexus. The poster for this last item helpfully includes the car’s current Blue Book value ($8000) and its starting bid ($12,000). And don’t forget the food! Delicious vegetarian cuisine at reasonable prices. This last, I did not pass up.

Amma is a registered trademark. None of the licensed items on offer fail to put that little circled “R” next to her name, lest she lose her claim. I know how this works. I used to be in charge of this kind of stuff for a Japanese company that made a superhero show and we did exactly the same thing. She’s got a cute little logo too, just like we did. Branding is everything! I’ll bet you dollars to donuts she goes after bootleg Amma merch just like we went after bootleg Ultraman merch.

Later on, after my hug, I got to witness some of Amma’s teaching. She’s not bad. In fact she and her opening act, a bearded swami whose name I’ve forgotten, are fairly accomplished stand-up comics. That was something I didn’t expect. The jokes were pretty corny, but not too worn out. There was one about a guy who walks into a bar and throws his drink at the bartender. Before the bartender can get mad, the guy starts weeping. He tells the bartender he can’t help himself, it’s a compulsion. The bartender recommends a shrink. The guy goes and then returns six months later whereupon he again throws his drink at the bartender. The bartender says that the shrink doesn’t seem to have helped. The guy says, “No. He helped a lot. I still have the compulsion but now I don’t feel guilty about it!” The crowd laughs, the spiritual significance of the joke is explained and everybody sighs deeply in unison at the beauty of the great teacher’s great teaching.

And just what is Amma’s message to the world? Here are a few quotes from the free pamphlet (chock full of advertisements) given out to all comers; “God-realization is nothing but the ability and expansiveness of the heart to love everything equally,” and “Love is what fills life constantly with newness,” “Try to cultivate a heart that never harms any being in thought, word or deed.” That sort of thing.

We are also told in the pamphlet, “To love is Mother’s (Amma’s) nature, to serve is her nature,” and assured that, “As far as Mother is concerned, everyone is her child.” “There is nothing preplanned about Amma’s mission,” the pamphlet tells us, “All her projects have been spontaneously compassionate responses to the sorrow and suffering she sees around her.”

And yet, and yet, and yet… for all the charitable work and messages of kindness and generosity there is something deeply disturbing about the whole circus that surrounds all of this admittedly admirable work.

Maybe it’s because it is such a circus. Why do we need to driven nearly to a frenzy with spiritual madness before we can be coerced into contributing to a good cause?

What’s wrong with worshipping Amma, after all? She seems nice enough. So what’s the problem?

The scariest part of the whole thing to me was the men standing around her transfixed just like dogs ready to obey their master. The expressions on their faces were just like the expressions you see on a Doberman waiting for its master to say “fetch” or “kill.” A dog is only as good as its master. If the master tells the dog to fetch the paper, it fetches the paper. If the master tells the dog to maul the black man who just moved in next door, it mauls the black man. The dog’s only criteria is pleasing its master. It has no will or moral center of its own. Blind obedience is never a good thing, even when it’s directed at a supposedly “good” person.

What happens when these folks who’ve learned only obedience get tired of Amma? They have learned only obedience. Who will they obey next?

We need personal responsibility. This is truer now than it ever has been in history. We now have access as individuals to unprecedented power. This was brought home clearly by the events of September 11, 2001. A handful of people were able to cause a level of destruction and havoc that had previously taken the efforts of an entire nation. And things have only become more dangerous since then.

It’s never a good thing to give up your personal power. You need your personal power in order to take personal responsibility.

Maybe Amma delivers pure love. That’s what her press agent says, anyway. Still, I’m not sure pure love is what we need either. I think what’s truly needed is a balance of love and hate. By “hate” I’m not talking about the kind of hate that manifests as crimes against people of other races and that kind of thing. Hate is something much deeper and more profound.

There are two sides to the Universe. Spiritual people always talk about oneness, about dissolving into the embrace of Universal love. But that’s only one side of reality. The other side is hate, separation, aloneness. Both are real. When love and hate are balanced there is compassion and wisdom. Love alone is beautiful but powerless. Hate alone is powerful, but too dangerous.

It’s as bad to deny hate is as it is to deny love. When we acknowledge our separation we can act in unity with each other. When we lose our sense of separation we lose our effectiveness as individuals.

The two sides of our being are not mutually exclusive. It’s not that we have to give up our existence as individuals to merge into the warm embrace of all-encompassing Oneness. Our essential Oneness and our essential separation are manifestations of the same thing, which is neither oneness nor separation.

There are no words for this because the function of words is to divide and categorize. But reality as it is defies all categories. Even something as obvious as saying love is better than hate is an attempt to pin down and define that which is beyond definition.

We must act with compassion if we want to create a peaceful world. That’s true. But compassion is also beyond love and hate. Compassion is a spontaneous response to what needs to be done right here and right now.

I don’t detest Amma any more than I detest Phish or The Grateful Dead or anyone else who offers an evening of escapist entertainment based upon that heady feeling of warmth and community that can be created in an environment specifically designed to amplify those feelings while pushing all the other stuff to one side. I had fun and I would go again. The food was delicious too. I am overwhelmed by my own good fortune to have friends as wonderful as Aspen, Sawa and Tenaya who accompanied me and tolerated my annoyance at much of what went on at the event. I am overjoyed to live in a world enough at-peace that something like the Amma experience is allowed to happen.

What I question is when such experiences are offered up as if they provide some kind of Ultimate Answer to the world’s woes. If we don’t acknowledge and understand our own hate we can’t effectively deal with the problems that hate creates in our world. Warm smiles and hugs don’t fix everything and, sadly, they never will.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Brad Warner's endless tour continues soon and he may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

As you read this I will be winding up the first part of an extensive international tour to promote my latest book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. I have a small break now before a short hop to New Mexico and then the madness all starts again in August when I go to Finland and Germany.

Whenever I give a talk I’m always in a hurry to get to the Q&A section. That’s where the real action is as far as I’m concerned. At several of my stops on the current tour people have asked me whether I’ve had the experience of satori and, if so, what it was like.

The word satori means “awakening to one’s true nature.” According to most of the earliest English-language books on Zen, including the works of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, satori is the goal of Zen practice. I happen to come from a tradition that looks upon satori in a completely different way. But even in my tradition, there is the idea that if you do your Zen practice long enough and sincerely enough, there will come a time when the true nature of yourself and the universe becomes clear.

But asking someone else about their satori is a little bit like the guy in the Monty Python “Nudge Nudge” skit who keeps pestering a stranger about his sex life then finishes by asking, “Have you ever slept with a lady? What’s it like?”

Like sex, satori is something that can’t really be explained. Also, just like sex, it’s very easy to make others believe you’ve had an experience that you really haven’t. There’s enough literature out there these days that anyone who wants to could cobble together a pretty convincing satori experience story without even having done a single period of zazen. Plus, again like sex, there’s a huge market for stories of satori experiences among those who want to try and live vicariously through others, leading to the development of a very popular and lucrative field of literature we could call “sa+0ri pr0n.”

I’m not a big fan of this kind of literature, though I feel I may have inadvertently produced some of it myself. A lot of the readers and reviewers of my first book, Hardcore Zen seized on an incident that happens about 2/3 of the way through, in which I described the experience of understanding that occurred one day while I was walking along the banks of a river on my way to work. Sometimes people ask about this and their questions get so garbled I can barely make sense of them. One guy in Detroit a few years back asked about the incident in my book where I saw an apparition beside a lake. I can only assume he must have been talking about that part of the book. Unless he was talking about someone else’s book entirely!

Zen literature is full of expressions of the state I was trying to address with that passage in Hardcore Zen. Sometimes it’s described as “seeing your own face as it was before your parents were born.” My first teacher, Tim McCarthy, said, “It’s more you than you could ever be.” Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who ordained me, said, “My personality extends throughout the universe.” Just the other day in Saskatoon a guy told me about how depressed he’d been when he found out God didn’t exist. I told him God exists and that I can no longer doubt it at all.

These explanations really don’t help much, though. “Seeing your face before your parents were born” sounds like a description of reincarnation. “It’s more you than you” just sounds weird. “My personality extends throughout the universe” sounds like the ultimate ego trip. And how many other worthless assholes claim they know for certain God exists? They usually end up causing major catastrophes. There are a million other expressions of the same thing out there, all equally useless.

Yet one facet of my experience that day by the river was that all of these expressions were not useless at all. In fact they began on that day to make perfect sense. I don’t expect you to believe that. In fact I wouldn’t even want you to believe that. You really shouldn’t. Don’t. Please.

You’ve got to be very careful about people who tell you about their amazing spiritual experiences. They’re usually trying to sell you something. I know of one guy who asks $50,000 to give you a satori experience. And I’m trying to sell books. I won’t lie to you about that. Not necessarily by talking about that experience. But it’s part of it. But I do want to make it clear that I am not trying to get followers. Followers are a pain in the ass. They’re the ultimate stalkers. I have nothing but contempt for followers, especially if they’re mine.

When the folks who tell you about their amazing spiritual experiences aren’t trying to sell it to you they’re usually trying to get you to validate their experiences. They’re not sure if their enlightenment was real or not, but if someone else has believes in it they might be able to believe in it themselves.

But then on the other hand I know why a lot of people ask me about whether or not I’ve had satori. Here I am telling them it takes years of hard slog for zazen to start really working. They don’t want to waste their lives on boring Zen practice unless there’s gonna be some kind of pay off. They want to know what that pay off is supposed to be like so they can decide if it’s worth the trouble.

If that’s your view I can tell you right now it’s not worth the trouble. You might as well do something fun instead. The only way you’re ever going to have what it takes to pursue Zen practice is when you’ve exhausted every other option, when there’s nothing left for you but to dive right into the truth itself no matter what it costs you. Because it will cost you dearly. It will cost you your soul.

Still, when I started out with this stuff I found some sa+0ri pr0n inspirational. From time to time, the hope that I might one day have an experience like that myself kept me from giving up, just like my hope that I might one day have a 3-way myself kept me reading Penthouse Forum. That very same hope for satori someday also made me lose faith in Zen entirely a number of times when I realized it wasn’t happening, the same way I finally stopped reading Penthouse Forum. (Y’know, someone at SG should start and “SG Forum” group. I’d read that.)

So I don’t really know whether it benefits anyone to give them my own Penthouse Forum-style tale of satori or not. Plus there’s a sense in which mentioning these things at all is seen as bragging, like only people on a highly elevated spiritual plane or some such shit can have them. But the fact is that satori is available to anyone serious enough to work at it. It is your birthright. It is the underlying core of your real experience this very moment.

The best I can say about what happened to me on that day I wrote about in my first book is that I went in a moment from seeing myself as a guy walking to work to seeing myself as a concrete expression of the will of the universe. And it was not an intellectual experience. It was pure body knowledge, the same way reading about a 3-way in Penthouse Forum is totally different from actually having one on a Saturday afternoon in your own bedroom with two very close and beautiful friends.

Looking at the sky was exactly like looking into a mirror. Same with anything I turned my attention to. Yet, although I’d never felt that way before, it didn’t feel like anything new. It was like this had been the way things were all along and my other way of thinking had just been a temporary obstruction. It was like recognizing the mind that I’d been born with.

But most people who believe in satori or various other kinds of “enlightenment experiences” think that these experiences will be the ultimate fix-it-all. They want the experience because they imagine it will instantaneously wipe away every pain, fear and difficulty they have in life and they will exist forever in a state of permanent bliss and happiness. They think it will end suffering. It doesn’t.

In fact in my case it didn’t really fix much of anything. OK. A few nagging fears that had dogged me for ages were gone. I’m no longer afraid I’m going to die someday. That doesn’t mean I don’t fear death at all. It’s just that I don’t fear it as death. I don’t worry that one day I’m going to disappear. I can’t disappear. Neither can you or anyone else. Yet you’re not going to live forever either. You’re gonna be dead as a doornail someday and ain’t nothin’ gonna bring you back. You won’t get reincarnated either.

I still have all of the residual karma I had before that day. I am exactly the same person as I was. As Dogen put it, “Realization doesn’t break the individual any more that the reflection of the sky in a dewdrop breaks the dewdrop.” You still gotta deal. Yet you deal from a new standpoint. You deal with life knowing now what you’re dealing with and who is dealing with it.

I’ll say it again; none of the foregoing is intended to impress you or to make you believe what I say. I honestly couldn’t give two shits who it impressed or who believed it. In fact if you do believe it I’m likely to regard you as kind of a sap. But the fact of having been asked about it so many times on this tour lets me know there are people out there who are curious about these things and I’d like to try and give a realistic answer. This, I think, is very important because there are so many bullshit answers to that question and a whole lot of people believe them. I believed a lot of that bullshit myself and it did me a lot of harm.

So take from this article whatever you want. Argue about it in the comments section if you feel so inclined. Enjoy yourself. Be happy.



Brad Warner is ON TOUR RIGHT NOW and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Brad is currently looking for women to help him “do research” for his upcoming book about sex and Zen. He can be contacted directly for an appointment through this website!

The Dalai Lama recently said, "Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication.” He says that celibacy, ultimately, brings a better life with “more freedom” and less ups and downs.

I found this interesting and wanted to ponder it further and engage in discussion with my friend, Brad Warner. Brad is sometimes referred to as a Buddhist teacher and people often ask me if I ask Brad about Buddhist shit. Mostly I don’t. We normally eat burritos and talk about how much sex we are or are not having, but since I’m a curious kitten and this topic was fresh in my mind I decided to ask him what his thoughts were.

Who am I to disagree with the Dalai Lama? Hence, I looked within myself to figure out where my feelings lay on the subject. And then asked Brad for his.

I definitely see what the Dalai Lama’s saying. I have several journals full of romantic anguish that would depress a holocaust survivor. I can understand how a life without the distractions of all that might be could ultimately more desirable, and for a while I sat with that.

I realized that when I reach for my journal it’s often to get the feelings out that might bore my friends, since its pages contain more angst than can be hammered out with a night’s drinking.

While at times life is taxing, I’m usually living in the land of the blissfully content. I’ve had my heart broken but I’ve also experienced true intimacy and found out what love is. I’ve bonded myself to several individuals for life through our relational and lustful encounters -- and I wouldn’t miss that for the world.

Maybe I’m just an intensity junky, but what goes up, must come down and isn’t it better to engage in a rich life experience, when it comes to this stuff anyway, than to abstain from romantic relationships entirely? That’s what I think I think, but I wanted to clarify my position and see what Brad’s thoughts are.

Aspen: Do you agree that sex and dating ultimately cause suffering and attachment?

Brad: Sure. But just about anything you do causes suffering and attachment. Any kind of personal interaction leads to suffering and attachment. When monks leave family life behind they just form new attachments in the monastery. It’s impossible to really live free of human attachment, except for maybe a few people who live in the mountains, but in general, yes.

Aspen: Isn’t it more important to have a well-rounded human existence with interpersonal relationships than it is to try to avoid suffering?

Brad: People think that because I’m a Buddhist teacher I’m an advocate of not having these human attachments, but it’s next to impossible to actually do so.

Aspen: So then maybe a better goal would be to learn to deal with your suffering...

Brad: Yeah. I come across as sounding kind of boring in that way, because really the best way to be free from suffering, as much as possible, would be a marriage or a monogamous relationship, or these kinds of boring things. When I go on SuicideGirls and I start reading that people are into polyamory. It’s a nice fantasy but it normally doesn’t really work.

[Brad is surprised I don’t know what that is and explains its an extended polyamorous family, and alternative lifestyle. According to Wiki, it’s having more than one intimate relationship with the consent of everyone involved. Brad picks up a guitar and starts to strum it. He and I discuss the fact that we’re both suffering right now as I write this.]

Aspen: Even the dog is suffering.

Brad: Really? Even the dog?

Aspen: Yes. She wants you to give her as much attention as you are giving that guitar right now. What are you suffering about?

Brad: Cookies.

Aspen: Do you think there is suffering even when we’re in love and the sex is mutually agreeable and both participants are laying around afterwards all dreamy?

Brad: If you really looked closely you could see some.

Aspen: How would searching for suffering serve me?

Brad: Suffering is always a matter of comparing what you have now with what you think it ought to be. I’m not saying you should look for it, I’m just saying it’s there.

Aspen: Do you think that all of us in this urban experience have pressure from society to have an enhanced sexual desire?

Brad: Yes. There is a great push in the advertising community and incentive to promote the idea of sex, because sex sells. In our media saturated culture, you are constantly being told various things about sex. Most of the people who are telling you don’t have a clue. They are presenting fantasies or something that isn’t real…like the Playboy mansion. This is the life the Buddha lived before he left the palace to embark on his own spiritual journey.

Aspen: So you are saying the Buddha is like Hugh Heffner?

Brad: Yes. He was like Hugh until his early 30s. There are all kinds of stories about him having hotties at his disposal and he saw that that was not an end to suffering…to keep coming back to that word.

[Brad then plays with the dog and tells me since she’s fixed she’s not suffering.]

Aspen: How do you feel about love?

Brad: Oh….um…..love….love stinks. Remember that song? Love is a funny thing. In Christianity, it’s all about love and Buddhism tends to value the word compassion a lot more so…Then there’s the agape love. There is something called love that you could say holds the whole universe together, an interconnectedness. Love in the emotional sense tends to be problematic.

Aspen: Does it always involve attachment? There is often a fine line between intimacy and co-dependency. It causes an extraordinary amount of pain in the world. If you don’t love someone, they can’t hurt you.

Brad: Yeah, I’m sort of thinking about my own life and this marriage that’s ending. Its also culturally bound. I tend to be kind of cold.

Aspen: Yeah, I can see that.

Brad: I’m not really Mr. Cuddly. I’m not a “Mr. I-love-you-all-the-time” kind of person, so when you say love it means different things to different people.

Aspen: Yes, but I asked you.

Brad: I don’t think too much about love.

Aspen: Don’t you think too much about everything?

Brad: Yeah. Um…..I don’t have any great deep thoughts related to the word love.

Aspen: What about the word burrito?

Brad: I have a lot more associations with the word burrito because I had a good one in San Fran with Soyrizo. What do you think about love?

Aspen: I think its something people chase like food and when people don’t, its just so they don’t get hurt.

Brad: I think men and women think different things about love. Men say “I love you” in the heat of the moment without really understanding what that means to the woman. I’ve never gone out searching for lots of sex. It’s mostly not worth the trouble. That’s what the internet is for.

Aspen: Why? Because it’s often less fulfilling than you would like?

Brad: Yes and it often has to do with your upbringing. My parents stayed together until my mom died, so it’s just not something you go and do. I have the same sort of urges of any man….I sound very confused and weird….

Aspen: I see how the roller-coaster inherently caused by dating would go against the typical Buddhist path of staying even-keeled. How can one keep a steady mind if they want to experience a healthy dating life while keeping steady on their spiritual path?

Brad: You’re probably not going to and it’s a tradeoff.

Aspen: Well when the endorphins kick in, you’re too high to stare at the wall and when you do you just think about sex.

Brad: When you are in that state you cant really think clearly.

Aspen: Why would you ever want to avoid that experience entirely?

Brad: Well its standard in Buddhist practice to avoid states of bliss because bliss is the other side of terror. So that’s why you’d want to avoid that terrific state because it always has a backside to it. This is why the long term relationship is better….if you get through that bliss state you can get through the flip side and then settle in a place that is neither one of those.

Aspen: Awesome. I dig. Do you think people turn to spiritual journey when they are looking for love, or after they have it?

Brad: Both. I think often people get into these spiritual groups because they are looking for a love experience but that’s also why people join cults…because they feel they are loved by the cult and that can create a kind of drive toward looking for that.

Aspen: Does urban living affect one’s spirituality?

Brad: Yes it does but then so does rural living. These days it might be equal because of the internet and everything. I’ve spent time in Tassajara [an SF Buddhist mountain retreat] where no technology is allowed and its very isolated. I was talking to a guy I know who spends a lot of time there and also a lot in San Francisco and he was saying he thinks that we get acclimated to the sounds of the city and you are actually primed to react to that and it’s in your nature to be alert to sounds that might hurt you so he was thinking that based on his two experiences that we are expending energy to shut out all of these sounds. So like a billboard that flashes something to you, it is causing a response and all of that is taking a toll.

Aspen: So you think that people seek refuge from the stimuli?

Brad: Oh yeah. More often what I see people doing is searching for stimulus. I find myself doing this, like when you surf the internet, people are spending hours on the internet looking for stimulation. The worst thing I do I go on YouTube looking for old bands. It causes a reaction so sometimes people want to be away from that. And what’s really important is to find a way for people to live in that environment. This will gradually change the environment itself but it will take time. The economy is a reaction to over stimulation and we’ve put ourselves in an economic recession to avoid stimulus. When you go around you see blank billboards and you didn’t see that in Los Angeles two years ago. When things go too far it’s over consumption and we sort of recognize that we are over consuming, but we don’t know how to do it in a comfortable way, so you have all these very deep unconscious reactions…

[I’m yawning and he says doing zazen makes him fall asleep too easily.]

Aspen: Do you think those in urban society are more promiscuous than in rural areas?

Brad: Not necessarily. I think were more open about it. Christians are more promiscuous but they hide it well. Like Sarah Palin and her pregnant daughter. Maybe were a little bit more in this kind of a society but…..it’s a common idea to idealize rural life. That it’s free of temptation….but sometimes in a rural society sometimes all there is to do is fuck.

Promiscuity always seems to lead to misery but people seem to mask it because they’re going to have more orgasms. Well the orgasm lasts a minute but you’ve invested a week into getting a minute long orgasm. You’ve invested a week of miserable hunting and pursuit and you cant help but get tangled into peoples lives.

Aspen: Does zazen affect your sex life?

Brad: There are two ways it affects your sex life. The sort of net result of doing zazen is that your life is more balanced so you start to pay attention to everything. When you start noticing everything, sex is just one of the things that happens. It doesn’t become less exciting, and it can become more stimulating because you’re more present. When everything becomes extraordinary, sex becomes less of a contrast to the rest of your life.

Aspen: Do you have anything specific to say about LA and sex and spirituality?

Brad: Los Angeles is a funny city when you talk about sex and spirituality because the entertainment industry is based here. A large portion of the population is involved in the entertainment Industry. In the ‘60s there was a huge spiritual movement here and it’s always struck me as being flaky. The actors have too much time on their hands -- that’s sort of a caricature but I think its very true. The entertainment industry is based on sex. Everyone needs to look sexy and everyone is better looking in LA.

Aspen: Everyone is very focused on grooming here.

Brad: When I go back to Knoxville everyone is a lot fatter. They seem healthier here. In LA the emphasis is always on getting something from it, like being in the spiritual community is good networking. Like scientology and this weird thing where they get together and yell at you but when spirituality is done for a gaining ideal then you’re just back into the same trap of anything where you’re trying to gain something like enlightenment or peace of mind.

Aspen: Meaning you aren’t content.

Brad: Well that’s part of it but the Zen focus tends to be on seeing what you really are now without trying to alter it deliberately. And it changes as you see it whereas other spiritual practices focus on….well I want to be this and how am I going to get to be this person I want to be.

Aspen: Well right now I’m a mess, Brad.

Brad: Well then that is very helpful because what you want to be is an idea created by that mess so it’s not a sound starting point. If this messiness creates an idea of what it wants to be then the idea is fundamentally flawed so its better to look at the mess and if you keep looking at it, it sort of gradually sort of fixes itself. But I don’t think there is any other way to do it.

Aspen: Well if you are looking at yourself where you are now, then why do zazen?

Brad: Because it’s the best way.

Aspen: According to whom? You?

Brad: Well yeah. Because you’re sitting still and a blank wall doesn’t lie to you it just kind of presents. It’s kind of an amazing thing how that wall will present to you everything that you are.

Aspen: Usually it just presents my grocery list and the calls I need to return.

Brad: Yeah that too. At least you remember.


Brad Warner is currently on a book tour to spread the gospel about his latest spiritual guide, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate.

A guy I know wrote me the following question:

Zazen is the type of meditation I teach. I use the word meditation here a bit loosely since zazen differs greatly from most other activities that fall under that heading. Unlike most forms of meditation, zazen is completely non-directed and has no goal. This is the key to its tremendous power. To see SuicideGirl LizaRose demonstrating how it's done go here. For more info see my book Hardcore Zen.There must be a zillion on-line sources of info on it as well.

The subject of Zen practice (aka zazen) for survivors of trauma has been much on my mind of late. I’ve tried several times to write something intelligent about it. But since I’m not a survivor of trauma myself -- other than life’s usual traumas that we all have -- I sometimes feel it’s not my place to say. I have known people who are both childhood sex abuse survivors and dedicated Zen practitioners. I hope one day one of them will write about this subject. But until then, I’ll take a shot. Much of what I want to say is based on what I’ve observed in them. But whether they involve childhood sexual abuse or not, traumas of all kinds are serious business and probably share much in common.

It’s a fact that zazen brings stuff up. No matter what kind of stuff you have locked away in your mind and body it's going to come out during sitting. It’s also true that zazen is different from other forms of meditation (if zazen is even a form of meditation) in that it is not directed at any ideal condition. In zazen you allow whatever comes up to just come up as it will, rather than attempting to move the mind toward a specific desired state as most forms of meditation do. This means that trauma survivors may be more likely to face repressed memories and suchlike while doing zazen than while doing other forms of meditation.

I don't think it's truly dangerous for trauma survivors to do zazen. But they have to be careful. Of course, anyone should exercise caution while doing the practice. But survivors of trauma need to be possibly even more careful. A practice that's very much focused on having an "Enlightenment experience" quickly is more likely to bring this stuff to the surface before you’re ready for it. This is yet another reason why crap like Big Mind® is so incredibly heinous and irresponsible. A pox upon them and their putrid ilk!

But here’s what a trauma survivor might expect to encounter in traditional Zen practice. Most of this is also applicable to anyone who practices zazen, trauma survivor or not. There’s not a single person in the world who doesn’t have some stuff they don’t acknowledge buried below the surface.

On the most superficial level zazen will bring up memories. At first these will be familiar memories. Meaning they won't be particularly surprising, just stuff you haven't thought of in a long time. For a trauma survivor, this can mean you start recalling things that are painful and that you have avoided thinking about, but which you are basically aware of. The reaction to this runs along the lines of the response you'd have to it even if you weren't sitting zazen. But sitting tends to intensify emotions. You might start crying or having other similar responses. This can be a bit embarrassing in a crowded zendo. But you should know that you are not alone in having feelings like this.

On the next level zazen can bring up things you have deliberately repressed and forced yourself to forget. At this level the memories can be surprising since you might start recalling things you were not consciously aware had happened. You may even be unsure if they're true memories or not. Indeed some may not be true at all. That’s important. Just because you remember something doesn’t mean it actually happened. These memories might make you confused, angry, etc. Again, the fact of sitting zazen can intensify this more than if it had come up in a "normal" day.

As you continue to practice you get to stuff that is hard to even recognize as memory. You may get strange impressions of vague things or just bare emotions devoid of any particular context. These are harder to deal with because they're impossible to figure out. You’re better off not to even try to figure this stuff out because that just builds up more thought and emotion on top of what you’ve already got to deal with. Acknowledge it and, as much as possible, try to just let it be. It will pass.

Sometimes -- even when they try not to -- practitioners will assign these emotions to events and people inappropriately. People who experience this kind of thing and don't understand the source of it (and no one could possibly understand the source of it) may blame it on their teachers or on other people practicing. It is often the difficult duty of a Zen teacher to bear the brunt of some of this misdirected stuff. So be kind to us, please! Or practitioners may blame themselves or have a whole lot of different responses. Don’t worry about your responses either. Let them go.

I should point out here that it generally takes months or years to get to this level. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to encounter in your first zazen class. What you generally encounter in your first few times doing zazen is utter boredom!

So what do you do if this happens? By the time you get down to the more difficult strata of buried stuff you will probably already have developed a relationship with a teacher. If you have a teacher it's good to discuss it with her or him. That’s what they’re there for. As long time practitioners you can be certain they have experienced this themselves. Remember that most of us in the Zen teaching game came into it because we had our own very serious stuff to deal with. Since they have watched their own stuff come up in a similar matter, your teacher should be able, at the very least, to tell you how they dealt with it. They can also assure you you're not going crazy and so on.

Whether or not any of this comes up in this way depends largely on the practitioner. If you're very gung-ho and in a big hurry to reach some rarified state of consciousness or -- God forbid! -- Enlightenment, you're more likely to encounter this kind of thing faster. If your practice is more gentle and unhurried, you're less likely to. If it does come up, you’ll already have some grounding that will allow you to handle it. So I would suggest taking it slow and easy. Just enjoy sitting zazen for its own sake and don't try to get anywhere with it. If you do it that way, the stuff that comes up will come up in smaller portions over time and won’t confront you before you're ready to deal with it.

In spite of all the foregoing cautionary material, I still believe zazen can be a very good thing for survivors of traumatic experiences. Maybe even the best thing. It can put you directly in contact with the source of the trauma itself. By slowly and carefully removing the psychological barriers you’ve erected to protect yourself from these memories you can finally become aware that the memories themselves are just thoughts in your head. No matter what the content of your thoughts are, they are all just thoughts. This is easy to say but very difficult to truly understand because we’ve been taught since birth to believe in our own thoughts.

Once you’ve seen what these thoughts and memories truly are, you will come to see that they have far less power than you imagined they did. And once you’ve seen how powerless all thoughts really are, you can then transcend these memories and the detrimental effects they’ve had upon you. The key is to see what's going on right now, rather than trying to see into the past through memory or into the future through thought.

This is all more complex and involved than I can possibly get into here. But these are the basic things to look out for.

Brad Warner is ON TOUR RIGHT NOW and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

I was very pleasantly surprised to see R. Elisabeth Cornwell’s articles The Evolution of Religion and Why Women Are Bound to Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective in these pages recently. Could Suicide Girls become a journal of serious discourse on religious matters? Incredible. And to think there are a bunch of “Buddhists” out there who say I shouldn’t be writing here.

You can’t argue with Cornwell’s thesis in her latest piece that women have generally been extremely poorly treated by religion and yet continue nonetheless to propagate the very beliefs responsible for their often sorry position in society. You hear a lot of talk about primitive matriarchal religions that treated women well. But most of those religions are so ancient and so thoroughly dead that what we can say about them is mainly conjecture. The powerful patriarchal religions of the modern world have mostly treated women like shit.

Except for Buddhism.

You knew I’d say that, didn’t you? But it happens to be true. Historically Buddhism has been much better to women than any of the other major religions*. To be sure, there are examples of times when certain Buddhists have treated women just as badly as any other religion. But in doing so these Buddhists have gone against the explicit directions of the founder of their faith.

Buddha’s first order of monks was an all-boys club with a big “No Girls Allowed” sign on the door. But there was a group of women, including Buddha’s step-mom (his mom had died giving birth to him and he was raised by an aunt) and the wife he ditched when he first went on his quest for the truth**, who hung out with the monks, listened to Buddha’s lectures and practiced the meditation he taught. One day Buddha’s step-mom went to Buddha on behalf of these women and asked that they be admitted to the order. Buddha said, “Forget it.”

But a little while later, Buddha’s right hand man Ananda asked Buddha, “Are women less intelligent than men?” Buddha said no, women were just as intelligent as men. Ananda said, “Are women less capable of reaching enlightenment than men?” Buddha said no, women were just as capable as men of reaching enlightenment. Having thus backed him into a corner Ananda went for the kill and asked, “Then why don’t you admit them into the order?”

Buddha had to admit that his initial decision had been wrong. So he opened the order to women. But he was a realist. He knew India in his time was a male-dominated society and would look very much askance at a religious order that admitted women. Plenty of people were already bitching at him for a lot of the radical stuff he’d done. So he made up a list of rules women had to follow that were much stricter than the ones men had to observe and he separated the boys from the girls into different monasteries. He also predicted the order would eventually fail because of this decision. He was wrong there.

Once Buddha was dead, though, less sexually liberated men took control of the order. After a while some male monks developed a stupidly superior attitude that led a lot of them to take ridiculous vows such as that they would never touch a woman or speak to one, some even vowed never to so much as look at a woman. The founder of the Buddhist order in which I was ordained, Dogen Zenji, called bullshit on that.

Dogen wrote a piece called “Prostrating to The Attainment of the Marrow” (Raihai Tokuzui in Japanese). You can read it in volume one of his masterwork, Shobogenzo.

Dogen says, “nowadays (nowadays, in this case, being the year 1240) extremely stupid people look at women without having corrected the prejudice that women are objects of sexual greed. Disciples of the Buddha must not be like this. If whatever may become the object of sexual greed is to be hated, do not all men deserve to be hated too? As regards the causes and conditions of becoming tainted, a man can be the object, a woman can be the object, what is neither man nor woman can be the object, and dreams and fantasies, flowers in space, can also be the object. There have been impure acts done with a reflection on water as an object, and there have been impure acts done with the sun in the sky as an object.”

I can vouch for that last bit. I used to work in a group home for mentally handicapped adults. We had one guy there who had a thing for shoes. You didn’t dare take yours off when he was around lest you find a sticky present inside when you put them back on! Dogen says, “if we hate whatever might become the object of sexual greed, all men and women will hate each other, and we will never have any chance to attain salvation.”

I always think of this when I hear people talking about the supposedly great virtue in the way some religions force women to cover their bodies lest men become sexually greedy. If we follow that logic then an oil magnate who owns a flashy Cadillac ought to drive around with it covered in a burlap sack to keep those who can’t afford such cars from suffering the sin of envy. We’ve all got our own specific objects of greed and it’s up to us to deal with that ourselves. It’s not up to other people to shield us from temptation.

Dogen goes on to say, “Even in China, there was a stupid monk who made the following vow: ‘Through every life, in every age, I shall never look at a woman.’ Upon what morality is this vow based? What wrong is there in a woman? What virtue is there in a man? Among bad people there are men who are bad people. Among good people there are women who are good people.”

He cites numerous famous female Buddhist masters whose understanding far surpassed most men, saying that a guy who took a vow like this would never get a chance to learn from them. He then derides the then-current Japanese custom of not allowing women to visit certain temples.

To get back to what Cornwell wrote, in her article on women and religion she says, “In order for women to abandon religion and its securities, there needs to be something tangible to replace the support that it offers.” This is truer than I think even she realizes.

One of the greatest marks of Buddha as a real man of genius was that he didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. He realized religion and spirituality were pretty fucked up. But he also understood the very important role they play in human society. As Cornwell points out in her article on the evolution of religion, religion serves a need much, much deeper than anything the intellect can ever hope to reach.

This is why atheism, as rational and sensible as it is, will never be an adequate substitute for religion. It’s like trying to substitute actual eating with a superbly argued essay on food. It’s an intellect-based solution for a problem that has nothing at all to do with the intellect.

Buddhism did away with deities and belief systems, but did not do away with ritual and practice. Buddhist temples, though they aren’t strictly speaking “religious temples,”*** look like religious temples and the things you do in Buddhist temples seem like the same things you do in religious temples. You chant, you prostrate yourself in front of statues, there are people in funny clothes inside, there are rules to be followed, there is a community of fellow adherents, and all the rest. Thus the deep need we all feel to belong to that kind of an institution is satisfied. Yet there is no pretense that some big guy with a beard who lives up in the sky will smite you if you fail to do these things or reward you if you get all the steps just right. It’s all up to you.

I know I sound like a shill for Buddhism here. But I’m not really interested in converting anyone. If you can find another philosophy that does all these things, by all means go for it. Or if Buddhism’s just not for you, that’s fine too. No skin off my ass either way.

Although technically I am a Buddhist monk, I’m also a bit of a reluctant Buddhist. I’m a Buddhist because I have to admit that Buddhism really is the best thing on offer. I tried the rest and went with the best. But I don’t really self-identify as “a Buddhist” unless I’m specifically called upon to do so (such as when I’m asked to write a column about Buddhism for a pin-up website).

Still, I think in its attitude towards women and in its immensely practical attitude towards religion itself, Buddhism hasn’t been bested yet. Maybe someday. But not yet.



*Actually I don’t consider Buddhism to be a religion at all. But for the purposes of this article I’m treating it as one. It’s not a religion in the sense that it doesn’t have a deity and it isn’t based on spirituality. It is a religion in terms of its age, its function in society and its number of adherents. This subject is much too deep to get into in a footnote, though!

**Yes it's true, Buddha left his wife. But he didn't exactly dump her in a roach infested tenement with four screaming babies. Buddha was a prince at the time and knew his wife would be very well cared for when he was gone. There was a tradition in India of householders leaving home on spiritual quests and there were, and still are, customs and legal regulations in place to deal with such cases. And please note that later on his wife too entered the Buddhist order. Again, this is way too big for a footnote!

***See first footnote.

For further reading check out this page on the history of women in Buddhism.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and his latest, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

My new book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate is out now. The nice folks at Borders put an excerpt from the book on-line and you can read it by clicking HERE. I’ll be touring extensively to promote it this year, see below for a link to a list of dates.

I want to talk a little about the book. Not just to promote it (though I won’t deny I’m doing that), but because I wrote it to address a topic I think is really important. And that is, why we can’t seem to accept good spiritual advice unless it comes from Superman. I already ranted in my last column about how Buddhism isn’t spirituality. But here I’m using the word “spiritual” just to refer to that area of life that addresses the deep questions about the nature of things. It’s convenient shorthand. But everything I said last time still stands.

ANYWAY, there’s a long-standing notion that runs through a wide variety of religious traditions that people won’t listen to good spiritual advice unless the source of that advice possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men (and women, of course, but I’m quoting the intro to the old Superman TV show, which was very sexist). Thus it is not enough that Jesus said to love your enemies and advised that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. In order for anyone to accept that good stuff, the folks who spread his message thought we also needed to believe that Jesus had magic powers. I mean, why should we bother treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves unless the guy who said we should could change water into wine? D’uh.

This line of thinking runs through all the world’s great and not-so-great spiritual traditions. Buddhists are not any more immune to it than anybody else. There are hordes of stories of Buddha’s miracles and even of his virgin birth. The only real difference with Buddhists is that, by and large, they don’t tend to give a whole lot of importance to whether or not you believe those stories. In fact several major Buddhist lineages discount them entirely. But that doesn’t mean a lot of other Buddhists don’t believe them or even that for plenty of Buddhists those stories aren’t crucial.

The notion that for a spiritual teacher to be believed he or she must appear to be superhuman still carries a lot of weight even today. Of course, nowadays we’re less likely to believe our contemporary spiritual teachers can really do magic tricks -- though lots of people still fall for the sleight of hand of Eastern fakirs and Western faith healers. Sophisticated, worldly urban types tend to expect their miracles to be a bit more subtle than walking on water or turning into fire-spitting whirly-gigs as the Buddha is reported to have done. But we still expect miracles.

Sometimes we like our guys to be Great Ancient Masters reincarnated right in Beverly Hills or possess psychic abilities and beatific vision. And even when we’re not after those sorts of blatant conjuring acts we still look for people who conform to our image of spiritual purity. Those who are spiritually pure shouldn’t be like ordinary people. They need to be perpetually serene and unaffected, liberated from bodily desires and distress. When we find out that they’re people just like the rest of us we’re liable to rebel and turn upon them viciously. The mechanism by which this happens in Zen is well documented in books like Shoes Outside the Door and The Great Failure. Neither Richard Baker, subject of Shoes Outside the Door nor Dainin Katagiri, the subject of The Great Failure, ever claimed to be spiritual Supermen, but that didn’t stop certain of their followers from reacting with anger, distress and even grief when it was revealed they were not.

Of course someone who advocates a meditative practice ought to show signs of that meditative practice having had some good effects on their own lives. That’s perfectly reasonable to expect. What’s not perfectly reasonable to expect is that those good effects should manifest in precisely the manner we imagine they ought to. We can never know what these people would have been like if they hadn’t done their practice. Furthermore it’s not how meditative practice has affected your teacher that’s important. It’s only how meditative practice affects you that matters. And you are the only one who will ever see the full extent of that.

ANYWAY, the reason I wrote Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate was, in part, to try and kill the notion of the spiritual Superman for good and all. The only way I felt I could do that effectively was to character assassinate a specific Eastern spiritual teacher. Since I come from a tradition that believes you don’t find the really important truths by looking outward but by looking inward, it wasn’t good enough for me to do what the authors of the books I mentioned above did and pick out someone else as my target. The teacher whose reputation I was to trash had to be me. Admittedly, I’m not a really good example because so few people actually believe that I am any kind of Great Enlightened Being. Those that do are mostly a couple fries short of a Happy Meal.

Still, since I’ve started becoming more popular I’ve seen people react to me in ways that are a little scary. I’ve only been recognized on the street by random strangers a couple of times. But these days when I walk into a meditation center where they know my work, people’s eyes light up in a freaky way and some even seem to cower when I try to speak to them. To these folks I am no ordinary person. I find that kind of reaction difficult to deal with. Some people are starting to react to me in ways that only make sense if they have begun to project something ethereal upon the image they carry of me in their minds. They expect things of me that they would never expect of each other. And that’s unfair.

I didn’t really want to write this book. It’s hard work exposing your worst side to public scorn and ridicule. This book was physically painful to write. I had at least half dozen other ideas for a third book that would have been a breeze to write and would have been more commercially bankable. But this book screamed at me to get it done until I had no choice but to obey.

There was something very deep that could only be got to by digging around in my own guts. In doing so I discovered that even the tawdriest portions of my life are not all ugliness and horror. In fact, much to my surprise I found very little of that. There’s a kind of beauty to the truth that transcends whether or not you find that truth to be pleasant or objectionable. Plus there’s some jokes in the book too.

I wanted to write a book that told the truth about teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions. Because there are still a lot of illusions out there about those of us in this game. The public has been conditioned by the media to believe that teachers in Eastern traditions aren’t like our garden-variety preachers, priests, imams and rabbis. Yogis, Gurus and Zen Masters, we’re told, have this special something called “Enlightenment” that makes them transcend the world of ordinary humans. You can make very good money exploiting that twaddle. There’s even one so-called “Roshi” (i.e. Zen Master) who sells gullible rich people five days in his godlike presence for $50,000 on the grounds that by being in proximity to him they just might get some of this Enlightenment thing for themselves. It won’t happen, so you might as well give the money to me instead!

But just because no spiritual teacher is Superman doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot through the practice of meditation. I happen to believe zazen is the only way humanity has to get out of the mess it’s in. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t bother shouting about it.

In this media saturated age where every person’s sleeziest action is captured on digital video and put up on YouTube for all to see two hours later, there is nowhere left for spiritual Supermen to hide the pulleys and wires that enable them to do their magic tricks. It has become urgent that we kill the idea of the spiritual Superman and start looking at how we can accept good spiritual advice even from people who burp and fart and -- oh my god! -- fuck just like we do. If we can’t do that there won’t be any way we can accept good spiritual advice from anybody.


Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and his latest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Looking over some of the comments to my last piece for Suicide Girls, I think I figured out the root of a lot of the confusion I’ve created here. When I write about religion and the religious point of view, it seems like a lot of readers assume I’m including Buddhism in that category. I don’t. Even though books on Buddhism, including my own, are usually shoved into the back corner in the religion section, Buddhism is something very distinct from religion.

When you say that, people usually respond with, “OK, then Buddhism is a form of spirituality.” Spirituality is seen as something better than religion. It exists outside the constraints of the organized formality of religious institutions. It’s a personal relationship with your spiritual nature.

Which is fine. But Buddhism is not a form of spirituality.

The history of philosophy throughout the world has been a struggle between two basic fundamental systems -- idealism and materialism. Spirituality is a kind of idealism. It takes the view that the spiritual world, the world of ideas, imagination, and mental formations is the true reality. Matter is secondary at best or sometimes even regarded as non-existent. We are spirits trapped inside bodies made of gross matter -- some bodies are a lot more gross than others -- and the way to happiness is to get free of this material world and its miseries. In many Eastern philosophies we are told, “I am not this body. I am the spiritual soul within.” This is not the Buddhist viewpoint. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

Materialism on the other hand sees matter as primary and spirit as either non-existent or, at least, negligible. What we perceive as our soul, we are told, is just the workings of a highly complex biological machine. We’re all just animals. The more radical materialists go on to assert that the only way to be happy is to get as much money, sex, and power as possible. There is no soul. There is no afterlife. There is no God.

Buddha explored both of these ideas and found both of them lacking. He was born a prince and spent the first part of his life dedicated to the practical study of materialism. He had everything he could possibly want -- money, hot babes, power. But they didn’t satisfy him. So he set off to see if happiness could be found in the opposite direction. He dedicated himself to various spiritual practices and achieved their highest goals. He got a massive spiritual high, but in the process he nearly destroyed his body. That wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t until he rejected both extremes and found the Middle Way that he began to teach the philosophy that now bears his name.

Buddhism starts from the basic premise that neither materialism nor idealism is correct. The Heart Sutra says, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.” In other words, matter is the immaterial, the immaterial is matter. With apologies to Sting, we are not spirits in the material world. Rather, the experiential, internal, subjective, spiritual side of our day-to-day existence and the hard, external, objective, material world we inhabit are one and the same. This is a very radical idea. Even today, 2500 years after Gotama first put forth this notion, few people can accept it. Even those who call themselves Buddhists all too often believe that it’s a form of spirituality.

While it’s not spirituality, Buddhism is not materialism either. Buddhism is realism. There's a tendency for contemporary people to assume that realism is the same as materialism. When they use the word “reality” it most often refers to the material world as explained to us by science. But that's not what Buddhists mean by "reality." The materialistic point of view is also just a concept.

Now, matter is obviously real. But the trouble is that our understanding of what matter is may not be correct. Most of us believe that matter exists first and because of its existence sense stimulation occurs. Both idealists and materialists tend to conceive it this way. The computer in front of you is made of matter and it’s real. So is your forehead. When you bang your forehead on the computer it hurts. The subjective experience of pain is the result of the objective collision of material forehead with material computer. Buddhist philosophers like Dogen, Nagarjuna and Buddha himself turn this around and place sense stimulation first. Because our senses are stimulated in certain ways, we assume matter exists. It is a completely different way of conceptualizing the world from what we’re used to.

Science happens to be a very good way to look at the material side of reality, so we need to accept science (legit science, anyway). But Dogen, the guy who founded the school of Buddhism in which I study and practice, said that the universe in all directions is just a tiny fragment of reality.

That doesn’t mean that the material world is here and somewhere out in the vastness of space is another even bigger universe made of something else. Dogen was talking about our real day-to-day experience. The material component of our experience forms just one small part of our existence.

Furthermore we never experience mind separate from body or vice-versa. The idea that one side is true while the other is false doesn’t fit our real experience.

We constantly swing back and forth between materialism and idealism. When materialism doesn’t satisfy, we try idealism, when idealism lets us down, we swing back to materialism. As a culture we can see this happening right now. A century ago it seemed like materialism might one day solve all the problems of mankind. But, in spite of the fact that most of the poorest among us enjoy wealth and comfort our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of, materialism has failed to fulfill many of our most basic needs. So we, as a culture have started to drift back towards spirituality in the hopes that it might solve our troubles and bring us the fulfillment we seek. What we’ve forgotten as a culture is that spirituality already let us down. That’s why we became so materialistic in the fist place.

A lot of people look to Buddhism as a spiritual answer to our materialistic woes. But if Buddhism is just another form of spirituality, it’s as worthless as any other religion. We need something different.

Every other religion, philosophy, addiction or any other method for dealing with what life throws at us that I’ve encountered says, “You feel unfulfilled? OK. Try this. It will fulfill you.” Materialism works for a time. But once you buy something the thrill of buying it is gone and you want to buy something else. Spirituality can give you a great big high. But there’s always a comedown.

Buddhism doesn’t promise to fulfill our desires. Instead it says, “You feel unfulfilled? That’s OK. That’s normal. Everybody feels unfulfilled. You will always feel unfulfilled. There is no problem with feeling unfulfilled. In fact, if you learn to see it the right way, that very lack of fulfillment is the greatest thing you can ever experience.” This is the realistic outlook.

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

Plus he also has a spiffy newly revamped YouTube Channel.

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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

On November 28th, His Holiness the Dalai Lama* made news by saying celibacy is good. Must’ve been a slow news day.

What he actually said -- in English without a translator, hence the cutely weird grammar -- was, “Sexual pleasure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication. Naturally as a human being ... some kind of desire for sex comes, but then you use human intelligence to make comprehension that those couples always full of trouble. And in some cases there is suicide, murder cases." As for celibacy he said, "we miss something, but at the same time, compare whole life, it's better, more independence, more freedom. Too much attachment towards your children, towards your partner (is) one of the obstacle or hindrance of peace of mind."

He’s correct, of course. Sex is complicated. Abstaining from it relieves you of those complications. Since having sex isn’t strictly a necessity -- meaning you, as an individual, can live without it -- it makes perfect rational sense to simply drop it.

If only things were that easy! But sex is such a very knotty subject in so many ways. Religions always try to come up with a single formula for dealing with sex that will work for all people in all situations -- from holy matrimony to pious abstinence. The Hare Krishnas, to cite just one example, try to mix the two, allowing sex but only for procreation of Krishna conscious children and only after the couple chants for a few hours first to insure the dirty deed is sufficiently pure. I don’t see that ever becoming a widespread practice. In any case, no one will ever come up with a single formula for dealing with sex that will satisfy everybody.

I’ve written a lot in these pages about the Buddhist precept that says, “Do not misuse sexuality.” My teacher rephrases this one as, “Do not desire too much.” Bodhidharma, the fifth century Buddhist monk traditionally cited as the founder of the Zen school said, “There is nothing to grasp. Not giving rise to attachment is the precept of not misusing sexuality.”

The precept is deliberately vague. The people who created it had already seen the damage done by religious leaders who tried to create hard and fast** rules for sexual behavior that could be applied universally. So they simply acknowledged that sexuality could be misused, that its misuse leads to trouble and that Buddhist practitioners would be better off if they vowed not to misuse it. Just what that constituted misuse was left up to individual interpretation.

Or not. Even Buddhists sometimes aren’t as smart as they ought to be. There was an early school of Buddhism that tried to work out exactly what did and did not constitute misuse of sexuality. They made up a huge and detailed list of rules. My favorite one says that it’s not misuse of sexuality if a woman has sex with a monk while he’s sleeping and he doesn’t realize what’s going on. You just know there’s a story behind that one! I’m sure some douchebag priest used that as an excuse -- I was asleep the whole time! I swear! -- and it made its way into the books.

Celibacy would seem like the ultimate solution. You can’t possibly misuse sexuality if you never have sex. Or can you? My first Zen teacher once told me he thought that sometimes the best way to avoid misusing sexuality is to fuck. There may be occasions when a quick roll in the hay is the best and most expedient way to avoid causing bigger problems. I think about this every time I hear about yet another supposedly celibate religious figure getting caught diddling a choirboy. It seems pretty likely to me that if some of those guys just got it on with some willing lass of an appropriate age, or maybe one of their fellow clergymen if they were so inclined, one less child would be traumatized for life.

What about true celibacy, then? What about someone who doesn’t just say they don’t have sex but who really and truly does not have sex of any kind -- even masturbation was forbidden in those early Buddhist sects I mentioned. Good for them, I say. If they can manage it. I don’t think I could, personally. My head would get so filled up with thoughts of hot pink pussy I’d be a menace to society. If you get so sex obsessed you can’t think straight, what good are you to anyone? Still maybe there are people who aren’t like that, and if there are I say go for it. But I doubt anyone with that much self-control needs my permission or even cares about my opinion anyway.

On the other side of celibacy you’ve got stuff like polyamory. Polyamaory, to me, sounds like a recipe for a stressed out life -- and just because somebody represses their stress so well they’re unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Believe me, I personally would love it if this were not the case. Are you kidding? If I thought I could just boink whoever I wanted whenever I pleased and everybody would be cool about it I’d be out there by the Jacuzzi in a black latex Speedo and leather chaps right now.

Sadly I can’t accept such fantasies. To me, sex without entanglements is like the Loch Ness Monster. It would be really cool if it existed. And every once in a while you get tantalizing hints that it might. But whenever you examine the evidence objectively it falls to pieces.

Sex creates attachment. There’s no two ways about it. This doesn’t mean sex is bad. Attachments are just part of life. Just because some bearded doofus you saw walking around at Burning Man wearing a bathrobe said that Buddhism was all about getting rid of attachments doesn’t mean it’s true. Sure, the fewer strong attachments you have, the easier life is. But none of us can go through life without any attachments at all. In any case, you’re always going to form some level of attachment to anyone you share bodily fluids with. And just because you think you’re so cool that you won’t get any ideas of commitment or betrayal or jealousy or any of the rest of that stuff doesn’t mean your partner(s) won’t. Or even that you won’t. This stuff happens at a level far deeper than conscious thought can reach. It’s a very sticky proposition in more ways than one.

Still, I have no interest at all in trying to convince anyone to live the way I think is best. What you do is your own business. I’ve got no moral problems at all with what anyone does in their bedrooms -- or kitchens or back alleys or wherever.

Yet to some extent the way other people conduct their sex lives does affect me. It affects all of us. The fewer people there are running around all stressed out about their sex lives the better things are for everyone. They won’t be so busy figuring out their social calendar that they crash their cars into the guardrails and stop up traffic for hours. They won’t be so sexually repressed that they attack hotels in Mumbai. Stuff like that. So to that extent I’d like to see more people paying more attention to how they manage themselves sexually. Then when they interact with me they’ll be a little more chilled out.

I suspect this is at the root of all religious restrictions about sex all over the world. Ancient people were just looking for ways to manage this new thing they were developing called “society.” They knew sexual interaction created complications. The day after caveman Og did the nasty with caveman Ugum’s woman they started throwing rocks at each other and all hell broke lose in the village. Something needed to be done so the chief made a rule. All the moralizing and threats of burning in Hell just got tacked on later as extra incentive for the more suggestible to do what seemed more likely to keep things civilized.

The Dalai Lama admits that abstaining from sex means missing out on certain aspects of life. He seems content in the idea that these things aren’t really worth much anyway. You might feel differently. Maybe it’s not just wild nights of unbridled passion you’re after. Maybe you want marriage and family and all that nice stuff. That’s fine. I’m not so sure the Dalai Lama’s solution is quite as neat as he thinks it is anyway. I’ve hung around enough monks to know that there are plenty of cases where all the emotional and attachment-related bullshit they escape by not having families just ends up getting transferred on to the surrogate family of fellow monks they live with. Like I said, there’s no easy answer to any of this that’ll work out for everybody every time.

Anyhow, in the end it doesn’t matter what the Dalai Lama thinks and it certainly matters even less what I think. It comes down to what’s most important for you. I would only say that I’ve found that what’s truly most important to most people is to live as stable a life as possible. If you understand that you want that, then sex has to be handled carefully. It pushes a whole lot of buttons, whether you want to admit it or not. Pay attention and be willing to accept things you don’t really want to accept. This is the advise I give myself all the time.

FOOTNOTES:
* Just FYI, the Dalai Lama doesn’t speak for, or even claim to speak for, all Buddhists. He’s the leader of one very specific sect of Tibetan Buddhism. I’ve never studied or practiced in that sect and know precious little about it.

** Heh-heh, I said “hard and fast.”

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the forthcoming Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. 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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

In his recent Suicide Girls column Richard Patrick talked about religious authority. He said, “Many years ago, peasants were stealing from each other and murderers were running rampant throughout the world. To deal with the mayhem, rulers came to the conclusion that putting the fear of God in the masses would keep them in line. Organized religion started as a way for those in power to get what they needed from the people.”

That’s pretty close. And it’s not entirely untrue. But there’s more to it than that. It wasn’t just that the rulers — the upper classes, the fat cats in power — who got together in a dark room somewhere, smoked some cigars and made a decision to create religion in order to control the rest of us. The development of religion was the work of the internal “ruler” we all carry with us wherever we go — that little voice in every one of us, whether peasant or king, that wants order and longs for control.

That internal ruler drives us to seek external rulers, to seek God outside of ourselves. We have rulers and authority figures because we want to be ruled. Religion is a product of something all human beings have in common — the desire to live in an orderly place. We cannot live together unless we have some sort of governor to keep the peace. Religion serves that purpose, among others.

Well, sometimes it serves that purpose, anyway. But, as we all know, religion often goes in terrible directions and becomes a force of destruction. It makes people fly planes into office buildings. It makes them vote against peoples’ rights to choose who they can marry. Governments and other institutions intended to maintain harmony and keep peace among groups of people living together also go wrong in similar ways.

If you think about it, it would seem that the governor we need to keep societal peace and order doesn’t really have to be an outside entity like a king or a pope or even God up in heaven. We all have the potential to govern ourselves. But human beings rarely live up to their own potential in any area. Why would we expect large groups of them to be able to live up to their potential not to be assholes to each other? This is why I love the idea of anarchy but would be the first person high tailing it as fast as he could out of any country that declared its intention to do away with its government and police force. We seek external power to govern us because we intuitively know our own shortcomings even if we won’t admit to them.

Unfortunately the real God, if he exists, isn’t available to rule us. Maybe he’s too intelligent to run for office. Or maybe he’s just got too much other stuff on his plate. In any case, we’re forced to seek a human substitute. In the old days we used to pretend the person we chose to rule us had a direct line to God and could tell us what he wanted us to do. Lots of people still believe that. But most of us don’t. In fact, I don’t even believe that most of the people who say they believe in humans who speak for God really believe it.

Belief in what people tell you God thinks is called “faith.” Dominance and submission play a big part in how faith works. We all have a side to our personality that longs to be submissive. Religion is a good outlet for this because it offers us a socially permissible way to be subs to the ultimate dom. Sometimes followers of religious authority figures are so into that submissive head-space of the worshipful servant they will believe and do absolutely anything just so long as it means they can keep their subservient position. It also means that they can keep deferring responsibility for their own conduct onto their master. This never works, by the way. No matter how hard you try and avoid it, the universe will always make you take responsibility for what you do. To say you’ve lost faith in your religion or its appointed spokesperson means you’re no longer able to be a submissive to them. Generally I count loss of faith as a positive thing.

Of course, personal responsibility is just one area that religion gets into. Religion goes beyond merely governing people and keeping the peace among them. It attempts to answer the deeper questions of what it means to be human, it tries to discover the origins of the universe itself. But we don’t need to look to anyone outside ourselves for these answers anymore than we need someone outside our selves to take responsibility for our actions. In fact, no one else’s answer to those deep questions will ever satisfy you. Just like its ultimately impossible to defer responsibility for the things you do, it’s also impossible to accept the “big answers” given to you by someone else.

Yet in the commonly accepted religious scheme of things we’re supposed to have faith in what our religious authorities tell us. And more than that, we’re supposed to have faith in our religious authorities themselves.

That kind of faith will always fail us, no matter how hard we try to make it work. Faith that is directed outward, away from ourselves is like a fire hose pointed away from the fire.

Of course, there are other meanings to the word faith and not everything people call faith is altogether negative. But when it comes to the subject of having faith in religious authority figures, you can always count me out.

When you feel disappointment in a person you deemed Great because she or he does not meet your expectations, this is a good thing. That kind of disappointment is a better teacher than the person you were looking to for answers. It points your faith back where it should be aimed, at yourself.

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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

This will be my last Suicide Girls posting before Americans will make their choice between shining, purest good and foulest, most vile evil.

Will we choose the candidate who supports needless death, war and bloodshed or the one who supports meekly kneeling before the terrorist hordes that seek to destroy our civilization?

Will we vote for the one who'll take a stand for making our environment clean and healthy for future generations or for the one who will build up our industries and get our economy back in order?

Will we elect the candidate who wants to murder innocent, unborn children or the one who will take away women's rights to choose and thereby create an overpopulated and impoverished world?

The choice this year is so black and white; the powers that be have even kindly given us color-coded candidates to help us choose. But could black be good and white evil?

Is anyone else as sick as I am of all the hype and rhetoric -- the way everything is presented as a choice between the rightest right and the wrongest wrong (as in the examples cited above)? And am I the only person in America who feels like he’s living in an episode of The Prisoner these days? Doesn’t all the stuff that’s going on in world politics and economics feel a little too perfect to anyone else -- like the whole thing has been carefully scripted? When the hostages were freed in Iran the day after Reagan took office it was eight years before anyone seemed to notice that was just a little too easy. Isn’t it funny how we got a full-on economic meltdown exactly a month before the elections?

I’m not one for conspiracy theories and I don’t have one to lay out for you here. I just think the whole thing reeks like a tub of rotten tuna. That’s all.

Even though a song by my band Zero Defex is being used by the Ralph Nader campaign in one of their official web commercials, I’m not the least bit excited by the elections. Politicians stir up our emotions, fire our imaginations, present enticing visions of hope and prosperity or conjure up fearful specters of war and slavery.

Politics take place in the realm of the human mind, where good and evil exist. Politicians are like stage magicians using sleight of hand to draw attention away from reality.

It’s none of my business who you vote for. I’m sure you agree with that. But I’ve been pretty horrified by what I’ve seen from a number of American Buddhist teachers who think it is their business. Way too many Buddhist teachers and Buddhist centers in this country think that Buddhism and liberal politics are one and the same. Four years ago when Dubya won a second term I was contacted about contributing to a book about “Buddhist reactions to the re-election.” Writers were invited to talk about feelings of loss, disenfranchisement, and powerlessness as if not a single Buddhist in the United States had supported the Bush campaign. I wanted to write about how amazing Bush was just to provide some balance. Trey Parker said the most punk rock thing you could do in LA was walk into a party and say, “I think George Bush is awesome!” Same in the world of American Buddhism. The book never came out. Good.

My own teacher’s teacher, Kodo Sawaki, said, “The right wing is completely wrong. The left wing is also completely wrong.”

He also said:

Listen. Voting is good. So get out there and vote. But watch your level of excitement about the process. Those highs and lows are damaging. For all the feelings of loss, disenfranchisement, and powerlessness the guys who wanted to make that book about Bush’s re-election felt, the world survived his second term more or less in tact. I may be too cynical about the whole thing, but I’ve always loved that joke where an Englishman tries to explain American politics to a fellow Englishman. “On the one hand they have the Republican party which is analogous to our Conservative party,” he says, “and on the other hand they have the Democratic party, which is analogous to our Conservative party.”

Perhaps the very slight differences between one candidate and another have some value. I would never say they didn’t. Just don’t get your panties in a bunch if your guy loses or celebrate the ultimate triumph of good over evil if he wins. I‘m sure all of you politicos reading this will say you already know that. But any scan of the TV when the results are announced will prove otherwise. All that elation and all that hopelessness ripple outward like a wave.

The balance that you retain or lose right now will ultimately have a far greater effect upon the world than who gets elected.


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.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Back in March I wrote an article for this website in which I criticized one of the many scams out there masquerading as Buddhist practice. Last week my publishers found and pointed me to this massively delayed reaction to what I wrote. (My thanks to Waylon of Elephant magazine for writing the piece.)

I find this fascinating on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters I thought the videos by Genpo Roshi and Ken Wilber were hilarious. The Ken Wilber thing is especially priceless. With production values like a bad mid-morning chat show, Wilber’s sycophantic fawning over “enlightened being” Genpo with its fetid overtones of delighted self congratulation — after all, who but a fellow “enlightened being” could recognize one of his own — the Ken Wilber piece reminded me of one of those Sammy Maudlin sketches from SCTV. How do you say, "Isn't Genpo just about the most wonderful thing you’ve ever seen? He's such a deeply, deeply decent human being, which is harder than being enlightened, by the way" with a straight face?

Is this what Eastern spirituality has been reduced to in these latter days — pricey instant enlightenment schemes (Big Mind™ will cost you $150 a session) and sub par Las Vegas revue nonsense? Here’s my video response:



I count myself lucky that I came across Zen practice at a time when nobody wanted to know. In the early Eighties anything that smacked of "wisdom of the East" was relegated by the masses to the realm of played out hippy bullshit. Now it’s back and bigger than ever. But, as usual, the mainstream ignores real practice in favor of glittering garbage. The current interest in Buddhism is good news for me since I got a book deal out of it and a free subscription to Suicide Girls. But as a minor part of the media’s current fascination with all things mystical and Eastern, I often find myself placed not among fellow practitioners of the Buddhist way but among a crowd of media created spiritual superstars of dubious merit. As such I’ve found it necessary to keep putting out reminders that I really don’t have a clue what most of these whack-jobs are saying. It’s got to be difficult for serious people getting into Buddhism these days to weed the good stuff out from the charlatans in pretty robes. Good luck!

So how can someone recognize real Buddhism from the scams? Before I address that I’ll repeat what I said in that article back in March. The scam artists out there calling themselves Buddhist teachers are the exception, not the rule. Most folks in this business are not out to cheat or brainwash anyone. So in most cases it’s just a matter of finding a teacher whose style suits you. Although I should add that my own current teacher’s style did not suit me at all when I first started seeing him. Yet I saw the truth in what he said and did, so I stayed with him as much as it went against my personal tastes and preferences.

Also, I’ll say that the claim by Genpo’s spokesman that it violates the Buddhist precepts for me to call Genpo on his bullshit doesn’t hold water. Yes there is a Buddhist precept that says not to criticize Buddhist monks and laypeople. But this is being abused by scamsters who think that calling any old nonsense “Buddhism” relieves them of worries that their peers might openly disapprove of it. Sadly there seems to be great reluctance among Buddhists in general to speak out when Buddhism is slandered this way for fear of being accused of breaking the rules.

The scams are so see-through it always amazes me that anyone goes for them at all. But then again people really do send money to anonymous Nigerian bankers who contact them by random e-mails when they think it’ll net them millions of dollars without working for it. The spiritual scams work exactly the same way. They promise something for nothing and guarantee quick results. But spiritual practice is like learning to play a musical instrument. You’re going to suck the first time you pick up a guitar. Even Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix had to go through their suck-y period. It doesn’t work any other way and no technological advance will ever change that.

The Dharma does evolve in the sense that it adapts itself to different cultures and different times. But the essential process does not change because it cannot change. You can’t bend your leg around the back of your head after your very first Yoga class and you can’t get enlightened before lunch time.

When Ken and Genpo claim you can realize your true nature in a couple of hours and then “flash on it” any time you please they’re just conning you so they can pay for better set decorations. It’s a fact that your true nature is present at every moment, that it’s the basis of your very existence. But the conditioning we’ve all laid over top of that is very heavy and cannot be resolved quickly. The language of Buddhism can be corrupted just as easily as anything else. Just because someone uses words like “true nature,” “realization” and “mindfulness” (Ugh! How I hate that word!) means nothing at all when the so-called “true nature” they point to is some dreamy, blissful state to be found in the far off reaches of the cosmic void.

There’s nothing to “flash on” anyway. Enlightenment isn’t some experience you have and then file away with all the other cool shit you’ve done in your life like the memory of a three-way with your sister’s best friend and your analyst. Enlightenment is a full time job. You can’t get through the layers of bullshit you’ve swallowed from society in mere minutes anymore than you can take off the pounds put on by a lifetime of Big Macs and Frosties after a quick jog around the block following which you reward yourself with another Big Mac. This stuff takes work and anyone who tells you it doesn’t is lying.

The good news is that you can get through a million plus years of human conditioning in a decade or so, which is really not so bad when you put it that way. Plus real meditative practice has beneficial effects as soon as you begin. Try some yourself. Here’s Suicide Girl LizaRose showing you how!


Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen column appears monthly on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more posts. Brad 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.

As Brad says in the video, you can order a copy of the new CD by his band Zero Defex (aka 0DFx) from CD Baby. Get yours now!

I got an e-mail recently and it said:

I get a lot of variations on this question of how to cultivate “non-attachment.” But I’m not really sure why. I never talk or write about cultivating non-attachment, and none of my teachers were particularly concerned with the matter. I suspect the reason I hear this so much is because in the West the words “Buddhism” and “Zen” have come to represent a gigantic blancmange of unrelated Eastern philosophies and religions. In some circles it’s seen as dangerous sectarianism even to suggest there may be essential and irreconcilable differences between the various teachings propounded by Yogis and Gurus and Eastern Meditation Masters of all shapes and sizes that have washed up on our shores over the past fifty years. But there are. And some of those ancient Eastern mystical teachings are very bad.

There is an idea within Zen Buddhist philosophy that’s sometimes expressed with the word “non-attachment.” But it has nothing to do with the weird belief that we should all be completely aloof from everything in life. Dogen, the 13th century monk who wrote extensively about Zen, talks some about not being attached to self and not being attached to views. But this is a completely different thing from cultivating an attitude where a person strives to be an island unto him or herself, loving nothing, caring about nothing and generally just not giving a shit about much at all.

The notion that we should cultivate such an attitude is extremely dangerous. It’s one of those beliefs that cult leaders use to dominate a community. We all form attachments to those close to us. When we’re told to cut ties with family and friends and with the mainstream society, we’ll naturally form ties with the community and its leader. That’s a very slippery slope. Even when the community and its leader start off relatively cool, that kind of power corrupts quickly and thoroughly.

The don’t-give-a-shit attitude cultivated by far too many who proudly label themselves Buddhists is one of those things that people who dislike Buddhism always use to trash it. And rightly so, because it’s a crap idea! Unfortunately for them, the idea isn’t Buddhism at all. It’s a kind of psychosis — what the psychiatric community calls sociopathy. That’s not what Buddhist practice is intended to bring about.

In fact, this bizarre idea of “non-attachment” runs completely counter to the Buddhist worldview. It’s utterly impossible for anyone ever to be unattached in that way. What we call self and what we call non-self are one and the same. Our real attachments to everyone and everything we encounter run so deep and strong we couldn’t possibly break them no matter how hard we tried. We are fundamentally attached to everything. And of course you’re going to form even deeper attachments to those people and things that are more closely related to you, like your family, friends and home. Don’t sweat it.

Non-attachment to self and views is something entirely different. It means not trying to force yourself to be one single solid unchangeable thing forever and ever world without end amen. What you call your “self” is constantly in a state of flux, mutating and metamorphosing at every moment. But most of us fight against that. We try to establish a fixed personality — a "self." We waste all kinds of energy defining and defending this fiction we’ve worked hard to create. Stop doing that and you’re free to use all that energy in far more constructive and beneficial ways. Personally, I don’t think the word “non-attachment” is a very good way of describing this so I don’t use it (FYI, even in the passages I referred to, Dogen never actually used the word “non-attachment” since he didn’t write in English).

As far as your attachment to the things you ought to be attached to is concerned, the worst that Buddhist practice is going to do is to make you a little less emotionally frantic about that stuff. When my mom died last year, I didn’t sit around all glassy eyed going, “I have no grief for, lo, I am not attached.” I cried. Hard. But at the same time I didn’t hang on to my grief as tightly as I might have.

Let’s take grief as a case in point that’s applicable to the rest of what we might call emotional attachments. The initial wave of grief you feel at the loss of someone you love just happens. No need to dwell on how or why. It’s just there. And you react; you cry or feel sullen or act in whatever way your cultural upbringing has conditioned you to respond. After that, though, is where things get complicated. The habit of latching onto emotions and incorporating them into the sense of self is so strong that we’ll grab on hard to even the most unpleasant feelings that come along. We hang on for dear life lest our sense of who we are should collapse if we let go. We very literally feel like we’ll die if we don’t. Habits like this have us abusing our bodies and minds in ways that lead to all kinds of trouble. But they’re not necessary. You won’t vanish if you stop reinforcing your image of who you are at every moment.

You can’t undo habits this deep instantly. You shouldn’t even try. But once you become aware of them you find that you always have a clear choice whether to respond habitually or not. Not responding habitually doesn’t mean you become cold, robotic and “non-attached” in the sense a lot of people seem to envision non-attachment. It just means you don’t push your body/mind more than it needs to be pushed.

You still love all the people you loved before. You may even hate the same people you hated before. Even hate doesn’t have to be a terrible thing when you don’t latch onto it and call it your self. It arises and fades away like any other emotion and there's no need to act upon it. But that’s a topic too big to go into here. In any case, the kind of “attachments” the guy who wrote me that letter remain fully intact. You still love your family and your friends and your kitty cat too.

So don’t get all attached to the idea of non-attachment. OK?

August 28-31 I’ll be at the Maezumi Institute Young Buddhists Retreat in Montague, Massachusetts. See you there.

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.

Often in my writing for SuicideGirls I’ve talked about girls, but I haven’t talked a lot about suicide. Last week a friend of mine attempted it, unsuccessfully, thank you Jesus. Twenty-five years ago another friend managed to do it successfully and I’m still bummed about that. When I lived in Chicago my band used to play at a place called Batteries, which was booked by Jim Ellison of the band Material Issue. I was pretty torn up when I found out he’d killed himself in 1996. They played their song "Valerie Loves Me" at a club I went to this week, which got me thinking even harder about suicide and its consequences. I’ve known a couple people, including an uncle and a co-worker, who managed to commit slow suicide by drinking themselves to death. And I myself have come pretty close to doing the deed, too.

We used to get into these long philosophical debates around the kitchen table of the punk house near Akron City Hospital, where nearly everyone on the scene seemed to hang out 24/7. In one debate almost everyone in the room agreed that suicide was a perfectly viable option and that it was up to the individual alone to decide whether to do it or not. I’m not sure I was the only one who disagreed. But I was certainly in the minority. I imagine a lot of “alternative” type people feel somewhat the same way as my friends did; that suicide is an acceptable option.

Intellectually, it’s easy to come up with a convincing argument that suicide is nobody’s business but that of the person who kills herself or himself. But in practical, real world terms, this is never the case. Suicide is devastating to everyone whose life a person touches. No matter how much of a loner you are, there are people who care about you and it’s never easy to deal with someone you care about killing themselves. In the case of my friend Iggy who hung himself in 1983, he seems to have been deliberately trying to hurt his girlfriend who’d recently dumped him. But she dumped him because it was the only way she could think of to make him deal with his alcoholism and general destructiveness. I don’t blame her. I would’ve done the same thing. What he did was incredibly nasty and mean. And I don’t think it really solved his problems.

Most religions forbid suicide and imagine horrible punishments awaiting in the next world for those who take their own lives. If you dug through the Buddhist literature I’m sure you could find some variation on this. There must be a sutra or vinaya text somewhere saying what kind of future incarnation awaits those who commit suicide. But I don’t know about it since I’m a pretty lousy Buddhist scholar. This in itself says something, though. Because even if such a text does exist, it’s not greatly emphasized. There are a number of scholarly articles on the Internet about the matter. Here’s one. Here’s another. And here’s one more.

The Vietnamese Buddhists who set fire to themselves to protest the Viet Nam War are well known. For a while there that seemed like one of the most enduring images the general public in the West had of Buddhism. People on this side of the planet had already been taught by their early scholars that Buddhism was a Nihilistic religion filled with talk of suffering and emptiness. So it probably came as no great surprise to hear about Buddhists offing themselves. Buddhism isn’t nihilistic, though. And I don’t think those guys did anyone very much good by going up in flames.

In any case, I’m not terribly concerned with scholarly research or mass opinions. I scanned through those articles I linked to, but I really didn’t read them in depth. It’s interesting to know the history, but not really necessary. Buddhism, as far as I’m concerned, is more about our own experiences than about received wisdom from others. My own experience tells me that suicide is not really a viable option. It ultimately cannot possibly solve the problems it’s intended to solve and it causes a whole lot of unnecessary suffering and grief.

People kill themselves to put an end to their suffering. Ian Curtis did it to end his suffering over his marriage and finances. Pete Ham killed himself because he was suffering over the fate of Badfinger, the world’s greatest power pop band. Kurt Cobain killed himself to end his suffering from all those stomach aches. Of course these are all over-simplifications. But it’s clear that all of these people, as well as anyone else who has ever taken their own lives, did so because they saw it as a way out of suffering. It’s certainly not something you do just for the hell of it.

But the idea that committing suicide will end your suffering comes from the belief that you and the world in which you live are two different things. You believe that you can leave this world and thereby leave suffering behind. But my own sense after years of zazen practice is that this is not true. I’ve spent a long time watching the boundary line between what I call “me” and what I call the rest of the world blur and fade. I’m no longer certain at all where the dividing line is. I’m beginning to even suspect that that guy Buddha may have been right when he said it doesn’t exist at all. In fact I’ve had a few times when this apparently nonsensical notion has come up and bit me on the ass in ways I cannot possibly deny.

So what I’m saying here goes a little further than just the old “the show must go on” type thing, where people say you have a responsibility to your friends and family not to go off and shoot your brains out in the greenhouse. You also have a responsibility to yourself and even to the universe as a whole not to do that. Even if committing suicide solves the immediate problem by ending a poor relationship or making it so your stomach doesn’t hurt anymore, the suffering you thought was yours alone spreads out like a wave to those parts of the universe you’ve been taught to think of as separate from you. It’s impossible for me to believe that even the person who dies does not, in some way, continue to suffer just as greatly after suicide as before. I no longer believe it’s possible to leave this world. And that’s as far as I want to speculate about that. Anything I might say about the mechanism involved in how this happens would just be a load of stinky brain farts. Still, I have a very deep and unshakable feeling that this is true.

Anyway, please forgive the grimness of this little piece. What my friend did last week got me thinking hard about the matter. So SuicideGirls readers, don’t kill yourselves! Life is beautiful, so why not eat health foods instead?*


*This title of this article comes from a punk rock compilation album put out around 1979-80 by New Underground Records. The Descendents and Red Cross are featured. I’d love to find a copy of this or its sequel Life Is Beautiful So Why Not Eat Health Foods.



Brad Warner will be at the Young Buddhists Retreat in Montague, MA from August 28-31.

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.

You can buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex (0DFx) at CD Baby.