Last week I was in Boulder, Colorado where people have long discussions with their sushi chef about whether or not the mackerel and squid they serve is fished sustainably. I’m from Akron, Ohio where the most likely conversation with a sushi chef is, “Take this back, it’s not even cooked!” By the time most of you read this I’ll be on my way to Japan where I will try and find out what the fuck is going on with the company I work for and then go lead a four day Zen retreat.

While I was in Boulder at the sushi shop where people worry about sustainable fish there was a dude outside on the street panhandling. There are tons of panhandlers in Boulder, nearly all of them young, White, healthy and looking like the only thing they’ll use your spare change on is recreational drugs. This particular White panhandler, not quite as young as most of them, had obviously used some heavy drugs in his past -- perhaps even his immediate past -- and put some serious wear and tear on his body. He was getting pretty belligerent with his companions and I kept my eye on him to see if he started heading towards the restaurant’s patio where I was sitting. Eventually he moved on somewhere down the street.

Seeing that guy made me realize that my life really isn’t my own. We all imagine that our lives and our bodies are our own possessions to do with as we please. We figure as long as we don’t do something really egregious like knife our next door neighbor or go shoot up the local grade school it’s nobody’s business what we do with ourselves. But I wonder if that’s really true.

When that hobo was doing all his drugging and drinking and whatever else got him into the state he was in, he probably thought, “Fuck the rest of the world! I’m living my life the way I want!” Of course, I can’t put words into his mouth. But I know that I have felt this way for most of my own life. If I wanted to take acid it was my own brain I was fucking with and nobody had any right to tell me not to. If I wanted to stay out all night partying, I was the one who had to deal with the consequences the next day so screw anybody who had any opinion about it. If I wanted to eat junk food instead of being healthy it was my own body and that was none of anyone else’s concern.

But now I’m starting to doubt that attitude.

Of course if people want to look or dress a certain way society has no business telling them not to. Just because someone doesn’t like your tattoos doesn’t mean you need to remove them. And just because someone doesn’t like your Mohawk doesn’t mean you need to get a Jay Leno style blow-dry do. Your choice of a life partner is nobody else’s bee’s wax either -- except, of course, your life partner’s. Making a decision about whether or not to have an abortion or vote Republican is a very personal matter and no one else needs to be consulted.

It's also not your duty to keep everyone you meet satisfied. Most people are so thoroughly fucked they don’t have the vaguest clue what they really need or even what they really want. Yet they insist upon demanding that others satisfy their confused ideas about what they think life owes them. Life owes you nothing, people. But I see this attitude all the time in my role as a Zen teacher. People have a lot of bizarre ideas about what I should do or what I should say and they have no compunctions about demanding I play the role they’ve assigned me. I’m sure you get this too. We all do. Sorry friends. That don’t fly in B-Town.

But having said that -- which is so obvious it’s a shame it needs to even be stated -- your life still isn’t really just yours alone. This is why I don’t do drugs. If I get high I’m asking the rest of the world to take care of me. I can’t drive. I can’t find the little hole in the front of my undershorts. And most importantly if some kind of emergency comes up I’m of no use at all. I’m shirking my duties as a human being for the sake of a shallow thrill. If I don’t keep my body in reasonable shape I’m also impinging on others. I take up more than my fair share of space on an airplane or bus. I get pissed off easy because my body never feels right so I can’t think straight. If I get angry or otherwise over emotional it’s never my own personal affair. I spread that anger to others through my careless actions, since when you’re angry you never, ever, ever act reasonably. Never. If I get depressed I force others to deal with my black moods. If I get distracted I might run over somebody’s kitty cat.

This is why I do Zazen too. I discovered that when I didn’t do it my body and mind were too scrambled up for me to interact with anyone in a sensible way. It was through this practice that I began to see very clearly that I was not my own possession. I am a manifestation of the universe, duty bound to take full responsibility for everything I encounter. And everything I encounter is everything in the universe.

Look. You’re an asshole. Seriously. A complete asshole. You have no idea what you are or what you’re supposed to be doing. Yet you run around all of creation like it’s some cheap-ass toy Santa gave you that you’re now gonna break and then cry until Santa gives you another one. Cuz there are a million of them all lined up on shelves at the store. Hooting and hollering your ugly head off at three in the morning and waking all the people on the street. Turning your moronic music up as loud as it can go to show the world who you really are. Racing your Harley down Sunset Boulevard at full speed. Dreaming of enlightenment you can buy in a box from some windbag Zen Master and leave in your car while you go out and buy something else. Hanging out at tawdry meditation seminars hoping some genius guru will show you The Light, paying him good money for garbage fantasies. You’re fucking useless. Totally fucking useless. The universe is yours and all you want to do with it is write your name in spray paint on the wall. You’re like a dog pissing on a fence. No one who sees the mark you left on the world could give a shit.

But sit quietly and even a piece of gibbon’s dung like you can see it. There’s no one in the universe but you. You spread out all the way past the farthest galaxies and that’s just the beginning. Your thoughts are all stupid. Your perceptions are completely wrong. There’s nowhere you can be but here. There’s nothing you can know that’s worth knowing. You have no future or past and yet you’ll always be here. And because of this you are God’s eyes and ears on this world.

Pay a little attention, butt wipe.

Brad Warner will be in Akron, Ohio November 7,2007 at the Akron Public Library

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica. This is open to anyone who wants to show up.

I’m up in Northern California this week doing book signings and talks in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Petaluma (if you Petaluma wrong it’ll bite you, so be careful). My trip to the North started off like this:

Bwaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!!!! What the fuck! I bolted out of bed to the loudest noise I have ever heard in my life. It sounded like the most obnoxious feedback in the world. At first I thought some piece of audio equipment in the house had gone nutso. So I’m looking all over the place trying to figure out what on God’s green Earth could make such an vile noise. Yuka, my wife, was awake too. Not even she could sleep through that.

Finally we figured out the noise was coming from outside the apartment too. When I opened the door I could smell smoke. The apartment is built around a central courtyard and I could see the neighbors running around trying to figure out what was happening. Something was on fire. That was for sure, and it had set off the alarm throughout the building. But none of us could figure out what or where the Hell was smoking. None of the apartments were spouting flames. I looked at my watch. It was just before five in the morning.

I called 911 and they put me on hold! I got one of those recorded messages like you get when you’re calling the DMV or something. “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. Calls will be taken in the order they are received.” Jesus H. Christ! I could be getting raped by Cossacks or something and they’re putting me on hold? With Muzak® too? After a couple minutes and operator came on and I told her my building was on fire. She said they were sending the fire guys and that I should wait in the front of the building.

Meanwhile Yuka had also called and she got through a lot faster. Do they take calls from women in distress before they take them from men?

Everybody in the building was standing out front. The dog owners all had their dogs. I didn’t see any of the cats I knew lived in the building, though. Where were they? And the guy down the hall with all the fish hadn’t brought them out. I guess fish are pretty much s.o.l. when there’s a fire. I brought out my computer because it had my new book on it.

It took the fire department a good long while to show up. But they finally arrived with two big, shiny fire trucks. They stretched out the ladder on one of them up to the roof of the apartment, four stories high. It was pretty impressive. I kept waiting to see if one of them was gonna race up there. But nobody ever did. What a rip off!

Anyway, as it turns out the fire was in the dumpster in the underground garage. Apparently the fire itself was already out by the time the fire department showed up, having been doused by the sprinkler system in the garage. But that didn’t stop it setting off the alarm.

They gave us the all clear to go back inside and we all started filing in. I heard a couple of the women in the building saying how hot the fire guys all were. I hadn’t noticed. A friend of mine has a fetish for firemen. Maybe this is something Suicide Girls should look into for the Suicide Boys site.

Anyway, I survived and I’m up in Santa Cruz now. Last night I did a talk at a bookstore called Gateways. That was fun. Then we went out to a vegetarian restaurant called the Satur’n Café (that’s how they spell it). It’s like a malt shop but with no meat. Pretty interesting.

I’ve done more radio interviews than I can count (well I could count ‘em, but I’m lazy). Did a book signing at the Virgin Megastore, which was weird, but fun. Got another couple gigs to do before I can go home, including a talk at San Quentin prison. Me and Johnny Cash, I guess. We’ll see if all this effort helps sell a few books or not.

Tonight (which is last night for you since I’m writing this on Friday) I’ll be at the San Francisco Zen Center. I’m pretty psyched about that because to my mind, San Francisco is the place where Buddhism really got its start in America. There had been some Buddhist books published over here in the early 20th century and you’d had the beat poets and their fascination with their own take on Zen (which was totally wrong, but that's another story). A few temples for the Asian communities had been established. But it wasn’t until Shunryu Suzuki washed up on our shores in the early Sixties that Zen as a practice really began to be established here.

There are a million other books where you can read about Suzuki’s story, the most notable is Crooked Cucumber, his biography by David Chadwick. So I’ll just give the briefest outline in the world here. Basically, Suzuki was sent to the US with the idea that he’d be a minister to the Japanese community living in San Francisco. But when hippies and beatniks began turning up at his doorstep wanting to know about meditation, instead of turning them away politely, he decided to try and teach them.

This is pretty unusual because in Japan, Zen temples tend to be training centers. You usually can’t just walk into one and start doing Zazen. So Suzuki’s policy of letting whoever showed up join the practice caused some consternation among the Japanese community who’d set him up in San Francisco to begin with. But he ignored them and kept on going with the Zazen classes and talks.

Pretty soon the San Francisco Zen Center began to grow exponentially. When the numbers got too much for Suzuki to handle himself, he invited two other teachers over from Japan to help out. One of these teachers was Dainin Katagiri and the other was Kobun Chino. Later on Kobun went on to be the teacher of my first Zen teacher, Tim McCarthy. So I’ve always felt a strong connection to the San Francisco Zen Center, although I’ve only visited it once before.

I’m pretty honored they asked me to talk. So I guess I better go figure out what I’m gonna say. I’ll let you know how it went next week.

In the meantime, take care and don’t get caught on fire!

Here's the remaining dates of the tour:

TONIGHT Saturday June 16th 7 PM I'll be at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th I'm at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashin’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. Supplies are dwindling. Get yours today!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

When I heard Lou Reed was doing music for meditation, I had to check it out. I got into Lou Reed’s stuff fairly late in the game. When I was a teenager someone played me the Velvet Underground’s "Heroin" and I thought Lou sounded like a low-rent Dylan rip-off. And he's singing about heroin. How decadent and cool, maaaan. Whatever. Heroin chic never did anything for me. It wasn’t till I was in my mid-twenties when I heard "Venus In Furs" — which is only three songs later on the very same record — that I became a convert. If only I’d let the whole album play through way back then. I’ve been a fan ever since, though you gotta admit that when Lou Reed is good he’s great but when he’s bad, ugh!

His new CD, Hudson River Wind Meditations, is not one of his bad ones. But it’s very different. I used to be into what they called ambient music in the late 70’s. I especially dug Fripp and Eno’s No Pussyfooting album. That album’s worth getting just for the cover alone if you can find it on LP (good luck). Sadly, my copy is long gone. No Pussyfooting set off the trend for music that was supposed to be interesting enough that you could pay attention if you wanted, but bland enough to blend into the background if you just wanted to have a pleasant sound playing while you did something else. No Pussyfooting doesn’t really succeed because it still has some of the atonal aggressiveness characteristic of Eno’s work with Roxy Music and Fripp’s King Crimson. Later ambient musicians smoothed this out and are less interesting to me because of it. Later on the New Age Music movement further blandized everything and I lost interest completely.

The new Lou Reed record comes after a few decades of ambient albums — possibly including Reed’s own Metal Machine Music. So it’s a far smoother affair than those early pioneers could have accomplished. And obviously way smoother than Metal Machine Music. But it’s still a Lou Reed record, so the attempt to make something that’ll totally blend into the background isn’t wholly successful. The tracks are generally fairly mellow, but the booming bass and some atonal elements add a nice touch of what the Brits call astringency to the sound.

But the thing that really held my interest in those early ambient records was that they usually used repeating tape loops on which the sound tends to degrade in beautifully ugly ways. I liked listening to how the sounds changed with every pass. Unlike Metal Machine Music, whose liner notes detail every piece of equipment used on the record, there are no specific indications on Lou Reed’s new CD as to how the sounds were produced. But I’ll take a wild guess and say that he manipulated sound samples on his computer like everybody else does. Unlike tape loops, computer sound loops repeat in precisely the same way every time. Boooring. But I guess the idea is to be as boring as possible, so I can’t really complain. Well, I can complain, but most folks will probably find this an improvement — the way most folks today think drum machines, beat quantization and electronic pitch correction improve music. They don’t. They make everything sound like it was played by machines and sung by animatronic robots. But that's another day's rant.

Anyway, this is supposed to be meditation music. One of the questions I always get at my talks about Zazen is, “Can I do Zazen meditation to music?” I remember once someone asked my first teacher that and his answer was an uncharacteristic flat “No.” Tim used to discuss most questions and give detailed explanations. But that time the answer was just “No,” which always stuck with me.

See, cuz before I started doing Zazen I used to use those old ambient records to kinda sorta meditate to. It was totally half-assed meditation, really. Mainly I just laid on my back with the speakers on either side of my head and dozed off while the records played. But I thought I was meditating. At the time I wondered why Tim was so down on musical meditation. It took me a while to work it out. So let me try and explain.

When meditation is done to music, the music inevitably dictates the content of the meditation. I don’t like music during Zazen for the same reason I don’t like so-called “guided meditation” or even the practice in some Zen centers of giving “dharma talks” while people are sitting Zazen. These kinds of practices can be pleasant enough. But when your meditation is guided by someone else, your experience ends up being molded and shaped by that person’s thoughts and ideas, even when expressed through music or other sounds.

According to the sticker on the front of the CD, Lou’s new record is intended to help “explore inner spaces” while doing Tai Chi or meditating. But if you use music to do this the “inner spaces” you explore are not your own, but inner spaces set out for you by somebody else. In Zazen we’re going for something altogether different. We want to observe ourselves exactly as we are, not move in a direction guided by someone else — even (maybe especially) if that someone is supposedly “Enlightened” or whatever.

I don’t know a whole lot about Tai Chi, or whatever kind of meditation Lou does, but Zazen might be something different from what most people think of as “meditation.” You really can’t do Zazen to music. I mean there’s certainly no law against throwing on a CD while you sit in your lotus posture. But that’s not Zazen. I’m not even fond of those “natural sounds” CDs some people use for their practice. Zazen should be done without any such distractions.

The places most of us live these days are fairly noisy. The busy street in West Hollywood I live on is a corridor between an area filled with lots of young people and an area filled with lots of bars — a recipe for noise if ever there was one. But I still wouldn’t put on Lou Reed’s CD or even a Fripp and Eno record while I did my practice.

It’s best to do Zazen in as quiet a space as you can find. But if you have to put up with noise, observe how you react to that noise. Of course, if it’s too noisy you might have to move to another space or wait for the noise to die down. But it’s usually not necessary to try and cover it up or shut it out. In Japan my teacher’s dojo was next to a playground and our day-long Zazen retreats were on Sunday afternoons. On summer days with the windows all open the squeals could be deafening. But we still sat through it and the practice was better because of that.

All of this is not to say that sitting in lotus posture listening to boring ambient music isn’t a valid way to appreciate it as art. That’s a whole different thing. I wouldn’t really call that meditation, though. For my part, while I might put on Hudson River Wind Meditations while cleaning house or even for general listening pleasure if I’m feeling perverse, I wouldn’t use it or any other music for meditation.

As ambient music it's not quite as fun as No Pussyfooting or even some of Eno's other ambient records. But it ain't bad. It's certainly better than anything else in the New Age Music section. Still, if you're new to Lou Reed I'd recommend Rock and Roll Animal or Loaded by the Velvet Underground first.

I’m gonna be in San Francisco a whole lot next week. Here are the dates:

Tuesday June 12th at 6PM at the VIRGIN MEGASTORE in San Francisco
Thursday June 14th, 7PM at GATEWAYS in Santa Cruz
Friday June 15th After Dinner Talk at the SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER Zazen at 5:30, Dinner at 6:30, Talk at 7:30
Saturday June 16th 7 PM at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashin’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. Supplies are dwindling. Get yours today!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Apparently Christians down in Kentucky are so up in arms over the idea that dinosaurs once ruled the Earth they’ve erected a museum to prove that God just put those fossils there to test our faith. Now, me, I love dinosaurs. In fact I made a webpage devoted to my collection of old dinosaur books. So I will beat up anyone who says dinosaurs didn’t really exist to my face. Besides, if dinosaurs didn’t really exist the where did Godzilla come from? Answer me that, smarty pants!

As I understand it, creationist theory has it that everything described in the Book of Genesis happened exactly “literally” as described. The various fossils we’ve discovered were put into the ground by God, who wanted to see if we’d still have faith in what He wrote in His book if we were faced with physical evidence that proved it wrong. There are a number of variations on creation theory, ranging from rockheaded adherence to the Bible to the various anthropic principles out there which basically accept science but say that the world was still created by some kind of intelligent being or some such thing. I really don’t follow this kind of stuff. It just puts me to sleep.

One of the things I have never been able to figure out about religions is this whole concept of faith. To the hardcore creationists, the word “faith” seems to mean accepting that everything in the Bible is literally true. But the this brings up a whole ‘nother area of what we mean by “literal truth.” Does it mean that the Bible records the facts as they happened as if observed by an impartial observer on the scene? Is there even such a thing as an impartial observer? I mean, look at the Kennedy assassination. That happened less than 50 years ago in front of loads of eyewitnesses with still and movie cameras and tape recorders documenting the whole thing and we still can’t get a consensus on exactly what went down that afternoon. How are we supposed to verify that things that went on thousands of years ago occurred exactly as the people of the time said they did?

I suppose a Bible thumper would say that God is infallible, He wrote the Bible and therefore everything went down just as He said it did. This is a nice argument because there’s nowhere you can go from here. The Bible is perfect because the Bible says the Bible is perfect. End of story. But that argument does nothing for me. If a God like the one they believe in existed, even He would not be an impartial observer since He would have His own specific point of view that would, of necessity, be completely different from anyone else’s.

On the other hand, liberal Christians say stuff like, “When the Bible says the creation took place in seven days, those are really seven of God’s days and we don’t know how long those are.” This is very sweet and avoids conflicts with science. Yet it still means that we have to accept that the Bible is infallible. It’s this reluctance to believe the Bible — or any book, for that matter — could contain mistakes that always bugged me.

One of the things that attracted me to Buddhism early on was that it does not have the concept of an inerrant scripture. The Buddhist sutras were written by human beings. Some of those human beings, it may be said, were pretty extraordinary. But none of them were infallible. Furthermore, Buddhists don’t get too fussed when you point out to them that the sutras were often changed and revised during their copying and recopying over the course of hundreds of years. In Shobogenzo, Dogen even points out some canonical sutras that he says are bullshit. This did not get him in any trouble even in the 13th century because Buddhism had already developed a long tradition of questioning its own scriptures. This dates back to Buddha himself who said, “Do not go by what is written in scripture.” This, of course, certainly includes scriptures about him.

If we look at the debate between creationism and evolution in terms of our subjective experience, creationist theory may be comforting. It’s nice to believe there’s some big guy with a beard up in the sky ready to smite your enemies and snatch you up to Heaven before the End Time Tribulations. There are times even I wish I could believe in such things. But when we look at the physical world we live in, creationist theory just does not fit the evidence. I know those guys in Kentucky want to prove it does. But the only way to do that is to make your theories incredibly convoluted, invoking a God who likes to trick people and so on. We all know that nature doesn’t work like that as it plays out right before our eyes on a day-to-day basis. Why would it work that way over the course of thousands of years? Why would God bend His own rules all the time? Why would He deliberately try to fool us into believing things that would make Him have to send us to Hell? What kind of God is that?

In terms of our actual experience based upon real action in the real world, we have both our subjective wish to be comforted by ancient stories and our objective evidence that these stories aren’t true. Somehow we have to find a way to live a realistic life in the midst of that. Can we find philosophy that satisfies our need for reassurance yet doesn’t fly in the face of what we can see for ourselves is true?

Only this moment is real. The past is never real existence, whether it happened 65 million years ago or 65 nanoseconds ago. So in that sense the creationists are right and the dinosaurs are not real. But on the other hand, Buddhists accept that cause and effect is absolute, that nothing, and no one — not even God — is free from the law of cause and effect. Looking at the real evidence of fossilized Archocanthosaurus skulls in terms of what we know about cause and effect, the only reasonable explanation is that are the remains of creatures that once lived, breathed and chased Raquel Welch in a Dimetrodon skin bikini.

But if we believe that, aren’t we giving up the comforting reassurance of religion? While there is no sense in arguing with science, science is restricted to the material world. In Buddhist terms, the material world is only a small part of reality. This may sound like wishful thinking on the part of Buddhists, like we haven’t given up our fantasies of there being something beyond the world we perceive through our senses. But look at your life and you’ll find it’s true. Our real experience is never limited to just that which occurs in the material world. Our experience is always both subjective, or spiritual, and objective, or material, at the same time.

The reason the folks in Kentucky are so concerned with whether the dinosaurs really existed or not is because science scares them. They’re afraid that if science is true, the Bible must be false. And that would be a bummer because it would mean there is no God and everything we do is our own responsibility. Plus the whole deal about getting yanked up to Heaven before the Antichrist takes over the world pretty much goes right out the window.

But we don’t need to be frightened of science. For example, science says that what I call my consciousness — or my soul if you want — is just electrical energy whizzing around inside a three-pound lump of meat in my skull. That is a frightening idea if you believe in the existence of an immortal soul. But as a Buddhist I am perfectly OK with that explanation. Just because you can explain something with words doesn’t really mean you know what it is. Just look what electrical energy whizzing around inside the meat in your skull is doing right now. Because of that energy you’re able to interpret abstract shapes glowing on a piece of plastic in front of you and use them to communicate with me over enormous distances. We can even communicate with Buddha, who’s been dead 2,500 years. It’s incredible stuff. It’s mystical stuff, when you get down to it. That the so-called “mundane” everyday world exists at all is a tremendously mystical thing. The world we’re living is more worthy of worship than any God we could invent.

The problem with arguing creationism versus evolution is that such discussions can go on endlessly without any hope of reaching a conclusion. One of Buddha’s admonitions to his followers was not to get caught up in these kinds of discussions since it just wastes time. Life is short and none of us has time to waste. I find the theory of evolution entirely convincing and I have no difficulty accepting it. I don’t really have the time, patience or inclination to try and convince believers in creation science they’re a bunch of numbskulls. Still, though, it’s important to oppose the practice of teaching creation science in our public schools. Schools need to teach the highest levels of real scientific understanding, not indoctrinate their students in arcane religious ideology. I wouldn’t want public schools to teach Buddhist doctrine either. That’s not their place. Except in so far as Buddhism is realism and schools need to teach realism.

Part of my family lives in Cincinnati, and the next time I visit that area I’ll probably make a stop at the Creation Science Museum just to check out the animatronic dinosaurs. But ain’t nobody ever gonna convince me creation science is true.

Here's some plugs though...

TODAY Saturday June 2nd, 2007 at 7 PM I'll be in Phoenix at the ARIZONA ZEN BUDDHIST SOCIETY.

I'm in the June issue of LA YOGA magazine with Lou Reed on the cover.

An excerpt from my new book SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP! is in the current WHOLE LIFE TIMES magazine as well as in CONSCIOUS CHOICE magazine in Chicago and Seattle, and COMMON GROUND magazine in San Francisco.

On Sunday June 3, 2007 at 1 pm Barnes & Noble Desert Ridge - 21001 N. Tatum Blvd. - Phoenix, AZ
On Monday June 4, 2007 at 7 pm Changing Hands Bookstore - 6428 South McClintock Dr. - Tempe, AZ

Tuesday June 12th at 6PM at the VIRGIN MEGASTORE in San Francisco
Thursday June 14th, 7PM at GATEWAYS in Santa Cruz
Friday June 15th After Dinner Talk at the SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER (Zazen at 5:30, Dinner at 6:30, Talk at 7:30)
Saturday June 16th 7 PM at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashin’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. Get yours today!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Lately a lot of people have been asking my opinion about The Secret. In case you’ve been buried in an eight foot deep hole with just a straw sticking out through which you receive air and occasionally soup for the past year or so, The Secret is the latest fad in vaguely Eastern spirituality to hit the stands. It’s selling by the truckload everywhere from new age bookstores to supermarkets.

Generally I’m not interested in things like this. I mean, I leafed through the book at my local Ralph’s grocery store and I could tell within a sentence that it was pure bollocks. But it seems like I can’t go more than three or four days without someone either in an e-mail or at a talk asking to hear what I think of The Secret. So the other day when my friend Svetlana told me that a friend of hers was so into The Secret that she gave her a copy I asked her if she’d bring it over so I could watch it.

Good lord in Heaven what a steaming pile of reeking poo! I mean, with all the hype this thing has gotten I had hoped there would be at least a teeny little wee bit of substance to it. But it’s a fucking infomercial for God’s sake. OK, the budget’s a tad higher than the Ginsu knife or Abdominizer ads. But it’s exactly the same formula. Every single person who appears on screen is so obviously intent upon selling me something that I began to spontaneously get that feeling you get when you’re waiting through the Kool Aid and Pop Tart ads for the Three Stooges to come back on.

The producers of this trash would have us believe that all the great ancient traditions have taught The Secret down through the ages. We are told that a host of dead geniuses including Lincoln, Emerson, Einstein, Plato and Beethoven, all knew of its power. Buddha gets trotted out several times during the production and, like those other guys, gets misquoted out of context to appear to support the dopey philosophy of The Secret. So I guess Buddhism and The Secret are pretty much the same deal. These dudes are then compared to the “greatest teachers on the planet today” — in other words the guys who speak on camera on behalf of The Secret. Evidently the greatest teachers on the planet today are a bunch of excitable Malibu tanned goofballs with $400 haircuts who look like they ought to be sipping martinis and playing golf at a country club in Brentwood (and probably are right now as you read this). I don’t know about you, but people like that have always made me feel very, very icky.

Anyway, let’s take a look at the great teachings as laid out in one of the DVD’s extra bonus tracks by some stiff necked jittery coked-up looking guy named Bob Proctor who calls himself a philosopher. Everyone on the video has the manic look and mile-a-minute delivery of a religious fanatic on crank. At least they avoided the dredlocked psychopath who gets labeled in the interviews as a “visionary.” I think the next time I revise my resume on Monster I’m gonna put down “visionary” as my desired position. Anyway, here’s a little of what Bob has to say.

Bob says he’s not really Bob. “I am a soul, a non-physical being living in this body.” Well Bob, if you believe that and you want to connect your nonsense with Buddhism you better go back and look at a few books on the subject since Buddha repudiated this idea. But I digress.

He goes on to say that, “I have the ability to dictate the vibrations that will be attracted to me. We choose our thoughts. I can attract anything I want,” he says. To do this, “I take the idea and impress it upon my subconscious mind which in turn affects the entire universe.” This is because, “thought waves are cosmic waves that affect all time and space. If I want greater wealth I just have to see it coming into my life! I can see myself in beautiful relationships. I can see money coming to me. We become what we think about,” he tells us. “Do you want prosperity? Abundance is your birthright! If you want more, if you want greater wealth, build the image and hold on to that image!”

Getting a new car is as simple as sitting on your easy chair picturing yourself behind the wheel. Want a new house? Just imagine yourself living in it! Simple as that! The new house vibrations will be attracted to you and — voila! it’s yours! Mortgage? Schmortgage! It's all due to the Law of Attraction, the most powerful force in the Universe! Just attract what you want and it's yours!

And just in case you aren't quite greedy enough to be lured in by the promise of riches and abundance for just thinking about them, they throw in the threat that the Law of Attraction can't distinguish between good and bad thoughts. So if you think about car crashes and cancer you might just get car crashes and cancer. Quick, don't think about a furry pink elephant! You get how this works, kids?

You may be saying to yourself, “I want to get a lot of money just by sitting around wishing I had a lot of money! Plus I'm scared of car crashes, cancer and furry pink elephants!” So you’re probably going to ask, how do we get what we want and avoid what we don't want from the Law of Attraction, Bob? Bob kindly tells us to, “watch the film The Secret over and over. Go to the website. All of the products that they are offering you will help you change your habitual way of thinking.” Oh! I see! I buy lots of stuff from you and then I’ll get rich! That makes sense. Then Bob says, “I look forward to meeting you on another series of meetings this company is offering.” Oh! More meetings I can buy! And when I buy more meetings with you I get richer!

And you’re my friend Bob. I can touch you just by touching your image on the TV screen. And I’m sure that if I saw you shopping for $800 underwear on Beverly Drive and came up and told you all about how much The Secret meant to me, you’d invite me up to your house in Bel Air and we’d sit around drinking champagne and chatting away like old buddies! You’re such a super guy, Bob! I know you’re super because you’re talking right to me! And I know you’re talking to me because you call me “you” right on camera a whole bunch of times!

I don’t think I will ever understand why people fall for pitches that are this obvious. To me that’s a great secret. The real big secret of The Secret is that it's a group of crappola New Age nonsense slingers who figured out a way to join all their brain-dead philosophies together and sell them out of one on-line shop. D'uh! Are we really so retarded that nobody can see this?

I mean, I don’t consider myself any kind of a genius, but this stuff is just way too ridiculous for me to even stop and ponder for twenty seconds let alone spend my hard earned cash on. I guess people love the idea that they can get something for nothing. It won’t happen. Sorry, Bob. It didn’t even happen to you or to any of the other swindlers on the video. You worked your asses off to become rich charlatans who dupe people out of their cash for silly bullshit like this. I thought “greed is good” went out with Kajagoogoo and A Flock of Seagulls. Guess I was wrong. You knew that, Bob, and made a bundle. That’s the only secret I can see at work here.

So what about the supposedly “deeper” teachings of The Secret? I mean, that whole “mind is the universe” thing they trot out a couple times sounds a little like Buddhism. Sure it does. Because they ripped it off it from Buddhism. Just like Hitler ripped off the Swastika and the word “Aryan” from Buddhism. And just like Hitler, all these guys know about Buddhism is which of its ideas sound wicked cool. They don’t have the first clue in the world what they mean. Please show me where Buddha said the idea that the mind is the universe leads to the idea that if you imagine yourself living in a chateau on the Riviera you’ll magically end up in one. I think I missed that particular Sutra. Mind is the universe doesn’t mean we’re living in a universe dictated by our imaginations. I’m not gonna try and go into what it does mean here. But, taking a hint form The Secret’s bag of dirty tricks, I can tell you that I do talk about this in my new book! And it’s a lot funnier of a book than The Sceret!

So if you want my opinion on The Secret, there it is. I, for one, will not be spending my money on the products they have to offer. And Bob, sorry to disappoint you, but if you were looking forward to meeting me again you’re gonna be waiting for a long time.

Here’s a list of places I’ll be, though:

I’m in the current ish of Cleveland’s Scene magazine.

I'll be in the June issue of LA YOGA magazine.

An excerpt from my new book SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP! will appear in WHOLE LIFE TIMES magazine in June as well as in CONSCIOUS CHOICE magazine in Chicago and Seattle, and COMMON GROUND magazine in San Francisco.

Saturday June 2nd, 2007 at 7 PM I'll be in Phoenix at the ARIZONA ZEN BUDDHIST SOCIETY.

On Sunday June 3, 2007 at 1 pm Barnes & Noble Desert Ridge - 21001 N. Tatum Blvd. - Phoenix, AZ
On Monday June 4, 2007 at 7 pm Changing Hands Bookstore - 6428 South McClintock Dr. - Tempe, AZ

Tuesday June 12th at 6PM at the VIRGIN MEGASTORE in San Francisco
Thursday June 14th, 7PM at GATEWAYS in Santa Cruz
Friday June 15th After Dinner Talk at the SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER
Saturday June 16th 7 PM at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashin’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. Get yours today!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

I’m back from Japan now. While I was over there I got to meet three Godzillas at the same time. Here’s how.

OK. My friend Norman England, an ex-pat who’s lived in Japan even longer than I did, and who made a great, fantastic, wonderful, funny, poignant film called The iDol (that’s how he spells it), which has yet to find a distributor because all the people who distribute movies are too moronic to know how good it is even though it totally kicks the asses of everything in the theaters nowadays, just like my movie Cleveland’s Screaming, which is also without a distributor… Uh, where was I? Oh yeah, Norman is making a documentary about the people who make Japanese monster movies. This is being produced by another couple friends of mine, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski. As part of the film, Norman managed to get the three main guys who wore the Godzilla costume all together in one spot for the first time ever in history. As ridiculous as it sounds, not even the Japanese documentary makers had ever managed to get the three of them together all at one time.

The interview was to take place at Monsters, the workshop of Shinichi Wakasa, the dude who built the monster costumes for several of the recent Godzilla movies. Wakasa and I have been friends for a few years so I got invited to come see his interview. I had no idea, though, that the three “G-Men,” as the guys who played Godzilla are referred to as in Japan, would be there. So when I arrived I was pretty shocked to see Haruo Nakajima, who played Godzilla from the first movie up till 1972’s Godzilla Vs. Gigan, Kenpachiro Satsuma, who played Godzilla in most of the 90’s films, and Tsutomu Kitagawa, who played Godzilla from the turn of the century until the supposedly final G-film, Godzilla Final Wars in twenty-ought-four, all sitting around a table in back smoking and chatting. Naturally I had to get a picture with all of them together, so here it is:



I’ve been a fan of Godzilla movies since I was a wee lad, and that, as much as my interest in Zen and my interest in getting a job that paid a living wage, is what led me to Japan back in 1994. So it was way cool to get to be a part of this historic meeting. It is also what led me to be part of other non-historic meetings like the one I wrote about last week. The advice given by Miake in the comments section is extremely good for anyone working with a normal Japanese company. The folks I work for, though, happen to be a little special. I ended the week still not having a clear idea what was going on. But at least they gave me a little form they want me to turn in every week. So that’s a start, I guess.

The world is shrinking rapidly. As cliché as that sounds, it happens to be true. We’re all having to deal with cultures foreign to our own. My Zen teacher, Gudo Nishijima, is pretty jazzed about this. He sees the United States as the model for the emerging new world society. I know a lot of people chafe at hearing statements like that, as I did when I first heard him say it. But I think he’s probably right, reluctant as I sometimes am to admit it. The USA is a kind of historical experiment, a thoroughly culturally and linguistically mixed society. As communication and travel become cheaper, easier and more effective, the barriers that once separated different human cultures are breaking down. Like it or not — and some people really hate it a whole lot — it won’t be long until there is just one single unified human culture. There will always be local variations, but the idea of truly separate cultures is dissolving before our eyes.

When I was over in Japan I picked up a DVD of a film called The Last War (Sekai Dai Senso). In 1961, Eiji Tsuburaya, special effects director for the classic Godzilla movies of the Fifties and Sixties, directed the effects on this very serious look at what World War III might be like. It’s a very downbeat film. Though the special effects are pretty primitive by today’s standards, they’re also surprisingly effective at conveying the real horror that the Cold War could have unleashed had it turned suddenly hot.

As scary as some of the shit that’s going on in the world today now is, I remain very optimistic about our future. We are certainly going to do a lot of stupid things from now until the day we finally get tired of making each other so miserable all the time. But it’s far less likely that we’re going to wipe out our entire species in a matter of minutes as seemed highly probable until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I happen to believe that Buddhism will play a major role in unifying our disparate cultures. We may have to abandon the name “Buddhism” at some point to avoid offending those who are easily offended by such things. But real Buddhism is not a religion or a sect. It is simply realistic philosophy itself. Buddhists must believe only in reality and must hold no views that contradict what is true. Anyone from any culture or any religion who can accept what is real can learn to live a better life. It’s going to take a lot of hard work to make realism the over-riding philosophy of the human race. But I do not doubt that it will happen, even if I do doubt I’ll live to see it.

Anyway, whatever. I’m just psyched I got to meet three Godzillas in one day.

Here’s some of the places I’m gonna be in the coming weeks:

I’ll be on the Suicide Girls Radio Show TOMORROW May 20th. So listen up, motherhumpers!

I'll be in the June issue of LA YOGA magazine.

An excerpt from my new book SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP! will appear in WHOLE LIFE TIMES magazine in June as well. They're affiliated with CONSCIOUS CHOICE magazine in Chicago and Seattle, and with COMMON GROUND magazine in San Francisco.

On May 23rd I'll be a guest on a radio show called THE GOOD LIFE with host JESSE DYLAN at 10:15 Pacific Time/1:15 Eastern. That's on Sirius Sattelite Radio.

Saturday June 2nd, 2007 at 7 PM I'll be in Phoenix at the ARIZONA ZEN BUDDHIST SOCIETY.

On Sunday June 3, 2007 at 1 pm Barnes & Noble Desert Ridge - 21001 N. Tatum Blvd. - Phoenix, AZ
On Monday June 4, 2007 at 7 pm Changing Hands Bookstore - 6428 South McClintock Dr. - Tempe, AZ

Tuesday June 12th at 6PM at the VIRGIN MEGASTORE in San Francisco
Thursday June 14th, 7PM at GATEWAYS in Santa Cruz
Friday June 15th After Dinner Talk at the SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER
Saturday June 16th 7 PM at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashin’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. Get yours today!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

OK. Before we start I gotta plug my speaking gig on May 17th (Thursday) out in West Hollywood at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore first. I’ll be there at 7:30 PM talkin’ and signin’ my new book. So be there or be square!

And I’ll be on the Suicide Girls Radio Show a couple days later on May 20th. So listen up, motherhumpers!

*****

So I'm in Tokyo now basically having big arguments with the people I work for (What? You thought writinng for Suicide Girls and talking about Zen paid the bills?). OK. I'm over-dramatizing a bit. But yesterday I had this huge, long, painful meeting with my two bosses that consisted mainly of me saying stuff they didn't understand and them responding by saying stuff I didn't understand back. Language and cultural barriers are a huge factor, of course. Japanese is not my first language and, though one of my bosses speaks pretty good English, it's not his first language either. I lived in Japan for 11 years and understand the culture probably about as well as any foreigner can. But it is an enormously different culture. The Japanese style of business and the US style are basically incompatible. Trying to find ways to compromise is the biggest part of my work.

ANYWAY I was looking over the notes I took at the meeting and one of them was "explain why stuff is good." This was evidently the most intelligable translation I could make of what they were saying to me. Even now, not 24 hours later, I'm not entirely certain what they were saying that caused me to write that. But I do know the basic thrust was that they did not understand why the things that were entirely 100% obvious to me were good things to do were actually good things to do.

ANYWAY, I'm also staying at my Zen teacher's eensy-weensy government subsidized apartment. So after having this Hell meeting I came back totally drained and spilled my guts to him all about it.

Now you'd think a old Zen Master would tell me to leave the struggles of the secular world and follow the Buddhist path, wandering around like David Carradine in Kung Fu dispensing cosmic wisdom and kicking ass when necessary. But Nishijima Sensei isn't that kind of guy. He basically told me to keep on struggling with my company. "Try making your own job," he said. "And if it is successful, that is good. If it is not, you can resign."

A lot of people imagine it'd be wonderful to escape from their every day lives and run off to some kind of spiritual world where everything is okey-dokey all day long. This is how cults work, by promising a life free from trouble in exchange for believing stupid stuff and blindly obeying. But the truth is that there's no cult, no church, no monastery in the world is any less succeptible to politics and basic human bull crap than any company or any other organization. The dreams we all have of there being some ideal place we could escape from all such troubles are all just empty fantasies. Sad, but true. I dreamed this dream myself for a very long time and still find myself lapsing into it. But it ain't gonna happen. Not to me. Not to you. Not to anyone anywhere in the world at any time or in any place.

In Los Angeles, where I live right now (until it all burns up anyway), people are always hopping from job to job trying to find something better. The culture in SoCal seems to say that as soon as things get rough you run away. And, of course, there are times when you have to split an uncool scene (groovy hippy talk, man) — battering husbands, Bobbiting wives and that sort of thing are good examples. In fact, I tend to suspect my own current situation just may be one of those too. But if you do split — he says to himself as much as anyone else reading this — just watch you don't do so with the expectation that everything's gonna get solved for good and all.

Our day to day real human struggles are important. I hate 'em just as much as anyone else. Maybe more so right now since I gotta spend the rest of this week trying to explain why stuff is good to people who don't seem to be very interested in understanding. But it's what I gotta do. And even if I run away from this particular struggle now, it's gonna come back and bite me in the ass in another form later on. I wish it wasn't this way as much as you do. But facts is facts. Watch your own life closely and you'll see this is always the case. Don't get me wrong. You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not running away.

The brilliant thing is that doing what you do is how you realize your life and realize the universe. Your struggles are your self. Weird, but true.

ANYWAY, right now I have no idea how this is gonna play out. But for now I've decided to follow Nishijima Sensei's advice and fight the good fight without worrying too much about whether I'll win or lose.

I'll let you know next week how it went.

*******

HERE'S SOME MORE INFO ABOUT PLACES I'LL BE SPEAKING:

I'll be in the June issue of LA YOGA magazine.

An excerpt from my new book SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP! will appear in WHOLE LIFE TIMES magazine in June as well. WHOLE LIFE TIMES is an LA based mag. But they're also affiliated with CONSCIOUS CHOICE magazine in Chicago and Seattle, and with COMMON GROUND magazine in San Francisco. So I think the excerpt will appear in those magazines as well.

On May 23rd I'll be a guest on a radio show called THE GOOD LIFE with host JESSE DYLAN at 10:15 Pacific Time/1:15 Eastern. That's on Sirius Sattelite Radio.

On Saturday June 2nd, 2007 at 7 PM I'll be in Phoenix at the ARIZONA ZEN BUDDHIST SOCIETY.

AND I'll be all over the San Francisco Bay Area the following week. Here's what's lined up so far:

Tuesday June 12th at the VIRGIN MEGASTORE in San Francisco
Thursday June 14th, 7PM at GATEWAYS in Santa Cruz
Friday June 15th After Dinner Talk at the SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER
Saturday June 16th 7 PM at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma, CA 94952
Sunday June 17th at San Quentin Prison (this isn't open to the public, but all inmates reading this are invited!)

AND on Wednesday July 25th, 2007, my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! will have its world premier at the EGYPTIAN THEATER in Hollywood. So mark your calendars!

Plus, the very first record by my old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. This 7 inch vinyl record contains our 1983 demo tape full of thrashin’ Minor Threat/Negative approach style hardcore with a drop of psychedelia thrown in for good measure. This will be followed by a second 7 inch of an earlier demo tape and later on by a double CD set with a million bonus trax. Get yours today!


Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Before I forget, for those of you who’ve bought my new book, Sit Down and Shut Up!, I found a mistake. Turn to page 74 and look at the bottom of the second complete paragraph. It says: "To really suppress anger, you have to suppress the urge to avoid the beautiful juiciness of it all." It's supposed to say, "...suppress the urge to enjoy the beautiful juiciness of it all." So go get your Bic and fix that. Thanks. Those of you who haven’t bought the book must do so right now. You will obey me. OBEY! OBEY!!

AND I'll be doing a talk and book signing on MAY 17th, 2007 at the BODHI TREE BOOKSTORE which is located in West Hollywood, California (click for directions) at 7:30 PM. So show up, dammit! A good time will be had by all.

I imagine most of you saw the news post by Psuedonymph this week about Quentin Tarantino. It seems that Quentin, being influenced by Uma Thurman’s dad Robert “Buddha Bob” Thurman, has embraced the philosophy of Buddhism and come to know the truth of his past lives — including former existences as a black slave and as Chinese and Japanese people. I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout Tarantino embracin’ no Buddhism. But I wouldn't mind embracing Uma Thurman.

When Psuedonymph called me up to ask what I thought of the story I said it sounded pretty dippy to me. I mean I love Tarantino as a writer and director. But as a Buddhist? I don’t think so…

Lots and lots and lots of people these days seem to think that all Buddhists believe in reincarnation. In fact, one of the main reasons for the popularity of Buddhism in America these days is because so many Americans think that Buddhism is the belief in reincarnation. So let me state this clearly and for the record I am a Buddhist teacher and I do not believe in reincarnation. In fact, you’ll find that a great number of Buddhists do not believe in reincarnation. Dogen, the founder of the sect I belong to, said, “Firewood, after becoming ash, does not again become firewood. Similarly, human beings, after death, do not live again.”

Dogen was highly critical of the belief in reincarnation, going so far as to say that people who claimed to be Buddhists and still espoused that belief weren’t really Buddhists at all. At the risk of offending Robert Thurman and thereby ending forever my chances to embrace Uma, I tend to concur. I think the belief in reincarnation is a complete distortion of everything the Buddha taught. It seems to have been shoe-horned into the philosophy at a later time by folks with misguided notions about popularizing it. In its most basic form Buddhism has nothing whatsoever to do with the belief in reincarnation.

Buddha had a completely different view of time from that of pretty much anybody else in his day. To him, the only real time is right now, this very moment. The past is just memory and the future is just a dream. In the moment when we’re alive, we’re alive. In the moment of death, we die. In truth, though, we are dying every single moment. You are not the same person you were when you read the first paragraph of this article. That person is dead and gone, never to return or be reincarnated. The only way you can have reincarnation is when you believe in linear time, when you believe that there is some immutable entity — your “self” or your “soul” — that stays the same while everything else around it changes. Buddha flatly denied that idea. It’s a shame to see those who call themselves his followers embracing it.

As soon as you start spinning off dreams about what might happen to you after you die or what you were before you were born you’ve completely left the realm of reality and entered the land of fantasy. In spite of Tarantino’s assertion that he has “just a feeling, a knowing” about his former life as Kunte Kinte’s bunkmate, nobody — and I mean nobody — knows their past lives. Hell, we don’t even know what we did at breakfast yesterday. You may have memories of this or that. But how reliable is your memory? Mine isn’t worth shit, I know that. Whether it’s a memory of a past life or a memory of a night out with Uma, all memory is just the action of the brain cells. It’s not reality. Only this moment is reality.

The whole past lives deal sucks most people right in and once you mention it they can’t seem to concentrate on anything else. Lost in dreams of glorious lives lived in former centuries they’ll never notice where they really are right now. I cannot seriously accept anyone as a Buddhist Master if they’re encouraging their followers to live in dreams and fantasies. Sorry everybody. But I can’t.

Look. Everyone is afraid to die. And we’d all like for some starry-eyed mystic in robes who seems to know things that are hidden from our view to come up and tell us not to worry, that we’re going to live forever. Starry-eyed guys in robes have made a damned good living selling that fantasy for thousands of years. But it’s all just smoke and mirrors. They don’t know anything you don’t know. Not a one of them.

So what happens after you die? Fuck if I know. I’m scheduled to go to Japan next week and I have no idea what’s gonna happen to me after I get there. I can plan for it. I can dream about it. I can even buy a bullet train ticket to Kyoto for the Tuesday after I arrive. But that doesn’t mean I know anything about what will really happen in my future. Being able to live with the unknown is the only way to live a truly happy life.

In the case of past and former lives — or Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (Limbo’s been abolished) if you prefer — there’s really no point at all in speculating. Even if it were true what good would it do you to know? So you were Napoleon? Now you’re waiting tables in Fresno. You’re much better off fawning over that guy in the nice suit so he’ll give you a good tip than getting so caught up in reliving the Italian campaign of 1796 that you forget to pour him some more coffee.

This is what counts, the life you’re living now. If anyone should know that it’s a guy like Quentin Tarantino. You don’t make a masterpiece like Kill Bill by worrying about what your soul was doing 400 years ago. You do it by paying attention to what’s going on right now. The ability to fantasize has some use when writing fiction or writing screenplays —I even use my own ability to fantasize when writing non-fiction like this. Buddhist literature is, in fact, full of made-up stories intended to illustrate a point. But even in these cases we can only use fantasy in a productive way when we understand the difference between our imaginations and what is actually real. The dream of the movie Kill Bill didn’t sell a bazillion tickets, as the millions of people who fantasize about making their masterpiece but never take any action towards realizing it can attest. The movie itself on 35mm celluloid is completely different from the dream. Reincarnation fantasies always blur the distinction between dreams and reality. They should be avoided.

So Quentin, if you ever really get interested in Buddhism, feel free to stop by my Saturday morning sittings in Santa Monica (see below). Or, better yet, just send Uma around for a private lesson…

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Before I start, I just wanted to let everyone know my new book, Sit Down and Shut Up! has begun shipping! You can already get it on-line and it should be turning up at your local bookshops any day now. Get yours today. It's got a bitchen cover!

* * * * * * * *

I’ve been spending the week at my dad’s place north of Dallas helping him clear out his garage and some of his closets. Now that my mom is gone (see my trilogy of articles — 1, 2, 3 — about this from earlier this year) he figures there’s nothing keeping him in Dallas.

In the process of clearing his stuff out, I discovered a lot of my own stuff that I’d left at their place for ages. The main bulk of this was about three or four crates of vintage records. I used to be a pretty big record collector. And when I say “pretty big” I mean “certifiably insane.” I think I had around 30 or more crates full of records at the height of my mania. It was a massive burden to cart around every time I moved.

These four crates were now all that was left of a once mighty empire. Many had been sold or given away. A large number had been stolen outright during a breakup with a girlfriend. What was left now were just the items I couldn’t bear to part with when I moved to Japan in 1993. There was some pretty amazing stuff in there, too. A mono Sgt. Pepper with the inner sleeve still in tact, a Syd Barrett bootleg with a cover by Robyn Hitchcock, a bunch of extremely rare releases on the Beatles' Apple label, a few things that were not terrifically collectible but had lots of sentimental value. And now they all had to go. I wasn’t about to try and drag four crates of records back with me to Los Angeles. So I bit the bullet, packed them all in my dad’s van and took them to the local Half Price Books and Records where I got waaaaaaaayyyyyy less than half the price I’d paid for them.

I have a great admiration for the proverbial Zen monk who owns nothing but his robes, his begging bowl and his zafu. To me, this seems like a sensible lifestyle, closer to our natural situation. Conversely I have nothing but pity for the flamboyantly rich that make up much of the population where I live now in Los Angeles. I don’t envy their silly cars and their pretty pink houses and their gaudy jewelry, although I gather that I’m expected to. For all the shiny objects they own they always look so very sad. It must be hard to have to stress out all the time about status and property.

On the other hand, I’m certainly far from being a monk with just a robe to my name. I got stuff — pawn shop guitars, Godzilla toys, a collection of old dinosaur books. I go through my junk periodically and purge the things I no longer care about. My curse is that over the years I’ve gotten a whole lot better at sniffing out really cool things that I’ll never be able to find again, which makes the purges a lot harder and less thorough. But whenever I look over the stuff I got I can’t help thinking what a mess it’ll be for whoever has to get rid of it after I die. I hope they get a better price for it than I did for those records.

But the proverbial monk with nothing but a robe is largely a thing of the past. I’ve come across a few people who’ve tried to create modern day variations. But I’m largely unimpressed. One guy I saw followed the ancient Buddhist custom of never handling money. Only all this really meant was that he never picked up the check. I watched him stick a group of his students for a smack-up Indian meal on their dime (our dime, actually, since I stupidly gave a donation) while regaling them with tales of skydiving lessons and expensive sea cruises. All of this extravagance was paid for by their loving dana donations, which he, of course, never deigned to touch with his pure Buddhist Master hands. “For too long it’s been thought that the Buddha’s path is an inward journey. But it can be an outward journey as well,” he chuckled, his eyes gleaming with Enlightenment. You’re laughing. But you should’ve been there. This guy’s followers were lapping it up like manna from Nirvana.

I have met a couple monks who, unlike that guy, were actually serious about the whole no possessions thing. One guy made his entire living through begging at train stations. This is a common sight in Japan. But once my teacher told me, “I never give money to those people because I don’t know what they really use it for.” In both the cases I observed of this, though, the monks in question gave up after a short time and took on real jobs.

It’s nearly impossible these days to be seen as much more than a freeloader if you try to live that way. I’m also completely unimpressed by the recent trend of American Buddhist practitioners to do what they call “Plunge Experiences.” This is where they go out and pretend to be homeless people for a few nights to try and bring about some kind of far out experience. Whatever. You won’t catch me wasting time on anything like that.

For people who are really serious about Buddhist practice the contemporary world presents something of a dilemma. We can’t fall back on repeating the ways of the past the way many religions do. In fact, aping what our ancestors did is counter to the very fundamental spirit of Buddhism. What to do then?

It strikes me that the answer is to apply the idea of the Middle Way. A lifestyle of excess is obviously unhealthy, while a lifestyle of having nothing but our robes and begging bowls may not be practical anymore — though, certainly, if you could actually do it, that would be nice. But I don’t and neither have my teachers. Living in a capitalist society requires that we participate in the economic life of the society to some degree. Besides that, if Buddhist practitioners are perceived as a bunch of freeloaders living off the rest of society, that doesn’t do us any good at all.

We need to be careful not to desire too much, not to take more than we need or can use. We need to live sensibly within our means and to support the society we live in by contributing to its health and wellbeing. This will mean something a little different to each person, and that’s fine.

It’s a beautiful romantic notion to dream of being absolutely free from all possessions. But few among us can really do it. And I don’t see any compelling reason why more of us should. Just be sensible. Find the Middle Way in everything you do.

By the way, about that rare Syd Barrett bootleg? I put it in a box and sent it back to my apartment in L.A. along with a few other records and books — including a tattered copy of the brilliant, but long out-of-print Horrors from Screen to Scream. So sue me.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki says that in most religions practitioners become like a sharp angle pointing away from themselves, while in Zen the angle points towards ourselves. The events Monday at Virginia Tech showed clearly what can happen when someone keeps sharpening and sharpening that angle pointing away from himself. We can say that the worthless piece of garbage who committed those murders was a nut case, schizophrenic or whatever multi-syllable word they finally settle on to describe him, and maybe it’s true. But he wasn’t the least bit different from the rest of us.

We all strengthen and enlarge our egos by constantly raging against things outside ourselves that we say make us upset — exactly like that dirtbag did. Maybe in our case it's different stuff we blame for our troubles and maybe we don't deal with it the same way. But we are absolutely convinced, just as he was, that the source of our problems is out there somewhere, not inside our own hearts, minds and bodies. That sharp angle points ever and always utterly away from the real source of trouble.

Thankfully most of us don’t take things to the kind of extremes we saw on Monday. We’re more likely to simmer and stew in our own misery occasionally pausing to rail at a world we never asked to be born into, but mostly just feeling sad and sorry for ourselves. Trust me, friends and neighbors, I know all about this. I was the sharpest angle pointing away from himself you could ever want to meet. My unhappiness was everybody’s fault but mine. There was never any lack of evidence of this, so nobody could ever convince me I was wrong. Not that most people I knew ever tried very hard. Cuz if my troubles weren’t out there then neither were theirs. And that’s not an easy thing to own up to. I was lucky enough to meet one person who had admitted to himself where the real source of his problems were and who helped me to see the real source of mine. I later discovered there was a long tradition of people who did this. But it’s always been a tiny, tiny minority.

It is the hardest thing in the world to admit that you are the real source of your own problems and your own pain. Harder than anything you can possibly imagine. We’ll commit any kind of atrocity, endure any kind of agony, slaughter our families, friends and neighbors, terrorize each other, do pretty much anything horrible, wrong, deceitful and stupid all just to get away from putting the blame for our troubles where it really belongs. Not out there in those bad people. Not out there in those terrible circumstances. But right in here. It’s you. It’s always been you and it always will be you.

Pretending the trouble is out there is a great way to avoid doing the real work that actually needs to be done. You can never really do anything about your problems as long as they’re out there. It’s hopeless to try and change the whole wide world into something more to your liking. You can write blogs or letters to the editor or scream and shout on street corners. You can shoot up your whole campus or post office or blow up a few major buildings. Or you can just do the little things we all usually do, act like jerks, insist on our own way, cut in line, litter, pardy hardy and wake up our lousy neighbors. But no matter what you do to all those people out there who’ve made you so upset it’s never, ever, ever going to solve your real problem. September 11th didn’t convert the world to the Muslim faith. McVey didn’t topple the United States government. That asswipe in Virginia didn’t teach the rich and the debauched a damn thing. And nothing you do against all those people and things out there you think caused all the shit in your life will ever make a bit of difference either. But when you change your attitude and change your focus, point that sharp angle back at yourself then — presto! — everything changes completely.

Does this mean you never do anything to put the outside world right cuz everything's, like, groovy now and you're all enlightened? Not a chance. You’ll be working at it every second of every day for the rest of your life. Because the most important thing you can do to put the outside world right is to get yourself together. And that's a job that never ends.

This is a very serious matter. The idea that our problems are all out there beyond ourselves is the cause of all human misery — every crime, every suicide, every act of terrorism, every war. Even your common garden-variety complaints can always be traced back to the deeper underlying idea that our problems are somewhere out there.

If you really want to do something to make sure other tragedies like this don’t occur anymore, you can. There’s a lot of work to be done, and it’s going to take time. But it’s work you can do right here and right now. More than that, it's the work you really want to do. It's what you were born for. It takes real courage to do this work because what you’re going to see is that the crazed killer isn’t out there in Virginia or out there in the hills of Afghanistan or out there in the White House. He’s you. But the good news is that once you see that, then you can take real, useful action. And it doesn’t start by watching that idiot’s dumbass manifesto over and over and over on YouTube or whatever. Or watching the folks at NBC lie to us that their motivation for releasing the tape was anything other than irresponsible greed. Or even with reading what I or Shunryu Suzuki or anyone else has to say about it. It starts with you being very quiet and seeing who you really are.

This won't fix everything today or tomorrow or by the end of next year or in the next decade. But slowly the effect will spread. It's all up to you.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Before I begin I want to do a brief eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I was gonna do a long one, but there have been too many already. So I’ll just say that his book Cat’s Cradle was one of my own stepping-stones towards Buddhism. Those of you who’ve read it — and if you haven’t, you should — will recall the fictional religion of Bokononism that appears in the novel. Bokononism starts off from the promise Bokonon makes to his followers that, “All the true things I’m about to tell you are out and out lies.”

Unlike other religious leaders, Vonnegut’s character Bokonon didn’t expect his followers to have faith that the impossible things written in his book actually did happen or that he had any kind of special knowledge they did not possess. This is very much like the Buddhist attitude. It does not attach any importance to believing in the literal truth of its scriptures nor are its teachers held up as examples of divinely inspired beings. I first encountered the idea that something could be true without being literally factual in Vonnegut’s books. When I found that Buddhism had the same attitude I was pretty much sold.

ANYWAY, today I wanted to write about another topic that’s been written about way too much lately — Don Imus’ comments about the Rutger’s women’s basketball team. Actually I couldn’t give two shits about Imus and his comments. I haven’t listened to him since Seventh grade. But what’s happening to him is a little like what’s been happening to me. Although I’m not calling anyone a nappy headed ho. I lived in Africa at just the time my…. um… manhood was beginning to awaken, so the fine women on that team are my idea of smokin’ hot. Nor am I getting suspended or anything for the stuff I say. But, a bit like Imus, I am encountering the idea that, as a public figure (who me?) my audience — at least some of them anyway — get hoppin’ mad when I say stuff they don’t approve of.

Mostly this comes from disgruntled wanna-be Buddhists who think I should write more like their idea of what Buddhist teachers are supposed to write like. I usually just tell people like that to quit reading me and go read stuff by guys who write the way they think Buddhist teachers ought to. There’s plenty of namby-pamby crap out there. But after the Imus thing happened I started thinking about why it is that we demand that writers and public figures should write and speak in certain approved ways.

When you really look into it writing is a fairly new thing. Yeah, it’s been around for something like five or six thousand years. But human beings have been around for something like 130,000 years. That means that for about 125,000 of those years nobody anywhere ever wrote anything down. Just because we only know 5000 years of our collective history doesn’t mean we’re not carrying the other 125,000 years — and perhaps far, far more — with us, mostly buried in the deep recesses of our brains where conscious thought never dares venture.

When writing first emerged only very, very important things were committed to paper and stone. Tellingly, the very earliest forms of writing were receipts. But after that people started wanting to write down the very most important philosophical and scientific stuff they thought of. Sometimes they pretended that stuff was told to them by God. Maybe they really believed it was. They were cavemen after all.

When you think about it, writing must have seemed like a really mind blowing thing when it first got started. Just by making abstract marks on a rock or a leaf or whatever, two or more people who understood the system could read each other’s minds. The fact that not many people could do this made the ones who could seem almost divine. Literature of any kind must have seemed sacred. Some of us still revere those oldest books as something magical.

But the magic of those ancient books really wasn’t anything supernatural. It was due to the fact that the written word was so incredibly precious that the folks who wrote stuff did so very, very carefully. They were, in a sense, practicing a very extreme form of what we now call journalistic responsibility. Writers weren’t just expressing themselves. They were expressing the core ideas of their communities. As literacy increased and more books were produced by more people the air of sacredness accorded literature as a whole and the necessity of community restraints upon it gradually wore off. Though even now there are places where you can still get killed for writing something your community objects to. When film, TV and radio appeared there again was a sense that these forms of communication were too powerful to be left unsupervised by the community at large. So we had the Hays Commission censors, the FCC, the MPAA and all the rest. The airwaves are still considered to be public spaces. And so when Don Imus or whoever says something people don’t like on what they consider “their” airwaves, the shit hits the fan.

But as we all know, the whole idea of any sort of community restraints on what people say has gone right out the window in the age of the Internet. Nothing is sacred here at all. But this doesn’t mean we don’t still hold illusions that it ought to be. 125,000 years of thinking in a particular way about things doesn’t just vanish in a decade or so.

The thing about people telling Imus that he shouldn’t say “nappy headed” or telling me I oughtn’t to say certain things in the context of a piece of Buddhist writing seems to turn on the idea that public figures have a duty to be responsible about what they say lest they influence others. There seems to be some kind of vague fear that if Imus says “nappy headed hos” or I say something somebody out there regards as improper, then somebody out there may think racism or whatever is OK, and that person will get his buddies together and lynch someone. Or something like that. It’s hard to say exactly what the fear is.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing and speaking it’s that there is not a single thing you can say that cannot be misinterpreted. Charles Manson thought the message of the Beatles’ White Album was to start a race war. Should the Beatles have refrained from recording Obla-di Obla-da just because some nutcase might take it the wrong way? Furthermore, there are always people out there who want to argue or criticize or complain about what you say no matter what it is. All you can do as a writer or speaker or artist is to avoid deliberately attempting to fan people’s anger and hatred and avoid deliberately trying to incite violence.

In some sense, though, I can understand why people make these demands on public figures. I agree that public figures have a special obligation to be responsible. But here’s the thing. We live in a time when anyone can say anything they please and potentially reach a massive audience. Anyone can be a public figure. Everyone with an Internet connection is potentially a celebrity. As a species, human beings can no longer afford to allow the defense that because an influential person says it’s OK, then we can do whatever he says — or whatever we think he said — without being in any way responsible for that action. We have to stop accepting that lame-ass excuse from anyone anywhere under any circumstances — even from ourselves. We should have been convinced of that after World War II, but not enough of us have learned the lesson yet.

The single most vital thing that needs to happen to insure our survival as a species is for each of us to learn to take responsibility for ourselves. Yet the ability to be responsible is still seriously lacking. Can you believe there are people out there in Internetland who even want me to take responsibility for them?

I won’t. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. No matter what Imus says or what I say, you alone are responsible for how you react to it. And as the collective noise of humanity grows louder by the minute there’s gonna be plenty more to react to in the future. If we cannot learn to accept responsibility for what we do no matter what we hear from the media we’re in a whole big mess of trouble.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Before I begin today’s thing I wanted to let everybody know that my new book, Sit Down and Shut Up! comes out in just a few weeks from New World Library. Look for it in fine bookstores everywhere. In conjunction with the book’s release, I’m getting together some personal appearances. On May 17th I’ll be at the Bodhi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles. On June 12th I’ll be at Gateways in Santa Cruz. On June 13th I’ll be at Green Gulch in… wherever that is. Near San Francisco somewhere. On June 14th I’ll be at Books, Inc. in San Francisco. On June 15th I’ll be at the San Francisco Zen Center. I’ll also be in Phoenix either June 2nd or 5th. And I’ll be on the Suicide Girls radio show, but I don’t know when. Sounds like a lot. But I can do more. So I wanted to let you know I am available for speaking engagements. Just write me at brad.warner@mac.com for details.

Here’s a little sample of what you might get to enjoy if you hire me out for your six year old’s birthday party or whatever. There are several more clips on my blog and on You Tube.



I’d like to write a little about what I talked about in that clip, which is the concept of “mundane experience.” I once found a book supposedly about Buddhism that demolished the entire philosophy in its opening sentence. It said, “Buddhism points the way out of the world of the mundane — this world — towards the world of Enlightenment.”

This is not what Buddhism is about at all. Buddhism is not a type of spirituality. Buddha specifically rejected both materialism and spirituality. The rejection of materialism is well understood. But a lot of people are deeply confused about his rejection of spirituality. Some people seem to miss this entirely. Of course, words always have varying definitions. So if you use the word “spirituality” to mean anything other than materialism or to mean something different from secular philosophies, then Buddhism may end up in the “spirituality” category by default. But let me give you my take on the word “spirituality” and try to explain briefly why Buddhism is not spirituality.

Forms of spirituality are always based on the premise that there is this world in which we live every day, which is mundane, ordinary and boring, and then there is another world — the spiritual realm — which is way more kick-ass. The aim of spiritual religions is to get you out of this sucky world and on to that one. Most of the time spiritual religions say you’ll go to the kick-ass place after you die if you just do what their leaders tell you to. But sometimes, spiritual religions promise you that you can go to the spiritual world right now. Methodologies differ. Sometimes it involves special mental gymnastics, breathing techniques and so forth that alter your brain chemistry. Or sometimes you just have to eat some peyote or ‘shrooms and trip out. In either case, the evidence that you’ve achieved a “higher state” is that whenever someone from this world tries to talk to you while you’re in that “higher state” all you can do is giggle at them or drool. By that definition, when I worked for the Summit County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities I met a lot of people who were in permanently “higher states.” (I remember a couple of the guys on the photos on that website!)

Higher states are bullshit. I’ve been in a few of ‘em and they’re always a big load of crap. Your brain is full of fantasies. If you do the right kind of mental gymnastics or take the right kinds of drugs those fantasies can be made to seem very real and very important. Of course they seem important to you, you made them up! But those things are never reality.

It always amazes me that so-called “higher states” always — and I mean always — involve the loss of skills we have in the supposedly “lower” states. I mean would you want to ride in a car being driven by someone experiencing a “higher state of awareness?” I’d take the bus myself. I once read about some dopes who went to India to experience some kind of heightened awareness meditation deal. According to the writer, they all had to be locked in a room for a week while people came a few times a day to deliver their meals and clean up their messes. And these people who did the retreat were actually proud of that. Forgive me, but I cannot get excited about the insights of people who can’t even fix themselves a sandwich.

In Zen practice you can and do experience some weird shit sometimes. But whenever a student trips out like that it is the job of the teacher to smack it out of him. Not usually literally, but sometimes even that is necessary. Reality is always different from some kind of psychedelic head trip.

But what we call “mundane experience” is the truly important matter. If you’re a healthy person most of your life is what usually gets categorized as “mundane experience.” You get up, you brush your teeth, you make the bed, you do the leftover dishes from last night… Add up the time spent doing stuff that’s “mundane” and compare it with stuff that’s kick-ass and you’ll see that you spend a lot more of your life doing the mundane stuff. People who try to have it any other way always end up going nutso.

But this supposedly “mundane” stuff is the real activity of the Universe. This is what really needs doing. The kick-ass stuff is a diversion that keeps you away from your real duty. Which isn’t to say you should never have any fun. Just don’t get confused into believing that the ideal life is one in which everything is always kick-ass. And especially don’t get confused into thinking the goal of life is to get out of this mundane world into the kick-ass world way off in some higher plane.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up! He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

As most of you know, my mom died a couple months ago. This has made me reconfirm something I committed to a long time ago, but which I still forget from time to time. It’s vital for every person to come into themselves. And that’s not some kind of deviant sexual reference. It means you need to find what your role is in the world and fulfill that role without fear or reservation. This is tough because often what we want to do and what we think we should do are quite dirfferent. But doing what you need to do is the most important contribution you can make to the Universe. We’re all going to die. It’s important to use the life you have in the best way possible. Just know that what you think that means and what it really means may not be precisely the same.

My teacher, Gudo Nishijima, always says that when you establish the Balanced State you can do exactly what you want. But it’s often very difficult to quiet your brain down to the point where you can differentiate between what you think you want to do and what you really want to do. I’ll give you my own concrete example.

When I was a kid, I thought that when I grew up I wanted to be a horror movie host like The Ghoul who showed cheap-o Japanese sci-fi flicks like Gamera Vs. Monster X — in which a giant fire-breathing turtle and a massive toad that spits poison spears duke it out in Osaka — and blew up plastic model kits every Saturday night on Cleveland’s channel 61. I talk about Dogen and Nishijima a lot these days but not much about The Ghoul. He was a major role model just by being honest. He’d come on during commercial breaks and tell you straight out that the movie sucked and watching it was a waste of time. Maybe so. But listening to someone who tells the truth is never a waste of time. Though the horror host business dried up before I was old enough to enter into it, I found the same attitude in punk rock and took to that. I found that what made me happiest was going up in front of people and making a fool of myself by telling them what I knew to be true.

But I was also very idealistic. I wanted to save the world! I thought that being an entertainer — especially a punk rock musician or, god forbid, a monster movie host — was a low and base thing, unworthy and ignoble. So I ended up going to college and getting a teaching degree. Teaching the little children! Awwwwwwww….. What could be more beautiful? After graduation I took a job at the Summit County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities helping poor mentally handicapped people learn how to cope with life. Even better! What could be a more saintly occupation than helping these unfortunate people find joy and value in their sad lives?

God, I hated that job. Not every minute of it. Some of the people I worked with, the retarded ones mostly, were the greatest people I ever met in my life, and they weren’t nearly as sad as I thought they’d be. But for the most part it was all I could do just to get through each day I worked at that place. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I quit, moved to Japan and eventually took a job at a company that made low budget monster movies just like Gamera Vs. Monster X. For the first couple years, I was so freaking happy my head almost exploded. Yet I felt incredibly guilty about it, too. I’d gone from something honorable and good to something almost unbelievably vile and base. A few years before, I’d been helping those in need. Now I was working on crappy monster movies. What right did I have to be happy about that?

Meanwhile I was still studying and practicing Zen. So I talked to Nishjijima about my dilemma. I was thinking of quitting the monster movie company and doing something more worthy, going out and saving all beings, that sort of thing. I was fairly vague about it. But I knew I ought to be doing something other than what I was doing. Nishijima listened to me whine for a while and then said I should definitely continue working in the entertainment business. This was clearly what I actually wanted to do and, as such, it was the place where I could be most truly useful.

At the time that just shocked me to the core. I was truly baffled by what he said. How could it possibly be better to work in an industry that made movies about mutant slugs eating Shinjuku than working for an organization dedicated to saving the planet? Isn’t that what Buddhism is all about?

But I took his advice and I stayed. And as I continued my job I began seeing that saving all beings is not limited to doing those things that society has sanctified as noble and worthy. Real balance is needed everywhere, in all walks of life. Those whom society has labeled as “needy” aren’t the only ones in need. Those professions society has labeled as “worthy” aren’t the only jobs that need doing. Society is fucked. So why would society’s definitions of who among it was truly in need and which among its professions is noble be any less fucked?

By following Nishijima’s advice, a weird thing has happened. I am now exactly the Buddhist equivalent of The Ghoul, broadcasting a low-rent, low powered message to a tiny band of weirdos who like seeing me blow shit up. Yet this is what I need to be doing. Someone who attended one of my classes (which are always open to the public, just so you know) had a similar dilemma. She wants to save the world, but what she truly enjoys — and I swear I’m not making this up — is studying the sex lives of mollusks. I told her what Nishijima told me. What you truly like to do is the best thing you can do to save the world. The world needs mollusk researchers. For all we know mollusks may hold the key to human survival. If the people who really love studying them are off doing something else because they think that’s nobler we could all end up dead! Of course, if teaching the little children or helping the handicapped or whatever is your thing, by all means do it. But do it because it’s your real calling, not because everyone else says that’s what you ought to do.

Anyway. Mom dying just gave me a much-needed whack on the head to stop hemming and hawing and start really doing what needs doing. Cuz you don’t know how long you’ve got. You really don’t. So it’s vital to be 100% honest all the time — taking into account, of course, that you need to be polite and courteous. And, hey, aren't I always polite and couteous?

Doing what you truly do best is how you save the world. It’s absolutely irrelevant whether or not society deems that a worthy profession and rewards it accordingly. The thing you like doing best may be the key to what needs doing most.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

According to this story in the Mainichi Daily News, an English language paper in Japan, there's a punk rock Buddhist priestess stirring things up in Osaka.

The story references an earlier story from Spa!, a notorious Japanese gossip rag and says:

Wow. Sounds like what might happen if one of the SuicideGirls read my column and took the vows! Rengetsu, you go girl!

I got tons and tons of responses to that last post I put up here and the related ones on my blog. So I take it that I may have stumbled upon a subject that interests people. Either that or it's cold in the rest of the country and people have nothing better to do than type on their computers. Anyway it interests me, so I’d like to continue.

One source of the problem lies in the idea of Enlightenment and what constitutes an “Enlightened Being.” While India is chok-a-blok with Realized Sages, Japan is just swimming with Zen Masters and the rest of Far East has seemingly endless traditions of purportedly God-realized men and women both ancient and modern, historically we in the Wild, Wild West haven’t really had many encounters with supposedly “Enlightened Beings.” The few we have met with on this side of the world have had their reputations blown up to unimaginably gigantical proportions. I once heard a story, don’t know if it’s true or not, but it certainly could be. Some missionary goes to India to bring Christ’s message to the poor Godless heathens. An Indian guy asks him why he should believe in Jesus. “He walked on water, healed cripples and raised the dead!” says the missionary.

“Oh,” says the Indian guy, clearly unimpressed, “There’s a guy over in the next village who does that too!”

In the Sixties we had a huge influx of rishis, roshis and lamas into this country. For a few years there they were the era’s new rock stars. The idea that these guys were Gods descended to Earth spread quickly and, unfortunately, not a whole lot of them made any big effort to dispel the notion. The Beatles were horrified that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (allegedly) made a pass at Mia Farrow’s sister because they thought he was supposed to be some kind of ethereal creature with no such desires. But he wasn’t and Prudence Farrow was a smokin’ hottie in those days — though I still woulda gone after Pattie Boyd, myself. The problem wasn’t that the Maharishi was a man like most men, it was that he had allowed, even encouraged himself to be seen as something else.

My friend Gwen works for a very cool website called Buddhist Geeks. While I can't say I'm down with everything that appears on the site, the people who run Buddhist Geeks seem much more intent than most others in the biz to get at what really matters. Last week they posted a really great audio interview with a guy named Daniel Ingram on just this subject. You can listen to it here. Daniel is a teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. And for a guy from the Lesser Vehicle he’s pretty smart! (This is a joke, OK.) Though I think he lays it on just a tad too thick towards the end — like someone else I know has a tendency to do (me) — he’s spot on in his basic assessment and I really wish more Buddhist teachers would say stuff like this.

One of the problems is that it’s very easy to play the Enlightened Master role and it most definitely does pay very well. But, as Wil Wheaton wrote about in his column this week (can’t wait for part 2!), just cuz someone can act like Captain Kirk for a few hours a day doesn’t mean that person really is Captain Kirk. Wil had an excuse for believing in Captain Kirk, though — he was 16. But Captain Kirk was just a character from a TV show and William Shatner was not him. Unfortunately, far too many grown-ups are eager to believe that their favorite Enlightened Masters really, literally are the spiritual equivalent of Captain Kirk on a 24/7 basis and way too many so-called spiritual masters are happy to let them go on believing that.

It’s a vicious circle for which I hold both sides equally to blame. The masters allow themselves to be deified because it’s the key to making a damn good living. That’s been widely reported and talked about. But what about their supposedly “innocent” students, duped, they’d like you to believe, by clever manipulators who wanted only their money? What would happen if these Masters let down the disguise for a minute and allowed their flock see them as they really are? Those adoring devotees would drop them faster than a teenager drops Britney for Lindsey and run off to someone with a more convincing schtick and a brighter fake spiritual gleam in his eye, never admitting that maybe the whole Awakened Spiritual Master guise itself was the problem all along. Since I’ve been at this Zen Master game I’ve seen for myself the intense pressure “spiritual seekers” of all kinds put upon their teachers to live up to their own silly and unrealistic expectations of them. It’s tempting to try and play that role just because of how badly all kinds of people seem to want you to and how disappointed or even angry they get when you don’t. Lately though I’ve started taking great pleasure in disappointing and angering folks like this. Who knows where they run off to after? At least they’re not my problem anymore.

Inevitably troubles arise when an inner circle of intimate students develops around a teacher. Because, although any decent actor — or even William Shatner — can be Zen Master Kirk for a couple hours a day while on stage in front of adoring crowds garlanding him with flowers and singing his praises, it’s quite another to try and keep that up offstage. In fact it cannot be done.

If the teacher is a decent enough person and his (or her, but I stick to his for now) students are not too full of fantasies, the problems that arise when the students start seeing him acting like a human being are easily solved. In fact they add to the relationship and help deepen understanding. On the other hand, if the teacher is a total asshat and students’ heads are clotted with visions of the Perfected Master you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Usually the real situation is somewhere between these two extremes. But depending on where along the gauge the needle lands, that’s how much trouble there’s gonna be. In the worst cases, the students start trying to fool themselves into believing that their Master’s every perversion is a sign of deeper wisdom while the Master’s perversions just get more twisted as he tries to escape coming to terms with the vast gulf between his students’ desire for him to be Swami Superman and his own sure knowledge that he is nothing of the kind. As time goes on there is more pressure to keep up the appearance of the saintly master and the students at his lotus feet, just so both sides don’t end up looking like a bunch of dolts to the rest of the world. So-called “Enlightenment experiences” only make matters worse as both Master and students dive deeper into their own head trips, becoming more and more convinced by the shallow and tawdry game they’re all playing together.

A great book about just how dire this can get is Enlightenment Blues by Andre van der Braak, all about Andre’s years with American guru Andrew Cohen. It’s a harrowing account of just how sick and twisted the relationship between a supposed Enlightened Master and his dewy-eyed student becomes when reality takes a back seat to pretty fantasies.

Great Enlightened Beings free from all worries, cares and difficulties, with no desires and no defilements, possessing magic powers to bestow their spiritual prowess upon you only exist in bad movies and fairy tales. This isn’t to say that there’s no benefit to Zazen practice, or that you end up just as much of an asshole after ten or twenty years of hard work. Nor is it to say that Zazen practice can’t help you see into the deepest truths about life, the universe and everything. It all depends what you’re working towards. If you’re trying to escape real life by running away into the ever-deepening fantasies buried in the recesses of your subconscious, you’re going to end up being an even bigger buttwipe than you ever were. But if you make your efforts to see clearly exactly what you really are, and what you see is that you’re a buttwipe, you’re likely to want to make changes. That’s when we can start talking about real Enlightenment.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Although there are scam artists out there calling themselves Buddhist teachers, they are the exception, not the rule. Most people who put out their shingle as a Buddhist teacher are at the very least sincere and well-meaning, and at best the kind of people who go entirely unrecognized during their lifetimes but will be regarded as saints and foreseers of the future of mankind by generations as yet unborn. Go find one and make friends.

I’m usually not specific when I write about the rare scams disguised as Buddhism because when you point fingers at someone you always get into trouble. Today, though, I’m going to point fingers, knowing full well there will be a backlash for having taken a stand against wealthy, well-connected and powerful people who will not like what I have to say. You can take what I’m about to say however you like, but at the very least I want to make it clear that, although the people I'm going to talk about here call themselves Buddhists in the Soto school of the Zen tradition just like I do, I do not support their methods nor do I want to be perceived as having anything at all to do with them. If you find what I say about Zen interesting and want to learn more, please do not go to these guys to teach you. What they teach is not Buddhism in any way shape or form, and I'll explain why.

Dennis Merzel, who calls himself Genpo Roshi, has developed a system he calls Big Mind™. And yes, the little ™ is part of the name. According to the Roshi, by using this technique, "you will have in one day — before lunch actually — the clarity and experience that a Zen master has. But Zen is seen as the school of sudden enlightenment. And we're just making sure it remains sudden." Ken Wilber, in his foreword to Genpo Roshi’s forthcoming book on Big Mind™ says, “In Zen, this realization of one’s True Nature, or Ultimate Reality, is called kensho or satori (“seeing into one’s True Nature,” or discovering Big Mind™ and Big Heart). It often takes five years or more of extremely difficult practice (I know, I’ve done it) in order for a profound satori to occur. With the Big Mind™ Process, a genuine kensho can occur in about an hour—seriously. Once you get it, you can do it virtually any time you wish, and almost instantaneously.”

This is, of course, pure horseshit. Clowns like these can con folks into parting with large sums of money — there’s a $150 “suggested donation” to attend a Big Mind™ seminar — to hear them spout drivel like this because there is so little understanding of what kensho or satori — Enlightenment, in other words — actually is. In fact, there is so much confusion on the subject that I tend to reject the words entirely. If what Genpo Roshi is selling is Enlightenment, I want no part of Enlightenment.

What do you imagine happens to a dude who gets a wild tripped-out dissociative experience in an afternoon and has some other guy who’s supposed to be a “Spiritual Master” interpret that experience for him as Enlightenment just like Buddha’s? How does the dude feel about the Master who he thinks gave him this great gift? Does he owe the Master something now? And will the dude do pretty much anything the Master asks him to just so the Master will keep on confirming the dude’s Enlightenment? What if the dude does something the Master doesn’t like and the Master starts telling everyone the dude isn’t Enlightened anymore? Does the dude’s Enlightenment even exist without the Master’s confirmation? That’s the key question. And, for bonus points, having just parted with a hundred-and-fifty smackers is the dude a.) more or b.) less likely to admit he’s been ripped off? Answers on a postcard, please.

People love to be told they can get a big pay off with no real investment and Genpo really packs ‘em in wherever he goes. But when was the last time you got something for nothing?

In the furious paced, get it done yesterday world we live in the idea of In-And-Out Enlightenment sounds pretty appealing. But do you really think someone who weasels you in with an appeal to your hunger for big experiences right away so you can get it done with and move on to the next thing really has anything at all of value to offer? It is this very hunger for big experiences that Buddhist practice — real practice as opposed to Big Mind™ — is intended to root out.

You cannot suck a piano into your nose through a straw and you cannot get Enlightened in an hour. Never. No way. No how. Fergeddaboudit! Enlightenment — the very word makes me cringe at this point — is a process that necessarily involves maturation over time. Just like a little kid can’t become a grown-up in an hour no matter how hard she wishes for it, neither can you “have the experience of a Zen Master” before lunchtime. The very idea is patently absurd. It would be like someone telling you that you could develop biceps like Arnold in an afternoon or be able to shoot hoops against Michael Jordan after a day’s b-ball lessons. It is not going to happen. Ever. To anyone. Under any circumstances. Period.

Buddhist practice is difficult and takes a lot of time, effort and energy. I know no one likes hearing that. But tough titty if you don’t. There are no shortcuts. There are no easy ways to circumvent the pain and difficulty of practice any more than there are ways to develop Arny-style guns without working out for years.

I do not doubt that Genpo has developed a technique that will give you some kind of tripped out experience in an afternoon. But tripped out experiences you get in an afternoon have no place in Buddhism. Everything I said previously about supposedly drug induced Enlightenment experiences goes double for Big Mind™.

If you think Enlightenment is something someone can give you in a big hurry for $150, you deserve your Genpo Roshis and their slimy ilk. But if you're ready to face up to reality, the real practice is there and the real teachers are more plentiful than you imagine.

Brad Warner may never work in the Zen business again after this. But he is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

I got the Definitive Edition 2 DVD set of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ from Satya last week. I was living in Japan when it came out in theaters in America. I found the Japanese reaction to the hullabaloo far more interesting than any of the actual debate going on in America. The Japanese didn’t quite know what to make of all the fuss we were making. Kind of the way you and I can’t make heads or tails out of why the Sunnis hate the Shi’ites. When the film came out on DVD in Japan at Christmas time, the ad campaign made unmistakably clear that the Japanese take on Christianity was far different from the American one.



It's pretty hard to see the photo. But the image on the left is of a tired Japanese salaryman carrying a Christmas present to his girlfriend through a crowded train station (it looks like Shibuya to me). The tag line reads something like "Because Christ died, Christmas was born." The Japanese are very into Christmas as a secular holiday, but generally don't know bupkiss about Jesus.

Those of you who read my blog know I’ve always had a strong interest in Christ and Christianity. It was the film Jesus Christ Superstar that first sparked my interest in religion and I’m always up for a good Jesus movie. But I didn’t see The Passion until I rented it on video about six months ago. At that viewing I found it alternately boring and gratuitously gruesome. I ended up fast-forwarding through most of it. But when the 2 DVD edition came out promising loads of extras about the making of the film, the historical research that went into it, a theological commentary and even deleted scenes, I decided it was worth the investment.

As always, I watched the bonus material first. The most interesting section is called "The Legacy." This features short documentaries on various aspects of the film including the language used, the history of crucifixion in the ancient world, and a kind of “where are they now?” of the historical people the characters in the film are based on. This segment was interesting in that, when talking about sacred figures such as the apostles or Mary Magdelene, the producers stuck with the orthodox explanations. For example, though historians are almost unanimous in their opinion that the gospels were not written by the apostles for whom they’re named, Mel Gibson and company insist that they are. On the other hand, in the case of less sacred figures like Herod and Pilate, we’re given explanations that accord with historical scholarship. It’s this kind of attitude that always bums me out about the religious approach. Certain people and events are beyond question and must never be examined thoroughly and dispassionately. Just as the religious view holds that certain aspects of ourselves cannot be looked into or examined.

And while I was very interested in hearing the theological commentary, I was ultimately disappointed. At the outset, Mel Gibson and two Fathers, one of whom is a prof at Loyola Marymount, tell us how they can’t possibly express the depth of the religious meaning of the film in just two short hours. Then they proceed to waste our time commenting about the lighting and the fake fog and all kinds of other shit. I turned it off after half an hour because it was just annoying. I should have realized these guys were never going to point out where Gibson had strayed from the scriptures and why, or any of the real history behind the gospels. Buncha wusses!

As for the film itself there are certainly things to like about it. It’s exceedingly well photographed and the musical score is tremendous. I also like the fact that Gibson chose to present the characters speaking in as close an approximation as possible of the languages they actually used. He says in the commentaries that in the old Hollywood Jesus movies, Jesus is always an American while the bad guys like Pilate and Herod have British accents. I checked out a few of those and he’s right! It wasn't the Jews that killed Our Lord and Savior, it was the Limeys! I also noticed that in previous Jesus movies, Our Lord always has armpits as hairless as Lindsay Lohan’s baby-maker in contrast to the thieves next to him who are as hairy as a Penthouse centerfold from 1975. At least Mel Gibson’s Jesus doesn’t get Brazilian wax jobs.

But, while it’s very cool that he makes these concessions to being historical, Gibson lays on every bit as much Hollywood style gloss as any of his predecessors. Take the famous scourging scene. Please! Has anyone else noticed that every big Hollywood movie since the '70s has been required to have at least one scene that stretches its own premise to the point of complete unbelievability. Like in Superman, they get us to accept a guy that can deflect bullets and bend steel with his bare hands, but that’s not enough. They have to also have him fly around the world backwards so fast he turns back time. Same with the scourging scene in The Passion. First we’re supposed to believe that Jesus is all powerful and can do miracles like sticking a guy’s ear back on after it’s been hacked off. Then we’re supposed to believe that he stops doing these miracles and suffers like anyone else to take away our sins. But then he survives a beating that no human being could possibly have lived through. How come nobody in the movie is astounded at that? Plus that whole scene is so Hollywood. It’s the new trend to show us all the gore they used to save for slasher movies. Like those guys blowing themselves up in Letters From Iwo Jima. It’s as if we’ve become so desensitized as a culture that film-makers think the audience won’t really feel it unless they slam us in the face with whatever it is they’re trying to make us feel.

I was also disappointed in the resurrection sequence. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 epic King of Kings, Jesus materializes in front of the tomb in full color — and this is before color photography had even been invented, so it’s all tinted by hand. Plus he’s got this amazing giant halo around him, just like Mickey Mouse in the old Disney logo. All Mel Gibson gives us is a set of empty robes on a marble slab and Jesus hanging around next to them looking bored. Puh-leeze! I want a real resurrection scene! With all the CGI and crap they have nowadays you’d think they could’ve at least done that.

Mel says he made the film to get us thinking about the true meaning of Christ’s coming. OK, I did. It’s impossible for me to believe that Jesus was somehow a different kind of being than the rest of us, with super powers and a hot line to God that we don’t have. If you take the story that way, I can’t see any useful meaning to it. That idea just allows you to defer responsibility for your own actions onto some mythical figure.

I tend to see Jesus as a guy who knew he had something very, very urgent and deeply meaningful to convey. In order to see to it that the message got out there he voluntarily became part of The 27 Club. You know how the truly iconic rock stars are always dead by age 27? In effect, Jesus died before he had a chance to make any shitty records. Before he went disco or got into fusion or produced his Combat Rock, Jesus had left the building. But his messy death insured that future generations would take his message seriously. Whether they got it or not was a whole different matter. At least they paid attention. The reverence that got heaped upon him later is exactly the same kind of reverence people these days give to Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley or even The Beatles who broke up before they got as crappy as the Rolling Stones managed to on their later records. Just multiply that kind of adulation by 2000 years. At the core though, was a young guy who felt so passionately about his message that he was willing to die for it. That’s certainly impressive.

The Passion, on the other hand, is less impressive. In fact I’m not too passionate about it (Har! Bet no one has used that line before!) The goriness, which Mel says is intended to drive home Christ’s message, just goes on for far too long and is way too graphic to drive home anything but nausea. It’s a shame, too, because it gets in the way of what is a rare attempt at depicting the historical scene as authentically as possible. As for the extras on the new Definitive Edition DVD, they are certainly plentiful and very well-made. Yet an over-cautiousness not to offend the faithful — including those who made them in the first place — gets in the way of their being truly useful. For a better take on the history of Christ and his time try Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew, or just about anything by Bart D. Ehrman.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

On Monday (February 12) the LA Times published an interesting article called The Mind As It Evolves. The subtitle was, “Depression as a survival tool?” As I mentioned in an earlier article, I’ve dealt with depression pretty much all my life and ended up reaching some conclusions about it that seem fairly uncommon. So I was interested in reading what the folks at the Times had to say on the subject. Apparently, there’s a new trend in psychology that speculates that depression may be an evolutionary adaptation, something our remote ancestors developed as a survival tool. This is pretty revolutionary since up till now depression was mainly viewed as an illness to be cured.

According to the article, Matthew C. Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, says in the August issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that depression may serve as a way to signal a person to, “quit wasting effort and to conserve energy when a situation has proven itself unpropitious.” I had to go look up “unpropitious.” It means, “not seeming to promise success.” These fellows and their big words! So basically, Neanderthals and Australopithicusses gave up chasing Brontosauruses when they became depressed over not catching them once they ducked under water with only the tops of their heads sticking out and, instead, concentrated on snagging land-bound Stegosauruses, thus insuring their survival. This tendency to get depressed when things go wrong was then passed down to us, their remote descendants. Or something like that, anyway.



As mankind evolved and we changed our own environment drastically, what once served a healthy purpose and kept us alive became a disorder. Stephen S. Ilardi, an associate prof of psych at the U of Kansas, whose name I love because it sounds like Ghoulardi, a legendary horror movie host from Cleveland, says, “There’s increasing evidence that we were never designed for our sedentary, socially isolated, indoor, sleep deprived, frenzied, poorly nourished lifestyle.”

Daniel Nettle, a psych prof at the U of Newcastle in England, says, “For our ancestors, it was quite useful to follow impulses strongly and spontaneously.” But today it is so easy to satisfy our every whim that this kind of indulgence quickly turns into a disorder. Modern problems such as addiction are the result. Early man had little opportunity to get addicted to anything since it was so difficult to repeat any pleasurable experience over and over again. But what did we do with our highly developed brains but immediately use them to figure out how to feed our various cravings? Sometimes being wicked smart doesn’t pay.

Looking into my own past bouts of depression and how I deal with the problem now, a lot of this makes good sense. I used to go through long periods of ever deepening depression that would eventually resolve themselves at just about the point I was ready to throw myself into oncoming traffic. At the time it seemed like depression appeared out of nowhere, then it would go on and on and on until, again for reasons I could not understand, it would vanish. Not that I would feel totally great when it went away. I’d just be normal again, though “normal” for me at the time was pretty dour.

Although I used to imagine my bouts of severe depression came without any cause, the fact was I was living a pretty shitty lifestyle. I used to go for days with little sleep, drinking, using drugs, eating crap food, not doing much of anything physically, driving myself buggy to try and experience all kinds of stuff that advertisers, peers, and society in general told me I absolutely must experience lest I miss out on something really vital. It took a lot of work to finally see that that was no way to live. The reason I didn’t notice what I was doing was bad for me was because our society as a whole fails to recognize that the lifestyle it considers to be “normal” is anything but — except perhaps in the sense that normal also means common. Could it be the main reason people think they need so many drugs nowadays is because we’re trying to force our bodies to conform to mistaken ideas we've concocted about how life should be lived?

Waves of depression still sometimes hit me even now. But I’m much more clear about where they come from and what to do when they come. That doesn’t mean I can always pinpoint some easily definable cause. It’s more intuitive than that. When I get too down, it’s time to re-normalize my life. More Zazen is always a big help. This is because whatever the trigger for depression, the main thing that will cause it to grow to the point that it becomes truly problematic is thinking too much. The only way to solve the problem is to not think so much.

The reason so many of us make ourselves so depressed all the time is that we are constantly defining ourselves to ourselves in our thoughts. One of the best ways to define yourself is by contrasting your supposedly unique self with things that self doesn’t like. So depression, sadness and frustration are tremendously effective ways of sustaining the illusion. I think I'm depressed therefore I am. If you’re truly interested in breaking this cycle — and most people are not — it is necessary to drop the idea of “self.” This is very, very hard to do because we have been taught that it is vital to define and sustain this “self.” We fear that if we don’t constantly define ourselves we might vanish altogether. The interesting thing you learn in Zazen practice is that even if you stop defining yourself to yourself, nothing important really changes — except that you feel a whole hell of a lot better.

Another important thing is discipline. There’s a widespread misconception that Buddhism is an indulgent, “anything goes” philosophy. I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but Buddhism is not, nor has it ever been, an “anything goes” philosophy. Cuz even back in Buddha’s day the easy availability of various forms of indulgence had already led to tremendous problems. In the 21st century these problems have grown to crisis proportions. Sadly, though, the word discipline tends to be uttered in hushed tones by some popular Buddhist leaders who seem afraid of scaring off the masses. Discipline doesn’t always mean giving up what you like to do, but it does mean learning how much is too much.

One of the big turning points in my own struggles with depression came when I started regularly attending Zen retreats. At a retreat you are forced to live a highly disciplined lifestyle — out of bed at 4:30, followed by an inflexible schedule of Zazen and work periods, where even the meal breaks follow a regimented pattern. You commit yourself to this and for a fixed period of time you allow yourself to be forced to follow rules that are not comfortable or easy. Now I should mention that the retreats I’ve attended, and the ones that I lead now, are pretty undemanding by some standards. But I’m not sure how hard you need to drive yourself. If you’re serious and sincere about it, a little is enough.

Far from feeling trapped, at these retreats I felt freer than I’d ever felt in my life. In my usual life I miss that kind of discipline, to the extent that I even impose it upon myself when I don’t really have to. I work from my home with no fixed schedule and it would be easy for me to just stay up till all hours rockin’ out and roll out of bed sometime after the sun got hot. But I don’t. And while I don’t keep a retreat schedule at home, I do follow a set pattern as much as possible.

Of course everyone knows how militaristic discipline in the name of religion has led to all kinds of heinous cult activities, mass killings and bad weird hairstyles. This is why you have to not be a total idiot. There is a difference between following a disciplined lifestyle and deferring responsibility for your own actions to people who are clearly insane. Learn the difference.

I would never claim to have The Answer to the problem of depression. But I can say what has worked for me, and what continues to work. It’s not as easy or as quick a solution as popping a few pills each day. But in the long run it’s better to learn how to deal with your self by yourself rather than letting drugs do all the work for you. For one thing, you’ll never forget to fill your prescription. Yet the solution that worked for me involves opting out of what most people consider to be a “normal” way of life and “normal” over-indulgences. If you’re ready to make the sacrifice you’ll end up seeing it’s no sacrifice at all.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.