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Turn your eyes away from the good life for just a second and there it was: not depression as much as an ugly little doubt about everything you had ever done; not confusion, exactly, but a kind of lingering question.
What’s the point of all this? would be putting the question too crudely, but it was something along those lines. All this striving and aggravation, all these joys and miseries, all this busyness, all this stuff—a thousand headlines, a hundred thousand conversations, e-mails, meetings, tax returns, warranties, bills, privacy notices, ads for Viagra, calls for donations, election cycles, war in the news every day, trips to the dump with empty wine bottles, fillings and physicals, braces and recitals, Jeannie’s moods, my moods, the kids’ moods, soccer tournaments, plumbers’ bills, sitcom
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oil changes, wakes, weddings, watering the flowerbeds—all of this, I started to ask myself, leads exactly where? To a smashed-up Buick on a country highway? And then what? Paradise?
This would be a good quote to start discussion
The purpose, the plan, the deeper meaning—who could I trust to tell me?
I am not one of these people who wants everyone to live the way I live. What causes more trouble on our troubled earth than people like that? The Homogenists, I call them. Look at me! they say. I’m happy! I’m right! I’m law-abiding, productive, and pleasing to God! All you have to do is live like I do and we’ll have world peace! And if you don’t live like them they’ll slaughter you.
there was something in this fellow’s bearing that reminded me more of a long-haul truck driver than a peaceful monk. True, his head was shaved, but he wasn’t smiling. He was two or three inches shorter than my sister and built like a middle linebacker, with a wide rough face that could have belonged to a man of thirty-five or a man of sixty. It was almost as if he were a combination of all his predecessors: part yoga master, part biker, with a glint in his eyes like that slimy orchestra guy.
World Wrestling Federation cross-dresser.
“this is my guru, Volya Rinpoche.
“I’m giving him my half of the land, and the house, too, if you’ll let me.
What do you think Otto thinks of this?
I know you don’t believe in what I do, but everything in your aura says you could be liberated in this life.
“Why would I want to change my life, Seese? Think about it?”
Isn’t this what Otto had been thinking about earlier?
When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.
IT’S NOT ABOUT RELIGION. IT’S ABOUT RELATIONSHIP.
How about it’s not about politics it’s about relationships
We had been tremendously different in background, temperament, even hair color. I was a farm kid, she was a Connecticut sophisticate who chose grad school in Dakota to get away from an abusive mother and to pursue a short-lived interest in soil chemistry. Somehow, our physical infatuation and intellectual kinship had evolved into real love, her strengths filling in for my weaknesses, and possibly vice versa. We had our tiffs and bad moments, of course, but I rarely forgot to be grateful for her.
There is such warmth and likability about this character
I was visited again by a wave of loneliness, and by the feeling that had been bothering me over the past few months. Not loss, not mourning, just a sort of quiet knocking at the door of my contentment. I ate and drank and pondered it.
“I am guru. I know other things than you. You should ask. Every morning at breakfast I let you ask one question.”
“I see. That’s today’s lesson.” “Yes. It is good lesson. If you want to see the life as it is in a true way, then you have to make the water very pure, very clean. This is not easy in this world but it is what you have to. You cannot upset the mind.”
“What is life? First question answered
“Very good,” he said. “Very good practice. The best practice.” “Practice? Practice for what?” “Dying,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Family love is the best practice for dying. For understanding that you are part of something big, not just your one separate body. This is why you are such a good man.” “My children are something more than mere practice for my own dying,” I said, just as the waitress made another pass.
“I am finding, in this life, the places where all the religions are the same. What Jesus said. What Buddha said. The way the Jewish people live and the way Hindu people believe. Maybe now I will make a new religion that holds all of them and people will not kill each other so much because of what they believe God is.”
the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid.
Ok, so Otto is showing Rinpoche Americana but up to this point what Rinpoche has been showing Otto is a mirror
ethnocentrism,
“You couldn’t have told me about this earlier?” “Forgot,” he said, and for the first time I really thought he was lying. Not evading, not skirting, not giving a sketchy account, not engaging in some Zen trickery. Lying.
“You have a ways to go to get the hang of American politeness,” I said, and I said it calmly. There was an edge, but it was a calm edge. “Thank you,” he said. “I mean, you could have at least let me know.” “Thank you for helping me with American politeness. I appreciate. We should go now. We’re late.”
I realize I am generalizing and tiptoeing along the edge of the territory into which we never venture very far in the American national conversation: The fact that there are whole neighborhoods into which cabdrivers refuse to take a fare; that there are people among us who live in circumstances we are ashamed to talk about, children who live that way; the fact that there are huge quadrants of our cities where people like me—and not just white people like me—simply do not go, places we do not see, do not want to think about as we are sipping our designer martinis in swanky downtown bistros
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dinner for two costs what these other Americans earn in a week. We excuse it by citing the laws of capital, or by telling ourselves we work harder, or that it is social inequality that serves as the motivation for our national wealth. All good logic, maybe. Still, I’ve always been ill at ease with the vast distance between my life and the lives of other Americans.
“But also the good, you see, also the pleasant. You will love the person you are married to, or your lover, and you will learn. You will love your children, your work, your pleasures in this life, your friends, your hobbies, your sports, your sewing, or your gardening. Each of these things acts as teacher for you. You see this? Each of these things is kind of guru, too, you see? Illness, failure, sorrow, success. Yes. It is not necessary to have
any particular spiritual path in this life in order to learn from these things. It is not essential to have guru, to eat this way or not eat this way, to talk this way or any way. Some part of this education of the spirit in you will happen to you in this life. That is so for every soul.”
if you cultivate good thoughts and feelings where you can instead of bad thoughts and feelings, if you do this then you will . . .
what is the word?” Rinpoche glanced back at me as if I might offer it. “Compound. Is that right? Yes? You will compound your learning. Or increase, maybe increase is the word in your language. Do you see? It does not mean you are better person than the one who does not do these things. Do not think that. Thinking that will not help you. It means you will squeeze all the juice from this life that there is to squeeze. You will not waste your time here, that you have been given, that is so precious we do not realize until the moment we die. You will not waste this precious time, do you see? This
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“And what purpose does all the learning serve?”
What is the purpose, my friend? The purpose . . .” he paused several beats and tapped on his right thigh with the fingers of his right hand. “The purpose is life itself. This is what life is for, this education of the spirit inside you. Everyone says this. Every teacher in all religions. Life is for to learn, to make a progress, to make a movement toward—”
“Then what would be the motivation for someone to do the extra work? I mean, life is hard enough, isn’t it? And what if you’re happy with things the way they are? Why change yourself? Why meditate, or pray, or go to church, or try to alter your thoughts from bad to good if you are happy and decent without doing those things?”
“but you do good instead of bad. Tell me, why do you?”
When the silence became difficult to bear I said, “I’m not sure.” “Not sure,” Rinpoche said. “Not sure is all right.” He laughed, and the crowd laughed with him. “But when you understand why a person like you chooses the good and not the bad, then you will have your answer to your own question.
the fine old stone buildings on Youngstown’s main drag somehow seemed to mirror me: nice enough on the outside, architecturally pleasing and structurally sound, but with some hollowed out places where the rats ran. Why should I have such a feeling? I was not a bad man.
like me do the right thing and not the wrong thing? Fear of jail, divorce, eternal punishment? A belief in heaven? Just in case there turned out to be an afterlife? And for the people who did more “spiritual work” in their lives, who not only didn’t cheat on their spouse or steal from their company or condemn citizens to torture, but spent hours each week in prayer—for those people were there different, higher, more pleasurable levels of paradise? I sensed I was missing part of the argument.
There must have been two dozen thank-yous there on the Youngstown sidewalk, at least as many bows. The smiles, the shining faces, the childlike adoration—why was it all so irritating?
“I do not flatter,” he said, in a tone rather more forceful than anything I’d heard him use with me. “Your questions were precisely very good. Your answer to me,” he chuckled and touched my arm lightly, “not so very good.”
Such was my state of mind that I found myself wondering if my noticing them, my small spasm of almost reflexive lustful thoughts—that I knew would lead nowhere, and didn’t want to lead anywhere—I wondered if somehow these thoughts would hurt, however slightly, my progress along the spiritual path.
So it appears Otto is now less reluctant to be on a spiritual path
This, I said to myself, is where all the mumbo jumbo leads. You’ll start worrying about every little thing—Is the coffee free trade? The chicken free range? Should you
stop looking at attractive women? Recycle the wrapper of your chewing gum? Should you go home, lock yourself in your room, and pray, as the Bible instructs, without ceasing?
“Please, stop with the good man remarks. It sounds false to me, to be perfectly honest. It sounds like flattery.” “Ah,” he said. “You do not believe you are a good man.” “Of course I do. I don’t hurt people. I’m a good father, I know that. A good husband. A decent citizen. We do our share of charitable work, Jeannie and I. We give generously to various causes.” “But something,” he said, and he waved both hands around in a way that he had, as if he were playing an imaginary, upside-down keyboard with floating fingers, the notes not quite beside each other, the piano itself not quite level.
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“Of death,” he said. “Of losing everything.”
“You never had any urge to have children?” “Of course,” he said. “Sad to me I do not have children yet. I love children very much.”
He sounds Ike Yoda
“A little bit sex. Not too much. Nothing too much for Rinpoches. Food, sex, sleep, business, giving talks, happiness, sadness . . . not too much.”
“I feel inside when I have the right balance.” “And too much sex would throw you off?” “Too much anything. Too much meditating, too much talk.” At this, I fell quiet. I considered the idea of ordering another glass of wine, wanted to—I had no balance
problem there—but, thinking of the drive ahead, I refrained. I did savor a piece of tiramisu and a decaffeinated coffee.
elsewhere
This book was published in 2008. Jobs started going overseas when corporations (GE Jack Welsh in 1970s) began to think that their main responsibility was to their stockholders, not their workers.
Profit fed the life we lived, I knew that, and saw the necessity of it. But those people had made a god of profit, it seemed to me, and according to the rules of their religion, if it was profitable to close the factory and ship the jobs overseas, then it was morally right.
