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But it’s not just “Buddhism” or “Zen” that says that. It’s me, right now to you. And I’ll say it again: this world is better than paradise, better than any Utopia you can imagine. I say that in the face of war and starvation and suicide bombings and Orange Terror Alerts. This world is better than Utopia because—and follow this point carefully—you can never live in Utopia. Utopia is always somewhere else. That’s the very definition of Utopia.
There is no future for you. There is no future for anyone. There is no future at all. Future is an idea. You can’t live in paradise—but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.
I could never accept someone else’s version of the truth and I don’t think anyone else should. If the meaning of life, the universe, and everything could be put into a few definitive words that everyone on Earth could agree upon now and for all time, someone probably woulda figured them out and written them down. But even if they did, it would still just be someone else’s truth—not yours. If it seems that within these pages I’m urging you to accept my version of the truth, let me apologize now for expressing myself so poorly.
GG Allin
Nishijima
Hearing the Heart Sutra literally changed my life. It
In Buddhism, the five “heaps” that make up a person are these: form, feelings, perceptions, impulses toward actions (and the actions themselves), and consciousness.
Nishijima translates the famous line “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” as “Matter is the immaterial, the immaterial is matter.” John Lennon expressed the same idea in Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey: “Your inside is out and your outside is in.” The world we perceive and the thing that perceives the world are one and the same. Another modern Indian teacher, a guy named Krishnamurti, was fond of saying, “The observer is the observed.
The eight “folds” are these: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Even physical suffering works like this. I saw this fact clearly for myself about a year ago when I passed a kidney stone, allegedly the most painful experience a person can actually survive. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that the pain was astoundingly bad. And yet when I stopped comparing what I thought I ought to feel like (namely, free from pain) to what I actually felt like (namely, in enormous pain), things became far better. It still hurt like hell, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re not trying to run away from the unavoidable hell of suffering, if you just let it be, your
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Dogen—
Anyone who really pursues any activity to the point of becoming so good at it that millions of people want to come watch really must have understood something fundamentally real, fundamentally true. They must have understood the philosophy of action through action itself.
“I’m angry” is wrong. “Right now I am anger” is closer to the truth of the matter. My sister’s ex-husband wrote me an email as he was going through the divorce proceedings with my sister and stated our usual concept of anger wonderfully: “It’s impossible not to feel angry when you are facing the gale-force winds of your emotions whipping across your body.” Most of us experience most of our emotions like that most of the time.
But try this on: Experiencing anger is like sitting in the bathtub frantically thrashing around and throwing handfuls of water into the air while simultaneously wondering why the hell your head and face keep getting wet. You’re in a stupor so deep you cannot even see that you’re the one causing the problem. If anyone should know
Objectively it takes more resources to keep smoking than to stop. Yet giving it up seems much harder than continuing because you’re addicted.
The universe desires to perceive itself and to think about itself and you are born out of this desire. The universe wants to experience itself from the point of view of a tree, and so there are trees. The universe wants to feel what it’s like to be a rock, and so there are
A Buddhist learns that his thoughts are just thoughts, nothing requiring any response. But most of us feed into them: a little spark of a complaint appears and instead of letting it die out, we stoke it up. If we work really hard at it, we can make a tiny spark turn into a raging blaze in no time at all. Then we get upset because it’s getting too hot. Once the blaze has gotten that big, though, it’s hard work to put it out. What’s worse is that we have no idea how to put it out.
You can get hooked on afterlife ideas just like a drug. The reason to avoid ideas about life after death isn’t because they couldn’t possibly be true. Maybe they could. How would I know? It’s because ideas like that promote a kind of dreamy fantasy state that distracts us from seeing what our life is right now. “The question doesn’t fit the case.” Look at your life as it is right now and live it, right now.
There are people who think that they can do wrong and get away with it, even profit from it. It don’t work that way. This is always and inevitably the
To cause another living being pain isn’t evil—it’s just stupid. Because that being is you.
People long for big thrills, peak experiences, deep insights. Some people take up zazen practice expecting that enlightenment will be the ultimate peak experience, the peak experience to beat all peak experiences. But real enlightenment is the most ordinary of the ordinary. And our ordinary, boring, pointless lives are incredibly, amazingly, astoundingly, relentlessly, mercilessly joyful. You don’t need to do a damned thing to experience such joy either. You don’t need to snort an ounce of coke, get a turkey-baster full of hot grease shoved up your ass, blow up the Washington Monument, win the
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