Vaughan Bites the Lime

Henri Matisse, Still Life With Oranges (and maybe a lime)

The false self is the self of duality, the self of self-consciousness and limitation. Our true self is as wide open and unstructured as this very moment. Sesshin challenges us to experience this moment without limitation, without thinking good or evil, without thought of "how we are doing" or what we are accomplishing or failing to accomplish by our sitting. 
Barry Magid 

It's me, still working on that koan I discussed last time, which is working on me as I piece around in James Ford's The Book of Mu.  What I'm getting is that the point is just to be here experiencing reality.  You can get very fancy with koan work, but the point is almost laughably simple.  Just be open to reality.  A baby can do it. 

I wish I had managed to videotape our godson Vaughan one Sunday at brunch when he vigorously communicated his desire for a lime wedge on his Dad's plate.  He was under one year old, a dynamic, curious child.  His Dad gave it to him, he turned the lime around, quite a feat in little fingers, looking at it, squeezing it to see what it would do.  He touched his tongue to the skin.  Made the decision and bit down on that lime.  The expressions that played over his face were priceless, starting with shock and awe.  I can't describe that visible flow of direct experience.  Maybe you could try it yourself in front of a mirror.  I can't, I laugh just imagining it.

We get so fancy about life, how to live, and oh, how to fix ourselves.  People get very fancy about the Zen retreats mentioned in the quote, which are called "sesshin," and there can be a complex "etiquette" and rituals to follow.  The idea is that following all this encourages you to pay attention to your movements every moment, though it does seem easy to fall in love with all the theater of it and forget the point.

The goal is actually so simple:  just be here.  This moment.  Then keep doing that.  Being wide open.  Biting that lime.

Terrorism in Mumbai: Is Bollywood the answer?

What a striking example of delusion in today’s New York Times, “What They Hate About Mumbai.” The author, Suketu Mehta, argues that Mumbai “stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.” It is “a mass dream” comparable to Bollywood, and hated by religious extremists, “a pleasure-loving city, a sensual city.” His solution is to defy the extremists by flying to Mumbai, where he intends to enjoy food and drink and watch a movie. He will Show Them that we will not be deterred from our pursuit of pleasure.

I was struck by the dualism of this response. Just like the “religious extremists” Mehta sees the world as divided into two camps, them and us. They hate pleasure, we love it. And by God, they’re not going to stop us. How can we not be reminded of the drunk who staggers about insisting on more?

It is remarkably like the issue the Buddha addressed in his first sermon. His old friends, the ascetics, were appalled that he had abandoned their lifestyle and eaten a gift of rice pudding that is sometimes described as very luxurious, made with heavy cream. From their point of view, he has gone over to the other side. They are sure enlightenment is found in extreme self-denial.

The Buddha explains a wholly different way. This is not, according to professor Jeff Shore, a way that steers between two extremes. Following the “Middle way” does not mean walking a boundary line between wretched excess and self-denial; it means living from our centers. It is a way that deals with actual reality, in which action proceeds from our core, not from abstract ideas of purity, and not from childish revolt against those ideas.

This is not just an issue for governments, but one that we are constantly faced with in our daily lives. The Western tradition represents it in the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. Live for today or abandon all joy and live for tomorrow. Wrong. That there is drunkenness doesn’t mean we should not enjoy a glass of wine. That there is gluttony does not mean we have to eat stark, unappetizing food merely to fuel the body. Working for a peaceful, secure future does not have to be joyless.

And the fact that there is a huge banquet laid out does not mean we have to gorge ourselves to the point of feeling ill, and ignore the hungry people knocking on the door. Just because there is a mass dream, represented by the opulent Indian cinema called Bollywood, doesn’t mean we have to live in a dream.