Easy Businesses & U R [up] 2 NO GOOD

It seems that businesses either are really easy to work with, or really hard. American Express is easy to work with. I wanted to know if I pay my bill 25 days after the statement date will it be “on time.” So I did the chat. She wrote, “I hope you are doing well.” Anticipating a long discussion, I answered, “I hope so too.” Then I asked her the question. I don’t remember why I thought it was a woman. Some of these chats would take 30 minutes. She quickly and  joyfully answered my question with a “Yes.” She didn’t ask for my account number or my mother’s maiden name. She didn’t escalate the request to someone else. It was simple yes. I wrote back to her that I love American Express, and I am doing well, and I hope she’s doing well too. She responded, “Thank you.”

++++++++++

U R [up] 2 NO GOOD

So my wife said yesterday that she didn’t think there had been any benefit to my 11 or 12 years of meditation. I disagreed. But you know how comments, even if you deny what they assert, bother one. Maybe she was being cranky because she was having a few challenges of her own. Maybe I needed to think about her comment. Maybe she’s right.

I heard the comment at my other zen center that “Zen is good for nothing.” Maybe I should take that at heart.

I wasn’t going to go sit tonight because I’ve had a long day and had to take one package to UPS and another to FedEx. But maybe I was giving up because she said I’m the same person. Anyway, just around the corner now both UPS and FedEx have boxes that take ground packages and I was back home in five minutes.

I didn’t really believe “Zen is good for nothing.” But maybe my mensa wife is seeing something that I’m not seeing. Maybe I am exactly the same person, totally disillusional in my belief that some benefit has come my way from this sitting endeavor.

Would I continue? Should I continue? Was I given false expectations?

Some pray to get on God’s good side so that things will turn out well. Others pray to acknowledge, ask for forgiveness or thank God. I don’t know why I sit.

Last night a couple of people asked me why I’ve been leading this Zen Writing group every week for so many years. I said it was because I like so much the people who come to it.

Why would I ever look forward to going at an unreasonable hour to sit and face a wall? Especially if it was without benefit? Maybe because it is like eating ice cream. Because it tastes so good.

P.S. So I just asked mensa wife if she meant it yesterday. “No,” she said. I thanked her for giving me something to write about.

Not Knowing is Most Intimate

So I’ll have an idea and I’ll tell my wife and my friends and they will tell me I’m wrong and then maybe I’ll write about it and more people will tell me that I’m wrong. I love to be wrong, which is good because I’m often wrong. Way wrong.

So I had this idea that God is actually an emotion. We could call her awe. It is an appreciation of that beyond our imagination and comprehension. If we made a vend diagram circle of the things that we know, it would be a little circle so small that it would only be a dot. And outside of that would be the things that we don’t know. Years ago I heard that the things that we know doubles every six months. You’d think we’d know a lot by know, at that geometric rate of progression. But we learned in grade school that X times 0=0, which means that what we know is still just a dot. Zilch.

Across the street, someone built a beautiful house. It took a year, if not more. It is decorated. Some company comes and cuts the grass. But nobody lives there. I don’t know the story.

I heard today about someone’s son who has cancer and he is in remission. We don’t know if his cancer will come back.

What is meant by the koan that ends with, “not knowing is most intimate”? In the Western mind, knowledge is power. We strive to know, and when we don’t know, we investigate further. We assume that our lack of knowledge is the result that we didn’t try hard enough. Or that we didn’t have a powerful enough telescope or microscope or whatever. Students are tested on what they know, not on what they don’t know. Imagine this as a history test, “What do you not know about the Civil War?” That’s what killed the cat (curiosity)!

S wrote that she’s glad that she’s had no experience of God. I’ve always been curious about people who have that experience. And exceedingly jealous. I was glad to hear that Mother Theresa only connected to God for one week of her life. And she’s now a saint, isn’t she?

N questions my theory that believing in God is really an emotion, like love or joy. Some people never have that emotion. I was fortunate to visit a church in North St. Louis, where the congregation were speaking in tongues and falling backward into each other’s arms. Their God was an emotion that ransacked their bodies. This was not a discursive belief that they adopted. It was something that invaded their body like shrapnel from outer space.

If I told them it was just in their imaginations, they’d laugh at me. You’d only have to be there to see that something else was going on. A temporary psychosis. That’s how some might describe it. Mass hysteria? I don’t know. But it was as real as the moon in the sky, which could be some kind of hologram. Do we really know?

I like Elon Musk’s theory that our chances of us not being simulations from some advanced civilization are only 1 out of 1000. Even more surprising is that he is not phased by the idea of being a simulation. He embraces the idea. More than that, he embraces not knowing if he actually exists. And yet he lives his life to explore new technologies and new worlds.

Does God Surpass Joy and Love?

N, in a discussion on Facebook, asked me if God was any more special or profound than joy or love. I immediately thought of conversations that I’ve had with my neighbor about comparing the size of different infinities. Supposedly the set of all the whole numbers is the same size infinity as all the even numbers, but there are infinities bigger than other infinities.

Joy and love are not measurable so they are infinities. God, as an expression of the divine, is also immeasurable. All three of these are so immense that I feel that it would demean any of them to reduce them to less than another thing. In the continuum going from feelings to emotions to states of mind, joy, love, and God can all be states of mind.

 Some say that God is love. Jesus said that “the kingdom of God is within you.” Is this in the same vein that our 1st Zen ancestor Dogen said that when we sit we are Buddha? Could one say that when we love we are God? When we sit, our DNA does not shift to a man who lived 2500 years ago. Yet, when we sit, which may well be something more than plopping ourselves down on a cushion, we become transformed into something much bigger and more universal than ourselves. We enter a new state, almost as if we had traveled beyond. And when we love, we also migrate to this different cosmos, which becomes infinite and timeless. To say that anything is bigger than joy or love when we love or are consumed with joy seems to be wrong. With love or joy, when you enter these states, you are right there at a place that is unbeatable and unsurpassable. So, N, God is not any more special than joy or love. In my mind, this equality in no way diminishes God but rather elevates joy and love to pinnacles that cannot be surpassed.

Mango and Cherry Homemade Popsicle

Excessive and Moderation

Norman Fischer was asked what was the most important job he had done as abbot of a large multi-location zen center. Unexpectedly he said, taking care of myself. I’ve been hearing those words all week, and finally, this morning, skipped meditation and just got to the temple in time for the dharma talk. It was quite a treat “not to rush.”

I mentioned a few days ago that the Dalia Lama sits four hours a day. Is this a similar effort?

In the Buddhist world, generosity is considered the most important perfection. Norman recently wrote a book on it. So one might have expected that he’d say that the most important thing he did was to serve the homeless, or some such thing.

It is kind of obvious why he took care of himself. For the same reason, when the oxygen mask drops down, you first put your mask on, then your child’s mask. Perhaps it seems a little counter-intuitive at first.

People think I’m abusing myself by eating nine meals a week. It is actually feeling like the opposite. The meals are good, and I’m looking at my next meal with mixed feelings. It seems like abusing one’s body to be in a constant state of digesting food.

People think writing my blog and drawing a picture every day is excessive.

People think sitting every day is excessive.

How about being married for 50 years plus a few days?

There are the moderation advocates. But what is moderation? Really? Buddha’s disciples were ready to throw him out with the bathwater when he broke his diet of 1/2 of a grain of rice a day. He prescribed that the monks should finish eating by noon. They wanted to do an evening begging round, but Buddha said that would be putting too much of a burden on the laity.

A High-priced Courtesan

“At least according to the biblical account, they had to wander in the desert for “40 years” because they were whiny little bitches who complained to God too much. God condemned them to wander because God is a vindictive, childish, hypersensitive authoritarian.”

N is referring to what Moses reportedly heard from God and his reporting of the supernatural events that are purported to have been caused by God.

I don’t think we need to believe that these are “God’s words” in the Torah, nor that God exists as more than a perspective—a way of viewing life. It is a book of stories that have been very important to some people.

Imagine that “God” was actually “life.” Would this make a difference?

Life has that ability to be kind and mean. One day a woman wins the lottery, and the next her dog get swept up by the street cleaning machine. Joko Beck, the Zen teacher, would say that life makes no mistakes. Many Jews lost their faith in God because of the Holocaust.

I like to think of the God in the Torah as a reflection of those that authored the book. He or she developed through the Torah as the Israelites developed. I love the Torah because it is such an accurate description both of men and of life itself.

What would “obedience” mean if there were no God? For some, they can’t imagine how one could be moral without having the fear of God within him. I disagree, as I believe there are so many examples to the contrary.

We studied today a little verse from one of the ancient Buddhist woman, Aḍḍhkāsī. She was a high-priced courtesan who becomes disgusted with her body.

All of the Kāsi countryside:
My fee was equal to that.
Having made that my price,
the town1 set me as priceless in price.
But then I became disenchanted with my body,
and—disenchanted—dispassionate:
“May I not run again & again
through birth & the wandering-on.”
The three knowledges
have been realized.
The Buddha’s bidding
done.

Here’s more on the “three knowledges”: http://www.buddhisma2z.com/content.php?id=530

Relating to the “belief” in God, can one have these three knowledges and still accept modern science? Can one be a critical modern thinker and accept the notion of God?

God Love Mistakes

The Torah is one big mistake, starting with the fact that their 40-year journey could actually have been done in one day if they had a map and compass (or GPS). And then there are the rabbis that say that it isn’t that we don’t follow the commandments (when we don’t), it is just that we don’t follow them yet.

George Bernard Shaw said you should make your first 1000 mistakes as soon as possible so you can start on your second 1000.

I read about one company that gives its workers a paid vacation when they give up on an idea. Barking up the wrong tree doesn’t benefit anyone.

Maybe teachers should grade by subtracting the right answers from the possible answers. So the As would become Fs.

And then there are Post-It Notes, made with a failed glue.

How many creative ideas came from mistakes? I wonder.

Was the idea of karma developed when people did bad things and then saw the effect. I’ve learned that not telling the truth causes all kinds of havoc.

I did this drawing and the guy standing behind me pointed at a finger that didn’t have a dark blue line around it… so I fixed it and acknowledged it as a mistaken finger.

Am I a mistake?

God love mistakes. We call them dharma gates because they teach us so much. 

Crickets and the Red Heifer

I walked out the door this morning at 6:09am and a cricket greeted me on my front steps. Then his friend started chirping. They blew the theory that Vaughn had yesterday about the crickets in the clouds.

I like how we tend to think that the last explanation to any quagmire is the correct one. And then the next one. And then the next one.

I’ve had three meals in the last three days and am feeling pretty hungry. That’s a lie, I think. Very hungry. Going at noon tomorrow to one of my favorite macrobiotic restaurants. And I get two meals tomorrow. Do I take the first meal before or after? We’ll see. Oh, just made myself a glass of vegetable broth. That’s “allowed.” No longer hungry.

We read in Torah study today about the red heifer.

In the olden days of the 1st and 2nd temple, the red heifer would be cooked for a purification rite, and the ashes would be given to a woman who had sinned to purge her of her transgressions. But it was a curious procedure, since the perfection of the animal, prior to 8/28/2018, was unheard of.

Our group came up with the idea that the purification actually involves the search for such an animal, rather than with the cooking of the actual mythical beast. Of course, that search was before Google.

I kept imagining a conversation between the Torah writers and some puritans. The puritan women insisted that there be some rite for those bad women. So the writers (men, of course) made up a rite that could never be done to appease them.

I came up with the idea that the red heifer was a prediction of the coming of Christ who was also perfect. The rabbi said he hadn’t heard of such a reading. There are 100s of readings of the Torah, but some (mine) are not warranted, I guess. Though in my heart of heart, in a book filled with failings and indiscretions, why do we all of a sudden have the description of something perfect, without a grey hair? I will keep my reading as a possibility.