On Health and Happiness

The paradox is this: for the divine source, nothing is more important than wellness and enlightenment.  But for the sick, who long for health, nothing is less important than wellness.  And for those who long for transformation, nothing is less important than enlightenment.

I have begun getting real with myself about spiritual dynamics.  The last few months for me have been a constant look at my liabilities.  It has been immensely difficult.  Recently, though, I have begun to realize that this kind of orientation is incredibly important.

In June 1st’s “Refocusing my Practice: Salutations from One About to Die”  I talked about the fact that, for me, Zeal is a depressant.  In AA, after a recovering addict gets a handle on the chemical side of his addiction—after he stops drinking to dull his feelings—that addict has to learn, in a positive sense, how to feel again.  And it means many harrowing moments of facing reality without the help of a drug.  Chemical sobriety can be measured with AA tokens, in terms of days and months and years. Emotional sobriety is a more complicated, lifelong process, of actively owning what drugs helped him evade.  It's not as quantifiable

I call my drug of choice "Zeal," but it goes by other names.  Zen teachers call it “Zen sickness:” it’s the period where Zen is all a student can think about, the barbaric yawp that he sounds from every rooftop.  I suppose it’s helpful.  Those who are zealous or Zen-sick definitely become more proficient in the intellectual knowledge of their subject matter.  Zeal caused me to major in theology in college.  But it caused me, as well, to unwittingly substitute self for God.

For me, Zeal is a drug because of the quantity of Self-Awareness it implies.  I would have sucked at  Mysticism if Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle was the only account of how one becomes close to God.  Teresa of Avila, for all of the confusion of the spiritual journey, could say with fairly certain accuracy where she was in relation to the father.  I have not handled, and would not handle, similar knowledge well.  Any indication of spiritual proficiency sends me careening into how awesome I am.  Teresa had the wherewithal to keep her focus on God’s generosity.

Thank goodness there’s John of the Cross.  Thank goodness, for Zen students, for the importance of Mu.  John of the Cross talked about hidden ladder mysticism.  He said that it’s possible to approach God in a way the practitioner can’t see, to have God do the work while all that’s visible is one’s interior mess.  Mu is the same way:  wherever you think you are, you're not. 

Over the last few months, I’ve discovered new footing.  It gave rise to Under the Influence, and is the only reason I continue to be substantively spiritually engaged.  Amidst the gratitude of such new orientation, old obstacles arose as well.  Confronted with my own inner chaos, and newly equipped with the negative mystical tool that “working on mu” is, at first I became way too attached to moments of peace that characterize renewed spiritual practice.  I found myself going into meditation with the longing to return to peaceful states I’d been given in the past.  Subtly, I was trying to arrive, by my own efforts, at the states of Egoic release God had given by his generosity.  It’s an early and insidious form of idolatry. Luckily enough, this isn’t exactly my first rodeo.  I saw myself being attached to that peace, and knew that, left unchecked, I’d attribute it to myself rather than God, and repeat past fuck ups.

One of my two best friends--the Iranian Jew with Zen training, not the Filipino German ex-con and Cabinet Maker-- often says "Whenever I talk to people about Zen, I just can't wait to shut the fuck up."  He is, as I am, aware of the disgust that spiritual desire can present one with.  He presents bliss in the form of a story.  For the buddhist monk, sitting alone in his cave, the ideal is to arrive at the end of the day and say "Not one thought of Zen today."  Of course, noting the lack of Zen is as good as thinking about Zen, but to hell with semantics.  The fact is, spiritual ideals can fill one up with as much self-conscious egotism as anything else. 

So I am learning to live without my drug: without zeal, I am slowly learning to be normal and feel things again.  This summer, spiritual work has simply been hard.  Meditating doesn’t always relieve the background noise of egoism.  Meta-thinking, trying to take an observational stance on the fruits of my thoughts, is a goal that ranks as a close second to inner silence.  Even being able to meta-think, however, involves a mix of willingness and grace that I can’t be assured will always present itself when I want it to.  

I have come, all over again as if it were the first time, to two conclusions.  Firstly, I’m not in charge, and cannot heal myself.  I use, all too consistently, my "longing for God" to justify stirring the pot when it isn't my kitchen in the first place.  Secondly, whatever is transcendent is working on me.  I don’t know what to call it, and I don’t know what it’s doing, or what it has done or how I got here.  I am maximally confused.  

But I am learning to prefer divinely-authored confusion to self-designed certainty.  Since Under the Influence began, I have had moments of connection with the “stuff” of Catholicism, Judaism, Zen and Hinduism.  And yet, rather than pushing me toward identifying with any of these religions, it has pushed me toward the very opposite.  Religions are useful, and much of what they say accords with the Truth.  Meister Ekhart said “I pray to God to free me from god.”  As often as the deities that present themselves have turned out, by and by, to be of my making, I resonate with him daily.  But the minute I formulate a statement that involves “God” and “I,” we two are separate.  To be more precise, I pray for forgetting: I want to be in his embrace, but forget there are two of us involved.   I want the Truth, not the things that point to it.  

There’s an oft quoted spiritual maxim that sums this up.  It’s acquired a meme-like ubiquity.  I did some research, and found it fist in meme form.  So I suppose I should say it’s potentially trite, and I can’t vouch for its accuracy.  The maxim goes “A man said to the Buddha, ‘I want Happiness.’ Buddha said, first remove ‘I’, that's ego, then remove ‘want’, that's desire. See, now you are left with only Happiness.” That applies, I’ve found, to any object.  Happiness, Spirituality, enlightenment, God, or the energy to do a rainy-day grocery run.  Goals, minus ego and desire, yield actualization.  I truly hope this is accurate.  If it is, may God preserve me from being certain of it.