On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Healthyplay1 <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
>
>
>
>>>As far as attention and life, I find my constant challenge comes from finding
> more parts of my life that I have trouble paying attention to, ao my life
> seems
> to be rather more than i imagine. i prefer Karen Maezen Miller's formulation
> that what we attend to florishes.<<
>
> I like this perspective as well. I guess you're saying here that your life
> is busy in the sense that you have more demands on your time, energy and
> attention than you expected. If so, that is probably true for most of us.
> Then there is being confronted with the unexpected--as in the events in Japan.
>
Hey Kristy,
I meant something rather different, and which in the light of your
later post about how "Enlightened Masters" seems like a dodgy thing, I
think is relevant.
The original statement you quoted from Cheryl Huber was like "Our life
is our attention." I was trying to say that my attention is not my
life, except in moments of clarity perhaps; my attention turns away
from my life, and that is my challenge. Not just that I get
distracted, but a more systemic distortion: when I get mad, I almost
never able to pay attention to myself or the situation, getting
flipped into some pretend world.
It's not that my life is too busy to attend to; it is that I am blind
to pieces of life that I don't wish to think about/see/deal with. And
I don't even necessarily know how much/about what I am averting my
gaze.
So the way that relates to the problems with "perfect masters" is
that, I suspect, most people have some areas of blindness like this.
Maezumi was awesome with the folks from a different country, but get
him back with his brother and he's drinking again. Any teacher who
isn't keeping this awareness, that they themselves could be blind to
important areas of their own self, could really make Big Mistakes.
(sorry :)
Any relationship is ultimately a relationship of equals, of peers; and
my peers at least, all might be making mistakes, can only offer
provisional advice and perspective. My teacher in Maryland in fact
has a card in her office; the outside says, "Just two words to know
about zen" the inside says "Not Always So."
The awesome value of a teacher relationship is that a different person
can see pieces of you that you can't see, and they have different
experiences, a different perspective than the one you have. It's not
that they are always aware of reality and living in the moment. Every
one has some blindnesses. The ones I've interacted with have brought
the taste of zazen to the many dilemmas that living offers, and share
that experienced perspective.
I found a really interesting book about the dilemma of teachers in the
US, "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, which is not, despite the title,
a book about the path of raising children, but a book interviewing a
bunch of people, mostly US born I think, who went and studied with
various Masters in various Exotic Locales, and had Great Experiences,
lost their selves, and achieved great wisdom, and then came back to
our quaintly frenetic commercial lives and found that a thorough
knowledge of unity with all gained in the forest with people brought
up in a different culture than you, doesn't always translate to
equanimity, joy and compassion when interacting with your siblings
while being sensorially assaulted by media and distractions on all
sides; that Mu dissolves the ego on the retreat, but the clever angry
spouse can bring ego back so easily.
Despite my humor (sarcasm?) in describing the above, its a very
interesting book, the dilemma portrayed is one that the interviewees
are aware of and generally work sincerely to deal with, and all in
all, one comes away respecting the "professional Zen corps" in the US
rather more than less.
But my point remains - as a student, you must enter dokusan knowing
that only Buddhas are bowing; for example, the other person, while
hopefully not quite as silly as me, could well make mistakes, and
quite likely will have certain issues that irritate and annoy them
time and again. The student may or may not know what they are, but
the teachers siblings, parents, spouse, etc. probably are aware of
them. The teacher is probably only partially aware of the full
reality there.
The teacher can not teach how to live with Absolute Knowledge and
Certainty - they can teach how to life with grace when you are in the
situation we are in, not knowing our blindnesses, but seeing that we
have blindness. Being open to the fact that we can always learn from
what others are seeing in us.
Brad Warner has the (non-charged) example of eating loudly. When he
lived alone, he never know he chewed cereal really loudly. Only by
living with others, did he gain the chance to chew more quietly (and
compassionately?)
So my challenge with my attention is my life, is that my life exceeds
my attention. My daughter, when my wife and I start nit-picking on
each other, will plug her ears and say, rather loudly, "Thinking of
Prancing Ponies." I have more subtle ways of not noticing, but the
principal remains. (And actually, the action my daughter is taking
there is a straightforward intervention; she's not thinking of
prancing ponies, but helping out; but it's too funny for me not to use
as an illustration.)
Be well.
--Chris
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