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edz

How to Survive Your Promising Life

On June 14, 2014, Norman Fischer gave the Baccalaureate Address at the Stanford University Commencement. This is the prepared text for that address.

Good morning, everyone. I am honored to be here this morning with all of you. It is, literally, awesome to see – a sea, an actual sea, of waving faces. I have no idea why I am here, but I feel quite lucky to have the chance to reflect, to muse, to ponder with you at this important moment in your lives. A moment is a moment.

It is a long while since I have been a university student. I enjoyed that time in my life immensely. It was full and it was exiting, a time almost completely devoted to study and exploration of life’s big questions, with a little fun thrown in, and powerful friendships, and, yes, a certain amount of misery and angst. College is a privilege, but it is not necessarily the easiest time of life. As with all other times of life – but perhaps even more so – there are highs and there are lows. I hope today you are feeling the high.

But time passes and you forget. These days when I go to university campuses, which I do from time to time, I feel as if I were in heaven. I imagine that heaven must be exactly like a university campus – everyone young and healthy, spending their time in social and intellectual pursuits, flowers in season, the trees well trimmed, the lawns manicured, the buildings more or less matching and clean. A university is by definition a place of promise – and students are promising individuals – you perhaps more than most because Stanford is more than just another university, it is a great and storied university that, these days, seems to be at the center of the universe. Because of what you have received – not only from Stanford, but also from your families and friends, who have given you a lot of love and support – you now have the skills and the connections – and the obligation – to do great things. And this means not only great things for yourselves: You are expected to do great things for others, and for the world. We all have high hopes for you, probably higher hopes than you have for yourselves. Let’s be honest – as much as we discuss and practice wise punditry, we older people don’t really know what the world will require in the coming times – and we are a bit bewildered, and unsure, though we hate to admit it. To grow old is to gradually cease to understand the times in which you live. So we are placing our trust and our hope in you. No pressure, of course. But the promise of the future really is yours.

And yet the truth is, it is not going to be so easy to survive your promising life. For one thing, there are a lot of promising young people out there – not only here at Stanford, or here in California, here in the United States, but also in Europe, in China, in Latin America, all over Asia, and in India, and Africa – some of you in factarethose people – bright, energetic, and mobile. With so much competition, and so much anxiety about that competition, it is possible that success, if it comes, will not come easily. It is also of course possible that success will not come – or that it will come, abundantly, but that you will not find it as meaningful as you had expected. It is also possible that success comes, and you do find it meaningful and satisfying – but only at first, when it is still bright and shiny. And that later, the state and pace and social implications of the successful and ambitious life you will have lived will wear you down, and you’ll find yourself tired and bewildered.

It’s also possible that as time stretches on your personal relationships will not work out as you had hoped, your sense of yourself will not hold up to scrutiny, that there will be disappointments and setbacks, acknowledged and unacknowledged – in short, it is possible, even likely, that there is some pain awaiting you as you go forth from this bright day – ruptured love affairs, betrayals, losses, disillusionments – seriously shaky moments. It’s possible too that, as you move through the decades, it will become increasingly difficult for you to maintain the idealism and the hopefulness you have today. It’s possible that one day you will find yourself wondering what you have been doing all these years, and who you have become. It’s possible the life you wanted and have built will not be as you’d expected it to be. It’s possible that the world you wanted and hoped to improve will not improve.

Anyway, you will keep busy, you will have things to do. And you will try not to notice such feelings. You will try to deny any despair or disappointment or discouragement or boredom you may be feeling two, five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years from today. And probably you will be able – more or less – to do that. But only more or less.

I am sorry to say all these things to you on such a wonderful day and in such a beautiful place as this.

I realize that baccalaureate speeches are supposed to be bright, uplifting, and encouraging. The folks at Stanford who invited me to speak today sent me links to previous baccalaureate talks so I would know how they usually go. The speeches I looked at were wonderful – they were serious about challenges ahead – but they were always positive. So, yes, I too intend to say something bright and encouraging. But I thought I would be more convincing if I were also realistic. And it is realistic to say that your lives from now on are likely not going to be entirely smooth sailing. The skills you’ll need to survive may be more than or other than the skills you have been focusing on so far in your life. The truth is, it takes a great deal of fortitude and moral strength to sustain a worthwhile, happy, and virtuous human life over time in the world as it actually is.

OK, here is the uplifting part:

Your life isn’t and has never been about you. It isn’t and has never been about what you accomplish, how successful you are or are not, how much money you make, what sort of position you ascend to, or even about your family, your associations, your various communities, or how much good you do for others or the world at large. Your life, like mine, and like everyone else’s, has always been about one thing: love.

Who are you, really? Where did you come from? Why were you born? When this short human journey is over, where are you going? Why – and how – does any of this exist? What is the purpose and the point of it all?

Not even your Nobel Prize-winning professors know the answers to these questions, the inevitable, unavoidable, human questions. None of us knows the answers. All we know is that we are here for a while before we are gone, and that we are here together. The only thing that makes sense and that is completely real is love. Love is the only answer. This is no mystery – everyone knows this. Whether your destiny is to have a large loving family or to have no partner and no family – love is available to you wherever you look. And when you dedicate yourself to love, to trying your best to be kind and to benefit everyone you meet – not just the people on your side, not just the people you like and approve of, but everyone, every human and nonhuman being – then you will be OK and your life – whatever it brings, even if it brings a lot of difficulty and tragedy – as so many lives do – as even the lives of very privileged and promising people sometimes do – your life will be a beautiful life. As I promised, this is uplifting – or at least I hope you find it uplifting.

But there’s more.Howdo you love?Howdo you make love real in your life? This doesn’t happen by itself. It takes attention, it takes commitment, continuity, effort. It won’t come automatically, it won’t come from wishing or from believing or assuming. You are going to have to figure out how to not get distracted by your personal problems, by your success or your lack of success, by your needs, your desires, your suffering, your various interests, and keep your eye on the ball of love even as, inevitably, you juggle all the rest of it.

To find and develop love you have to firmly commit yourself to love. And you have to have a way, a path, a practice, for cultivating love throughout your lifetime, come what may. Love isn’t a just feeling. It is an overarching attitude and spirit. It’s a way of life. It’s a daily activity.

In my life I have cultivated love through a path of spiritual practice, a life of meditation and study and reflection. I think you also will need a path of spiritual practice. You also will need some kind of religious life if you are going to survive this difficult human journey with your heart intact and your love generous and bright.

A spiritual or a religious life doesn’t need to look like what we have so far thought of as a spiritual life. The world now is too various and connected for the old paths to work. Not that the old paths are outmoded – they are as useful today as they ever were, perhaps more so. But they need to be re-formatted, re-configured, for our lives as they are now. And above all, they need to be open and tolerant, transparent and porous rather than opaque, and expansive rather than exclusive. A spiritual life can and should be much more lively and various and interesting than we have previously imagined. To investigate at the deepest possible level the human heart and the purposes of a human life that is essentially connected at all points to and with others and the planet Earth can be – and should be, maybemustbe – deeply engaging and satisfying. There are a million ways to approach it. But the main thing is, I think, that you need some commitment, some discipline – and you need a regular practice, something you actually do.

The most important characteristic – the defining characteristic, I would say – of a spiritual practice is that it is useless. That is, it is an activity that has no other practical purpose than to connect you to your heart and to your highest and most mysterious purpose – a purpose that is literally unknown, because it references the unanswerable questions I mentioned a moment ago. We do so many things for so many good reasons – for our physical or psychological or emotional health, for our family life or economic life, for the world. But a spiritual practice is useless – it doesn’t address any of those concerns. It is a practice that we do to touch our lives beyond all concerns – reaching beyond our lives to their source.

For me that practice is and has been for a long time sitting in silence. That’s a good one; maybe it will also be good for you. I certainly recommend it to everyone – regardless of your religious affiliation or lack of one. But there are many others. Prayer, for one. Whether or not you believe in God you can pray. You can contemplate spiritual texts or art, poetry, or sacred music. You can walk quietly on the Earth. You can gaze at the landscape or the sea or sky. And there are many other such useless practices you can devise or invent.

You could practice gratitude – when you wake up every morning, as soon as you put your feet on the floor from bed, sitting on the side of the bed you can close your eyes, be quiet for a minute, and say the word “grateful” to yourself silently, and just sit there for a moment or two and see what happens. You could practice that right now…

Or you could practice giving – always making the effort to intentionally say a word or offer a smile or material or emotional gifts that confer blessings on another person.

Or you could practice kind speech – on all occasions, even difficult ones, committing yourself to speaking as much as you can in kindness and with inclusion of others and their needs, their hopes and dreams. Not just speaking from your own side.

Or you could practice beneficial action, committing yourself to intentionally acting with a spirit of benefiting others, of being of some use to others, in whatever way you can, even stupid ways that seem not to be useful or beneficial but could be if you intend them to be. For instance, you can practice benefiting others by wiping sink counters in public restrooms, or in your own kitchen. Wiping counters with a spirit of beneficial action – with that thought in your mind intentionally – can be a daily spiritual discipline. Or you can cook a meal with love for others, with a spirit of benefiting others. Even if the meal is for yourself, you can benefit yourself with the good food, that you paid close attention to when you prepared it, because one’s self, truly and kindly understood, is also another.

Or you could practice identity action – recognizing that when you do anything, whatever it is, you are not, and cannot, do it alone, by your own power. Inevitably whatever you do involves others and the whole world, this Earth we live on, its life-giving sunlight and plants and animals. So that every action we ever take involves others and a world of support. You could notice that whenever you do anything.

Or you could practice compassion – going toward, rather than turning away from, the suffering of others – and your own suffering too. We all want to avoid pain, to make it disappear. But when it’s impossible to make the pain disappear you can go toward it rather than running away – you can become softened by it.

I could go on and on. Spiritual practices are unlimited – and they are imaginative. And – especially – full of love. They come from love, they encourage love, and they produce love. When you do them over time you find that you are living in a world full of love. And for your life and for our lives collectively in the times to come we are going to need love – lots of love. In good times, love is lovely. Nothing can be better. And in hard times, love is necessary. It turns tragedy into opportunity – something difficult and unwanted becomes a chance to drive love deeper, to make it wiser, fuller, more glorious, and more resilient.

A while ago my friend Fenton Johnson, who is a wonderful novelist and writer and professor of literature, and a lifelong spiritual practitioner – and who is sitting in the audience today! – sent me an email about this talk. He wrote, “If I were giving such an address I’d talk about the mystery of life, how one can and should lay great plans, but how life has its own ebb and flow, and our first duty is to be present to that ebb and flow, to realize that failure and success are social conceptions that can be useful but that in their conventional definitions have little to do with what really matters, which is the study and practice of virtue.” As Timothy Kelly, who was abbot of Gethsemani Monastery, Thomas Merton’s monastery in Kentucky, said, “How one lives one’s life is the only true measure of the validity of one’s search.”

The Beat poet Philip Whalen was my dear friend and teacher. Like me, he was also a Zen Buddhist priest. As a poet and a spiritual practitioner, he couldn’t do anything other than search. His genius was that he could express the seriousness of his search while maintaining not only his sense of humor and play – but also a clear and sane knowledge that the whole thing is actually as ridiculous as it is tragic. Here is a poem of his, written in the 1960s:

TO HENRIK IBSEN

This world is not
The world I want
Is Heaven
& I see
There’s more of them

*

I’ve seen most of this world is ocean
I know if I had all I wanted from it
There’d still not be enough
Someone would be lonely hungry toothache
All this world with a red ribbon on it
Not enough
Nor several hells heavens planets
Universal non-skid perfection systems

Where’s my eternity papers?
Get me the great Boyg on the phone.
Connect me with the Button Moulder right away.

So please do seriously think about it – but not without some joy and some lightness. Today you are closing the door on one life and opening the door to another. Today you fall out of heaven. Where will you land? What will you do there? What is really worthwhile and what is just distraction – however much people tell you it is not? You are the only one who can ask and answer these questions.

So I am saluting you this morning – you and the wonderful life of promise you have lived up to this moment, and the new life of challenge and difficulty and passion that you are entering. Cheers and congratulations.

edz

There are No Distractions

1st talk at 2014 Samish Island Sesshin

ONE MORNING by Rosemerry TrommerOne morning
we will wake up
and forget to build
that wall we’ve been building,

the one between us
the one we’ve been building
for years, perhaps
out of some sense
of right and boundary,
perhaps out of habit.

One morning
we will wake up
and let our empty hands
hang empty at our sides.

Perhaps they will rise,
as empty things
sometimes do
when blown
by the wind.

Perhaps they simply
will not remember
how to grasp, how to rage.

We will wake up
that morning
and we will have
misplaced all our theories
about why and how
and who did what
to whom, we will have mislaid
all our timelines
of when and plans of what
and we will not scramble
to write the plans and theories anew.

On that morning,
not much else
will have changed.

Whatever is blooming
will still be in bloom.

Whatever is wilting
will wilt. There will be fields
to plow and trains
to load and children
to feed and work to do.

And in every moment,
in every action, we will
feel the urge to say thank you,
we will follow the urge to bow.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Good morning, I’m really grateful to be here and I’m really grateful to each and every one of you for being here. A community springs to life from this sacred ground. A community springs to life from our hearts, from our intention. From our love.

It’s wonderful to stop isn’t it? Just to be. Just to breathe. Just to step out of the frame of busy and trying so hard. To drop all that. We can’t quite explain why this is but of course we do try. 6 talks this week by myself, Michael, and Norman who is arriving tomorrow afternoon.

In case you’re curious he’s coming later this year because he was invited to give a sermon at Stanford Memorial Church – “memchu” I grew up hearing it called. His talk is part of Stanford’s graduation ceremonies. He’s giving this talk just about exactly now and will hop on a flight tomorrow morning. A nice opportunity for him to serve and offer some of our Zen attitude to the brilliant young minds of that place. Maybe he’s also considering with them the peacefulness of just being.

Why would not doing much be helpful? And of course we’re always doing something. So maybe there’s a little confusion in that very idea of not doing. We’re always doing.

We don’t really stop until we die. I recently was with someone who died. There is effort and hard work right until the final minute. Then stopping. Real stopping. It was unbelievably peaceful to sit in the room with her for a few minutes. If her body was still her exactly. I am really grateful to have received that teaching. Maybe it’s essential training to be present at a birth and at a death. How else do we start to know the dimensions of this life?

But probably we won’t have that experience this week. No one is that pregnant or that close to death as far as we know. Maybe we will. But we will also see many births and many deaths in our experience. Sometimes an overwhelming amount of things bubbling up and falling away. Some we like, some we don’t like. Even living this simple life for a week is so full. So rich.

We want it to stop in a way I guess, we hunger deeply for peacefulness and slowing down, but we don’t want it to really stop: we fear the real peacefulness of death. We are funny creatures that way.

And the minute you try to say something about this it’s a little off, a little tangled up. Better to say less probably. The standard joke is “well there was a Dharma Talk on the schedule so we have to give a talk” just follow the schedule if our first teacher at sesshin. But is there anything to be said in these talks?

Our Zen ancestors had some great ways of expressing this. Here’s a story from the Book of Serenity:

As Dongshan was presenting offerings before the image of his teacher Yunyan he retold the story from before about depicting reality. A monk came forward and said, “When Yunyan said, ‘Just this is it,’ what did he mean?”

Dongshan said, “At that time I nearly misunderstood my last teacher’s meaning.”

The monk said, “Did Yunyan himself know it or not?”

Dongshan said, “If he didn’t know it is, how could he be able to say this? If he did know it is, how could he be willing to say this?”

I’ve always loved Yunyan. He’s the one who also gave the wonderful teaching about knowing the one who is not busy. And through various strange circumstances we are in possession of a whole box of books by the wonderful teacher Darlene Cohen on dealing with our busy mind more wisely that is based on that case as we mentioned last night. I hope you take home a copy of that book and read it after sesshin.

In our story Dongshan is a teacher now and he’s remembering his teacher Yunyan’s teaching phrase, “Just this is it.” I love his humility. One of his students asks about that teaching and Dongshan says, “I didn’t get it at first.”

His student goes on with a very wise question, “Did Yunyan himself know it or not?” Meaning is there anything to get anyway? Is there some phrase, some teaching, some wisdom that’s a something that we can get, that we can understand, that we can know? We conventionally think that way of course. But is that really how it all works?

Dongshan brings up both sides of that: there is a kind of knowing but that knowing is without a separate kind of knowledge. Knowing without knowledge might be a way to describe it. “If he didn’t know it is, how could he be able to say this? If he did know it is, how could he be willing to say this?” If you know it you know it can’t exactly be said in a way.

But we have to say something, we have to do something, we do need some method, some way to work with his mind and heart. Our main method this week looks like it’s zazen – seated meditation. Of course we are doing lots of other things, but I think “zazen” appears most often on our schedule. What is our goal in zazen? What is it we hope for?

The word for this week of ritualized life is sesshin. Sesshin is composed of two characters: “setsu” and “shin” – this in the odd Sino-Japanese concoction which is the way the Japanese pronounce Chinese characters when they’re referencing them as Chinese. Kind of Church Latin in a way. Setsu means to touch or make contact with. Shin means heart or mind, heart and mind. To touch the heart. To touch the true mind.

All kinds of experiences arise in sesshin but somehow as we settle there is some kind of contact with something. How that shows up as subjective experience is all over the map of course, how could it not be? We look like we’re more or less the same and more or less doing the same thing here but of course we are all at the head of our own karmic trajectory, pushed along by our past, our habits, our tendencies the collection of thoughts and emotions that we string together into some more or less coherent idea of “me.” So each “me” meets this contact with the heart and mind differently.

When I started practice there was a kind of ban on talking about your meditation experience. The idea was we’d just confuse each other because our experiences are so different. Someone might describe an experience you find desirable and that would trigger all kinds of stuff. Better to say nothing. Also implied I think was that the wise Zen masters should be told as they can take it all in with complete equanimity. I think we hold this a little more lightly now.

We can trust each other to have a little equanimity! Our varied meditation experience isn’t exactly a secret, but it isn’t exactly all that interesting to talk about either. Some things may be really helpful to share and helpful to say out loud to explore our patterning. And it can be profoundly helpful in releasing from our projections to hear a little about the foibles of other minds in meditation.

Funnily when I teach the mindfulness classes it’s the opposite: we do talk quite regularly about meditation experience. And that speaking out meditation experience is a practice itself. It’s a practice of describing to yourself and others experience as experience. Releasing as best you can from judgment, from summarizing, from twisting experience into future goals and past regrets. Just to talk simply and honestly about it. Here’s what I noticed. Here’s what I felt. To identify less tightly with it. We don’t need that “I” in there really: where’s what arose, here’s what happened. We don’t do that so much in Zen but internally we are talking to ourselves all the time about it right? So who do we talk to ourself about our meditation experience?

How do we approach this desire for settling, for contact with something. How do we work with our love of that expansive open feeling that comes sometimes. What about when that’s not happening? What if we feel overwhelmed instead? What if we feel resistant? What if we are just too tired? What if we just hurt? What if we get really stuck in something.

Does Yunyan’s practice of “just this is it” apply to meditation that doesn’t feel remotely like meditation?

I received an interesting list of likely meditation states from one of my teachers recently, I’m not sure where she got it, but it seems helpful.

There are 10 categories of experience in this scheme and I saw it presented as a kind of wheel with one moving into the next and back around. I don’t know that it’s always that simple but the idea of a wheel matches our experience here I think. This sense of going around and around in some way.

1st is Contact – this is what we want. That contact with the moment, with the heart, with this place, with each other; contact with peacefulness and connection. Just being present is a kind of experience of contact.

2nd is Expansion – the heart opens, the narrow feeling of “me” opens up wide, ahhhh. Wonderful. Big meditation experiences for all their joy and ultimate confusion are here. Usually the moment we get excited about Expansion and try to hold onto it it’s gone.

3rd is Overwhelm – that openness lets a lot in. Floods of emotion. Difficult memories. Worry. Pain. Why are they saying it’s peaceful to sit here? It’s horrible. Overwhelm can be so challenging. Of course we try to let it go, we return to the breath in the belly, we try not to add fuel to the fire. We seek relief. Sometimes there is no relief. Overwhelm is overwhelm. Maybe we can be with overwhelm with some awareness. And somehow even here “Just this is it” – it’s just overwhelm.

4th is Distraction – the mind just won’t settle. The famous monkey mind. We hardly know where we are and what’s happening. The bell rings and we’re surprised and maybe a little ashamed. Another good zazen period wasted. Sometimes distraction has an enticing creative quality to it – that’s kind of nice, I remember my neighbor at the Tassajara zendo telling me he’s written some wonderful plays in his mind during zazen – other times it’s just noise. So random. Where did that come from? Distraction, distraction, distraction. “Just this is it”?

5th is Unconsciousness – we go to sleep. We check out. Our body is still here, but we are gone. Vague states we can’t quite put a name on. Something almost remembered. People often come to the dokusan room looking for an escape from sleepiness. Sometimes we need to sleep. There’s an essay on giving yourself permission to have all of your experiences in meditation where he says “you have permission to go to sleep, how else will you learn about waking up?” Can we sleep with Yunyan’s “Just this is it”?

6th and 7th are Avoidance and Rejection – we want out of here, and we are totally justified in wanting out of here because this whole thing is messed up. This mushy, vague, Soto Zen retreat is not working for me. The food is wrong. The cabins are too funky. Norman’s pretty good but I don’t know about these other jokers. I have so much to do, what am I doing wasting time here? Can we recognize this as avoidance? What are we trying to avoid? Can we recognize rejection? And even here even in the middle of the mind actively trying to wriggle out can we again breathe with “just this is it?”

The 8th and 9th meditation states in this system are Feeling Fake & Numb. This is the flip side of Avoidance and Rejection in a way. Here the problem isn’t the sesshin, the problem is me. I’m not doing it right and I’ll never learn how to do it right. I’m faking it and they’ll find out sooner or later. Maybe some projection: she’s such a great meditator, I’ll never be as good as her. And a strategy for dealing with this might be to just go numb. Who cares really. I like the talks so I’ll just sit here and suffer all day until then. This numbness is it? Don’t think so. So interesting to see if we can bring up awareness in this state.

And of course they get all mixed together, we’re distracted and don’t get up to go when the han sounds. I’ll be late anyway, my body hurts, I think I’ll stay in my room. And so on. And of course these examples are a bit of a caricature – these experience states may be arising in much more subtle ways. We can use them as a kind of exploratory tool if we like. Is there contact here? Is there expansion? Are there moments of overwhelm? Was I hanging out in distraction for a while there? Am I resisting the full possibility of setting my stuff down? Is there avoidance and rejection bubbling up? As I look at the buffet table is there a flash of annoyance or rejection which I usually ignore and drop back into my breath? Is there a numbness or the self-doubt of being a fake. These states can be quite brief and subtle too, but the idea here is that there are still interesting and worthy of our kind attention.

Then 10th meditation state is Intention. This is seen as a very powerful state in Buddhism. A quality of mind that can turn the wheel right round. Accessing a sense of Intention is how, on the one hand, we can bring our subjective experience right back around to Contact and Expansion, that’s nice, but more importantly we cultivate the Intention to be with all of these states as the practice. We take Yunyan’s teaching seriously. We honor that all states are simply what’s happening and we can turn towards even the most unpleasant state with awareness, with kindness, with patience.

So we have this kind of driver of Intention, why are you here at Samish this year? What’s your intention? It’s a little different from goals or hopes. It’s less about outcome and more about direction. Which way are you moving in this life. Intention has a quality of turning towards, of opening. Maybe it’s a kind of ambition that’s liberated from desire and clinging.

The idea here is there are no distractions. Everything that happens is practice, is path. And if we don’t like something and want to exclude it from our sesshin experience maybe if we’re lucky we’ll catch ourself. Maybe we can see it for what it is, maybe we can breathe with “just this is it”? Maybe some words from this model of 10 experiences or some other model will come to mind to support us?

We don’t think this way usually, though do we? We have this idea of distractions and all of the aspects of ourself and our experience that we would like to get rid of. Distractions can’t be meditation, distractions are the enemy of meditation.