I discarded the following as my new Suicide Girls piece for this week. But I thought it was sort of OK. So here it is for all y'all.
But before that, here's yet another song. This one was directly inspired by Dogen and is the climactic finale to my rock opera Hovercraft. It's called:
The Weight of Things
The intro is incredibly long. And if you listen close you'll notice that almost all of the instruments present in the intro drop out before the vocal starts and are replaced by other instruments. Since I only had 8 tracks to work with, I had to accomplish this by writing a section that allowed enough time to drop one instrument and grab another.
Anyway, here's what I wrote:
Some people just don’t get it. But that’s OK. Some people just aren’t ever gonna get it. And you have to accept that.
A certain segment of the audience that reads what I write assumes I’m just a seething bowl of anger. I’m really not. But I guess I can understand why people think I am. They see a sentence like “Genpo Roshi is a useless piece of shit and his Big Mind® process is a scam,” to take a recent example, and they think, “Gosh. The only time I would call someone a useless piece of shit and say his life’s work was a scam would be if I was totally enraged.” So they read their own emotional state into what I say and make assumptions accordingly.
This doesn’t just happen with me or the stuff I write, of course. It happens all the time, to all kinds of people who write or say all kinds of things. I probably get a bit more shit from it than some people because I’m writing in an idiom where you’re expected to project a bunch of phony baloney “inner peace” all the time. I just can’t play act that well, though. I’ll leave the play acting to guys like Genpo.
The question of whether I’m an angry guy or not is entirely irrelevant. But the matter of human communication is an incredibly important issue.
We human beings have developed language to a higher degree of precision than any other creature we know about. We are so good at communicating our ideas to each other that we can do all kinds of really amazing things like put people on the moon, cure gonorrhea, or build computers so that we can look at each other’s unbelievably cute kitty cats.
Because we’re so good at conveying certain things to each other, we tend to assume that everything we say is received exactly as intended by the people we say it to, and that conversely, whatever we think someone is saying is what they're actually trying to convey. Of course, if you ask anybody they’ll always tell you they know that’s not true. But check yourself some time and you’ll see that, in spite of knowing full well how things can get misinterpreted, you still tend to assume most folks you talk to know what it is you’re trying to say. And when you read or hear something you assume you get it. When that doesn't happen we’re pretty quick to blame the other guy.
When people don’t get what I say I’ve found it’s always more useful to assume I’ve communicated badly. I’ll even pretend that’s the case when I know perfectly well the asshole I’m talking to just wasn’t putting in the least bit of effort to try and understand me. It’s a good tactic to put assholes like that off guard and diffuse a situation that might get tense otherwise.
Part of the way in which we communicate is by making assumptions regarding people’s moods. And that’s OK. But it’s just as vital not to necessarily believe our own assumptions. It’s also not important to insist that people communicate in the way we believe they ought to communicate.
This is especially true in the current age of open communications. We’re already dealing with a deafening cacophony of voices spreading malicious misinformation, trying to incite anger, attempting to humiliate or intimidate and all kinds of other such stuff. It’s only gonna get worse. We need to find a way to deal with this stuff.
In my line of work I’m often told that I have a responsibility to express myself in ways that are incapable of misinterpretation, lest I lead others astray. But there’s nothing you can say and no way you can say it without someone misinterpreting you. That’s just how human communication works. Shit, Hitler thought Buddha’s message was, “Kill all the Jews.” No matter what you say, someone out there will take it wrong. That doesn’t mean you have to stop saying stuff.
Of course we are all responsible for what we say and we need to be careful. It’s important not to say things with the deliberate intention of inspiring anger, hatred, humiliation and all the rest. But even if you do take care not to do such things deliberately there’s no way in heck you’re ever going to be able to censor yourself so perfectly that absolutely nothing you say can ever be taken any of those ways. There’s really no point in trying to do so.
I take a lot of shit from people who believe that any kind of Buddhist teacher must express himself in the standard issue calming, soothing, stilling manner they’ve come to expect from guys who play Buddhist teachers on TV shows or scam artists who make money imitating that style while claiming to be the real deal. I just can't do it, though. I've tried a couple times in my life and it was awful.
Those of you assume I'm angry at Genpo -- or whoever you assume I'm angry at -- will assume whatever you want to assume. It's not my problem. If some of you would rather have me project an image that has folks assuming I'm all blissed out and sweet all the time, well, I'm sorry. But I won't. I've seen too much damage caused by that shit already. I refuse to contribute.
But more important than what I do or don't do is what you do. It's how you react to what you read that matters most. And not just to what you read from me, it's how you react to whatever you read. You are responsible. We all are. The Internets have created a world where everyone can broadcast whatever message they want very loudly. How do you respond to all that noise? Are you an information junkie, flitting from one blog to the next, wallowing in the muddy beauty of your own indignation or feelings of affirmation? Is that a healthy way to live?
