There are a lot of people out there who enjoy adopting the pose of being "freaky" and "alternative." And they do some very superficial things that make them look a little weird. They'll buy some funny clothes, maybe get a couple of body parts pierced or tattooed. All of this shocks those who are easily shocked. But internally these same people are often extraordinarily conservative and judgmental. Sometimes they're even more conservative and judgmental that more "normal" people. Now that punk rock has become so trendy as to be ubiquitous, you meet a lot of these kinds of people wherever you go.
Long before even I was born, MAD magazine ran a piece in which they contrasted ordinary conformists, ordinary non-conformists and MAD non-conformists. It points out how regular, so-called "non-conformists" always conform to other "non-conformists" but at heart are really just like everyone else. Yet the MAD non-conformist is truly not conforming. I have a copy of this locked away in storage, so I can't quote the whole thing. But I managed to find a couple bits of it on line, where people had referenced it in blogs and suchlike. Here's what I found:
PETS -
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS raise parakeets, cocker spaniels, boxers, collies, turtles, snakes, cats, white mice, snakes and tropical fish.
ORDINARY NON-CONFORMISTS raise Russian wolfhounds, French poodles, Weimaraners, ocelots, minks, deodorized skunks and rhesus monkeys.
MAD NON-CONFORMISTS raise ant colonies, anteaters, falcons, leeches, octopii, anchovies, water buffaloes and performing fleas.
MOVIES -
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS go in for uninspired Technicolor musicals, stories with happy endings, migraine-provoking Cinemascope, and 6 1/2-hour double features that destroy the eyes, ears, nose, and spine.
ORDINARY NON-CONFORMISTS patronize stuffy out-of-the-way movie houses that show "experimental" films, arty-type films, documentaries, and obscure foreign language pictures with the sub-titles in pidgin Swahili.
MAD NON-CONFORMISTS enjoy hand-cranked penny arcade machines which contain film classics like the Dempsey-Firpo fight, Sally Rand's Fan Dance, old Ben Turpin comedies, and Tom Mix pre-adult westerns.
I kind of feel like real Zen practice may be for MAD non-conformists. It's fun and cool to learn a few of the trappings of Zen and show off to people who don't know any better. It's not hard to learn how to ape the Hollywood stereotype of what a Zen guy is supposed to be. But it takes a MAD non-conformist to really do what must be done. You have to be just a bit crazy. Or cracked. Or, uh, National Lampoon....?
I know there's gonna be people in the comments section going, "But I don't own a pet octopus or watch Ben Turpin movies! Are you saying I can't be real Zen????" Or variations thereof. Go for it.
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Also, I know that a lot of people don't read the comments to this blog. Which is generally a good thing. Though they've been getting much better lately. So I thought I'd share something here that I posted in the comments section. To wit: I'd like to comment on some of the "benefits of an on-line sangha" posted by James:
- Regular access, no matter where you are.
• This creates too much dependence on the teacher. Things that are too convenient tend to weaken people and make them unable to do stuff for themselves. A teacher or sangha should not be so readily available. It's better to have to work for it. It wouldn't be good for someone in therapy to have 24/7 access to their therapist. It'd be a nightmare for the therapist and it wouldn't do the patient much good either. And while Zen is not therapy, I think it may be useful to make the comparison in terms of access.
- Expanded access to much more information and many more teachings than would be available in person.
• Encourages people to be over-intellectual. You don't really need that much information. Most of us have far more information than we can ever process anyway.
- Your choice of teacher, instead of just the teacher who’s closest to you geographically.
• Sometimes choice is the worst thing you can have. I certainly would not have chosen Nishijima Roshi if I'd had a world of Zen Masters only a mouse click away. And that would have been a shame. I really do not believe in random chance. To my way of thinking, and from my experience, there is always a reason you are geographically close to those you're geographically close to. Ignoring or avoiding those near you leads to alienation and loneliness.
- Communication is recorded and saved (via video and forums) so the teacher is held responsible for his or her words.
• Would life really be better if every bit of communication we ever had with anyone was a matter of record, available to be re-examined and re-thought-through, re-interpreted, second guessed, shared with others who were not there when it happened and have no business knowing it? It seems to me a lot of people these days think so and are making efforts to move in that direction.
Some kinds of communication are better left unrecorded. Recordings don't preserve very much of what was shared by people no matter how detailed they are. It's one of the most confused and damaging myths of our time to believe that they do. Someone who was not involved in a conversation can't really know the content of it just by watching a video tape.
This may, in fact, be one of the main reasons an on-line Zen teacher can never be anything like a face-to-face teacher.
When I first started working on what was to become Hardcore Zen, I had an idea that part of the book would consist of conversations between me and Nishijima Roshi. We'd had a lot of really interesting ones in the past, so I thought I'd preserve them.
In order to do this I brought a tape recorder with me and would turn it on when we started talking. To my surprise, the conversations when the recorder was switched on were never the same. That intimacy was gone. The tape recorder became a third person in the room. No. Not a third person, even. It became a potential audience of who knows how many. It was no longer a person-to-person conversation, or even a tight manage-a-trois. It was a performance for an audience. And that's a very different thing. I never used those tapes. My memories of our truly one-to-one conversations were far better.
When you're conversing in some manner that can be preserved and recorded, you're not as free to speak openly as you are when there is no potential audience. Sure, OK, maybe that means a teacher can hit on a student when nobody's watching and then deny it later. But, really, that's hardly the only kind of thing that people share and want to keep private. And, in spite of all the books and net postings it's really not a major component of teacher/student relations in Zen.
Things aren't always private for nefarious reasons. In fact most of the time when something is kept private, there's nothing scandalous about it at all. It's just that the participants know that others would be likely to misunderstand what was said because they wouldn't be aware of a whole world of context outside of the conversation.
In this sense, all conversations held via any kind of media that can be preserved have to -- they absolutely must -- lose the true intimacy necessary for genuine deep communication. Accountability comes with a very high price.
*****
Can you believe I wrote all that while I should be having fun seeing London? The things I do for you people!
