I have a new article up on the safe-for-work Suicide Girls blog. It's called I Resent My High School. Click on the words I Resent My High School and you will magically be flown there to see it. It's free. There are no naked pictures there to destroy your purity either!
It's another piece of confessional writing in the style of some of what's in my book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. One hopes in writing such directly personal things that it resonates with other people's experiences and feelings. But when you write like this, you always risk coming off sounding like, "Oh woe is me! My life is so horrid! Look at how horrid it is! Look! Look!"
But I'm really influenced by records like John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band and Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, where the songwriter bares his soul in a very personal way. Even though I was never a member of The Beatles or a Greenwich Village folksinger turned superstar, I still found those songs really compelling. And not in a voyeuristic way of being all like, "Oh John Lennon thinks religion sucks" or something. It was more that I could relate to the directness of it as an expression of what all people go through.
In case any of the people involved in my high school reunion are reading this, I'll say again, this is not what I "really think" of you. It's just a part of what goes through my head when faced with the prospect of seeing people from Wadsworth High School again.
To say it's what I "really think" would be to imply that of all the thoughts that pass through my skull about the reunion, the ones in the article are the ones I've chosen to believe and to call "mine." That's what we do a lot of the time. I do it too.
But what I'm trying to express here is that the Zen practice has allowed me the space to be able to step back a bit from that process. None of what goes through my head is what I "really think" in the sense that I am obliged to hold fast to it and establish it as my position on a given subject. And that, of course, is not just true for me. It's true for all of us.
But we've been taught very thoroughly that this is the way to respond to thoughts. We are taught to select certain of our thoughts and adhere to those. We thereby establish a specifically defined and rigid personality. That's where most of our problems stem from. But we don't know this process is even a source of our difficulties let alone the major source of them.
I am not perfect in my skill at allowing thoughts to pass without getting caught in making them "mine." I still do it a lot. But mostly when I do it now I can see myself doing it and know that it is not necessary. But the deeper the level of attachment you have to a certain type of reaction to a certain type of situation, the harder that can be.
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In the comments section on that last piece someone said, "In your book Sit Down and Shut Up, you seem to emphasize the importance of finding a teacher (ch. 5, Zazen by Alone). Here you say don't worry about it. Do these two ideas contradict each other, or is there something I'm not seeing (in which case my 'not seeing' list is that much longer)? Thanks."
It's hard to express this just right. Yes, to study Buddhism you need a teacher. But you do not need a teacher to practice zazen. Someone in the comments section said something like, "Don't let lack of a teacher be an excuse not to practice." I agree.
Zazen can be a solitary practice or a group practice. For Buddhist study you need some kind of a mentor, even if that person doesn't have specific certification to teach Buddhism (though I think that's generally -- but not always -- better). Without a teacher there's too much danger of going off in some bizarre tangent.
It's a bit like what I was talking about earlier in this article. Some of your habitual reactions you are not aware of until someone says something to you about them.
I was not aware that I eat my cereal obnoxiously loudly until one of my roommates complained about it. This is because for most of my life I've eaten my cereal alone. When I eat breakfast with others it's never cereal, and even when I was married I almost always woke up earlier than my wife and I still ate it by myself.
In Buddhist study there are some things you simply cannot judge by yourself because, as in my cereal-eating, you have no criteria. My cereal-eating doesn't sound any quieter to me now that I make sure to close my mouth when I chew than it did before. It might even be a little louder to me. But my roommates don't complain when I chew it with my mouth closed.
It's sort of like that.
