The Scholarship of Self-Consciousness: An Introduction to How I Am

When I gave up poetry, it wasn’t that I stopped writing it, but that I stopped believing in it. It was too loose, emotional, abstract to be good. I had to ask myself “What do I know of the world” and in fact I didn’t know much. I didn’t know, until 28, what wainscoting was.

Of course, I knew about the wars, I knew about some religions, I was a reader of literature and critical theory so I knew some things about language and meaning. But I didn’t know how to identify types of wood or cars or how to fix plumping. I had lived in Oregon, Cape Town, Albany, Rochester, and Philadelphia, and I couldn’t tell you the populations of any of these places, or even the names of restaurants near my apartment.

I had read thousands of books and couldn’t remember the names of characters or what exactly had happened to them. I wasn’t one for dates or names or rote facts and I couldn’t retrieve information quickly when I needed it. It was for this reason that I stayed away from grad school after a short stint. I could understand the complex terrain of theory…I could not remember the names of books and their writers.

It seems, upon reflection, a sort of idiocy, a sort of interesting psychological retardation, an almost willful obtuseness, because, of course, I could remember these things if I simply made a point to.

But a part of me resisted the solid facts of the world, as if they were weights that anchored too much, keeping me from floating through the ether, keeping me from the grand vistas I aspired to where everything was harmonious, where entire systems showed themselves to me, where the abstract terrain of emotion, symbol, meaning became apparent through a sort of distortion of normal vision. The magic eye books made sense to me that way. I had to lose track of the world in order to see its secrets.

I had a friend in college who once mentioned an idea for a story. The way he presented, it you could tell that he wasn’t sure if it was inspired or stupid. He imagined a girl in a mall looking at a display of a magic eye picture. This was in 1997 when malls did that sort of thing. Then, there’s a guy staring at her and somehow the magic eye is staring at him. I’m not sure why this image stuck with me. It’s rather facile and the triangle motif has certainly been done before and much better, by O Henry and others.

But when I think of it further, I see that her staring at the magic eye is not a staring, but a blurring so that she can see the sailboat or flower. And so is his gaze on her not a staring, but a blurring, not a fascination with her form, as would seem the role of most college guys, but a blurring of the eyes to see what pattern emerges. This, of course, is where we get into realms of intuition, spirituality, symbol, and art. What he sees, if he sees correctly, which can take a while or happen immediately, is what this moment is in the context of his larger life and what that life is in the context of the larger world. What it would mean to have the magic eye watching him was never discussed. Although I supposed the hidden image could be an actual eye that appears to be gazing over her shoulder at him. The magic eye within the magic eye. The gaze that appears within the gaze. When I am looking, becoming aware I am looking, and looking at myself looking. Stamping a big eye on my forhead like an Egyptian prince. I GAZE. I gaze on my gazing. You get it? No, neither do I.

But it is important to try. At least, it feels important to try. And there’s nothing much more seductive than the scholarship of self-consciousness. It’s the stuff of coffee houses and the most obvious marriage between post-adolescent angst and academics. It was my life for a number of years. I wanted to understand my consciousness and the consciousness of the world. I turned to literary theory the way some turn to religion. I read each new book like a Christian child reads Genesis: with wonder and the thought, “so this is how is how it all began.”

A good theory of history, literature, art, though always just a theory in the end, nonetheless has the quality that the stage director Ann Bogart wrote good art has: it stops you in your tracks. Theory takes the programming of our world, from culture to custom to law to valuation, and anything that humans do, and says, “Here. This is a program, or many programs working on each other. Here is how they do it. Here is how you are a part of it and perpetuate this.”

Good theory can wake you up the way a meditative breakthrough can: slicing through layers of bullshit until you see the real methods and movements of your life. But, like in Buddhism, seeing clearly can be devastating and should be attempted with a proper amount of detachment and guidance. The zen teacher and writer Charlotte Joko Beck warns that some students of zen move quickly and peer into the emptiness of reality too soon, without working their way up to it, and that this can be devastating to those who aren’t ready for it, who haven’t sat still with reality so long that the truth is in their bones as well as their brain. It seems to me that if something is in your brain but not your bones, that’s when trouble starts to happen.

It’s because I value truth so highly that I see my myopic fuzziness with a certain dismay. Although a good theory really can illuminate life the way passing a koan can, a theory remains a way of seeing, while passing a koan means you actually are different. Have the theory books I’ve read changed me? Yes. But they are still programs that dismantle other programs. Just being, whatever that ultimately means, no matter how goddamn impossible it is to do in any sustained way, is what life IS. As soon as I conceptualize life, I have, as the ancient Eastern saying goes “a finger pointing at them moon.”

And so I have become an excellent finger-pointer. I can point really, really well for someone my age. I keep pointing at this moon, and feeling empty. I want the moon, but it is so far away.

“Always,” as Whitman wrote, “the procreant urge of the world.”

The world urges on with its grasses and great trees, with its eroding mountains and corroding buildings. But the interior life urges on too. And it feels like an urging toward answers. But where are they? 20 thousand years of human history and not a single answer yet. To what question? Does God exist? Why are we here? Why should life feel like an empty cup always waiting to be filled if, indeed, it cannot be filled? Why do we suffer the pain of regret of the past and fear of the future? Always TV and art and history and lanuage and church and more TV and food to say “you are comforted my child” but this is temporary.

And long before TV and church, but not before good or art or history or language, people in India asking these same questions, and trying to answer the question of suffering with the answer of Buddhism. Accept that life is suffering, that suffering is caused by desire, etc. etc. etc. It is 3,000 years later and most of the world runs on a desire-based economic system. Fantasies, distractions, fears, promises, all for a price, all promising freedom from suffering. And the method of zen Buddhism sort of smiles ruefully and says, “Just sit with it.”

I want to stop suffering. But I don’t want to give up my theories. I certainly don’t want to give up my fantasies, especially the fantasy of my big brain figuring everything out. But there is a way, if we remember that gaze that sort of spreads out over its object to see beyond it, there is a way to find love in the strangest of places. And when I say love, I mean the purposeful being with life as it is.

The things of the world we can see and notice and note and place. “This chair is a chocolatey, wood color. It has a round seat, like a captain’s chair. Its grains run horizontally. The seat is connected to the back by eight short poles, each carved at the middle into a knob.”

As I note this chair I realize that someone had, at one time, sat down and considered how to design this chair, what pattern to carve into these beams and so on. I realize that I never really look at this chair and appreciate its knobs and color and shape.

I suddenly feel remorse, which appear as a tighteneing in my chest and upper arms and a slight shortening of my breath. The accompanying thoughts are: “I didn’t see this chair. I must not see many things. Am I missing my life? What does this mean about me?”

I take a deep breath. These little moments happen constantly. I noticing, an experiencing, a thought, a judgment. When I’m driving through Philadelphia in my car, they happen at such a rapid rate that I have to shut down as much as possible. What does remain is the experience of frustration and anxiety, and the judgment of others and myself. I swear and yell. I have no pity and no patience. I have to be alert and fast and I have to stop every couple minutes for a light and then negotiate pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers coming at me. Just thinking about it I feel the stricture in my chest, this time of anger. And then the thought, “I am so angry. I don’t want to be so angry.” And the judgment “I’m a bad person, other people have road rage too. There are more bad people today than there used to be this is a big problem. We really need to do something about it.”

But I don’t know what to do about it. What do we do about the way we react to our parents, to people who we despise or who despise us? How do we react to distasteful experiences, to negative memories that creep up again and again. It’s a million different facets of the same stone. What can I do about this thing that is in my life that I don’t want?

You immediately want to say “Get rid of it.” Magic words. “Get rid of it. Rid of the road rage, rid of the bag memories, rid of the suffering.” And indeed, you can. It’s quite an effective trick. But, consciousness is watery and the effects of the trick drift away, like firework ashes in the Delaware.

The Zen Buddhists say you get rid it of by “sitting with it” as I was doing before. And when the thoughts come up, as they inevitably will, you simply return to the chair, or the wall, or the spot on the carpet, or the space between of hearing, seeing, feeling.

When we are in the world, studying it, paying attention to it as it is, or existential suffering moves to the backseat. The sky is beautiful and we know it is, but we don’t know what to do with this knowing. Is experiencing this beauty enough? Why do some kinds of beauty make us sad? Or better put, why do we make ourselves sad when we experience certain kinds of beauty?

There is the sky, there is the experience of it as beautiful and/or sad, but there is, before the thousandth ‘beautiful’ sky we see and sort of nod to, there is the sky as it is. Not beautiful, not ugly, but a complete miracle. These things have been said and written for thousands of years. This is not new. But it is new to me, because I live in a world of naming and have not been able to see things as they are since I was a child. I did not want the world to keep its secrets, so I challenged it to open up to me.

What I found was that I saw enough so that I could never be normal, yet I didn’t see enough so that I could transcend my smallness. I heard the sad poems of October in the trees, I saw the ruins of civilizations in the falling leaves, I wandered halls of schools, teeming with strangers who wished me ill and I could not reconcile the cruelty of my peers to the life of nature, except when I saw a well-fed housecat stalking a bird mercilessly.

I made myself sensitive to the cruelties of my peers. I made myself a cage of their limitations. I became like them, or maybe we became like we believed each other to be. I became cruel and haughty and intermittently kind and Christian. I was sensitive to all ill will and blind to hidden good will. I thought the world a terrible place. I imagined I had appeared here from another planet and longed to go home to my people.

When I wrote, I wrote of my wish for popularity and my love for a certain boy, whose name always changed. I wrote of my conflicts with friends and enemies, parents, siblings, teachers. Even as I wrote, I could hear the artifice in my voice. Were these really my feelings? Were these really the things I thought? No. But I had no means to articulate the complex troubles beneath my daily eruptions. I knew this, even as I wrote, but could only sum it up as: “Life sucks.” Or, if I wanted to throw the magic penny of positivity out there: “I know I have a lot to be grateful for. Things will get better.”

Things did get better. I received words and books and the blessing of certain parts of the brain that finally develop by age 25 and allow a kind of certainty about life to arise, as well as an ability to analyze the past and thereby separate ourselves from it emotionally.

And then, when I almost drowned in analysis, the flows of emotions returned to my body with renewed vigor.

Le corps est le corps. Il est seul, et n’a pas besoin d’oragne. Le corps n’est jamais une organism. Les organisms sont les enemies du corps. –Antonin Artaud

The body is the body. It is alone, and does not need an organ. The body is never an organism. Organisms are the enemy of the body.

What does this mean? I memorized it on my way to Florida last Thanksgiving. I painted it on a smallish rectangular canvas and it hangs in my room. I read it in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and considered it deeply, trying to connect it to the difficult concept of the body without organs.

Organisms are the enemy of the body. Is this because organisms decay the body? It is important here, of course, to remember that all this is both literal and figurative. It is the physical body of me and of other objects, and it is also the body of everything. The organs, also represented as ‘desiring machines’ are those processes that keep the organs moving, the shitting and spitting, the decaying and birthing, the unstatic nature of the universe, everything moving into everything else, bit by bit. There is that fundamental unstable nature of the universe, and there is it the provisional truth of it’s apparent solidness and stability. And there are the abstract entities like capital, which has a body, a being, but also continuous movement.

These are my thoughts at this very moment on a thousand page book. Where they take me, where I take them.

If we begin to sense the world as made up of these flows, we can also start to sense money as a flow, objects, energies, attentions as flows, and we can start to open up the flow of them into our lives. The traditional view of self, others, work, and money as static things doesn’t take into account the strange thing we have called ‘luck’ but is really just being open to knowing where your heart is pulling you and what the wind says.

These are things I’m starting to learn, and that I want to believe. The leap from quantum physics to personal power is seductive, popular, and is still a pretty big leap. We still cannot full explain thought and its power what power it can have beyond our interior landscapes. It is hard to measure the actual effect our thoughts have on the world, besides small-level attitudinal changes. But humans have always wanted to believe that wishing can make it so. All the new-age gurus espouse the power of intention, or positive thinking.

Sometimes I feel like I’m half blind, half seeing; or half-mortal, half-magic, but just can’t seem to throw that other leg over the fence. I want to believe in this power of conviction, that just knowing something to be true can make it true. There is much in me that resists this, and so I rail at others who resist it. They scare me because I see myself in them. I call them small minded and provincial, pathetic and unseeing. I do this because I fear these things in myself.

Do I miss my youth? No. Do I feel regret for lost happiness? That is harder to answer. I feel a sort of pride in my struggles. I feel I have at least not lived a superficial life. I have not lived an unexamined life. I have tried to learn the secret of happiness and come across some true wisdom in this path, and sometimes true happiness. I have also almost driven myself mad with repeating thoughts, sometimes so bound of in complex emotions and wrong thinking, bad logic, and fear that I could not rightfully be called introspective, but instead, delusional. I look back over what I consider the terrain of my life, its bumps and valleys. I feel it like a 3-D relief map.

I can feel there are pulls in certain valleys, steep like funnels, sucking like blackholes, where parts of me still remain, where I went farther than I ever had and in some ways never came back. Places where I am still 21 or 12.

But this terrain is the terrain of my perceptions of my life. It takes no account of other people’s lives, it groups together hours and days and months and calls them one emotion, one color, I think back to an apartment I had on the edge of the woods and I remember a view from the window, the feeling of lying in bed there, my heart races a little and once again the tightening in the chest of anxiety.

Almost all my memories bring me anxiety. Is this normal? Even moments without obvious conflict? Why is this? It is the feeling of something undiscovered, some secret, unseen, below the moment that I could not grasp and was only vaguely aware of. I look back on my past and remember mostly anxiety. But really, maybe this is the nature of life, the thing that books leave out.

The fact that is every moment the future arrives unknown and though the past should be a secure place, a place where nothing can any longer change, that it nonetheless feels empty and insecure. Is this natural, is it this the effect of the way I live my life, half in, half out. I live life through the mirror of my interpretations and perceptions. I don’t see the moon, but I see me seeing the moon and what this means about me. But, when I can give up my fantasies, even more a second, I am exactly as I am: illuminated, dying, waxing, waning, in pure existence.

Live Free or Die

There is a debt we pay that is not ours.

But I want to live free.

We give more to the world than we ask. And what we give is the thing is each of us that makes life ours: autonomy.

I am an adult, and yet I find the abusive mother and demanding father in all my bosses and their institutions, in the policeman anyone who would hold power over me because I am lead to believe I want something from them.

Leave wanting and you are free. Or keep wanting, but want what you can give yourself: which is everything. Everything that you are seeking out there: comfort, ease, laughs, beauty, meaning. You sell your hours and your self-respect for a small cube of space to eat your macaroni and cheese. The New Hampshirites are right, “live free or die.” But New Hampshirites, like everyone else in this world, suffer the diseases of bondage.

I fought the world long enough by fighting myself. In angry complicity joining the throngs and whipping myself forward like a horse, dangling some carrot like a morning coffee to put some gippyup in my step. All out of fear of what would happen if invoked the wrath of the one who told me I would have nothing without him and his rules.

Society exists because of the complicity of billions of people. We are given no choice, we are given a picture of the world and told “this is it.” The insidious myth of America is that we don’t do this. Because we don’t wrap up our women and hide them away, because we can choose between 150 brands of cereal, we are free.

But freedom is a decision the soul makes. It can be done by anyone at any time. It is done by people in movies and books much more often than in real life, I suspect. It requires self-reliance and the willingness to face the displeasure of others for the autonomy of your own soul.

The world will tell you that you are selfish. You are running away. You misunderstand the nature of freedom. Giving is freedom. Being a part of something bigger is freedom. These sound wise and just counter-intuitive enough to be true. I am not worried about saying the wrong thing. That worry, itself, is a tentacle of that very monster I am unwinding myself from. I am standing still in my life, this very moment, and redirecting my thoughts from their normal train of worry and speculation to a reckoning that THIS ISN’T LIFE. And those who would tell me that it is and the parts of my that echo them and betray me are the same functions in the world that exist to keep society running.

But I believe the truth is this: the dignity of each human life will not lead to anarchy. In fact, I feel more peaceful today than I did yesterday, full of ressentiment and frustration. I have been a scared child too long, asking for the favor of everyone I meet, afraid to look even my peers in the eye. But believing this WAS the world and I should get used to it.

Whatever would have scared me before, I must let go now. There are many worlds that live in me. I have given credence only to the ones I find the most base and therefore the create this monolith because they can’t imagine better. They will not notice that I’ve slipped away unless I come to them and want something from them. And if someone from in there reaches out to take something from me, they will find that I am miles away, ungraspable, with the illusion of nearness. What the world wants from me, I don’t know. I am beginning to think that people only function together to find out the answer to this question, as if the throng of bodies could produce one ringing voice, and that ringing voice could set you straight.

I don’t remember feeling really good about myself since I was too young for it to count.

It’s never enough. No matter what, it’s never going to be enough to achieve and make them all happy and be perky and presentable and smart and sophisticated and order the right wine and speak French well and reveal just the right amount and read the right books and speak about the world in the right way and share angst like a joke and kiss the right ass and pretend I don’t see what I see and pretend I do see what I don’t. It isn’t worth what I buy with this money I sell myself for. Sushi dinners and a false sense of security.

God, I love the world and the world drowns itself in me. The lights of the city dim. I have only one heart. It is dinner than the milky way. It outshines all the stars in the night. I have only one heart and it is beauty and warmth and I have missed out on my own heart for so long.

They say that with freedom comes responsibility. I say that with freedom comes freedom. If it is a high road, if it is a low road, at least it is my road.

What Should We Take Responsbility For?

This is a response to the question of taking responsibility for our lives and how it applies to something like being raped.

If you can imagine: there have been probably millions of rape victims throughout the whole of history. Can you imagine all the different ways that rape has been responded to in each victim? Some have been devastated and committed suicide, some have retaliated with murder, some have retaliated with taking the person to court.

Some have gone to therapy, some have started rape-awareness organizations to help others, so the point is that we can't always control the things that happen to us, but we can control the way we respond to them.

So, does a person who is raped have to feel like a victim for the rest of their life, or can they use the experience to grow in compassion for themselves and others, can they use the experience to empower themselves and others...You have to learn to think more subtly about these things, to really acknowledge the difference between what happens and how we respond to it. Anything can be a blessing if turned into one, anything can be a curse if turned into one.

We live in a paradigm that sets up being in blunt and unsubtle ways. Oftentimes it can be hard to begin the process of separating out the things that happen to us and our response to them. And when someone tells you to do so, your first reaction is, "Well, someone did this to me, someone hurt me...why should I take the responsibility for that?"

The process of transformation usually begins with really seeing how we've been hurt and misused in our lives...it all comes to the forefront and it hurts. It doesn't feel fair that we should take responsibility for our parents hitting us, or being dumped, or how mean kids were in middle school.

But, the farther on this path you go, and the safer you feel in your own skin, the more you can look back at these things and kind the value in them. And you can see that although these things happened to you, they are over, long over, yet you still suffer from them. Why? Because you made them mean something about you, and now every day you re-create in your mind a life in which these things have happened to you and they mean something about you. So, in a way, now you are the one hitting yourself, being mean to yourself, rejecting yourself.

I have had to think about this a lot, because my mom was a tyrant when I was young and I can trace most of my deepest fears back to those times. But I'm 28. She hasn't even lifted a hand to me in many, many years...in fact, she's the most loving, settled person now. Yet, when I get nervous, scared, sad...I can easily blame those years, when the world wasn't safe for me and blame her. Sometimes I do...and that's okay.

But that blame doesn't help me. It just continues to make me a victim. It doesn't really help me to become free. What I have to acknowledge...and it's a process that has and will continue to happen in stages...is that I made a story about what being hit as a child meant about me, i.e. that

I was bad, weak, that the world was bad and scary, that I couldn't trust the people who were supposed to love me, that confrontation had to always be painful, that I couldn't do anything right...etc. etc. etc. and so as I grew up, whenever anything related to these ideas happened, I used it to reinforce these "truths" about myself. It takes a lot of psychic power to continually reproduce these stories every day, that is part of what has made just simply living so difficult.

Most people never know they have a story, much less that the story is a lie and can be overcome. Overcoming the story is the work of a lifetime, but it's the only way to become free. You can become free of your diagnosed mental/emotional problems, and that's something that psychology and medicine doesn't understand. I would submit that your borderline schizophrenia and your manic depression can both be overcome with time, if you can learn to be who you really are in every moment, and not your story.

The crux here, especially for those who tend toward the over-analytical, is that it can't be solved with our minds. And so, all these words here are just words. Our mind is a function of the small self and therefore a function of the same self that is built on a "story." There is no 'figuring it out' with this little mind. We have to return to the breath, to be in the moment, to chant, to learn to change in our very being, not just in the mind. That is why meditation and chanting are so much more profound than thinking and reading about this stuff. Thinking and reading is just the finger pointing at the moon.

Exteriority vs. Interiority

Exteriority is either forced on us (usually through fear of not dealing with the tangible pressures of daily life) or we choose it (by radically embracing the tangible pressures through inspiration, vision, compassion…making the decision to thrive instead of just survive. The problem with exteriority is that we don't have many real forums to express our frustrations in today's society.

At one time, if you were trying to accomplish something and were consistently thwarted by someone, there was either no recourse at all (because of class structure) or there were ways to physically deal with them (sword fight, clan feud, battle ax). Although we live in an age of dialogue, the real problems, I think, aren't with other people, but institutions. We can dialogue all we want with each other, but inevitably our movements are very constricted. We have no real recourse to address or even tangibly engage power unless we create it ourselves. In the past, institutions were just as stodgy as they are now, but people could hack each other up. Now, we're not allowed to fight each other and we certainly aren't allowed to fight the institutions.

When I say "aren't allowed," what I mean is we are bound by our faux civility and the cultural disdain toward personal violence and anger. What we end up with is these muted but pervasive dramas: road rage, apathy, and suicide: the kind of alienation so perfectly exemplified by Kafka.

I would surmise that external frustration + time to reflect = interiority.

My well-traveled friend, Nick, told me the other day that there are very few windows into other cultures while visiting another country, which can be both freeing and frustrating. It seems to me, therefore, that being in another culture acts as a dramatization of the institution: sets the stage for both intense exteriority and intense interiority, and, as I say this, I am remembering back to my time in South Africa how these two poles vacillated painfully. One day I would be wandering a township, thrilled and afraid, and the next day I would lock myself in my room, depressed and in completely turned inward.

I would conjecture that if our exteriority is full of mostly painful experiences, we will create a space inside to retreat to, and vice versa. The psychological complications come when we interpret our exterior frustrations as somehow being "about us" and then turn our interior life into a painful place as well. I think that's how most people live in the modern world: without any safe place to go to. We reflect on situations that aren't working out for us, to attempt to use the mind to fix what we see as the problems of our lives. We make a problem of our interiority and then become obsessed with it. If what all the Zen and Insight teachers say is true, most people are almost never really present for their lives…always living in the past or the future.

So, to sum it up, absorption in b.s. requires exteriority, but it has been my experience that too much absorption in bs hits a critical mass and then turns back on itself as an alienated interiority. If daily life is full of exteriorities that are pleasant, then retreating from the external world would almost never be necessary.

But we make a problem of exterior life, which then engenders interiority, and then we make a problem of interiority. So, yes, it would make sense a la Deleuze and the Buddha, to stop making a problem of exterior life in the first place. Yet, my problem is with the word "bs" because it implies frustration to me. If it can become just life, without a value judgment, then there would be no problem, and no need to retreat to interiority. Right?

Five-Minute Miracles

It is hard to think which miracles are made in this world. They happen without us knowing; they cannot be differentiated from the rest of phenomenon. Yet we feel them, don’t we, they hit our hearts with an ache of awe. We know what they are, though we don’t see them.

I am mostly dumb. Made of dumb hands and tongue, weak eyes and ears and nose. I grope against a blunted world and know not what I touch. I see only a fuzzy, blurred landscape. So, I turn to myself for a clearer picture. In me are stronger forms, they are home and so they make themselves sharper. I can see the outside world now, the forms of other people take shape, the dark silhouettes of buildings lighten with detail. I can see them, as I see myself.

Then, they fly. With one breath, I am completely in my body, alone again, but this time not dumb. I can see clearly, more clearly than ever before, and I see I am alone.

Then, I am in my terrycloth bathrobe, under green and yellow blankets, in a white room. I feel simple and clean and the room feels simple and clean. The world here is known to me, inside and out.

Suddenly the mind narrows and contracts, like eyes that focus afar. The indigo thoughts peer out into space. Where I once searched for the world, I now search for the universe. I do not bring back anything I can know, but a tingling in the arms, a quickening of the heart. A miracle.

One Last Revolution

We must wait, always. This life is a waiting. A constant and long hesitation, among all the daily hesitations. Life promises, but we don’t know what...but is DOES promise, and we all know that. Life is empty air and a sort of swimming through empty air towards the solidness of dreams, which when neared, break apart like undone jigsaw puzzles, and we see the are partial objects, structured to look connected from a distance, and in between them are enormous spaces that we must continue to float through to the farther fields, where even more solid scenes appear. Life promises solidness. We wait for it all our lives.

What do you do when the answers are right in front of you, but are wrong?

What do you stand on?

Life, like money, is easily spent on the wrong things.

It can be taken apart and reassembled. It can be danced with. It is not up to you to say which someone else should do. It is up to you to be a vulture, circling, and pick at the scraps left for you. It is up to you to pick the bone clean. To be too finicky before life is to misunderstand what you are. But to stand before life naked and blind is for sages and the insane, most of us must aquire armor and corrective lenses. Remember that desire causes itself and that what you loathe you do well to loathe. Trust your perceptions and constantly pick at life, demanding it open up, and if in its opening, you find your desire attaching to what you previously loathed, then realign, realign, realign. There is no God but the God of the Now, and no moral code but the code of correct vision. And the now and its accompanying vision are your most deft tools in the negotiation of correct action. Each is developed by constant vigilance of the heart. If you want to know if a thought is right, drop a coin against it. What sort of ping resonates? Is it taut and clear, does it sing in your heart?

All good is known through the singing of the heart. In the interior, we all know the same moral code, but this code can only exist temporally, and cannot be forcast. If all humans could learn to listen to this voice, there would be one last revolution- and then peace forever.

No moral code may exist outside of the individual. And yet all individuals who know the now and have correct vision share the same fundamental characterstics.

I am happy to know my life is tinged a bit with this hue of infinite profundity.

I am happy to know my heart has witnessed many things and has not turned away yet. Its stories are dark, and yet it doesn’t ultimately despair.

What are we?

What do we do?

What is beyond all this?

We stand before a great opening circle and gape. It gapes back. Its mouth, ever-widening, yawns and gapes, and its diameter inches toward our toes. We are still gaping, unable to move, it is imossible to turn back, to even stand still. We are being beckoned into the dark, and all we can do is meet it, mouth open, eyes open.

It is hard, amidst all of this, to know what it is one does with one’ s life. We do things with things: we kick a red ball, we sew with a sewing machine, we flip a pancake with a spatula, we mow with a lawn mower and push forward products with an assembly line, but what is it we DO with our lives?

Any 10-year old can reason that, as the ancient civilizations in her school book fell to dust, so will ours some day. And even the megalomaniac, in his rare moment of soberness, knows that a name that lives forever is not the same as truly living forever. To live on, even a hundred years after our death, has no meaning to the dead, whose ego cannot be assauged or pleased once it is extinguished.

We do not know what life is. And we do not know what to do with it. So we use it like a spatula, like a lawn mower, like a pen, to flip, cut, inscribe; we occupy ourselves with these small items of movement, and reason that this IS life, and what live offers: DOING, and if we are lucky, LOVING. Life is all to the one living it. And death is incomprehensible. What does it mean to be extinct? It means to have never been.

I look out upon the life ahead of me like a half-ackonlwedged gift, appreciated, and still taken for granted, expected, planned for, dreamed of, unsure in its possibility. Most never awaken to the reality of their own existence. Humans have not taught each other, even after thousands of years, how to live well.

If you summon me, I will come, apprearing in the form of a cloud or a small animal. I am the will that wills fate. I am the call that requires the universe’s answer. I am the response to the sincere song’s question. I am the signs that can only be seen by the seeking. They have said in all your fairy stories that only he who believes shall see. You thought, when you were five, that you would be this person who believed because it was the hero’s way. As you grew, you began to think that he who sees because he believes is a fool and a liar. You said, I see what is there, and if I cannot believe in fairy stories, it is because I am of the real world and intend to stay there.

When life again returns to its rightful place, balanced between your real world and the world of belief, you will once again become a child, and for the first time, a true hero.

Summon your energy now. Summon your strength for the fight ahead. Half of your enemies will be flesh and bone, half with be of the ether and the interior. Use all that is given to you- as much will be given to you- and do not take for granted that many mystic scrolls, parchments of magic words, guides, seers, ghosts, and objects will come to your aid.

Always, there will be a situation in a room, where you want to continue through the door tot he next room and something stands in your way. Always there will be clues as to how to get by. Always you will be both inside and outside, alone and amid an army, near the gravestone and the birth canal. You can change the rules of the game at will, the objective, the hues and tones and parameters that set your stage. You can turn your self into a life machine that plugs in and plugs out from desires, suctioning forth through life pleasure by pleasure. You can deny pleasure for the tiny formulations of modern man’s self-concept, looking to tv and magazines for your behavioiral modifications. You can stay perfectly still in a room for twenty years, hoping no one will notice you.

Whatever you do, know that inside you is a call to happiness, a long call that echos wild through all of time, and it is not too difficult to follow, as it makes itself known when attended to. Sometimes it stakes some years of figuring, but that is mostly because we don’t believe it could really be so...that the purpose of life is to learn what happiness truly is. And to then show others how the dreaming of dreams is possible.

Open to Everything, Attached to Nothing

The mind, which calcifies with age, can only reverse this process by unlearning and staying open. Becoming an expert at life means cutting off most of life. The expert can only see certain things, say certain things, believe certain things. We think we have learned our lessons and keep refining these axioms until we only have one street to walk down, one vista, one friend. There is a sutble but important difference between wisdom and stodginess. What is the difference? Wisdom knows it can only be applied in one moment.

We define ourselves against the categories of people we are introduced to. We define ourselves against others, this is simple enough. But what if I were not to belong to any category? What if I couldn’t be defined against all these others? What if I had no idea who I was or could be, because I had never been given correct information? What if this were the case for all of us? What could we do with this awareness? And how could we remedy this situation?

Strange Principle: My Life

I come from a family of very humble people- the kind of humbleness that is part true humbleness and part fear. I was raised to never brag, to work hard but doubt myself, to be passive in the name of 'going with the flow'.

These values were never overtly spoken, but modeled every day in both my parents. The rationalization was that stating what you wanted and go for it was egocentric, aggressive, too bold.

I come from people who work hard, who get up early on Sundays to go to church and run Sunday School classes, who volunteer blood, sweat and tears to causes that inevitably don't show appreciation back, and who suffer and bide their time, waiting for life's rewards. This is a problem with people around the world, especially with women, and particularly with my family.

I always said, though, I'd rather be humble and not ask for what I want that be a 'bad person' who is selfish.


What I didn't realize is that those aren't our only two options.


When I was 23 I took on leadership roles in the Soka Gakkai that put about six young women under my care. I had what appeared to be a strong practice and lots of faith and determination, but the truth was that I was very unhappy and hoping that I would somehow 'win' happiness by taking care of others. Of course, taking care of others is wonderful, but I did so to the detriment of taking care of my own needs. Eventually I exhausted myself and completely fell out of activities for a year and half, questioning not just my leadership role, but my entire belief in this practice. I had been doing what the gosho warns us again and again not to do—I was placing the law outside myself.


And what I also didn't realize is although I'm not a Christian, I was practicing a Christian-Buddhism, in which by being 'selfless' and by suffering I was somehow cleansing my life, earning my future happiness. Through much sadness, struggle, and daimoku I came to the realization that I don't 'earn' my happiness.

Over the past year, I have regained a profoundly stronger practice and faith, and I feel my greatest lesson was learning to listen to myself and trust my life. If I feel deeply compelled to do something, I do it, if I don't, I don't. I try not to allow myself to be swayed by what other people want or seem to want from me- and no matter what, I try not to place any head above my own.

The beautiful irony of this type of self-reliant practice is that by having great esteem for myself, I can interact with others without having to place them above or below me—I feel secure enough to just be and let others be. I have so much less anxiety than I used to. And I no longer fret over being the perfect Buddhist—I just observe my mind when it becomes agitated and go to the gohonzon—reiterating again and again that, no matter what, my life is 100% respect-worthy.

Becoming More Yourself: The Strange Principle

When we listen to ourselves, when we listen to our own lives, when we fundamentally respect our own lives, we see that we naturally expand with wisdom and right action into our environments.

When we follow the trends, traditions, mores, and rules of others and do what we think others want us to do just for the sake of conformity, we fundamentally disrespect our own lives. Even a thought or action that seems to be noble and selfless can be a bad cause when performed by someone who isn't honoring their own life.

This problem with incorrect practice happens to well-intentioned people who practice this Buddhism all over the world. The following passage was written from a struggling member to Dr. Obo, a member of the doctor’s division who wrote the guidance I will be working from today:

"As you have written I have done my best to do shakabuku up until last year, to promote the World Tribune, gave lots of zaimu, and fought with all my strength. But this year I am fighting illness and I'm on welfare. Why, despite my hard work, are all of these things happening to me?"

Dr. Obo responds that when you say “if I do these things, then I can become happy,” this is a life condition of hunger. You are also expecting something in return, so if you don't overcome your problem you end up resenting the effort you put forth. It is different from the life condition of Bodhisattva.

My happiness is the immediate result of appreciating my existence as is it, because it is. This doesn't mean I stop doing, stop reaching out, stop having goals for myself and others—this means that I do these things as an extension of my own sense of power, wonder, and the pull of earthly desires and my need to fulfill them—not as a system of rewards and punishments. This is not a game—it's not someone out there keeping score. As Dr. Obo writes:

"You accumulate fortune when you rejoice and enjoy whatever you do and when you allow your life to shine as it is. It will become your good fortune. Automatically, others will value your existence."


Question: Do you agree that there might be a connection between being ‘good’ and not valuing one’s own life? How do we often define ‘good’? In what ways can being ‘good’ actually lead to lower life condition?


Dr. Obo writes:
"It's okay that we seem like we are arrogant, or audacious or bold although people might not like it. Yet, if we change our attitude this way, everything strangely starts to open up. I often realize that when I see such cases and people. Conformists are now deadlocked.”


“In observation of many people, conformists, hard working, responsible, caring and altruistic people, mysteriously enough come to a deadlock. Those conforming to other while working hard cannot break through. These altruistic people often face rejection, refusal, being made fun of, and in extreme cases are despised. Serious conformists can’t advance.


“On the contrary, irresponsible, arrogant, and shrewd people are successful in every attempt. Since everything goes well and they are targeted for flattery they become even more successful. This is a very popular phenomenon. While I have encountered various types of people and their lives, I have witnessed many of these cases. What is this all about? Earnest people are fooled and the villains get fattened up.”

He expresses this phenomenon as the “Strange Principle.” "Strange” means Myo and “Principle” is Ho. Thus, people who neglect the entity of the Mystic Law lose fortune. People who shine their entity of the Mystic Law multiply fortune. The question is what way you are. Simply, it is either way. It is whether you shine in your life, and the direction in which you enjoy living, or a direction in which you disrespect yourself. Dr. Obo writes:

"Gohonzon means the object of fundamental respect. President Ikeda's guidance said, "What do we fundamentally respect? It is one's life. Our life has the highest value. It is the foundation of respect. The respect of one's life, therefore, can not be based on whether one succeeds or fails. No matter what happens, we must start from respect. This is the meaning of embracing the Gohonzon."

“If serious people, kindhearted people, good people, and warmhearted people speak up and stand up for justice and create momentum, selfish people will automatically feel uncomfortable and eventually vanish. President Makiguchi once said, only if we create this can we have the “era of humanistic competition.”

Question: Can irresponsible, arrogant, and shrewd people really gain fortune the way Dr. Obo says they do? If so, why? And how can good people empower and respect themselves without becoming irresponsible, arrogant, and shrewd?