On Spiritual Schwagging

Schwag aside, Brad Warner’s poetry blows. This you can clearly see from his blog post today, “Spiritual Schwag.” http://www.hardcorezen.blogspot.com/

However, the guy’s ideas, I generally like. Warner comes across as needing to do the spiritual masquerade less than most and I respect that.

What is “schwag?” you might be asking. Well, I’m getting old and I live deep in the fly-over, so I had to look it up. Merriam Webster doesn’t have a listing. The Urban Dictionary, however (something I use quite often at work because I don’t understand the precise meaning of about 25% of what young urban people say these days), has this:

Term used to describe low grade marijuana. This type of marijuana is usually brown, seedy, dry. The term is also used by many pot heads to describe anything that is low grade.

Warner may not mean it that way and may not even be a pot head but it seems to fit with his point – a lot of people seem to become spiritual teachers in our nauseating times in order to get high by providing low-grade entertainment. Or if you prefer psycho-speak, you might say spiritual teachers sometimes get their needs met by the size of their group (or maybe the size of their schwag but I’m sounding too much like Hardcore Zen now).

However, only about ten people show up for Hardcore sittings – 5 or so more than usually show up out here on my dead end wild fox street. Warner says that if 75 people showed up, 65 would be there to be entertained and the rest would be, well, the same 10 that show up now.

As recovering schwag and collector of schwag, it seems to me that his comments really roll up into one big joint. The metaphor there might not work but I’m trying to say that from my experience, he’s smoked it.

Zen (as zazen) isn’t what most people seem to want. Talk about it, yes. Hang out in a nice building in a beautiful part of town with others that like to talk about it, yes. Hear an erudite sermon by some gas bag, yes. Identify as a group “member,” yes. Play with projecting a spiritualized ego, yes again.

In Maslowian terms, lots of dharma centers (aka, Buddha churches) these days seem to be about offering to meet “belongingness” needs in exchange for donations. If we take the bait, we’re schwag.

When its our turn to die, nobody can help us. And if we’ve used this life to sit in circles with a bunch of posers sharing our ideas instead of actually taking full responsibility and sitting up-flipping-right, we haven’t done our work but rather depended upon a group of confused people, or worse yet, Dogen or some other seemingly alive spiritual guide to do the work.

But it isn’t them that’s gotta die now.