This American presidential campaign season has been something of an emotional roller coaster. And, then I think, oh, my, we are only tailing in to the end of the primaries…
Sadly, among many of my friends, the predominant emotions are anger and rage. Hope has tended to be in short supply. Fear on the other hand has rolled like wave after wave. And right below that, the deep sea for many has been despair.
Good old Merriam-Webster defines despair as “to no longer have any hope or belief that a situation will improve or change.” And, of course, despair is also a transitive verb, an action in and of itself. It is, in short, a way to live.
For me as I look out into the world, I get it.
I actually have more hope for the short term than many of my intimates, I have more confidence in some of our politicians and the range of the possible than many of my friends do.
But, so far as the long term is concerned, I in fact do agree with those who think we’re screwed. In the collective, as human beings, homo sapiens, I think we are doomed. My reasons are many. I will not rehearse them here at this moment. But whatever the specifics the reality is, as the Buddha observed, all things made of parts, will come apart. And, that means everything. As I creep toward my sixty-eighth birthday the personal and intimate is more to the front. But as far as human beings go we seem a text book example of success carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Over population and ecological catastrophe seem to go hand in hand, and with that hand in hand, on over the cliff. Increasingly I feel more likely sooner than later.
Sad. Frustrating, you would think we could do better. And seeing that we seem unable to, well, despair seems a totally reasonable response.
And.
I was talking with a friend who is pretty much at one with the despair thing. And the topic turned just a tiny bit. She said that she didn’t see any reason we should survive. Having considered this I replied that I think “reason” in the sense she was using it, “justification,” to use a more classical theological term, are words that probably don’t really fit. And with them words like “good” and “evil,” while things we very much live with in our lives, are at the same time all constructs of our human minds.
The real is concerned with different things.
Here I found myself thinking about that old Zen koan. It comes from the early Twelfth century Chinese anthology of Zen stories, the Blue Cliff Record. It’s the sixth story in the collection and it’s all about awakening.
Yunmen asked his assembly, “I don’t ask you about before the 15th of the month. Tell me something about after the 15th.” No one spoke, so he responded himself, “Every day is a good day.”
This isn’t a complete non sequitur. The 15th is the time of the full moon, and is a common metaphor in East Asia for the moment of awakening. Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to note that Yunmen lived in harsh, politically unstable times, where armies were on the march and famine and hunger and danger the common currency of the day. The possibility of bad endings was more along the line of a probability. So it would be very hard to find the phrase “every day is a good day” as meaning “don’t worry, be happy.” This good day carries with it the possibility if not the probability of ending very badly.
Now a koan is a term of art in Zen having to do with an object for meditation and encounter with a teacher. And, just to muddy the waters, the word koan has also entered popular use within our English language usually meaning a thorny problem, or, for those a little more familiar with it as a spiritual thing, as a question that has no answer, a non sequitur. Neither use is what koan really means, at least within the context of a traditional Zen spiritual discipline. Although I like the mess it brings to the encounter. Non sequitur, after all, presents things in juxtaposition in a way that someone thinks is meaningful, but is not. And, in that sense, at least, we’re actually on to something.
But its that primary sense that is most important: a koan is a statement about reality, and is an invitation into presence. Or, another way to say it, a koan is a pointer to the real, the deepest real, and with that an invitation to come and stand in that place.
And this is most important. It is within presence we find our awakening, our waking up from the slumber of a life that has been distracted from the most important matters. We slumber with our apparently endless desires. We slumber as we grasp after things. We slumber with our anger and hatred. We slumber as we figure something out as true and defend, fiercely that idea of that true, sometimes even to the death. Sometimes our own, too often someone else’s.
And we slumber when we are carried along by emotions like despair. There are facts on the ground that support the view that we are all on a path toward death. You. Me. The whole species. But. Despair is being carried along by a story of loss and pain.
Waking up is waking to something different.
Waking up is waking up from all this grasping at wanting and resenting and hating, and knowing for sure, into something else. And, and this is most important: this waking up is also our common human experience. It comes to us as Christians. It comes to us as Jews. It comes to us as Muslims, as Hindus, as Buddhists. It comes to us without any religion at all.
Awakening can be experienced a number of ways.
Annie Dillard tell us, “We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”
That works. I find this a true accounting.
And for me and my own experience, I think of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna pressures Krishna to show his real self. Krishna warns him that is something he probably doesn’t really want. But, Arjuna persists. And Krishna does, burning brighter than ten thousand suns, as the pages sing to us “Lo, I come as death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Nothing sweet. Nothing nice.
The real. Is.
No space for despair here. Nor, of course, for hope. If we turn in to the real, everything burns. Hope burns. Despair burns.
And, awakening is getting real. Right into the flames of those ten thousand suns. And brighter.
Eternity and a moment.
And, of course, then what? Here we are. There are still bills to pay. Things to do. And. You are dying. I am dying. Our species is dying. The world is dying.
And, there are those ten thousand suns burning bright.
Getting real is not missing both things.
And the art for all of us, after seeing true, is finding ways to live with the many truths, but most of all with the fire. Burning bright.
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