I used to work with someone I did not like. To be in a meeting with him drove me crazy. As soon as he spoke I began to squirm and eventually to seethe. No matter that a lot of people agreed with me that this guy was a "jerk", I knew that my reaction was out of proportion, and I had to work on it to see what it said about ME. I sat with it for several days, trying to narrow my distress down to a single characteristic that bothered me. I eventually realized that what really got my goat was that (I felt that) he was lazy. And even worse, he got away with it. No one challenged him or made him do his fair share.
Once I had gotten to the crux of what characteristic irritated me, I had to turn it back on myself. How was I in the laziness department? The opposite. Miss Compulsive Worker. Stay up all night to finish a project. Do it myself rather than delegate to someone else. Haven't allowed myself to take a non-working vacation in 15 years. Suddenly I realized that I was actually jealous of this man. He was "lazy" and I never let myself even relax. I'd stumbled onto an idea of who I was and how I had to be busy, productive, compulsive. As soon as I realized this, my excess emotion at him dissolved, and I was able to leave "him" and go back to work on me.
Anger is a very good koan, enabling us to step back a little from our self- notion and see where we are attached. Do we have to do anything about what we discover? I don't know. Depends. Often just stepping back to see something is enough. Often just becoming aware of something, like a little piece of our notion of self, means the beginning of the end of that something. Many koans show evidence that Zen teachers used anger skillfully to poke at their students' addictions, unbalance them and help them step "off the top of a hundred foot pole".
Another example. A student came to me in sesshin, unsure if she should work on Zen koans because she was a Catholic. I asked her if she had any questions within Catholicism which were bothering her. She said that she had been worried over the question "Is there anything outside the will of God?" Perfect koan! She 'worked intently on it all sesshin. In Zen terms we could re-phrase it, "Is there anything outside of Buddha nature?" Is jealousy outside the will of God? Is child abuse outside the will of God? Is a toilet brush outside of Buddha nature?

Jan Chozan Bays

“It’s fun to laugh at a hypocrite, and recent years have given Americans a great deal to laugh at…Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return. With contempt you don’t need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And best of all, contempt is made to share…Tell an acquaintance a cynical story that ends with both of your smirking and shaking your heads and voila, you’ve got a bond.”
“Well, stop smirking. One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and eras is that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of others’ hypocrisy we only compound our own. Social psychologists have recently isolated the mechanisms that make us blind to the logs in our own eyes. The moral implications of these findings are disturbing; indeed, they challenge our greatest moral certainties. But the implications can be liberating, too, freeing you from destructive moralism and divisive self-righteousness.”
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, pp. 59-60.

bread & water

can so easily be

toast & tea

Nunc caepit, Domine, nunc caepit.

Now I begin, O Lord, now I begin.


Perservering in the practice of love.....and prayer requires us to repeat this over and over. Kevin Hunt, a Trappist from St. Joseph's Abbey, says this has been an invocation of monks for centuries. Today is a new day. Let us begin again.

I find myself easily caught by the enticements of secular consumer culture: new cars and tables and shampoo all do make me feel much better about myself, and even provide a more secure sense of my false self, but this self is fleeting. It needs to continue to be upheld by neverending amounts of stuff.

One of the other stay at home dads, Ted, was a lawyer. He worked at a firm downtown and had graduated from U of M law school. Ted keeps up with seven of his fellow classmates all of whom moved to Chicago and got jobs at big law firms. All seven of them either have a drug/drinking problem and/or are divorced. But they all drive nice cars and have plasma TVs.

How much of what I buy do I truly need? How much of our lives are spent working for empty stuff that doesn't satisfy on any level?

A poet, Andrei Codrescu, had a short piece on NPR's All Things Considered. While I am always pondering these ideas, this piece spured yet another reflection on them. You can read his commentary HERE.

be well,

Chris