Kill Your Self

by Dogo Barry Graham

  To put on a uniform and fire bullets at people in a different uniform is to engage in war. To put on a shirt with a peace sign and spit at a soldier in uniform is to engage in war. To think of others as “evil,” or, perhaps just as bad, to think of others as “them” is to engage in a war.

  Are you at war?

  SUPERMAN ISN’T COMING

  I used to give talks to a “Buddhist” discussion group at a Unitarian Universalist Church. I put the word “Buddhist” in quotes because most of them didn’t do any kind of Buddhist practice—or any other kind of spiritual practice—at all. They just liked to get together every Sunday to tell each other their theories about a spiritual tradition they knew very little about. Imagine a hybrid of Codependents Anonymous and the Deepak Chopra Fan Club and you’ll get an accurate picture of this group.

  Each time they invited me to come and speak to them, I would tell them that Buddhism is a practice, not a belief. It’s not something you think, it’s something you do. It’s not a theory about the nature of reality, but the direct experience of that nature. Essentially, I told them they were just playing at it, but, as codependent people will, they kept inviting me to come back. I began to feel as though it was a kind of abusive relationship; I should probably have shown up wearing a wife-beater undershirt and carrying a six-pack of Coors. After a few visits, I realized that I didn’t have the medicine for their sickness (or, rather, I did, but it was medicine they weren’t willing to take), and the next time I was invited I declined.

  One of the members of this group was a woman who was also a member of a cult. She was so into the cult that she spoke its jargon even when talking to non-members who couldn’t understand what she was talking about, and she found it difficult to speak in standard English. She came to hear each talk I gave, and one time she came to a meeting of my sangha. After one of my talks at her discussion group, she approached me and asked if she could talk with me in private. I agreed, we went to another room of the church, and she began to talk in the jargon of her cult. I told her I couldn’t understand her. She kept trying, and then she finally managed to say it in plain English.

  “I think you’re a hypocrite,” she said.

  I asked her, “Why do you care? Why does it matter if I’m a hypocrite or not?”

  She thought I was being glib, but I wasn’t. I meant what I said. For her to have decided, for whatever reason, that I was a hypocrite, and that she had to confront me with it, meant that she had an investment in my not being a hypocrite. Even though she didn’t know me, had no relationship with me at all beyond hearing my Dharma talks, it was important to her for me not to be a hypocrite—so important that it bothered her that she thought I was one.

  Like so many people, she wanted a guru. She wanted a perfect being, the embodiment of a cosmic parent, to tell her what to do. Like all those who invest in leaders or gurus, she didn’t want to have to take responsibility for herself, for her own happiness. She wanted answers to be given to her by the Wise and Holy One (me), and those answers wouldn’t be much use if I wasn’t perfect.

  A teaching is either true or it isn’t. If it’s true, then the character flaws of the teacher don’t turn it into a lie. If it’s not true, then the wonderful, perfect, fresh, fragrant, shiny character of the teacher can’t turn it into the truth. Spiritual teachers don’t really teach, because you can’t teach anyone anything that they don’t already know. All a spiritual teacher can do is help you to uncover your own perfect wisdom, your own flawless clarity, the enlightened being that you are and have always been.

  Such an awakening cannot come from belief in magic or superstition, or from devotion to gurus. It’s comes from pulling your sleepy body and mind out of bed early on cold mornings, getting on a cushion and doing zazen. It comes from living with compassion, humility and gratitude. It comes from swallowing the entire phenomenal universe whole while simultaneously being swallowed by it. It comes from realizing—not just knowing, but realizing—that the source of all suffering is self-centered view. It comes from paying attention. It comes from questions, not answers, because it’s about experiencing that the question is already the answer.

  I don’t know whether I’m a hypocrite or not. It’s not my call, but if I had to make a guess I’d say that I probably am. I’m also an enlightened being, and so are you. It’s up to you whether you experience your own enlightenment, and the vehicle by which you do so is the perfection of wisdom no matter whose mouth it comes out of.

  ARE YOU READY?

  In centers of spiritual practice (and other places), people talk about being “on a journey,” and they talk about things “I’m ready for” and things “I’m not ready for yet.” Or they talk about how they will address certain wounds “when I’m ready to.”

  Are you “ready” for a child to develop a terminal illness? If your child does, it will happen whether you are ready or not. Are you ready to lose your job or your partner? Your boss may fire you and your partner divorce you, and whether you are ready will not be factor. Are you ready to get old, ready to get sick, ready to die? It doesn’t matter. Life will do what it will do, while you are caught up in a self-centered dream about readiness.

  If I wanted to deny impermanence, a look at my email archive would make it impossible. So many vibrant, engaged emails from friends whose bodies are now rotting into the earth or scattered to the wind. And so many “living” people who are waiting to begin their lives, thinking that they always have time.

  NO PAST, NO FUTURE

  When you see your photograph, do you say you’re a fiction?

  — Jean-Luc Godard

  A few years ago, as I washed dishes, I looked at a photograph on the wall above the sink. It was a photo of three sisters, one of whom was the friend I lived with. She was on the left of the picture, smiling all over her face, just about to get married.

  When I viewed the picture, the marriage was over, and the sister who had an arm around the bride had died four months earlier, at the age of 21. All three of them smiled from the picture.

  I have no pictures of myself taken before the proliferation of digital cameras. Few pictures were taken of me as a child, and none were given to me. As I began to wander around the world, I kept a small folder containing some pictures taken in my late teens and my twenties. A few more were added in my early thirties. These photos were destroyed by a person with a serious mental illness whose pain showed itself as undiscriminating rage.

  So the only pictures I have of myself were taken with digital cameras in my mid-thirties and my forties. I don’t seem to have changed much physically in the last ten years, so in every photographic image I have of myself I look the same. Except for (always unreliable) memory, I have no access to how I looked in the past.

  I like this lack of a past that I can verify for myself, because it reminds me that our stories are only stories, and that there is no permanence to anything that ever happens to us. No past or future, only the present moment. A dead woman and a divorced woman smile from a picture taken just before the wedding.

  THE MIDDLE WAY

  Buddhism is often called The Middle Way, but there is widespread confusion as to what that means. Many people I talk to think it means moderation, the path between extremes. It doesn’t.

  The Middle Way is the path between attachment and aversion. It could be seen as extreme rather than moderate, because it rejects everything we are taught to believe in—the self-centered dream, the way we have been conditioned to live, which brings us nothing but anxiety and dissatisfaction, even when things are going the way we think we want them to.

  In turning away from delusion, The Middle Way is not really the way between two opposite extremes, because attachment and aversion are not different; aversion is just attachment with an ugly face, and attachment is just aversion with a smile. Without a story about attaching to this and being averse to that, The Middle Way is the way of actuality, of life just as it is.

  CUTTING INTO ONE

  In the koan �
��Nansen Kills the Cat,” Nansen cuts the temple cat in two.

  Anybody can cut one thing into two—but few have learned how to cut two things, or all things, into one.

  A man tells me he doesn’t believe it’s possible to feel pain or sadness without suffering. I tell him that’s because he doesn’t yet know how to cut two things into one.

  Suffering comes from a feeling of alienation, or the fear of alienation. You may think it comes from pain, but when you examine it you’ll find that the suffering is created from a feeling of being alienated, separate, from people who’re not in the same kind of pain that you’re in. There is never any separation—it’s only a story we tell ourselves—and so our suffering is always unnecessary.

  When your wisdom is sharp enough to cut two things into one, there is nothing to be alienated from and no one to be alienated from it. Pain and sadness are just pain and sadness, perfect as they are, being perfectly felt just as they are, with no story and no suffering.

  MOVING

  I’ve heard pessimistic people say that if there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, it’s more likely to be an oncoming train. True, but what’s wrong with oncoming trains, other than that we don’t like them because we’re attached to continuing to walk along the tracks in the direction we’ve decided to go?

  As the train approaches, we can doggedly walk towards it, in which case we’ll be crushed underneath it. We can try to outrun it, but it will catch us. We can try to dodge it, hoping to squeeze to the side of the tunnel and have it pass us by. Or, perhaps, as it passes, we can hitch a ride and see where it takes us. That place is likely to be home, even if we don’t know it and are afraid of it at first.

  WRONG QUESTIONS

  Many of us want someone else to help us, to save us, to take away our suffering, our fear and uncertainty. No one can do that.

  Many of us realize that, and so we think we need to help ourselves. No one can do that, either.

  So, if no one else can help us, and we can’t help ourselves, what can we do? Are we doomed to suffer?

  Our suffering cannot end until we stop fixating on the wrong questions. Who can help me? How can I help myself? These are questions that don’t even begin to address the problem (or what we think is a problem).

  Questions that might be more useful: Who is this that wants to be helped? Who is this that wants to help himself? Who is this that thinks she has a problem? Who am I without the belief that I have a problem?

  THE PRESENT MOMENT

  In Zen circles, it is said that we should “be in the present moment.”

  Not many people understand what that means. I hear it being invoked as a deliberate amnesia about the past and a reckless disregard for the future, a self-centered and irresponsible attitude of “live for right now and to hell with everything else.” This attitude actually disregards the present moment, and turns instead to the timeless habit of navel-gazing. To focus obsessively on this very instant blinds us to the actuality of this instant, because we are stuck in our own story and opinion about focusing on right now. It is a turning away from life, and it is futile. You can ignore karma as much as you want, but karma will never ignore you.

  The past is not over, because there is no such thing as the past. The future is not coming, because there is no such thing as the future. There is only, ever and always, the present moment, which fully includes what we call past and future. It is beginningless and endless. It includes the exploding of the first star, and the burning out of the sun, and the dirty dishes in the sink, and the clean dishes on the counter.

  In Case 37 of The Gateless Gate, Mumon comments that if we can understand the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming to the east, then there will be no Shakyamuni in our past and no Maitreya in our future. I say that when I wash the dishes, the dirty dishes are not in the past, and the clean, dry dishes are not in the future.

  To wake up to the present moment is not to become like the protagonist of the film Memento, who remembers nothing prior to each instant, never knowing who he is or how he got there. To be in the present moment is to be present to all of life, just as it is, to be free of the stories we tell ourselves about the past and the future, and to see, hear, taste, smell and touch the world, free of the wall of self that keeps us separate from the ground we walk on and from our own heart. It is to know who we are.

  MARA’S FAVORITE THING

  The closest thing Buddhism has to a Satan-figure is Mara, the god of delusion. Mara is not supposed to be taken as an actual being, but rather the delusion that is possible in all of us, and present in most of us. But, in Buddhist mythology, he is often personified.

  In one story, Mara is walking with attendant, and they pass a monastery. They see a bunch of young men lined up outside, waiting to be ordained as novice monks. To the surprise of his attendant, Mara smiles and nods in approval.

  “What are those guys doing, Evil One?” his attendant asks him.

  “They’ve got a taste of awakening to their true nature,” Mara says, still smiling.

  “Don’t you hate that, Evil One?”

  “Not at all,” Mara says. “I love it. It’s my favorite thing.”

  “But why would you like seeing people get a taste of awakening?”

  “Because they’ll make a belief out of it,” says Mara. “And when they do that they’re mine.”

  Any belief that we have about anything turns out to be a belief that we have about ourselves. Whether it is a religious belief, a political belief, a scientific belief or an artistic belief, it is the same delusion—because we use belief to define who we think we are, and in so doing we become prisoners of the self, locked away from one another, from the actuality of the lives, from the entire cosmos, from our own hearts.

  I ask people, “What do you think about the war in Iraq?” A common answer is, “I’m a Republican” or “I’m a Democrat.” To which I say, “I didn’t ask about the label you put on yourself. I asked about your understanding.”

  When we let go of attachment to the illusion of self, there is no belief left, because there is no separation. Nothing to believe in, and no one to believe in it.

  Where belief ends, wisdom begins. The sun shines, whether we believe in it or not. The rain falls, whether we believe in it or not. The wind blows, the moon is visible some nights and not others, birds fly, fish swim, creatures eat, drink, piss and shit—and it all happens regardless of what we believe. Our beliefs don’t affect the universe. They only affect us, and the beings we cause harm to as a result of them, because beliefs exist nowhere other than in the minds that produce them.

  IS MARA REAL?

  Yes. When a homeless man is raking through a trash can outside an artists’ collective in downtown Phoenix, and one of the artists who lives there yells, “Get out of our trash, you fucking animal!”, the person doing the yelling is Mara.

  But Mara gets around. Mara is also the man writing these words, whose heart hardens against anyone who would be so cruel to a homeless person—and, in that hardening, gives life to Mara’s cruelty, and on it goes. Mara is also the person reading these words in anger.

  But there is also Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who hears the cries of all who are suffering. Kanzeon is the woman in the apartment next to the artists’ collective, who hears the homeless man being abused and weeps because of it, and who decides to find ways to feed people. Kanzeon is the man writing these words, who just wants everyone to be fed, safe and loved. Kanzeon is also the person reading these words in kindness.

  TELL IT TO THE JUDGE

  Enlightenment without morality is not yet enlightenment.

  — Dogen

  The word” judgmental” has become one of the most common pejoratives used by westerners drawn to Buddhist practice, and that makes sense. But too many people make the mistake of thinking that not being judgmental means not making judgments. This view is simply amoral, and stands in contradiction to the Buddha Dharma.

  To be judgmental is to put someone
down, belittle them, see yourself as superior to them. But that’s not the same thing as making a reasoned, ethical judgment about a situation or a type of behavior. For example, I would contend that it is better to help homeless people than to spit on them, and that a person doing the latter is behaving reprehensibly. By the logic of a Barnes & Noble Buddhist, though, I’m “being judgmental”—because I’m making a judgment.

  This view combines intellectual laziness with moral cowardice, and is the quintessence of what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called “idiot compassion”—a superficial egalitarianism that is not compassionate at all.

  Buddhism, in fact, is based upon making judgments. The Buddha judged that most people were causing needless suffering to themselves and others, and that this was a bad thing. He judged that pathological karma could be brought to an end by diligent practice of the Dharma. He made a judgment, in other words, that he was right and that most other people were wrong.

  He was not being judgmental, not putting people down. But he used his skills of qualitative judgment to diagnose the sickness and then prescribe the cure. To the smiley-faced, hug-giving Buddhists who frequent American bookstores and meditation centers, though, he was a bad Buddhist.

  When you take a moment to examine it, the dogma of not making judgments collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy, because it is in itself based upon a judgment—that we should not make judgments. It is a view that denies hierarchy, that denies right and wrong, while stating that those who hold this view are right and that those who don’t are wrong.