Wisely Selfish

My dad and I were talking about kids one time long ago and he jokingly said  “You know, if a 2-year-old could kill you for a cookie, they would.” He was right, of course, but in my head I thought “Yea but then wouldn’t that toddler die of starvation later since his cookie provider was dead?” We were both right but the sad part was that it took me another 20 years to understand that I had been acting like that same toddler for most of my life.

Being selfish is not only perfectly normal and natural, it is actually hardwired into your genetic code. When a mommy bird sacrifices herself by luring a cat away from the nest that maternal instinct isn’t just touching and brave, it’s also the result of the base drive to protect her genetic legacy. There is almost nothing more basic to our nature than the desire to protect and provide for ourselves above others. Many religions and philosophies see this as a fundamental problem, something that must be overcome by what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

Of course anyone with even a passing knowledge of history and reality can tell you that time and again these admonitions fail and someone acts out of self-interest, even if this ends up causing lots of harm or even death to others. So we feel guilty when we act out of selfishness, but we still do it.

You can’t halt selfishness anymore than you could end jealousy or hornyness, it is simply one of the facts of being a human being. Those creeds which demand that we deny a basic human feature fail over and over because what 30 million years of evolution has wrought cannot be undone by a lifetime of guilt trips and threats. In fact,  you don’t even really have to end selfishness to substantially improve the world. The wiser course is to take those natural traits and to use them as a cautious person uses fire, carefully employed for a positive benefit.

To act in a wisely selfish way means to consider all our actions and their effects in an enlightened way. To think even a few hours down the road often changes things drastically. To act with care does not mean that we have to be martyrs or saints, it just means not taking actions that will ultimately harm ourselves later. In a real way there can be no more selfish action than to try to live in as kind  a way as possible, for this generally rewards us far more than a few short-term, but ultimately harmful actions do.

A simple example;  to steal from the local store so much that it goes out of business results in not only the store owner suffering, his other patrons too, but ultimately even the thief has nothing left to gain once the store is gone. Everyone has lost, even the thief supposedly acting in his own best interest . This is selfishness in ignorance, it is gaining a little something now and losing much more later.

Take instead the example of having a rich but annoying Great uncle, to sit and listen to his boring stories is a small sacrifice until he passes away and you find that he left you a giant inheritance. In this case the uncle gets an audience, and you (and your family) gain financially. A small sacrifice in the short-term for a larger gain later. Selfishness in wisdom.

I am aware that these are really simplistic examples, but the fact is that many of the stupid decisions we make are for a short-term payoff at the risk of great harm later in situations just as simple as my examples. I do it all the time and when I finally realize what a little wisdom would have done to improve an impulsive selfish urge  I want to kick myself. The fact is that even if you only want to see the world through purely selfish eyes you would be foolish not to act out of compassion for others. It isn’t hard to see, you only have to stop and look at what is occurring daily in our lives. Conflict and pettiness always result in more harm and suffering, over and over we marvel at how silly dramas and slights turn into bad blood and even violence. I don’t think its an exaggeration to suppose that many lives have been ruined over a thoughtless comment or look.

I have lived both kinds  lives for some time, before I got my head out of my ass in my mid thirties I went through most my life thoughtlessly selfish and time and again my shitty actions ended up with my having shitty results. You can’t make a pie with mud and think its going to taste like apples, but that’s exactly what I did. I was always amazed that I could never catch a break when all I had to do was look and see how I had failed to give anyone else the same courtesy and it should have been painfully clear why my life was so unhappy.

I got lucky when I had a near nervous breakdown. Something broke free in me and I realized that something fundamental with my world was not working .  Something in my life was out of sync with the rest of the world. It took me many years of meditation and effort at correcting my poor behaviors and attitudes to get the tiny bit of progress I have (believe me, I’m still a prick, just less than before) But almost immediately I began to find that all those breaks I had been missing started to head my way. It didn’t take long til it almost felt like magic the way that things fell into place in my life, it wasn’t magic, it was simply that I was no longer trying to  succeed by fucking other people over. It also didn’t take long to realize that if I really wanted to be selfish then I would have to be so wisely, If I wanted the world to behave the way I wanted then I had to start by fixing my own actions. If I wanted to be respected and safe and loved then I was going to have to start giving that out as well, why did it take me so long to see it?

I think it is because wise selfishness is learned, stupid selfishness is inborn in the basic lizard part of our brains. Basic selfishness is what makes a rat take a small crumb because its 3 inches closer than the bigger crumb, once we start to open our eyes, though, we can fianlly see the larger rewards that come with a little more effort and self-discipline.

Why you gotta bring up old shit!?

Today at work a very talented tattooer that Cara and I will be sharing a booth with in next months Baltimore tattoo convention came to visit us. In the past year or so we have become friends with J and it’s always nice when you can say that about a local tattooer, far too often we (as in “we tattooers”) see everyone else in town as the competition, as potential enemies at the worst or as someone to compare ourselves to at best. The longer ive been doing this for a living the more I appreciate that in some way each every person “pushing the pins” has a role to play in our chosen field. It’s certainly more productive to consider all these other tattooers my colleagues than it is to consider them my foes. Which brings me to my next point.

This artist who visited our shop today works with another artist who I apparently was extremely rude to in the past. I used to be the typical mediocre tattoo guy who was so insecure that anytime some other person would come in and talk about learning (or wanting to learn) to tattoo I would gruffly dismiss them and their dream, regaling them with stories of how hard it is, how difficult they would find it, and how there was already “too many of us in this town already.” This was years before I became a Buddhist and years before I felt any sort of confidence in my own abilities, the result was a whole lot of tough guy bluster and a whole lot of hoping that folks didn’t notice how poorly I actually tattooed.  So I was embarrassed to hear that now that this artist still has some hurt feelings over the matter, she has since gone on to become a very good artist (and in far less time than it took me to be even passable). As I talked with J today he mentioned that one point he too had come into the shop selling his first set of flash and talking about his dreams of being a tattoo artist, and , you guessed it, apparently I was a douchbag to him as well.  Of course the irony is that not only have both people gone on to become really talented (through years of hard work) but that both remember at a pivotal moment in their tattooing careers that I was an asshole to them.

I d0 feel guilty about this and I certainly wouldn’t approach the conversation in the same way today (even if I believed the same things, I have learned better ways to say it). Im not losing sleep over it or anything, but i do believe that everything has a lesson in it.  In this case the lesson I have drawn from it is that some thing I had done in an off the cuff manner, something I have no recollection of,  has had ripples that at least these two fine folks remember. I’m not suggesting that they are traumatized by it but it has made an impact to the point that they remember it while it is long gone from my memories. That is not an  inconsequential thing to consider. We all bear scars in our memories of childhood, of school, of important moments when our lives were altered by another even if it is only the slightest bit. Being one of the few creatures with a conception of the past has  down sides as well as numerous upsides and one of these is that we don’t just remember the past, we relive it.

It’s a good reason to be a little more careful with how we treat other people.

When people begin studying Buddhism they often stumble on the idea of Karma. Everything else seems to logical and straight forward in Zen and yet here are all these otherwise level-headed Zen masters asking us to be aware of something that sounds like magic.  I sure did and the cause of my confusion is, like everyone, I had my own ideas of what words mean and to me karma meant some magical hand of justice punishing people (sometimes in another life, but we’ll get to reincarnation in a different long ass blog) for their sins in the past. The more I did Zazen though the more I began to realize that all the ideas I had in that sentence were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works.  I didn’t need to believe in a magical force because the results of Karma happen naturally, as naturally as the fact of you pushing a ball makes it roll. In this case I realized that 1)I had hurt some folks back when and it has caused 2)me to feel bad about it when I learned that it had made them feel bad. There it is, Karma right there with no magic  or outside force necessary.

So, you might ask, if Buddhists don’t really believe in a past or future then why do I feel bad for something that happened in a mythical past? In other words, if Im so buddhisty then why can’t I just say to myself “all that old stuff is just an illusion and doesnt matter”? It would be nice, but I can’t because all that bad stuff  from the past is happening right now.

the end.

Just kidding, I wont try to dodge the hard stuff that easily.

What I mean when I say  its happening right now is because each moment contains all the past and all the future right in it.  It sounds weird but all this is occurring countless of times per second, the universe is formed and destroyed over and over and we live each moment as a moment. Dogen once used the example of firewood. Firewood is just firewood, he said, it isn’t a tree anymore, and it isn’t ash yet either, however it does contain both “being a tree” and “being ash” in it. So even though I’m the guy who isnt-a-dick-to-beginning-tattooers anymore, I still have that guy-who-is-a-dick-to-beginning-tattooers in me. I’m both at the same time even though one happened “a long time ago”. Yes its as confusing as it reads but if you do something to help you live in this moment a little more (like say, Zazen) it begins to make more sense than the commonsense notion of existence does.

Think of it like a piece of movie film, each individual frame is just a picture, a still life of a scene. If you were to run film, through a projector at 4 frames per second it wouldn’t look like a movie, it would look like a very confusing series of flickering stills and you would also see the black lines between frames. But if you speed that up to 24 frames per second all the sudden it looks like continuous motion. Our eyes , it turns out, don’t work in one continuous stream, rather they take a whole bunch of pictures per second, in fact it takes less than 24 pictures per second or else it film wouldn’t look like it was in motion, get it? Once you get up to a high enough series of flashing frames the effect is of continuous, flicker free motion even though the reality of film is that it is always just a series of still images. Life occurs in moments, each one unique and complete in and of itself.Its one of the many things that seem like a contradiction in Buddhism but that in reality works without needing us to “understand it” with our brains, intuition is the proper tool for that job in this case.

Whatever action we make contains its results already within it. It’s why no one ever really “gets away with it” and why Karma doesn’t require a guy on a throne with lightning bolts in his hand. If you kick a dog the seeds of that dog biting your leg in return are already within that action, if you treat people poorly then the fallout from that is in your action as well. The interesting thing is that the more deluded we are the longer the effect seems to take, we don’t perceive it because we are acting under the ignorance of rule of cause and effect, the more you sit with it however the less and less lag you see between acting and its fruits. Theres a reason Zen masters don’t go around kicking dogs and stealing porno mags from the corner store and it isn’t because they are “nice guys” (though they may indeed be nice, that’s incidental) once you become aware of karma and its inevitable-ness it just doesn’t make sense from a self-preservation standpoint to keep setting yourself up to get run over by Karma (my karma ran over my dogma. . .. har har).

So yes, the past is an illusion, and I’m paying for it now.

Action/Reaction

In the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a great many deals are struck, and with each one a price is extracted.

In the first the Green Knight appears and issues a challenge, he will let any knight strike him on the condition that the Green Knight be allowed a similar strike one year hence. Gawain agrees and slices off the Green Knights head. To everyone’s considerable surprise the Green knight picks up his head and says “I’ll see you in a year” before riding off.

The second is when Gawain goes to meet the green knight in a year (being a  heroic knight he can’t do the sensible thing and ride the opposite direction). He meets a Hunter who has a beautiful wife and stays with them until he has to meet the green knight in a few days. The Hunter makes a deal with Gawain, he will bring the young knight whatever he finds the next day as long as Gawain does the same. They agree and the hunter rides off the next day. The hunter’s wife tries to seduce the Knight but he manages to avoid temptation having received from her only a single chaste kiss. That night the hunter returns with deer meat and Gawain give him the same small kiss, The next night the same thing occurs despite the wife being more persistent and giving two small kisses. On the third night she is the most alluring of all and tries her hardest to entice Gawain, but he resists, she gives him three kisses and insists he take her green garter which , she claims, will protect him from the Green Knight. He accepts this and when the hunter returns Gawain give him the three kisses but not the garter.

The next day Sir Gawain meets the Green Knight who is sharpening a giant axe next to a tree stump. Gawain bravely puts his neck out to allow the Green Knight his promised strike. Two times the knight almost swings and pulls back at the last second. On the third stroke the axe comes flying down. . . but just merely nicks Gawain’s neck. The Green Knight leans down and says “that was for the Garter”.

When I first heard this story a couple of things immediately stood out in my mind, but the first thought that popped into my head was “you don’t get something for nothing”. Gawain paid a tiny price for his tiny breaking of his promise to the hunter, sometimes we pay a much higher price. Had Gawain given into temptation he might have paid with his head!

Years ago I used to pace the floor of our tattoo shop, broke, desperate, and over and over in my mind was the thought “If I only had some money, if i could just win the lottery, I wouldn’t have to worry about anything!” Fortunately for me I never did win, it would have been a fucking nightmare! In the years since I’ve noticed time and time again the fact that nothing that has come my way has come without a price. The price of peace of mind was letting go of my old ideas and comfortable habits. The price of receiving the business and generosity of my customers was in taking a genuine concern in their lives and in insuring that I constantly did my best work for them. I’m very lucky that so far I have been able to afford the good fortune which has come my way.

I can’t imagine what winning an obscene amount of money would entail, but I do know it would be a price far too high for me to feel it was worth it. Money, fame, power, all these things come attached to a time bomb that seems to blow up in the face of whoever is desperate enough to chase after them. Over and over again we see in life that the good fortune we receive has to be earned and in my own life I have ceased craving anything that I don’t work for. It safer that way!

it doesn’t take “believing” to understand this either, all you have to do is observe. The bodybuilder who uses steroids to get bigger faster than his body was meant too suffers all sorts of deadly side effects. The junky who uses drugs to feel temporarily better than reality is doomed to pay the terrible price of a lifetime of dependency and suffering. The investor who uses insider information to bilk people out of money suffers a cold fear and hypertension over and over every time someone knocks on his door and he imagines it is the IRS or FCC. The famous go insane (*ahem* Mel Gibson  . . .) the rich who do not share their fortune grow degenerate and sickly, its enough to make one frightened of all the stuff that we in the west lust after.

One of the funnier aspects of this is how riches and luxury seem to turn an ordinary life into an extraordinarily annoying one! I’ve watched numerous people lose their fucking minds because traffic took one second to long to move in front of their BMW or  act like it was the end of the world if their latte is 2 degrees too cold, imagine what kind of hell it must be to have your day ruined by something as silly and inconsequential as the waiter forgetting to hold the onions on your lobster salad!

No thanks. Those who are genuinely desperate, those who struggle with making their bills every month, who have mouths to feed and no sure way to provide really seem to appreciate every cent and every kindness done for them, because what they receive has a real and important impact on their lives. Those who give of themselves and show compassion to the world are given the same back and I’d bet that all the lottery money in the world can’t buy the peace of mind that someone who has done a true kindness feels.

We don’t have to “believe” in karma, we just have to open our eyes and see it.

Delusion pt.1

“Comparison is the lowest form of thought.” -David Chadwick

Im afraid that I labored under some very mistaken notions about Buddhism for quite a long time. Of course, the more I feel I understand the more reasonable this seems, after all one of the most basic teachings of Buddhism is that we are deluded. This delusion doesn’t mean we dint ‘get’ things as they really are,but rather that the WAY we try to ‘get’ it is fundamentally flawed. The way that no amount of using more force will let you use a shoelace to pound a nail, no amount of trying to think harder using our deluded minds will make things any clearer.

For me several things that seemed so difficult to understand or make sense of now seem so simple that I have to laugh at myself a little for having so much trouble. For example, the whole “God” question. One of the things that appealed tome about Buddhism was that I believed I could remain an atheist and still be Buddhist. i suppose this is true, the same way a fundamentalist christian could be a Buddhist and still remain a fundamentalist, but the reality is that if you spend any amount of time meditating and living the dharma the less likely you will be able to hold onto your old views no matter how cherished! The problem with my atheism was that it relied on too small a definition of what ‘God’ could be ( which, ironically, is the same problem with trying to remain a fundamentalist and a Buddhist at the same time). In my delusional mind I was arguing against a judeo-christian idea of what god was, and so I believed I had no faith because their version was something i couldn’t accept. Needless to say that once you open your eyes and see “God” as just another word for ‘everything in the universe’ then it becomes quite a bit more sensible and ‘believable.’ The other part of being deluded about God this way is that its worrying about a question that a0no one can know for sure and b) doesn’t really matter! As Ive written before, i was amazed to read over and over that when the Buddha was approached with questions about whether there was a god or a heaven and hell his answer was “The question does not fit the case.” which is simply a kind way of saying “why are you wasting your time worrying about shit that doesn’t matter to your real life in this moment!?”.

Or as a great Zen Koan put it once, a king once asked a monk “what happens after we die” to which the monk replied quite reasonably with “I have no idea”. the King was surprised and said “How can you not know ? You’re a monk!” The monk turned and left saying “yes that’s true, but I’m not a dead one.”

My other problem was with the concept of Karma. Like most folks my idea of Karma was like a bank account. You put in a ‘good deed’ and eventually the karma came back as something ‘good’ and if you did something ‘bad’ then your karma would punish you later. It made me mad to think that someone like Hitler didn’t seem to suffer much ‘bad karma’ while perfectly innocent folks got shafted by life without having seemingly committed any ‘bad deed”. Once again, i found that my concept of Karma was sadly inaccurate. To start with Karma simply means ‘action’ and the concepts we have of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are constructions of our deluded minds. On top of this Buddhists generally don’t believe in a past or a future that exist. To be brief, the future is a concept, and the past was a moment that is never again going to come back (or even be able to be recollected accurately) so the only moment in existence, ever, is this moment right now. How is my deluded idea of Karma supposed to work if the future never occurs and the past doesn’t exist!? The answer, finally after years of wrestling with this, was that our Karma is arising and falling the exact moment the action that ‘creates’ it does! You don’t do a bad deed, wait a while and then suffer some consequence, you reap that bad news instantly, its only our delusion that makes it take so long to see the results! The more i sit and the more I become aware of the present moment the less time it takes for me to see the results of my actions both good and bad! Karma, it turns out, is the commonsense fact of cause and effect. No magic required!

Buddhism has taught me that not only was my view of the world fundamentally wrong (and thus a source of much suffering) but that the very method I tried to use to observe it was flawed. once my understanding began to develop all the sudden the world started to look recognisable to me, in fact the first few months I got almost giddy telling my friends that for the first time in my life I felt like I ‘fit’ in the world. The amazing thing was that nothing ‘really’ changed, i didn’t adopt sopme systems of belief that required me to ignore facts or to pretend to believe the unbelievable or miraculous, i simply wiped a little of the dust on my perception away and saw an iota clearer than before. i have a long long way to go still, but I have also understood that Buddhism is a path not a destination, I’m content knowing i will never “arrive’ because the journey has been so amazing.