When I first started meditating, my motivation was selfish. Enlightenment was the goal, and I wanted to be the most enlightened kid on the block. People would praise my wisdom and insight, and buy my books by the caseload. There would be temples and t-shirts and coffee mugs. It was gonna be awesome.
Shockingly, my spiritual practice was anything but calm and peaceful. I remember getting pissy with my ex-wife when a change in a school field trip caused me to cut short a peaceful spiritual retreat. The irony was lost on me. I was as clueless as Mitt Romney drawing up sketches for a car lift. My practice, as Buddhists would say, was “too tight“.
These days? I haven’t scrubbed myself of this impulse. Far from it; it’s ever-present. It shows up whenever I babble on pridefully about my spiritual practice. Or when I get impatient and snippy because it’s 10pm and I haven’t sat zazen, and suddenly all of my kids are STARVING, DAD! Or when I beat myself up for having a “bad” zazen sit.
But at least I’m aware of it now. And knowing is half the battle.
I know I’m not unique. People of all religions and philosophies face this problem – whether they’re Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Scientologist, Atheist, or Friends of Bill. The best religions work to unbind our awareness of ourselves from our small egos, and help us identify instead with these “other people” who piss us off at regular intervals. They erode the illusory barrier between “I” and “Thou”.
But the ego’s stingy. It doesn’t cede any territory without a fight. So “being spiritual” becomes another way for us to separate ourselves from one another, and prove our superiority. On an individual scale, we become arrogant about our practice, and defend against anything that interferes with it. On a social scale, we end up with religions that preach compassion, love, and tolerance, but whose practitioners practice bullying, hatred, and murder.
Is it any wonder atheists get so pissed off at religion? Only it isn’t a religion problem per se. People are people. If being sage and wise were as easy as giving ourselves a label like “Christian” or “Buddhist”, we’d all have been reborn by now in the Pure Land, where Jesus and Mohammed would feed us cupcakes off of the stomachs of 40 virgins.
In Zen Buddhism, we point toward something called Buddha-nature to help dissolve this action of the ego. There’s no need to chase after enlightenment, because you already are Buddha-nature. There is nothing to attain; what we seek is already here. Beneath all of our drives and our fears, our true natures are free, open, and unrestricted. We attempt to diminish the desire to score a game-winning kick by demolishing the goal posts.
In practice, this means that we don’t have to be so grasping and territorial about our possessions, our children, our pride, or even our faiths. We don’t have to throw a fit when our day plays out differently than we’d imagined. We have a choice in every moment: we can retain our death grip on the way we think things ought to be…or we can relax, and admit that perhaps there are more things in heaven and Earth than our dreamt of in our philosophies. We can take life as it’s force-fed to us, rather than insisting everything come out our way.
And we do this, day after day, moment after moment, for the rest of our lives. Because there’s nothing to attain. There’s only the caress of your partner, and the abundant smell of spring after a long, hard winter.
Oh, and the starving children. Never forget the starving children.
“You should take time for yourself,” she told me in the proto-stages of our relationship. “We both should.” Back then, I was pushing for us to commit, to see whether we could make this crazy thing called “us” work. She was hesitant (or rather, prudent), desiring more time on her own before re-settling. ”Don’t you want to define who you are outside of a partnership?”
While biking to the store tonight, I saw what had to be the saddest thing I’ve beheld all week: A “Lost Bird” sign. It was for a parrot that had somehow flown its cage, found a door or window (whose openness is no doubt now a matter of intense family debate, not to mention future grist for a potential divorce proceeding), and soared off into the wild blue yonder with a song on its lips and spring beneath its wings.
The ocean spray was cold. I wanted warm. But I’d take what I could get on a beach in December. I closed my eyes and, for a moment, forgot where I really was.
If you thought the Road to Sexual Equality in American couldn’t get worse than Rick Santorum 
The kids at my children’s Unitarian Universalist church have an expression: “Don’t yuck on my yum.” Translation: Don’t put down something I enjoy just because you don’t like it. This lesson is easily grasped by my eight-year-old son. Sadly, it appears lost on mother and fundamentalist Catholic Lisa Mladinich.
