This is the fourth of our new series of arti­cles on The Zen of Let­ting Go, with side ref­er­ences to body­work, breath­work, and energy (espe­cially sex­ual energy) work.

I amuse myself with how easy it is to find appro­pri­ate ref­er­ences for arti­cles. I was read­ing the Octo­ber 2010 issue of Toronto Life, and found (pg. 56) this Q & A com­ment with Dou­glas Coupland:

Q: Player One [Coupland’s new book] con­tains some­thing called Doug’s law: “You can have infor­ma­tion or you can have a life, but you can’t have both.” Why Not?

A: There’s that weird sense you get, at 11 at night, when you real­ize you’ve spent three hours look­ing at cute cats on YouTube. That you life is richer for the expe­ri­ence is debat­able. You could have been out white­wa­ter raft­ing or gar­den­ing. Your life is either a wave or a par­ti­cle, but never both. [all empha­sis mine]

Inter­est­ing.

The rea­son we get into the sna­fus that we do is a prod­uct of our ratio­nal mind, as demon­strated in the above Q & A. I’ve lately been read­ing To Meet the Real Dragon by Gudo Nishi­jima. He’s a Soto Zen priest and expert on Dogen, 13^th cen­tury founder of the Soto sect. What I’ve been play­ing with is Nishijima’s take on the 4 Noble truths.

In short form:

I’ve writ­ten about the 4 Noble truths before. Nishijima’s ver­sion fits quite closely with how I see it. With­out get­ting too bogged down, here’s the point.

Ide­al­ism

The first real­iza­tion is that we all have quite active minds. They day­dream, and plot and describe — I call this telling sto­ries.

From To Meet the Real Dragon

“Think­ing is a kind of activ­ity that pro­duces images devoid of sub­stance. At times those images appear to be real, but in fact they are not.” p 100

“But, at some stage, the real nature of dreams has to be learned. Sooner or later we must rec­og­nize that dreams are not the real world.” p 100

“Each and every human being must suf­fer from the con­flict between dreams and real­ity.” p 101

Many are the peo­ple who think their imag­ined real­ity is either real, or “ought to be.” That, if only they could get their man­i­fes­ta­tion mantra cor­rect, the world would bend to their will. Or who refuse to fully engage with oth­ers, because some­thing bet­ter might be just around the bend. After all, they’ve imag­ined this “bet­ter world…”

The first “wak­ing up” moment, then, is the real­iza­tion that the world of imag­i­na­tion is not real.

Not to say it’s not impor­tant. Every­thing we see around us was first cre­ated in someone’s mind. Our minds, ade­quately used, are awe­some instru­ments. It’s just not the whole story.

Mate­ri­al­ism

The sec­ond real­iza­tion hap­pens as peo­ple real­ize that men­tal images are not real. I like to think this is a West­ern issue, but here’s the Bud­dha, 2500 years ago, step­ping through the same mine field. Any­way, most peo­ple decide that if the mind’s imag­in­ings aren’t real, then Mate­ri­al­ism is cer­tainly real. They shift from the mind to the accu­mu­la­tion of stuff. Peo­ple. Money. Cars. Con­quests. Some­thing, any­thing, to give a sense of per­ma­nence and real­ity to life.

The dif­fi­culty with this POV is 2-fold:

1) deal­ing with the disillu­sionment (Get that word! We stop cre­at­ing illu­sions!) of the non-reality of our ideals is not solved by focussing on mak­ing big piles of stuff.

2) Stuff is a dis­trac­tion. If the goal is to find mean­ing and pur­pose, (i.e. life itself) then mate­r­ial goods, which can be divided infi­nitely, are not “real.”

The sec­ond “wak­ing up” moment is the real­iza­tion that desir­ing and cling­ing does not lead to the ces­sa­tion of suf­fer­ing. It typ­i­cally just leads to want­ing more.

Matu­rity requires the let­ting go of try­ing to choose between Ide­al­ism and Mate­ri­al­ism (or any­thing else!)

Action

The third real­iza­tion is this: our very human ten­dency to seek either/or answers is flawed. As we’ve said end­lessly, dual­i­ties lead to wars, con­flict, headaches, and all kinds of bod­ily symp­toms. In the Buddha’s time, and now, peo­ple were fight­ing over who was right — the “reli­gious” — the Ide­al­ists, who posited some ver­sion of “pie in the sky, bye and bye,” and the Mate­ri­al­ists, who were anti-everything to do with mind and spirit, and cried, “Every (wo)man for them­selves.” The Bud­dha had tried both paths, and found them NOT wrong, but flawed.

The Buddha’s Mid­dle Way con­cerns itself with the solu­tion to the war over who is right.

Pic­ture a river (the Mid­dle Way) with one bank being Ide­al­ism and the other being Mate­ri­al­ism. The Bud­dha sug­gested that both “banks” have their uses, and one might put one’s canoe to either shore and stock up for the trip. How­ever, the “cure” for the dilemma of choos­ing, of “right and wrong” is sim­ply to leave the chose shore and resume pad­dling your canoe.

In other words, and this is the third “wak­ing up” moment, nei­ther view of the way it is, is cor­rect. (The 3^rd noble truth is often called the truth of negation.)

If we see that the first two views meet in the here and now, then we might even notice that both our mind (ide­al­ism) and our bod­ies (mate­ri­al­ism) inform our moment to moment action. We are, then, called out of end­less debate into the realm of pure, informed action.

Life Itself

The fourth real­iza­tion is that the first 3 are the­o­ries, and even an ele­gant the­ory only describes. So, a the­ory of “how life works” is NOT life, work­ing. Life is what is hap­pen­ing all around us, and in us, and life hap­pens with­out us. Life just is. It’s the water under the canoe.

The fourth “wak­ing up” is this: pad­dle your canoe, by sit­ting your butt down and going along for the ride. The Bud­dha taught this as med­i­ta­tion, or zazen.

So, back to the orig­i­nal Cou­p­land Q & A. Cou­p­land is stat­ing the Mate­ri­al­is­tic view, and using Quan­tum physics to do so.

Sim­ply, take a “pho­ton.” In the quan­tum world a pho­ton (or any sub-atomic par­ti­cle) exists as a hybrid—a particle/wave. It becomes one or the other when it is observed. In other words, the exper­i­ment per­formed deter­mines the out­come, and the particle/wave “col­lapses” into either a par­ti­cle or a wave.

He uses this idea back­wards, and says you are one or the other, never both. (Here’s the par­al­lel to the 4 Noble Truths: right/wrong thinkers make such state­ments. EITHER ide­al­ism, OR Materialism.)

The rest of his point is well-taken. Wast­ing your life star­ing at YouTube videos is, well, wast­ing your life. How­ever, he points this out so that you might choose to use your time dif­fer­ently. There­fore, he is cor­rect that you can’t white­wa­ter raft and watch videos at the same time (the­o­ret­i­cally…) How­ever, what you choose is just that—a momen­tary choice. Each choice, then, fixes itself, or col­lapses, like a par­ti­cle, until you choose dif­fer­ently!

The pho­ton becomes one or the other in the instant of the exper­i­ment.
How­ever, the NEXT pho­ton is still a particle/wave, (The Mid­dle Path) and remains so until the next experiment.

OK, let’s be prac­ti­cal. Just because you’ve always done your life one way, metaphor­i­cally, or actu­ally piss­ing it away on YouTube videos, doesn’t mean that, in each moment, these is no choice. Because of Action, there is choice.

You can do what you always do, or you can act dif­fer­ently. Noth­ing is stop­ping you, except you.

In coun­selling, stay­ing stuck involves blam­ing and set­ting up absolutes, and just sit­ting there. In body­work, stay­ing stuck involves refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate, block­ing feel­ing, block­ing energy, main­tain­ing bound­aries, refus­ing to explore the chargy bits.

Action says: do some­thing other than what you are doing, hold the judge­ment in abeyance by let­ting it swim around in your head with­out shut­ting down, and have a new experience.

Next week, we’ll start at the Root Chakra and move up, giv­ing you the chance to exper­i­ment with “life as energy.” You can play along and see what hap­pens, or shut down and stay where you are.

As always, your choice.