The Naked Monk

Archive for February, 2010

Our daughter Melanie introduced us to her new boyfriend last night. Although she’s been dating for years, she’s never been as excited about a boy before; she even suggested I blog about love.

That surprised me because she’s really not the starry-eyed type; in fact, she’s generally on guard in her relationships—in part because that’s who she is, but also because we’ve encouraged her to be mindful of her own hopes just as much as other people’s motivations. I was perhaps a bit overbearing on that count—she once begged me to let her enjoy her illusions while she was still young and innocent!

Still, she knows better. Last night, she confessed to falling in love. “It’s crazy,” she said. “We’re crazy. We both feel that way, and we haven’t even known each other a month. That’s not possible is it? I mean, it can’t be real, can it?”

Obviously, her feelings are real. We tell her so. Our concern is that she doesn’t jump from this fact to the belief that this love will last forever. Of course, it might; plus they’d be crazy not to want that—after all, they’re risking their hearts. Still, chemistry is volatile; they’re better off avoiding interpretations about ‘what it all means’ and enjoying the moment. Apart from avoiding complications, it enhances the experience and the focus one brings to it.

Mindfulness is so useful—it cultivates letting go of compelling thoughts and staying with what we know. We all gravitate towards what we want, and speculating about that usually means thinking wishfully. Hopes and dreams beg to be believed in; it takes skill to keep letting them go, but to the extent I’ve been able to do that I’ve found myself more able to follow my gut, sidestep my fantasies and trust myself.

Melanie’s made a good start on these mental factors, and her new boyfriend seems to be of like mind. If that’s part of their chemistry, they’re off to a good start. We found out that he plans to run for public office one day. Lord knows, we need leaders with ethics and clear-headedness. He believes that that career path “holds the greatest potential to effect positive change for the most people.” Let’s hope he pursues both his personal and his public life with discernment and a clear head.

If you read my last blog then you’ll know I believe in art. The one unbroken thread in my life has been the search for freedom, and for me there is no more creative pursuit. Whether I prefer this or that form is secondary; the process itself leads to freedom.

In the blog, I described the notion art is successful only if it sells as “not merely a mistaken belief that one can throw off with a shrug, but a relentless current of the society in which we live and against which we must persistently strive.” With sublime poetic justice I was viscerally reminded of this truth within hours of posting my clever words. Shortly after two in the morning, my eyes sprang open and I faced the dismal reality of my life gone awfully wrong. Like insomniac sheep, the endless string of failures, bad decisions and missed opportunities passed before my eyes; unable to avert the parade, I took the poison to heart. It was a negativity of extraordinary intimacy.

Meanwhile, my rational mind cogitated busily with counter-proposals. With fifty-seven odd years of hard-won wisdom and firm intentions under its belt, you’d think it could wipe away my baseless imaginings with a flick of the wrist—right? Wrong! The demon of self doubt wormed its way into my unresisting soul. It’s not that I didn’t try. I pulled fletch after fletch of crystal logic from my quiver and aimed it unerringly at the target. But the emotions were formless spectres; every projectile passed through harmlessly.

Sound familiar? Since, dear reader, you’re a fellow homo sapiens, then I’ll bet it does. This is the stuff of human spirit, the flip side to all hope and positivity, a reminder that life is not ours to manipulate but a bag of mixed and unruly blessings. In the unexamined life, stress and anxiety runs amok —but wait, am I not a teacher of self-examination, an exemplar  of how to not be victimized by one’s own subconscious? Well—am I not a fraud?

To fall for that, as I very nearly did, is to invest in the phantasms of the wakeful night; I refuse them even as they torture me. I choose freedom especially when I’m most obviously imprisoned; who doesn’t? There’s more to freedom than knowing better, and free will is an unpredictable gift, a volatile moment of opportunity that spins into existence and out again in the wink of an eye. To grasp it, you must be on guard. For so many since the times of Democritus, Parminides, Sextus Imperius, Gotama and Nagarjuna, free will lurks in the moment between stimulus and response. Stick your foot in that door and you can preempt karmic momentum—even stop manufacturing it, so they claim. Clearly, it’s not easy; equally clearly, only a fool wouldn’t try.

When I was young and searching for a teacher, I dreamed of someone with all the answers; I now know that’s not the point, but I acknowledge that hope—perhaps in my students—and ask, would you be taught by someone who lives without stress and anxiety, or by one who struggles with it daily, who reaches stubbornly for integrity each time his bearings are scattered, who turns what was once defeat into a mere miss, and draws from it a lesson? I’m not as perfect as I once thought I’d be by this time, but I examine my responses with more verve than ever, and have learned a few small tricks. I hope to inspire—if necessary, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up again. After the gifts of my teachers, and from a lifetime of inseparable hope and disappointment, I’d be a fool not to.

Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce (Parami Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-097797741-3) by Peter Clothier
[Purchase here.]

At face value, Peter Clothier’s Persist is a rallying call to starving artists everywhere to never, ever, give up. Under the surface however, it’s considerably more—a manifesto for art at a time when the art marketplace is buttoning up and people are confused about what art is and what it’s for.

According to Clothier, some of that confusion has come from the art literati, in seeking to establish standards and to explain what people should and shouldn’t be looking for in various works. In one chapter he describes how, at a gathering of the art establishment, he inadvertently let loose the word ‘beauty,’ and promptly found himself sticking out of the crowd like a very sore thumb. This is just one of several personal disclosures he makes, AA style, in this series of essays. He describes himself as a ‘recovering academic.’ I relate to this self-description in a far more than abstract way, for my writing/teaching too is the product of a scholastic background from which I’m in constant flight.

Clothier is on a mission to reinforce the artistic spirit in the face of relentless commercialism from which no one is immune. Yes, the starving artist is a heroic image, and the many millions of us who create art daily, while supporting themselves with a mundane ‘day job,’ draw comfort from this image. But he goes further and describes a yet deeper layer of the artistic spirit—the act of resisting the notion that our works are successful only if they sell. This is not merely a mistaken belief that one can throw off with a shrug, but a relentless current of the society in which we live and against which we must persistently strive; not just an act of will but a meditative endeavour in which we look past what’s presented as self-evident in search of a deeper truth.

Here is the underlying theme of Persist: the notion that art is an introspective and subjective path to integrity. As I was reminded just last week by one of my own readers: to be authentic, the act of creation must stand on its own two feet. That said, once it’s finished it has to be promoted, for all art says something, and therefore demands an audience. It’s at this stage of the process, which involves a qualitatively different kind of creativity and far more brutal sort of persistence, that artists risk losing themselves.

I don’t know the art world with any familiarity, but I do know the vicissitudes of selling a piece of writing, and especially of marketing a book in this age where there are more titles released each week than ever before, while publishers take on fewer and fewer per year. On the one hand, there are more small presses and self-publishing opportunities; on the other, the cost of promoting a book so that it stands out of the crowd has risen exponentially. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. What used to be the creative side of publishing—risk-taking—is a dying art as publishers seek out sure bets. I can only presume the same is true of the art world.

Clothier is author of The Buddha Diaries, a long-standing blog that you may have stumbled into as you google Buddhist issues. He’s a passionate advocate of mindfulness and describes in this book both the practice of sitting and the doing of art as an exploration of self. He’s emphatic about meditation being a non-transcendental affair, and gets what many would-be Buddhists don’t—that mindfulness is about dealing with what’s right in front of you. That often means pain and insecurity, uncertainty and confusion. He’s concerned not with bliss but with wounds, and in quoting Rumi and Leonard Cohen (“it’s where the light gets in”) he also reveals his poetic roots. This is the opposite of what most people want from meditation—tranquillity and escape—but it’s unambiguously what the Buddha was addressing.

If you write, play, paint, sculpt or just daydream in any way that needs to be expressed, you’ll find Persist a friend to sooth your frayed nerves, comfort your lonely soul and energize your resolve. Art is ultimately a process in which you create yourself, and in doing so hopefully recognize that self as contingent and ultimately indefinable—something infinitely greater than one solitary creative soul. Clothier’s warm and engagingly authentic book is a breath of fresh air that will help you remember that.

Stephen Schettini is director of Quiet Mind Seminars and author of The Novice: Why I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit and What I Learned (Greenleaf Book Group Press, Sept 2009).

Not long ago the Olympic games were a unique emblem of nobility and wholesome ethics. Professional athletes—i.e., those paid to undistractedly practice and participate—were banned. Anyone with gumption had a chance at gold—or so it seemed. In the popular imagination, it was all about the sheer love of sport.

How that’s all changed is too obvious to rant about. Like other sports, the Olympics are now dominated by corporate money; to get their attention, serious participants abandon lifestyle balance from a tender age. The wholesome has become disturbing.

One thing’s the same as ever, though: athletes compete. They want to be the best, and they want it known. As someone who’s particularly uncompetitive, I sort of get that, but am awed by the lengths they go to, as amazed as everyone else by the technological edge that’s become part and parcel of the winning formula. Countries with more sophisticated material science today provide their athletes with superior equipment and a better chance at gold. It’s a long way from naked young Greeks proving their mettle on the slopes of mount Olympus. We shrug. That’s the way it is nowadays.

The way it is, is about winning. True, it always was; but it was also about character and dignity, nobility and poise: words that raise an easy giggle—they’re so old-fashioned; does that mean out of date? While I’m sure those qualities exists in the heart of most olympians, corporate sponsorship and the single-minded demands of winning clearly have no interest in promoting such honest simplicity.

We live in times of material plenty and spiritual paucity. We’re reviled for it by many, attacked by zealots in the name of God. Quite apart from being under fire from people who are even more out of touch with themselves than most capitalists, we’re in danger of losing touch with the qualities that brought our success—those old fashioned values that seem so irrelevant to those who would guide us into today’s culture of entitlement. It saddens me to think that they value those fine athleletes more for the science of winning than the art of competing, and the intuition and heart that go with it.

Caroline and I were at our local drop-in clinic this morning. I carried a thick book to bide me through the wait while she swayed on her walking cane. She’s up and about, but not out of the woods. Like many medical waiting rooms, this one was packed and, it being February in Canada, everyone was bulky with coats, hats, scarves and boots; the heating was up high too. It would be enough to put anybody in a bad temper (well, me at least), but no—everyone looked on cheerily, eying Caroline as if they were just dying to jump to their feet for her. First, however, she had to hold down a form with her elbow while filling in her vitals and clutching her bag and cane in the other. Yes, I could have helped, but she’s thoroughly sick and tired of other people doing stuff for her that should be effortless; it takes considerable self-control sometimes to stand back and let her be.

She handed over the papers, someone offered a seat and down she sat. I was just heading outside to wait when two other people shifted themselves to free up a spot for me next to Caroline. Everyone exchanged chit-chat smilingly as they did so, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t find myself actually choking up at the innate kindness of human nature. Everyone was in there being nice to one another, unknowingly breaking down my cynicism, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. 

People really are good, or at least they prefer to be when they have the opportunity and the mental space to pay attention to others. We’re so busy running around these days that we don’t really notice others unless our situation brings us together—in this case a clinic waiting room. How much easier it is to commiserate with others when we recall our own vulnerability.