I don't reside in a world of competition or pecking orders or ladders of winners and losers but other people sometimes do. I realized that last night at a small group that meets weekly at our house where we often do the exercises in books like The Work where we investigate our unexamined thoughts. I realized that reading Dave Roger's thought-provoking post on the meta-marketers and I caught sight once again of this 'competition' meme.
Dave says that the meta-marketers are using the evocative suggestive religious themes to alter the perception of marketing. And for us marketers, 'The Market', is the exacting God we must appease.
Dave, that is not my God whatsoever. Demon, er, I'll grant you a definitive maybe.
I mix up religion and the worldly so that we might remember that the Tao is seamless and knows no man-made boundaries. In a private email, Dave, rightly brings up the fact that although The Cluetrain Manifesto is the professed meta-marketing blogger's Bible, he hasn't seen much in the way of enlightened business tactics as a result. Very true.
And I once had a friend obsessed with being an Enlightened Millionaire (via the bestseller) which netted him neither Enlightenment nor millions. It's too easy to dismiss our own sound surfing instincts which are rooted in the magic of I-don't-know in deference to experts' I-know-how-to's.
"Tao," said the Chung-yung, "is that from which one cannot depart. That from which one can depart is not the Tao." - "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen", by Alan Watts (fantastic essay)
I concur with Dave that the Tao Te Ching would make a much better marketer's bible. (Okay those weren't his words, but he triggered that idea.) But you cannot simply read about Tao.
Albert Einstein once said the most important question a human being can ask is “Is the universe friendly?”
I vowed to find out the answer to this question for myself about four years ago during a very unfriendly time of my life. If you remember the movie, The Truman Show, the wrath of the god-er-executive-producer Christof (oh, how obvious these symbols are) is unglued as Truman, the unwittingly star of this reality TV show, begins to question and wonder: to wake up. The traffic jams, forest fires, nuclear power leaks, storms and hurricanes? All ruses to keep Truman busy and consumed in his fears. The illusionary gig is up if Truman gets much further in his quest. (Don't be fooled though as to the source of these fears, it's not Christof; search your own mind first.)
Einstein's question? I'm not telling, but the answer isn't what you think nor does it reveal itself the way you might think (for instance, it doesn't respond to Why's.) It's a question I noticed was on the minds of many tsunami survivors. Very very few investigated it. (Why me? slams not opens the door.) From one that started to inquire and named a foundation after his wife: "My wife returned to the sea and I see her as the dolphin swimming in the bay." He continues: It's all different configuration of atoms but nothing's been lost. We are Nature.
The way those who inquired with curiousity spoke wasn't philosophically. And that unspoken understanding is what mattered not the words to describe the undescribable they formulated. He lived his answer now. You can't Xerox it, fax it, or digg it.
Faith in an idea is risky. Ideas can change, and tomorrow we may not believe the same thing. Buddhist faith is experential. Once we have tasted the reality, no one can remove that from us. - Thich Nhat Hanh, Be Still and Know: Reflections from Living Buddha, Living Christ
About a week ago I went to the charnal ground, or where one goes to face our demons - which might include competition, The Market, our partner leaving us, fill in your blank. Psst...no bible can do this for you.
"In the end, everyone looks like a Zombie, you realize that everyone is dead, locked up in the sad psychoses of themselves." - Jack Kerouac, Town and Country
Charnal ground? Serendipitiously timely, I was reading Chapter 22 in Food for the Heart: The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah (the well-known Thai forest monk). He vowed to face his fear of death head-on by heading to the place in his town where they cremate bodies - the charnal ground - and not to leave until his task was complete.
It's very Buddhist to go towards your fear. He manages to somehow survive the dead of night unscathed. The next morning a family brings a corpse to burn. Once they leave his fear escalates as his imagination runs wild.
The next monk got more food in his begging bowl? No biggie. In fact, Ajahn advises monks that if they feel insatiable hunger and begin to salivate when the bowl is filled to push the bowl away and eat only after one stills their mind.
But ghosts, well, that's not a defilement or mere thought for Thais, they're really real. In Thailand, houses are built in a long narrow style to minimize any corners where phi, ghostly spirits, might duck and hide. Ajahn is pretty good at gripping ghost tales and I feel awful cutting this down, but:
[He keeps his eyes closed.] "I felt as if it were waving its burnt hands back and forth in front of my closed eyes. Oh, this is really it!... From the day I was born I had never experienced such fear..."
"What am I so afraid of anyway?" a voice inside me asked.
"I'm afraid of death," another voice answered...
"Whether you are afraid or not, you die just the same. There's no escape from death."
As soon as I had this thought my perception seemed to change right around. - Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart
Ajahn reminds me, "People don't trust the practice; they don't dare to really do it. They're afraid they'll go hungry, afraid they'll die." The practice is ultimately to go toward your fear, inquire and stay. Witness the fear arising as impersonally as possible. Stay.
This time I'd already railed at god (old habit) - futile I might add - felt good and victimy - so it was finally time to head to it, call its bluff, "Fine, let's ___ (usually a form of death, the end of something) then." I'm never entirely sure it is a bluff so I have to be willing to accept the consequences. The fear vanished. I was incredulous: That was it? "And I thought of the Buddha's words Paccattam veditabbo vinnuhi - 'the wise will know for themselves," concludes Ajahn Chah.
In Bryon Katie's The Work, we also examine uninvestigated thoughts. One of my favorite sub-questions is along the lines, "What is the terrible thing you think this thought keeps from happening?"
When I went to my own charnal ground last week I didn't tell anyone what I was doing because I didn't want to be talked out of it or rescued by well-intentioned friends and family. Strategizing my way out of facing the strong undercurrent of terror for the one thousandth time was simply no longer a choice.
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry. And the tempter came and said to Him, "If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread." But He answered and said, "It is written, 'Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.'" - Mathew 4:1-4
The Word of God is often translated as Logos, in Greek, or Tao in Chinese. (It's far more than any printed word; and it definitely speaks.) I used to think this was easier said than done. I still feel like a bumbling baby who grew up relying on bread and throws a tantrum when you pull a slice from its grubby fingers. What is implied by living Tao or 'living on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God' in the day-to-day isn't spelled out.
Whether it's death by ghosts, death by competition, death by starvation, death by humiliation, death by loneliness, death by abandonment, etc. a lot of our worst-case scenarios keep us paralyzed if left uninvestigated.
"You've got a very good job as an art director. To do better, you'd either have to move to another firm, move to another town, switch careers or go back to school. And all of them have costs and very uncertain returns, so you stay.
You have 100 competitors in an industry that is self-described as a commodity. You use the same tactics your competition does, because if you change your pricing or fundamentally alter your marketing outreach, you get punished in terms of [short term] sales or profits." - Seth Godin, Understanding Local Max
You can try keeping the fear at bay each time it wells up, or you can allow it and face it once and for all, even if you've not exhausted point B yet (and oh, how we fool ourselves that we're at a peak). The quickest, least painful way though Seth's Point C is going to your charnal ground to witness your thoughts in choiceless awareness. (Don't be too literal, do you think I really went to a funeral home, crematory or cemetery?)
After I confronted one long-held fear and felt its power dissolve I noticed yet another buried fear peek through.
It's safer to serve up the same (same, same as Thais say) every day. Few Beat poets are alive today - Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferliinghetti, Michael McClure, I believe are it. The review below slams Synder's and Ferlinghetti's latest books. Snyder's danger on peaks is his first collection of poetry in 20 years.
Well, obviously, [Gary] Snyder has benefited, as have readers content with his freeze-dried style; a better line of inquiry might return to original question: is Beat poetry ethical? Not was it ethical, but is it good now, for the continued health of English-language poetry, to continue writing books in a style that has gone from challenging the status quo to assimilation by the status quo and, further, to being a living artifact? Neither Snyder’s nor [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti’s books serve notice that the Beat movement is alive and well; instead, they illustrate how quickly yesterday’s revolutionaries become today’s bureaucrats, and how young poets can hustle their own poetry by invoking the same model... I find it difficult to blame Ferlinghetti or Snyder for continuing to hustle the same poetics that found them early fame, as it seems easier to blame the model of poetic succession they participated in — and yet they have participated in it. - "The Revolution Will Not be Poeticized", The Contemporary Poetry Review
The truth is social drag is less of an issue than self-imposed drag. Maybe I see my readers as fixed and therefore I bend to suit their rigidity. Maybe I see my friends the same. Yet I'm not the same person I was two weeks ago, much less two years ago. Yeah I was the pretty much the same person in 1993 as in 2000 though; so I'm not talking about that every cell in our bodies change every seven years stuff. I mean I don't hold any of my own old beliefs. So how can I hustle the same stuff that got me my early fame with any integrity when I am not the same?
It's the fear. Drats. Ughh, but surely? But I was just there. At the charnal ground last week. Christof, this isn't your doing is it?
"This moment doesn't care that we stepped off the 100 foot pole yesterday," I can hear my teacher say. "You will realize stepping off that place you step from Wholeness. It is an act of love. It comes from silence. You'll know anything else is not true." (btw, This is no imaginary teacher, I'm being literal here. After awakening, he says there is no guidebook, but the Tao Te Ching gives the gist of how you might move in the world.)
The thought crops up: Yeah, people aren't really ready to hear that. That as that paragraph and everything lately that falls into category: "What?! I can't write that."
What terrible thing do you assume would happen if you didn't believe that thought? The terrible worst-thing-that-can-happen that's left for me (I find no others at all, at least, yet) is I'm afraid of death by cruxifiction (think Jesus) or martyrdom (think MLK Jr) or even simple shunning sends shivers up my spine. Death by being true. (Well, more accurately, pointing in its general vicinity.)
"I've refused a lot of exhibitions, but one can't go on refusing forever." - Alberto Giacometti, a sculptor, painter and friend of Sartre
The Tao though, you know, it's really in charge, and when it moves through you there is no refusing your Self. And that charnal ground? I'm ready to brush the phoenix ashes off once again.
p.s. The image is of Giacometti's work. People moment: Stephen Mitchell wrote my fav translation the Tao Te Ching and is married to Bryon Katie of The Work; he wrote Loving What Is's great introduction. The Zen koan in the headline is intimately related to this other "koan": How Do You Fall Asleep Each Night?
I find it funny that we both have a similar fear. I find myself scared of talking about things that are too controversial because I do not want to be a target for the small-minded.
Dooce finds herself in that situation so often that it scares me. She talks about how she taught her daughter to sleep through the night and every mom on the planet wants to have her jailed for child abuse.
Every time I feel that fear, I reveal MORE of myself on the Internet. I do the opposite of what my gut tells me. Someday, maybe I will stop feeling the fear...
Posted by: Laura Moncur | Apr 04, 2006 at 08:08 PM
Now, in a more lucid moment, I see and feel that all these fears are ghosts themselves. Under the fear, I noticed stomach-wrenching guilt. I think I understand why people say "racked with guilt" because it does feel akin to torture. But after those layers peeled off, it was just still and pure.
It's worth investigating the monsters under our bed rather than feeding them cookies to fend them off so we can see for ourselves if they are substantially real or not. You cannot force this, but next time the fear arises you can practice being with it and being curious in terms of inquiring and turning it over like a stone you've never seen before. Again, "Loving What Is" is highly recommended as well.
Posted by: Evelyn Rodriguez | Apr 07, 2006 at 12:29 PM
Excellent blog! Thanks
Posted by: Josh | Apr 07, 2006 at 03:47 PM
this is very strange
and francesca thinks its strange too.
she is my bird
Posted by: lulu | Jun 01, 2006 at 09:41 AM