(The latest Episode of Rappoport Podcasts -- Episode 9 -- "The Monkeypox Outbreak---Is It Real?" -- is up. It’s a blockbuster. To listen, click here. To learn more about This Episode of Rappoport Podcasts, click here.)
~~~
One thing I’ve learned from giving lectures to audiences over the years: never meet expectations.
“Expectations”
is a large container waiting to be filled up. People have these
containers. They lug them around with them. They want them to be filled
up.
For example, if they expect shocking information from the speaker, and they get it, their expectations are met.
Audiences train themselves to be audiences, and their expectation-containers are ready when they sit down to listen.
There is something missing. Something monumental.
The
present moment. The present now. The alive moment. Because, for all its
fanfare and interest, the event is not really in the present.
This
is by design. No one wants the moment. People’s whole lives are devoted
to avoiding the moment, because it is spontaneous. That’s what a moment
is. Spontaneous.
“Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become ‘stage-worthy.’” (Viola Spolin)
No one is used to spontaneity. No one is prepared for it.
No one knows what they would do or how they would react in the spontaneous moment. That’s why it is avoided.
“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves.” (Viola Spolin)
Yet,
the paradox is: people yearn for the spontaneous moment. They yearn for
that freedom. It’s not freedom as an idea or concept, but freedom as a
living thing.
I
bring all this up because passivity is the universal effect of living
for most people. In that state, they still have expectations and those
big containers, but the way they receive information---they certainly
don’t intend to climb up out of their own passivity. That’s the last
thing they would do.
“It
[spontaneity] creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from
handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and
information and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s
findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are
faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this
reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole.
It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.” (Viola Spolin)
So
when I speak to audiences at live events, I find a way to remind them
that we’re in a kind of false relationship. It’s interesting and false
at the same time. There we are in a room, and I’m the speaker and
they’re the audience. I’m active and they’re passive.
Those
are our roles. Those are our functions. It’s accepted, but it’s
unworkable. It’s self-defeating, unless we all want to be existing in a
dead space outside the living present moment. And I don’t.
This
means I have to readjust things. I have to let people know that I know
they’re there. Right now. I know they’re listening, and I know they’re
absorbing, and I know that beyond a certain point (10-15 minutes),
they’re going to shift down into passive mode.
Finding a way, an interesting way to let them know is a challenge.
It’s really a challenge that extends to the whole world.
Are we alive or are we doing it by the numbers?
Look
at any set-up, which is “the way things are supposed to be,” and “the
parts that people are supposed to play,” and you can see light. The
light is what could happen to upset that situation and turn it into
something else. Something that would bring people in from the cold, into
the moment itself.
Spontaneity means everything is created now.
That’s
why I keep writing about imagination, because imagination will change a
life. It won’t only change the content. It’ll change the way life
happens.
Here’s
something I can guarantee anywhere in the universe where beings
populate planets, where they think, plan, strategize. They’re not living
in the moment, but they claim they are. They’ll say, “How could I be
anywhere else? We’re all in the present. That’s all there is.”
But
they’re wrong. Their big containers are in the moment, and they’re
waiting outside to accept the flow of information from the containers.
If
a person (usually a hard-headed realist) thinks he’s already in the
moment, have him go up on a stage with another person and take on the
role of a galactic cop on patrol, questioning a suspect who is accused
of stealing a planet. If the realist can eventually improvise and do it,
he’ll experience being in the moment in a way he never has before.
Likewise,
if he painted 200 paintings, something different would happen to him.
He would come to the edge of what he already knows (which he’s
expressing in the paintings), and then he would step off. He would do
something on the paper or canvas which is not what he knows. It would
arise spontaneously, and he would feel a new space, a new energy, a new
now.
Imagination. Alive imagination. That’s the key. The key to the door that leads out of the Matrix.
~~~
What's wrong with Zen?
Nothing is wrong with Zen, except the people who practice it.
That's a joke. Sort of.
In
the modern style, especially in America, Zen is mostly meditation, and
more meditation, and more meditation, and the point of it seems to be to
get to a zero point, where you can watch your own mind, your own
thoughts, and finally, without effort, stay separate from them, separate
from all that radio static, and separate also from your own unbidden
parade of emotions that swing by with tooting horns and crashing cymbals
and clacking drums and gawking dancing clowns.
A laudable goal.
But on the whole, how many people who do this wind up becoming passive? That's the thing. People tend to opt for quietness.
Whereas, the whole idea ought to be: launch a tremendous amount of dynamic action from the platform of zero-stillness.
Because stillness as a way of life sooner or later begins to disintegrate.
In
original Zen, there were ordeals. The teacher gave the student things
to do, tasks which eventually became absurd, without discernible
purpose. The teacher spoke to the student in riddles and wisecracks. The
teacher drove the student into a state of desperation, because the
student's rational faculties, which were obsessively involved in
systems, couldn't supply answers to questions which defied logic.
The
teacher did whatever he had to do to bring the student out over the
edge of the cliff, where in mid-air, there were no foundations...and the
student felt terror. But the teacher persisted.
And
then, in one explosive moment, the student found himself floating in
the air. He saw there was no need to explain his existence. There was no
need to place a veil between himself and the present moment. He didn't
die. He was, finally, alive.
Who
knows how this radical approach actually worked out in the many
cloisters and huts and cottages where it was practiced, where the
stories grew and expanded in their retelling.
Those old teachers were tough characters. They weren't merely meditation instructors.
There
was another aspect of Zen, which survives to this day. It could be
summarized as: “become the other.” The archer becomes the target. He
becomes the bow, the arrow, and the target.
The runner becomes the road and the air and the sky and the clouds. The artist becomes the canvas.
The theater of merging with the other.
And as in any theatrical setting, the actor can, by choice, merge with, and un-merge from, his role.
But
again, in these times, the main thrust of Zen teaching seems to be
meditation, and the culture of stillness, quietude, and passive
acceptance.
I'm not saying the meditation is easy to do. It isn't. But somehow, its environment has become circumscribed.
This
is unsurprising in America, where every philosophic and spiritual
import from Asia has been distorted and watered down for the
seeker-consumer. The overriding intent has been to create The Quiet
Person.
The
world of action has been painted as too disturbing to the “student
seeking inner peace.” Therefore, retreat. Therefore, set up a buffer
zone within which all is harmonized and balanced.
Where
is the Zen now that sends people out into the world to revolutionize it
down to its core, that stimulates the desire to find and invent a Voice
that will shatter delusions and create new realities that have never
been seen before?
If the moment of insight, satori, doesn't instigate this, what good is it?
How can satori be “seeing into one's true nature,” if the result is a wan gaze out on a uniform landscape of soft-boiled bupkis?
The
answer is obvious. Breaking apart, exploding the primary illusions and
fears that hold an individual in check is not the goal of most Zen as it
is now practiced. That objective has been replaced with the false
promise that some ultimate “consciousness” will reconcile the soul with
itself.
The
way this promise is offered and the way it is taught and the way its
surrounding social culture is embroidered is a dud. Dead on arrival.
It's time for a few new koans.
What
is the real sound of David Rockefeller? What does Henry Kissinger say
when somebody finally puts him in a small bottle with a cork on it? How
does an android disguise himself as a human?
If
I need a Zen teacher, I'll go to Henny Youngman: “A doctor gave a man
six months to live. The man couldn't pay his bill, so he gave him
another six months.”
In the beginning, the whole point of Zen was to shake things up, not calm them down.
The
master assumed a new student was an annoying clod. But that doesn't
comfortably mesh with today's “tolerant culture.” Today, annoying clods
are a special interest group.
Silence,
as a key Zen feature, isn't only about a desired inner condition
now. It's about a synthetic attitude. So show me a temple where the
meditation room is outfitted with a few dozen giant TV screens. The
students do their meditation while CNN, Christingle Matthews, Sean
Hannity, Oprah, news-boy-on-a bike Brian Williams, Hawaii Five-O, the
Shopping Channel, Pawn Stars, Jimmy Fallon and his screaming pubescent
audience, and four or five Spanish soaps are going full blast.
That would be a start.
Or throw on 20 or 30 TED lectures simultaneously---prancing grasshoppers extolling the future of technology.
I
submit that if the one of the ancient Zen teachers walked into a modern
American Zen cloister today, that's exactly what he'd do. Turn on a few
hundred TV sets, computers, and mobile devices and say, “Okay, try
being quiet in the middle of this!”
Zen is sacred? What? When was it ever sacred? Soft bells, empty halls?
No, you must have Zen confused with a funeral home.
Every
age has its massive collection of heavily loaded apple carts, and the
job of Zen is to overturn them. When up is down, and insanity is called
normal, that's where you begin…
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Substack, Twitter, and Gab at @jonrappoport)
No comments:
Post a Comment