Something I really like doing is seeing/finding zen-ny things where you don't expect to see them. I could spin some flowery crap about how it helps me to see the good in everything and find inspiration from unexpected places, but really I like it because it makes me feel smart. I have issues.
Something else I really like doing is watching Sons of Anarchy on FX. I like Kurt Sutter, I like what he does, I loved The Shield (yeah, I know, Shawn Ryan was the show-runner for that, but I credit everything Sutter touches to Sutter). If you've never seen it, allow me to summarize:
Cliffnotes Version: It's a show about the Sons of Anarchy, a motorcycle club.
Better Version: It's a show about the members of a motorcycle club, and how they navigate the balance between the MC and their families, operating on the wrong side of the law for (sometimes) the right reasons, and all the trials, tribulations, and challenges included therein.
The show has a rather large cast, with each character possessing a varying amount of badassery. It can be extremely violent, and in it's 4 (we're in 5 now) seasons we've seen rape, countless murders, someone burned alive, a tattoo torched off a man's back, a child molester's dick cut off... You get the idea. Not somewhere you really think you're going to get anything zen out of.
Cue Chucky.
Chucky is a chronic masturbator (no, really, like right in front of you) that the Sons adopt, for lack of a better word. He's by no means in the MC, but he's sort of a pet. Or mascot, if you want to be less condescending about it.
Chucky is a character that Kurt Sutter surely meant to kill off. He was a minor character in one lesser story arc and, in what was almost certainly supposed to be his last scene, the Sons give him to some Chinese gangster. If I may blow some more smoke up Sutter's ass, he's a show-runner who really pays attention to his fans. He listens, and when he can he gives us what we want. In this case, we wanted Chucky.
Why am I going on about this, you may ask? Because Chucky is ultimate zen.
In addition to being traded to the Chinese and having his fingers cut off, he is spoken down to and ordered around almost constantly. What does he, a grown man, say in response to these taunts and commands?
"I accept that."
Chucky, to me, is zen incarnate. He has taken the shittiest of circumstances time and time again, and just accepted them. He doesn't have to like it (in most cases he doesn't like it), but he accepts it. His gratitude to the Sons for saving him (after they abandon him, but still) allows him to take everything going on, and just be. I can barely do that and I work in a fucking cubicle-farm. Not really a volatile environment.
Among the death and violence that hover over Charming like that cloud following around the stick figure in the anti-depressant commercial, we will always have Chucky. And I accept that.
I've told you that the true art of a warrior is to balance terror and wonder. Power can be met only with power. The crux of sorcery is the internal dialogue; that is the key to everything. When a warrior learns to stop it, everything becomes possible; the most farfetched schemes become attainable. We are a feeling and what we call our body is a cluster of luminous fibers that have awareness. As long as you think that you are a solid body you cannot conceive what I am talking about.
ReplyDeleteWarriors keep controlled and aloof. They don't believe anything, but still act efficiently.
We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason , forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime.
We are perceivers. The world that we perceive, though, was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born.
We, the luminous beings, are born with two rings of power, but we use only one to create the world. That ring, which is hooked very soon after we are born, is reason , and its companion is talking. Between the two they concoct and maintain the world. So, in essence, the world that your reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which the reason learns to accept and defend.
The secret of the luminous beings is that they have another ring of power which is never used, the will . The trick of the sorcerer is the same trick of the average man. Both have a description; one, the average man, upholds it with his reason ; the other, the sorcerer, upholds it with his will . Both descriptions have their rules and the rules are perceivable, but the advantage of the sorcerer is that will is more engulfing than reason . You must learn to let yourself perceive whether the description is upheld by your reason or by your will . That is the only way for you to use your daily world as a challenge and a vehicle to accumulate enough personal power in order to get to the totality of yourself.
- Castaneda, "Tales of Power"