Zen is popular these days. I get it, Zen is cool. I’m a Christian, and yet I’ve made something of a study of it for just that reason. Because it’s cool. That’s actually the entire point of Zen, believe it or not, to be completely and totally cool. To achieve a mindset where you’re never disturbed, mistakes are impossible, and everything is generally pretty groovy. The eastern/Asiatic aesthetic helps too. A high-definition photo of a rock garden or a bamboo reed is hard to beat for conjuring up thoughts of tranquility. And, yet, for all that, the amount of people I meet who are actually at peace with themselves and the world is practically zero.
The difficulty is that people are haunted by ghosts. I wrote about this problem a year or so ago but it’s worth retreading with slightly different shoes because it really is the crux of the problems in your life.
When you get up in the morning, and you think about your day, what happens? If you’re like most people, your mind does a two step process of 1) thinking about all the things you have to do that day and then, 2) imagining all the ways they might go wrong. You don’t just think about the fact that you have a deadline to meet this afternoon, you also think about very bad things that might happen to you if you don’t meet it. If you don’t meet deadline, your boss could get mad. You might lose an important client. The company might go under. You might get fired. If you get fired, you might become homeless. You might not have food. You might be lying in a gutter as cars drive by and splash water on you and you freeze to death somewhere south of Sheboygan in January. All these thoughts from something as trivial as a “deadline”. Even the name of it makes it seem more imposing that it is. “Deadline.” Dead, line. A line that, if you cross it, you’ll be dead.
How ridiculous.
In almost all cases deadlines are just words written on a calendar, or a sentence in an email. They’re just words. Nothing more. And yet somehow that entry on your company’s google calendar page revs up your heart rate as though you were staring into the face of a lion. Insane. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to do a good job and be punctual, of course you should. But you should do so constantly in a state of, “And if it doesn’t happen… so what?” That’s Zen. That’s being completely cool. Loosely speaking, practical Zen may be defined as “realizing that emails can’t kill you.” We only think that they can because we construct narratives around them and then make the mistake of believing our own fiction. Entries in calendars. Words in emails. Bold faced type on envelopes or words like “audit” or “performance review”. None of these things have any power to make us anxious or afraid except that we give them power through stories. We wake up in the morning and construct a story where-in missing a deadline leads directly to us dying in a ditch. That’s not real.
It’s a ghost.
Most of the things you fear are likewise nothing more than phantoms in your head. Narratives you’ve made up to spook yourself. You probably have several. You probably have a specter of cancer that you worry about from time to time and which causes you to go into a panic spiral every time you get a weird pain. You probably have a phantom of abandonment or two, a worry that your friends and family will all give up on you if you don’t perform sufficiently, whatever that might mean. Maybe you’re haunted by ghosts of physical attack, lying awake at night, jumping at every creak of an old house for fear that that burglar has finally come to kill you. Or maybe you, like so many people today, are simply haunted by the fear of not mattering.
But these are all just stories. Stories you wrote yourself. Most of you worried about cancer have probably never had it. Most of you fearful of abandonment have friends who would never leave you. Most of you aren’t in danger of being killed by a robber in the night. Most of you won’t die in a ditch if you miss a deadline and lose your job. That’s not reality. That’s just a ghost. That’s a narrative in your head.
So what to do?
Western Zen enthusiasts who recognize this problem recommend “being present” in the moment and “clearing your mind”, or some such thing. Good as far as it goes, but the real purpose of trying to “empty your mind” in meditation and think of nothing is to realize that you can’t do it. Minds think. That’s what they do. Just as hearts beat and lungs breath, minds think. They create and process thoughts and you can’t turn them off unless you’re dead. Heck, they even like to go on thinking while you’re asleep through dreams. You find, ultimately, that you can’t “live in the now” by trying to not think about the future. You can’t be “fully present” enough to avoid anxiety and fear. It doesn’t work.
The missing ingredient is faith.
I’m not just putting a “Christian spin” on Zen here. Faith is an essential part of any spiritual path. Remember how I said part of Zen was being in a mindset where “you’re never disturbed, mistakes are impossible, and everything is generally pretty groovy.” That’s only possible by faith. Because faith is really nothing more than believing that everything is going exactly as it should. When the Buddha spoke about the path as one of abandonment of desire he was speaking of this. You care about things working out one way or another, and fear that they will not, because you don’t trust that there is a higher plan. You believe that you can screw it up.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from the will of your Father.”
You can’t die until it’s your time to go. The picture Jesus paints for us here is that everything is following a higher plan and pattern, even the birth and death of a little bird was thought of and fixed before the foundation of the world. There really is a higher narrative into which our lives fit, one that overrides and supersedes whatever fictions we can come up with to scare ourselves with. The mind can’t not think, so let it think of that. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you as well.” Fix your mind on the story God is telling, then you can truly be at peace in the now.
Caveat
I wish I could end this post now because boy that’s a nice finishing sentence, “Fix your mind on the story God is telling, then you can truly be at peace in the now.” Really ace. But I would be remiss not to warn you of the one exception, an exception which is difficult to understand. I hate that I have to do it because it makes this post messy but, what’d’ya gonna do? So, here it is:
In both the Zen and Christian tradition there is this idea that you can’t screw it up… unless you fear that you can. It’s hard to wrap your mind around but the gist of it is that, if you go with the flow of life, things will work out exactly as they should. If, on the other hand, you resist and try to force it to work out some other way, you can cause yourself a lot of pain. The Buddhists spoke of fate like a chariot, and man could either accept and work with his fate and ride along very pleasantly in the chariot; or, he could fight and try to go the other way and be dragged behind the wheel. Your life would follow its course one way or another, but you could certainly choose to make it more painful if you desired. You see this with many figures in the Bible. Abraham for example was chosen to be the father of Israel & ultimately Christ. This was his purpose and he would fulfill it one way or another. When he tried to force it to happen though, by fathering children with a slave woman not his wife, he begat all manner of problems. He still got where he was going, but he and his descendants had to be dragged behind the wheel to get there. Jonah was made to be the prophet to Nineveh and he was going to fulfill that role, by the easy way or the hard. Likewise with David, Samson, even St. Peter, we see this pattern over and over again. God has a plan for you. Go with it or don’t but you’re going to end up there either way.
So, as Jesus did, I say to you don’t worry. Worry, fear, that’s really the only sin. Because fear is the opposite of faith and keeps you running from all manner of ghosts. It gets you dragged behind the chariot. You’re still going where you always had to, only instead of enjoying the ride your fretting over an email from some HR lady named Denise. You can’t screw it up unless you think you can.
Very good read.Thank you.