Category Archives: gōng (功)

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the intellectual is extinct

not intelligence – intelligence is a complex topic. I adhere to Howard Gardner’s 6 intelligences work (note that my spell checker “corrects” me for making “intelligence” plural). intelligence, as we humans understand it, easily extends to primates, dogs, cats…

intellect, though, is another thing: intellect is to intelligence as musician is to music (kind of – because what is music? what is a musician?) on a basic level, intelligence is the mechanics of solving problems, problems here meaning situations which one wants to alter, to be distinguished from whining on the potty with kleenex about all your “problems”. the mechanical intelligence is essentially unalterable, biological, and every creature possesses it, without acquiring it.

we acquire knowledge, which augments or supplies intelligence. the acquisition of that knowledge is widely varied in its method: some go to endless college, where they intake that which they think will augment their intelligence in beneficial ways – in ways that will allow them to solve specific problem sets. doctors want to solve medical problems. for this, they require medical knowledge.

but of course, intelligence, as Gardner tells us, is not generic – its variance is myriad. you could use a word like “aptitude”, if you fear intelligence types. So, a doctor with tons of medical knowledge, can be terrible at solving medical problems even worse, a doctor can substitute problem solving (intelligence) with sophisticated application of knowledge blocks – not unlike modern AI “RAG” retrievel mechanisms, where by questions are answered by retrieving appropriate text blocks from articles, rapidly, and collating them into actionable from. in AI, this uses vectors – long chains of similarity of ideas, from which the machine chooses “the best”. not to be too esoteric here – you know these people: they are great standardized test takers. there are legends of people who run a racket of memorizing huge chunks of written data, in preparation for competitive tests – even sell their skills on the black market.

But worse yet are those who flood the professions today, completely unequipped to apply intelligence – critical thinking, analysis, synthesis – all words gone by the wayside in modern times. This is the doctor who, in 15 minutes, discerns the type of cancer you have (this, discernment, is indeed a type of intelligence), but then skips the deduction, and jumps to sophisticated code matching, to produce the cause and the treatment of this type (“label”) of cancer that you have. and then they proceed to kill you – because the human body is so complex, as is a modern pathology like cancer, that text retrieval is highly likely to pick the wrong similarity. this is also compounded by the nature of the the texts which are produced today – also flawed by the industrial nature of research and research writing – there is no money in finding the needle in the haystack – in fact, that needle is usually the thing that disproves your whole thesis, and hell, you don’t have time to truly follow the scientific method!

I’ve wandered again. got hung up on widely diversified intelligence, battling with highly specialized knowledge storage and retrieval. what I was aiming at was a dinosaur – the intellectual; the intellect. a dying or dead breed of person who, through rigid social structure, was forced to learn a raft of non-specialized knowledge, for some unstated reason. the opposite of OBE (objectives based education). The “objective” was to become an intellectual – something pretty esoteric, but supported socially. It was part of social selection in the intelligentsia to regularly quote esoteric Heraclitus, in the context of rhetorically complex argumentation, to “win” a likewise intellectual point. mental masturbation, in its most common application.

to this end, one learned Latin, Greek, plus a modern language, and, not just at the SAT level. there were aged task masters, whose claim to position was exactly their pedantry. because you can’t really learn this shit without repetition and rote memorization.

I could take a moment here to talk about Picasso – this painter who is famous for abstraction. Picasso started out in the grueling, pedantic system of classical painting – did hundreds of non-abstract drawings of tables, flowers, etc., with no hope of abstraction – because he was the germinal inventor of abstraction! at some point, he began “cubism” – whereby you abstract simple geometric shapes, from those rigid “classical” 3-point-persepctive drawings. this process evolved into his ultimate abstractions. but none of this could have happened without his being inundated with the entire history of rendering, and forced to replicate it.

so the intellectual is the product of excessive education, an acuity to problem solving intelligence, and, of course, a wild spirit longing for freedom.

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Why G*d doesn’t answer your prayers.

Because G*d isn’t a business. G*d is not an old man with a beard, unless that’s how you imagine him. G*d is omniscient – knows everything; omnipresent – everywhere; omnipotent – all powerful. Surely you’ve heard this before. But even the priests, ministers, pastors, who say this in one breath, in the next breath tell you to ask G*d for help, for favors, Christmas presents… The two notions just don’t match.

You don’t need to tell an omniscient consciousness your needs or wants – because “all knowing”.

You don’t need to pray “to” an omnipresent being, because “everywhere.”

G*d is responsible for everything everywhere – your cell mitosis and your cancer diagnosis. “responsible” does not equal “cause.” As far as we know, we exercise freewill. So if you pour garbage into the clean body you were given, G*d lets those cells do their thing. Don’t pray for that to change.

Then there’s G*d’s plan. G*d is also ineffable. Sorry we’ve lost that word through our poor educational system. It means it’s not possible to explain G*d. Doesn’t mean we just don’t know how to explain G*d – it means there is no human with the capacity to explain the Creator of Everything. So, might be smart to stop trying. Anyway, what good would it do you?

These are the building blocks. But the best building block is this: Jesus actually told you how to pray! Jesus didn’t really leave us a lot of information – or, you could say, he left us just enough. First, he pared down the 10 commandments – they weren’t his, and were probably made up by Moses, or the politburo that represented Moses – these “commandments” seem a lot like human laws, and coincide neatly with the Jewish norms at the time. Always gotta be suspicious when some guy says “G*d agrees with everything I say.” Convenient for an authoritarian system.

But totally the opposite of what we said above: free will. No, G*d doesn’t tell you not to do anything. Go for it! And for sure, the human machinery – the way humans work – will deliver to you the consequences of your actions – not G*d.

Jesus said you only need two “commandments”: love G*d with all your heart, mind, spirit. Any questions? And then: “love your ‘neighbor’ as much and in the same way as you love yourself.” And then the kicker: “on (just) these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.” The Jewish Torah is divided into the Law and the Prophets (so is the old testament: Deuteronomy means the (second) law; and all the books with names on them are Prophets). So, this is also a hard thing for us modern dummies: it’s called (in math) a “discreet system.” Means you don’t need ANY MORE RULES than the two I gave you. All other rules you could think of derive from those two, so you don’t need to add them.

Jesus told you how to pray. The Lord’s Prayer. That’s the only thing you need. There are no other prayers in the New Testament – except for a couple of little ones, but again, they are connected with the Lord’s Prayer.

  1. “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” This is Jesus choking up just before he is nailed to a crucifix, saying, “skip me on this one.” But – and this is the big but – he adds the clause from the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” He doesn’t expect G*d to not go through with the great plan, which requires a sacrifice – but, never hurts to ask.
  2. “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” A prayer-lite for the sake of the Love of the Neighbor. Also – directly from the Lord’s Prayer!

That’s it! No “please give me that bike for Christmas”, or “please let my son get into Harvard.” Zero (0) requests! It’s not Oprah! Not Grant a Wish! It’s like this

  1. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done. Do what you intend to do – not what WE ask you to do. On earth, just like in heaven. Even if you escape earth, the same deal is in heaven for you.
  2. Give us today our daily bread. Ok. Maybe this is an “ask” – except in the original language – Aramaic (remember Jesus was not a Hebrew) – it’s not “daily” – people argue about this a lot, but mostly about the translation from Greek – which is not the language Jesus said it in. Give us today maybe our last meal – ever. Remember, it’s ok and entirely possible that we will die TODAY, and that’s a good thing. “Daily” is really the wrong word, and confuses the whole meaning. Look at what follows: 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them… 34 Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself…
  3. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Again, back to the “commandments.” First thing is to US: You there! You forgive everybody. Forgiveness is the rule, thy neighbor as thyself. But we can and should ask G*d for forgiveness.
  4. Lead us not into temptation. Again, this is more you talking to yourself – don’t let yourself be led by something else – into something that will harm you.
  5. Deliver us from evil. Not sure on this one. Reminds by of George W. and the “axis of Evil.” Not sure that this was passed down correctly. But ok. G*d does indeed have the power (all-powerful) to quash “evil.” The main point is, it does not mean ” make that car swerve out of the way of my child in the street.” That’s not evil: it’s freewill – your child knows the rules, and still goes out into the street. Something painful might happen. Not G*d’s deal.

That’s it: 1) let it happen 2) get me through today 3) let’s forgive one another 4) let us choose wisely 5) let us choose wisely. It’s a “personal oracle” – a conversation with everything around you, that echos back to YOU. You are G*d, as long as you are Love.

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Ginsberg Theology

Needless to say, a gay Jewish man on acid comes to the conclusion that there is God in everything.  If you haven’t ever read the Paris Review 8 “Art of Poetry” interview….

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4389/the-art-of-poetry-no-8-allen-ginsberg

Anyway my first thought was this was what I was born for, and second thought, never forget—never forget, never renege, never deny. Never deny the voice no, never forget it, don’t get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds. But the spirit of the universe was what I was born to realize. What I was speaking about visually was, immediately, that the cornices in the old tenement building in Harlem across the backyard court had been carved very finely in 1890 or 1910. And were like the solidification of a great deal of intelligence and care and love also. So that I began noticing in every corner where I looked evidence of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hand placed them there—that some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me. That some hand had placed the sky. No, that’s exaggerating—not that some hand had placed the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself. Or that God was in front of my eyes—existence itself was God. Well, the formulations are like that—I didn’t formulate it in exactly those terms, what I was seeing was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body … my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I’d been existing in. So, I’m trying to avoid generalizations about that sudden deeper real universe and keep it strictly to observations of phenomenal data, or a voice with a certain sound, the appearance of cornices, the appearance of the sky say, of the great blue hand, the living hand—to keep to images.

So then, the other poem that brought this on in the same day was The Little Girl Lost, where there was a repeated refrain,

Do father, mother, weep,
Where can Lyca sleep?

How can Lyca sleep
If her mother weep?

“If her heart does ache
 Then let Lyca wake;
If my mother sleep,
Lyca shall not weep.”

It’s that hypnotic thing—and I suddenly realized that Lyca was me, or Lyca was the self; father, mother seeking Lyca, was God seeking, Father, the Creator; and “If her heart does ache / Then let Lyca wake”—wake to what? Wake meaning wake to the same awakeness I was just talking about—of existence in the entire universe. The total consciousness then, of the complete universe. Which is what Blake was talking about. In other words a breakthrough from ordinary habitual quotidian consciousness into consciousness that was really seeing all of heaven in a flower. Or what was it, eternity in a flower … heaven in a grain of sand. As I was seeing heaven in the cornice of the building. By heaven here I mean this imprint or concretization or living form, of an intelligent hand—the work of an intelligent hand, which still had the intelligence molded into it. The gargoyles on the Harlem cornices. What was interesting about the cornice was that there’s cornices like that on every building, but I never noticed them before. And I never realized that they meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of industrial tin. Not only that man, the workman, the artisan, but the architect had thought of it, the builder had paid for it, the smelter had smelt it, the miner had dug it up out of the earth, the earth had gone through eons preparing it. So the little molecules had slumbered for … for kalpas. So out of all of these kalpas it all got together in a great succession of impulses, to be frozen finally in that one form of a cornucopia cornice on the building front. And God knows how many people made the moon. Or what spirits labored … to set fire to the sun. As Blake says, “When I look in the sun I don’t see the rising sun I see a band of angels singing holy, holy, holy.” Well, his perception of the field of the sun is different from that of a man who just sees the sun sun, without any emotional relationship to it.

 

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Discipline

I wake up at 5 a. m. every morning to do yoga. People have said that this requires discipline, but that word strikes me as objectionable and false in this context.

Growing up a musician, I was constantly presented with the word discipline. What it meant as a child was forcing yourself to do something you didn’t want to do. But later it became clear that this was a childish view. Clearly I love music. It is not that I don’t want to do music. It is rather that so much practice time is sometimes difficult to reconcile. Most people cannot imagine what it is like to spend 6 to 8 hours every day practicing. This begs a different meaning for discipline.

For Westerners discipline is usually wielded like a sword of righteousness. It is entirely egotistical. A disciplined person loves his discipline and disdains those that live in sloppy disarray.

In my practice there is no room for the ego. Indeed the Vedic teaching are focused on freedom from the ego. Patanjali’s yoga was one of the first attempts at realizing the Vedas in a way that people could embrace. Instead of discipline – the word is never used in any translation – the Vedas offer 6 “graces”.  Together, these comprise what I substitute, in my heart , for discipline. (Summaries are from Shankaracharya, The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom)

1) Restfulness – a steady intentness of the mind on its goal.

2) Self-control – the steadying of the powers that act and perceive, each in its own sphere, turning them back from sensuality.

3) Withdrawal – the raising of the mind above external things.

4) Endurance – the enduring of all ills without petulance and without self-pity.

5) Faith – an honest confidence in the teaching and the Teacher.

6) Meditation – the intentness of the soul on the pure Eternal, but not the indulgence of fancy.

This ego-less approach is very difficult for the Western perspective.  The fist question the Western student has is, “wait – what’s the goal?” The answer that Dogen would give is that you can not possibly understand the goal, even if it were expressible in human terms. This is where Dogen uses the word Faith – it is faith in the Teacher: that your Teacher knows what to teach, having inherited from the thousands of years of Teachers, the path to this goal.

Back to music – what is the goal of music? In America, the goal of all those hours of practice is probably Money and Fame – among the “graces” of the Capitalist Church.  But discipline with that goal will produce mediocrity. A very great film, coincidentally about the cello(ish), is Tous les matins du monde.  It has been very influential to me, in terms of my understanding of “discipline”.  Here is the iMDB summary:

It’s late 17th century. The viola da gamba player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe comes home to find that his wife died while he was away. In his grief he builds a small house in his garden into which he moves to dedicate his life to music and his two young daughters Madeleine and Toinette, avoiding the outside world. Rumor about him and his music is widespread, and even reaches to the court of Louis XIV, who wants him at his court in Lully’s orchestra, but Monsieur de Sainte Colombe refuses.

One day, nineteenyear-old Marin Marais (Guillaume Depardieu) shows up at Sainte Colombes door, requesting that he be accepted as a pupil. In spite of an impressive audition, the Master rejects him, to the great disappointment of both Madeleine and Toinette. In a short but cold and biting pronouncement, Sainte Colombe tells him to go to play at the Court, where his undeniable talent will be most appreciated, but he, Marais, will never know what real music is all about, and what it means to be a musician: You make music, Monsieur, you are not a musician.

For me, this suggests the related word “discipleship”, instead of discipline. You go to your shed in the garden each day to practice, through no power of your own, no ego. Instead, you are called to the shed, to do the work you have been gifted with.  It would be impossible to explain this as a kind of “goal” to someone else. This is why discipline may be loud, but discipleship may be quiet. St. Paul says, in the first letter to the Corinthians

 In fact, preaching the gospel gives me nothing to boast of, for I am under compulsion and I should be in trouble if I failed to do it.  If I did it on my own initiative I would deserve a reward; but if I do it under compulsion I am simply accepting a task entrusted to me.  What reward do I have, then? That in my preaching I offer the gospel free of charge to avoid using the rights which the gospel allows me.  So though I was not a slave to any human being, I put myself in slavery to all people, to win as many as I could.

I have also heard the word sacrifice used in relation to discipline. I take issue with this, as well.  In the Western sense, sacrifice is again, tied to the ego. People would not do sacrifice if it were kept a secret. If they drag the cross up the hill, they do so only with a crowd of onlookers. Sacrifice in this sense implies the loss of something great.  I see no loss in the few hours of sleep I might have had. I see no loss in the sleep I lose to quiet my baby’s fears in the night.

Instead, I see only gain, feel only enrichment

 

 

 

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Kingdom Come

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done – on earth, as it is in Heaven.

Christian don’t really understand this passage – it is locked in an antiquated style of English, with far too much reliance on a level of grammar that has gone lost in our times.  It means:

Let your Kingdom come, let you will be done – let this happen on earth, as it happens in Heaven.

Thus, Christians are tasked with making the Kingdom of God happen on Earth – that is, here, now, where we stand.  Make Heaven happen on earth, In this way, Jesus has the same  “good news” as Buddha.  Both were reacting against religions (Hinduism and Judaism)  that preached enlightenment AFTER death. The radical message that both preached was –  don’t wait!  Get enlightened now!  Before you die!

In the Kingdom, All are enlightened. To be enlightened means to see as God sees – that all Things are only one Thing, that all bodies are actually one body.  And this is not a metaphor. When we see as God sees, we see not as “through a glass darkly”, where individual shapes move about, darkly, ominously; rather, we see a visual field, we hear an aural field, within which we can choose to distinguish individual elements, or not.  Of course, there are phases we must go through to get to this sense of awareness: the first phase is to feel a sense of love for everything.  To love as God loves. As J.D Salinger writes:

J.D. Salinger

“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

And this is what Nietzsche meant by “Übermensch”. Shaw unfortunately was too arrogant to try to understand German when he mistranslated this to “superman.” Indeed, it is easier to understand this word if you are from California: if someone says  “Über schwag”, it means “of the highest quality; at the point of highest development”.  So, an “Übermensch” is not above human – just really, finally, a human – no longer a beast. It’s not a question of evolution.  it is a question of growing up, all the way, into a full understanding of who you are in relationship to where you are.

And so, we seek to live daily on a higher spiritual plane.  The first step is to forgive.  The second is to love. The third is to forgive because you love. The fourth is to forgive others, because there are no others – they are we. And so, the fifth step to finding the Kingdom is to love others as you love yourself. The sixth step is to practice – to discipline yourself to think this way all the time, so that it becomes automatic; it becomes “easy”. The seventh step is to make it – to live, to help us all live. The eighth step is to clear some space out, so you can space out. The ninth step is devotion – pary at all times.  The tenth step is surrender – breath out, let go.

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This Self cannot be gained by one devoid of strength

Nayam atma balahinena labhyah – This Self cannot be gained by one devoid of strength
– Mundaka Upanishad iii:2:3
This mantra has always appealed to me, made me feel good when I think about it, say it… I think I like it because of two reasons:
the phrase “this Self” strikes me as personal – not pondering over some metaphysical conundrum, but rather something from myself, like my ear or my leg.
there is also the feeling that the writer of the mantra is writing from experience – a long trail of experiences, which were not easy.
I think about when my guru recently described someone as “strong, strong.” The person she is describing is, indeed, a strong , strong yogi. He looks it. There is no doubt. But I immediately thought, “not ever so strong as you.” Because the strength fired by passion is what the mantra is referring to – clearly. We all know that, seen from far above, the strong man is indistinguishable from an ant. Indeed, proportionately, the ant is much stronger. But both Man and Ant can be brushed off the surface of the earth by the eyelashes of Satan (I use this name because it invokes fear in many people, from diverse cultures.)
Because the strength of the Upanishad mantra is that strength needed to combat the greatest power in the human universe – fear. Fear of This Self. When you are alone, are you alone? No. You are always trapped with You. It is in utter aloneness that humans feel the most wretched, nauseating fear, and this is because they do not recognize the frightening being that surrounds them in this aloneness. It is us. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Incidentally, my dad used to read me Pogo, incessantly, insistently. He wanted me to know something. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” What the mantra is saying, however, is that we do not run from This Self – we must gain it. Tame it? Embrace it? Yes. I think so. And for this, we need that special strength. Do you know what it feels like?
Because you have to feel it once, before you can recognize it. It’s likely not one of those alternative strengths that someone has preached to you in the past, like “moral strength” or “strength of character.” No. Indeed, this strength feels exactly like physical strength, only, inside you. It feels like the cows are tied to your arms, and pulling you apart. But, you feel the sinews wrap around the pain and the force, and counter it. We who practice Ashtanga and Yi Jing Jin feel it in our practice, once we have surpassed the deceptive feelings of physical strength.

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Zen Koans

— communication between the Master and apprentice. translated by my lifelong friend, Chiung-Ju

# “Please make my heart return to tranquility?”
“Please bring your heart here, I will make your heart return to tranquility.”

# “What is free in a moment”
“Who is tying you?!”

# “What is understanding?”
“Buddha was never confused.”

# “Where is the clean-pure land’s whereabouts?”
“Who has befouled you?”