...
I need to remind you that tomorrow night is the big deal moon, but I think also need to talk about men... their deathless, their unspeakably relentless vexatiousness... the ironclad eggshells called egos. It keeps bubbling up here a few times a day lately, so maybe I should just try to get it off my chest. I mean, I'd hoped a silly little reminiscence about Barrymore could dispense with it, but there's way more about them that drives me up a wall than simply that they can almost never think about anything without sex getting in there... in general... as a fairly safe rule of thumb... mostly... don't even try to deny it.
Sometime in the past I know I must have griped to you about my seriously stupid and physically repulsive neighbor who likes to slide his beady eyeprints over my form, call me "pretty lady" and then start talking in that paternalistic tone, as though I were, say, four, wax competent and experienced on subjects as abstruse as his love of the bakery. This is one of the most ridiculous incarnations of the problem... as though they are not all idiotic.
Okay, it's not all only men. It's everyone, but I don't even particularly want to talk with women. I mean, there are a few women who really do want to interact about important things, but mostly not so much. I love my women friends, but I have no time for the bullshit between women. Let someone else deal with that crap. The good ones I know, or may meet, will be fine with me, even if they don't want to come along on my subjects... and that's actually also true with some of the men I know... that's all mostly jake. It's that thing with me always being with the boys... from forever... that's right.
I was a Camp Fire Girl, but probably would've been better as a Boy Scout. Not a scintilla of gender identity problem has ever gone on here. I'm just all woman and some people find it mannish. I remember a particularly sociable sap in Mensa who called me "man-hearted woman". Yes. I tried that. I was not going to, way not going to, but a dear friend told me she thought it was conceited of me not to join, to give them a chance. That was back when someone could accuse me of such a thing and I'd be worried they were right. So I gave it the college try. Even going to the huge old annual wingding at Asilomar to make good and sure I got a fair representation, it was all classes for how to break the ice, how to have a social life, how to stop being such a drip, plus origami and agreeing to form committees to [never] decide things. People endlessly leaping to self-depricate in all directions, it being a particularly chic thing for geniuses to do.... The best politicians of that benighted community had some social graces, were actually gregarious, had ideas, but were stultifyingly less equipped to turn them real than your basic bubba. He was one of those.
It all went terribly wrong sometime in the middle of my Junior year in high school. They started talking to me like I was a girl or something. Certainly, to an extent, that's a good thing, but this wasn't just taking care not to be unbearably crass around me. It was ceasing to engage with me on matters of life on earth the way they had before. It's as though developing gonads turn males and females into alien species. With the obvious exception of taking up a baseball bat to ward off physical advances, I didn't get that. I never got that.
I wanted the same clean interaction. Deep discussions. Comparing notes. Figuring out the road forward. I wanted what I'd always gotten with the boys, but now the boys didn't have that anymore. Role playing had literally replaced them... and the best way to insure I never got them back was to insist on trying to fish them back out from behind the gonadally-generated jousting helmets they kept insisting were them.
I know it's gotta be daunting to try to be a man in this world. We have stripped out just about all the ways boys can become men and men can be men, and if we have ever intended to put back new and improved ones, we've completely failed. We end up with putzes like my disgusting neighbor, trying to use the voice on us... like that could cover it. We end up with assholes who use slimy debating tactics to pull the wool over our eyes instead of gain or give access to understanding, or clarity, instead of getting nearer to truth, to fundamental reality, to the cores of our very own lives together. We end up with bozos who decide to call themselves things like "teacher" or "executive" or "artist" or "shaman" or "counselor" or what-have-you, guys assuming the role of mentor when they can't mentor their ways out of paper bags.
I remember Kelly. He decided he was a writer. Because he wanted to be a writer. He browbeat me into reading his manuscript. I'd've done it happily, and started to, but it was bad... really, really, really bad... the kind of bad no amount of constructive criticism covers. I totally suck at making disingenuous bleats in these kinds of situations, so I really hoped he wouldn't press it. He pressed it. The normally mild-mannered Kelly went postal on me to read that manuscript. So I did. He insisted on my opinion. I told him it was total crap. Nobody on earth gives a shit about every moment of your boring trip to Europe. We don't want to hear about every step of the way, especially if you can't make it sound interesting, and more especially if you can't do anything better than write "Eiffel Tower" to describe a sight in Paris. Not only that, but the thing's so full of typos one's almost not sure you got to Europe at all.
This did not daunt him. He kept it up. He does not make his money writing. Maybe he publishes himself now that there is the internet, but, well, I can tell you for sure, without having seen him in nearly twenty years, sales are not brisk.
The last time he came down from the foothills of the Sierra to see me was when I was living in Stinson Beach. We had a nice long walk on the beach. It was all pretty much nice until he pointed up at a bird in the sky to pontificate about sea gulls.
Kelly. Kelly? That's a pelican.
The last straw.
He never spoke to me again... except for bumping into each other years later at a restaurant in Mendocino... and I don't think that counts.
Or there was that blowhard at the inn on Atitlán. I was thirty-nine. He was about sixty. We all dined together in the main room of the inn every night. I had mentioned in his hearing that I was a refugee from a Zen monastery and he started in talking about how [not] Zen were the Japanese. Do you realize how many jackasses of the generation preceding mine equate Zen, or Buddhism of any kind, with kamikazes? They're all male. Do you know how many times I've had to mention to them that Japanese are Buddhist in the sense that we are Christian, that other than at certain cultural functions where they might light a stick of incense or something, they aren't anything but annoyingly polite regular humans? Anyway, his tone. It was his tone. Like my neighbor on the bakery. The avidity for taking whatever comes out of a woman's, maybe anyone's, mouth and trying to make it sound stupid or childish or wrong or misguided or... less. Like my disinclination to load up on sweets is somehow a stupid head trip when I could be pigging out on maple bars with the big boys.
I remember when HuffPo first opened for business. I was stuck at Billy and Berit's place, for nearly two months, for my big surgery ordeal at the time. I don't even know how I found out about it. Probably Scott trying to help me find things to keep me amused on the internet. I noticed over the weeks that people really liked to come in and beat up on Deepak Chopra. He would regularly contribute little ditties, nice little pieces for the masses to consider and there were some guys who came in there and insulted him up one side and down the other, seemingly for drill, because it was rarely even on topic, just really vivid abuse. So I started interacting with them. I managed to make them stop it. There was some guy on there who was dazzled by my ability to pacify the goon squad, who came right out and asked me how I did it. He wanted my advice on spiritual matters. I told him I am no teacher, but I would help to whatever extent I thought I could, would stay open for it.
Big mistake. It turns out this fellow believed he was enlightened, but wanted some advice on matters of technique. I have to say he did seem to me to have some ability with depth, with insight, and so this is probably what lulled me into some mode of private interaction with him. He began writing me endless long emails about everything in his head, his life, his fucked up life, battered within an inch of his life by his father, and I was trying to muddle along with it because one really does have to disgorge all the awful inside and find oneself still here and happening in order to get with the program at all, and lort knows I owe the buddhas of the ten directions on that score, but somewhere a week or so into it he mentioned that he wanted to start teaching.
I freaked.
You can't be a teacher before you've even started! He said that he'd been accidentally enlightened already. Do tell. How, prithee, did that happen? His TV. He was watching TV and it suddenly got psychedelic on him, like that poor sap with the blipverts on Max Headroom, only his head did not literally explode from it... just metaphorically. He was awakened by the Buddha of the Flicker Rate... which is to say he was not awakened at all. He had one memorable hallucination that gave him such a nice feeling of knowingness that he decided to be a Zen master just precisely like Kelly decided to be a writer. On the basis of nothing but the mere desire, aka thin air.
I was still patient. I tried to tell him that whether or not his hallucination had actually constituted spiritual awakening, it is mandatory that it be borne out of lucidity or it won't work... or you can't start. If you don't do the work you are just pretending, and if you are just pretending you are not a teacher. You are a charlatan. You are adding more suffering to the world. And, no, you can't be a beginner and a teacher. You can't be sweetly a more honest kind of charlatan and make that okay, because the rules here include that you cannot be putting on airs of any sort, not even "sweet" or "honest" ones, while you're getting to your first real, lucid, consciously-approached enlightenment... moments or hours or even days of kensho... or... well... not a Zen teacher anyway, not a spiritual teacher of any sort. No, no, no... nope.
You could teach third grade. You could teach horseback riding. You could be a ski instructor. But, no way, no way, no way can you be a spiritual teacher before you even get to first base with spiritual teachings, or you are hurting people who are already hurt just as badly or more than you have been. You're a jerk, an egomaniacal jerk.
How can a sweet honest gentle person be a jerk? The steel that firms up around your right to make us buy into your story, believe in whatever posture you choose, no matter how meekly and mildly it proceeds, no matter how preposterous it is, is as maniacal as the brashest rudest braggart ego... maybe even worse for being less obvious. That's how.
He wouldn't listen. I wouldn't talk to him again. All these years later I know exactly who he is and what he's doing and it is precisely as I told him it would be, except, thankfully, he does not seem to have attracted anyone who means it... hardly even anyone who doesn't mean it, come to think of it. I suppose I could have rested in the knowledge that this is how it would turn out for him, but at the time I was very tender on the point of posturing ninnies getting up to hold forth in front of living, breathing, hurting, fearful, miserable, mindfucked sentient beings.
It's connected up with that faking manhood thing. They think they can brazen their way into it. They think the posture of the thing is as good as the thing itself. They are wrong. This is what's wrong with the world. You cannot decide to just be a condescending fuck to people talking about new, or out there ideas, and convince them you know your stuff, that you are alpha and they are deluded squirts. You can't just think to yourself that now you're in your sixties you can just talk down to everyone in the world and they have to take it. You can't just keep on making head trips, and busy imposture, do in place of your actual life. You are not dealing with cartoon characters. You are not a cartoon character.
Maybe I can't be part of the club, can't hang with the boys pretending to be men, can't have the kind of interaction that floats my boat because they think I might eat them... or something... that's okay... well... not... but it will do. Maybe I can't control whether they read me and are helped by the input or just go off in their assumed impostures, gathering however many chumps as they may. I can't be holding parties over the welfare of all sentient beings and letting it make me fume.
Quoth Chögyam Trungpa, in The Myth of Freedom, directly on point for my plight:
The path tantra involves developing an attitude of richness and generosity. Confusion and pain are viewed as sources of inspiration. Furthermore, you acknowledge that you are intelligent and courageous, that you are able to be fundamentally alone. You are willing to have the operation without the use of anesthetics, constantly unfolding, unmasking, opening on and on and on.I'm down with that. Truly. I do not get irked by this stuff for my own sake these days. The hitch is that I get irked by it for others.
I will recall that all my fear and rage and loathing of the notion of the psychotic TV-Zen wannabe's dedication to imposture no matter who got hurt was really just me running nerve movies depicting the transcendence of my compassion up on my own mind screen. If I hadn't been busy with that, I might have realized there was little chance he could have hurt a flea with that action. I would have remembered my teacher telling me that sentient beings only get the teachers they deserve, that even if, yes, it is loathsome these impostors get to baffle and bilk so many miserable souls, those miserable souls also have karma they have to work through to ever get in front of a real teacher anyway.
Real teachers don't waste it on hopeless cases and fake teachers are drilled further into bedrock by them.
Karma handles it. It all works out.
So now that I've blurted some of it out, maybe I can take Trungpa's advice and use this to inspire me.
...
And, by sheer chance, NEIL SANDERS [link fixed] pops up to drive the point home, and the meat of it is in part 2, while discussing the vicissitudes, ego trips, pitfalls, mindfucks of social media with Morris. This is pertinent to every life who finds itself in thrall of TwitFace, or glued to its cell phone, actually to anyone alive right now. It's so much work! People who can't face the work to live up to themselves nevertheless work themselves to the bone every waking minute of every one of their days, even if they don't have a job, to end up dying benighted.
You need to stop. And look.
...
ONE WHO MADE SURE TO ACTUALLY BECOME A MAN....
It's time to think our way out of what we believed our way into.
.
