It Is What It Is

It is what it is. 

Man am I sick of this phrase. I used to joke that this was the most common five words on a construction site. Probably true. But I'm starting to think it less funny. It's actually rather depressing. What is this fatalism that seems to be sweeping the nation? Everyone is saying this, or things like it. I hear it in class, on the radio, from friends, and from strangers overheard in diners and coffeeshops. Everyone seems to be throwing up their hands at the world and saying, "there's nothing I can do." 

I heard a story on NPR the other day, about teaching strategies, East and West. Here in the West, kids are taught that smart kids are the ones that do well in school. In the East, kids are taught that it's the hardworking kids that succeed. An experiment was done, some years ago, where children from Japan and from American were given a math problem far above their ability. The Americans gave up after, on average, thirty seconds, saying "we haven't had this yet." The Japanese children worked on it for over an hour. 

We deride the East, saying they are robots that learn only by rote. Somewhat true, their creativity is less pronounced. But it seems that Americans are helpless without being told exactly how to do things. We don't work for things, we give up. They said it was because failure in the West is taken as a personality flaw, not merely a lack of effort or even luck. So when confronted with an insurmountable problem, we turn away. What has happened to us?

I said to my uncle that back after WWII, there was a surge in energy, a sort of collective testosterone rush after having won the war. We were invincible, unstoppable. Just as in any contest, the victors go home, full of optimism and pride, have lots of sex (baby boom) and build lots of things (suburbia, highways, etc). The post-war boom. Things got stagnant more or less in the 70s, and now we're on a downswing it seems. Oh, there's been GDP growth, but that means little, especially to the common man, who's wages have stayed stagnant for decades. 

I think the fatalism is a defensive strategy for this decline. Things are failing, and people are stepping back from it in a sense, as a way of insulating themselves from it. That's the way things go, they seem to say, and as it falls, they try to remain separate. When things slip downwards, there is no collective energy for doing things. It is a period of waiting, to see which way things are going. But to wait too long is to fail entirely. And anyways, insulating yourself from the failure of the world is to cause the failure of the world: if no one does anything to sustain, to build, to keep alive, then, it will not be sustained, built or kept alive! It's a positive feedback loop, also known as a vicious cycle. 

Not that it's all bad, this accepting of reality; in a way it is a good thing. In remodeling homes, a specific case, you see that there's nothing you can do about the shoddy work that went before, or the fact that the wall studs are warped. The baseboard is going to have gaps between it and the wall. You grab your caulk gun and go to work. But too often I see, even in myself, an unwillingness to go the extra mile, to put in the effort and time and care to make things right. Money rules the day, and working quickly in some ways trumps doing things precisely. The evil profit motive ruining things once again. Again with the baseboard: if the corner joints aren't perfect, even when the walls were, it's okay, caulk will hide it. You say things like, "good enough for paint-grade," "can't see it from my house," and "spackle caulk and paint make a carpenter what he ain't." 

True enough. In the end, we make it look good. And often, as I said, you just have to fudge things to make them work. A good carpenter is one who can hide his mistakes, they say. One must work with what is there, must be able to see clearly what is. 

Of course, for myself, very often I rage internally against the standards some people hold. They want their walls smooth and their woodwork perfect, even in an old house, every joint hidden, every nailhole covered, and so forth. The smallest defect, they freak out over. (They also want it done for next to nothing, and as fast as possible). I may not have the patience for finish carpentry. These Euclidian ideals do not square with the world, they do not follow the curves, so to speak, of the earth. Thus the old man wastes much energy picking every leaf off of is lawn, though more fall every day, and becomes bitter and obsessed. 

So in a sense, the fatalism is a positive response. We are awakening to the reality around us, seeing it clearly, and in a sense realizing that certain things cannot be altered, and do not need to be. We are tuning in a bit better to what's there to be tuned into, ditching these Platonic ideals for a more empirical reality. This shall be the birth of the new world, as the old crumbles. 

But that it is a fatalism, and not mere clarity, is what makes me think it is an example of a greater problem. We are getting soft. We have had it too good, been too insulated from real work and real things. We have fewer than ever people entering into the trades as apprentices. In 20 years, who is going to be doing the work that will so desperately needed to be done, as we recreate our society? Mexicans, I suppose; such work has always gone to the latest wave of immigrants, from the Irish, to the Italians, the Polish, and so on. Yet as goes the prosperity, so go the Mexican immigrants, I bet. I'm sure they'd rather be poor in their own land with their families nearby, than poor in a foreign place.

Even our wars, we are loathe to fight. The hoopla over the Benghazi attacks. We are fighting a global War on Terror, however misconceived, people. Do you really think there will be no casualties? Do the Taliban or al Qaeda, after a drone strike, freak out and lob investigations and controversy at their commanders and leaders? No. These are men who know what a war is. They know about suffering, they know about effort. They mourn their dead, and go right back to the fight. 

If we are going to fight wars, which I'm not saying we should, we should do it 100%. I agree with our military leaders in this. Clear goals, and support your commanders. If you can't do both, it's time to pull out. There will be mishaps, there will be pain, there will be death. If you can't handle that, don't fight a war. 

So while I'm all for recognizing reality, we need to ditch this phrase and the attitude behind it. We are not mere slaves to fate. Perhaps the government is corrupt, business self-interested and insane. Fine, but don't submit to it with fatalism. Fight! Build something new! We can't wait for the old to fall before we work to make the new, we must start now, with hope and energy. Otherwise we're going to be stuck with some dystopian future we really aren't going to like. 

To Tao From Zen

I love the little book of wisdom that is the Tao Te Ching, but sometimes it strikes me as extremely useless. All this stuff about how the sage does this, the sage does that... well, that's fine and good for the sage, but what about the rest of us? If we try to emulate what the book says denotes a master, all we end up with is hypocrisy. We're aping the saints, not a saint ourselves. You need only look as far as the religious right to see what I'm talking about. They're rigid legalists, not Jesus-like Christ figures. They're faking it. A real sage doesn't read in a book how to act, it comes from his or her inner nature, from their oneness with Tao. If a sage lives as an ascetic, it isn't out of self-denial from guilt, or to set an example, or to not pollute the world with reckless consumption; it's because he realized he didn't need all that stuff to begin with. If he is generous and full of kindness to all, it isn't because he should, but because he deep down must.

The Tao Te Ching often just seems not like a how-to book, but more of a snapshot of the sage. Full of lofty sayings and statements that tantalize but don't quite deliver. Interesting, in a way, but not always entirely helpful. What we all want is to know how to actually embody such sagacity. How do I find the Tao? I know it's a ridiculous question to even ask, knowing intellectually that it is all around us (so sayeth the texts and wise ones), it is all that is, as well as all that isn't, we couldn't get away from it if we wanted to.

How do you do without doing? It's a bootstrap problem: wei wu wei, doing non-doing, is impossible to achieve. Attempt it, and you are acting with expectation, forcing things, and forcing is wei, not wu wei. Like in Buddhism, when you accept that desire causes all suffering (dukkha), and go on to desire to end desiring. This is the hypocrisy, and actually dangerous, because you may be deluding yourself, and get the spiritual pride going. You're doing all this religion/philosophy stuff to achieve enlightenment, which is something you (think you) don't have, but want to attain in the future, and thus you're always a seeker, never a finder. You are getting in your own way.

So how does one get out of one's own way so as to flow with the Tao? There is nothing simpler, nor harder; it's always the most obvious thing that gets missed. But as always, I circle around to acceptance in the broadest sense. The only way to act without expectation is to not be in the future, by being in the present. You get there through surrender, surrender to your experience, whatever it currently is, without comment or opinion. In the present, you can't act with expectation, because it's all there, and you're just grooving with it. This is the point of insight meditation

Or perhaps this bootstrap problem is the point, to throw you against your ego's incapability, and knock you sideways into the Void-- a sort of Taoist version of a Zen koan-- Taoism being the mother of Zen (who's father was Mahayana Buddhism). You read the TTC, see how impossible it is to do this, get wrapped up in the dilemma, until the whole thing dissolves in a sort of ego-death or satori, if only for a moment. Sometimes I think this is the main point of sacred writings, from the Law in Judaism, Jesus' teachings, the Tao Te Ching, the Buddhist sutras, and so forth. Not to show you the way, but to prove that the way is impossible for the "i" to attain, thus pushing you into the realization of "I".

This post is also posted on The Rambling Taoists as a guest post.

Acceptance Part 2

I feel I must revisit my thoughts about Acceptance, as written about in that post. Mostly I stand by what I said, but I feel I glossed over the most important issue: how can you accept clearly negative things? Didn't really deal with the issue. So I'm going to hash it out here, and see what I can come up with. Your thoughts and ideas, as always, are welcome.

For me, right now the best example is silence. As I wrote in that original post, while reading One Square Inch of Silence a part of me kept feeling annoyed at all the bitching about the noise the author experienced. Like, the Zen side of me saying, hey, the air traffic is part of the landscape you're trying to get a recording of, it's not an intrusion, it just is. The problem is your preconcieved notions of what it should be. But of course, then the environmentalist, asthetic, and Wild Man sides of me come out and I'm right there with him, arguing against human created noise.

So as I sit out on the patio evenings after work, I can accept the endless jet traffic roaring over me; but will I ever really like it, will it ever sound beautiful, and will I ever be able to relax in its context? Perhaps on a deep Zen level, all existence is beautiful... but I kind of doubt this will ever happen.

But now, as I write, an idea occurs to me. I suppose, if I'm really accepting the experience, I also have to accept the thought and feeling within me that the sound is ugly. Acceptance doesn't delete all the old feelings, does it?

So I no longer fight my experience... but the experience is inherently disharmonious. Accepting that the noise is there, but also accepting that I hate it. This must be the motive for action, right? Not asthetics, but this, a more primal urge: the move towards harmony between the inner and outer experience?

Or does this disharmony mean I haven't really accepted the noise? Does working to change a thing equate to non-acceptance of a situation or condition?

Acceptance

View from my sister's balcony

We are our experience, not the things in our experience. As I gaze upon the sunset, it occurs to me that as the sun dips low and bathes the clouds in a golden light from below, that I am that golden light, I am that cloudscape. It exists in my mind, making me integral to the scene. The scene does not exist anywhere for me but within my mind. I have never known anything outside of my own consciousness-- what would that even mean? The sunset is simply what the inside of my head looks like when I look at a sunset "out there." But no one has ever seen "out there" because whatever they saw, it was "in here," in their mind.

I said that acceptance is important. There are two ways in which acceptance seems to be understood. The first, and most common, is about saying "well, I guess that's just the way it is, nothing you can do about it." It is a form of giving up, the road of despair. We rightly disparage this form; to accept that evil exists, or that a bad thing has happened, seems like quitting.

But that is not all that acceptance can be. The second acceptance is about understanding the truth that we are our experience. The entire world that we know exists within us. We talk about how society is out of harmony with the world, but when looked at from this acceptance, we see that this is false. I look at the sunset, and perhaps mourn all the telephone lines and buildings and the roar of airplanes and traffic that get in the way. But then if I accept, I suddenly see that it all exists as a giant whole. There is no harmony or disharmony, there is only IS. It's all there.

So, okay, now I've accepted (we'll suppose). Now I understand that all is one, including me. It is one experience. This is purely logical. Now I look at the sunset not only feeling part of the happening, but knowing that the telephone lines and traffic are integral too. For now, at least. Change happens when we, still accepting what is, change what is.

Perhaps the whole solution comes down to simple asthetics. We choose sunsets without telephone lines, and find ourselves on a pristine mountainside. Or, maybe in a cleaner, less chaotic city, as she work for change that way. There are many ways to have change, but it is acceptance that first opens the doors, that first illuminates the many paths.

I continually find myself coming back to Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching; it has so much for me. Perhaps one day I'll be able to move on to other chapters, but for now it seems to hold the main lessons for me. I keep reading it more deeply. It ends:

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

Lately I've been focusing so much on looking for a job, thinking about money, getting my truck fixed (that's at least done), bills, friends, goals, ideas. I've been busy on the computer, reading, writing like a maniac (and loving it), but haven't sat back and watched sunsets enough, have hardly looked at the trees, have taken no time to simply breathe. I have been forgetting to pause. I keep feeling so low, being surrounded by this urban shit-scape, but that just means I've become too caught up in the "being," not remembering the "non-being;" that is, I've been wrapped up in the things in my experience, and fighting that reality, rather than being one with the experience itself, accepting it.

The roar of traffic as I try to enjoy the sunset seems a bother, but then I realize sound is only existing because of the silence it vibrates within. So I sit back and accept the traffic, hearing the quiet below it. The telephone poles and buildings block my view, but I can accept them, and for the moment let them help form the beautiful moment by framing it. Things like poverty and evil cannot be changed if we continually deny with even part of our minds that it is there. Accept the reality of it, that's step one, but it needn't end there.

We can work the universe like a master craftsman, who constantly checks in with the reality of his art. If he doesn't look at what is before him, he ruins the sculpture. So he looks at his carving, at one and present with its current reality, shaves a little more wood off just here, then checks in again. A dialogue with the world begins this way, and we move towards the beautiful, the good, as a wise man must if he is wise.

Delicate Arch at dawn

As I read and reflect on One Square Inch of Silence, I keep having this nagging thought, a counterpoint to the whole issue, and it has to do with all I'm saying now. If Gordon Hempton is working towards silence and quiet in the national parks, great! It's a better asthetic choice than listening to air traffic while we ponder the age and beauty of Delicate Arch or the stoic strength of an old growth forest. But let us not forget that as the long road toward his goal is walked, we can be enjoying the peace that is already out there all the while. We need not wait. The stars in the city are few, but it's still good to look at the ones that remain.

So. We work with what is, making it more beautiful (one hopes). But it is always important to be rooted in the non-being, which is where the totality of experience, and all of its peace, is realized.

(EDIT: I revisited this post, to readdress some issues. Find that post here)

Surrender

I'm in a decent mood. Kinda feeling happy. I think I need more comedy in my life. I think too much, worry too much. Right now I can feel the stress creeping back in, with repetitive thoughts about things I have to do, about money, work, school. But that's foolish. I'm happy now. I was laughing and smiling all evening. There are no worries. I have been spending way too much time thinking about happiness and not actually having any.

Acceptance and action, those two things seem to be the main ideas in religions and philosophies. I think acceptance really just means surrender to reality. You surrender to it, and in doing so, open up doors for action. Surrender and acceptance don't mean accepting bad things, or good things either. It's about accepting what's real, what's actually there. Notions of good or bad is our judgement and comes after.

Once we've surrendered to reality, we stop wasting energy complaining and worrying, stressing and fretting, and generally just being miserable. Once we surrender, we are free to act, because we're no longer busy pushing reality away. Acceptance brings access to action, and the energy to act. Or to not act, as the case may be.

Of course, we have already surrendered to everything, on the basic level; there's no escaping that, it's a condition of existence. No matter what our mind thinks is the case, we are part of the situation whether we accept it or not.

The point here is to make that surrender a conscious thing. All the strain in life comes from the mind fighting its situations, trying to believe things aren't what they are, and deluding itself with fantasy. We are living as a house divided. The body surrenders, but the mind has not. Therefore we suffer