UnMind 87. Pandemic & 4 Spheres — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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The Four Spheres are real —
as real as anything else —
but temporary

We left off with the promise that we would continue examining the can of worms called “anxiety.” To a fish or a bird, as Master Dogen analogizes, this would be a more attractive proposition. Growing up outside a small town in southern Illinois, we lived near the country club overlooking an artificial lake, where we and others would go fishing. I sold earthworms for bait on the road to the lake in front of our farmhouse. Amongst other things, I learned to lay sheets of cloth or paper on the ground so that the worms would voluntarily crawl to the surface. That way I didn’t have to dig them up. I don’t know if they experienced anxiety or not, but they would do their utmost to wriggle out of my grasp. One of Buddha’s early experiences of suffering in the world was said to be his observation of earthworms that had been plowed up, writhing in agony.

Anxiety is frequently encountered in meditation, including that around concerns as to whether we are doing zazen correctly, along with other obsessions of the worry-wart monkey mind. But also in daily life, especially when the unexpected happens, such as an emergent natural disaster like the current pandemic, or a man-made calamity like the war in Ukraine. When more than one such cataclysms are occurring simultaneously, the synergistic effect elevates the level of anxiety to panic proportions. You can’t spell “pandemic” without “panic.” To make matters worse, we often don’t know whether we should panic or not, depending on the proximity of the threat, and the quality of the information we have about it. Not to mention those lurking on the horizon that we are completely unaware of at present. One more thing to worry about. What you don’t know not only can hurt you — it can kill you.

In such cases, it is difficult to determine to what degree our “eye of practice” — Dogen’s phrase — can recognize or anticipate the clear and present danger with any accuracy. In the case of climate change, a scientific view from the perspective of extensive training and experience informs an opinion bearing more weight than those based on relative ignorance of atmospheric dynamics or confirmation bias. All too often in the polarized world, the latter wins out. If you have a bias, you want to confirm it.

The quote from Dogen’s Genjokoan [Actualization of the Fundamental Point] generalizes this reality:

Though there are many features in the dusty world
and the world beyond conditions
you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach

Needless to say, your eye of practice is your only bulwark against your own prejudices and opinions. Much of what our eye of practice can reach depends upon repetition, not only in Zen but in any field. And I think we can assume that no two person’s would be identical, though when “coming to accord” with your Zen teacher, one would presume they are in some wise congruent, at least as regards the degree to which we can grasp the implications of buddha-dharma. Certainly our eye of perception is not as dependable as our eye of practice, as Dogen reminds us in Jijuyu Zammai [Self-fulfilling Samadhi]:

All this however does not appear within perception because it is unconstructedness in stillness; it is immediate realization.

When calamity occurs, however, very few of us, other than first-responders, have enough significant repeat experience to train us as to how we should respond to the situation at hand. In Zen, contemporary causes and conditions may be regarded as variations on a theme. That in some sense, all people of all times have confronted similar threats to their comfort, health and life, and that Zen has always provided a resort, if not a sanctuary, in dealing with them. In this sense, nothing is new under the sun.

But on the other hand, humankind may have reached a tipping point that amounts to an existential threat to the species. In that sense, we may say that this situation is unprecedented, at least in recorded history. One thing is sure: the pandemic and other daily and looming disasters have illuminated some of the underlying premises of Zen, and its central method of meditation. Examining these things thoroughly in practice, another Dogen construction, makes it clear that some of the cultural maxims, memes and morsels of received wisdom are not to be believed. Let’s review a few:

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. No, not really. Not necessarily, anyway. In “Trial of the Will,” an article in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens, while dying of cancer, criticized this trope:

“Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America's homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive…

Aging and sickness actually make us weaker. We may effect a recovery, but the long-term diagnosis trends downward, in terms of vim and vigor. There are many prognoses for practicing healthier lifestyles that lead to longevity, including Zen meditation and its moderation in all things including diet, but nothing reverses the inevitable decline. But this is natural, according to Buddhism. Get used to it.

We are not in control of everything — Nature is. If you disagree, next time nature calls, tell her to take a hike. You are busy meditating just now. See how far you get with that. We do not control our breathing even though we may use that construction in the instructions for meditation, particularly of the yogic variety. Pranayama, as I understood it when first practicing yoga before I was exposed to Zen meditation, is purported to be a kind of breath control. Advanced yogis can ostensibly affect their body temperature, thaw out frozen sheets, et cetera. But if someone knocks you out with a baseball bat, your body will keep breathing on its own, thank you very much. Depending on how hard they hit you. The point is that the body is doing the breathing, and eventually will do the dying. There is not a whole lot that we can do to prevent that in the long run, though we postpone the inevitable as long as we can.

Our political leadership is woefully inadequate to the problem. I don’t know that anyone would seriously propose a theory contradicting this belaboring of the rather obvious. R. Buckminster Fuller, one of my mentors in the realm of design thinking, said something to the effect that we look to politicians for answers to our everyday problems. But if they really had any answers, they wouldn’t be politicians. They would be out doing something to actualize the solutions they had come up with. Politicians are the poster boys for maintaining status quo. Particularly their place at the public trough.

Emphasizing the economy over public health is short-sighted. Another goes-without-saying. But it depends on whose economy is getting gored. Yes, yes, yes, I could do the right thing that engenders the greatest good for the greatest number, but if it affects my pocketbook negatively it is difficult to convince me of its value. The tragedy of the commons writ large. Another cow will improve my lot, even though it inevitably degrades the lot we all share in common, the cow pasture.

Seeking fame and fortune is a waste of precious time. I once had a Zen student accuse me of seeking fame and fortune as my motive for propagating Zen. I took it as doubly insulting because I am obviously so incompetent at doing so. If I were in it for the money, I wouldn’t be in it. There are plenty of ways to make an honest buck. There is no money in Zen. If it were for fame, good luck with that. You are going up against a lot more interesting people who have a lot more entertaining subjects to present than Zen. Zazen is boredom on steroids.

We do not need to commute to work. We never did, actually. As long as you are willing to temper your lifestyle to meet your demands on a local level. It was only with the inception of the industrial revolution, with its assembly line production efficiencies, that everyone had to show up at the same place to get the job done. Nowadays that assembly line has been scattered all over the globe, resulting in the supply chain glitches that have further aggravated aspirations of the masters of the overall economy to achieve ever greater growth. It seems there is a natural limitation to growth on the corporate scale, just as there is on the personal level, though that does not keep the captains of industry from trying, however much the former impinges upon the health and vitality of the latter. King cotton, king coal, king oil, king nuke, they must grow, like a cancer, in order to deliver ever-greater profits to their owners. Their hosts may not be so lucky.

It may be that the pandemic will inspire a return to the village model, where everyone can work at home or close by, relying on the interconnectivity of world-around media in the information age. But someone still needs to deliver the goods. Enter Amazon. Maybe eventually everything can be delivered to your door.

If what you have to offer is good enough — a better mousetrap — they will beat a path to your door. Not no more. To compete with the big boys for the big bucks you have to already have the big bucks. Check out the cost of a Super Bowl commercial. Thirty seconds in 2021 was over half a billion dollars.

We can have clear skies, fresh air and clean water. For a brief period everyone was sheltering at home. The expressways and surface streets in the city were relatively quiet. You could hear the birds over the muffled sounds of traffic. There was no rush hour. The air was taking a breather. Everything other than the virus itself took a break. Then, of course, everyone got bored and started pushing to return to “normal.” The politicos got out in front of that parade, as usual. Who wants that kind of “normal”?

To close out this rather long segment, let’s return momentarily to the model of the Four Spheres of Influence (see diagram). It should be mentioned in passing that Zen finds no conflict with the findings of science — a point that my teacher, Matsuoka Roshi, would often make — and one that is endorsed by HH the Dalai Lama. But with the pressures of population growth and disruptions in the geological and geopolitical realms, that does not mean that everything is hunky-dory, whatever that means.

It is clear in the examples cited above that in the face of the current upheavals, the Universal intrudes upon the Natural, Social & Personal realms, sometimes with a vengeance. There is a direct connection between not only the atmosphere, but the sun itself, with the annual orgy of forest fires, for one example. Just as dependably, the Natural takes precedence over Social and Personal spheres, in terms of influence. Read Covid. The Social likewise impacts the Personal, negatively as well as positively. And the Personal is where we ultimately live, but only in the context of the Universal, with intervening Natural and Social spheres. It is no wonder that we feel caught in a trap, along with Master Elvis. And we really cannot go on together, with suspicious minds. Like a vice, when the heat is on, the surrounding spheres become more and more claustrophobic. Where you gonna run, oh sinner man, all on that day?

In Zen, we turn to the Three Treasures for refuge. In terms of where they live within the four Spheres, Buddha is Personal; Dharma is Universal; and Sangha is Social. They are all Natural, as is meditation, at least Zen’s approach to it. In zazen we find and follow the natural posture, the natural breath, and eventually find ourselves residing in the natural state of mind, awareness or attention.

In conclusion, let me suggest that pandemics remind us of basic buddha-dharma: that Life is fragile, and temporary at best. That the tropes that have come out of the collective experience are as unreliable as the ones cited above: we are emphatically not all in this together — witness the uneven distribution of vaccine. On the downside, we are all in this together — unless we all get immune to the virus, it will be the gift that just keeps on giving. Finally, we will not all get through this together, no matter how much the feel-good commentators and politicians vying for your support in dollars, ratings or votes argue to the contrary. Witness the half-billion cases and over six million deaths worldwide. Perhaps Mother Gaia just concluded that there are too many humans demanding too big a piece of the pie, and it’s time to give some of the other species a fighting chance.

Let’s leave it here, or there, for now. It is neither here nor there, as grandpa used to say. But it is now. Please stay tuned for more cans of worms to be opened. Here’s your daily koan: How did those worms get into that can, if it was closed?