Discipline and Choice

In a very strange place right now. I feel as though last night, after the talk and after a nice, quieting walk, I “woke up” out of the retreat and out of the whole spiritual illusion. It’s disquieting, but I’m kind of letting it happen, see how I feel about it with time. I had done the walk, and come to some basic understanding about where I am relative to the whole Buddhist renunciation piece. Feel like I’m at a good “place” there. For some reason I went on the computer and cleaned up the last of my email - just a couple of administrative things about Zeek, working on the Excel spreadsheet. By the time I was done, I was really back in my normal self - and liking it. That being the difference from a lot of the time before retreat.

Ordinary life ain’t that bad. That’s the thing. There’s this whole setup here, and in almost all spiritual life, that ordinary life is somehow deficient, or misguided. It is deficient, I guess, in that it isn’t complete. And definitely some kinds of ordinary life - idiotic suburban materialism, for example - are vapid, harmful, and pretty degraded. But other kinds of ordinary life - say, being a nice liberal lawyer, raising a family of decent kids, enjoying life’s quality pleasures - these are really not so bad.

That sent me into a more radical place: believing that my own life has gone completely off the rails. What the hell am I doing teaching Kabbalah? Doing ridiculous poetry readings for a few weird gay men? I mean, that’s all nice as a hobby, but where’s my real life? The only reason I’m not a successful lawyer/professor/whatever is I lack discipline. To just sit there at the desk and do the work. Well, the same discipline is required here - it’s inescapable.

I also feel the retreat process itself - samadhi in, samadhi out, all this mindfulness - is too much, in a way. It’s too focused. Yes, there is suffering. Yes, there are altered mindstates in which things seem great. Okay, now let’s move on. See, I don’t really regret the retreat work I’ve done until now. I just (whenever I say “just” I get a little watchful about aversion) am saying that - okay, enough. But enough in the sense of also, enough with the spiritual highs all the time in regular life. Maybe I’m just really full here, satiated, whereas most of the time I am hungry. So when I go back, after a couple of weeks, I will realize how lucky I am right now, to have been so well-fed. I don’t know. It seems like something that should be done a little bit, but not as much as I do it. Not making it my life. And not at the expense of material well-being, since, again, much of ordinary life ain’t that bad.

I had a “process” I had to go through. During the clerkship year, I was coming out, I was confused. I couldn’t see myself in a real job, because I had stuff that needed to get out, be expressed. Well, for the last five years, I have sure expressed. I feel good about that, as I reflect on it. But I feel like it has been enough.

Let’s get to breakfast before they eat all the oatmeal again.

OK, back.

So I’m finding my thoughts have come back to where this whole piece actually started: discipline. I have a real problem with it in my life, and to some extent on retreat also. On retreat, it can be excused by things like “as long as your mindful all the time, that’s what matters.” But in life, well, some people make that same ‘excuse’ actually. Asked What do you do? They say, I try to be with every moment. Meaning, the discipline I have (this is the person answering, not me) is to come back to every moment in the present. Not, e.g., get a real job.

I feel that I lack discipline and ‘resolve’ in my own life. Even though I think Annie’s talk was not very useful for me on the subject, the subject itself is important. My problems with discipline are manifold:

- I just don’t like it. Not only don’t I like giving up the desired object which you have to give up in any discipline, I don’t like the energy of discipline itself.

- I have lots of stories that start very easily, and that, while I can dismiss them as stories, have some trenchancy (is that a word) to them. I think we are, in general, overdisciplined in many key areas, and underdisciplined in others. But because we value discipline per se, the discipline people have makes it difficult to even question the goals/areas of discipline. American sexual ethics are a good example - discipline in places where I don’t think it’s a good thing, and undiscipline in areas where it’s needed.

- My own personal story of discipline and repression with regard to my sexuality.

- I have lots of doubt about goals and means. The thing is, if you believe in a goal, and in the means to achieve it, then, sure, resolve/discipline is a necessary piece too. But it’s hard to have that if you question either the goals or the means, as I do all the time. On retreat, the goal is liberation and the means are, the means. For a little while, I can suspend doubt and try out these means to see if they work, even as I have doubts about one of the fundamental pieces of liberation. But in life, it’s a lot harder than that. You make certain choices. On the walk this morning, I realized that next semester is a good ‘retreat’ opportunity for teaching Kabbalah. I think it’s maybe not right for me. Well, next semester will be the time to find that out.
I’m trying to see if there’s a difference between Buddhist discipline and army boot camp discipline. Obviously the former has more compassion and the rules bend when necessary. The goals are different. But I’m seeing more similarities than differences.

I definitely did not come here to learn discipline. I don’t feel very ‘spiritual’ when I experience discipline. I feel like I’m enslaved. I guess it would be nice, to put it mildly, not to feel that way. Then maybe I could choose a goal and stick with it.

As for the choice, I am still completely undecided. What do I want out of life? I really want to see a life-coach! I feel like here are two stories:

1. ‘Making it’ in a conventional sense may be satisfying in some ways, but it will always leave me unfulfilled. I have too many spiritual & literary & visionary gifts to be chained to a desk in a law office. Plenty of other people can do that - my unique gift will be in doing something more unique to me. Moreover, what are the reasons I want to ‘make it’ in this way? Competition? Pleasing mom? A lingering sense of inferiority because my friends will soon have nicer houses, more recognition, and more conventional success than I will? Hey, maybe it will even be possible to make some money being a writer and teacher. But even if the money can never compete with being a law professor, the point of life is to drink deeply, and its deepest and juiciest in the areas of writing, teaching, exploring.

2. All that spiritual stuff is very close to hogwash. I don’t want to be a meditation/liberation teacher - and even if I did, I’ve got way too much stuff myself to deal with. Who am I to give advice to others. And Kabbalah? It’s imagination - just like the imaginary realms that I made up as a child. Dreamers are dreamers; there’s no reality to any of it. Now, as part of a life, dreams and the heart and the soul are all very important - critical, even, to be balanced. But to make it the center of my life carries huge costs. Material well-being, which leads to a lot of other kinds of well-being. A sense of achievement and success. Status in society. These things matter.

A few insights from that:

- I noted that in the 2nd paragraph, I wanted to say “you” a lot more than “I”. I was going to put as the last line, “you know in your heart this is true.” Notice that schizophrenia. Who is talking to whom?

- As I noted on the walk, I have a lot of doubt that the pure process here - sit, watch the breath, be aware of feelings - is really going to solve this quandary. I think it is only one part of seeing clearly. I think also it definitely leads more toward #1 than #2, but I think it does that because of an emphasis on immediate satisfaction and good-feeling, as opposed to long-term. Yes, I have to concede it is true that when the attention is wholly on the now, there is nothing lacking. But – there remains that story, that comparison, and that gnawing sense of “dammit, I don’t have to be one of those people who is satisfied with less/nothing. I have the ability to be more than that.”
Now, stepping back again. All this has to be based on my own iteration of the role of desire in life. Because obviously that desire for the company to succeed financially is bad news from an ortho Buddhist perspective. It is, like, the opposite of what I should be doing. I’m so fortunate now to not have many entanglements. This is deliberately re-entangling myself in a constricted environment where desire is the only motivating factor. Not just desire: greed. Material greed, and greed for a certain kind of societal status.

And yet, it doesn’t feel wrong to me. It feels more right than trying to be some sort of weird spiritual teacher. Because if my company were to succeed, a lot of questions would be answered in my mind. Especially if I helped make it succeed.

Now, what am I prepared to do. Am I prepared to devote serious time to it? Travel elsewhere? What? Give up other dreams and hopes?

Well, I have some time to think about it, and even sit with it. I do know that when I work at the company in small enough doses, it actually feels good. And, I would still have time outside of that to do some other things - just not every other thing. And it is a short-term commitment.

I had felt that I had done my piece already. But if the company fails, I will have a gnawing sense that maybe I could have helped it succeed, but I was too undisciplined – in too much of a hurry to go off doing spiritual stuff to take care of business first.

Notice the gam v’gam nature here. I don’t have to choose between 1 and 2. That is my real desire: the gam v’gam. It works with pizza and falafel, but it avoids a fundamental fact of life - that decisions need to be made, and something needs to be not chosen.

The irony is, and with this I need to close, the discipline that’s required now, and for the next four weeks, is to not spend a whole lot of time in this discursive place. Well, yes and no. This is my retreat. I do think it’s likely that the insight that’s been reflected in these pages and the last 16 hours of thinking is a fruit of the samadhi that came before it, just as the samadhi was a fruit of the concentration practice. One does not lead right into the other. It is sowing seeds.

End for now.