March 06

Flakes
by Jay Michaelson
p. 2 of 3

2. Spiritual Poverty

Yet by denying the importance of some aspects of the self, the green meme distorts the self. Green-meme spirituality is, above all, opposed to the treadmill of corporate America, which squashes the soul and paves the Earth. And yet, in my limited experience of it, corporate America isn't really a treadmill, because it actually does go somewhere. Even a treadmill accomplishes something, after all: you lose weight and strengthen arteries. Ten years in the corporate world, you don't have nothing to show for it: you have anywhere between a hundred thousand and three million dollars. That may not be a green-meme value, but it sure helps pay the mortgage.

Some green-memers really have no use for decent homes, trips to the Caribbean, and dinners in nice restaurants. However, these kinds of pleasures exist because they speak to powerful human desires -- otherwise, people wouldn't pay for them. Obviously, the excesses of conspicuous consumption race far beyond actual human desire, and rich people are often as miserable as anyone else. But in my experience, it seems that people who are paid well for their work do a better job of returning phone calls. They're less rushed, and perhaps less absorbed with questioning whether all this was really worth it or not. They may even have a secretary to help with the workload.

Of course, from the perspective of justice, this is the whole problem: lawyers who help corporations grow get rich and happy, while those who help abused women get temporary restraining orders struggle with the bills. No public interest lawyer I know would make the green-meme-spiritual argument that more money would actually be a bad thing. On the contrary; they think these benefits should be on the side of people who help.

Financial poverty is a form of spiritual poverty. Chronically-underfunded organizations are unhappy ones, and it takes an awful lot of job satisfaction to overcome the fact that you don't have decent health care. That spiritual poverty, in turn, leads to all kinds of distortions of the self: to flakiness, to burnout, even to precisely the kind of rudeness that spiritual work was supposed to help diminish. It's terrible that our society asks so many do-gooders to sacrifice so much. Why should one have to be a hero just to do some good in the world?

Of course, some spiritual traditions value povery, because it keeps one from being deluded. But not the Jewish one, which holds that spirituality should never be the source of one's material living. Even the 106-year-old sage Rabbi Yitzhak Kadouri, who died last month, worked as a bookbinder to support himself -- not to get rich, but to pay the bills. Maimonides was a doctor; Rashi was a vintner. L'havdil, I'm a lawyer, and thank God routinely that I do not rely on my Kabbalah teaching or writing for all of my means of support since otherwise I'd be even more envious, needy, and resentful. Having a "day job," certainly in the Jewish tradition, is not an inconvenience, or a necessary evil. It is part of the spiritual path, both because it keeps one grounded in the material world, and because it is meant to provide one with enough satisfaction in that material world to be a balanced, happy person -- whatever that means for each specific individual.

We've seen, then, several interrelated causes for the congruence of flakiness and spirituality: the ressentiment flakes have for the mainstream world and its values, the green meme's emphasis on process rather than product, and the distortions that come from neglecting certain aspects of the self in favor of others. I'd now like to turn to how spiritual flakiness utilizes (and distorts) the teachings of two contemplative traditions I know reasonably well, Buddhism and contemplative Judaism. There are, of course, many other sources for green-meme, flaky spirituality: astrology, Taoism, Vedanta, paganism, you name it. But these are two traditions with which I've worked closely over the last ten years, and I think the way they are appropriated is representative. Let's look at Buddhism first.

3. Feel-Special Dharma

Buddhism as practiced in Asia is greatly, perhaps overly, aware that it is a path, with a beginning, middle, and a hoped-for end. One really does make progress (hopefully), even though one does so precisely by letting go of the idea of "progress." It's tricky, because "advancing" means a greater and greater understanding that there is no such thing as advancing. But there is still a path. There is also, of course, a seriousness to the practice. One doesn't go on retreat now and then, because why not, it sounds nice, my soul is in the mood for it. One goes, and one sits, and, ideally, one is serious about attaining liberation from the chains of attachment and thirst (tanha, the urgent, consuming desire for the pleasant).

This is how Buddhism came to the West, too -- initially. We may have an image of hippies from the 60's meditating in between hits from the hookah, and indeed there is some truth to that image, but the ones who became today's leading meditation teachers actually devoted years to concentrated, devoted practice, generally spending years in Asia. And the original Bodhidharmas who brought Buddhism to America -- D.T. Suzuki and his ilk -- were not easy teachers. Yes, they taught acceptance, yielding, and nonviolence -- but you had to work hard at it.

However, as we're seeing today with the Kabbalah (more on that below), difficult dharma doesn't sell, either commercially or psychologically. And so, within two decades, Buddhism, and meditation more generally, came to mean something that you could do in your spare time, almost like a hobby. This shift wasn't for purely economic reasons; There were at least three ideological, non-economic reasons for the flake-ization of Buddhism, as it is understood by sincere practitioners in the West.

First, Asian Buddhism grew up in its societal context; many of the strictures of Theravadan Buddhism, and the hierarchies of Tibetan Buddhism, legitimately came to be seen as more products of their societies than essential parts of the dharma. As Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi once quipped, if Buddhism came to America the way Judaism did, no one would ever have taken it up. It's often sexist, sometimes classist and even feudal, and tied to a society that valued the monastic way of life in a way American society never has. Much of Buddhist practice had a sharp distinction between monks, who pursued enlightenment, and householders, who supported the monks. This did not work well with American values. We all want to have our cake and negate it too -- why can't I pursue enlightenment and the American dream of financial security, accomplishment, and personal achievement? And whatever our economic reality, we don't like feudalism in principle. So Buddhist doctrines shifted, either to beliefs that you can be fully enlightened even while living a conventional Western life, or to a more incrementalist approach to Buddhist practice, which sees a lot of value in "leaning back" -- in desiring less, in getting trapped less -- even if "full enlightenment" is no longer the goal.

These moderated, perhaps "watered-down" practices do work, remarkably well. I teach a class called "Meditation on the Run," in which students learn simple meditation practices that can, indeed, be squeezed right into an existing, rushed life. They work: you can be calmer and happier even if you just do walking meditation for thirty seconds on a subway platform. Certainly, even just by going on a week's retreat twice a year, you can experience intensely blissful mindstates, become more compassionate, even begin to loosen the identification with the small, egoic self. But none of this means "don't worry be happy."

Second, and as an unintended consequence of the first factor, meditation became confused with a spa. On the one hand, it can have some very pleasant side-effects: bliss, joy, and relaxation, to name a few. And on the other, the Buddha is saying it will release you from suffering -- just like a good spa! The dharma has devolved to such a point where "meditation" now means diametrically opposed things to different people -- just like the word "spirituality." It means both stopping thought and focusing on thought; both letting go of imaginary ideas and exploring and visualizing imaginary ideas; both appreciating the normal and leaving the normal to be special. The special feeling -- that, I think, is the central relationship between Western Buddhism and flakiness. A "good Buddhist" is supposed to be really, really relaxed -- so what if he's an hour late to a meeting? You should let go of your judgment; hey, you could have used that time to meditate! Besides, I was late because I was on a vision-quest, in which I spoke with angels.

And finally, as the Dharma came to the West, it inevitably became partially absorbed in the grammar of the West, which is an egoic grammar. Spirituality became something to attain, or something with which to please the self. I meditate because it makes me feel good -- and what could be more important than me feeling good? As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche taught, however, this kind of spiritual materialism is very different from Buddhism. It feeds and enlarges the self, and it's the self that's the problem. At the same time, it must be admitted that spiritual materialism does get you somewhere: by letting go of the real world and entering an imaginary one, it can be a delightful excursion away from the unpleasant. Not a Buddhist one, which would ask you to go right into the unpleasant and work to accept it, but a very enjoyable trip nonetheless. And one exquisitely amenable to not returning phone calls.

These three distortions -- domestication/watering down, a focus on special feelings, and spiritual egotism -- together worked to create a form of Buddhism that is focused on feeling good, rather than on feeling whatever arises, and on reinforcing the green meme's disdain for too much linearity and hard work. To be clear, very little of this is found in the actual words of Western Buddhist teachers. It's more a symptom of what one might call magazine Buddhism, in which writers (including myself) are asked to explain the "benefits of meditation" in 500 words or less. If Buddhist meditation is poured into an unaltered Western professional container, then sure, it means worry less, relax more, and stop being so tightly wound up all the time. For most people, that is a necessary correction to a wild, high-pressured lifestyle. But don't make a religion out of it.

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