On being authentic ... "and relevant"

An article in the Sunday NY Times discusses the attempts by evangelical/fundamentalist churches to become "relevant" by morphing into cafes, yoga studios, movie theaters, whatever.

According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who are not affiliated with any religion is on the rise, including a third of Americans under 30. Even so, nearly 80 percent of unaffiliated Americans say they believe in God, and close to half say they pray at least once a month.

The “spiritual but not religious” category is an important audience that evangelical leaders hope to reach in a culture that many believers call “post-Christian.”

So they arrange meetings in movie theaters, schools, warehouses and downtown entertainment districts. They house exercise studios and coffee shops to draw more traffic. Many have even cast aside the words “church” and “church service” in favor of terms like “spiritual communities” and “gatherings,” with services that do not stick to any script...

For new leaders coming out of seminary, “the cool thing is church planting,” Mr. Bird said. “The uncool thing is to go into the established church. Why that has taken over may speak to the entrepreneurialism and innovation that today’s generation represents.”..,

That strategy, blending religion with everyday activities, disarms people put off by traditional notions of church, said Scott L. Thumma, a professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“It’s pretty low risk to wander into a bar or movie theater or hotel,” Professor Thumma said. “It ends up delivering the message of relevance: we’re just like you, we’re struggling, we might have a beer together — and our faith is also relevant.”

Disarm, indeed.  There's a lot to criticize in the article ,  and it's trivially easy to criticize  as well.  You have incredible arrogance: "Jesus went out of the synagogue, and therefore we should..."  "The uncool thing is..." You have this idea that you should be "low risk" and "disarming" to people.  And their "faith" is "relevant." 

Yeah, true true true...and...what of ourselves? There is a value irrelevance, kind of like a mathematical proof.  Many times you start out with several lemmas,  which don't necessarily seem related at first.  Usually, there is a "bridge" built with other intermediate steps between these lemmas, which, applying other axiomatic principles or lemmas leads to the final proof.  But sometimes, a proof can be constructed with seemingly unrelated lemmas, and the final proof just falls into place, kind of like an "Aha!" moment in print.

You have bills to pay, demands to other people to be met. It doesn't always seem relevant to wash the dishes or do the laundry - some demands on time and wants will always seem contradictory to one another. 

Being at peace with that can be a real pain in the butt.  To be in reaction to the fact that others are not at peace with it is also a want that is contradictory, etc. etc. 

It used to be important to me to point out how all those other folks "were wrong" and I was...etc. But...it's not as important as it used to be, partly because I realize that my reaction to the above is a pointer to my own inauthenticity.  And I can be pretty inauthentic and hypocritical. 

Don't get me wrong. It's important to attempt to see things and do things as they are.   But as they are, the illusions of others are important only to the extent that transcending all beings dukkha should be done expediently. 

Let them have their movie theaters and coffee houses.  I want to help us here.  I want to help me as well as you.  If that here is in a coffee house, and it's in an emergent whatever, there it is.  I won't be oppressing people there because of their beliefs or not, and won't countenance others' oppression likewise. I will help you if I can, or at least I intend to.

So today that means some odd yard work. It's the day before New Years' Day. Stuff has to be removed.

Some things I experienced from 2012...

I typically  don't do lists of "best of  the year" though perhaps I could.  I just don't get out enough.  Beyond that though, people generally don't experience things linearly.  So here's some stuff. Experiences:

Movies (4 of which are kind of sort of new in 2012, and of those new ones, all were actually better than Argo, which was the best Hollywood film I've seen of this year):

1. Outrage: Way of the Yakuza.  Though critics derided the violence in this movie, its intricate tale of a Yakuza on the downfall was so representative of the zeitgeist (see I can use those words too!) of Japan of late, even though it is a more complex retelling of Sonatine.  Nobody in the US can make a movie that is this kind of crime movie so beautiful.

2.  Argo.  Commercial appeal.

3. The early Stephen Chow movies. 

4. Dragon.  Donnie Yen and Takeshi Kaneshiro made this movie what it is, which is a kind of mash-up of a film-noir with a martial arts movie, though intelligently made and performed; it asks  the question, "Can people really change?"

5. Hara-Kiri Death of a Samurai.  Takashi Miike's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's (1962) Harakiri is, oddly, more faithful to the original than we've come to expect from remakes of Hollywood movies, which is a tremendous compliment to Miike actually.  Miike's films are noted for over the top violence and horror, but this one has very little of that.  Instead this is a must-see film to watch about the demands of honor, loyalty, and what those with power and authority owe the powerless in their charge.  I once saw the crucial (and most violent) scene in Japan in the mid-90s,  and am glad this film was re-made.   It is a tremendously sad film, but well worth your efforts to see.  

Books:

I'm still getting through Hsu Yun's work.

Maybe more stuff.

On Myoshinji disavowing Eido Shimano

NellaLou got the story a few days ago, and I'm just now catching up with it, or I should say, I'm expanding a bit on the comment I made there. It has to do with a rather oddly timed statement from Myoshinji stating that successors of Eido Shimano aren't connected to Myoshinji.

I agree somewhat with the comments of Carol Spooner:

I find it pretty disgusting that they allowed American Zen students to believe otherwise for several decades. Pretty damn cynical in my view. In addition, Shimano had a very public transmission ceremony from Soen Nakagawa Roshi, with many Japanese priests and officials in attendance. In addition, there were many Japanese priests and officials in attendance at the opening of Dai Bosatsu Monastery. There is reason to believe that Soen Nakagawa Roshi ever officially “registered” Shimano’s transmission in the record books at Myoshin-ji — for whatever reasons he may have had. But no one told the students here in the US. To the contrary, they actively participated in making Shimano look authorized and genuine. Bah! I say. Bad form.

As for this having far reaching implications for much of the US Rinzai world, I really don’t think so. Much of Soto Zen has already disconnected from the Japanese temples, and no longer registers their priests there. American Zen will stand or fall on its own feet, IMO. Whether it’s the death knell of ZSS and Dai Bosatsu Monastery, maybe. They made much of their Japanese connections in the past. But there are several independent Shimano Dharma heirs who have split from him, both recently and over the years, who maintain Zen Centers of their own without needing the support or recognition from him or from Myoshin-ji.

I think it does have implications, at least as far as legitimacy of teachers is concerned.  As it happens there are other Rinzai teachers in the US,  and they are not Sasaki Roshi or his successors, either.  (And it begs the question, will Sasaki's "home branch" in Japan make similar statements at some inopportune time in the future?

But...it reminds me of a larger point, and one that is not often mentioned in American Buddhist circles.

Sometimes, sometimes, organizations deal with "problem people" by assigning them to places far away from where the action is, far from where they could do noticeable damage to the organization.   This is common in many governments and corporations.  The Catholic Church was notorious for doing this, and not only in the child molestation scandal; google "Diocese of Partenia" for a telling example of how how the Catholic Church responded to progressives in its ranks of bishops fairly recently.  Did Soto and Rinzai organizations in Japan do this?

I am sad to say it would not surprise me if this were the case, but then again I'm not entirely certain how these organizations are run.  If this were the case it is as bad a decision to have had people assigned this way as it would be in any organization with people who are notably really problematic.  That is to say, such things are ticking time bombs. 

I tend to see why Brad Warner tends to be critical of the official Soto-shu hierarchy in Japan, and statements such as those from Myoshinji don't exactly put a harmonious and consistent view towards what is legit teaching and what is not.  That is certainly problematic.  But it may ultimately help things; maybe it will help demystify all the hoopla about succession, and such, and get people paying more attention to what really matters. I hope so. Life's rather short.

Some times seem to have a recurring theme.

This year's holiday season seems to revolve around odors.  The other day I was cleaning the house and the vacuum cleaner failed spectacularly, leaving the house with an odor of a combination of burnt rubber and dust and that very characteristic "electrical fire" smell. 

It was not good.

Now my house is awaft  (this doesn't seem to be a word yet, but should be) with incense from Tibet, from Japan and from India.  It's to cover up another scent, which needs covering up. The origin of that scent is too exotic and far-flung to be repeated here.  

Fascinating odd karma is what existence sometimes brings. 

You don't see this often in US media: Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing

I had missed this post in the NY Times/International Herald Tribune dated November 29th.  It's worthy of note because it demonstrates that the China-Tibet relationship is far more intertwined than what is often made out to be, and that the average (Han) Chinese person has a far different view of Tibet than what is often presented in the US.

On a freezing Tuesday this week, dozens of special guests from China’s cultural, political and business elites gathered within the blood-red walls of the Forbidden City. They were there for the opening of the newly restored Hall of Rectitude, the center of Tibetan Buddhism during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing.

After a fire in 1923, the hall and about a half-dozen surrounding buildings that comprise the Buddhist architectural complex lay in ruin for nearly a century in the northwestern corner of the 8,000-room former imperial palace... 

As I mingled in the crowd in the Forbidden City on Tuesday afternoon, I heard, once or twice, the words “Dalai Lama” spoken quietly, seriously — and one such mention turned into an impassioned discussion about “why the Dalai Lama doesn’t like China,” among three visitors who looked Chinese and spoke Mandarin, as they looked at Tibetan tangkas, or religious paintings, in one of the new galleries... 

Much of China’s claim to Tibet rests on the close relationship that existed between Beijing and Lhasa during the reign of three Qing emperors — Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong — in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s religious leader, exercised great influence on the emperors during that time, in a patron-priest relationship...

This is not the only Tibetan temple in Beijing, either.  Most importantly, there is the "Lama Temple," which I visited several years ago, and again, discussion of the situation in Tibet wasn't discouraged, at least in one tour group I had overheard. The Lama Temple is huge. Point is, there's a lot of Tibetan Buddhism in China outside of Tibet,  not even near Tibet.  And also the point should be made that China's traditional relationship to religion was the political and religious were strongly intertwined; this happened before the Communist era, and those patronized religions weren't considered "false" because they were patronized. 

All of that said, it would be good for some kind of modus vivendi to be worked out between the Tibetans and Chinese.  That part of the world has more than enough problems right now.  Then again the same is true for people everywhere.

Reflections on the Time of the Year and all the Shootings

It's that magical time of year... "the most wonderful time of the year,"  so it is said. This wonderful time of the year has been the time in which there have been a number of high profile shootings, including the horrific story at Newtown Connecticut.

There have been the obligatory calls for can't we get along.  A nephew in law mentioned that it's been 13 years since Columbine, and the state of our mental health and the state of our violence have not changed in any way.  He's right.  Nobody made it a priority.

It does make the Zen blogosphere sex scandal situation ridiculously irrelevant by comparison. 

People tend to get wigged out during high stress times.  Yeah, love each other.   But relax, too. Stop. Relax.

It is crazy, but being relaxed and keeping composure help cause peace.  Being stressful to the point of loss of composure is hazardous to peace.

There's abuse and there's abuse and there's narratives

I had written a somewhat long post that I have refrained, so far, from publishing.  

And I'm going to publish this one instead, although I'd like to make a point or two in this post that will have been made in the other post, if I decide to publish that one. (That one's just a bit too incendiary perhaps.)

Let's stipulate that some women were harmed as a result of abuse by Sasaki Roshi - though I have absolutely positively no first hand knowledge of any events in the matter.  My interest is that of a lay practitioner in the Rinzai school, as well as a guy who's known his share of bad things flown his way and all related suffering to that.  Not to mention all the crap that I've inflicted on others as well.

But were all women who interacted with Sasaki Roshi harmed, and were they all harmed to the same degree?

Likely not.  This is not to minimize the suffering of all who were greatly harmed but it is to point out a fact that is sometimes lost, especially if one is too attached to a narrative.

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion mentioned that he was the recipient of highly inappropriate sexual advances on the part of some clergy member.  But Dawkins makes a very interesting point, one that I heartily endorse.   That point is that the abuse of children by attempting - and succeeding often - at convincing  them they are fundamentally damaged goods who will suffer the fires of hell for eternity can be far more damaging and widespread than the incidents of sexual abuse by Christian clergy. 

He's right. 

He's so right.

I was never sexually abused by clergy, but I sure as hell was the recipient of various forms of abuse predicated upon the above narrative. 

We should be careful about the narratives we are prescribing for the harm we see around us.

On second thought, maybe some of these posts aren't all Zen, Buddhist, or anything like that

Nathan wrote a good post yesterday or the day before.  This post is not about that post.  And unlike him, you'll be able to tell who and what I'm talking about here, even though my tendency is to remain elliptical anyway.

The other day I said that everything was perfect, and complete, and lacking nothing, etc., and that's still true.

But with a different mix of treasure and poisons smeared through the aggregates you'd get a different reality more or less.

In reading a couple of the posts about the latest brouhaha, I was struck by two things:

1. Some of the so-called teachers were certainly not acting in a way I'd have done, if I were a designated teacher.  In particular,  two teachers blogging on Sweeping Zen...these folks are supposed to be teachers? (And one of them is a psychologist?)  

2. It seems that I have an issue not with Sweeping Zen's blogging about Zen master sex scandals, but, ummm...the very premise of "Sweeping Zen" itself.  I was kind of surprised to conclude that, but there you have it.

Regarding the first point, I don't know if it's because of the weakness of their teaching, practice, or whatever, but it seemed that line after line from their  posts revealed a profound lack of understanding of various things.  I've already blogged about a some of them, but this attitude of "I'm right - and if I'm mistaken, it's because I'm RIGHT!" that I read from them, well, I hadn't quite caught that before.

Regarding Sweeping Zen itself...hey, I've run this little blog for significantly longer than Sweeping Zen's been around...Mr. Tebbe obviously think's he's filling a need, a niche, etc. But Mr. Tebbe's site...well...about that...

Sweeping Zen is the global Zen community’s largest online resource, a trusted voice on issues that matter most to Zen practitioners of all walks of life. A grassroots initiative, we rely exclusively on the generosity of our site readership to continue our important work.

I have to think Mr. Tebbe wrote this, and it's  at least partially untrue, I regret to say.  I can think of at least two sites that have more resources - like, you know, texts and such (one is the "Zen site.")  I've regularly consulted those sites for texts, histories, etc. While I generally respect some of the teachers that have posted at Sweeping Zen,  I would hardly say that their words, videos, etc. "matter most" to me.   And what am I, chopped liver?

Moreover, the "global Zen community" contains a heck of a lot of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean practitioners, not to mention Vietnamese.  A heck of a lot more folks than read Sweeping Zen no doubt.   There's a Japanese Roshi - in Japan - with more Twitter followers than Sweeping Zen.  Significantly more.   Not that that's any measure of anything, but it's just one data point.

And if you call yourself a "trusted voice," don't be surprised if that engenders skepticism. I'm just saying.

How do people get this way? 

I used to have more grandiose ideas about practice and all that.  I had grandiose ideas about this blog, though I kind of like the way it's settled into itself.  But it's just a blog, dammit.   And I never really entertained the notion that this blog would be authoritative with respect to matters of Zen.  I mean, that's oxymoronic.  

But I think this kind of sort of "mission statement" is part of the same problem as some of those posts I'd read elsewhere. These sort of statements reveal the state of the minds of those who make them, in which there are ...well...how do you want it said? Unskillful thoughts? Poisons? Ignorance? Whatever. 

So ... I guess all I'm really saying is "more humility, please."

The Way was the Way before people discovered problems with power relationships and their own ignorance, and the Way will survive even this blog post.

Useful Obscurity and Celebrity Opposition

The title of this post is a play on Ivan Illich's "The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies," which I read once long ago, but haven't been able to re-locate.  Illich is one of those people that would make my list of authors who've influenced me, and while much of what he says is flat out wrong, naive, and unworkable, it's useful to read him as a thought exercise.

In the title I've referenced, Illich makes a plea for the idea that too much of what is done in society is relegated to "professions," which he views as blocking people from entering endeavors they otherwise would have little problem entering (if people were "usefully unemployed"); in effect, professions are an otherworldly clerical class as seen by Illich (oddly, given his theological background, or more properly precisely because of his theological background). 

As a professional, as one who has seen the rank stupidity that goes with people acting as though education and credentials don't matter, I can't abide by Illich's position categorically, though for sure many professionals have huge blind spots and canyons of ignorance abiding in their minds, and no doubt that goes for yours truly.  But Illich's point does have some utility...when it comes to "celebrity."

It's an interesting coincidence in the Buddhist blogosphere when in the short space of time the Joshu Sasaki thing is going on while it's announced that Bernie Glassman and Jeff Bridges will kind of sort of do a road show together.  Celebrities.

Why are there celebrities? The short answer is because there are those that make others to be that.  Maybe they are attractive or like Stephen Hawking, ostentatiously crippled.  Maybe they are brilliant, like Hawking, or maybe they're NFL linebackers.  In some cases, they are human bubbles (well, we're all human bubbles) - really popular human bubbles, such as Bruce Lee, who was incredibly talented, and not simply physically and whose celebrity became a kind of bubble which if traded on some kind of market exchanges, would have reached stratospheric heights.

But almost all of us are not celebrities.   Many of us are fans who live in a kind of symbiotic albeit likely dysfunctional relationship with celebrities.  I think the whole fan - celebrity thing is indeed dysfunctional.  I think it's more than OK to consider that John Lennon or Lady Gaga are talented folks, but the idea that these people are different - they are the celebrities who make the fans who the fans are - that idea is strange and unhealthy.

As I get older, I am trying to develop and keep learning new things, and not simply technical things in my chosen field.  I am doing this not only because I don't want to watch TV all day when I'm retired (if I ever actually retire), but also because I find it inherently interesting.  I am not a professional musician nor artist, but I would like to find my own voice and view in these things; my own idiom; I can say after all these years I kind of do have my own idiom in my style of technical development/design approaches.  And I am fortunate enough to be doing some parenting/mentoring/leading...hopefully passing on what little I have learned with a minimum of damage to the next generation.

I have been fortunate that in more than one of these endeavors I've met people with remarkable, tremendous skill and in some cases trained with them.  You've never heard of them unless you're a kind of specialist, but it doesn't really matter; they never needed popularity or fame to do what they did, but they did need the 10,0000 hours of practice and effort.   That 10,000 hours tends to be 10,000 hours not doing PR; it is indeed useful obscurity.

Now I have no problem per se with a Jeff Bridges/Bernie Glassman road show; I liked The Big Lebowski as much as the next guy (probably more - I maintain the film can't be fully appreciated without a deep knowledge of The Big Sleep,  because that's where the humor's really deeply embedded).   I just can't imagine what claims they could make on my attention beyond those things that already have huge claims on my attention.   I mean ...seriously...why should I see them? Does it have to do with clown noses?  An understanding of Zen?  The basic goodness of a fictional naive stoner who is really an anti-Philip Marlowe? (A more interesting area of exploration: Jeff Lebowski contra Philip Marlowe; but you can explore that yourself, can't you?)  Well, whatever...

Good luck to Danny Fisher and Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman - though I hope somebody gets to ask the latter about Genpo Merzel, if only out of a sense of mischievousness.  But even if I lived in the LA area, I'd have other plans that night. 

I see more of Brad Warner's view momentarily...

This thing from Sweeping Zen regarding some yearly message from "Soto-shu" sounds really corporate.

I mean really corporate.

Oh, that's not Adam Tebbe's fault either, in fact, kudos to him for bringing that up.

無 does not mean "nothing." But it doesn't mean something either.

I'm reading something by Koryu Osaka on the 公安　無.  And he wrote what's in the title of this post more or less, or at least that's attributed to him somewhere in that text.  No matter.

I'm reading stuff on Buddhism in the blogspace, stuff that seems re-hashed, and to some degree recycled.  I've rarely, if ever, recycled anything, myself; I can't fault those who do, but I wouldn't recycle anything on this blog until I re-edit a bunch of old posts and publish them together.  At least that's my plan.

But the stuff I read on Buddhism in the blogspace...it tends towards being quite ...um...not what I'd intended to be blogging about in the Buddhist blogspace (please don't get me started on celebrity meatspace-op blog posts either, but chacun a son goûts.)  And there's still that feeling I've had of late...everything is exactly the way it should be.  Flaws and ignorance and hatred and all.   My own hatred and anger and stupidity and basest rage and all that comes with that and all that is misplaced, disowned, lost, and forgotten or repressed. That too is exactly as it should be - it is as though it is neither overdetermined or underdetermined; it's n  equations in n unknowns, so to speak.

It's all  無.     Those Buddhist blog posts, this Buddhist blog post, it's all 無.  Ditto for self/no-self,  poisons, celebrities, misplaced interpretations of sutras, vestigial rantings about George W. Bush, etc. etc.

It's exactly the way it should be; it's all the product of aggregates that have come together, dependent on previous conditions, states, actions, etc, to be exactly the way it is now.

Is this making any sense at all?  Hope so.  And the nature of the "self" is just like this.

The stupid...sometimes it's hard to take...

It may be down the memory hole pay wall by now, but the New Yorker had an article up last week about college kids taking speed...only they weren't calling it speed, and they were couching it an updated version of the language that was use in the 60s to describe physician prescribed pep pills. 

Not long ago, I met with Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in his office, which is tucked inside the labyrinthine Penn hospital complex. Chatterjee’s main research interests are in subjects like the neurological basis of spatial understanding, but in the past few years, as he has heard more about students taking cognitive enhancers, he has begun writing about the ethical implications of such behavior. In 2004, he coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the practice of using drugs developed for recognized medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition. Chatterjee worries about cosmetic neurology, but he thinks that it will eventually become as acceptable as cosmetic surgery has; in fact, with neuroenhancement it’s harder to argue that it’s frivolous. As he notes in a 2007 paper, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.” At school and at work, the usefulness of being “smarter,” needing less sleep, and learning more quickly are all “abundantly clear.” In the near future, he predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

Chatterjee told me that many people who come to his clinic are cognitively preoccupied versions of what doctors call the “worried well.” The day I visited his office, he had just seen a middle-aged woman, a successful Philadelphia lawyer, who mentioned having to struggle a bit to come up with certain names. “Here’s an example of someone who by most measures is doing perfectly fine,” Chatterjee said. “She’s not having any trouble at work. But she notices she’s having some problems, and it’s very hard to know how much of that is just getting older.” Of course, people in her position could strive to get regular exercise and plenty of intellectual stimulation, both of which have been shown to help maintain cognitive function. But maybe they’re already doing so and want a bigger mental rev-up, or maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill.

Recently, I spoke on the phone with Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge University, and the co-author of a December, 2007, article in Nature, “Professor’s Little Helper.” Sahakian, who also consults for several pharmaceutical companies, and her co-author, Sharon Morein-Zamir, reported that a number of their colleagues were using prescription drugs like Adderall and Provigil. Because the drugs are easy to buy online, they wrote, it would be difficult to stop their spread: “The drive for self-enhancement of cognition is likely to be as strong if not stronger than in the realms of ‘enhancement’ of beauty and sexual function.” (In places like Cambridge, at least.)

See what I mean? Take a pill to make yourself "more."  Now I happen to be in the camp that would say it is possible to use technology to alter our behavior - this is in some ways self-evident: a pair of running shoes makes it easier to run.  A Wing Chun dummy enables one to practice Wing Chun without a partner.   A swimming pool helps one practice swimming. 

There are limits to this though.  Technology will extract a kind of "karmic debt" with everything else - it then becomes a question of one's willingness to use the technology at the price of the karmic debt.  I'm having a cup of coffee. If I want coffee in the future I'll have to make more soon - and the whole host of behaviors of having coffee come with the coffee.  If I have it late at night I can't sleep.   A technology that makes us feel happy all the time robs us of honing the skill of using depression, sadness and grief to benefit all.  The same goes for other kinds of technologies besides the chemical. 

You get the point. Speed kills now just as it did then.  Taking that crap won't make us all John McAfee, but we might be something repugnant anyway.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

Yesterday I had a colonoscopy for the first time in my life.   Probably most people who read this blog who aren't over 40 or so have little idea of what that actually entails.   To put it bluntly, you eat a very low fiber diet for a couple of days and then the day before you have the colonoscopy you're supposed to have a liquid diet until...it's time to take the "super laxative" they  prescribe for you.  And then there's predictable results.

You take that super laxative again (in the regimen I was prescribed) a few hours before you're supposed to show up at the hospital for the actual procedure.  After the second ingestion of the super laxative, along with a liter of water, you're not supposed to eat or drink anything until the procedure.  Suffice it to say, when you're at the hospital, you really aren't in any shape to do much of anything.  You're dehydrated, your electrolyte balance has gone blooey,  and your mind can't really focus on anything. 

Being at the hospital in this shape, when for all intents and purposes you're otherwise healthy is strange, to say the least.  I was in the "short stay" area of the hospital, but it still was a hospital, I was in a hospital bed wearing a hospital gown, etc. etc. etc.  The TV had some kind of "hospital advice" channel for new mothers.  Someone had left a "Weekly Standard" as reading.   I tried reading some blather about the "Tea Party," and didn't get far.  Then I went through 2 episodes of "Law and Order" on the TV (even now I haven't a clue what the story line was).  They wheeled me into the place where the colonoscopy was to occur,  gave me some kind of Valium derivative mixed with fentanyl  - and I was out.

Anyway, I had the predictable meal afterwards, slept, ate again, etc. etc. slept,  and then I woke up this morning.

And I sat.

And everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be.   

It probably is related to the microflora ecosystem in my gut and its relative changes after the procedure, as well as a whole host of other aggregates and things, but ...anybody else ever feed profoundly good after something like this?

Everything Under Attack

Pop neuroscience is under attack, so says the NY Times.

Meet the “neuro doubters.” The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.
A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers — including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks — now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. This group, for example, slammed a recent Newsweek article in which a neurosurgeon claimed to have discovered that “heaven is real” after his cortex “shut down.” Such journalism, these critics contend, is “shoddy,” nothing more than “simplified pop.” Additionally, publications from The Guardian to the New Statesman have published pieces blasting popular neuroscience-dependent writers like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell. The Oxford neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop’s scolding lecture on the science of bad neuroscience was an online sensation last summer.
As a journalist and cultural critic, I applaud the backlash against what is sometimes called brain porn, which raises important questions about this reductionist, sloppy thinking and our willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for, well, nearly everything.
Voting Republican? Oh, that’s brain chemistry. Success on the job? Fortuitous neurochemistry! Neuroscience has joined company with other totalizing worldviews — Marxism, Freudianism, critical theory — that have been victim to overuse and misapplication.
A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies. Writing in the journal Neuron, the researchers concluded that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

Well. There is a more than a bit of silliness in much of the pop-whatever these days: "Wisdom of the crowds" (Walmart Black Friday stampedes anyone?) and "Blink" come immediately to mind.   As well as anything David Brooks has ever written, if that qualifies.

Still...Brain's neuronal connections being plastic and all that...it seems intuitively obvious that some people with rigid thinking - yeah, some extreme right wingers - well, their brains do seem to work differently.

And as regular readers to this site know, the author is no fan of "spiritual" "mind" "technology."  Gladwell was right about a few things, most interestingly the need to practice a lot. So yeah, be skeptical a bit. 

But then again everything is "under attack."  Dosho Port seems to be going in the direction of saying Zen is "under attack" because, hey, it seems Sasaki Roshi couldn't keep his hands to himself, and... he's still going strong at 105.

Sooner or later everything ought to be questioned,  especially Zen.   There's a crack in everything, Leonard Cohen said - it's how the light gets in.  

But keep going. 

And a brief word to Adam Tebbe...

...based on what I read here.   Ultimately, any "teacher" whose misbehaved in the course of his teaching will have to deal with the fallout of that, as will the objects of that "teacher's" misbehavior.

But there's no point in trotting near paranoia and conspiracy theories.

But...let me just say this:

The  rumored or reputed misbehavior of "teachers'" is not the Way,   but so it is also for scandal blogging for the sake of scandal blogging.

Point is this: Even Genpo and Eido Shimano and  George W. Bush are worthy of compassion.

Difficult, ain't it? Genpo may be a phony (Brad Warner's very legit beef with him), but that guy too is worthy of compassion.

Ain't gonna be happy all the time, and most certainly shouldn't

That's what came to me as I read this.   Stress has a purpose, just as relaxation and being care-free does.   No doubt you can have apps that improve your life, and more will come, apps that observe you.  But happiness won't come without unhappiness.

Thanksgiving Zen Scandals

Oddly enough it seems when holiday season comes around, it's time for another scandal at a Zen center somewhere or other.  

I am beginning to have  mixed feelings about all these "Zen Center Scandals."  Yeah, don't sexually harass folks, Zen teachers.  No sh!t, Sherlock, at this point, right?  But some of this stuff, especially the Mt. Baldy stuff, does not start to make sense to me at all.  I was going to write a lot more about this, but I would just like to take one example for now, that featured prominently Sweeping Zen.

Myoan Grace Shireson, you almost write were groped on the grounds of a Zen temple. I believe you. But when you say "Not only was there a culture barrier, but we had been instructed to be friendly to lay people..."  Culture barrier? Culture barrier?  Are you kidding me???? I have no idea how old you are, but I guarantee you  that when you were in Japan there was a name for such people: 痴漢, ちかん　which translates as "pervert."  Yes, they have issues like this on trains in Japan (and a reverse problem where many men are afraid to sit near a woman on a train for fear of  being falsely accused).   But in no way is this an accepted part of the culture.   There are different sexual morés in Japan, to be sure and yes, they have had more than their share of issues with gender equality to put it mildly.   But in Japan, the guy who groped you was a 痴漢,   such people are not tolerated and haven't been for years, and what you experienced wasn't a culture barrier but instead an ignorance of their culture.

I also don't know how long you've been in Japan or how many times you've visited there, but if you've been there frequently, and if you have a reasonable knowledge of the language and culture today, there simply is no reason for you to have phrased your experience there this way - you'd have known what the culture is in this regard; all you have to do is know people and ride a train in a major city, for example.

I might add the rest of your post there is similarly culturally uninformed and hardly inclusive in language, presupposing that the only form of harassment that can take place is a male in a position of power abusing a female with less power.  Police and authority figures in government are indifferent to everyone; I'm sure it's worse with women, but c'mon, been through airport security lately?

The best way for Zen centers, frankly, to deal with this problem might not be to register as religious institutions, but as corporations subject to corporate law on harassment, etc.   The law is an imperfect tool, but it does at least provide redress and remedy when harm is done.

One other point I want to make about this, as a guy who's been studying Zen for a number of years. It's why I'm increasingly ambivalent about this whole Zen scandals everywhere thing.  When you've studied with a teacher for a number of years, they don't really seem as gods, but they seem every atom a human being.  I don't care what the teacher is teaching, but every good teacher, if you are with them long enough, you will see they're slobs just like you, though with more knowledge and skill.

I'm reading about the Mt. Baldy scandal, and I just can't square "sexual scandal" with "the teacher is a slob just like you."  That is to say, - and I direct this to commenters who are citing POWER POWER POWER as a reason for "why" these scandals happen - when you've trained for a period of years, it is simply inconceivable if you're training with any halfway competent teacher that you will see any kind of "power" differential at all, because why the teacher may be older, more knowledgeable and more skilled, after a certain point it gets to the point where it becomes kind of obvious that you're capable of getting there without that particular teacher, because whatever's getting you there isn't him, isn't really you, but it's in the nature of - or lack thereof - in the 5 aggregates so to speak. It just is.  And so your teacher isn't a god, but a guy helping you along, even if you're never actually given adulation and praise for a snappy koan answer.  You've come to expect that bell to ring telling you sorry bud, sanzen's over for today, better luck next time, and it's not so important that you have to invest ego, time, worry, self-image, etc. etc. over it.  It's important, but not important to use a logic by which Leonard Cohen described Joshu Sasaki roshi.

That's what I find hard to square with this sexual harassment.  Plus the guy's over 100 years old.  But mostly the former. Sasaki roshi was evidently, at least echoing what was an effective teaching at least for some people.  And maybe he was a 痴漢.   Maybe he's been both of them.    But it reeks of Orientalism to say that such things as gropings are tolerated in Japan, and yeah,  what Stuart Lachs has said elsewhere.   These people aren't gods and aren't viewed as such in their own societies.  They may be rare in this country or the world, but isn't everyone?

A couple of brief thoughts about the importance of the Great Matter in "Western" Buddhism

Does anyone really care about the hippies anymore?   Does it really matter one whit if the importance of the Great Matter is emphasized or not in "Western" Centers?


皆様は、死刑がある。

Everyone has been given the death penalty. It's a consequence of being born.  The resolution of the  Great Matter is our resolution of the cold, hard fact that this is the case for those between birth and death.

And any substitution of the deep knowledge and action on our 死刑 with "pragmatic psychology which is meant to address universal human ethical concerns"  really pretty much is bullshit.  Human ethical concerns are only realized with the deep knowledge and action on our 死刑.

Who the hell writes this stuff?

In reading what might be an otherwise unremarkable NY Times book review on a biography on Brigham Young, I came upon this passage:

The perennial question in Mormon history is: Whose side are you on? For over a century, the church cleaved to “faith-­promoting” histories about heroic Joseph and Brigham, and the evil Gentiles who persecuted them. As recently as 19 years ago, Salt Lake’s guardians of the Saintly flame excommunicated several prominent writers and historians for what the old-line Soviets would have called “deviationist” points of view. (Some of them have since rejoined the church.)

Turner is on the side of good history, and he generally negotiates the many tripwires in the Saints’ story — the “hall of mirrors,” as he calls it — with aplomb. For example, he unflinchingly recounts the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and their Paiute Indian allies killed a group of emigrants from Arkansas. While he writes that Young encouraged the Indians to attack the wagon trains, Turner allows that no document directly links him to the horrific murders of 120 men, women and children. Turner does note that Young cynically billed the federal government for $3,527 worth of gifts supposedly distributed to “sundry bands of Indians near Mountain Meadow.” The gifts — steers, clothing and butcher knives — had in fact been plundered from the slaughtered settlers. What Turner calls “the dark stain the Mountain Meadows Massacre” left on Young’s reputation remains to this day.

That this guy, Brigham Young, is celebrated by any segment in our society is pathological, and probably  more pathological than if any segment of our society celebrated Sonny Barger - the latter I would claim and those like him are more honest in their endeavors.  You know what the Hell's Angels are.   They don't claim to be the one true religion yada yada yada.

Of course, that a nominee for President of the United States can't bring himself to address issues such as this - that is to say, how does he square his Mormon-ness with the questionable history of this church - and that nobody wants to go there is even more pathological.

"And a religious worldview, like any worldview, can dispose a researcher toward certain mistakes in thinking?"

So says the NY Times Beliefs editor.

I suspect the editor may be right, but not in the way that he thinks...

The case in point involved some kind of social science researcher who is some kind of right-wing Christian who managed to get a study published that claimed that households run by teh gay have more problems than otherwise, and the resulting brouhaha.

One can easily imagine why there might be reasons where this is true, but irrelevant (e.g., gays have more problems because heterosexuality as defined with a male patriarchy is privileged in this society, for starters).

But I digress a bit...

The worldview we should aspire to is no worldview.  The writer seems to make it as though worldviews were like clothing or hair styles, and most right wing Christians make this sort of appeal.    But it's immature in the extreme -it is like saying, do we want to play spies or cowboys and Indians or Muslim and Christian?

We shouldn't seek to adopt a set of beliefs - although much brouhaha has also been made of the Buddhism without Beliefs of Stephen Bachelor,  the point remains that Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and the 10,000 things is going to be Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and the 10,000 things no matter what we necessarily want to make believe is true about them.

So, in a sense, any worldview is already a mistake.

Changing the world...

I have recently been involved in trying to do something new in my work life.  This new thing is kind of evolving with a bunch of people.

There's obstacles.  The obstacles are being maneuvered in a 功夫 kind of way - "being like water."  Obstacles are a form of dukkha.  There's one particular obstacle that has been bothering me...but I think I figured a way around that obstacle - and it requires a profundity in what we are doing.

I think I may be on to something - the degree to which one can transcend the obstacles in life is the degree to which, in being like water, we make a profound radical change (not necessarily an arduous one.)

Thanks everyone for your continued support on this blog!

This is obviously, totally not the right way to go

If you give kids pills because their environment's bad, you are fostering the notion that you should not change what you should change, and you are fostering the notion that it takes something external to one to change what is inside of one. And it teaches them that there is separation, and that society's sicknesses must be accommodated  for rather than treated.

"I feel like it's getting out God's word to those who need it."

The NY Times reports on that curious sacrament of Texas, played with religiosity.'

School district officials ordered the cheerleaders to stop putting Bible verses on the banners, because they believed doing so violated the law on religious expression at public school events. In response, a group of 15 cheerleaders and their parents sued the Kountze Independent School District and its superintendent, Kevin Weldon, claiming that prohibiting the students from writing Christian banner messages violated their religious liberties and free-speech rights.

On Thursday afternoon, the two sides met in a courtroom on the second floor of the Hardin County Courthouse. It had all the trappings of a high-profile courtroom drama: Lawyers from both sides haggled over the Texas Constitution and the cheerleaders’ own constitution, a police officer with an assault rifle and binoculars was stationed on the roof, reporters filled the jury box, and one witness — Kieara Moffett, an 11th grade cheerleader — teared up on the stand during cross-examination.

The superintendent’s decision has outraged many students and their parents, and has brought national attention upon a small town about two hours outside Houston. The cheerleaders’ supporters have put up lawn signs and started a Facebook page called Support Kountze Kids Faith that, with nearly 50,000 members, far exceeds the town’s population of 2,100...

Each side’s lawyers cast their clients as courageous: The teenage cheerleaders, for standing up to the school district to protect their religious views, and Mr. Weldon, himself a Christian and a former football coach, for taking an unpopular position in a largely conservative Christian town in order to, as he sees it, uphold the law.

After a daylong hearing that included the testimony of two cheerleaders, District Judge Steven Thomas of Hardin County decided to extend for an additional 14 days more a temporary restraining order that he had put in place two weeks ago. The move prevents district officials from enforcing the ban on religious signs for 14 days and allows the cheerleaders to continue to create and display the banners at the home game on Friday night as well as other coming games. It seemed likely that the judge would hold another hearing in two weeks.

“I feel like it’s getting God’s word out to those that need it,” Kieara, 16, said of the banners.

Yeah, people need to see bible verses and they need to do so at the football games to which they go.

And yeah, Kieara, you surely feel that way,  I submit.

I don't know how far it goes back, but the arrogance of this stuff is breathtaking.  Regardless of what eventually happens in this case (which depends, naturally on case law being followed, which in this benighted time and that benighted place might be different than what one might expect), regardless of what happens, it certainly doesn't reflect well on the bible sputtering cheer-leaders, their parents, or their religion.

It all leads to death...and when you die, they die. The gut bacteria, that is.

My wife was reminding me last night about one acquaintance with a brain tumor who now can't recognize others and another who is in the last stages of liver cancer.

There's a heck of a lot of dreck that comes about in the course of living one's life.

And it all leads to death.

The trick is doing it gracefully, beautifully, and compassionately, and yes, with skill.

At the same time I still know the 67 year old guy who can do 詠春券 to the point where he can outdo others.

So, yeah, it depends on skill.

And when you die, they die.

Who?

The bacteria flora in your gut, inter alia.

The bacteria flora in your gut are responsible for amazing things. According to a recent RadioLab Show (entitled, helpfully enough, "Guts;" you can Google it, I'm working through a bad cold this week), the ecosystem of bacteria flora in your gut are more than possibly strong contributors to one's mood.

This brings the whole issue of 5 aggregates and all that into an entirely different realm, I think.

How to handle a pathological liar...or, advice to Barack Obama

I watched the debates last night, or I should say parts of them. Yeah, yeah Romney lied through his teeth and Barry pulled his punches.

I mean, if I were there, and Willard was spewing the lies that he told, I would have put it to him thusly:

"Mitt, we know what you've said in the past; it's recorded multiple times all over the place.  Either you've changed your positions - again - which brings up fundamental questions about trusting you - or - you're not being honest here tonight, which also brings up fundamental questions about trusting you.  Is there anything you'd like to walk back considering the video record that's out there?"

Simple enough.  Maybe the Obama folks know this and are going to blitz the airwaves with these ads which would be so easy to make.  But as for me, I simply would have said the above.  It's true, it's accurate, it's somewhat delicate.  And it pins Romney.  And it's what people would have wanted to see. 

Either that or the whole thing's been scripted from the get-go.  I can't discount that.

We're all downtrodden...even if we believe we're not...

An interesting point is made in the NY Times recurring talking head series "Room for Debate" by one Hastings Wyman, in this case, on why the South is more right-wing than the rest of the USA.  Well, actually he could have made it slightly better, so I'll make the slightly better version:

There were two ethnic groups alone in the South, and pretty much nobody else, unlike pretty much the rest of the country.  The native Americans were largely exterminated or ethnically cleansed.

So there weren't really Irish to realize that in their being picked on by the WASPs,  they were in solidarity with Germans,  Jews,  Poles, Italians, and,  yes, African Americans and Latinos.

I think it's one of the cases where if we can see our common state of dukkha, we're a bit better off; a smidgen of suffering is transcended right there.

A few things Stephen Chow on YouTube for your perusal

Because you can't get much Stephen Chow in the US of A...and I have nothing particularly edifying to say at the moment...







"The God of Cookery"









"Hail the Judge"







"From Beijing with Love"

I'm even younger than that now...

I am now listening to "My Back Pages," one of the great songs about maturity by Bob Dylan.

And I realize...

It's possible that it's possible to go beyond "My Back Pages."


There was a time when it all made sense to not take a hard position...but...

Sometimes you must sadly, regretfully, and with a sense of loss tearing you to the heart...to...

take a position that is black and white.

Sometimes,  despite the utter folly of humanity's existence, despite the complete insanity that defines everything from the murders carried about under Sargon to Pol Pot to George W. Bush that...

One must take a firm position: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.

And sometimes, place where "Here I stand!" is, is a knife's edge.

Game theory, you know.

The moment someone says "Carthage Must Be Destroyed" ...well...that creates problems...for which one can only respond in certain ways...

More to come...time to deal with home stuff again...duties...see above.

I should have known it would be something like this...

So as it happens, there's a whole bunch of rare earth deposits, gems, and evidently valuable stuff that's being discovered as Greenland's ice sheet melts.

Now I get it.

Same principle as Tibet.


A person with a vested interest in exploiting a country chock full of untapped resources might make all kinds of justifications for doing anything or nothing as long as they can get their hand near the cookie jar.

Can't escape suffering. Nope.

It is not for nothing that we say we don't annihilate suffering but rather that we transcend it.

We cannot escape pain in life; it is what gives life its poignancy.

Can't escape death either.

It's good to be prepared.

Not a lot of separation. And yet separate, when it comes to genetics

A bit in the Sunday times on fatherhood and epigenetics:

Before I began reading up on fathers and their influence on future generations, I had a high-school-biology-level understanding of how a man passes his traits on to his child. His sperm and the mother’s egg smash into each other, his sperm tosses in one set of chromosomes, the egg tosses in another, and a child’s genetic future is set for life. Physical features: check. Character: check. Cognitive style: check. But the pathways of inheritance, I’ve learned, are subtler and more varied than that. Genes matter, and culture matters, and how fathers behave matters, too.  

Lately scientists have become obsessed with a means of inheritance that isn’t genetic but isn’t nongenetic either. It’s epigenetic. “Epi,” in Greek, means “above” or “beyond.” Think of epigenetics as the way our bodies modify their genetic makeup. Epigenetics describes how genes are turned on or off, in part through compounds that hitch on top of DNA — or else jump off it — determining whether it makes the proteins that tell our bodies what to do.  

In the past decade or so, the study of epigenetics has become so popular it’s practically a fad. Psychologists and sociologists particularly like it because gene expression or suppression is to some degree dictated by the environment and plays at least as large a role as genes do in the development of a person’s temperament, body shape and predisposition to disease. I’ve become obsessed with epigenetics because it strikes me as both game-changing and terrifying. Our genes can be switched on or off by three environmental factors, among other things: what we ingest (food, drink, air, toxins); what we experience (stress, trauma); and how long we live.  

Epigenetics means that our physical and mental tendencies were not set in stone during the Pleistocene age, as evolutionary psychology sometimes seems to claim. Rather, they’re shaped by the life we lead and the world we live in right now. Epigenetics proves that we are the products of history, public as well as private, in parts of us that are so intimately ours that few people ever imagined that history could reach them. (One person who did imagine it is the French 18th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed that acquired traits could be inherited. Twentieth-century Darwinian genetics dismissed Lamarckism as laughable, but because of epigenetics, Lamarckism is staging a comeback.)

There are certain problems with the above text though in general I agree with its sentiment. First the problems: No, Lamarckism is not staging a comeback - Larmarckism held that in general acquired traits are inherited.

The degree to which we can make choices is also shaped by prior inputs and states,  and we don't know to what extent what was shaped by what because it's all interconnected.

But yeah, stop messing with the future in a bad way.

I've been REALLY busy lately, but...

I couldn't pass up this bit of what I can only see as strange news.

GAPYEONG, South Korea — North Korea has decided not to send a delegation to South Korea to attend the funeral of Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, a senior church official said Thursday. "When I was in the North, I was told by the officials there that there would be no funeral delegation to visit the South," said Park Sang-Kwon, president of an automaking joint venture the church established in North Korea in 1999. Speaking to reporters at the church's headquarters at Gapyeong, east of Seoul, Park said officials in Pyongyang had cited lingering anger over a recent US-South Korea military exercise. "They said the North still had hard feelings... and it may be inappropriate for them to send the delegation after criticising the South so much in recent weeks," he said.

So let me get this straight:  A right-wing exploitative cult leader dies, and the cult-like leftwing dictatorship to the North had actually considered sending someone to this guy's funeral.

Weird.

Kitsch and Buddhist Imagery and What It All Might Mean

It's been a few weeks since I've had a blog post.  This has been for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the strange internet conditions in the People's Republic of China, the fact that I was doing something creative at work, and that creative thing was sorely needed.

In my travels to NY this year my siblings and I were involved in settling my mother's estate.   Evidently my mother was a rather avid collector of something called "Precious Moments."

She was, I think, under the impression that these things would increase in value, kind of like the way some people would have bought Thomas Kinkade "paintings" for the same reason.   Like Thomas Kinkade, these things ooze what is commonly called "kitsch."  The Wikipedia article on kitsch describes Milan Kundera's view on the subject:

The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), defined it as "the absolute denial of shit". He wrote that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult with which to come to terms, offering instead a sanitized view of the world, in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions".

In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptableconsensus; by contrast, "everything that infringes on kitsch," including individualism, doubt, and irony, "must be banished for life" in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera wrote, "Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch."

For Kundera, "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

And this led me to the question: is Buddhist imagery kitsch? I think some imagery can be considered this way,  but not all of it can, just as some Christian imagery is definitely not kitsch, but some is.  

It is kind of interesting to me though that some aspects of Buddhist inspired arts, notably those Zen-derived, strive to incorporate some aspects of "real life," or emptiness, or wabisabi (侘寂).   

Coincidentally, there's been some discussion in the Buddhist blogosphere of something called "near enemies." 

I'll go out on a limb here and say I'm not sure there are such things as "near enemies."  There are, of course ways of being that are not conducive to the transcendence of suffering, to be sure.  And those ways of being are ways of being that just won't go - you cannot expect to be entirely rid of attachments, envy,  hatred, greed, etc. 

That's not the point, of course, the point is to transcend them.

But there is also talk of pity, indifference,  and something that is substituted for true feelings (which makes them, what, false feelings?).

I'm not sure there are such things...take pity for example.  Pity might not be the best of all possible worlds - that is pity as kindly sorrow for another, which, I'd submit recognizes a difference between the pitier and the pitied.  And it is a motivator of charity in which there is still a gaining idea (the problem with much of so-called "Christian charity.")

But I think it may be more of a continuum than a set of discrete and separate states. Pity might lead to compassion, if the pitier realizes his separateness from the pitied. 

I agree with Barbara, that it's good to have a relationship with a teacher to help. 

But one still shoulders the responsibility here. 

I may have more to say on this later.