It's name was taken from the title of a show on WBAI a long time ago, hosted early Saturday mornings by a guy named Simon Loekle. The show morphed into "As I Please," which was very literature-centric.
Ah that was then.
I knew why the revolution hadn't come: the revolution hadn't come because the revolution was a manifestation, a projection of what we thought we were lacking in ourselves. What I didn't see is why the revolution hadn't come was what I was not seeing and living from in my own life; or to put it another way, we included me. And I certainly couldn't put in motion anything like a revolution because it wasn't operative in my own life. The revolution happens when the Wheel turns. If you are personally stuck no wheel is turning.
Emma Goldman might not have said, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!" Apparently she did say, "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." But it's not clear that her revolution ever really came.
Somehow, somewhere along the way I lived a life and met some remarkable people, and somehow somewhere along the way I actually did participate in a revolution, and you may have benefited from my participation in that revolution.
Some folks are still stuck. Some folks may not know what Mazu was talking about, and think that cultivation is unnecessary. Some folks may be too concerned with polishing a tile or not polishing a tile. It's possible to get stuck in the notion that you're complete as you are without X, because it seems so good, right, on the side of the angels. But of course having that expression is still attachment. And what I wrote is still attachment. Take the I out, or replace it with you or some other noun; play Mad-Libs with it, and it's still 90º off target.
I don't know about anyone else (though I have conjectures), but as for me, the encounter with my own suffering, and the idea that this suffering could be everyone's (see last paragraph) was useful for me to get beyond that. And beyond that is something wonderful.
There is a heck of a lot of suffering out there. Some people are in a particularly difficult place; they feel (often with justification) that they have been marginalized, and feel impotent to act with those who are seen as marginalizers.
The revolution comes when the First Noble Truth is begun to be apprehended.
The word "功夫" has an interesting translation in Japanese; it means either (pronounced as "ふう" or "kufū") as (1) scheme; device; scheming; devising; figuring out; coming up with; solving ingeniously; (2) dedication to spiritual improvement (esp. through Zen meditation)," or (pronounced as "カンフー" or "kanfū") it means what you might know as kungfu. You know - Bruce Lee, Wingchun and all that.
The first definitions - figuring out, solving ingeniously, and dedication to spiritual improvement are implicit in the juxtaposition of the kanji - the first is that for "achievement, merits, and honor" and the second is that of a man.
They're really one in the same. Spiritual development is one and the same with becoming skilled and accomplished in one's day to day life.
But with regard to Prof. Myers and "Dr." Chopra, I do remonstrate. First with respect to "Dr." Chopra, he writes:
By making belief in God their enemy, atheists deprive themselves of what spirituality is really about: a process of inner growth. There are wisdom traditions around the world that do not use the word God (e.g., Buddhism, Vedanta) or advocate religious worship in the conventional sense. Countless people have seen through the faults of organized religion and turned instead to their own spiritual journey. Hitchens and other atheists stand at the door to that journey and slam it shut, assuring all who approach that to seek God, the soul, or higher reality is a fool's errand. How do they know? It's not as if they have inquired deeply into the great saints and sages who have successfully traveled such a journey. Hitchens dismisses every spiritual person out of hand, which means that he dismisses William Blake (the source of his phrase, "mind-forged manacles," which Blake applied to modern industrial life, not religion) in the same breath that he dismisses Bible Belt preachers.
By discounting the whole notion of spiritual awakening, atheists make a claim to false knowledge. They haven't walked the walk, yet somehow they know, with dead certainty, that Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Confucius, Zoroaster, Saint Paul, Rumi, Kabir, the Prophet Muhammad, Rabindranath Tagore, and countless others aren't just wrong; they are stupid and blinkered compared to any everyday atheist today. I have my doubts. The atheists I've met went through a period of personal disillusion with religion, and on that basis alone they became atheists. Could anything be more subjective for a crowd that decries subjectivity? Could anything be more idiosyncratic for a group that claims to represent universal reason?
I'm not on this path not because I expect to become a master at anything by this phase of my life. I'm not on this path because I want a cool experience of seeing a deity, or because I affirm or deny what any big names in philosophy or religion might or might not have said, assuming they might have existed. Myers writes, in various places, in response to this:
"Spiritual journey" is one of those New Age phrases that means nothing: it means not going anywhere, not learning anything new, only wallowing in one's preconceptions and justifying it with bafflegab about "spirituality", which is also undefinable and unmeasurable and utterly useless...
Scientists and atheists have set reasonable standards for evaluating truth, and like to point out that the claims of religion not only fail to meet that bar, but also are contradictory, both within and between the different mythologies. We know the multitudes of bizarre spiritualities can't all be true, and given that they won't even try to justify their beliefs with evidence, we may righteously discard them all until they make an effort to show that they actually possess some tiny fragment of truth.
I have seen and experienced suffering.
I have seen and experienced that there is a cause to suffering.
I have seen and experienced that - however briefly, due to my incompetence - suffering may be transcended.
I have seen and experienced that when I follow the path of the Buddha, the above sentence becomes more true more often.
I take issue with Chopra because he is a huckster, a charlatan and a liar (he has met Richard Dawkins, who would not say that he became an atheist because he had a "period of personal disillusion with religion, and on that basis alone [he] became [an] atheist."
But I take issue with Myers because you just can't look at a friggin' life of many in Buddhist sanghas, you just can't participate in the tea ceremony in indifference, you just can't marvel at the effects of cultivation of skill for others and not say that the practice of a religion that emphasizes these points is superstition.
Speaking of Hitchens, here's a Youtube video that purports to be of Yip Man, Bruce Lee's teacher of Wing Chun, 1 week before his death of throat cancer. Yip Man, who was known to have been an opium addict at some point in his life according to his Wikipedia page, wasn't perfectly cultivated all the time, and neither is yours truly. But that's not the point.
Somewhere in all that is the answer to the Genpo Roshi/Eido Shimano koan too. I'm sure you can figure that part out. But as long as you've gotten this far, and if you saw the above video of Yip Man, you might as well see what his student did, according to this guy who deconstructed some of his moves.
Yes, at one time they had to rely on skill because CGI had not been invented yet.
And so it is for our lives. Except we don't have to do 20 punches in 3 seconds or something like that.
As a Christian I can Assure you that even Jesus Christ was against organzied "religion". Christianity is about loving God, loving others and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ to the rest of the world. Mumon you seem to be very leary of any group that doesn't fit into your fundamentalist "box" [sic]. How is promoting Gods genuine love corrupting Vancouver and the greater Clark County area? If anything Christianity is bringing back moralistic ideals to an already declining society. I welcome you with open arms brother, you don't have to like me or my beliefs but know that regardless how angry you are right now, God still loves you! :)
Now I wasn't in the least bit "angry" of course when I wrote that post, or the e-mail to that church. But I think it's likely that this is what was in the minds of the folks at Kessid Church when they started their venture: They thought they were "promoting God's genuine love" and "bringing back moralistic ideals to an already declining society." (I am always intrigued by how conservatives are inevitably using adjectives with "-ic" on the end of the word when there's a perfectly good alternative, nearly identical, that's shorter and means exactly the same thing. Can somebody tell me why they do that? But I digress.)
They likely thought they were "promoting God's genuine love" and "bringing back moralistic ideals to an already declining society." The hubris behind such a statement is breathtaking to me. They were promoting "God's" "genuine" "love." Anyone who believed differently from them was not. And they had morality on their side. They had a guy who could suspend not only disbelief, but the laws of physics, economics, biology, and mathematics for His People. We other skeptical schmucks were "stuck" with reality.
"Nobody could have predicted" then, that such hubris might lead some folks to think that such a belief might lead them to make rash choices, such as that the cash flow from a health club could pay the freight on a budding megachurch. And this in a place - where two other outfits had failed before, one in an economic boom time. And this in a time when the region's economy was in free-fall, in the worst economic decline since the Great Depression. I do hope the place taking over the club, though succeeds. Not that I'll join them, but I do hope the area comes back; Vancouver WA is still in a real-estate depression, relative to boom times. But the complete insanity of what these guys did; it's breathtaking. We've had some economic successes locally recently, but these have generally been places that have folks behind them who know what they're doing because they've done it before. The Kessid guys were evidently utter, rank newbies, by comparison.
It is clear from watching the video to which I've linked that these guys were young, enthusiastic, and utterly without the sort of business-sense needed to build a resilient operation. That is why I sent them an e-mail, empathizing with their loss, reminding them of Buddha's parable of the mustard seed, and hoping they would understand that in one's endeavors, skill is often more important than belief.
I hope they will come to realize that it was the hubris and greed of taking their beliefs for reality, and becoming to attached to those beliefs, and the "wants" behind those beliefs that is related to their debacle. It would make them ultimately healthier, happier, and better able to really be part of our community, which includes people of all types.
And to provide a bit of contrast on the topic, here's some folks trying to live on one dollar a day. While they too seem young, idealistic, and perhaps slightly naive, I think their feet are more on the ground and they are more connected to reality, at least as we are aware, than the Kessid crowd.
Update: Evidently they did keep the "center" separate from the church. Except - and if you read the article and comment tellng me, "See! They used a manager!" please remember the folowing: they made a blunder so colossal words fall short: by calling the thing "Kessid Center." Consciously or unconsciously, this harebrained branding scheme a) conflated the center with the church and b) conflated the center with a weird, foreign-sounding word (even though it's Hebrew for something good, I'm told). The latter effect of course would drive away nativists, and the first one would drive away Progressives.
But then, it seems like a good idea to keep church and workouts separate.
