Theory to Practice: zen lessons learned in the navy

Slightly different style.  I wrote this as a general piece of reflection on some experiences over deployment and before and what I had learned about zen practice through these experiences, with an eye toward submitting it to Tricycle and Buddhadharma, but they both passed.  So I am putting it on my blog because I've been a lazy bum about writing on here as of late.  Enjoy.

When I decided to join the navy, I was fresh out of a summer of work practice at Tassajara Zen monastery in Northern California.  Having made it through that experience, I imagined that I could zen my way through any difficulty.  After five years working in reactor department on an aircraft carrier, I can safely say that I was wrong. In the nuclear propulsion community, we have a saying: Theory to practice. It means putting what is understood through contemplation into action. It also means recognizing that how things play out in the real world is not always how we imagined they would.

One of my favorite moments from deployment this year happened when a group of Japanese naval officers (and a few enlisted) came to join the buddhist group for meditation. I'm the lay leader. While I am honest with the group that my experience is almost entirely zen, I try to keep the group non-denominational. I avoid words like "zazen," substituting "meditation" in readings, for example. Or I say "flat cushion" and "round cushion" instead of "zabuton" and "zafu". It is important to me that other sailors interested in buddhism not feel forced to adopt a specific sect or school, and I felt like I ought to be able to practice non-attachment to zen forms and lingo with ease. But I do miss the shared experience of practicing with other zen students.  So I was tickled pink when the Japanese contingent arrived and one of them looked around at the setup and the posture we were in and went "Oh! Zazen!"  This is but one of many instances in which I was confronted by the gap between theory and practice as a zen student in the navy.

For me, zen practice encompasses much about that need both to verify with actual experience something I have read, for example, and also the notion that understanding something once, twice, a hundred times, isn't enough; I have to do the work, instance by instance, if my practice is to have meaning to my life.  I have felt many times like I understood some helpful aspect of zen teaching.  Those moments mean nothing, however, when it comes time to actually put it into action. I can draw on that understanding, but doing it is the meat and potatoes of zen practice, and that is the hard part.  Even writing this piece is all well and good, but I'd bet my paycheck that I'll still lose my shit the next time they run out of a dish I was really looking forward to in the chow line.  So it is nice to go up to the flight deck, look around at the horizon, and verify that, yes, as Dogen says, the world does look like one big circle when one is out on a boat far from shore.  But life in the navy has presented me with many difficulties through which I have not been able to zen my way. While I could conceive of an alternate reality in which I "did the work" and got myself through those struggles with the cool, breezy air of an adept monk, in this life I failed again and again, and I started to feel that this meant I was failing as a zen student.  Again, though, I was wrong.

Failing to maintain aloof composure isn't a failure to practice. Failing to act selflessly isn't a failure to practice.  The practice of zen (and this is one of those nuggets I have understood in the past and STILL forgot) is about coming back, coming back, coming back: to the cushion, to my breath, to the present moment.  It's about falling down and getting up.  As my teacher, Greg Fain, puts it, "be present for what arises."  When I was comparing my life to what I thought zen practice looks like, I felt like the gap between theory and practice was unacceptably big.  By dwelling in imagination, I was ignoring my life in practice.  But after bumblefucking my way through enough of these experiences, it eventually occurred to me that my ideas about zen were flawed, and I came to a new appreciation of zen theory.  I continue to encounter difficulties.  And I do try to be kind, compassionate, slow to anger, etc.  What I am working on more now is meeting my experience, whatever it is, and carrying on rather than falling into rumination and regret.  And that, theory to practice, is a lot healthier.

One last sea-story, I think, could well be put down as a genuine navy koan.  The case:  A sailor in reactor department (me) was tripping out in his head over time.  We measure distance with feet or meters, we measure weight with pounds or kilograms... What, exactly, is it we are measuring with seconds, minutes, or hours?  So the sailor went up to his chief and asked, "Seriously, chief: what IS time?"  The chief handed the sailor a fox tail (hand-held brush-broom) and said, "Go clean something and find out."  Commentary: What was I hoping to accomplish by using mind to answer a question I cooked up?  Field day goes for two hours, no matter what "hour" means in theory.

Ocean of Samsara

     Watching the sea, with its choppy water, I had the sense I was observing some alien form of society.  The way the crests and valleys would dance with each other, changing places, it seemed like the water was communicating with itself in a manner unintelligible to conscious thought.  I witnessed populations continuously manifesting and dissolving, imbued with a latent intelligence, carrying forth living and dying in a drama that was all their own.  This life was merely the result of energy, abundant and mysterious, on the surface of the ocean, the surface of the physical realm, not dissimilar to humanity in this respect.  We are intelligent, yes, but how much of this human drama is no more than the interplay of energy (karma?) in the medium that is sentient biological lifeforms? Scientists and mathematicians can describe the action of waves, outlandishly intricate and random though it may be, with vectors and calculus and algorithms.  Though there may be orders of magnitudes more variables involved, it seems that, by and large, a sufficiently smart, talented, and studious collective of scientists and mathematicians (perhaps a hyper-intelligent, non-human species) could describe our human drama with high math and vectors and algorithms as satisfactorily as we describe the movement of the sea.  Human fluid dynamics.  Then again, when it comes to nuclear physics, although scientists are able to predict with a very high degree of accuracy the time it takes for half of a sample of a given nuclide to decay away and what manner of decay it is likeliest to undergo, they are not (yet?) able to determine WHEN or WHY any given atom of said nuclide will decay or how.  Humanity may be like this, instead of like the ocean.

      I may be wrong about a couple points.  It may not be possible to completely account for all the variables involved in the interplay of energy in the sea.  And for all I know, some scientists may have already started to crack the code of individual atoms' fates.  But I am pretty sure that we will not ever arrive at an accurate, satisfactory explanation for human behavior.  Even if sociologists and psychologists can predict that one in ten people will steal the spare change from the dish at the convenience store, and even if they can further explain the indicators which made this action more likely in the tenth person and unlikely in the previous nine, I doubt very much we can ever know for certain WHY people do or do not do any particular thing.  Zazen, the spiritual life generally, can have a transformative effect on karma.  I think the impulse to seek the great self is universal, but listening to that small whisper inside is not.  Why do some people listen and some do not?  Why do some people keep following the trail of breadcrumbs and others walk away?  How revolutionary is the path that goes against the stream if a high degree of proclivity is the threshold for seeking it out to begin with?  Christians may answer these questions with "the grace of God", and I think more than a few Buddhists may answer with something similar.  More and more, I feel like I can count myself among them.  Because really, I don't fucking know.  And I don't think I can know.  I think subjects like these lie beyond some philosophical event horizon, past which the mechanisms for understanding just do not function.  Like atoms, like waves, humanity is to some degree predictable, and to some degree a baffling mystery.  I think most of the universe may be that way.  That's fine.

      As an afterthought, I recently had the opportunity to ask a zen teacher a question, and I asked "what is free will really like?"  His eventual answer was something to the effect of: you need to stop taking for granted the framework which gives rise to this question; as the relationship to this framework changes, the question can't continue to exist.  I feel like this is a modern form of "the question does not suit the case".  I'll square with you: I am bothered by the things I do, sometimes, and I don't really understand why I am the way I am, and this troubles me often.  This is one reason I have been trying to sort this issue out.  Another is my concern for human beings' future as a whole.  The concern is big.  I realize, though, that troubling myself over esoteric, philosophical conundrums does nothing but muddle me about.  Maybe I should instead try to make peace with the limits of reason and speculation and put my efforts into seeing beyond this framework or whatever.

Being a Warrior isn't Buddhist

     In the student bathrooms at Tassajara, there is a sheet of paper with spots on it for students to sign up to clean throughout the current month.  The note accompanying the sign-up sheet details what needs to be done and urges students to follow through and actually clean on the day they sign up for.  The last sentence of the note reads: "Remember: cleaning is a core practice of zen training."
     Both with and without remembering this note, I have often thought to myself that with all the cleaning I do in the navy, I'm basically already doing zen training.  There are many parallels to monastic life in the navy, actually.  Every morning at Tassajara, there is work circle -- the navy has morning quarters.  At Tassajara there is soji -- in the navy we do "cleaning stations".  Also, I am usually sleep-deprived, my nerves are frayed, and the temperature of where I sleep is largely influenced by the weather.  So what do I have to go to a monastery for?  I already touched on this subject in a very early post that I wrote here.  But I have continued to think a lot about this issue, and there is more I would like to say.  In particular, I often remember a comment one of my root teachers made during dokusan when I asked for his thoughts on my decision to go into the navy:  "being a warrior isn't buddhist."
     As I said in that early post, the way my mind responds to the activity of the moment is what makes the difference between the activity resembling a fanciful image of zen practice and the activity being tedious and frustrating.  I know, tedious, frustrating activity is the quintessential stuff of zen practice.  It's the best zen practice of my life in terms of providing frustrating, aversion-inspiring experiences to hold in spacious awareness and activity with with to engage fully having no gaining idea, and I'm sure it is quite healthy to be engaging in activity which does not resemble a fanciful image of zen practice.  Also, I suffer and my shit surfaces in very unhappy ways both in the navy and at Tassajara.  If I cannot awaken under these circumstances in the navy, what makes me think I could do it at a monastery?
     Perhaps if "the marketplace" was sufficient to support awakening and studying dharma, then monasteries would not be a thing.  At Tassajara, the other people actively support me (and I them) in cultivating wisdom and compassion.  In the navy... not so much.  While many of my shipmates are pretty righteous individuals who (though they may not realize it or phrase it with buddhist language) do a fine job encouraging me to continue with the struggle of right action both by their example and through conversations, for the most part it's a cruel, careless environment. It is full of distractions.  And there is not nearly enough zazen.  The mind needs space.  Life needs space.  As Brad Warner says, a person needs to let their mind become very, very quiet to see the way things are.  There is far too much noise, literally and figuratively, in the navy and the marketplace for a student to become settled enough to get a glimpse of the bright pearl, even if all things -- marketplace, navy, airplanes, propulsion plant spaces -- are actually phenomenal manifestations of the bright pearl.
     Another key feature to a monastic setting is the intention of the people there.  I only recently realized how much intention matters.  Through conversations with guys and gals I work with, I have observed a consensus that the reason we are doing something affects how we feel about it.  If we are "cleaning for time," (i.e. just cleaning because there isn't anything else our leadership has for us to do but they just don't want to let us go home yet), it is a lot more frustrating than if we are helping to organize maintenance paperwork to support the upkeep of our equipment.  So even though I could in theory control my own intention in whatever activity I engage in, the fact is that activity at a monastery is intended to support awakening and activity in the navy is intended to support war (and bureaucracy).  The intention of the students at Tassajara is different than the intention of the other sailors on USS Carl Vinson.  This affects my attitude, and the attendant feelings affect my follow-on mental activity.  This may be a wrong notion, but that's where I am at, currently.  Or at least that's one reason I feel that getting out of the navy and practicing at Tassajara will be more supportive of seeking the way.
     The last thought I wanted to explore regarding my teacher's admonition was that there is more to being a warrior than just being in the military.  I used to envision that there was a way I could be a bad-ass and buddhist, or at least a bad-ass buddhist.  But attributes commonly associated with being a bad-ass include a lack of empathy and a disregard for rules.  I seek to cultivate empathy, and even though I do bump up against the forms of zen from time to time, I appreciate them for what they are.  So being a bad-ass in this way is incompatible with buddhist training.  Similarly, even though I am in the military, I wouldn't dream of calling myself a warrior.  Plenty of people who are not in the military are more warrior-ish than me.  Being a warrior means drawing a hard line between allies and enemies.  Rather than seek to identify with one's enemy, a warrior seeks only to understand their strategy in order to out-maneuver them.  I have been like this in very small ways from time to time, but it is not a mentality I can maintain for a while.  It kind of reminds me of a Darlene Cohen talk in which she discusses her past nature of vindictiveness.  A warrior seeks to destroy the opponent.  In a warrior's world, the fight is never over.  I think that for a bodhisattva, a warrior analogy can fit: seeking to understand suffering in order to lessen it, never giving up the effort to save all beings even if that effort has no attainable end, etc.  My teacher is right that being a warrior is anathema to being a buddhist.  I don't think that I qualify as being a warrior just because I am in the navy, but I do think that being in the navy is so different from being in a monastery that I may as well be trying to be a bad-ass, warrior-buddhist.  And there's no such thing.  Is there?

Hope is a four-letter word -- Or, a pessimistic look at optimism

     The events of this post happened quite some time ago, so "today" doesn't literally mean the day I posted this but rather the day that I started writing it.  And even though my attitude has shifted since I started writing this, I still wanted to explore the thoughts that were coming up and finish this post.  It has been a while since I wrote anything substantial in this blog.  Enjoy.

     Today at work, I was the maddest that I have ever been, I feel.  I had to walk away from where I was to the loudest area of my work center's space, scream "Fuck this place!" at the top of my lungs, and then yell "Fuck!" multiple times while jumping up and down.  The root cause of this outburst was hope.
     Our work center recently got a new divisional officer.  I know him from previous interactions, and I had gotten the impression he was a reasonable person.  Before we left for lunch, we worked for several hours completing a cleaning "hit list".  Our spaces looked pretty damned good already, mind, but we worked those hours nonetheless because we had to.  As we left for the mess decks, one of the senior guys told us he was going to try to get us cut out early because we had done a good job.  But I resisted the impulse to become hopeful.  I ate lunch with my work mates, thinking how nice it would be to have most of an afternoon off.  But still, I reminded myself not to expect anything good just because someone had suggested it might happen.  I finished my food, I took my dishes and silverware to the scullery, and I headed back to the propulsion plant.  As I walked down the ladderwell, the thought bubbled up without restraint: "yay! I'm about to go home!"  But as it turned out, that thought couldn't have been farther from the reality I encountered when I got to our space.
     After gathering us together, the divisional officer proceeded to start walking around, running his finger over the surface of various components in our space as if he were head butler at Buckingham Palace.  Both his face and demeanor would be well-suited for that job, but that is beside the point.  He looked into every nook and cranny, making a note of each instance he found of cleanliness being less than immaculate.  The hit list he generated was even longer than the one we spent all morning working on.  And he was being a total dick the entire time.  He finished his tour, gave the list to the enlisted guy in charge of cleaning, informed us that the list must be complete to his satisfaction before we can go home, and left.  I was devastated.
     This story is not really unusual.  At work, we often comment to each other that hope or happiness is secured (means not allowed).  Starting back at prototype, some of us started using an acronym which we would mention when we needed a reminder not to get our hopes up: MAHALARA (maintain all hope as low as reasonably achievable... it's a reference to guidance for exposure to radiation).  Basically, even going home at the normal time must not be taken for granted.  Someone in charge could deal a blow to morale at any moment for any reason, and there is nothing anyone can do.  Work in general is pretty harsh for morale as it is.  Leadership likes to demand perfection.  With all the cleaning I do, I feel like an overpaid janitor a lot of the time.  Tasks get dropped in our lap last-minute a lot.  I am sick of people telling me "it could always be worse" by way of motivation.  And almost worse than that is leadership acting like they are doing us a huge favor by hooking us up with a day off here or there on a weekend which other departments normally get just because it's a weekend.  Since when is a two day weekend a hook up?  A great man once told me not to confuse a better deal for a good deal.  In other words, just because something is better than it could be doesn't mean it's not still shitty.  Even for normal privileges and freedom, I become hopeful at my own risk.  Having to continually resist the impulse to become hopeful is a stupid, stupid practice, I feel, but I have to because I couldn't take the near-constant disappointment otherwise.  Still, I must persevere and study my suffering.
     My teacher told me that it is not a bad thing to become hopeful.  Actually, it can be quite good.  But as I so clearly illustrated above, hope puts me at risk of great inner turmoil.  Doesn't it?  After reflecting on this for a while, I thought that maybe I did not suffer because I was hopeful but rather because I was very attached to a certain outcome.  It is fine to become hopeful in a spiritual sense, optimistic, in other words.  But the type of hope that my work mates and I have come to regard with suspicion is more materialistic.  We have colloquially been referring to attachment to a certain outcome as hope, but really they are not the same.
     So I think that the right way forward is a balance of spiritual optimism and cynical pragmatism.  I will allow myself to hope all over the place as long as it is uplifting and not greedy, but I will hold in check my impulse to dwell on good future events to the extent that their failure to manifest would result in excessive suffering, maintaining all attachment to a particular future as low as reasonably achievable... MAATAPFALARA

Navy Koans: Case 1

The Case:

     A sailor was cleaning a horizontal surface with a sponge and a bucket of water.  His chief walked up to him.  The sailor said, "Chief! I cleaned this horizontal surface yesterday.  It is clean.  Why am I cleaning it again?"  The chief whacked the sailor with a foxtail.  The sailor was greatly enlightened.

Verse:

     Bucket, sponge, water, horizontal surface
     Cleaning something that is already clean
     Abiding in non-duality, one does not suffer

Commentary:

     Careful, sailor, not to drown in your bucket of water! That horizontal surface was never sullied, nor will it ever be clean.  "Again," is spoken, but therein lies delusion.  If Dogen could hear this lie, he would drive him from the Propulsion Plant Space with a whisk!  Though we are already enlightened, still we must practice.  With no gaining idea, we all must clean a clean horizontal surface.  

Flushing Underwear Down the Toilet -- Or: Empathy Sympathy Sadness & Suffering

     Earlier today, I hugged a coworker of mine (I needed a hug) and told him, "you know that part in The Green Mile when John Coffey says how the hate and meanness of other people feels like bees stinging him?  I feel like that all the time."  It's true.  I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but one of my biggest challenges at work is being around rampant free expression of hate and negativity.  Whether I am weak of character, or whether I have subconsciously decided on a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach, or whether some natural social mechanism has merely run its course, I have started expressing hate and negativity more freely, too.  Back at prototype, when I told one of the staff instructors that I aspired to ordain and train as a buddhist monk, he advised that I get out of the navy as soon as I could.  "It might change you," he said.  He's right.  It's hard to say which causes me more grief: the anger and vitriol from those around me or the anger and vitriol from me, myself.  Whichever it is, I definitely struggle with both every day.
     I do often feel that either through birth or upbringing (or some combination), I am endowed with a deep-seated, abiding empathy which (and I didn't realize this until recently) A LOT of people lack.  It seems like most people do not have feelings in response to negativity, whether others' or their own.  It seems like many people just don't consider others' feelings a factor in their decision-making process.  Not to toot my own horn, but I often ask the question "how will this impact others?" when choosing my actions.  But (just to pick one example) on numerous occasions, the toilets in the bathroom for which reactor controls division (of which I am part) is responsible have gotten backed-up and even overflowed because someone has flushed underwear.  Such a person is obviously anti-social, just wants to watch the world burn, gets a fucked-up thrill from causing trouble for other people.  I fantasize about catching someone doing this red-handed: I would kick them with my steel-toe boot using my full strength square in the gut, then proceed to bash their head into the hardest, closest object to us.  Now, of course, if I ever did do such a thing, my navy career would be over.  Would I feel enough satisfaction from such violence to justify it?  I doubt it.  Would this individual "learn a lesson"?  I really think that if they aren't already considering the impact they have on other people, getting the shit beat out of them wouldn't help.  So actually, all this hatred and negativity is just festering inside me, causing me pain.  But I yearn so desperately to do SOMEthing about this situation and others like it.
      I feel like I got some small peek into how buddhism fits into all this at dinner this evening.  I went out to a nice-ish restaurant.  It had a sort of industrial, rustic décor, with the standard fare one might expect for such a place: a pork dish, a steak, some appetizers, some fish, lots of wine...entrées priced around $18-42.  After considering the various options, I decided to get the "Catch of the Day."  I liked the preparation described by the menu, and none of the other options seemed as appealing. I was going to ask what the "Catch of the Day" was, but then I realized I didn't care.  I had already made up my mind.  All that that information could serve to do would be to make me feel better about my decision.  I overheard a guy at another table asking questions about the fish.  At first, I thought about how all life is chaos and that people like that guy were desperately just trying to feel like they had some kind of control over it.  Then I realized I had been about to do the same thing.  Wouldn't it be something if we could both just be happy we had $20+ to spend on one fish meal that evening?  I passed a few homeless on the walk to the restaurant and another couple on the walk back.  I gave them nothing.  Whether it's fish or flushed underwear, life is constant chaos.  A lot of suffering results directly from ignorance of this truth.
     When I realized that I was doing the same thing as that guy, when I realized that the fish and the underwear were different manifestations of the same phenomenon, that's when I felt like I might have an inkling of what it means to practice buddhism.  We are all trying to control chaos, and we all suffer for it.  Rather than be a judgmental prick, I should endeavor to stop trying to control it and just sympathize with others for their suffering and suffer in my own way along with them.  I heard that equanimity was the willingness to endure whatever is arising.  That's a really good way to put it.  And even if whatever is arising isn't exactly what I imagined as something I could endure, still I must try to endure it.  It's a struggle.  But, as my teacher Jane Schneider said: "The struggle is the only real.  Success is nothing."

Motivational quote of the damned century...

Suck it up, Buttercup -- Equanimity, Navy-style

     If there is one lesson I am grateful to have learned from the Navy, it can be summed up in the phrase I used for this post's title. When I first heard a chief say this to me, I almost laughed aloud I was so delightfully surprised by the direct wisdom of this playful yet stern catchphrase.  I really feel that this is pointing to a lesson I have learned time and again through zen practice.
     I have a lot of problems. They range from macroscopic (how will the human species avoid destroying ourselves?) to trivial (fucking assholes don't know how to merge!). Quick aside: it seems like those two problems are really just different iterations of the same underlying frustration. But anyways... At work, I sometimes delay my own progress out of frustration with some such issue or another. This only hurts me. At times, doing this even adds to my frustration. The resolution I imagine will fix everything will never come to be. The resolution I should instead put my efforts toward realizing is essentially equanimity: the willingness to experience any mental state (nod to Darlene Cohen for that phrasing). When I am unwilling to be frustrated, I am unwilling to deal with my frustration in a constructive way.
     Getting all butt-hurt about stuff is useless. Whining about it and ruminating only make it worse. The buddhist guidance of right attitude is not something I will eventually obtain after practicing at Tassajara (though I may benefit in other ways). I can practice the noble eightfold path (or whichever spoke is applicable) here and now. Sometimes, though, I need a verbal smack on the head to remind me of this.