Zen and the Beat Way

The result of this fantastic division between work and play is that work becomes drudgery, and play becomes empty.

But as you learn when you study the records of these self-discoveries, the fascinating thing about them is that there is so much agreement among all those who do discover the world for themselves.

And yet, you do not achieve this agreement by seeking it. It is not achieved by looking out of the corner of your eye to see if everybody else is getting the same results as you or by trying to find out what others have already discovered. It is achieved by going down into one's own inner, secret place and asking there for a direct encounter with the world, independent of convention.

By being able to think about all sorts of future possibilities we are able to experience the emotions appropriate to those possibilities as if they were present happenings. In other words, civilized man tends to be in a state of chronic worry and fear and anxiety, because he is always confronted not with the simple actuality of what is happening before him but with the innumerable possibilities of what might happen. And since, because of this, his emotional existence tends to be in a chronic state of anxiety and tension, he increasingly loses the ability to relate to the concrete world as it manifests itself to him in the actual present in which he lives. He becomes so tied up inside that, as it. were, the channels of his sensibility become blocked. He gets a kind of neurological sclerosis, a kind of inability to give himself permission to be spontaneous, to be alive with full joyous abandonment. Thus the more civilized we become, the more stuffy we get. And, therefore, the need arises for various ways of liberating ourselves from society, for entering what the Indians call vanaprastha, the life of a forest dweller. Because when a person reaches a certain point in life when he says, "I have had enough of all this. I am simply tired of making life not worth living, by constantly living through the horrors of what might happen, for the sake of efficiency and membership in the community. Let me just get away from it all for a while and find out what the score is for me, myself. I am tired of being told what I ought to believe. I am tired of being told how I ought to see, how I ought to behave, how I ought to feel. Let me find out for myself who I really am." And so, these institutions that allow one to go back, as it were, to the shaman state of religion, to get away from the community interpretation of how one ought to think and feel, have arisen in a great many cultures. And they are arising again today.

And all this haiku poetry, and this kind of painting that the Sung artists so marvelously mastered, seeks to evoke that sense of what I would call possibility or potentiality, without actually filling in any details. And that is real magic.

This reaches a peak in the history of japanese culture in the seventeenth century, when there were four superbly important men: Bashō, the haiku poet; Bankei, a Zen teacher; Hakuin, another Zen teacher; and Sengai, a Zen painter

This is the principle that is called in Taoist philosophy wu wei, which means "not to force things." I've come to believe this is the best English translation. It is sometimes translated as "not doing, no artificiality, no interference." But our word forcing, as in a forced laugh, forcing a lock, forced behavior, forced kindness, forced love-forcing in that sense-is the opposite of wu wei. Wu wei means action in accordance with the character of the moment.

You can't

In the science of ecology, which studies the relationship between organisms and environments, one is acutely aware-in an intellectual way-that an organism, whether human or animal or insect or plant, is not merely something "in" an environment, as we are "in" this room, but rather that the organism and its environment behave together. They go with each other. The sense of the saying in the Gospels "Figs do not grow on thistles, nor grapes on thorns" has this application. So does the idea that human beings must grow in a cosmos that is itself intelligent. If human beings are intelligent-and we define "intelligence" as the human way of thinking and feeling-then the universe must be intelligent, too. We do not get an intelligent organism in an unintelligent environment. An apple tree does not grow apples all the time; planets and stars do not produce life all the time. But every so often they do. So if an apple tree may be said to "apple," this kind of universe in which we live can be said to "people." It is a peopling world, and we go with it. The problem is that we don't ordinarily feel that way. We feel that we're strangers on the earth, and so we talk about the conquest of nature and facing facts and all that nonsense.

To the extent that the thing being copied is real, the copy cannot do the real thing any serious harm. As I was saying earlier, if you set out to do what you really want to do, you may lose a lot of friends but you will not lose a single friend who is worth having. In the same way, a movement like the Beat way of life, for instance, or one interested in Oriental philosophy may be made vulnerable to ridicule because of its hangers-on, but they will not do it any real harm, and they will not lose it any friends worth having.

Nobody really does anything well unless they can put their whole heart into it. Therefore, a job that you are doing just to keep body and soul together, that you do not respect, is always something you will not do as well as you might. And so a lot of young men have come to the realization that instead of making money to live some other time-that is, after hours, or when they retire and are older-they have decided that they should do what they really want to do now, come what may, even if it means living in a shack.

Well, in the same way, all sorts of things that we believe to be real-time, past and future, for instance--exist only conventionally. A person who lives for the future, who (like most of us) makes his happiness dependent upon what is coming in the future, is living within an illusion. He or she has confused a convention with a reality. As even our own proverb says "Tomorrow never comes."

One of the functions of a way of the Tao is to deliver human beings from what Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness"; from confusing convention with reality; from confusing the laws of society with the actualities of the concrete, real world. It is in this sense, then, that the Tao is a way of liberation from social convention.