LIFE IS VERY REAL---ARE YOU?

‘Reality is a question of realizing how real the world is already.’ So wrote the Beat writer Allen Ginsberg [pictured left].

Life is very real. We have our little philosophies and religions and we think we have life explained and understandable, then, wham, reality hits us right in the face with, say, a terminal illness or a death of a close loved one. Here’s a Zen kōan, entitled ‘Nothing Exists’, which illustrates this point.

Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shōkoku. Desiring to show his attainment, the young student said: ‘The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received.’

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry. ‘If nothing exists,’ said Dokuon, ‘where did this anger come from?’

Good question. ‘If nothing exists, where did this anger come from?’

Now, this young student appears not to have understood the Buddhist notion of non-existence. Let’s get this straight. Buddhism does not teach that nothing exists, that is, that there is no existence at all. Think about it. If nothing existed, there would be no one around to make the statement, ‘Nothing exists.’ The statement could not be said at all---but it can be said. (It's a case of 'I philosophize, therefore I am.') The Buddhist notion of non-existence ('emptiness') is this---nothing (that is, no thing) has any intrinsic (that is, separate and independent) existence in and of itself. Everything---that is, every thing---is inconstant, identity-less and conditioned. A thing arises as a result of one or more causes or circumstances and when those causes or circumstances disappear so does the thing. Each thing is a cause of at least one other thing as well as being the effect of some other thing, so a thing is explainable only by reference to one or more other things which themselves are explainable only by reference to one or more other things, and on it goes. For example, a table is made out of wood, metal or other component parts, and it is made by someone. It is not independent of the things that come together to make it up, nor the person who puts those pieces together to form the table. Nothing has any permanent, separate existence in and of itself. This is at least part of what a Buddhist means when he or she refers to things being ‘empty’---they have no separate, independent or permanent existence. Anyway, I digress.

The point is this. The young student thought he would impress Dokuon with his knowledge and wisdom. You see, he thought he had life all figured out. Ha! How wrong he was! He was in for a rude shock. That might have been a damn good thing, for perhaps an experience of instant enlightenment came upon him. Being hit with the Zen master's keisaku (wooden stick) can sometimes help to bring that abut. Yes, perhaps he came to see things-as-they-really-are---for the very first time. Buddhism is very Aristotelian (as opposed to Platonic). At the risk of over-simplification, the essence of Buddhism is – what you see is what you get. That is all there is, but it is more than enough! Things are what they are. Life is not fair. Bad things happen to good people all the time. The innocent suffer. Things just cannot be 'squared up' in the life-to-come. For starters, there is no reliable evidence that there is any life-to-come. We can fairly safely say that this life here is all that there is---but it's more than enough. Make the most of it. I like the late Jackie Gleason's philosophy of life: ‘Just play the melody, live, love, and lose gracefully.’

Japanese formal garden. (Photo taken by the author.)

All too often we utter glib remarks to others who are going through pain or other difficulty or who have suffered bereavement or some other loss---remarks such as, ‘All will be well’, ‘God will look after you’, and ‘Everything happens for a reason’. As I say, we have our little philosophies and religions but when the proverbial shit hits the fan all too often we find that our theories and belief-systems explain very little at all. Part of growing up is to drop our illusions and wake up. Part of waking up is to drop our illusions and grow up. I have found both statements to be true.

When I was at high school I had a French teacher who would often say to us, Je suis un réaliste, or just simply Je suis réaliste (‘I am a realist’). It was clear that he did not believe in God or religion. He was an effective teacher---in terms of producing consistently good academic results in his students over many decades---but he was a bit of a sadist, largely teaching by fear, humiliation and ordeal. Many teachers of that era were sadists. It was considered par for the course. For the most part, things are different now. Now, this was a church school, and once a year the then current moderator of the Presbyterian Church would come to the school and give an address to the students at assembly. One particular year, the moderator was very elderly. Of course, they all appeared elderly to us kids, but this one much more so. This man of the cloth spoke eloquently of a loving God, Jesus, goodness and the life to come. We had a French class shortly after assembly, and I remember our French teacher saying to us, more than once, in the class, Imaginez, ayant toutes ses illusions à cet âge! (‘Imagine, having all his illusions at that age!’). 

That incident occurred some 45 years ago yet I remember it as if it was yesterday. In the ensuing years I would lose all of my illusions—and I don’t regret that at all. Je suis un réaliste ainsi.

‘Reality is a question of realizing how real the world is already.’

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LORD BUCKLEY AND THE EVER-SO-HIP ART OF MINDFULNESS

‘Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin' daddies, knock me your lobes!’ That's 'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,' in hip-speak.

Sadly, whole generations of people have never heard of this man Lord Buckley (pictured left as well as below), who, by the way, was not a real lord but he certainly sounded like a very aristocratic one when he wanted to. Why, in addition to his waxed moustache, he even wore a pith helmet at times along with his tuxedo. (Then, again, so did Groucho Marx on whose quiz show Buckley appeared in October 1956.)

His Royal Hipness Lord Buckley, who was one of the most influential figures in the American counterculture movement---he was a veritable 'Hip Messiah'---died over 50 years ago, and even in his own lifetime he never enjoyed more than a small jazz subculture cult following. Having said that, Buckley was a giant in what he did. ‘And what did he do?’, I hear you ask. Well, he was the ‘hippest cat of them all’ in the Beat era. I guess that doesn’t mean much to you either. No. Well, he had been a vaudevillian---ha, that’s been gone even longer----and a raconteur and monologist extraordinaire. No, he wasn’t a comedian as such, but he was very, very funny in a ‘black’ humour sort of way.

Perhaps the best way to describe Buckley is to say that he was a comic philosopher, actually a jazz philosopher. He was certainly a philosopher in the original sense of the word---a lover of truth. As for the jazz, well, he specialised in rhythmic hipster word-jazz---spoken jazz with scat---having taken onboard the slang and the rhythms of the black jazz musician along with the entire street language of black America. Yes, he was a strange mixture of pseudo-English toff, Sunday black preacher (no, he wasn’t an African-American), off-beat orator, storyteller, philosophy teacher, satirist, rapper (before its time), beatnik, 'flower child' (before there really were any), and, well, all-round hipster and 'personality.' What with his 'hip semantic' (that is, his own unique bop lingo ['bop talk']), Buckley's 'hipsomatic' retellings of Bible stories, Shakespeare and other literary works remain classics to behold to this very day. Yes, he was, in the words of one commentator, a 'white master of black patois.'

The hip-hopping, six times married Buckley, complete with his own 'royal court,' even founded his own 'church'---the first ever 'jazz religion'---known as the ‘Church of the Living Swing.’ To his undying credit, Buckley hated all forms of humbuggery including, most especially, organised religion, but he was very religious (‘spiritual’, we would say today) in his own way. Laughter, he said, is 'truly religious.' He also preached that only love could save the world, in the knowledge that if anything was divine, well, it had to do with people like you and me. 'I'm a people worshipper, myself,' he would say. 'I think that people should worship people. I really do.' And often he would utter these words to his audience---his acolytes---ever so respectfully and sincerely, and with a regal air: ‘M'Lords, M'Ladies ... beloveds, would it embarrass you very much if I were to tell you ... that I love you? It embarrasses you, doesn't it? Mmm.’ Buckley also said this: ‘The flowers, the gorgeous mystic, multi-coloured flowers are not the flowers of life, but people, yes people, are the true flowers of life.’ And this: 'Let me hip you to a little something brothers and sisters---When you make love – make it!' Beautiful stuff.

I first heard of Lord Buckley when I was in my late teens. That's about 40 years ago, counting daylight savings time. I heard this track on a comedy LP record, and I have dug Buckley ever since. Buckley had style---and class---and he had the knack of being able to capture and put into rhythmic words---yes, spoken jazz---the minutiae of life in all its glory and occasional decadence. Yes, he was an eccentric, but we need more of those people---not less. Clever people---truly talented people---are always eccentric. It’s the price you pay for genius. Mediocre people---that’s most of us---never understand. We’re too busy conforming and pretending to be normal.

Listening to Buckley is an exercise in mindfulness, requiring that you pay attention, and listen, yes, mindfully---that is, with choiceless awareness---to what unfolds from one moment to the next. Try that now. It’s not easy. For starters, it takes a while to learn the lingo and the idiom. It’s worth it, though.

Here, now, is the immortal Lord Buckley delivering his famous---and perhaps his greatest---hip language routine ‘The Naz.’ (The Naz [sometimes billed as the Nazz] is Jesus Christ, the 'carpenter kitty,' whom Buckley called ‘the hippest cat that ever stomped this green sphere,’ for he was ‘the kind of a cat that come on so cool and so groovy and so with-it that when he laid it down---it stayed there!’)

Now, that's what I call hip, man---you cool daddy-o.

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In a recent blog I wrote about the stream of consciousness style writing of James Joyce. This past weekend I have re-read, for the umpteenth time, On the Road by the immortal Jack Kerouac (pictured below - and listen here to him reading the last page of his book). How I love that book! It's, like, cool, man, dig?

I was just a bit too young to be part of the Beat Generation, which is probably good because I am sure that I would have ended up like many of the "leaders" of the Beat Generation. In that regard I am reminded of some beautifully hedonistic words of the pre-Beat “Rumba Rhythm King from Cuba” Desi Arnaz, recalling his early years in Miami, Florida, who in his autobiography A Book wrote, “I’ll never forget those gorgeous nights on the beach, with the moon over Miami. We ate and drank, sang and played, and screwed and screwed. It was fantastic.”

The term “Beat Generation” was apparently coined by Kerouac in a 1948 conversation with John Clellon Holmes. Holmes opined that Kerouac's stories "seemed to be describing a new sort of stance toward reality, behind which a new sort of consciousness lay."  He urged Kerouac to try to define it in a phrase or two. According to Holmes, Kerouac replied, "It's a kind of furtiveness ... Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge...a kind of beatness ... and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world... So I guess you might say we're a 'Beat Generation'.”

Kerouac was a master at writing what has beeen called "spontaneous prose" - and prose that reads like poetry ... with melody. His Joycean writing is proof that one's first thought is generally one's best. (Good advice when doing multiple choice tests.)

Beat is a state of mind ... a state of at-one-ment with the very beat or rhythm of life itself ... the very livingness of life ... and the givingness of life to itself. No wonder Kerouac linked the word "beat" with "Beatitude", that is, showing kindness, compassion, sympathy and empathy. Such qualities are inherent in the very beat of life itself and are perceptible, indeed palpable, through mindfulness. Dig it?

The lasting legacy of Kerouac's Beat Generation is the philosophical assertion, in the words of Alan Watts, that “the significance of life [lies] in subjective experience rather than objective achievement”. (See Watts' oft-quoted illuminating article "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen”. Watts was certainly no fan of Beat Zen, but he always makes for interesting reading.) 

"Subjective experience rather than objective achievement." I love those words. In this present world, where the prevailing "religion" of so many Westerners is consumerism combined with worldly success, I firmly believe that what we truly need is ... more beat!

If only Kerouac (who had been "on the road" for 7 years before he wrote the book in only 3 weeks) and his buddies had stayed grounded - "sympathetic" (i.e. "beat") - in the reality of the present moment and their Buddhism. Take these gems from On the Road:

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. ...

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” ...

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. ...

Unfortunately, too much of the moment involved activities which ultimately proved to be highly self-destructive. In time, the effusion of the moment dissipated but for a while it was wonderful ... or at least it seemed so:

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move. ...

Why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

True mindfulness involves staying with whatever arises … for as long as it lasts ... with the knowledge that all things pass. Notice what is passing through your mind with choiceless awareness … by getting up close.

So, dear beatniks, never tire of practising “awareness-ing”. Let your awareness take note of what’s going on ... in and outside of your mind ... and then, in the words of Jack Kerouac, "everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat ... ."

I mean, like, cool, daddy-o.


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