Not Even Not Zen 407: Towards a Collection

The Poetic Structure of Collected Stories, Followed By Mundane Reality 

Even before I finished a collection, readers pointed out the order of the parables in it is built around an illusion. Stories must appear in some sort of order, of course, when they are in a book. This is the structure I chose for them, a modified version of 'the four stages of enlightenment' from the Theravada school. Not everyone agrees with this view. I acknowledge the implied problems of adopting it as the overriding metaphor.

Poetic Structure

The stages of progress outlined in the Tea for Full Teacups collection are a view that seems likely to be incomplete, at best. These stages of achievement may have happened in this order for someone, sometime. They could have followed this order more than once, even. The structure isn't entirely misleading; that's why I chose it. However, we have no good evidence our progress must follow this pattern. We have no proof that progress follows stages at all, really, or whether these apparent stages are a retrofit imposed on us by our struggle to understand any progress we might have made.

When I reflect on my own experiences, I would say my journey may not have followed the traditional sequence. 

The strongest benefit I received from studying Buddhist, Stoic, and Daoist thinking came a few years in, when I was young, when I let go of my strongest desires. It was a mundane process. I spent years practicing. Almost ritually, I let go of desires each day, often in the morning or late at night. For me, the process involved a lot of envisioning. It's a modest and small-minded method. Nevertheless, it worked well for me personally. As a teen, I used visualization to help lose my fear of heights. I used it for basketball, martial arts, and swimming. For the formalized Buddhist practice of nirodha, I envisioned letting go of possessions. Of course, I actually let go of possessions, too, but I don't want to underestimate the helpfulness of the visualization. It works, although the quality of the practice makes as much difference as the quantity.

Mundane Reality

I don't want to underestimate the value of actually letting go of possessions, either. There are many other things to stop clinging to besides material ones but tangible stuff has the advantage of being readily evident. It's like the difference between building something in your mind and building it in reality. Reality is messy and inconvenient. Actions and their consequences play a role of giving you sanity checks, even about the consequences of releasing attachments. You don't think the playbill about you appearing in concert is important? Throw it out. 

Do you miss it? Too bad. It's gone. That's a consequence. 

Even as you envision not wanting things, you need to practice genuinely not having them. Sometimes there will be hardly any difference. Sometimes the difference will be dramatic. 

When I was nineteen, I was absolutist about letting go of desires. I took my Buddhist reading literally (even though all of it was in translation and most of it was summarized from longer Tibetan, Chinese or Japanese texts). To me, letting go of desires meant giving up everything. Some of the things were,

giving up possessions
giving up the desires for possessions
giving up wanting people
giving up wanting animals
giving up plants
giving up wanting to achieve things
giving up signs of past glories like paper awards, ribbons, medals, and trophies
giving up all desires as generally as possible
giving up food and hunger
giving up thirst

You might see that, at times, this was getting extreme. Giving up hunger and thirst is a good mental and emotional exercise - and a good physical one, too - but there are limits to fasting. Nevertheless, that is how I felt and it is what I strove for.