Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [24]
One of my more memorable roles occurred during episode 51 of that same TV series, in which I was cast as an American Blue Angel whose plane gets attacked by a gigantic pterodactyl-style beast devastating New York City. For this they gave me a uniform and put me into a mock-up of a cockpit complete with cast-off parts from actual planes. As I sat strapped into a pilot’s chair, a guy came in and taped a bunch of little plastic bags containing explosive powder to the control panel in front of me. These charges, I was told, would be “harmless,” just bright light and lots of smoke. Of course on the Ultraman budget they weren’t about to set off any of the fireworks during the test runs. Each run-through, the guy in charge of the explosives would shout “Bang, bang, bang!” to cue the camera crew when to expect the explosions. Finally, everything was set. They wanted to get this in the first take—film and firecrackers cost money. I, on the other hand, was working for free.
I was to look up, yell, “The monster’s too fast!” then scream as the explosives went off. I shouted my line and, right on cue, a huge fiery blast went off in my face. My scream was entirely genuine. I could feel the force of the blast and the heat on my face and chest. Amazingly, I didn’t get burned—but my ears rang for the rest of the day. Later when I saw a videotape of the action, I found out that those “harmless” fireworks had created a fireball about five feet across.
That was the fun part. But it didn’t take long before my dream job became—well, I won’t say a nightmare, but it did become just a job. It was something I had to drag myself out of bed for. My paradise had melted into plain old nothing before my very eyes.
EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING in the world at some time thinks that “if only” this or that one of our conditions could be met then we’d be all set. “If only I had a girlfriend / boyfriend / million bucks, then I’d be happy.” Or in the case of the more spiritually minded: “If only I were enlightened, then that would settle everything once and for all.” Think again.
An old Chinese Zen master once said, “From birth to death it’s just like this!”
Wherever you go in the world of human beings is pretty much the same. Only the details are different. All of my gaijin teacher friends who wanted to get out of Japan and back to the “real world” have discovered that the “real world” is hardly any different than the place they were leaving.
We always want to believe that somewhere there’s a perfect situation, if only we weren’t barred from it. But that’s not the reality.
We always imagine that there’s got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now; this is the Great Somewhere Else we all carry around in our heads. We believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there’s no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here.
Maybe your lot right now could be improved. I know mine could. And working to make things better is great. But we don’t just work to make things better and leave it at that, do we? We live in the idealized world inside our heads. And that keeps us from ever really enjoying what we have right now, from enjoying the work that we’re doing to create our better tomorrow. It’s as if we’re afraid to really commit to this moment because a better one might come along later.
This approach is totally ridiculous and completely absurd.1
AMERICANS ARE ESPECIALLY PRONE to thinking that if they can only find just the right job, they’ll be happy. That’s why we’re constantly hopping from one company to another, one career to another. Most of us are realistic enough to say we know there’ll be challenges wherever we go but we really do believe in our hearts that the perfect situation does exist somewhere—if only we could find it.
This belief is at the heart of all jealousy and envy, and ultimately all of our suffering. We envy the rich and