Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [25]
Whenever I used to hear Buddhist teachers saying we shouldn’t strive for money or fame I used to think it was some kind of admonition that we shouldn’t have any fun. It’s really not that at all. Thinking that money and fame are the keys to the perfect situation is a kind of deep confusion. Fame and money can actually stand in the way of real joy because rich people tend to get more and more easily suckered into the state of mind that if only they could acquire just the right house or object or lifestyle, then they’d be happy. Why else would movie stars and athletes who already have more money than God demand multimillion dollar contracts year after year? What could anyone possibly do with all that money? What makes even the richest, most famous and most powerful people still want more and more? In the end, what did money, power, and fame do for Kurt Cobain…or Keith Moon…or Sid Vicious…or Elvis? If this isn’t a lesson that fame and money are dead-end streets, I can’t imagine what else could possibly be.
My mistake was that while I could see money and fame weren’t going to make everything right, I still believed that there was some situation where everything would be just perfect forever. By setting my sights on something truly bizarre I was no doubt trying to ensure that my dream remained forever out of reach. You read a lot these days about “fear of success” and people deliberately sabotaging their own lives in order to keep their dreams from being realized. Maybe it’s not that people like this fear success so much as they fear discovering that success really isn’t success at all.
We want to keep our dreams as dreams. Once we achieve our goals, when our dreams become real, we see that they aren’t quite as thrilling or as fulfilling or even as interesting as we’d imagined they’d be. That can be devastating—as all the cases of rock-star ODs and CEO suicides can attest. When your dreams come true to the letter it’s even harder. You can’t bullshit yourself with any more if onlys.
Once I’d achieved my goal I had to admit to myself it wasn’t what I expected and that it did not in fact make everything perfect. And this will happen to anyone who attains any kind of “success” no matter how it is defined—even if success is defined as complete, unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment. You will discover upon reaching it that whatever it is, it’s not what you expected and nothing is any more perfect than it ever was.
And there is always some kind of exchange. Even breathing is a matter of exchanging one thing for another—carbon dioxide for oxygen, old breath for new, death for life and life for death. Nothing lives in any other way. When you get right down to it, most people’s idea of paradise involves the equivalent of somehow just inhaling and never again breathing out.
There’s no workplace in the world that’s free from office politics, petty jealousies, downright stupidity. While I’ve never lived full-time at a Buddhist monastery, I’ve heard from enough people who have—both in America and Japan—to know that there’s no monastery that’s free of those things either. Somehow, though, when I entered Tsuburaya Productions, I managed to forget all that. I was truly surprised to rediscover the same things there that I’d found in a dozen workplaces in America. The problem was that the job itself was so like my dream of perfection that when things failed to materialize the way I’d imagined they would—the way I knew they should—the reality of the Buddha’s first noble truth, the one misleadingly translated as, “All life is suffering,” became abundantly clear.
When certain Buddhist scholars elucidate this point they usually say that even if you get what you want it’s still suffering because it won’t last. This isn’t exactly wrong, I suppose, but to get a bit closer to the point you need to look at what suffering really is. Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought