Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [45]
IN OUR CULTURE TODAY celebrities mean a whole lot more than religious leaders. Most people would much rather have an audience with somebody like Gene Simmons or Alex Cox than with any religious leader of similar stature, say the Archbishop of Chicago. Vast tracts of society are far more likely to be influenced by what movie stars say than by the opinions of great theological thinkers.
Anyone who really pursues any activity to the point of becoming so good at it that millions of people want to come watch really must have understood something fundamentally real, fundamentally true. They must have understood the philosophy of action through action itself. The average religious leader, on the other hand, spends most of his time thinking about stuff. Thinking about stuff is useful, but life is more than thought.
Before I got deeply into zazen practice, I’d often noticed something different when I was working very intensively on a musical endeavor, either performing or recording. A special kind of concentration was required. When I was in that kind of concentration I’d begin to feel a kind of vast space open up—as if the room had suddenly become very open, the air itself very clear.
I used to come off the stage or out of the studio with a kind of a buzz. It wasn’t like being drunk or on drugs though. It was far better. I could still function as well as, in fact better than, I could at other times. There was a kind of purity to the situation.
But the level of a person’s celebrity status has no bearing on how truly balanced they are in their lives. Yet pretty much all of the world’s famous people are famous because they have pursued some kind of artistic or athletic endeavor to the point where when they do their thing, they exhibit some truly remarkable signs of the balanced state revered in Buddhism. Our celebrities are not Zen masters but nearly all of these performers, at least when they’re performing, surpass the level of balance achieved by the average person—though you have to keep in mind that the average in this case is not so high.
We may not realize it, but I suspect we care so much about what famous people say or do because we understand that their ability to focus gives them a kind of rare insight we rightly admire. We see their balance but don’t see that it comes from pursuing one thing wholeheartedly. We imagine that their balance or insight comes from some inherent quality they have and we don’t. Celebrities themselves are rarely any brighter than anyone else and tend to see the situation in the same mistaken way.
This kind of balance is not limited to famous people alone. It’s not something that comes from having a lot of money or getting a lot of adoration or running really fast or singing really well. People with far less money or fame or “talent” exhibit signs of balance far beyond our pop-cultural heroes.
Famous people are an interesting case to observe though. Of course many of them are driven by massive ego and colossal insecurity, but there’s also something more.
As I’ve said, Buddhist philosophy does not accept the existence of individual human beings in the way we usually conceive of them. The prevailing view of individual human beings as discrete units each acting with absolute autonomy is incomplete. It’s a view that takes into account only one tiny part of the big picture and assumes that this is the whole deal.
I think in most cases most people conceive of themselves and of other people like I’ve illustrated in Figure 1 on the next page. We think of each individual as a unit with clear boundaries. Each of these units, we believe, is able to act in at least some cases with complete autonomy irrespective of the others. We consider this so obvious as to be beyond questioning.
Figure 1
Our seemingly impeccable logic goes something like this: If