Boundless pain
Boundless joy
Boundless monotony
Boundless novelty

Firmly planted
Observing everything at once
Each passerby’s situation both familiar and unknowable
Hopes of the future
Dreams crushed

God is in his heaven and all is right in the world
The conditions aligned just right
But tomorrow, or next month, completely unpredictable
Certainly sorrow or depression can not be too far away
Still, the joy of now worth the chance of tomorrow’s low
Indeed; only possible in contrast

And yet, the smug self awareness of this is-ness
Keeps me just this side of oblivion
The ego still holding out
Keeping this secret joy to itself
Instead of releasing it into the void

What is The Question? You have probably asked it many times before. It takes different forms such as: What is the purpose of life, What is “it” all about, Who am I, or any other existential question.

Many people have questions like these and there are no shortages of people selling answers or cheap solutions.

Some examples of “answers” are cosmologies such as one where God loves you and when you die you will be with Him in Heaven, The Secret Law of Attraction, or even Buddhism, science, or drug induced peak experiences.

While some of these might provide solace, ways to improve your life or your intellect, or insight into The Answer, none of these provide The Answer itself.

Unfortunately, The Answer to The Question isn’t easily transmitted. It is as if—despite the sages that have come before us, with their teachings and their writings and their methods—we must each reenact the journey for ourselves; to perpetually rediscover all the depths that have already been explored. You can’t look it up on Wikipedia and you certainly won’t find it in this blog post; if you could, The Answer wouldn’t be referred to as The Unknowable.

The Answer is ever elusive because
The Question is ever evolving.

Why is the answer to questions like “What is it all about” and “Who am I” so elusive? It is because as answers are discovered by the question asker, the question asker evolves and thus so does the question. As one’s understanding deepens, “it” and “am” and “I” deepen even further, just past one’s grasp. In this way, answers to The Question are always temporary—satisfactory only to the old you. As in the Tao Te Ching: “The name that can be named is not the constant name”.

Don’t despair

As you progress in life you often times feel like you’re losing ground, less certain about your abilities or your wisdom, than when you were younger. With The Question coming up time and time again, and with some of the answers that come up, it is understandable that one might come to a nihilistic view, an existential crisis, or depression.

However, this infinite treadmill can be a source of comfort too; no matter how much you “get it” there is always room to “get it” more. Whatever span of life you have left, you can use it to grow the depth and span of your relationships, to strive towards liberating all sentient beings, to improve your artistic abilities, to reaching ever higher levels of awareness, etc. You may never achieve The Answer, but you’ll be more impressive than if you had never attempted.

So, What is “it” all about?

I invite you to leave a comment with what you think it is all about.

I’m inclined to say that it is all about growth via asking The Question in pursuit of The Answer. Though this answer might get me hit on the head by a Zen Master’s stick!

Foot notes:

• From a Zen standpoint you can get The Answer in an instant. It’s not that “you” “get” The Answer, it is that you are The Question and there is no Answer, or you are The Answer and there is no Question, or both. This will get me hit too
• If you only ask The Question, but have no actions in life you’ll probably become suicidal. Better to live an integral life where you ground The Question in a meditative practice, keep physically active, socialize, and eat a healthy diet.

Dancing is a series of videos on wherethehellismatt.com. I found out about this on my friend Dan’s blog. These videos, which have gotten progressively better, are really amazing. If you have time I suggest watching them in this order: Dancing 2005, Dancing 2006, Dancing 2008; if you’re short on time then you can just watch Dancing 2008. I was very moved by these videos and have watched each of them at least three times! Matt, who is dancing, used to be a game designer!

The Passage is an Art Game that has gotten the attention of many designers. You can download it here. Play through it a few times (5 minutes per session) and then read the Creator’s Statement. I think this is a game that Matt would appreciate!

I wish that there was a greater amount of moving media. I’m really happy when short form, somewhat avant guard stuff—like the above—ends up being genuinely moving. When you compare this to the amount of stuff that tends to be just a distraction, or art for art sake, it becomes an unexpected treasure!

This past Saturday was perhaps the last time that there would be training at my Zen Master’s house. He’s fixin’ to sell the place and immigrate to France. While I was serving tea, he corrected my form, and I was struck that there would not be many of these opportunities left. After sitting, while we drank coffee, he said that I would need to find ways to continue training on my own on a daily basis, that it would be a necessary self discipline to go further, not only in my Zen training, but also in my professional life, and I knew he was right. So here is my resolve! To rise early every day to engage in 15-30 minutes of calisthenics, followed by 45 minutes of zazen. I also intend to supplement this with martial arts training in the evenings. I’m going to do this every day for a year, even if I’m traveling.

The importance of everyday training

In Japanese, the term for “everyday mind/body training” is “Mainichi Shugyo”. The importance of this cannot be overstated; the difference between training 7 days a week and 3 days a week is “night and day”. Traditionally it has been difficult for me to do much training outside of a formal structure, but as such this is something that must be done; doing something that isn’t easy to satisfy an internal will, versus an external will (like going to work because you don’t want your boss to yell at you), is also “night and day”. Announcing this aloud on my blog will hopefully encourage me to follow through on this resolution. If you see me, ask if I’ve been keeping up with my routine. If I haven’t, give me shit—and if I have, say “What do you want, a pat on the back? What you’re doing is only a matter of course.”

Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor gives a passionate first hand account of a stroke that affected the left hemisphere of her brain—and the resulting subjective experience—in this recent TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

This could be, and apparently has been, the spring board for many conversations.

Ian Bogost wrote an article for Gamasutra about “Zen Games”. I disagree with his interpretation of Zen—and thus the article’s thesis—so I wrote the following letter to the editor. The stuff in quotes is in reference to Ian’s article, so you’ll need to read it to understand my critique fully. The image above is from Ian’s game Guru Meditation for the Atari 2600; I love the typography of its logo.

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If I’ve learned anything from my Zen training, it is that Zen is anything but “a relaxing lean back experience”. The posture of Zen is one of balance; leaning neither forward nor backward—but if you had to err one way or the other it would be forward. Effective Zen requires “continuous attention”. Though the practice of seated Zen meditation demands that the practitioner not move, other Zen activities such as calligraphy, tea ceremony, or martial arts most definitely require movement.

For me, the games that most express Zen are competitive games such as Street Fighter or Go. While at low levels of play these games can excite the overly reactive or analytical mind, competition at the highest level is often characterized by a state of no-mind; pre-reacting to situations based on intuition, seeing the space between two thoughts. As for the “deeply disturbing” nature of Flow, it is not a detriment to its Zen-ness; it is in-fact an opportunity for the player to ponder one of the most central aspects of life and in doing so an opportunity for enlightenment.

Ian’s understanding of Zen did improve when talking about the “most reviled” gardening activities, but in general he tended to equate Zen with “calm”, as opposed to something like “suchness”. Instead of seeking to express non-attachment by starving a player of stimulation, we should be teaching players to find a place of stillness amongst the commotion of the world.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

• OTM: Ratings vs. Reputation
• OTM: Me is for Media

Despite the second clip in relation to my previous blog post, I will venture to comment on the subject of killing. I wake up to public radio on a daily basis. A daily basis that often includes news like “30 died yesterday when a car bomb”, etc. Having become accustomed to such news, I had expected this specific event to blow over like all the rest. To date, no one at my work has mentioned it, no one at zazen, and a friend of mine who has no TV did not know about it until my wife told him. Despite this, it actually was a big to-do. I am not as concerned with the event itself—which was fucked up—as I am with the media circus and national mourning that has sprung up around this event; as if these deaths were more significant than those anywhere else in the world. To me it says that we are still very much a society of tribal identification as opposed to world-centric global empathy.

Ironically, I was going to write the following before this event had even happened: While walking home, perhaps when approaching my intersection where a dentist was shot dead last year, I had the thought that the most important things in life are to grow and to have experiences. Anything that interferes with ones ability to grow or to have experiences is, from this world view, bad. Nothing interferes with these two goals as much as death, and so, causing the death of another person, either intentionally, or not, is the worse thing that one could do. If someone does not share this worldview of growth (evolution of consciousness, improvement of ability, etc.) or having experiences (having fun, etc.), then they are under no obligation to avoid causing death. However, if the majority of society does hold this world view, they should pass and enforce laws that limit one’s ability to take another person’s life. Taking your own life under this system is perfectly acceptable because it in no way infringes on someone else’s rights. Limiting the ability to take another person’s life would mean outlawing driving, guns, bombs, and industrial processes that lead to an increased chance of death or sickness. I suppose they would also want to treat others in such a way as to encourage them to hold this world view, to invite them to the party of growing and having experiences.

Well, anyways, it’s just a thought filled with slippery slopes; I don’t see us getting rid of cars any time soon.

Screaming out, not just to the people in your vicinity, but to the entire potential web browsing populace: “I exist!”

Zen is about breaking free of the meme machine of mistaken narrative and self replicating ideas. Blogs propagate memes.

Can you propogate the anti-meme without creating a meme? I’m inclined to say: “not intentionally.”

And a lot of it also is… you know, some of the most effective education is failure-based, where you’re given a system and you can manipulate it and explore different failure states and success states, and all that. Most of our educational system is designed to protect you from failure. You know – here’s how you write a proper sentence, here’s how you do a math problem without failing. So basically, they don’t let you experience failure. Failure is seen as a bad thing, not as a learning experience. And even when you get to the professional world, things like architecture, engineering, industrial design, they teach you how to do it the right way. Where it used to be you would build five bad buildings and they’d fall down and you’d learn yourself – that was more the apprenticeship, craftsmanship model. You’d build 20 bad chairs but eventually learn how to build a good one because you would learn the failure states yourself, inherently – you’d experience them directly. Whereas when you go to engineering school they teach you how not to fail, so you’re never directly experiencing those failures. It limits your intuitions. Whereas a kid playing a game – the first thing they do is they’ll sit there and play five or six times and learn from that, and they learn at a very core level in a very different way. They’ve actually explored the whole possibility space. It’s not that they’ve been told ‘don’t go there because you’ll fail’ and so they never go there and never experience it directly on their own. They’re encouraged to do that all on their own, in fact they’re directly building that possibility map.