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dharma talks by Nomon Tim Burnett - Renouncing Ambition

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Renouncing Ambition

given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
July 09, 2008

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These are my lecture notes for this talk, the actual talk differs somewhat and is probably more interesting. If you're interested in transcribing dharma talks please let me know. --Tim

Lately I've found myself deeply re-examining my attitudes towards my life, and most especially my ambitions. Two event came together to help me see more clearly the importance of this kind of renunciation, this kind of letting go. And helped me see more clearly how tight and grasping my attitude has been towards career and ambition.

I think of myself as a kind of non-career person. I think this attitude is common amongst people who end up practicing. Even though I grew up middle class and went to colelge I’ve somehow felt myself a lineage holder of the hippie movement's insights into the emptiness of basing one's sense of meaning on career. And so in college I studied what I felt like, which was ecology and environmental studies, even though from a rational economic standpoint I should have been getting a degree in computer science as I already had a huge leg up in computer science having grown up with a scientist father and the earliest personal computers in the house. I was programming games on them by 10 years old and my high school first job, just after mowing neighbors lawns, was a computer programmer in a physics lab which I was 20 years younger than anyone else there.

But I had also as I mentioned absorbed from the air or maybe from the bong counter-cultural attitudes renouncing career and ambition so I didn't study computer science. I felt like I'd already done that and knew as much as I needed to know, which is maybe true, the work I'd already done in computers probably had me at nearly the level of a computer science B.S. graduate. I'm lately learning what an overachiever and a hard worker I am too, but more on that in a minute.

And that choice established for me a strong theme in my story of who I am which is just now unraveling a bit. That I am someone beyond career and beyond ambition. Someone who will just do what comes up, learn from it, not be attached to it, and move on. A kind of "Zen" in quotes attitude from early one which has been important to me. Part of my identity.

And so after a year or two doing the career I'd trained in at college, working for the National Park Service as a botanist, I gave that up because I didn't like the lifestyle. Too remote. And moved to Bellingham to do whatever I could find. Initially making a very logical and planned segue to environmental education, teaching mostly at Tennant Lake. And oddly this very week my own son is at Tennant Lake Nature Day Camp. A program which I taught 18 years ago with Bob Penny in our sangha. And for all my wishing that Walker was more interested in nature and trying to get him to go on hikes with me he came back from the first day of Nature Day Camp totally excited and full of facts about bugs and birds and habitat, but that's another story.

Anyway after a kind of logical career oriented step into environmental education after moving to Bellingham I figured out that there wasn't really much work there or maybe that I would have to be ambitious and driven to put together what little work there was in environmental education to make a go of it and I'm not an ambition kind of person so after that for several years, the rest of my 20's really I just odd jobbed it. For several years I just did the one easy and reasonable environmental education job I had, which was just in the Spring each year and the rest of the time I did this and that. I’d do an environment education job in the Spring and whatever the rest of the year. Working for friends hauling and painting. Working for a while in a cabinetry shop. Doing a micro business selling salad greens to the Food Co-Op. Working for contractors doing bits and pieces of carpentry. Loading furniture into college dorms. If you're willing and reasonably handy and living cheap there a lot of different things to do. I remember feeling quite proud of myself that I could do that. Not have a regular job. Just trust that something would come along and it would work out.

And then at my seasonal environmental job the school teachers who brought their kids we're impressed with my chops, I was very enthusiastic and organized, and kept telling me I should be a real teacher, not just do this one funky springtime job. And since I'm not a career person but I do respond to messages from the universe I said okay and at 31 or so I went back to school to get a teaching credential.

And I really got into it. I studied hard, learned tons of stuff about cognitive psychology, reading programs, how to teach math in a way that makes it a deep practice of thinking, I got straight A's and cruised through that.

Studying to be a teacher involved for the first significant time in my life the strong experience of failure. I failed on my first attempt at student teaching. The way they do student teaching is pretty bizarre really, very little support for a pretty difficult thing to do, immersion in the classroom - a sink or swim kind of apprenticeship with a practicing teacher you probably didn't know before that some beaurocrat at the University pairs you up with. But my first student teaching experience I failed at, had a kind of emotional breakdown. I was going to tell you all about it but the talk got too long. I pushed a difficult situation as far as I could past the breaking point and I finally did break. But I got back up, I’m a do-er, if at first you don’t succeed and so on. I regrouped tried again, and the second time through I won awards.

And before I knew it I had a full on professional teaching job. There's a lot of competition locally for jobs so getting this job I got teaching on Lopez Island, just about the prettiest place you can live in Northwest Washington too, was a serious coup. I was so happy but also somehow deeply validated in my basic presumption that I would be a success at anything I put my hand to if I just tried hard enough. I've been set up to not have much help in learning about humility somehow.

But the job turned out to be a bit of a set up for an earnest hard working perfectionist. I did fine with most of the kids – very well with a few - but the teacher I was supposed to be collaborating closely with, co-teaching with, became my enemy for some reason and being me I just barreled along. I just worked harder to compensate. Eventually I managed to confront her in a low key kind of way but I never found out why she's decided I was no good. And I had enough experience now to survive, I didn't wake up crying, I made it to work every day but I was working so hard and the harder it got the harder I worked in compensation. And like the failed student teaching experience I wasn't getting much meaningful help.

Through all of this I was getting the deepest most wonderful support from home you could imagine. My wife Janet was working hard to keep me afloat. But she also had her own challenges. She's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder just before we left for Lopez Island so she was doing her own healing and recovery from that and keeping the household economy afloat with almost no help from me. As I got up early, tried to sit a little which mostly just showed me how revved the mind was, and go into work hours before most of the other teachers so I could prepare the best possible lessons based on my recent learning at the University. I was not content to just go with textbooks or curricula lying around, and that particular school wasn't much for standard curricula anyway. but ever what little bits of existing curricula there were too boiler plate and not deeply examining the true meaning of the subjects for me. I wanted my students to have a deep understanding every subject. It just seemed like the thing to do and in that job there's no one really looking over your shoulder. No one telling you to lighten up. That system like most loves over workers.

I survived the year and was wiling to take another run at - maybe at some level thinking it would be like student teaching, the second time I would get it right and not have that much stress. But through a combination of factors I was laid off and came back to Bellingham where the gates of teaching school never opened to me again. This huge effort I'd made to become a teacher, surviving the student teaching assignment from hell and then the first teacher job from hell and they weren't letting me back in. I job hunted up a storm, I did everything right in the overachieving way I do stuff. I had a great resume, I prepared up the wazoo for the interviews, I got lots of interviews but never a job. I got used to coming in second on these jobs. I think over 2 years I had about 20 teaching job interviews and pretty much every time I came in 2nd or 3rd. I was so qualified that they always considered me but then they went with someone they knew already or someone who seemed less intense or more compliant. Of course you never really know but I got increasing good at prying bits of information out of them when they called and finally one principal said after rejecting me for a 1st grade job at which I was promoting my science background as a great asset, "Well Tim you seem like such a smart guy, we could really use you in the Middle School." He meant it as a helpful suggestion of course but I was devastated and upset, 1st graders don't get smart teachers? What's that about?! But basically it was another lesson about ambition and trying hard and working hard. I think if I'd been able to just relax, show my nice side, be warmer and more cuddly, I'd be teaching 1st grade now. And probably I wouldn't have had any time to come to the zendo either and I'd never have ordained and who knows if we'd even be sitting here.

And so circling back to the point of this story, I put all my teaching stuff away. Boxes and boxes of files and materials and books. A great injustice in the schools is that good teachers spend their own money and leisure time buying and creating teaching materials. So I have all these boxes of math manipulatives and lessons plans and science teaching stuff and we bought a house with a good sides shop so I put up some big shelves and stuck the boxes there and focused on other things for the last 8 years since all of this went down.

Why am I telling you at length about my career? Well I've learned from Norman that the first job in a dharma talk is provide a little break and entertainment so I hope it's an interesting story, but there is a point to it, because over the long weekend I finally went through my boxes and started preparing to give it all away. It seems that it's time to let go of being a school teacher now. That my paid career in the end is right back where I started when I was 16 years old programming the computers in the physics lab, it's time to admit that the economy seems to want me to be working at a screen and keyboard. And maybe it's time to admit that I don't always get my first choice. That this second choice career is just fine. And it is just fine, it really is, lately I'm getting a little bored in this work but as I study all of this I see that there's a real arrogance and pride underneath that thought. I have a well paid, flexible, mostly low stress, less than full time, job which enables me to support a family of 3 and leaves some time for Zen practice. I mean where do I get off indulging myself in the thought that "I'm bored and I deserve more meaning from my working life." Work is work, sometimes we just need to do what life has served up for us without complaint.

In computer programming there's a new concept called "technical debt" that's really helpful. The idea is there is often a quick and dirty way to write a program which will get the job done for the moment but might not be the best in the long run. The quick and dirty way might have a bug in there somewhere you aren't thinking about, might be hard to read and revise later, but it is quick. So you can do it the quick and dirty way or you can do it the more labor intensive elegant way which involves re-writing the surrounding code so that the new bit will work well with and new. The good way is easier to maintain, read, and less buggy. And the idea of technical debt recognizes that there are times when quick and dirty really does make sense. The deadline or the situation calls for it. But when you do chose the quick and dirty way you are incurring a kind of debt. This is technical debt, the whole project now has an additional load of technical debt. Some day next month or next year someone will have to go in there and deal with that mess and that cost has to be added to whatever else they were going to do. Likewise we incur a psychological and spiritual debt when we shelve our problems. There are times when you can't or won't or shouldn't deal with the real problem, there are times when you should stick your unfinished projects and aborted careers into a box in the dusty garage and leave them there. We stick stuff in the corner either physically or figuratively. When we leave important relationships half-broken we are holding a debt. And those debts weight us down, they really do.

So that was my initial sense of going through my teacher boxes. That debt of the career not fulfilled was weighing on me for these last 8 years. Time to clear the debt. But as I worked through this process I found it was more than just clearing the debt, or maybe that clearing that debt had a more transformational effect than just lifting a load off my shoulders.

Somehow I found I was learning something new and important about renunciation, ambition, and emptiness from my dusty teacher boxes and from my wife. It hasn't been easy, I've been meaning to go through those boxes for years and just haven’t been able to face them.

So over the long weekend, driven by the power of a project (which is to make room in that building for a kind of play house for Walker) and maybe because it’s just somehow time now. I've gone through almost all of the boxes. And I have a large pile of stuff for goodwill, for recycling, and to give away to teachers. Looking through all this stuff has been very eye opening because enough time has gone by that I can see that the person who did all that wasn't me. Well he was me and he wasn't me. Time going by helps us so much sometimes to release from how caught we are in our stories. The moment by moment sense of continuity and person we have seems to hold us over the short term but if you put a few years in there it gets a bit less solid. A bit less believable. Was the me of yesterday the same me as the me of today? Of course, sure, that was me. But how about the me of 10 years ago? 20? 30? 40? Time heals by eroding our confidence in that myth of self I guess.

At the time when I was teaching and creating the things that fill these boxes I was just doing my thing, doing my best, I didn't think too much about my approach, I just went for it. That's what you're supposed to do right? Well looking at this stuff 8 years later in the situation of my present life I'm really astounded by what I see. That this collection of materials could have been amassed over the course of a teaching career or just a year or two is unbelievable. If I wasn't there I wouldn't believe it. This is the collection of a maniac! It's a wonder my body and mind could hold up through a year of working that hard.

And once in a while I'd hit something that just grabbed my gut. The letter I wrote over spring break to my teaching partner asking her to come clean with me about why she was being so negative. The student teaching evaluations. Thank you and goodbye letters from the students. I was barely able to keep going sometimes. It was so intense.

And then at the same time as I was going through all of these materials from the past I've been trying to sit down with my wife to talk about the future. My future working as a priest. I've been aware that I need to do better at not just asking her about the next thing I want to do "Gee Janet to you mind if I'm gone all next weekend at the calligraphy workshop?" but to actually include her in the overall plan, and that I should actually have an overall plan. So immediately after sesshin, all fired up, I wrote up a kind of brainstorm 5 year plan kind of thing.

So over the long weekend I was on the one hand going through my teacher boxes being astounded at my enormous hard work and on the other hand thinking about my priest plan and trying to get Janet to sit down and look at it with me. Which we finally did.

So here's the plan I'd brainstormed, I'll read it to you:

How to increase priest and related work and drop programming for corporations?

 

1. more regular Zen programs -> increased membership, more opportunities to work with people

a. Saturday morning sits - low impact on family, leads into other Saturday activities easily

b. one day or half day sesshin - give people more chances for deep zazen, do oryoki

c. weekend sesshin with Kate/Michael

d. Teach Classes - Monday eves, Friday afternoons

2. community oriented programs -> donations, maybe a second sangha will build

a. Zen Community Workshops at Woodstock….already proven and easy to do

b. teach meditation other places: Coop Connection, Hospital programs, …?

c. workshops on healing, relationship w/ body (me + Michele or Nancy?)

3. other sitting groups, help with other sitting groups -> donations, RCZC members

a. Visit White Rock sitting group regularly - monthly? Monday nights

b. Start a group in Mount Vernon - has to be weekly? twice a month workable?

c. Seattle Sōtō Zen - visit on Sundays, Walker to the condo, once every other month?

4. family programs at the Dharma Hall -> touches whole new populations

a. Friday noon parents meditation, get on publicity

b. 1st and 3rd Saturday Buddhist Youth Service Corp. Compassion Corp? target 10-16 year old kids and their parents?

5. computers and Buddhism: Sangha Software

a. little downside to doing a modest version?

b. support work would be a bit too much like my job but it's a residual income gig

c. Do a rewrite of our admin section as part of this?

d. Include Latona and Terry in this?

e. Registration system too or just membership and communications?

f. Use stuff from a CMS? Not Joomla, maybe Plone?

6. Big sellable business like Magic Quest style theme park

a. but that would take me out for…years

b. probably nuts but would be exciting

c. involve the sangha?

7. Sangha business of some kind

a. Dharma Café - make it a club to avoid licensing?

b. restaurant

c. Something tech-based?

d. some kind of Buddhist related manufacturing like the sutra cloths guy?

8. Networking

a. meet with Father Ron Reddel and chaplaincy programs

b. other clergy in Bellingham (Rabbi, Unitarian, onward from there)

c. Shalom Center, what happens on campus with spirituality?

9. Priestly Services - Weddings, Funerals, Baby Naming, Coming of Age ceremonies

a. have a page on redcedarzen.org that I do these for starters

10. General business stuff

a. get cards made

b. brochure for just me-as-priest and services I offer

11. Counseling practice???

a. big question of overlap with practice discussion

b. can I do counseling for money with same people I'm working with in sangha? or once they join the sangha then switch to practice discussion?

So my wife read all of this and started with that she too often feels like the last thing I ever think about, I mean I love my wife and would never want her to feel that way, so I was pretty shocked. Even though she's told me this before of course, I'm embarrassed to admit. I always mean to do better at expressing my love and holding the relationship as the primary expression of my life, at practicing through my family first. So she'll tell me these things and I'll be upset with myself and remember what a completely wonderful woman I am married to and vow to do better, but them before long I get busy. I get to work. I get in harness. So we had a new and maybe I hope deeper round of that kind of discussion before she'd talk about my priest plan.

And then she did and she said something so causally and matter of factly but it felt like a real turning for me. She said "well you're very ambitious with this priest stuff." And something about how when the time is right she's sure it can all come to pass but maybe the time isn't right just now for all of this stuff. Maybe the focus need to be much more strongly on our relationship and our family for a while.

But I'm ambitious? I had to admit that she's right, the evidence is clear, but it jarred my sense of self and my sense of who I am and my story to the core. I'm not ambitious! I am flexible, I'm adaptable, I’m committed, I respond to conditions and do my best. Ambitious? me? And you have every right to laugh, it's probably obvious to everyone but me that ambition is a big part of my conditioning. I've owned up in the last few years more and more to have an addiction for production, for getting stuff done, for not relaxing and just letting things be. But ambition?! That's a much bigger concept, a driving force in life, ambition is driving me? That somehow put my whole life in a whole new light.

It's hard to quite describe. But something in the process of facing my work-life past going through my teacher boxes which has been hugely emotional and transformational. If all of this Buddhist teaching and meditation doesn't teach us that we are not just this little person inside this skin doesn't convince us then the deep emotional stories of the objects of our lives is there to teach us this truth too. These boxes are not just stuff, they are deeply a part of me. Handling stuff I'd used and put so much energy into, stuff that reminded me of successes and failures, this was holding my own body. This was feeling the pain of wounds in the body, this was feeling the strength and energy of the body. We are all of these things we touch and create and hold. We are them and they are us. We are everything, and we are not anything solid at all. It was a strange experience standing there in the shop feeling each objects’ power. And then to turn around and see that that drive and ambition was not something in the past, it's something that's arising now and mapping my thoughts about the future. I could feel something in me shifting as that became more clear.

And then I was thinking about renunciation. Renunciation suddenly has a deeper meaning for me through this. Norman and other teachers, the Buddha for instance are always talking about renunciation, about seeing the ways that desire drives you and turning down the flame. Not putting the body and mind in a position to activate those things that lead to suffering. I've always heard that as letting go of sense pleasures and I maybe be fooling myself but I've never felt myself to be so attached to sense pleasures, I mean I enjoy chocolate, a latte and going to the movies, I like our house, but I really think I'd be just as happy living in a tent with a few battered Tom Robbins paperbacks eating stale crackers.

But renunciation of ambition, now we're talking. What would that look like? Being aware of this form of desire, seeing it when it arises, working with it directly instead of just getting excited and spitting out 5 year plans and overworking. I don't think this means not doing anything, I'm not worried about that, but it brings a different light to planning and thinking about the future and the present. Sure some of my plans are probably excellent but what good is all that if I'm running around like a nut, if I'm leaning forward all the time, always looking to the next project and not fully appreciating what is. If I'm sitting there during zazen time indulging in how to improve something. What good is all of my priest and sangha brilliance if I let my home life be less than completely wonderful. Planning with renunciation starts with a deep appreciation for the prefection of what is as the central limb, not what’s missing.

Renunciation means to renounce. The first meaning of renounce is to give something up, to not choose something to refuse something. So I could renounce coffee that would be a fine thing but it's not the important issue here. The second definition of renounce is to stop following. To stop following someone or something. To stop following my ambition to stop following my desire. Or when there is trouble e not to let my aversion to conflict or difficult situations turn me away. So that seems to me the renunciation of the Buddha and his students over these many years. Don't follow that, it leads to suffering. But you don't know that if you aren't clear on what your following and you aren't paying attention to where you end up, if your eyes are always on the horizon or deep in the mud. Buddha's teachings are so simple but the web of ideas we weave in front of our eyes is so dense, so complex, and so interesting that we don't see these simple truths.

So I encourage you to think about what are the debts your carrying. Is it time to retire one or two? Is it time to face that which is in the dusty boxes of your life. Remember about the paramita practices, the perfect practices of Buddhism, number 3 is patience in the Mahayana reading but the original number 3 it turns out is renunciation- nekkhamma paramita. To do this practice you need support, you need another perspective, but you also need to bring up your own energy. You need the paramita of enthusiastic energy and you need the wisdom to be open and ready to work with what comes up and see where it leads. To bring the open mind of not-knowing with you.

Speaking of the paramitas I recently brought up the 10 paramitas and wasn't clear on two of them. Norman's teachings the other day straightened us out. You might remember there are 6 main paramitas: generosity, precepts, patience, energy, meditation and patience. And then 4 more were added: skillful means, vow, spiritual powers, and knowledge. I wasn't clear on the last two: spritual powers and knowledge. Bala paramita does mean spiritual powers but Norman mentioned a way to understand this that is so beautiful. He said the great power of Suzuki roshi and this way of practice is the power to reveal the beauty and perfection of ordinary things. To see things as they are and really see them is a spiritual power and many of us have experienced this in various ways. So that's number 9, bala paramita or spiritual powers. And the 10th, Jñāna paramita is a different Jñāna than dhyana so I was mixed up in saying this one was advanced meditation states. This means knowledge in the regular sense, learning a lot of stuff, applying yourself to studies and listening, being a life-long learner and of course learning that which is skillful and reduces suffering. So lest anyone thing Zen or Buddhism is anti-intellectual, the 10th perfect practice is to learn stuff, to learn a lot.

But the point of this talk is the power of really moving into the dusty or scary corners of our lives. Not all at once, little by little as we're strong enough, to start to retire the many debts we carry. It makes perfect sense that deluded beings in a suffering world take on debt, we have to, not matter how good things are. And in my case really conditions have been quite favorable all of my life, and yet one little twist on how I approach my life, deeply conditioned from the deep past or who knows where and I can turn the noblest of ambitions into a nest of suffering. And prevent myself from appreciating and enjoying this life fully, and even worse wall myself off from those I really love. And so tonight with you all as witnesses I renounce ambition. We’ll see how I do.

thank you very much.

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