given by Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Dharma Practice, Art Practice
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Freud once famously asked, "What do women want?" as though it were the most mysterious question in the world. A better question is, "What do people want?" What are any of us actually, fundamentally, looking for in all the various things we are looking for? We all are, and yet we remain unconvinced that we are, or that we are enough. Regardless of how much we augment our being with our immense doing, in an effort to construct an abiding and secure identity, we remain unsure. Even the greatest of us know, in the middle of the night, when the moment is most tender, that we are all like clouds, like grass, springing up and dying back when winter comes. Somehow, despite all the various accomplishments, both inner and outer, of a lifetime, none of us can escape the fact that we are less and less day by day, as time runs on. Whether or not we think about this we all know it. The most basic fact of our lives- our very existence, our very sense of identity- is elusive, constantly sliding away.
It was the genius of the Buddha to pinpoint this abiding human problem and to apply gentle acupressure right at the heart of it. The Buddha felt that since what we hold to as identity, our fixed sense of being a person, is so unreliable (as we always knew, always feared), we should stop insisting on it with such shrillness. Rather than trying to avoid the reality of not being someone, Buddha thought that we should observe and embrace this fact. There is no real identity outside of flux, he taught. If we practice and train in this existential fact, which we verify with meditation experience, then we have nothing to fear. As we begin to warm up to life in this way, with openness to the endless change within and outside us, we come to see the effort to maintain a brittle sense of identity as cold, even frozen. We come to appreciate that the whole point of spiritual practice is to warm up, to become flexible with what we think we are and begin to release ourselves to our experience as it really is. This warmth melts the ice of identity and lets the waters of our lifetime flow.
Those of us who practice Buddhism have to admit that Dharma, like all usable teachings that are preserved within traditions, is itself subject to freezing. The Buddha admitted as much when he spoke of the Age of decline of the Dharma. Although I am sure that the Buddha did not intend to establish a fixed doctrine (he was merely setting up some road signs on a path that he had traveled), it happened anyway, not only because human hierarchies and public expressions of truth are like that, but also because each of us is like that: we want a secure sense of self, we want to be frozen, even as we try our best to warm up.
What saves us? The imagination. Imagination keeps us and our religious traditions honest. Since we are constantly running the risk of freezing our lives and our spiritual practice (indeed, it might be seasonal!), an active engagement with the imagination as part of our spiritual path is a crucial necessity.
There's a long conversation in our culture about what the imagination is and how it functions. I would simply say that imagination is the human capacity to situate ourselves in reality more widely and more deeply than we can directly sense or rationally know. Imagination is the creative power of the mind that has the capacity to see into and through the apparent world. Living a meaningful life requires imagination, for it's imagination that projects vision and a sense of luminous significance for our lives. Without imagination there is only plodding on, surviving, getting through the day. Without imagination, the world is dead weight, simply crouching there, without fur, without teeth, without a beating heart. Without imagination what we call love would be impossible.
Clearly though imagination is tricky business, for imagination does not play by the rules and there is therefore no way to control or second guess it. No surprise that imagination is depicted as a goddess, a muse, who comes when she wants to and leaves without notice. From the point of view of the organized rational world, imagination is therefore dangerous, destructive, and confusing, for it holds the ordinary shared world in supreme irony.
I would distinguish between two modes of the imagination. One I'd call, simply, the imagination, and the other fantasy.
If life is desire (and where is there life without desire?) then fantasy is the mind's capacity for leaping over desire, which is uncomfortable, and using desire's energy to project a world of wish-fullfillment. Fantasy might be teddy bears, lollipops, sexual delights, or super hero adventures; it also might be voices in one's head urging acts of outrage and mayhem. Or it might be the confused world of separation and fear we routinely live in, a threatening yet seductive world that promises us the happiness we seek when what we are fantasizing about becomes ours someday.
Imagination, by contrast, embraces desire directly as the profound human experience. Imagination uses desire's creative energy to deepen the world, right where we are. In this sense, imagination is less about images and scenarios than about going beyond wish fulfillment toward a more intense and accurate vision of what is. For me, imagination and reality are not opposing terms at all; in fact they are complementary: imagination is that faculty that goes toward reality, that shapes and evokes it.
Spiritual practice, then, though it might seem at first to operate in quite different territory from the imagination, doesn't. Spiritual practice requires imagination to take us beyond the surface of things to the deeply hidden actual experience of being alive, which is essentially elusive. The senses and the rational mind, even the moral and emotional faculties, by themselves can't do this; they never quite touch experience completely. Only the imagination, beyond category and concept, can bring us this close.
Of course spiritual practice could quite easily be a fantasy, a set of images, legends, doctrines and explanations that might serve to distract us from the fierce reality of our confused desires - offering them a higher and more socially acceptable path for projection to take, a more sophisticated way to freeze ourselves in place than a mere personal ego.
My basic meditation practice is awareness of the breath. I've been doing it for a long time. When I instruct people in this practice I ask them to become aware of breathing in various ways, and then, once they have established this, to "make the breath vivid." People often ask what I mean by this. I say, "use your imagination to make the breath come alive." Be creative. You can't really be with the breath scientifically, nor can you be with it according to rules. Your giving yourself to the breath until you become it and it becomes you is an act of the imagination, and when you see this, and begin to put it into practice, your sitting becomes alive. You are no longer looking for rules and techniques.
To illustrate further the difference between what I mean by imagination and fantasy take the example of a person lost in the desert who suddenly sees a shimmering oasis in the distance. This oasis doesn't actually exist, it is a mirage, a beautiful projection of her desire for water (aided by physical causality). The mirage is a cruel fantasy. When she reaches it her bitter disappointment will be in exact proportion to the elation she felt as she ran toward it.
If, by contrast, she related to her circumstances imaginatively, she'd feel her thirst completely, with all the thinking and emotion and envisioning that went with it. She would be completely alive to her experience, rejecting none of it. She would see an oasis up ahead. She would understand it, and enjoy it. She might walk toward it, for that would be a beautiful thing to do. But she would not mistake it for a source of water, would not rush forward desperately, nor arrive with bitter disappointment.
Imagination is like a light that shines through perception- without it the world still appears, but it appears dormant. Imagination wakes the world up so that can be played with, experienced as alive. Fantasy, on the other hand, is desire's (and therefore fear's) bastard child; it can make the world virulent.
I think children, small children, have an easygoing and natural sense of imagination- for them there's no difference between the magical and what actually happens- the physical world and the world of dreams, stories, visions, are criss-crossing all the time. Small children have to learn to get a fix on the world, to get it to hold still, so they can figure out how to be persons in it in some organized way. Before they do that their desire is still innocent, and so fantasy and imagination are not very far apart. Everything is play.
But all children eventually become traumatized - whether disastrously or in more ordinary ways, growing up to be a person is always a question of being gravely disappointed one way or another by the world's feedback. Disappointment is education- how we learn to be in the world as it is. Each disappointment is a challenge to digest what's happened, incorporate it into the world, and go on from there. One way to do that is to use fantasy and projection as a defense mechanism, to construct a world of safety. This is what severely traumatized children do, and it is what we all have done, to some degree or another. For most of us, the world is a fantasy. We are too frightened to allow imagination to take the world apart and reconstruct it alive, moment by moment.
But exactly this is the process of spiritual practice at its best, an act of supreme imagination. This is why working with the imagination directly, through art, can be so helpful for spiritual practice. It's why doing spiritual practice can be so useful for the artist. Both disciplines go to the same source and counteract the same human tendencies. As a Zen priest I have been saved from freezing by my practice as a poet; as a poet I have been driven to greater truth and depth by my practice of Zen.
Working with the imagination requires cultivation and discipline. Without that it tends to privatize experience and distort it. Imagination is disciplined by being grounded in an encounter with some shape, some form, some outer analogue. Where there are some materials to hold and develop what's inside, an external format for inner inchoate visions, the imagination develops, and has the maximum chance of sustaining itself in a useful way.
This sense of the external is crucial in the arts. When you first approach art you do so out of passionate personal need to express your inexpressible feeling, to make something that is that expression. But once you wade into that possibility you find out that the words or paint or sounds or theatrical realization is extremely resistant to your self expression. Things don't just fall into place. You have to work with the materials, reshaping yourself to suit them. It turns out that making art is not so much self expression as it is a dialog between what is in ourselves we want to express (that we can't seem to express in any other way than by making something) and the materials that seem to have their own necessity for expression somehow. Engaging in this dialog with the materials moves us necessarily beyond the expression we thought we were trying to make into a new realm that involves a degree of attentiveness and concentration far beyond the private and the personal. The effort to make art, whether successful or not (and in the end it doesn't really matter whether it's successful) evokes the world for us as lover. The poet Paul Celan, writing of this, says, "The poem wants to reach an Other, it need an Over-against. It seeks it out, speaks toward it..... the attentiveness a poem devotes to all it encounters, with its sharper sense of detail, outline, structure, color, but also of "quiverings" and "intimations" - all this I think is not attained by an eye vying (or conniving) with constantly more perfect instruments. Rather it is a concentration that stays mindful of all our dates. Attentiveness (and here Celan is quoting Malebranche) is the natural prayer of the soul." (Felstiner; p 409-10).
I see three main ways in which art practice helps keep spiritual practitioners unfrozen.
First, we need it as persons, to give us a path into the content of our lives. Of course I don't need art to know what I think and feel. But without art what I think and feel will become quickly circular, self centered, and limited. Making art gives me a way to start with what I think and feel, and to plunge deeply enough into it until it becomes not only what I think and feel but what anyone thinks and feels, and even, beyond this, what isn't thought or felt at all. In other words, writing poems I reach beyond my own sensibilities to what Celan calls the "Over-against," which I cannot directly know but very much need to know. When I write poems I am met, through my own thought and feeling, by what's outside my thought and feeling. In this sense art practice promotes a profound empathy, a widening of my sphere of awareness and appreciation of my own life.
Second, we need art specifically as spiritual practitioners to help us overcome our weakness for religious doctrine, dogma, and identity, which we all have, no matter how resistant to it we think we are, for we are all looking for the security of a fixed truth. Not knowing the truth, but having to discover it for ourselves anew through the imagination, is a much more difficult proposition, one that we are all reluctant, at bottom, to undertake.
I enjoy spiritual practice. I find it very entertaining. But I never forget how painful and destructive it can become, when our enthusiasm for the truth of whatever tradition we are pursuing becomes exclusive and toxic. Not only does narrowness of view compel us to reduce others who practice and believe differently than we do - worse, it alienates us from ourselves, as we censor our thoughts and feelings in an effort to shape them into the methods and traditions of our chosen practice.
This can be a subtle brain-washing, one that can take place sometimes without many overt signs. But when you practice art- taking your inner life, that has been enriched and informed by your spiritual practice, out of the realm of tradition entirely (or, into another tradition- art) and allowing yourself the freedom of movement (tempered by the restraint that the materials enforce) that art can provide - this subtle brain washing is hard to effect. This has been my own experience. My lifelong involvement with poetry has kept me sane within a fairly narrow and rigorous life of practice.
And third, I think we need art simply as a form of recreation. I mean this literally: re-creation of ourselves.
One of the most interesting developments in spiritual practice in our time is, it seems to me, the democratization of mysticism. When we talk about "bringing practice into daily life," as so many of us do, this is what we mean, I think. In the past mysticism was inherently elitist - it could only be practiced by those who were willing to undertake years of acetic practice and study, to renounce the world, struggle and suffer, and then maybe, just maybe, have some direct experience of the truth that their tradition was teaching. But now many of us believe it is possible to experience these truths in some profoundly real way in ordinary life- not without some sense of discipline, to be sure, but in more ordinary ways- in the gazing into the face of our beloved, feeling the wind on the skin as the body moves through space, bearing witness with some depth and openness to an emotion or a thought.
In order to appreciate experiences like this we have to freshen and re create our lives, opening ourselves to a sense of play and wonder. Certainly we need normative religious practice - retreats, study, and so on. But we also need a way to refresh ourselves within the things of our life as they ordinarily are, and art can provide us with this. Viktor Shlovsky, the Russian formalist critic said, "To make a stone stony- this is why there is art."
Now I am not so much speaking of art in the formal sense, but rather of the aesthetic sensibility that can be applied to anything and any moment of our lives. Only some of us will be seriously committed, or even casually committed, painters, musicians, poets (though there are more people taking up the arts every day, and it may be that we are seeing a time soon coming in which almost everyone practices one art form or another); but all of us have some relationship with what's beautiful and true in the sense of beautiful, that sense that in looking at the world outside our own personal interests we can feel something of the divine or the whole- in the simple acts of looking, hearing, tasting, and so on, can go beyond ourselves to experience the timeless. With this sense, that our practice can certainly open us to, we can approach the tasks of our daily lives - taking care of our homes, our relationships, our bodies, our minds, as artists - with that same sense of attentiveness and love, with that same sense of grappling with materials, that is characteristic of art making. This is beautifully found in Japanese culture, profoundly influenced by Zen to make art forms out of the simple preparation of a cup of tea, the rendering of a word or phrase in ink, the arrangement of flowers, the drawing and shooting of a bow.
Being human is a big job. So much to do. Taking care of body, mind, soul, taking care of ourselves and each other emotionally and physically, repairing the world, earning a living - it's really endless. There's no use worrying about finishing the job or even doing it all that well. But to begin, and then having begun to continue: that's the great thing.
Zoketsu Norman Fischer, guiding teacher of our group, offers more dharma talks, essays, and poetry at his web site, EverydayZen.org