Most people’s direction is determined by their goals. In Zen our goals are determined by our direction.
Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I attended my first sesshin. It was also the sesshin when I was ordained, 30 September 2001. I was just forty-nine, but I remember it was very painful for my aging bones -- my knees blew up like overripe melons. Still, it was exactly what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. No, not “wanted” exactly, but rather where I knew I belonged.
It was not long after 9/11 and my wife was pregnant with our daughter Isabel. I was pregnant too. Sometime before that, I recall sitting (an approximate pink human lotus with persnickety knees) in the steam room at the New Orleans Athletic Club, and thinking “There’s a buddha in my belly.” No, not “thinking” exactly; it was more like a physical sensation, as though the little bugger in my hara had kicked.
Isabel is now in college. This summer she and I translated Philippe Coupey’s new book, Zen Fragments. In this candid little “memoir of flesh and blood,” Coupey tells about meeting Maitre Deshimaru and how he owed him an immense debt of gratitude because Sensei helped him find his direction. It is a “rare thing,” says Coupey, for someone to find their direction. He writes:
I owe a lot to him. Thanks to Master Deshimaru I found a direction for my life. It is a rare thing for someone to know what direction to take, to follow their highest aspirations. This is not to say that Zen and Deshimaru are the be-all and the end-all in this world; it is just that it is impossible for me to think that I could have followed any other path.
I know the feeling. I knew as soon as I walked into the temple in New Orleans in January of 2001 that I would continue to practice. But at that first sesshin I knew I had found my direction, that “rare thing.”
We are all pregnant with possibility. But we often smother it without ever finding out what it is because we are intent on preconceived goals. The real path might seem like a detour when it arises. What is it Blake says in the Proverbs of Hell? “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” This is usually taken (by the repressed advocates of Heaven) to mean criminal urges, but the advocates of Hell represent Energy (or Qi) in all its forms, and so they also reign over those other, even more dangerous desires -- our “highest aspirations.”
To paraphrase Blake then, let me put it this way: better to smother an infant in its cradle than to neglect the potential of our highest aspirations.
I am not talking here about the kind of desire that has goals, cupiditas (lust or greed), those that long merely to possess something or someone. I am talking about the goalless desire to follow our “highest aspirations” without attachment of any kind. We don’t need to confuse the two.
Most people live their lives chasing after goals. And it is these goals that determine their direction. What a terrible way to live! If you live for your goals, you can only be disappointed. If you don’t achieve your goals, you feel like a failure. And if you do achieve them, you also feel like a failure because of what you have missed out on while focused on achieving your goals — only to discover that the goals, too, are illusory, empty.
What Coupey is talking about, of course, when he says he found “a direction” for his life, is that he has found the Way. And what is the Way but the path of the goalless goal? It is the path that is the goal. So-called goals are just scenic landmarks along the Way, spots to take a selfie and be on your way.
In Zen we find a direction without goals. Most people’s direction is determined by their goals. In Zen our goals are determined by our direction.
If your direction is right, then you don’t have to find your goals; your goals will find you. For the past twenty years, I have had this proven to me again and again. Every predetermined goal has been shattered or shabby when viewed up close, and every unexpected goal has been magical. You go in search of fame and fortune, or health and happiness, an Oscar or a Nobel Prize, and instead of Hollywood or Stockholm, you get the Emerald City or New Orleans.
The Romanian writer Ioan Couliano wrote a book called Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. His thesis, or rather the proposition that he explores, is something along the lines of this idea of direction. And how an intensity of direction (will or a deep desire that he calls eros) can achieve goals in a way that seems almost supernatural, and in fact did seem supernatural in the Renaissance but today can be explained by various branches of science, especially the psychological and sociological sciences. Because what could be more natural than achieving one’s goals without a specific intention (or casting spells) but simply by following one’s direction faithfully and finding what that authentic intentionality brings? Not the imposition of our desires on the landscape, but the landscape inspiring a desire for what actually already is.
The simplest things are the most magical. Realizing this is Zen.
— Richard Collins
“Of course some people do go both ways.”