Monkey See, Monkey Do

enjoyed the film hero today and found an interesting philosophical comment during the climax. the king contemplates a calligraphy of the world “sword” drawn by an assassin. he’s wondering if the calligraphy demonstrates the swordsmanship skill of the artist, but decides it shows the assassin’s deepest ideals. he says with admiration:

In the first stage, man and sword become one and each other.
Here, even a blade of grass can be used as a lethal weapon.
In the next stage,
the sword resides not in the hand but in the heart.
Even without a weapon
the warrior can slay his enemy from a hundred paces.
But the ultimate ideal is
when the sword disappears altogether
the warrior embraces all around him.
The desire to kill no longer exists.

this reminds me of the three kayas in tibetan buddhism; an outer physical manifestation, an inner emotional manifestation, and an ultimate mirror-like awareness and openness free from dualism. kudos to director yimou zhang for making an action film with a higher view: that ultimate warriorship is to transcend the need for aggression altogether.

i wonder if those principles can be applied to relationships in general. the physical to relate to others with dignity, precision, and decorum; the emotional to be touched and to touch the hearts of others; and the ultimate to appreciate the relationships completely as they are. so the warrior’s ideal is to relate with others at all three levels simultaneously. without all three the relationship is lacking. to forget the ultimate is to live in poverty which breeds aggression and jealousy. to forget the physical leaves one sloppy and careless and hurtful. and without the emotional we lack the desire to relate properly in the first place. but with all three we can appreciate things as they are and have a desire to relate fully and precisely and skillfully as well.

it’s amazing how much i’ve sped through life so far, rushing from one activity to the next. i’ve found over time that i definitely need some space thrown in there as well to recharge. often one day out of twenty was a down day for me, to just sit and relax.

my recent meditation retreats are ‘filled’ with space though and over the last year the contrast between being busy and having unstructured space has been easier to see. sometimes i wonder if that’s all meditation is really, creating a contrast so it’s easier to see how we live and how the mind works - simply by making our experience more pronounced and then really noticing it.

this summer and fall has especially had a lot of space for me, intermixed with activity, and as a result more opportunity to see and contemplate the basis of my motivations and the nature of my mind and emotions. instead of resulting in a particular goal or direction so far, though, it’s just inspired me to do more intermixing - to continue to practice with the contrast and see how my mind and emotions work in more detail.

some time ago i bought a small van sized rv with the hopes of traveling: taking time from work and driving all over the states. last week’s trip to british columbia however demonstrated to me more of the underlying economics.

my van gets about 10 miles per gallon of gas, my small car closer to 28. for a trip like last week, where i drove about 2400 miles, taking the van would have cost me about $700 and my small car (which needs higher octane) about $265. the van has the advantage of not requiring stays in hotels along the way. but with an average hotel stay of say $50 per night, taking the car and staying in hotels for six nights would still provide me with a handsome savings and help the environment.

with today’s gas prices, driving what amounts to a self contained hotel room around only seems to make sense if you plan to drive somewhere and camp for extended periods. with my intention shifting more toward visiting family and meditation retreats, then the economics have shifted for me and it’s time to sell the van. anyone wanna buy an rv?

my recent post about leadership and the arts went to a basic level, describing heaven, earth, and person principle as connecting vision with the current situation. but that’s also a touch aggressive, based on a sense of poverty or a need to improve.

to be more thorough, i should note that there is a higher view possible of these principles too. it is that the current situation is also completely spacious and full of potential. it’s that we have everything that we need, we’re not poor we’re unimaginably rich in that way. in that view, the person principle is about helping us see that inseparability of heaven and earth in the present moment. that we don’t have to struggle so much with our daily situation, in fact we can appreciate the present moment both for it’s earthy, grittiness and also for it’s spaciousness and fundamental workability. so that kind of leadership is perhaps more subtle and profound. not aggressively trying to make the world a certain way, but leading toward appreciation, workability, and richness in the situation as it is already.

i’m spending this week in nelson, british columbia, a gorgeous little town in the foothills of the canadian rockies. i’m here for a shambhala guide training with acharya allyn lyon. she’s so down to earth and settled i’m really happy to just hang out with her; she’s the love child of my grandma and the buddha.

joi posted a about fantastic 1946 educational film on despotism. i wonder what people would think if watching this in today’s America. one change i would suggest though for the film would be to consider the velocity of change of each metric proposed, instead of the relative positions. the measures presented were economic distribution, power, respect, and control of information.

some of the asian philosophy i’ve been studying lately includes organizational leadership, and interestingly the connection of that to some art forms. it was posed to me this summer that practicing flower arranging and zen archery are excellent ways to develop leadership skills.

in ikebana there are three key elements of an arrangement, which we could call heaven, earth, and man. substitute person for man if you prefer gender neutrality.

heaven includes the tallest or most expansive flowers or branches in the arrangement, and represents the potential of experience, the unrealized but expansive vision that is possible in life.

earth includes the smaller flowers that establish a base, closer to the ground, for the arrangement. these represent the situation as it exists today. how we see the world in our current conceptual way.

man/person is then the most colorful highlight of the arrangement, usually midway in height between heaven and earth. these flowers represent our ability to connect the earth principle of seeing how things are now accurately with the expansive potential vision of heaven principle.

so an example arrangement might have some green, full, small plants at the base for earth, some reaching tall flowers for heaven, and a small colorful flower or two in the middle for person principle. and these can also symbolically represent the role of leadership.

leadership in this way could be described as seeing the current situation accurately, having vision and understanding the potential, and then apply the person principle of connecting those two: taking us from our current situation to realize our full potential. common sense yes? if so why do we see so many pundits primarily pushing vision without acknowledging the difficulties of the current situation and so many administrators primarily dealing with the day to day without a vision?

it’s official, the last three years of my professional efforts were just purchased by seagate. i really hope seagate take things in a good direction, i’m still a real fan of an always on device for small networks. tivo demonstrated the value of that technology concept for tv, and it seems like more and more aspects of small business and home computing could benefit as well.

i just read an interesting and pointed critique of various utopias published this month by jeremy adam smith. jeremy seems to work with my friend richard at the independent press association but i otherwise haven’t heard of him before.

perhaps contemplating utopia is so out of line with reality to be a ridiculous endeavor, or worse a dangerous one by envisioning something lacking practical meaning or implementation. but most of the visions presented and critiqued have an aggressive quality, that the society described must have a specific social order in order to achieve their higher aim.

more subtle to me is that all these utopias describe a particular cultural point of view. is there a way to describe utopia without imparting a particular cultural view - to have something that is beyond culture - so as to be relevant to all cultures? i think that might be possible, but then would not be an aggressive description of what should and shouldn’t be manifest and instead relate to how individuals can find contentment and happiness within any cultural context. so the vision then described would be more at an individual level, how we can learn to relate to culture instead of defining a culture that the individual must adhere to. what do you think?

with the madhyamaka retreat complete, it’s time to get on with life and back to work. though i must admit all the meditation and philosophy this summer has left me questioning exactly what i’m doing. perhaps it’s healthy to ask ‘why’. why do we work so hard, why do we stretch and labor? what merit do selfish pursuits have, and how can we be more beneficial? and what did the buddha mean by ‘right livelihood’?