Playing for keeps

Nobody wants to be poor or uneducated.
Nobody wants to have a meaningless, unfulfilling miserable existence.
For the most part we all want to be and do good.
Nobody wants to be a loser.

I’ve been looking at life and in particular at my own life trying to understand why with all our extraordinary efforts we fail to materialize our good intentions.
Why is success so important to me?
Well, for one thing I want to be able to offer my children a good life, a good education, a good chance for a fulfilling life.

I never had a problem of becoming successful in whatever I was trying to accomplish but every time my success ended in a crash and burn dive.
It was no problem. If I lost a job, I would find another one.
If I failed my business, I would start another one.
If my relationship did not work out as I planed it, I would find another girl friend.

When I was single I looked at all this like a game.
When disaster struck, I thought of it as bad karma, as paying the dues for my wrong doing.
I just picked up the pieces and started all over again.
But all that has changed the moment I started a family.
Failure for me is not an option anymore.

I can not go through another foreclosure and if I have a fight with my wife divorce is not an option.
The specter and possibility of failure has been a constant companion of mine for the last ten years.
The fear of another disaster has kept me from getting into financial troubles now when a lot of people are in trouble and sheer determination has kept my marriage afloat past all the storms.

Nut even if fear has worked for me keeping me out of the trouble I could not accept fear as the philosophy behind my life.
It just goes against all my beliefs and feelings.
But what else is there?

I have tried almost everything one can think of.
I have read all the how to be successful books.
I have meditated and contemplated for years.
I’ve been dissecting my life on this blog for months now.
What am I doing wrong?

After a lot of thought I think I have found the answer.
The secret of success is not knowing how to win but knowing how to lose.
I don’t have a problem wining, my problem is that I don’t know how to manage my loses.
I am like a football or basketball team with an excellent offensive but with no defense at all.
I am like America in Vietnam; winning all the battles but losing the war.

Now I understand what fear has been doing for me.
Fear has kept me on the defense.
When everybody was borrowing money for a bigger, better, more expensive house and life, I settle for and comfortable and affordable one.
When people droped out of their marriages I did the hard work of keeping mine alive.
I did well and now I understand why.

I like to be in control of my life.
I believe in God and I believe God gives us all great opportunities in life.
But when opportunity knocks at your door you have at least to open it.
Which reminds me; Interest rates are really low now. Time to refinance my house.
I am playing for keeps now!

A madness to my method

I don’t know if you remember but once upon a time around the60’s, 70’s Japan had an outburst of development that made it into an economical superpower.
From the electronics to car manufacturing they use the same smilingly basic formula:
They would take the best there was on the market at that time (let’s say the best car engine from Mercedes, best suspension from Peugeot, best style from Ferrari etc) change and improve the original designs and make a Japanese car, like the Nissan Z80.

I don’t know if my data is 100% correct but the idea behind it is correct.
I have a Nissan Maxima I bought 13 years ago and a Quest minivan I bought a year ago.
They both have the same V6 engine that Mercedes sport cars had 30 years ago – of course with more improvements.
Which brings me to the next point:

The way they evolve is incremental – Let’s keep the Nissan example.
Every year they change the basic model a little bit.
If the change turns out to be good they keep it but if the change turns out to be bad they drop it and try something else.
But here is the point:
The changes are so minute that the overall quality of the car doesn’t go down the toilet.

Unlike the Japanese, the way we Americans build cars is starting from scratch.
I have a friend that worked for a Ford dealership when Ford created the Ford Taurus.
Ford Taurus became an overnight success, best selling sedan 3 years in a row – beating up Toyota, Honda, Nissan and all the other American sedans.
But then they change the Taurus and the new model was so radically different than the first one, that nobody wanted to buy it.
Ford Taurus lost the market and it never recovered.

That is true for so many other successful cars Detroit built, like Thunderbird, Corvette and Mustang, cars that have become classics but then have lost the market by redesigning to inferior models.

What is car building has to do with Zen, you may ask.
Well, if you look at how nature evolves it looks like the Japanese way.
Nature doesn’t start a new animal from scratch.
Nature improves by small amounts and keeps the successes and discards the failures.
Sounds pretty simple and pretty logical, doesn’t it?

Well, it might be the logical way of life but if you look at my life, (and probable at your life as well) my life looks more like the American way of doing business then the natural way of evolution.
My life it is not a continuous organic growth but rather a hap hazard trial and error enterprise.
Success is fallowed by total disaster followed by starting again from scratch, trying something new and different, followed by another disaster.
And I am not talking only about financial problems; I am talking all aspects of my life, including career and relationships.

My life always seemed to have a plan but now looking in retrospective it never had the right method.
Although my spirituality has changed to Zen Buddhism my life, my actions are left behind to the crash and burn, trial by error philosophy.

The practical enlightenment

The practical enlightenment

There are a lot of stories and metaphors of life.
Here is one I like in particular for its practicality – life as a river.
Imagine life is a river and time is the flow of water.

First you are born.
Your soul, ego or mind, whatever you want to call it is put in this boat – that is your physical body – and we are pushed down the river.

As a child you don’t know much about what is going on.
You just enjoy the ride and if the river hits some rapids you just go - yahoo!
There are others – parents and teachers – that take care of the navigation.

But as you grow up they teach you that the river is dangerous and you have to stay out of the trouble waters.
So they teach you to control the boat and you start to paddle.

Then you become an adult and now you are on your own.
The problem is that many of us have no idea where we are going and so many of us end up paddling against the current and of course many of us don’t manage to stay out of the trouble waters.

Some of us though, get the idea and start taking advantage of life’s opportunities and manage to navigate the river.
But the river some times gets wild – like right now, when it seems we are going over a water fall and we don’t know where the bottom is.
But don’t worry after the waterfall there is a calm and safe pool – if you make it out of the fall alive.

Any way, you get a little bruised, a little wet but you keep on going.
You see, the river of time will carry you no matter what. There is no stopping until you hit the ocean!
Now on the river of life you meet other boats and exchange stories and maybe for a while you go down the river together.
Such is life.

Some people will tell you to stop fighting the current – which is a good advice always.
Some people will tell you to throw away your ores and be like a child, carried by the river of time.
Some people will tell you to study the river and learn how to navigate in harmony with the forces of the water.
Some people will tell you they will sell you the secret of navigation in exchange for your soul.

But no matter what you believe or what you do, one morning you wake up and you find yourself in the middle of the ocean.
You have made it, you will always will, because that is where the river ends.
So don’t worry, enjoy your ride.

Row, row, row your boat, merrily down the stream…

Some more questions

About seventeen years ago, when Bush the father was president, America went through a little recession – I don’t know if many of you remember that one – It wasn’t that bad or spectacular as the one right now but I will always remember it because at that time I lost my house to foreclosure, plus a large part of my other investments – stocks in particular.

It was a hard blow for me but fortunately at that time I was a single guy, no family or kids to take care of, so after some painful readjustments to reality, I pulled myself out of the mental depression and started rebuilding my life again.

I have learned a lesson – actually several lessons - about life and vouch never to be caught with my pants down again.

This bad turn of the economy I am faring much better.
I have paid all of my debt – well almost all, I still have my house mortgage but that is the only one – I have saved some money for the eventual loss of income and my investments, which by the way are not doing well at all but at least I can hope one day will go up again.
At this moment I am refinancing my mortgage and God willing it will cut my monthly payments in half, which will further increase my financial stability.

So what is this all has to do with Zen Buddhism?
Nothing!
And that is the problem.
Buddha never had to deal with mortgages, stock market, insurance, credit, interest rates, recessions, subprime crisis and other joys of the modern life.
He lived in an agrarian society where all this complexities of modern life did not exist; hence he never spoke about them.

So the question is: can the wisdom of the ancient be applied to the modern life?
Probable most of you will say “yes” – which by the way is my point of view as well.
So the next question is: How do you do it?

What is the Zen of “credit”, “interest rates” or “stock market”?
Should I renounce all material possessions, shave my head, put on the robe of the ascetic and go begging in the streets?
What if I want a family and children?
Is enlightenment reserved only for monks?
Can I be a father, a husband and a Buddha at the same time?
Do I have to spend the rest of my life on a job I don’t enjoy just to pay my bills?
Can I do what I like instead and enjoy a decent, comfortable life?

Sure I can.
I believe that anything is possible.
I just wish I knew how to turn that thought into reality.

The practical Buddha

I am not as enlightened as the self title “Buddha of Hollywood” might suggest.
Actually I chose that name for its ironic and funny side rather than for religious significance.
I am merely a student of Zen and life, more than anything else, and my only claim to fame is that I know that I don’t know shit about anything except that everybody else knows at least or less than me.

There is a lot of theory out there about enlightenment, satori, nirvana and getting your soul into heaven but aside my zazen practice nothing else has anything to do with the reality of life.
And reality is far from the Buddhist, Christian or other idealistic propaganda you might subscribe to.

You see for me reality is the ultimate truth.
I know, I know, there is no reality; reality is just an illusion.
But if I have to subscribe to that idea and accept the premise that it is all an illusion then this inexorable conclusion follows:
You are an illusion as well!

You are an illusion – the ego - trapped into another illusion – the world.
There is no escape from that predicament.

Well, you might say; not if you realize the illusion is just an illusion and not the real you.
But there is no real you – the ego is an illusion.
So now you are an illusion – the ego – that has an illusion – the real you – still trapped into another illusion – the world.

You see where this goes?
As an illusion you can only have another illusion.
There is no way out of the illusion until you actually return to the no-thig reality that created the illusion of the world and the ego in the first place.
In other words until you die.

So what all that means?
I don’t know what it means for you but for me it means one thing only.
Since this is my show, I will have to put up the best performance I am capable of and have the best time of my illusion called “life”

Break a leg!