The Dude and the Zen Master (12 page)

J
EFF
: Let All Eat.

B
ERNIE
: Somebody once wrote a little note saying, “Thanks for the café. I eat in many soup kitchens, and I really appreciate the food here. But what I appreciate most is that I don’t feel needy.” That feeling of neediness, of separation between you and someone else, was exactly what I hoped would disappear. We’d like to train more people in this methodology so that more such cafés can arise.

J
EFF
: It’s like bringing everybody to the table, not leaving anyone outside. We’re all here on this earth together.

B
ERNIE
: Exactly. If we can get to the moon, we can feed our kids.

J
EFF
: And we made it to the moon.

11.

NOTHING’S FU**ED, DUDE

J
EFF
: People complain a lot about the notion of instant gratification in our society:
I want this now, I want it this way, and I’m gonna get it, watch me, boom!
But since everything is changing and new shit is always coming to light, we can always learn, right? Let’s say someone gets drunk. She wakes up hung over and thinks:
Oh yeah, that wasn’t such a good idea
. She learns something.

B
ERNIE
: Unless she likes going unconscious with alcohol and wants to repeat that again and again. If you hang on to the gratification, new shit can’t come to light because you’re attached to it and will try to repeat it.

The other side of that is someone who wakes up in the morning and thinks,
I can’t believe what I did, I’m so screwed up!
If she obsesses over it,
that will also keep her in the same place. Either way, she has to let go, and that’ll move her toward less suffering. It may not move her closer to some expectation she has, but overall it will move her in the direction of less suffering. That’s just my opinion, and it’s a driving force for my practice.

J
EFF
: Shakyamuni Buddha said in the Four Noble Truths
*
that life is
dukkha
, suffering. Is he saying there’s a way to get rid of that entirely?

B
ERNIE
: He said there’s a cause to suffering and therefore a path out of it, which is described in the last of the Four Noble Truths.

J
EFF
: Are there people who have ended suffering completely?

B
ERNIE
: I doubt it. When I teach, I encounter all kinds of ideas about delusion and enlightenment. For instance, I tell people to write down the names of all the people who they think are fully enlightened, and on a separate list the names of those they think are deluded. It usually turns out that all the people on the fully enlightened list are people they’ve never met; often they’ve been dead for a thousand or two thousand years, like Shakyamuni Buddha, Jesus, Moses, people like that. Whoever they’ve met and is alive and kicking is usually on the deluded side.

Eihei Dogen said, “Delusion is enlightenment.” He meant, this is it, man. It’s not like you get to some place where the suffering ends.

J
EFF
: What’s the difference between delusion and illusion?

B
ERNIE
: I used to do magic long ago when my kids were young. I think that when I set something up so that what you see is different from what’s really happening, I’m creating some kind of illusion. But delusions are any ideas or concepts that you think are true, anything you’re hanging on to.

J
EFF
: Making movies is full of magic. There are two kinds, really. One is the kind of magic that you’re talking about, creating an illusion, like sleight of hand. In movies, that type of magic appears in special effects, makeup, the audience not seeing the fake nose from the real one. But there’s another kind, what I call real magic, or alchemy, where all the artists show up, throw their best shit into the pot, and something comes out that no one expected, something that reflects the human experience so deeply and meaningfully that it touches the heart of all those who see it.

Enlightenment is magic.

B
ERNIE
: And there are various depths of it. If I’m attached to this skin-and-bones Bernie, and I think of that as myself, that’s a delusion, and whatever I do—my loving actions—will be oriented toward taking care of this bag of bones.

Now I think my family is myself, my community is myself, even the whole universe is myself. These are all deeper levels of enlightenment. But no matter how far I go, even if I realize that the whole universe is me and now I’m working for everyone and everything, there’s still a delusion I’m hanging on to, there’s some kind of cap I’m putting on who I am. As long as that goes on, I’m in the realm of knowing, which is the realm of delusion.

A rock has its stage of enlightenment; a cockroach has its stage of enlightenment; Hitler had his stage of enlightenment. We have ours, and our Zen practice is to keep working on letting go of delusions and be in the state of not-knowing. That’s why we say it’s a continuous practice.

As long as you’re experiencing yourself as separate from anything else, that’s delusion. And as I said before, I’ve never met the person who doesn’t have some sense of separate self, no matter how small. The reality is that you yourself are everything, you are the universe. So delusion is also enlightenment.

But these are just words. It’s theoretical, and it’ll stay theoretical till I actually experience what I’m talking about. So I can think,
People are killing each other, delusion is everywhere, and that’s enlightenment, just like there are cells in my body killing other cells, it’s all chaos, and it’s still all one body, it’s still Bernie
. That’s an abstraction; it doesn’t feel real till you actually experience it.

J
EFF
: Delusion and enlightenment are both going on at the same time.

B
ERNIE
: They’re two sides of the same coin. Whatever you do is a reflection of the degree to which you are enlightened. You’re going to pick up the person who falls in the street because you know that person is you. You’re not going to say,
I’ve fallen, too bad
, and walk on. So your degree of enlightenment will define what you do.

And as you do things, new shit will come to light, you’ll be at a new stage of enlightenment, and new practices will be appropriate. So maybe right now you only pick up the person falling down in your street but not someone falling somewhere else, because that person is not your neighbor. Time goes by, new shit comes to light, and you now see that you are not just your neighbor, you are also any person who falls down in the street. You’re at a new stage of enlightenment, so your practices and actions will be different. That’s why we say that once you cross the river, get rid of the boat. Don’t keep on carrying it, because you’re in a new place, so what are the appropriate practices now?

All this is not so easy to see, so find a guide or a teacher to bounce off of; it’s hard to do it all by yourself. It’s good to have somebody who’ll be honest with you and point out to you where you’re sticking or attached.

The Dalai Lama basically echoes what the Buddha said. He says again and again that everybody wants to reduce suffering; everybody wants love and happiness. Can we come together around that instead of killing each other and watching children starve?

You can think of the Bodhisattva as Don Quixote, the man of La Mancha, who was both deluded and enlightened all at the same time, and his song is “The Impossible Dream
.
”
Beings are numberless, I vow to free them
.

J
EFF
: Isn’t feeling that you have to free them kind of arrogant?

B
ERNIE
: In some way. I’ve played with changing that vow to:
Beings are numberless, I vow to serve them
. It sounds less arrogant and more possible. But whether you serve them or free them, you’re helping people see that there is no one truth, that everything they believe or that others believe is just an opinion. If people can grok that, they’ll be freed.

J
EFF
: What if somebody has cancer and is in a lot of pain, is that just an opinion? How do they get freed then?

B
ERNIE
: Freeing people has nothing to do with changing what is. Freeing is seeing what is:

“Okay, I have cancer. What do I do?”

“Take chemotherapy.”

“That’s one opinion. What’s another opinion?”

“Talk to a Native American healer and get his medicine.”

“That’s another opinion. Is there another?”

“I don’t want to do any of it. I am ready to die.”

Or: “I want to live and I’m ready to try everything.”

I had two close friends who both came down with stomach cancer at around the same time. One decided he only wished to work with Eastern medicine, and if that was not successful, he was ready to go. The other was ready to try everything, and he did: radiation and heavy medications, holistic medicine, peyote in South America, everything he heard of.

You can’t eliminate sickness or death, but you can greatly reduce the mental suffering if you see that there is no one truth, that they’re all opinions you can play and dance with rather than second-guess yourself, your family, or your doctors. So if you think,
I’m going to do the chemotherapy because only chemo will take care of it
, you may run into problems. But if you see it as an opinion that you can choose or not, that’s living with a greater degree of freedom.

Either way, I’m not coming out of some fixed truths or falsehoods. They’re opinions and I listen to the one that feels right to me. It’s the same if it’s someone else’s cancer rather than mine. If I have some kind of fixed idea—
This is what you have to do!
—then that doesn’t help anyone. Instead, if I can say, “My opinion is that you should do this,” it loosens up the world. It doesn’t get rid of everything; cancer will still happen, wars will happen, whatever. But when they do, how do I take care of them? Expecting that they won’t happen isn’t taking care, it’s just adding more mental pain.

J
EFF
: Suffering also leads to the birth of compassion.
I’m going through this, and so is he.
Acknowledging
that we all go through pain and suffering can be the key that lets you out of prison. Bearing witness to terrible things can point the way to liberation and freedom. A John Goodwin/Bobby Terry tune comes to mind, “What I Didn’t Want
.
” You know,
Thank God, He gave me what I didn’t want
. Another knot.

I read
The Myth of Sisyphus
by Albert Camus. The gods condemn Sisyphus to push a large, heavy rock up a mountain, and as soon as he gets to the top, the rock rolls down and he has to roll it up again. So he does this useless, endless, frustrating task of rolling the rock up the mountain and seeing it roll down again, day in and day out. That’s a terrible life, you know? I mean, if we’re going to push the rock up there, then at least let’s build a castle or something groovy. If all you do is just work, work, work, what kind of life is that?

But the essence of Camus’s book was that Sisyphus was a hero. Instead of just saying,
Oh fuck, what is the use, man
,
he finds some interest in the job:
Oh, look at what happened this time! Funny, I never noticed that little shrub before. The rock sure raised a lot of dust this time when it rolled down, wasn’t that interesting? Oh, here it goes again. Oh, there it goes. Watch it.

B
ERNIE
: One of the definitions of the Bodhisattva is that it’s the person who climbs up the mountain, gets a spoonful of snow, comes back down, and throws it into a well. Then she goes back up again to get another spoonful. You can ask, what’s the value of working so hard to get a little snow and then throw it into a well? And, certainly, what’s the value of getting it spoonful by spoonful?

But is one spoonful of snow like another? More poetically, can you see the sun rise for the first time, every time? Can you live this moment like it’s the only moment, as if there’s nothing else? The movie
Groundhog Day
is a little bit about that.

J
EFF
: I also think about Viktor Frankl’s book
Man’s Search for Meaning
, which was about his life in the concentration camps. Some people in that situation became completely selfish and were willing to do anything to survive, but Frankl felt that this was also the place where angels and saints were born. He lived in what most people would say was a hopeless situation, and he decided that within that, he would do his thing. That book had a big impact on me.

Growth happens out of the most terrible things. It’s sad that sometimes those lessons have to be learned over and over and over again. It’s almost as if we need terrible things to push off of. So out of the Holocaust emerged that promise that we must never let something like that happen again. If we can learn, then there’s goodness there. But God, looking at history, we’re fucking slow learners, man.

I recently made a movie,
R.I.P.D.,
that had a scene that took place in a meat locker. We were surrounded by cows cut in half, carcasses hung on meat hooks. Frankly, it didn’t bother me that much. I thought,
Gee
,
we’ve been in here all day and it doesn’t smell that bad.
But when I got home, I got an e-mail from a guy who wanted me to participate in a documentary called
Unity
, and it was all about the importance of being a vegan. And he quoted Tolstoy: “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” And that rang true for me, because that same disrespect we show animals is what we show people whom we vilify and call the enemy. It’s the same consciousness, or lack of consciousness.

I dug what the guy was saying, but I felt my participation would be hypocritical because I’ve always eaten meat. I’ve always loved a good steak, you know?
I’d like it rare, please, just knock the horns off
. It was a piece of meat, nothing else. Every living thing has to eat to survive, but there are different ways of doing it. The Native Americans used to kill and eat buffalo, but in a ritualized way that emphasized their respect and gratitude to the buffalo for giving up its life to feed them. Not like us. When you see what we do and how we treat the animals, it’s inhumane. And the trouble is, we don’t want to look; the denial is amazing. The same kind of thing goes into how we treat people and how we treat each other.