A spiritual collision course

Meditation was not supposed to put me on a collision course with Buddhism.

Granted my entrance into the practice was not motivated by a search for Nirvana but rather a vulgarly practical desire to be more focused and efficient. I can’t say I expected it would become mainstay of my routine or my first avenue into exploring the world of spirituality.

But I haven’t reconciled the Buddhist ideas behind meditation with a modern lifestyle, and am not convinced I even totally agree with what the Bhudda has to say.

I was first introduced to meditation by a friend who is possible the least Zen-attributed individual a person could come across – a full-time blogger with a sometimes disturbing obsession with Venezuelan politics. He recommended a book called Mindfulness in Plain English, which I read it once years ago. My memories of what I had read guided my entrance into meditation and served as a practical how-to for making it a part of my routine.

Despite its association with fru-fru hippies, I found meditation one of the most practical things I’d ever done. It gave me a window into the thought processes going on in my own head. It helped me understand how I was constantly making decisions that I wasn’t aware of, many of which were not very good decisions. It helped me understand how and why I struggled with distraction and what I could do about it.

I bought a copy of the book recently to give to a friend I thought could benefit from the advice. Feeling slightly spiritually unsteady, I started reading it again (I never actually gave it to her) and found a number of things I didn’t terribly like.

I don’t agree that we should abandon our struggles and simply accept life as it comes at us. I don’t agree that people who yell and scream at baseball games are suffering from repressed anger. I don’t think people who play competitive sports are necessarily spirituality imbalanced.

Some of this may be more about how people have interpreted Buddha’s teachings than what he himself said. To that end I admit my ignorance of the original teachings and have to some extent naively accepted the words of his latter day followers as a proxy, which can more or less be summed up as Life means suffering, and the root of suffering is desire.

My problems start once the “radical Buddhism” ideas start to emerge – avoid desiring anything, don’t seek great achievements because you’ll just need more, don’t struggle to improve yourself through spirituality – just accept yourself.

I can see where they’re going with this. The nature of ambition is that it’s open-ended, unceasing, a road with no stopping point in sight. I sometimes dream of an existence where I can just enjoy the simple pleasures of life without the burden of eternally seeking new achievements.

But breaking new ground and overcoming obstacles are some of life’s most prominent virtues, ones that a trance-like Zen state of eternal satisfaction simply can’t replace. I struggle to balance my ambition to achieve with my desire to live in the moment. Of late I’ve let the latter win over, and I’ve noticed the consequence is a desire for more – more struggles, more victories, more awards, more accomplishment – and dissatisfaction that goes with it.

So here I go doing it all wrong again. The more I meditate the more I seem to do what the Buddha is telling me not to. Desiring more, and all the while using meditation as a tool that can let me achieve more. I still haven’t figured out the balance between these two things. Maybe the point is that I never will.