From Social Action, Wholeness and Integration, and Daily Log

12/9/2012
Let’s see if I can capture this. I’m in the middle of a Vision of how all the writing projects I’ve ever done fit together with the life I’m living and what is the one thread that goes through all the beads — an ongoing attempt to transform mainstream culture while immersing myself in whatever is in front of me. Be patient. It’s forming up as I type.

Note 2/17/2018: This was written at least two years before I started this web site project, and was probably a contributing factor on the path to conceiving it. It was the first time I mentally put together the Antioch Portfolio, Progoff Journal, Independent Scholar’s Journal, and Memoir and Personal Essay writing classes. 

 First is the Antioch Portfolio. It is about the plunge into the counterculture, wildly careening, taking LSD, smoking pot, flailing and pounding on my drums, “out to save the world”, finally ending with a Vision that I will combine Buddhism and Psychotherapy. (Note the word Vision has already appeared twice. As in Vision is Mind, Mind is emptiness, Emptiness is clear light, etc.)

Next is the Independent Scholar’s Journal 1981-1985. It is about being full-time at the Zen Center while working through a career as a corporate manager, trying to figure out the interplay between the two value worlds. With the same intention of changing the mainstream by bringing in non-mainstream values.

The third one is the Memoir Project. It started just before I was going to start my career as a public school teacher, applying what I had learned as a Buddhist in the sphere of public service rather than for-profit enterprise. In the process we left ZCLA, finally moving out. The Memoir Project binder includes post-ZCLA practices such as dance, Tenzin, starting a Los Angeles chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Mosaic Mendocino involvement, each involved in transforming the culture and/or myself.

The fourth is the Progoff Journal, which started in 1977, but which now 1-1/2 years into retirement, I’m starting to use to reflect on the meaning of this whole journey. Retirement begins just as I am losing the last shreds of my ability to be with people in conversation. It is the universe telling me I have almost no choice except for very deep reflection. I thought I would drum in retirement but my right arm can’t participate, which has kept me from my second longest-running and richest means of expression and deeply sharing in community with people after speech. I thought I would dance, but arthritis in my hips has severely restricted that third richly satisfying mode of expression and way of deeply interacting in community. The Progoff Journal includes a section called Dialog with Society.

The trigger for seeing all these projects as documenting a through-line has been reading The Making of Buddhist Modernism. This led to starting two other related books, Oriental Enlightenment and Sources of the Self. They help broaden and deepen the story that I was weaving for years, about a calling or mission to participate in the transformation of our culture by becoming an authorized zen master. I worked on that for 28 years, finally admitting defeat when I left ZCLA 11 years ago. I have since tried to see the larger context within which all that energy was expended, knowing that I was called by a very big project, but not knowing exactly what it was (or is).

This morning lying in bed it sort of all fell into place. Let me tell it loosely. Can be tidied up later. As a child I knew there was something wrong with my culture. These days I call it consumerist, capitalistic, militaristic, cruel, stupid, stuck, destructive, out of control. Then I found it superficial, silly, boring, stultifying. By contrast, I had jazz — the African American musical culture of swing, energy, improvisation. A gift from my father. A lovely respite from The System. I also read modernist European literature eagerly, and was nourished by minds much more sophisticated and exciting than my world of late 50’s and early 60’s America. Then at the end of high school I read Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg, DT Suzuki, Alan Watts, and others that planted the seed of what would become a massive counterculture, as the Establishment reached the apex of its logic in Vietnam. At the end of my plunge into this counterculture I wrote the Antioch portfolio. I had been living at ZCLA 3 years when I started writing it. The idea was that the jewel I brought back from the plunge into the counterculture was Buddha dharma. At ZCLA I was learning from Roshi and Pat and the vision was to integrate east and west through these modes…and by implication to bring wisdom and compassion into the culture.

I met Mary less than a year later. I committed to balancing career, relationship, and formal zen practice. The venue shifted from a wish to start a long program training for Transpersonal Psychology into the more practical, and very unexpected, realm of business and the corporation. I did RPS for 2-1/2 years, went over to Avnet, and in the 4th year working there started the Independent Scholars Journal. This was the second cut, after the Antioch Portfolio, at documenting an attempt to integrate east and west in my life, and make an impact on the values of mainstream culture. (Note the Art Kleiner book about counterculture influence of corporations, The Age of Heretics. Saw myself as a subversive infiltrator. Played with Riley).

When my corporate adventure ran out I found what was available was elementary school teaching. Had three months free before DI started, took Maureen Murdock’s memoir class. Those pieces were with me when I started teaching, and form the basis for the 3rd project (Memoir), which then continued with less polished writing as I transitioned from elementary to TL. Also in that binder, the therapy log and “Into the Library” documented the process of leaving ZCLA, finally moving out, getting into dance. Being a Teacher Librarian was the next working phase and high point of bringing all the wisdom into the culture, with 1000 teenagers and 75 adults every day for 9 years. Very sweet spot, totally natural expression. Working with Michael Lerner and Michael Meade were also conscious attempts to impact the culture in more refined ways than before.

So that’s what was percolating as I woke up this morning.