Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
success and failure
genkaku
Northampton, Mass. U.S.A. Veteran
I was thinking this morning that what passes for success or failure has some nice (and nasty) ways of cementing the social fabric: We seek out agreement about what constitutes success and what constitutes failure and then find a nesting place in that realm.
But the difficulty with success or failure in ordinary terms is that it invariably relies on what others think or feel. And it may come as an unpleasant jolt to realize that we are living our lives according to others' standards ... a second-hand, if cozy, existence. And perhaps worthy of consideration.
The implicit successes and failures of spiritual endeavor are no different, I would argue. On the one hand, success and failure can inspire some pretty good and fruitful action. On the other hand, they can create a world of stale socks and flat beer.
How could anyone succeed in spiritual endeavor?
How could anyone fail?
What do you think?
But the difficulty with success or failure in ordinary terms is that it invariably relies on what others think or feel. And it may come as an unpleasant jolt to realize that we are living our lives according to others' standards ... a second-hand, if cozy, existence. And perhaps worthy of consideration.
The implicit successes and failures of spiritual endeavor are no different, I would argue. On the one hand, success and failure can inspire some pretty good and fruitful action. On the other hand, they can create a world of stale socks and flat beer.
How could anyone succeed in spiritual endeavor?
How could anyone fail?
What do you think?
0
Comments
I don't like the world spiritual specially since I don't believe in the soul.
What others might call my spiritual endeavors, are really just my way of perfecting myself. Self-realization. Nothing more.
Is it a success or failure?
So, since you are improving, you are successful ... and in no need of improvement?
No. Because success and failure is not black and white. It's a spectrum.
Stated or unstated, perhaps we could agree that words like "Nirvana," "enlightenment," "original mind," "compassion," "emptiness," "true self," "unexcelled clarity," "peace" "heaven," "happiness" and similar designations are used. They may be used with or without much examination, but that doesn't halt the using of them to point out something akin to success.
Greater natural kindness is not something to strive for, genkaku? I may think I have an inkling of what you are getting at, but as there are results and causes, there is still Awakening is there not. And in that regard, even admist and within and despite of all the hiccups and falls, I see that as a positive result.
_/\_
So when I aim at a target and hit the bulls-eye, I have not exactly failed but not exactly succeeded either ... it's all part of some big, flowing relativism?
A few years ago a man who was compiling a book entitled "Success" wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. I heard no more from him, and I am not aware that my reply was published with the other testimonials. (From "Love and Living" )
It always makes me chuckle, and allows me to have a Real Ale or two without guilt. Then there is Bob Dylan with his line...."She knows there's no success like failure and that failures no success at all." (From "Love MInus Zero/No Limit)
Then a Zen Koan, "A clearly enlightened man falls into a well. How is this so?"
Even the enlightened appear to be prone to failure, but I'm no Zen man, so probably totally misunderstand.
To fail, you have to attempt to complete a given criteria, and not complete it.
This is why the concept of succeeding/failing will always be subjective. Who is it that is establishing the criteria? If you establish a criteria for yourself, then you can either succeed at it or fail. But...one can simply choose to walk a path without having a specific criteria in mind. There is no "end point" which defines success or failure. Now you could say, if I am making progress along my path, then I am succeeding. Well..then you have established a criteria, that being...Am I making progress?
Now from a third person perspective, people can impose their own criteria on others. For example, I consider a person successful if they have a job and a home. That is my criteria I overlay onto others. So I would consider a person living in his parent's basement as a failure. But his own criteria might simply be, I want a job and to be happy.
But..I do think the two concepts go together. One needs the concept of failure to understand the concept of success. The two go together, like suffering and joy.
I would think success or failure would not even be a matter to the real Zen man (or woman of course
_/\_
You have succeeded. But not more on this last stretch than the one who brought you to where you were when you began. If your goal is 20 and you have 19, getting 1 more is not a bigger success than having 18 and getting to 19.
I agree with the idea of how can anyone fail or succeed.
I have a teacher that said 'your best is all you can do,' but he could still tell someone what they do sucks.
Now, I thought that, if it's their best, that's all it is. And if it wasn't, then it wasn't, so it wasn't good or bad, it's just effort or not.
Or, how a day could be good or bad, what determines that is how you take in what has happened. Let's say you are in a relationship, and you ended it. That may have been good for you because it was unpleasant, but the other person may feel the opposite.
To be honest, there is no 'good or bad.' It's all just relative.
Props to Einstein.
Once upon a time in New York, I went to a sesshin or Zen retreat. Sesshin is an intense time as anyone who has tried it can attest -- gobs of silence and focus and attention. Anyway, at this particular sesshin, my teacher's teacher, Soen Nakagawa was presiding. And it was to him that individual students would go for dokusan or a private interview during which the teacher encourages or corrects the directions of the student.
I had never met Soen Roshi who was reputed to be a heavy hitter in the world of Zen. But my turn came to go and see him one-on-one. And at that particular time, for reasons I could not say, I was in a really foul mood. I was generically pissed off and no matter how much I tried to talk myself out of it on the cushion, it just seemed to get worse ... pissed-off-er.
I entered the room where Soen Roshi was sitting. I did the required bows and then sat about three feet in front of him and stated my practice. I hardly knew what to expect.
"How are you?" he asked mildly.
"Shitty!" I replied.
"Every day is a good day," he said, reprising the words of the great Zen teacher Ummon who had uttered them in response to a particular koan ... completely exempt from any relativism.
Well, I wasn't in the mood for any goody-two-shoes quotations and I got angrier still and snapped,
"Every day is a good day and some days are shitty days!"
And Soen started to laugh. He laughed as if he had heard the best dirty joke in the world. I mean I don't think he could have stopped. He was doubled over with laughter.
When he finally did stop, his face was polished with delight:
"You're absolutely right," he said. "Every day is a good day, some days are shitty days AND every day is a good day!"
And something inside me was brought up short -- just halted in its tracks. There was nothing I could do but ... laugh.
And honest laughter is not something anyone can do in a relative way.
Therefore the bodhisattva abides in a state of equanimity
Unruffled by attachment and aversion