No One Right Way to Do the Dishes
Zen Buddhism, Lithium's Past, and the Ethics of the Popular Mindfulness Movement
Hi friends, I thought I’d do something a little more chill for an article this week. I hope you enjoy the change of pace.
In the summer of 2013 I fell in love with The Books. Their effortless blend of found audio tapes and eclectic composition made me pause and reconsider not just what type of music I liked, but also what I liked about music.
I would sit in the balcony of my neighborhood coffee shop and listen to Thought for Food on repeat. It was the kind of cafe where I'd spontaneously run into a roommate, a friendly weed dealer, or my mom's ex-boyfriend. It was the type of place where my now overdosed and dead friend and I would hang out and talk about our weird lives as impoverished 21 year old boys, sitting across from each other pretending we didn't want to make out. And later, sitting across from each other pretending that we hadn't.
And The Books would ring out with a clip of a child declaring "I wish I was a boy!" followed by some raucous bass.
I wish I was a girl
A full decade later, 3,000 miles away, my friend dead, I decided to revisit The Books. If music is where we store our memories then The Books are a warehouse of bliss and melancholy. I suppose as I've gotten more sick lately, as my mind has stopped working how it used to, that there's something I'm trying to remember. Is it in that warehouse?
But my melancholic obsession with revisiting old music was interrupted when, on the track Group Autogenics II I heard a familiar voice talking to me.
John Kabbat-Zinn is the father of secular mindfulness. When he was younger he would go to Buddhist meditation retreats and practice with teachers and students alike, just another white guy in the westernized Buddhist community. I like to think he was an earnest and totally clumsy student, just like myself. When I was a bit younger you would look at me bow or watch me build an altar and you might be inclined to think that my mind was in order.
It wasn't. I existed as a separate person in my head, stumbling and tripping every which way. I thought that the perfection I could create in my physical adherence to the forms of Zen Buddhism could compensate for that. It couldn't.
Not completely. Projecting onto Kabbat-Zinn, I wonder if he was the same clumsy person I was: an overactive mind and a highly controlled body.
One day during formal practice John saw the potential for making the teachings of Buddhism more accessible. I’m not sure what happened next, I suppose you could read about that on Wikipedia. But eventually timelines of events and chains of causality put one of John’s non-Buddhist, mindfulness books into my hands. And then I decided it was too big, so I torrented the audio files.
In the track Group Autogenics II The Books take one of John Kabbat-Zinn’s audiobooks, likely his one about mindful parenting, and they give it a remix. They cut up his words and his sentences, and they make him say silly, yet somehow still meditative things like "your being merges with the garbage," and "see if you can float on a rubber raft into a big pot of boredom," and my personal favorite "there is no one right way to doing the dishes."
There is no one right way to doing the dishes.
I've spent months contemplating this verse, regarding it as holy. I consider the words of Kabbat-Zinn to be utterly dead, and yet The Books fully reanimated them for me. In the same way the ancient Zen stone-woman gets up to dance, I see John's teaching now dancing before my eyes.
"Is that okay with you?" his voice echos. I'm only sixty seconds into the track. I rewind. I play. "and let go completely of the question of time."
I'm back in Ohio. I'm kissing my friend.
Around that same era was the first time I was introduced to Zen meditation practice. A different boy had convinced me to go to the local temple with him, and being the romantic that I am, I put away my issues with organized religion and I drove with him to an old carpet warehouse on the outskirts of town. It had been renovated into a windowless palace, looking quite like where a group of midwesterns might sit on the ground together. I fell madly in love, both with the boy and with Zen. I still love the both of them too, albeit our relationships have changed a lot over the years.
That summer I sat in the tall grass of the anarchist garden on my lunch break from work, reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Across the street was the convent turned artist colony I used to live in with my lover, and behind me a run down mechanics shop that had a 30 foot photograph my mother had taken pasted to the side of the building. A student from the neighborhood was cutting through the path that bisected the garden on her way home, presumably skipping class.
The road the garden was situated next to was wider and had more lanes than necessary to accommodate the flow of traffic going through it—the whole city was planned during a different economic time.
I sat there on this beautiful summer day, in my ill-fitting slacks and tie soaking in the feeling of being in the weeds of the garden I helped an eclectic community build. It was time to go back to work and when I put down my book, I just put it down. When I stood up to walk I was just standing up to walk. And when I noticed my raw perception of reality was different from how it was just 20 minutes ago all I did was notice that feeling. I walked.
I saw how everything fit together, not in some complex matrix code scrolling way, no, it was simple. Everything was the way that it was simply because everything else was also the way that it was. The existence of one thing is dependent on the existence of everything else. It all comes into being together like one large exhalation from God.
Taking my own shortcut through the garden I felt a sense of perfection in the universe. Things perfect and exactly as they should be because things were exactly as they were. There ceased to be a right and a wrong, a good and a bad. There was a foot in an oversized dress shoe stepping through the mulch. There was a job at a place that treated me like shit because they knew I was a faggot. There was light. Dark.
Without judgements like good and bad, those who find themselves seeing through a lens of universal perfection can take the experience as a blank check to fund some pretty outlandish behaviors. In World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots were indoctrinated with these exact ideas as motivation and justification for their actions.
Big ideas. Bigger experiences.
For many, many generations the types of meditative practices that are known to produce this experience (of dependent origination) were held as secret. They were considered too powerful, and instead other, more moderate practices were handed out to lay people. These meditation practices were solely for the ordained monks and nuns. So when some nun had an experience that shattered her conceptions of ontological good and bad, she had the Vinaya, the monastic code of 311 rules to fall back on.
Today, in Zen Buddhism, the arduous rules of the Vinaya have been distilled down into an easy to remember 16 rules, or precepts. Whether or not you actually ordain and take those precepts, or vows, if you’re practicing Zen you are likely to have encountered teachings on them—they are the literal lifeblood of the religion. So when a Zen student experiences these expansive, meditative mind states that create this sense of perfection-as-is, we generally have a set of ethical principles to fall back on.
All things equivalent, no right, no wrong, perhaps I should cheat on my partner.
Perhaps I should gamble away my kid’s college money.
I should stop tipping service workers.
Have you ever met someone who’s done a lot of psychedelics and justifies their poor behavior with weird logic or catch phrases like “it is what it is”? It’s kind of like this.
If you've made vows to not be a jerk, hopefully in a moment of equivalence you will be able to see what actions follow your vows, and which don't.
Sometimes I remember stories.
"I remember damage."
I remember the story of Zen master, Darlene Cohen, being so frustrated with the arthritis in her hands, completely unable to open a jar of jam for her morning toast. How she chucked the jar and watched the glass shatter and the jam don the kitchen wall with abstract jam art.
Darlene felt no remorse for her outburst, and instead she felt satisfaction as she walked by the evidence in her kitchen throughout the day. Jars of jam don't fuck with Darlene Cohen.
"To the monsters, we're the monsters," and to me the monsters are the dishes. Last week I got very angry, I honestly don't remember at what (though maybe related to my swiftly progressing physical disabilities), and I felt this urge to throw a plate I was holding across the room. Like most emotionally well-regulated adults I have the sense to stop myself before I start throwing plates, but instead Darlene popped into my mind. I threw the plate. I threw some silverware too. I let them sit in the corner of the room for several days. No remorse.
There's more than one right way to doing the dishes.
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)—John Kabbat-Zinn’s eventual post-Buddhist meditation program—is a subtly insidious creation. Taking it's teachings directly from Buddhism, validating them in academic studies, and then transporting them directly to hospitals, schools, prisons, corporate settings, and even the military. Buddhism for the Sick™. Buddhism for the Unruly™. Buddhism for the Overworked™. Buddhism for Middle Management™. Buddhism for Drone Pilots™.
In a world of inherent perfection, I question if this is perhaps the wrong way to do the dishes.
Kabbat-Zinn presents mindfulness to the masses, and he does so with no system of ethics in place, but instead a simple promise: "if you meditate how I'm showing you, you will be less stressed." And who wouldn't want that? Who wouldn't want the sick and neglected to be less stressed? Who wouldn’t want children at deeply underfunded and short staffed schools to settle down? Who wouldn't want prisoners whose human rights are being violated on a daily basis to be serene about their situation? Who wouldn't want their exploited workers to accept the realities of their jobs, and to maybe even put in some extra hours? Who wouldn’t want their military sniper to have the ability to calm their thoughts?
Who indeed.
From the beginning, MBSR is being thrusted upon people who are having a normal stress reaction to an abnormal way of living. It can appear that we are helping to quell people's negative feelings, to help them live more uplifted lives. But the reality is that if you put on some welding goggles a dumpster fire doesn't look so bright, so maybe you let it keep burning.
When a practitioner of MBSR has an experience of the dropping away of good and bad, and due to a lack of a concrete system of ethics in their lives, they cause some harm, this causes real damage to them and their loved ones. But realistically this is probably a pretty rare and edge-case scenario.
What's surely more common is when a teacher of MBSR sees an opportunity to introduce the program at a new venue where systemic inequality is causing undue burden on those with less situational power.
I question: is it ethical to give these people tools that help them to accept their situations? Sick patients accepting their substandard care, "bUt hAVe U tRIeD mInDFulnESS??" Or "out of control" students being taught to calm down, not so that they feel better but so that the school system doesn't have to allocate them more resources. Workers who are being deeply exploited for their labor, learning how to set their negative feelings about work aside and to just "be in the moment" instead of more productively unionizing.
I believe in mindfulness, it’s been largely responsible for the positive directions my life has gone in the last 10 years. But we need to have what the Buddha referred to as “right mindfulness.” We have to apply the skill that is our awareness into the right directions. We have to learn about ourselves and our world. We have to make difficult decisions. If mindfulness is helping you to avoid or accept something, like systemic issues, or even relationship issues, without changing them, then maybe it’s not so “right.”
I took Buddha's Vows in the fall of 2014. They work long and slow on me. I'm just now starting to get familiar with them, intimate with their message. I'm still pretty young in terms of my Buddhist practice, but I'm old enough to have picked up a couple things along my way.
The way mindfulness works in my life, I look out beyond the horizons of my own immediate experience. My lens is open and I apply my system of ethics to everything in my field of view. What's great about a life of continual Zen practice is that I don't do this on purpose, it's just what happened when I meditated for long enough. But I'm concerned about people who are pushing mindfulness meditation practices onto the secular population, especially those who do not have the ethics that Buddhism espouses.
The mindfulness movement is pacifying people who are right to be mad. We are teaching people to look inside themselves for problems when they should be looking at the problems with the systems they're embedded in. We teach people to reduce their stress when their stress is trying to tell them something very useful.
Secular mindfulness teachers have so thoroughly accepted our capitalist hell-scape that they teach these tools as if they're going to help enact change, when the only change we really need is to tear the whole thing down.
To start throwing all the dishes at the wall.
This reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently in which the members were coming to the defense of the modern portrayal of the archetype of Pan, in the sense that panic/anxiety/stress) are seen as inherently negative qualities, instead of acknowledging that when Pan releases his cry to incite herds to stampede, it’s to protect them from imminent danger. The high levels of latent anxiety found in the modern human population is not a problem in and of itself, it’s a symptom of a collective feeling that something about the way we live our lives is very, very wrong. I think the way talk feel about commodified mindfulness can be applied most therapy as well. It’s a system in place to help people find and “fix” problems within themselves instead of acknowledging that any normal person would feel depressed, anxious, and lacking in focus when faced with our current reality.
I remember damage 😭💞 loved this piece! Makes me think of recent sentiment surrounding TikTok pseudo-therapy