After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

I have been reading a book by Jack Kornfield called "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry". Jack was the author of another book called "A Path with Heart" that was a huge influence on my spiritual path many years ago, and I'm finding this other book to be equally profound. He speaks to my early experiences with spiritual awakening, helping me better understand some of what I experienced in the past as well as my current spiritual path. After we have a profound, blissful, ecstatic spiritual experience, what next? His answer - do the laundry. The mundane affairs of life become our spiritual practice.

If we have felt the bliss of awakening to the way things really are, our next task is not to live in that state of bliss. It is to take the magic we have experienced and bring it into our lives. Having climbed the mountain and seen the view, we then need to come down the mountain to live our lives. But we can also share a bit of the light we've been given. That doesn't mean we have to preach it (though we can); it means we simply live and let that light shine through us. We embrace the mundane and live our lives with the fresh perspective we have been given.

There is so much I love about the book, but I'll just share a couple of pieces. In speaking about flexibility of mind and heart, Jack relates an experience he had with one of his early spiritual teachers:

The dogmatic and rigid qualities of religious fervor give way to the middle path, with a wise presence that is neither indulgent nor fearful.

My teacher Ajahn Chah demonstrated this flexibility when he was most inconsistent, contradicting things he had previously said, reversing teachings he had earlier emphasized. When this was pointed out to him by a frustrated student (me), Ajahn Chah laughed. "It's like this," he said. "There is a road I know well, but it can be foggy or dark. When I see someone traveling this road about to fall in a ditch or get lost in a sidetrack on the right-hand side, I call out, 'Go to the left.' Similarly, if I see someone about to fall in a ditch or get lost in a sidetrack on the left-hand side, I call out, 'Go to the right.' That's all I do when I teach. Whenever you get caught, I say, 'Let go of that too.' "

For years before I left the church of my childhood, I felt that church leaders painted with too broad a brush. At the time, I thought it was a necessary aspect of trying to teach so many people at once, but I think it also comes from a codified creed that begins to feel rigid as soon as it has been written down. Having the flexibility to change your teachings to suit the circumstances of your hearer(s) feels so liberating to me. I love how one yoga teacher handled that - from another part of the book:

Religious traditions often warn us about the dangers of entanglement with the senses, and it is true that we can become overly attached and identified with this body and its pleasures. Our culture has exploited this to an extreme. But in spiritual circles the opposite danger of aversion, fear, and unconsciousness is perhaps even more common. There is, as the Buddha suggests, a middle path to be found in each of our lives. One yoga teacher paused in the midst of teaching a difficult stretch to caution her students, "You strivers here, relax. And you sensualists, straighten up."

Speaking to an entire class, this woman recognized the diversity of personalities among her hearers and tailored her message to the specific tendencies of students. In my early religion, we often heard encouragements to do more, to be of greater service, to strive to be better, etc. Those of us who were already trying hard, sometimes at the edge of exhaustion, would hear these messages and feel burdened. But we kept trying. No doubt there are many who need to hear those messages, but I wasn't one of them. Or maybe I was when I was very young, but I reached a point where I didn't need those messages anymore. But they just kept coming. It would have been nice if we had had more flexibility to call out, "go left" or "go right" instead of "work harder".

Here's another gem from the book:

Zen teacher Edward Espe Brown is the author of many Zen-inspired cookbooks, beginning with The Tassajara Bread Book. Through describing his kitchen practice, he writes of the truths of the heart.

When I first started cooking at Tassajara, I had a problem. I couldn't get my biscuits to come out the way they were supposed to. I'd follow a recipe and try variations, but nothing worked. These biscuits just didn't measure up.

Growing up I had made two kinds of biscuits. One was from Bisquick and other from Pillsbury. For the Bisquick you added milk in the mix and then blobbed the dough in spoonfuls onto the pan - you didn't even need to roll them out. The biscuits from Pillsbury came in kind of a cardboard can. You rapped the can on the corner of the counter and it popped open. Then you twisted the can open more, put the premade biscuits on a pan, and baked them. I really liked those Pillsbury biscuits. Isn't that what biscuits should taste like? Mine weren't coming out right.

It's wonderful and amazing the ideas we get about what biscuits should taste like, or what a life should look like. Compared to what? Canned biscuits from Pillsbury? Leave It to Beaver? People who ate my biscuits would extoll their virtues, eating one after another, but to me these perfectly good biscuits just weren't right.

Finally one day came a shifting-into-place, an awakening. "Not right" compared to what? Oh, my word, I'd been trying to make canned Pillsbury biscuits! Then came an exquisite moment of actually tasting my biscuits without comparing them to some previously hidden standard. They were wheaty, flaky, buttery, sunny, earthy, real. They were incomparably alive - in fact, much more satisfying than any memory. 

These occasions can be so stunning, so liberating, these moments when you realize your life is just fine as it is, thank you. Only the insidious comparison to a beautifully prepared, beautifully packaged product made it seem insufficient. Trying to produce a biscuit - a life - with no dirty bowls, no messy feelings, no depression, no anger, was so frustrating. Then savoring, actually tasting the present moment of experience - how much more complex and multifaceted. How unfathomable.

As Zen students we spent years trying to make it look right, trying to cover the faults, conceal the messes. We knew what the Bisquick Zen student looked like: calm, buoyant, cheerful, energetic, deep, profound. Our motto, as one of my friends said, was, "looking good." We've all done it, trying to look good as a husband, a wife or parent. Trying to attain perfection. Trying to make Pillsbury biscuits.

Well, to heck with it, I say. Wake up and smell the coffee. How about some good old home cooking, the biscuits of today.

When we accept our place in the mandala of the whole, we come back to just where we are. And in this is found joy, ease, simplicity, and courage, and what T.S. Eliot calls the freedom "to care and not to care." 

Pretty cool, huh? That's just a small sample. This book is going to be another of my spiritual staples. I love Jack's perspective on life and his ability to convey its essence with simplicity and love.

If you get a chance to read the book, let me know what you think. If it doesn't work for you, that's ok. I think it's beautiful, the work of a beautiful soul. Thanks, Jack, for casting a bit of light along my path.