The Dude and the Zen Master (14 page)

There was that time you offered to come here with Eve to work on the book with me, and my thoughts went crazy:
I just finished this movie
—
I need time with Sue
—
I’ve got to have some free time
—
I’ve got to prepare for this next movie
—
I’ve got to work out
—
Oh, shit, they wanna come
—
I would love to see ’em but I wish they could do it later
—
They can’t do it later
—I got into overwhelm, which happens to me quite often. I wish I could be a little more Dude-like. In fact, I generally find doing a movie more peaceful, because I’m completely focused. When I’m not working on a movie, the world comes rushing in.

You could tell what was happening and you said, “It’s a good thing you’re into Zen.” That was a little koan for me, so I thought about it after we hung up. At first there was still the tightness, and then it was:
Be here in this moment. Don’t torture yourself with all the shit that has to be accomplished. Where are you right now?
I relaxed a little bit, and then I thought,
Oh, Eve and Bern, yeah. It would be a chance to hang, and I could do more study with them
.

I feel the same kind of panic with making a movie. People ask me how I pick my movies
.
In some way I try my hardest not to pick anything, because I know what it takes when you pick what you do. Dude likes to be comfortable, man. And it seems like all the parts want me to laugh and cry and
be real
better than I did it last time. They’re asking me to not be comfortable. And I say,
Come on!
Been there, done that. I have to do it better or bigger? You’re gonna challenge me, man?

But what’s happening is that inside I’m wondering,
Do I really have it? Can I do it?
So I resist as much as I can until a part comes along that is scarier than shit, it frightens the hell out of me, but it’s too groovy to pass on.
Crazy Heart
is a perfect example. It had so many things going for it: I got to do my music, I got to be with my friends, I got to have John Goodwin write a tune. Then the voices started:

But what happens if I don’t pull it off?

This is your dream. You can keep it in dreamland or make it real, your choice
.

But what happens if I can’t pull it off?

Yeah, but isn’t this what it’s all about?

And then I do it and it’s better than I ever thought. Every once in a while, especially with
Crazy Heart
,
Lebowski
, or any of my favorite movies, I’ve got high expectations going in, and those expectations are blown out of the water because something completely more wonderful happens. There’s resistance, a pushing against it, and then—BOOM! A wave breaks. But for that to happen, I have to be ready to experiment with those uncomfortable feelings. It’s almost like doing yoga and stretching to touch something you can’t easily reach.

I’ve learned to notice these reactions more and more as they happen, and instead of saying yes or no, instead of jumping in, I gently lean into the challenge a little bit. I’ve learned to create more space for myself; that way gives me a sense of greater freedom. And slowly, things become workable.

Cynicism is a big challenge for many people these days. I know it is for me. You say,
Oh, God, why do anything?
Look at all these problems; look at these politicians. Are you kidding me? I’m not gonna vote.
So how do you work with cynicism? I guess the first step is to just notice it in you. Then begin massaging it a bit—make it workable.

Another thing I learned from all this is that my limits aren’t what I think they are. In fact, each time I question them they seem to expand a little. I’m still on that same path, and my stretching gets a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger all the time. I respect my pace and at the same time I challenge it, you know? But I have to, I got to, please, befriend myself.

13.

STRIKES AND GUTTERS, UPS AND DOWNS

J
EFF
: Do you experience things like that, where at first you think you’ve reached your limit and then, all of a sudden, it feels different and you can go on?

B
ERNIE
: I have a slightly different take on it. Part of my training as a clown is to see how things that I perceive as failures or limits are opportunities in disguise. It reminds me of the story my clown mentor, YooWho, told me when he was doing one of his performances in a poor area in Chiapas, Mexico. At the very end of the show he announced to the big crowd in front of him, “And now, as my final glorious act, I am going to make you all disappear.” And with that, he took off his glasses. He can’t see without his glasses, so, of course, they all disappear. It always got a big laugh before, but not this time. All was silent, and when he put his glasses back on and looked out at the audience, he realized why. Not one person there was wearing glasses. They were too poor to wear glasses, so they couldn’t get the joke.

And he had to work with that. Bearing witness to his audience and who they were, he had to find a different way to end the show.

J
EFF
: What did he do?

B
ERNIE
: I don’t know, I never heard that part.

J
EFF
: Because maybe what he did didn’t work, either, and what happens then? You try to get the clown act together, you try to keep bouncing back up, and it doesn’t work. I want to keep on opening and it’s not working. Does that happen to you? I’ve talked to you about the tensions in my life, especially where I meet up with my resistance; I consider you farther down the road, but I’m curious, do you ever reach your limit? Does the clown ever stay down too long? Do you have feet of clay? If you do, show me those guys.

B
ERNIE
: As you know, I worked with Israelis and Palestinians for a long time and finally got very frustrated. Being a Zen teacher, I know that frustrations come out of expectations, but in this case I was really attached to seeing big changes. I read Israeli and Arab newspapers every day, I followed the Palestinian news, I talked to people and tried to keep on doing things, but at some point it just felt like too much. I didn’t want to go on.
I didn’t want to go back there, cross the checkpoints, hear the frustration in activists’ voices or see the exhaustion in their eyes; I didn’t want to deal with anything there anymore.

Of course, I knew this was an opportunity to open up, do more, and grow, but for several years frustration had the edge. So like you, I took a break, and now I feel different, more open to working there again. The world there has changed, not necessarily for the better, but for some reason I can feel my own energies on the rise once again.

On a more personal level, I have feet of clay like everybody else. When things feel overwhelming, my initial tendency is to run away, just get out of the scene. That’s always been an issue for me. Eve and I are very different, just like you and Sue, and when our relationship feels like it’s too much, my initial tendency is to get the hell out of there. So here I am, the Zen guy who’s always saying that you have to deal with what is and be in the moment, and there have been lots of times in my life when I withdrew to be separate.

As I’ve gotten older the urge to run away has diminished, but it still comes up sometimes. Running away means not dealing with things, and that happens to me like it does for everybody else.

J
EFF
: The two—wanting to do things and the resistance to doing them—are so interwoven.
Fuck this, I’m not gonna do it
. That’s how I deal with most tight spots, including those in my marriage to Sue. Like you with Eve, at first I get pissed:
I’m splitting. You don’t get me at all; I don’t get you, so fine, you go over there, I’ll go over here. You do your thing and I’ll do mine
. It takes a little time for the process to get moving.

I’m glad to hear that you go through this, too, that you’re not a hologram or something.

B
ERNIE
: Just this kid from Brooklyn. But in some ways I continue to look for those tough situations because I know that’s how I’m going to grow. Luckily or unluckily, they keep coming up.

J
EFF
: I feel like my pattern of resisting began before I was born. It’s an old pattern, man. Years ago I was watching TV and I heard these doctors talk about rebirthing. They said that birth is a primal kind of experience and how we reacted to it back then can teach us a lot about ourselves and our style of dealing with life. They suggested talking to your mother and asking her what your birth experience was like.

So that’s what I did. Mom and I sat on chairs facing each other, our knees almost touching, looking into each other’s eyes, and she told me this: “As you know, Jeff, you had a brother, Gary, who died of sudden infant death syndrome a year before you were born. That death shook me to my core. Imagine you have a baby who’s healthy and well, and one day you go over to the crib and he’s not moving, he’s gone. But Dr. Bellis, Leon, who delivered all you children and whom you’re named after,
*
finally talked me into having another child and I got pregnant again. I was very excited and feeling great. When my water broke, your dad took me to the hospital, but on the way there I felt you turning, so that you were no longer in the right position to come down the birth canal, almost as if you didn’t want to come out.

“When we got to the hospital, they strapped me down on one of those cold, stainless-steel tables; giving birth was different then. They gave me a spinal and also a sedative; to this day I can remember lying there while one nurse talked with another about buying a car.” When she said that, I had the strangest feeling that I could remember those nurses talking.

Then my mom went on: “But suddenly I heard one of them exclaim, ‘The baby’s heart stopped! Quick, get the doctor.’ It turned out that I was allergic to one of the drugs they’d given me. It felt like I was falling backward down a velvet-covered escalator. Finally Leon came in and started to slap me: ‘Wake up, wake up, Dorothy!’ But I couldn’t, because I was so drugged and strapped down. He finally told them to take the straps off me—he could tell I was trying to sit up—and right then I felt you turning back around and out you came, as if you’d changed your mind. And that’s how you were born.”

These doctors on TV encouraged you to take your birth experience and apply that to how you dealt with other traumatic experiences in your life. When I did that I noticed that when I’m in a tight spot I do what I did then:
No way, man, I’m digging it where I am, I don’t want to be born, I’m not coming out
, and just turn around in the birth canal. It could be another movie, it could be doing something for a friend or a fan, it could be doing my hunger work, anything. Thirty-five years ago it was my marriage to Sue. I want to say,
Fuck it, I’m not gonna do that,
and get back to some safe place where nobody will bother me. But when I give myself that opportunity to say no, I find it gives me the space to say yes and to check things out after all.

I think the Dude encountered resistance, too. In fact, maybe he was kind of afraid. Maybe that’s why he let go of trying to be someone or living up to something. In the movie he talks about being a radical way back in the past, but when we first meet him, the Stranger calls him the laziest man in L.A. Walter has to really egg him on to do something about that rug to get him going, and once he starts, engages, it’s as if life can’t leave him alone. That’s what I fear, I guess.

But, as somebody said, what we’re really afraid of is not how small and inadequate we are, but how big and powerful. When you think about that, it’s basically saying that each of us can be Christ or Buddha; it’s asking us to reach that high. But we don’t want to know about that, in fact we want to protect ourselves from that knowledge. Meanwhile life is demanding that we come on, live our life.

But when it gets too intense, you have to stop.

B
ERNIE
: You have to befriend the self.

J
EFF
: Give yourself a fucking break so you can move, so you can keep going. It’s like yoga. I’ll say,
Put your head on your fucking knees, come on!
And you know what? I get hurt because I can’t do it and I’m not patient or kind to myself, I pull a muscle. I don’t respect where I am. I push it too hard, I hurt myself, and that turns me off the whole process. But I could do it more gently, you know. Like,
row, row, row your boat
—gently.

Sometimes I feel that my relationship with you is a bit of a yoga pose, too. You expand faster than I want to, so it can become uncomfortable. The relationship is always about opening, jamming, digging what it is to be intimate and generous. It’s asking,
Who are you? What are you?
These are the same questions that I ask myself in different situations in my life, and the challenge is not to judge myself or my answer but to just notice. One of the things that I notice is that there are limits, and limits are a cool place in which to hang.

B
ERNIE
: Otherwise, you wind up with regrets, like you do when you hurt yourself in yoga, and you spend your energy dealing with the regrets instead of with what you originally wanted to do:
I should have done this, I shouldn’t have done that.

J
EFF
:
I wish I were better
.

B
ERNIE
: It’s more important to work with what happened rather than with your opinions about it. You made the best meal possible at that moment. If nobody wanted it, that’s fine, you still made the best meal you were capable of. Maybe it wasn’t the time for it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come up again.

We make meals all the time: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. We can feed ourselves and we can offer to feed people, only sometimes we waste energy on things like:
This is my meal and you’ve got to eat it
, or:
This is the meal I’m being served so I’ve got to eat it even if I don’t like it
. That’s another variation of
I’ve got to do this
or
she’s got to do that
, all leading to frustration.

So if a voice says,
I should have done this
, I can say right back,
That’s just your opinion, man
. It’s just an opinion; there’s nothing true about it. One of my Japanese Zen teachers, a famous and highly respected master, used to say, “That’s a nice way of looking at it.” A young, inexperienced kid would come up to him:
Hey, you’re all wrong
, or
Why don’t you do things this way?
Instead of telling him he’s wet behind the ears and doesn’t know what he’s talking about, my teacher would say, “That’s a nice way of looking at it.”

J
EFF
:
That’s interesting
.

B
ERNIE
: He didn’t have to prove the kid wrong, he didn’t have to prove him right. It was just another opinion. We can do the same thing with the voices in our heads.

J
EFF
: Let’s take the example of the snoring a little further. Let’s say my fingers ache. What do I do? I can take Advil; I can also give myself a little injection of heroin. Where do you draw the line? Is there a line? Do you even bother to seek comfort and take an Advil for arthritis or do you abide with the pain?

B
ERNIE
: It depends on the moment. You bear witness to your fingers aching in the same way that we bear witness to the aching of the world. In Buddhism we have something called the Middle Way. A lot of people think of that as halfway between one thing and another thing. In Zen, we say that the Middle Way is just what’s happening. It’s not good or bad; it’s just what is. The question is, do I bear witness or not?

The fingers ache, so I might take Advil, I might not do anything, or I might take heroin. After all, they’re all remedies. If I bear witness not just to the pain but also to the whole thing, the Advil might make more sense because it probably won’t become an addiction like the heroin. But for someone who’s already an addict and now has pain in his fingers, befriending the self might mean taking heroin.

We choose what we choose and then people have their opinions about it. Society may say,
You’re screwing yourself up, you’re taking heroin
. That same society sometimes tells me,
You’re screwing yourself up, you’re eating meat
, or
You’re screwing yourself up, you’re smoking a cigar
. Everybody has opinions. But if I have faith in bearing witness, if I can really just be in touch with myself, I’m going to wind up doing things that are good for me and cause me the least pain.

Having faith in yourself is what’s important here, faith that you will take the actions that are appropriate for the situation at this moment.

J
EFF
: Yeah, more confidence. Is having faith in yourself any different from having faith in reality?

B
ERNIE
: What’s reality? I always remember Robin Williams, back when he was Mork, saying that reality is a concept.

Do I take something to relieve the pain or not? I often say about myself that I have a high tolerance level for pain and therefore pain isn’t much of a problem for me. That’s okay as long as I’m not attached to this thought. So I have arthritic pain. I let go of my usual concepts, get into a state of not-knowing, bear witness to the pain I feel, and then decide if I want to take something or leave it alone. I have faith in just being where I am; I’m not trapped by what happened in the past or what I expect will happen in the future. And if I make a mistake and choose to do something that didn’t work out so well, I’m not critical about what I did; I did the best I could do at that moment.