The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  For instance, as I’ve said before, I’m often frightened of getting involved in a new project. I’ll say, “How am I gonna do this?”

  And Sue will remind me, “Hey, this is how you do it. You always get like this when you’re asked to do something new.” And I’ll say, “You’re right, that’s just what I do.” And her pointing that out, and me seeing it, is somehow comforting. I realize, Hey, I have done this before. Do I want to do it any differently? Or do I want to do it the way I always do it? And can I relax in that—not be uptight about being uptight? Sue shows me another way of looking at things. We open our hearts to each other.

  We do have one ancient war that comes up again and again, which basically runs like this: You don’t get it; you just don’t get me; you don’t know me; you don’t understand. And that’s true. I don’t entirely know Sue or her perspective, I never will. And she won’t know me or where I’m coming from, really, entirely. But as this ancient war rages, with each battle it becomes more apparent that this inability to truly know the other’s perspective is what we have in common. Knowing that, we learn to take our differences and opinions not so seriously, we open up. Having fought this out for over thirty-five years, I now find that when the war raises its head again, I feel: Great, here it is again, now we get to learn how to love each other even more.

  What is marriage? You’re setting an overall context: Okay, we’re going to jam. We’re going to experience all our stuff, I’m going to get pissed at you and you’ll get pissed back, but we’ll be in a marriage. We know we’ll have tough times, but we’re doing it all together.

  BERNIE: You stand side by side with the other person and you tie the two inside legs together. So now each of you has one leg that’s free and another that’s tied to the other’s leg. You’re independent because of your one outside leg, but you’re also tied together.

  Marriage is also like a miniature Indra’s net. The Indian god, Indra, hung a wonderful net stretching out infinitely in all directions, with a single glittering jewel in each eye of the net. Each jewel is its own self, and at the same time it reflects all the other jewels in the net. And there are an infinite number of jewels. When we’re together with someone, we have our independence, and at the same time our life is our spouse’s life, and vice versa. Little by little, by building these ties, we make Indra’s net more explicit. We’re connected and reflect each other whether we realize it or not, but relationships help us become conscious of it. That’s the difference between theory and practice. So marriage is a practice of making two streams of life three.

  JEFF: Speaking of marriage, do you snore?

  BERNIE: I don’t.

  JEFF: Not at all? Eve’s never complained?

  BERNIE: She snores. She’s got asthma and all kinds of allergies. And my dog, Bubale, the pit bull, snores. But I don’t.

  JEFF: I snore a little bit. Sue snores. My mother was a champion snorer. If she’d had some rhythm, got a groove going, that would have been one thing, but she had these uneven snorts punctuated by long pauses, leaving me to wait for the next snort, which never came when I expected it. Trying to sleep next to a snorer is interesting. On the one hand, you can decide to be with the snoring. On the other hand, you can move elsewhere and find a quieter place to sleep. How do you work with it?

  BERNIE: Moving away is working with it.

  JEFF: Just get the hell out of Dodge, man. But you can apply that to other uncomfortable situations, too. It gets back to what the Stranger says: Takin’ ’er easy. Taking care of yourself.

  BERNIE: I tell people that when stuff comes up and at a certain point it feels like it’s too much, move on. It’s not going anywhere and there’ll be a time when you’ll be ready to work with it. For now, listen to yourself. If it’s not the time, don’t push it. Gently down the stream. Some people say you have to work with everything, but there’s a time and a place. If it feels like a knot, wait. It will come up again when you and the universe are ready.

  JEFF: But there’s also the sense of urgency, you know: Now’s the time!

  BERNIE: Now’s always the time. This goes back to flowing with the grain. If there’s stuff you’ve got to deal with and you’re ready, now’s the time. But if you feel like you’ve got to get out because you can’t deal with this now, I would tell you to listen to yourself and wait. Don’t cause yourself to stumble.

  JEFF: Because in the long run that could deter you from finally getting where you want to go. It’ll turn you off the whole process.

  I think there are two streams pulling at us all the time, or at me, anyway. One is toward life and the other is toward death. The one toward life says, Open, open, open. I remember dropping LSD, and it was like: Open—I’m a little uncomfortable, but . . . open, open—there’s beauty here—open, open. But I overdosed on it once, and it became: I’m all the way open and I can’t do it anymore!

  So there’s opening up and there’s the resistance to opening up. We’re afraid that life will say, Oh, yeah? Well, check this out. You think you can do that? Okay, let’s see you. The more you open, things just seem to get tougher and more demanding. When that happens to me, my impulse is to just say, Fuck it. . . . Please, let it be over. Let me just be a rock, or something; I’m tired of this. I resist giving what’s needed because the need is so great. Life’s asking for everything and I’m holding on.

  BERNIE: And there’s also our conditioning, the life we’re used to. We might be in a marriage where we’re beating each other up. We don’t like it, we complain, but we’re used to it. At the same time, something’s pulling us toward a new birth, a new opening, but we don’t know what it is, so we’re afraid. We’re torn between the unknown and the known, where we’re comfortable.

  JEFF: But life won’t let you stay there.

  BERNIE: New shit will always come to light, but it’s hard to welcome something new because we have no idea what it will look like or where it’s going to take us. It’s not easy, but it’s always growth.

  JEFF: And it’s sort of the only game in town, you know? Because—BOOM! We are born. What choice do we have?

  BERNIE: It’s the only game in town. Still, most of us won’t play the game.

  JEFF: To consciously play the game is wild. I remember when I first got involved with the Hunger Project over thirty years ago. Werner Erhard had these gatherings where he would talk about how enormous the problem of world hunger is, and how we know how to end it. He specified the different countries that had ended hunger and how they’d done it. It’s not a problem of there not being enough food or money, or know-how, the problem is creating the political will to end it.

  Then he asked the question, “What are you willing to do to create that political will? What can you do?” He asked us not to make a gesture like donating a hundred bucks just to scratch the guilt itch, you know, to relieve ourselves of guilt, but to really do something that felt organic to our lives, something we could sustain. So I started to think about it and got really excited: Wow! Hunger is so prevalent and at the same time so healable. And if we could end hunger, think of what confidence that would give us to address all our other deep life problems.

  I asked myself, What are you willing to do, Jeff? Well, a guy who’s involved with the media as much as you are can get the word out, meet with politicians, make movies about it. So first I got excited in a big way, and then I started to think: Do you really wanna do this, man? Are you sure? Are you up to it? A lot’s going to be asked of you. You already have these feelings of tightness, you’re not sure if you’re gonna be able to pull it off. On the flip side, are you willing to go through life knowing that hunger can be ended and not do anything? Isn’t that much worse?

  So I made a deal with myself. I decided to go toward the light that I could see at the end of the tunnel but if I needed to stop for a little while, that would be okay. If I was going to be asked to do something I wasn’t willing to do, I wouldn’t let it turn me off the entire thing, I would just take a rest for a while. This helped me
go further and further, each time asking myself to do a little bit more, and then a little bit more.

  That deal continued later, too, when I got involved with the End Hunger Network, along with Monte Factor, Jerry Michaud, and some others. As I suspected, I was asked to do stuff I didn’t want to do. Some was too hard, too much of a reach, and I just said no. Some was just hard enough to make me stretch, like: That’s gonna be hard, man, but I’ll give it a try.

  The same thing happens in other areas of my life. I do these little experiments: I know you feel like that, but just try it and see what happens. If it’s not too far out of reach, I do it. And with each such experiment I learn something that I didn’t know before. I just feel my way into it: Whoa, this is—this is okay—I feel good. It’s a stretch, and I’m feeling on purpose.

  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

  JEFF: 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?

  BERNIE: 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.

  JEFF: What did he do?

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

  JEFF: 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.

  BERNIE: 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.

  JEFF: 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.

  BERNIE: 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.

  JEFF: 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.