Zen and Spiderman

How’s that for a pretentious title? Now you’re thinking how is he going to pull that one off ? What has Zen got to do with Spiderman? Is this guy a jerk or what!?

Not much. Or everything. I don’t know.

Let’s start with the beginning. So here I am in FLA. Like in FLA what else is there to do when you’re not hanging out at the beach reading the new Brad Warner book (my hero!) ? Except go to the movies, and there is a movie theater here with big ‘ol seats that are real chairs with drinks holders in the arms, and a handy place for the popcorn. So, let’s face it. I can’t resist. Add to that the fact that it is off season down here and no one goes to the cinema (there were about ten people is this one) and well I’m goin’ and nothin, not even Brad is gonna stop me!

So you’re thinkin’ “Was the movie good?” I thought it was great. I’m not kidding. It really wasn’t bad at all. You know it was the Spiderman story re-told. Awkward boy meets spider. Spider bites boy. Boy gets super powers. Then spider-boy saves the world. Pretty much literally. But I’m not gonna tell the whole story if you wanna to go and see it yourself.

Ok. Yeah, it’s violent. There are fights. There are guns. There’s a monster. There’s even a love story which is a bit if a tear jerker. Nothin’ wrong with that. But…But what? I’m a sucker for these super hero movies. I always go and see them when I can. The question is why? Aren’t they everything that’s wrong with America? Yeah. There are guns. I hate even looking at guns. And the fights? Yeah, ok the fights are bs and they’re far too noisy. I agree, even if I like the occasional Kung-fu movie, especially the ones with the ladies who fly around over bamboo trees in ways even Buddhist monks couldn’t do.

Here’s the problem. Even more than the violence, what’s wrong with the film is the image it projects. And the effect of that image.  It seems to go from one extreme to another. The awkward teenager (I’m simplifying, but hold on) becomes a super-hero. The scientist with unclear ethics becomes a monster advocating a Übermensch philosophy. This to me seems to me to be a very bad way of seeing the world. And I am not talking about the mad scientist. I call it the bi-polar thread in American culture. And I get to thinking that Brad was absolutely right when he talked about TV culture in Zen, Sex and Sin. ” The folks who make TV shows, movies, and commercials, know how to get you wanting the stuff…Mainstream TV shows have millions of people convinced that if they aren’t living the kinds of lives they see on screen something must be terribly wrong.” (p. 79) And why do we want the stuff? Because they’re selling us the same old stories we are always telling ourselves. The ones that get us into trouble in the first place. At least the ones I find myself telling myself. And these stories are always about extremes. About magical solutions…

Take Spiderman.  I’m talking about the kid himself who is portrayed as a semi-loser, or even a loser to start with. I personally could almost immediately relate to the character, as I imagine countless other spectators did.That’s because this culture has taught us to look at ourselves in a certain way, through a warped lens of extreme definitions of ourselves that do not correspond to reality. Through that pair of sunglasses with a different lens on each side. Loser on one side and winner on the other. Only, and here’s the rub, do we have both of our eyes open?

I imagine that we all had a rough time with the school bullies when we were at high school (unless of course we were school bullies/hot-shots-but I think that when it comes right down to it being a loser or being a hot-shot is the same problem.)  Anyhow,  we all fell in love with someone outside of our league, and we all did awkward things. It’s when the kid becomes Spiderman that things seem to go wrong. A little insect bite and magically (that’s the word and here comes the magic solution to all his problems) he is transformed into something he is not and can never be…You can imagine the rest.

Here’s the thing. And this is where I think Brad is right when he talks about the result of doing Zazen. There are no magical solutions. We don’t become Supermen or Superwomen. And any belief in a magical solution to our problems is probably part of the problem, if not the problem itself. This has been very directly and concretely my experience of Zazen. Even on my stupid, low and inexperienced level it is obvious that Zazen is in no way magic. As Deshimaru once said “Zen is suffering”. It is an antidote to the bi-polar story telling inherent in American culture-to both the cause and the effect of this manic story American culture has been telling itself (cynically?) for years.

So let’s come back to the metaphor of the sun-glasses. Here’s my point. If I learn to look through both lenses at the same time, I get a different picture. I am not saying that this is easy or that I have even succeeded at it for any length of time. Somehow I don’t think it works that way. At least not in my experience. Anyhow, the different picture we get is neither that of the winner nor that of the loser exclusively, but something else. For one I don’t even know if it’s legitimate to call this a picture. I don’t think that can be said about Zazen. Or what Zazen teaches us.

Anyhow this article is getting too long and I’m not sure I have made my point. This has been making me think about a Dogen quote, one that I first read about in Brad Warner’s book on the Shobogenzo called Sit down and Shut up: “Flowers, though we may be attached to them, still fall while weeds, though we may hate them, still flourish.”