Buddhist Village

A recent teacher gave the advice, "Practice acceptance. Accept everything." And my calculating, useful, mind begin to spin and analyze. Let's see, "Sometimes non-acceptance is good." I can point to examples that "confirm this." And Buddhist countries that have "accepted regimes" have done very poorly relative to democracies which are always in some sort of mostly peaceful revolt or non-acceptance. And my mind spun on, trying to figure out the boundaries and conditions under which "acceptance" is good advice and "acceptance" is obviously bad advice.

If the teacher had given me a Rinzai koan, it would not have bothered me much unless I thought I'd be humiliated or be whacked with a stick for giving the wrong answer. Rinzai koans have never seemed to grab the mind by the "nuts" so to speak.

I do not know what the teacher intended with his advice. I do not think he was trying to give me a koan; I think he was stating what he'd been taught, and found useful. Perhaps he was. I don't know -- and at this point don't really care.

As I was running the other day, it occurred to me that what I had not been given any advice for what Stephen Batchelor in The Faith to Doubt calls the calculating mind. It could not compute, because of contradictory experience, the advice in any useful fashion to determine where it would be useful and where it would not. Like a a shaft of light penetrating a dark cave, I realized I had been given a large dose of ipecac for the calculating mind, and it was barfing its head off. All the complaints were true in its framework, of course; that is why it found the advice so repugnant. Mind vomit -- all my questions and objections were just mind vomit. What a mess the vomit caused!

For the moment, though the calculating mind is quiet and empty on that point. It has finally realized that the advice is not something it can handle, and it is glad to be free of the annoyance of conflict. What acceptance means is not another "useful concept" that can be applied in some predictable fashion. It is not a solution to a problem. It is not a directive to be followed.

Rather it is a koan whose answer cannot be predetermined, but only unraveled and repeatedly solved in the immediacy of each moment. It is both traditional "acceptance" in some things, and acceptance that one can no longer accept something in the next. It is the acceptance that one does not know what to do, and acceptance of knowing what to do and not wanting to do it. It is the acceptance of a father who turns his son in for a parole violation, because it is the best way to get him off the drugs and away from acquaintances who are corrupting him again. And it is the non-acceptance of his son's replay of a downward spiral. The calculating mind boggles. The meditative mind doesn't. Life doesn't.

Acceptance vs. non-acceptance. That is the quandary of only a calculating mind. The meditative mind just reaches out in answer to whatever it finds, and does not shirk from that reach because it is accepting and non-accepting at the same time.

Damn. All that time spent in the mind vomitorium.