When I took philosophy classes, I often felt as though I entered a place where a gang fight was all set to happen when I entered the class room. I remember no women. The all-male class seemed calm but ready. I pictured someone being "weak" enough to utter a sound, perhaps a clearing of the throat. Instantly, the fight would erupt! "I object!" "J'accuse!" "But, you have forgotten...!" Noise! Energy! Analysis! Thoughts! Voices and wit and sound.
When I first read of the Flower Sermon, I was amazed. All my training, experience and background had pointed in the same direction as the philosophy class: thought! Effort! Attack! Nothing had said to just rest quietly. I, like my intellectual friend, had come from a practice of 'verbalism': discuss everything from every possible angle. Even in group prayers, we were constructing and transmitting a message to Heaven. But there are other directions. Just stop and sit. As Sylvia Boorstein's title says, "Don't Just Do Something. Sit There!"
In our usual Western vigorous parlance, we might say," Zip it!" Shut up! As the Bible puts it, "Be still and know that I am God"(Psalm 46). Mark Epstein's "Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart" describes how his Western training as a psychiatrist was similarly pointed toward finding and removing sickness and imbalances. That is a good strategy for sure. Much good indeed has come from rigorous pursuit of answers and solutions. However, as with most ideas, it seems to have limits. Listening to "The Demon Under the Microscope" by Thomas Hager, I heard about the very, very rigorous efforts of German chemists to find chemicals that humans could safely ingest that would stop bacterial infections such as strep and staph. One can't listen to details of the effort and time and patience and money focused on that effort so important to all human life without respecting the Western strategy, which, by the way, is becoming a world strategy.
However, as we hear more ideas of disease marketing that searches for some condition which humans will pay for a pill to remove, a condition of human life, it becomes clear that relentless effort in one direction can lead us astray. The British psychologist Dr. Petra Boynton is one of many voices that are warning of the drift toward taking human states and marketing pills that supposedly cure or lessen them. She is referring to female sexual desire but Epstein sees the many versions of feeling empty and unfulfilled as a much more important example. The West has tried to cure that feeling while the East has welcomed it as the tip of entering into a larger life and great accord with existence.
