Witch Eye: Just Say Yes! by Gabriel Carrillo

There was a while, a long time ago, when I was a quite serious, if not exactly devout, Buddhist. I have never lost my admiration for the grand scope and essential nobility of Buddhist thought, nor for the variety and excellence of Buddhist technique, but it is long since I have been able to consider myself a Buddhist.

Why? The Four Noble Truths, right at the very foundation of all Buddhist systems. I ceased a long time ago to accept that the essence of life is pain and that the highest good is to escape from the wheel of birth and death into boundless nothingness. As Ramakrishna said, in very much the same context, "I wish to taste sugar, I do not wish to be sugar."

If both I and the world in which I live are illusion, Maya, then to any measuring stick available we are both as real as we are unreal. By each other's standards, more so, in fact, as our apparent reality can be seen and felt, while our unreality cannot. If the I that measures, the measuring stick with which I measure, and the act of measuring itself are all equally illusory, it is as true to say that they are equally real.

One must remember that in Buddhist metaphysics impermanence is one of the principle marks of illusion. Anything which is subject to change or transformation is unreal because of its impermanence. A powerful and compelling view, but perhaps too absolute, too rigorous in its insistence in a view from an eternity which anyway does not exist in Buddhist teaching, whose nonexistence is in fact a major focus of Buddhist thought. It refuses to recognize the power of the fragile and transitory beauty it dismisses except in what seems to me to be the very highest forms such as Zen, and does not admit the possibility that impermanence is a part of the beauty.

There is a story, I believe on the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, of two monks walking along the wall of a monastery observing a banner flapping in the wind. "Look," says one. "Banner is moving."

"No," says the other. "Wind is moving."

A senior monk, perhaps the venerable Sixth Patriarch, overhearing, said, "Banner is not moving, wind is not moving, Mind is moving."

To which I say, "Perhaps all three are moving equally, separate but interconnected parts of one process."

If however Maya is seen as a play, as Divine Play, as divinity dancing with Herself, then it behooves us to dance the dance and not spoil the game. Instead of saying, "Everything is an illusion from which we must escape," it becomes possible to say, "Everything is play; shine as brightly as you can."

This game is a game that really has neither winners nor losers, and whose object should be for everyone to work together to keep the ball in the air forever.

What the Buddhists call the Wheel of Life, we, with a bow to Mr. Eliade, call the Eternal Return, assenting to and rejoicing in that which Buddhism tries to escape. We give our assent to that which Buddhism negates; rather than sit out the dance in a full lotus, we throw ourselves into dancing the mystery of birth and love and death with joyous abandon, "gladly and with excitement and with deliberate ignorance of the outcoum [sic]."

So we celebrate the wheel of the year and the waxing and waning of the moon, the rhythms of night and day, the rhythms of sex and the breathing patterns of childbirth. As the Reverend Robert Kirk wrote of the faeries in The Secret Commonwealth, published in Scotland in 1691, "'Tis ane of their Tenets, that nothing perisheth, but (as the Sun and Year) everything goes in a circle, lesser or greater, and is renewed and refreshed in its Revolutions; as 'tis another, that every bodie in the creation moves (which is a sort of life); and that nothing moves, but has another Animal moving on it; and so on, to the utmost minutest particle that's capable to be a receptacle of life."

If you examine pagan religious systems you will find that the bulk of them embrace a notion of time itself as cyclic, a great wheel whose movement is to be celebrated and aided at every season.

The universe itself is dancing with and about us; that dance is the dance of our very nature, and that dance I accept wholeheartedly. In that joyous assent to life and death is the seasons' round, the wheel of the year, the promise of the seed, the replanting of the oak; in that assent lies our dreams, our power, and our promise.

I will note here in passing that if I reject the Buddhist view of the world of illusion and goal of disinvolvement, I reject far more strenuously the damaging Christian view* of our entire life on this planet as a sort of boot camp readying us for eternity and whose only significance is as a testing ground. "This world is not my home," the old hymn goes; well, it may not be your home but it damn well sure is mine and I'll thank you to mind your manners and not make a mess.

A postcard from Amsterdam on my front door says, "You are a guest of nature. Behave."

One of the most destructive aspects of the Christian view of life and the world is the grim seriousness with which everything is to be taken. "Fight the good fight!" "Am I a soldier of the Cross?" "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war." The motif of war, struggle, and violence is central to both Christian history and Christian theology; one triumphs in this life by winning the fight against one's baser nature (for which mostly read anything that feels too good) and earning a gold crown and a place among the angels in the life to come. But when you fight against yourself, you always lose.

We have this world and this life, and nothing else -- at least nothing else that is certain, that we can feel and touch. The question, perhaps the only question that has ever been worth asking, is how best to live it.

The answer I have come to is play. Experiment. Do what feels good without regards to the tortuous rhetoric of long-dead saints like Origen, who said, "I believe because it is absurd," and, to stem the sexual urges that made chastity a burden, severed his own genitals. Such men and women were probably psychotics living out their sick fantasies.

The answer, my friends, is to just say YES. Yes to the whole bloody, joyous, messy, painful business of birth and life and death, yes to the fragile and transitory exquisiteness of moonlight on water and flesh moving under your hands. Accept the whole journey from newborn babe to dead meat.

Did those last words give you pause? Good; they were meant to. Don't flinch and turn your eyes away; look it square in the face: dead meat. We all have an appointment in Samarra someday. Undying spirit or not, your flesh and mine, my friend, and all the lovely flesh we have ever cherished, will one day in a span of time that will seem in retrospect the twinkling of an eye be transformed into piles of dead meat, with as likely as not some bozo dressed in white pumping formaldehyde into them in a grisly, meaningless attempt to provide some semblance of immortality by keeping them from rotting.

No one may stay the hand of change. We are impermanent, yes, but we are not illusion. We may be sparks burning as we fall through the night towards that final darkness, but for that span of time in which we fall burning, we are.

Rather than fearing death, let it be the light spur of urgency reminding you to live to the fullest, without holding back, to shine as brightly as you can against the dark. As a Chinese poet whose name I forget wrote, "This moment will not come twice; an inch of time is worth a foot of jade."

What, you may ask, about reincarnation, or the Summerland, the Appleland; those are beliefs unsupported by concrete evidence. They may be correct in one way or another, or be no more than wishful thinking. I have an opinion, but it is just that, unsupported by evidence that could convince a skeptic. And does it, can it, should it matter to us here and now?

I remember a passage from the Tripitaka in which the Buddha is asked about death and existence after death, and answers, "Why do you seek to understand death when you have not yet understood life?"

Such beliefs should, I think, make no difference in how we live here and now. We do not need the fear of heaven and the pleasure of hell to coax us to be "good." If anything, there is benefit to be derived from the certainty that there is nothing in the end but rotting meat. It reminds us not to let life with its infinite possibilities pass us by while we watch passively from the sidelines hoping someone will want to dance with us.

But you may say, accept pleasure and you must accept pain. Yes, I nod sagely, smiling a crooked smile, that's right. Very good; you're paying attention. But reject pleasure and you will still have pain to endure; fight pain and you make it worse.

Pain only hurts; there are worse things. Things like fear and guilt, which paralyze the will and rob life of the joy and spontaneity of free-flow.

Pain hurts and pleasure pleases. Take them together. But fear and guilt, shame and restriction, these have no place, at least in my life. They are the false inheritance of systems of thought aimed at controlling us, aimed at making us good sheep ready to follow the Judas goat up the ramp to the slaughterhouse.

They are the tools of those who claim power over us, who hold power over us only because we give it to them, and whose real interest in us is limited to how much wool, meat, and tallow they can make from our lives. The good shepherd cares for the lost lamb, all right, with dollar signs in his eyes and lamb chops on his mind. His stomach comes later.

Fear and guilt and shame: they alienate us from ourselves, from our very nature and bodies, even from our dreams. Estranged from ourselves, we spend our lives searching for the approval of others, or for power, money, position to shelter us from their disapproval.

Driven by insecurity, by fear of ourselves planted at the very deepest levels of our being by event he most well-meaning and loving parents and teachers (themselves victims of an ugly inheritance) we run, we hide, we learn to be good, productive, and uncomplaining citizens-as if the highest good to which we could aspire is to spend our brief precious flicker of time building better automobiles, scrubbing other peoples' floors or praying on our knees to the God who taught us shame, the God who in the legends of his own faith drove us out of the garden for tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge lest we should be tempted to taste of the Tree of Life and become too much like him for his petulant comfort.

This morning's paper brought me a quote from a local Christian newsletter put out by a conservative Presbyterian church active in the fight to deprive gay people of basic civil rights and criminalize abortion: "The religion of Jesus Christ, the only true religion, seek sot dominate every thought and bring it in captivity to Jesus Christ."

A jealous God indeed! But how shall I accept in a God what I would not accept in a lover or friend? And this is the same God whom, were I a Christian, I would have to believe created me with homoerotic desires which he then forbade me to act upon. I would as soon dance with Xipe Totec in the fresh-flayed skin of young boys as kneel to a God who would b so cruel. But what can you expect from a malignant dust devil from Sinai grafted onto a Lebanese war-god?

The machine runs, as it has always run, on fear and guilt and shame, chewing up human lives and hopes and dreams and spitting out poisoned air and earth and water, always taking reality and giving us symbols in return. To the machine alone, I say No! with the resounding finality not of words but of the substance and pattern of my whole life.

My life is my life; I will not waste it knowingly, nor give it up to any other.

I have seen much of life, in these years, often stripped to its most basic essentials. I have held a friend, sliced up and stabbed in a knife fight, while his wounds were bandaged. I have counted myself among the homeless for 18 months, and watched through the night with a friend on the edge of death from a motorcycle wreck. I have had an old woman die while I held her hand, and been hungry, and been mugged, and known love and lust in a thousand forms, felt a thousand acceptances and a thousand rejections, and the beauties of the world that are so intense that one weeps and laughs with the thought of them. I have both played and listened to music, and gone on my journeys-not once but over and over-into that strange country from which no traveler ever returns unchanged. I have seen much of life, and of death, and of change, and I say if I had it all to do again, I would not only do more, but my regrets , such as they are (for they are not a thing I feed) are almost all for the chances not seized, the risks not taken, the pleasures refused.

Just say yes, did I say? Don't just say it; shriek it with every fiber of your being. Roar it with your whole body so that its echoes will resound long after your voice has fallen silent. Remember the story of the Zen master who fell over a cliff, catching himself on a straggling vine halfway to the bottom, swinging by one hand as the vine slowly loosens its precarious grip on the rocky face. Below him a tiger roars, waiting for him to fall; his other hand and feet find nothing to hold to. In that last instant he sees a few ripe berries on the vine he holds. Faced thus with imminent death, what does he do? With his free hand he plucks and eats them. How delicious!

Flinch from nothing; dare everything.