If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same … 1
This ‘semi sabbatical’ I keep banging on about – talking, talking, talking about the virtues of silence! – is to serve two purposes. One is to dive – having spent decades trying, for the most part lurching from one side to t’other, to balance political acuity with ‘spiritual’ inquiry – into the latter. The other is to make time, including sleep-on-it time, to explore – at a juncture of great peril both for humanity and the countless innocent species “we” 2 seem bent on taking out with us – fundamentals of power and morality, without which political acuity is little more than a box of clever tricks.
Even my way of framing this is clumsily non-dialectical, but at least it’s out there.
By cosmic coincidence of the third kind I received a few days ago a post alert from a Media Lens primarily focused on media propaganda but at times offering a ‘spiritual’ slant, one of the pair running things being Buddhist. 3 By even greater cosmic coincidence – ain’t it clear the universe is messaging me? – I received not half an hour ago, from a friend in France, a video by another Buddhist, Alan Watts.
I’ll post The Universe Using You as Its Nervous System tomorrow. Today’s shot of the spiritual, 4 delivered without further ado, is that Media Lens piece …
The Magic Begging Bowl, Part 1 – The Failure Of Success
A beggar knocked on the door of a great king. By chance, the king himself opened the door. The beggar was not an ordinary beggar, he was almost luminous. He had such grace, such beauty, such a mysterious aura, that even the king felt jealous. He asked, “What do you want?” still pretending – “I have not taken any note of you” – “What do you want?”
The beggar showed the king his begging bowl and he said, “I would like it to be filled.”
The king said, “That’s all? With what do you want it to be filled?”
The beggar said, “Anything will do, but the condition is that you have to fill it; otherwise, don’t try.”
It was a challenge to the king. He said, “What do you mean by it? Can’t I fill this small begging bowl? And you don’t say with what.”
The beggar said, “That is irrelevant. Anything will do, even pebbles, stones, but fill it! The condition is: I will not leave the door if you start filling it; unless it is filled, I will remain here.”
The king ordered his prime minister to fill the begging bowl with diamonds; he had millions of diamonds: “This beggar has to be shown that he is encountering a king!” But soon the king became aware that he had been deceived. The begging bowl was as extraordinary as the beggar, more so in fact: anything dropped into it would simply be gone, would disappear. It remained empty. The treasures were thrown into it, but they all disappeared.
By the evening the whole capital had gathered. The king was now becoming almost desperate: the diamonds finished, then the gold, and then the gold was finished, then the silver, and then the silver was finished…. The sun was setting, and the king’s sun had also set. His whole treasury was empty, and the begging bowl was still the same, empty, not even a trace! It swallowed all his kingdom. It was too much!
Now the king knew that he had been trapped. He fell at the feet of the beggar and said, “Forgive me. I was wrong to accept the challenge. This begging bowl is not an ordinary begging bowl. You deceived me – there is some magic in it.”
And the beggar laughed and he said, “There is no magic in it: I have made it out of the skull of a man.”
The king said, “I don’t understand. What do you mean? If it is just made out of the skull of a man, how can it go on swallowing my whole kingdom?”
And the beggar said, “That’s what is happening everywhere: NOBODY is ever satisfied. The begging bowl in the head always remains empty. It is an ordinary skull, just like everybody else’s.”’
Osho ‘Bhagwan’ Rajneesh, ‘The Guest – Talks on Kabir’, 1981, pp.223-224
World Cup Car Wash
In 2003, Ben Cohen was part of the only England team to have won the Rugby World Cup. Cohen commented on that great triumph:
‘It meant everything, winning a World Cup.’
It is easy to imagine the thrill of being part of that team when Jonny Wilkinson nailed that drop goal in the dying seconds of the match!
We can imagine the euphoria, knowing that the world is falling at your feet, knowing that people will forever say: ‘That guy won the World Cup!’
Remarkably, one might think, the magic begging bowl in Cohen’s head sees it differently:
‘The bigger issue for me was that I just didn’t get a skill set or a life skill, and now I think, well, OK, winning a World Cup doesn’t really bring me anything. It’s not like it’s a degree, you know.’
This is pretty astonishing: winning the World Cup ‘didn’t really bring… anything’… unlike a degree! It echoes a comment made by hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst who helped win the football World Cup for England in 1966:
‘There was a tremendous feeling of anti-climax when we got home… I cut the lawn because I hadn’t been home for ages. Then I washed the car. It was pretty much like any other Sunday afternoon… It might sound a bit pretentious, but for me it had been another football match, albeit a very important one… It’s just like another day at the office. People may find that hard to believe but that’s how I recall it, and so do many of my teammates at the time.’ (Geoff Hurst, ‘1966 And All That – My Autobiography’, Headline Book Publishing, 2001, p.18)
Cohen’s regret:
‘I probably wish I’d got a skill set and a steady job.’
To his credit, he understands how his begging bowl would have responded to that course of action:
‘Then I probably would have looked the other way and thought “I wish I could have been a sportsman”. But the reality is I would probably rather have been over [on the nonathletic side], because it’s going to suit me for the rest of my life, instead of a portion of my life. When you sort of get [to retirement] you think: “I’m in my 30s, who am I?” And at that point you think, I am lonely here, this is sink or swim.’
He added:
‘We’re all in a huddle and it’s happy days, “yeah great, we can do this”. Then you turn around 180 degrees and it’s f—— lonely. You go, “I’m out on my own, where do I go now?” And then you think “oh s—, am I fit for purpose?”. That whole journey needs to be a transitional phase into coping skills and deconditioning into civvy street.’
Being part of a World Cup-winning rugby squad sounds like life lived at the exact opposite end of the spectrum from ‘f…… lonely’. It sounds like the ultimate social life: life-long friends bonded by glory, limitless grateful fans and admirers.
Spare a thought for golfing great Scottie Scheffler, who has been world number one for a total of 167 weeks and whose begging bowl has received total career earnings in excess of $195m …
Continued on the Media Lens substack …
Don’t we all recognise the truth voiced by Ben Cohen, Geoff Hurst and, when we reflect on it, Kipling’s unmasking of ‘Triumph’ and ‘Disaster’? (When I write a post I deem a job well done, I know peace for all of five minutes.) Aren’t we all tormented by the quintessential unfillability of our begging bowls?
Just saying.
Tomorrow I’ll post Alan ‘Way of Zen’ Watts on the chimera of separation.
* * *
- Rudyard Kipling – as if you didn’t know
- By ‘we’ I don’t mean your unforgivable little failure to recycle every bottle top, or my little issues around anger. I mean neoliberal ecocide and empire’s unholy savagery. When I say ‘only connect’, it’s not a call to false equivalences whose effect is to absolve the criminals in power; the 0.01% who wreak havoc and slaughter for their own insatiable gain.
- Since posting I’ve had this from author David Edwards at Media Lens:
By the way, it’s not a big deal, but I’m not a Buddhist. I’ve studied a lot of Buddhism, experimented with a lot of Buddhist meditations, but I’m not an ‘-ist’ :o)
- I don’t like the word ‘spiritual’, for reasons I’ve given before, and would use ‘existential’ if I didn’t need that for other duties.
Delighted to serve the universe on that one !
Universe be with you, my son …