Author and Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer is a former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation. His latest book is Sailing Home: Using Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls. The book draws upon the rich mythology of The Odyssey to help us understand our own spiritual journeys.
This is not another gimmicky self-help book. It is about you and your life, in all its messiness and seeming misdirection.
In the Introduction, Fischer writes that the spiritual odyssey is "full of irony, depth, strangeness and wonder. Full of paradox. In it, everything changes and nothing changes. And we will all make this journey, each in our own way, no matter how much we insist on ignoring, denying, forgetting or working against it."
In a talk and reading from his book on July 8, 2008, at the Empty Hand Zen Center in New Rochelle, NY, Fischer led everyone in the zendo in a focused exercise, first recalling a memory from early childhood, then another memory from later in childhood. This exercise is mentioned in the interview below.
Interview With Norman Fischer
B: I was intrigued by the part of the book about false stories, because as a Zen student I've been trying not to talk to myself about myself. And this is a book about talking to myself about myself, and you were talking about false stories. Can you elaborate a little on that? What do we do with our stories? What can we learn from that? What narrative have I got going on in my head about myself, and what is that telling me?
NORMAN FISCHER: Well, in the Odyssey there's a lot of deception, a lot of false stories. And Odysseus, and sometimes Athena, tell false stories for a purpose, in order to further the plot, in order get to their next point. And what I'm saying in the book is that's what we do, too.
When we have a story that we're telling ourselves that we believe, maybe, but that really isn't true, and we get into trouble in our lives because our story doesn't really fit who we are, we don't need to complain too much to ourselves. Maybe we need that false story to get to us to the next stage of life.
It's too idealistic, probably, to think that we're never going to have any stories, that we won't be telling ourselves stories. It's an acknowledgment that we are going to be telling ourselves stories, and that we're going to tell true stories and we're going to tell false stories. And both are necessary, because we're on a journey, and we're going to have to do whatever it takes to keep us going forward.
So, if we hold our stories lightly and realize that every story is temporary, and no story is the whole story, and the story may be true or it may be false, either way, it will take us where we need to go. If we have that view of our stories, we'll be less likely to be captured by them and confused by them.
B: You see them as a upaya.
NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, that's right. Look at all the deceptive stories the Buddha tells in the Lotus Sutra.
B: Like the Burning House story.
NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, exactly, the Burning House story and the Magical City story. Exactly the same.
B: As you've been talking to people about your book, have you been doing this exercise we did this evening?
NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, I've been doing this exercise. And it's worked very well.
B: What sort of things do people tell you come up for them? Anything in particular?
NORMAN FISCHER: I think they're telling me it makes them realize how many stories there are of their lives, that they could tell many, many stories that would all be true. And they realize that in fact they don't do that. They have a story that they stick to, and that they think is true, and this makes them realize there are many possible stories.
B: We edit as we go along.
NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, and we don't realize we're doing that. The stories that we tell ourselves are stories that come from a shared, materialist, socially constructed point of view. That's a story that of course we have to tell, but it's only one of the many stories. We don't see that it's a story from a social construct based on a materialist philosophy of life. We don't see it that way. We just think that's our story. We think that's really what happened. And we fail to realize that we could tell a lot of different versions of our story, and they can be quite amazing.
One of my theories is that we've all had incredibly powerful religious experiences in our lives, mostly as children, and we've literally been socialized out of them. Often we don't even remember them, because we've been taught they're not anything worth remembering or worth validating. And so they get knocked out of us. We suffer a lot for lack of it, because we're losing our imaginations as we get socialized.
Goodness knows our materialistic culture has provided tremendous material benefits to us and to others in the world, but it has impoverished our imaginations, and it's impoverished our souls to a great extent because we think this is the only world that there is. And it's only been a tiny time in human history that people believe that this is the only world that there is.
And we pretty much all believe that. Even when people insist on their spiritual experiences, they're insisting on them, almost, y'know, the lady doth protest too much. They're almost reinforcing that same view. So we need a more porous and more open view of what our lives are.
