The Radical Spirituality of Generation X, Part 3: Seekers Wanted, Apply Within Finding a Livelihood for the Modern Spiritual Life - By: Georg Buehler In college, I became passionately involved in spiritual matters. I devoured books, I visited teachers, I meditated. I chartered a student organization called the Self Knowledge Symposium and hung out with other people equally enthralled by the possibility that we could find Answers for ourselves. And then, as we neared graduation, we started to ask the same real-life profound-yet-mundane question that dogs every college student: what am I going to do now? Which is really a euphemistic way of asking what your parents are asking: “When are you going to get a Job?” (From the volume Radical Spirit, edited by Stephen Dinan) The Job is, after all, the central point of American identity. We are profoundly identified with our livelihoods. The answer to “Who are you?” is usually answered with a vocation: “I’m a carpenter. I’m a lawyer. I’m a C++ programmer.” Yet, after aspiring to follow in the footsteps of Jesus or Buddha, to go after the Divine with all I’ve got, it seemed ludicrous to just go out and “get a job” like everyone else. If the spiritual quest is what I really care about, surely there is a way I can be doing it all the time? In a typical Generation X fashion, I was ready to do some radical tinkering with the traditional lifestyle, if that’s what it took. Putting Career on the Table Most people never really factor their livelihoods into their sense of spiritual life. Lots of people ask for work that is “meaningful,” “significant,” “fulfilling” . . . but I didn’t hear too many people saying, “I wonder how my job will affect my spiritual life?” Career was a given, an unquestioned necessity, something everyone did. Even those people I saw in meditation halls and retreats were, by and large, never really questioning their jobs. The prevailing attitude went something like this: “Well, this meditation stuff is all well and good, and it adds meaning and perspective to my life. But I’m not going to pick up and go to a monastery or anything. I still want to have a life and all.” There were others who resonated with my desire for full-time spirituality, but for whom it still seemed like too much of a sacrifice: “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about, I would love to quit my job and just work on this spiritual stuff . . . but my wife would kill me.” And then there were those who were right there with me, who knew that they wanted to put the spiritual quest at the center of their lives, and yet had no idea how. “What can we do? As far as I know, there are no monasteries for open-minded spiritual seekers of no particular tradition. Looks like we’re just going to have to muddle along, find some way to stay alive and make a living, and keep looking for a better situation.” I could relate to all these positions. I myself have not found any monastery to retreat to — I seem fated to live out my spiritual aspirations in a secular context. But to unquestioningly give eight or more of my best hours, every day, to something that is not directly relevant to the spiritual life seems awful. It runs the risk of trivializing the spiritual — it makes God an extracurricular activity, something to do in one’s “spare time,” something not worthy of full-time attention. Or, as J. D. Salinger’s character Zooey Glass sarcastically puts it: “God is my Hobby.” So, the question hit me hard upon graduation: “How does my job fit into my spiritual search?” At best, I imagined a job or career that had a direct bearing on my quest. At the very least, I had to make sure it didn’t get in the way. Everyday Zen vs. Everyway Zen Of course, I can’t go too far in this line of thinking without some well-meaning self-appointed sage touching me lightly on the arm and saying with a beatific smile, “But, spirituality is not limited to any particular activity! Everything you do can be spiritual, if you are alive in the moment. So all this talk of ‘right livelihood’ is irrelevant. Just be!” This line of reasoning always strikes me as either a) the highest state of wisdom or b) complete and utter bullshit, depending on who is saying it, and why. On the one hand, I have no doubt that from an enlightened perspective, this is absolutely true. If you are Awake, if you have obtained a level of witness-consciousness that is constant and unwavering, then you could do pretty much anything in your daily routine and still be “spiritual.” From the eternal perspective, everything is perfect, and nothing need be done. On the other hand, the exhortation to “just be” is an extremely potent rationalization for never changing a damn thing about your life. I am always suspicious of spiritual prescriptions that don’t involve any work. Especially with the newer, less dogmatic spiritual perspectives emerging on the scene, laziness has a way of masquerading as wisdom. I do believe that, for a spiritual person, everything they do can be a spiritual practice. But that is only because the spiritual seeker has consciously and deliberately constructed a life for himself that affirms his spiritual direction. The genuine seeker engages himself in practices and habits that benefit his quest — the books, the meditations, the friends, the teachers, the students, and all the other things that keep him on track. Likewise, the seeker gets rid of those things that get in the way of the search: the bad diet, the distracting TV shows, the obsessive attachments. Spirituality is no accident. There is a difference between “everyday Zen” — looking for spiritual lessons in the here-and-now — and what I call everyway Zen — the conscious commitment to shape every aspect of one’s life around a spiritual aspiration. They are by no means mutually exclusive. The whole goal of everyway Zen is to maximize the possibility of here-and-now revelations, the visions of God-immanent. But paradoxically, even if God is everywhere, it might be easier to find him in some places than others. We must at least accept the possibility that we will have to radically alter our way of life in order to find God. And it’s no help to say, “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do! What are all these spiritual practices I’m supposed to be embracing, anyway?” If you don’t know what to do, then the first step of the quest is to find out — and that in itself can be a full-time job. When my Zen teacher, Richard Rose, was asked about prayer, he replied, “Your whole life should be a prayer. And if your whole life were a prayer, it would be instantly answered.” So, we’re still on the hook. We have to make sure that our livelihoods are conducive to the spiritual path we are undertaking. Maybe that will mean finding ways to inject spirituality into common, ordinary roles, and then again, maybe that will mean throwing everything out and starting fresh. Opt Out So, faced with the prospect of jobs, the obvious question arises: “How much money do I really need to make?” If I’m hoarding my energy for spiritual purposes, then perhaps the best strategy is to sell as little of my time as possible. This line of reasoning spawned the most stereotypical of Generation X strategies: Slackerdom. I don’t hear the Slacker label too often nowadays. In the early nineties, when young people faced a tight job market and cynicism was still cool, “Slacker” struck just the right tone of willfulness and nonactivity. Today the cynicism is drying up, but the urge to forego full-scale careers is still alive and well, recast in the more descriptive phrase, “voluntary simplicity.” The thinking behind the simplicity movement goes something like this: “Everybody is stressed out and unhappy because they work at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need. So we’re just going to opt out — not buy all the frills of modern western culture, and just live on the bare necessities. We might lose a certain level of convenience, but we will gain our freedom.” There is a compelling cleanness in this kind of thinking. Think of it as budget-cutting with a vengeance. The simplicity movement is no different from any household’s struggle to balance the budget. The only difference is that EVERYthing is on the table. Who needs a house in a suburban neighborhood? Who needs a car? Who needs health insurance? At the crux of this movement is a very obvious (and therefore very overlooked) principle: standard of living (how much you consume) does not have a firm correlation to quality of life (how happy you are). I bought into it. Or, more accurately, I cashed out. I quit my job as a molecular biologist and moved to West Virginia to live on an isolated farm in the mountains. The land was owned by my Zen teacher, Richard Rose, who had converted his family farm into a rustic retreat center for spiritual seekers. He was more than glad to rent out the tiny log cabins in the woods to people who wanted to live a life of spiritual austerity. It was spartan, but beautiful in the summertime and blissfully free of expense. Rent was fifty bucks a month. We heated with wood, cut for free from the hundreds of acres around us. There was no electricity in the cabins, but a vegetarian diet was manageable with dry goods and lots of peanut butter. I figured I could live on less than $1000 a year. With a “burn-rate” so low, worries about income seemed almost trivial — indeed, a little more than a month of minimum wage labor could fulfill my needs for a whole year. I spent about eight months in my “Walden” phase, reading and writing and meditating and going for long walks in the woods. I had almost nothing at all, and yet I had everything I needed. It was one of the most beautiful periods of my life, precisely because it was so free of desire. Such simplicity made me realize first-hand how little one really needs to be happy. And, moreover, it blasted away the number-one rationalization that always stood in my way, namely, that total simplicity was no longer possible in the post-modern world. If I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the Buddha, it was still possible. So many of us are stuck with a Bible-school notion of historical revelation — that God was easier to find when we were all herding sheep and living in villages, but now that we have airplanes and science and cell-phones it is impossible to “go into the wilderness.” But, as it happens, it is just as possible, and just as difficult, as it ever was. I’m sure most of Jesus’ friends and family thought he was nuts to hang out in the desert for forty days. Of course, I knew it couldn’t last. Rose had warned me, in his West Virginian drawl: “Don’t stay out there too long, or you’ll get simple. Monk-simple. You’ll go to sleep. You need other people to keep you on the move.” And I could tell that it was true. I was very happy, but I wasn’t enlightened, either. My meditation was not yielding any insights, and I had a sneaking suspicion that my time alone would only bring diminishing returns. There is no magic in the woods, other than the magic we bring with us. The Cost of Society In the woods, I had been so free of needs that I was having a hard time understanding why anybody needed to make much money. Coming back into society, I learned why: to buy the company of others. Living on the farm was cheap largely because I wasn’t doing anything that put me in touch with other human beings. I was living in the middle of nowhere, three miles down a narrow bumpy dirt road, twenty miles away from the nearest grocery store. I wasn’t going to movies, or classes, or cafes. Rough work boots and stained T-shirts were good enough clothes for me, and there was no one around to demand any higher standard of dress. My cabin was dark, dingy, soot-stained, and hardly a comfortable place to host a guest . . . but I didn’t have any visitors. Had I lived at this level of poverty in Raleigh, I would have been considered “backwards” or “weird” — but there were no neighbors to worry about up in the hills of West Virginia. In short, I realized that human contact was my most expensive luxury, the only real luxury there is. An apartment near the university, clean clothes, a couch worth sitting on, food worth sharing, an internet account and the computer to run it . . . what I considered “the basics” of my lifestyle were all geared toward maintaining contact with good, well-educated, ordinary people. In other words (loud rumbling noise as I swallow my spiritual pride) I just wanted to fit in. NOW I was starting to understand the real price of simplicity. It is possible to break away from the mean level of consumerism in our society — but it will cost nothing less than society. Living out of synch with others means social isolation. Some of my peers thought it was a good deal . . . they all opted for an impoverished and somewhat isolated existence, in exchange for free time. I couldn’t make that deal. The devil of materialism got me where I least expected it — in my desire to be around others. The Joe-Job So, if complete retreat from the world wasn’t going to do the trick, I looked at the next best thing: working a low-maintenance, undemanding job. We called it “the Joe Job” — the show-up-for-work-but-don’t-strain-yourself kind of work. This was typical Slacker employment: coffee shops, bookstores, carpentry, jobs that used the body but left the mind free for other pursuits. Of course, being an overachiever in all things, I went for the lowest and joe-est of Joe Jobs: security guard. Now, being a night watchman is the closest thing in the world to getting paid to merely breathe. If you have a short haircut and a pulse, you probably qualify for the job. I got a position on the graveyard shift at the Blue Cross Blue Shield building in Chapel Hill, and got paid to sit around in the lobby and read and write to my heart’s content. Working at night was a pain, but it let me take writing classes at the university during the day. And it was nice to walk around the building at night, lost in thought as I paced through the vast quietness of darkened empty cubicles. I felt almost like a ghost there. The vast proliferation of Dilbert cartoons, the snarling office humor plastering this human warehouse, made me think of all the unhappy people enslaved to their monitors, while I floated through it all, untouched. I was free to listen to the near-silence of morning, to hear the birds fluttering in the corporate-campus trees, and to see dawn reflected off the glassy ponds and gleaming skyscraper windows. Unfortunately, this meditative quiet was usually broken by the other security guards. Security, because of its undemanding nature, has a tendency to attract the dregs of humanity. Some were good people, stand-up working class men and woman — but many were not. The bad ones had only one way to pass the time — complain incessantly about everything and everybody. They bitched about the supervisors, bitched about the other guards, bitched about the regular employees who treated them like dirt, bitched about the schedule, bitched about the pay ... it was like standing under a waterfall of negativity, an unending cascade of petty nastiness. Sartre was right: hell IS other people. It was my first reminder of what I now consider to be the most important factor in finding a spiritually friendly workplace: work with good people, the best people you can find. No amount of freedom or money can compensate you for the psychic damage of having to hang around complete assholes. Family Ties Around this time I made the most momentous decision of my life, the most profound and most mundane decision: I got married. I resisted the urge to get married for as long as I could stand it. Not because I thought sex or relationships or marriage were bad, or evil, or anything — far from it. But I fully recognized that they come at a high price. I could see a trend in our society: relationship leads to marriage, marriage leads to children, children lead to houses, houses lead to mortgages, mortgages lead to unescapable careers . . . and careers, children, houses and spouses all put together eat up every single solitary bit of time and energy, miring us in mundane concerns and suffocating spiritual ambition. My Zen teacher Rose always advised his students to temporarily pursue a celibate life, not because he thought marriage was avoidable but because he thought it inevitable: “Someday, nature will expect you to fulfill your genetic destiny. Damn few people escape the urge to make more of themselves. Having children will be a wonderful, profound, selfless experience . . . and you won’t get much else done in the meantime. So put it off for a while, if you can . . .” So, when I finally did fall in love with a wonderfully spiritual woman, and couldn’t resist the nesting urge any longer, my thoughts on livelihood became much more sober. Love is the most potent and binding of obligations. Your love for your children (even your unborn future children) will drive you to all sorts of achievements you would not undertake for yourself; security becomes more important, and the burdens of “real jobs” more unavoidable. Now integrating work and spirit was not merely one potential option among many — it was the only option, if I wanted to keep my spiritual sense alive and well. Have Laptop, Will Travel I started looking for another path to freedom, the high road to freedom: entrepreneur-ship. If I worked for myself, I would have the maximum amount of control over my schedule and workplace. I could do what I wanted, whenever I wanted, so long as I could drum up the business. The only question was: what business? As if on cue, technology came to my rescue. The rise of the Internet and its surrounding software industry had given birth to a wide class of wandering ronin techno-warriors, intelligent freelancers whose skills in web design, programming, graphics, or networking were in high demand. Lured by the smell of money and prodded by my own latent geek genes, I became a technical jack-of-all-trades consultant, a smelting of writer/designer/ programmer/whatever-the-hell-you-need-tomorrow — a go-to guy. The only requirement was to communicate well and to learn as quickly as possible. Better yet, it brought the right combination of job security and job insecurity — I never had to worry about finding another job, but that didn’t mean I could afford to get soft, either. And the skill-set was blessedly applicable to spiritual ventures: I was setting up the selfknowledge.org website, starting email list-serves for spiritual groups, and desk-top publishing the posters and print ads that enlarged my own circle of spiritual-minded friends. The Post-Modern Monastery The biggest downside to being an independent contractor is, well, being independent. That is, still alone. It was very painful for me, the “ragged individualist,” to finally admit that I was most effective when I worked in a structured context with other people. We are gregarious critters, we humans, and we tend to do our individual best in all endeavors when we join with others. The advantages of peer support, peer pressure, opportunities to share information, to teach and be taught, are abundantly obvious in nearly all lines of human activity. Athletes have their teams, and scholars have their universities, and artists have their schools, and . . . of course, monks (even modern day mendicants like me) have their monasteries. My work with the Self Knowledge Symposium at North Carolina universities had taught me that working with other people is the single greatest aid on the path, perhaps even more important than having teachers or traditions to follow. With the right group of people, collective effort finds the teachers, or even creates them from within the ranks. So, with the obvious benefits of having fellow seekers, it was only natural to wonder: wouldn’t it be cool if a bunch of us seeker-types could work together in a common business? I got my wish when I joined Raleigh Group International (RGI), a software publishing company that was founded and staffed mostly by SKS people. With about 30 employees, RGI looks a lot like any other fast-growing software company. The office has an open floor plan, with more computers than people, and Nerf footballs flying past overhead. The salesmen dial and laugh and throw darts and practice their golf putt across the wide carpet floor. The sysadmins and developers work late into the night. While the dress is business casual, neither slovenly nor uptight, the atmosphere is one hundred ten percent Business. There is not a single business plan or employee manual that even mentions spirituality. And yet, the place is pervaded with spirituality, strictly because many (though not all) of the people there are into esoteric matters. The CEO, August Turak, sets the tone — his many years as a full-time Zen student did not prevent him from eventually establishing a stellar executive career with the likes of MTV and Adelphia, and later with his own company. Like the Trappist monks he still studies under at Mepkin Monastery, Augie has a life of ora et labora, an even mix of work and prayer. On his desk a well-thumbed copy of Moby Dick might sit next to The Spectrum of Consciousness or The Ego and the Dynamic Ground . . . which are probably burying the quarterly sales report. A conversation in his office can change from a business meeting to a Zen dialogue in a heartbeat. When his mind inevitably drifts into spiritual topics, his musings can make the physical world seem ethereal and unreal, while making the Divine palpably present. The values that Augie demonstrates attract seekers and non-seekers alike to the company. The seekers are happy to have a place where they don’t have to hide their meditation pillows, where they can get time off to go to a meditation retreat, where they can turn around in their chairs to find a good conversation on Jungian psychology, and where their boss is also a profoundly wise man. And the non-seekers, good people with no particular interest in spirituality, still find the place welcoming, mostly because politics are almost completely absent and there is a strong sense of trust. RGI has the usual small-business strains, the frantic pace, the “competitive stress disorder” — even when we’re doing well, it’s hardly cushy. But, as the multibillionaire Warren Buffett points out, the only point in having money at all is so you only have to work with people you like. The Really Have It All Generation Generation X is the “really-have-it-all” generation — we keep attempting to find the right titration of work, family, and spirituality that will somehow add up to a meaningful life. We don’t seem to have much more perspective than the previouis generation, who also tried to have it all, but with slightly less pretense. Adding spirituality to the mix has not cured us of the mistaken Boomer notion that we can plan out our path to happiness. Such attempts to find a perfect life are doomed — once we get everything scripted out, God has a habit of missing his cues. But until Life shakes me out of my hubris, I will keep hanging on to the hope that I’ve found a suitable path. My work is supporting the good of my friends, my family and my community. My coworkers share in my greatest spiritual aspiration, and remind me and encourage me in that aspiration every day. I find myself forgetting, in the middle of the day, that “work” and “spirituality” were once separate entities ... what better livelihood could I ask for? * * * * Georg Buehler balances his time between a software company, his writing, and his spiritual life. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife and his son. If you would like to purchase the Radical Spirit book from which this essay was drawn, please email us at manage@integrativespirituality.org About every two weeks we will post another article on generation X spirituality from the book Radical Spirit.. For more articles and more about Universe Spirituality and who we are, go to www.integrativespirituality.org Posted May 08, 2007 - 05:37 PM  Print this story    Email this to a friend