Episode 046 - A Truly Vast Fraction

As I've mentioned a few times in previous podcasts I'm always amazed whenever I come across significant wisdom in unexpected places. You can run into it almost anywhere and the sports world is certainly no exception. In basketball Phil Jackson is a former NBA player who became a coach and won more NBA titles than any other coach in the history of the game, eleven championship titles in all, which is truly impressive given how difficult the coaching position is. Not only do you have to master the details of the game, you also have to blend the egos of some extremely talented multimillionaires into a cohesive group that thrives on true teamwork.           Surprisingly for me it turns out that Jackson has had a somewhat mystical and spiritual approach to life for many years, which he claims was a major factor in his success. In 1995 he wrote a book called "Sacred Hoops," featuring some of his esoteric understandings and there was this one quote that I'd never heard before that really got me that stated, "In Zen it is said that the gap between accepting things the way they are and wishing them to be otherwise is the one tenth of an inch difference between heaven and hell."           This hit me on a lot of different levels which always gets me thinking. The first thing was the idea that heaven and hell were only a tenth of an inch apart. I'd always been taught that heaven was way up there, while its opposite, hell, was way down there. This idea that they seem close enough to be other sides of the same coin was revolutionary for me.  But it reminded me of a quote from a letter that was found in Abraham Lincoln's desk after his assassination which can still be found in the Lincoln Collection of the Library of Congress. It was supposedly a channeled message from a psychic and it said that "Heaven and Hell are conditions, not locations." So, if heaven and hell were actually inner states of consciousness, it seemed like the pathway to heaven was somehow connected to accepting things the way they are, while hell had something to do with wishing them to be otherwise. This led me into considering a mental process that we each have called "Idealization." Now this is where you have a desire for something and you develop a fantasy about having it. In Jackson's Zen quote you're wishing for things to be other than the way they are and you start weaving a fantasy about it. And we all know that there's an enormous difference between fantasy and reality. As an example, let's say you decide to get a new car and you start shopping for one. After a while you start to settle on this one particular kind of car, you start feeling good about it and your mind starts painting mental pictures about it for you. You may imagine a million different things. You're driving in it with your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, kids - whatever. It can go on and on but the important thing to be understood is that your idealizations are always positive and never negative. In all your imaginations you never imagine the feeling you would have if you went to a store and when you got back to your car there was a dent in the door because somebody dinged you when they open their car door. Or you never picture getting a flat or being stopped by a policeman and getting a speeding ticket.  That's all the stuff of real life while all these fantasies are happening within the dream world of your idealizations and once you actually achieve your fantasize desire and you get what you think you wanted, of course it turns into a whole different ballgame. Humorist Larry David put a funny spin on it in an early episode of his show, "Curb Your Enthusiasm." He and his wife Cheryl had decided to buy a new home. They found a place on the beach in Malibu and when they walked in, the living room had an enormous picture window overlooking the ocean. The view was absolutely magnificent. Now, I'm paraphrasing the dialogue here but this is the way I remember it. "Oh Larry! Look at the view! It's absolutely incredible," Cheryl says. "Two weeks," Larry replies. "What do you mean, two weeks?" Cheryl asks. "You won't notice it after two weeks," he answers. "You'll be so wrapped up in everything that's happening in your normal life, you won't even notice the view anymore."  Cheryl was idealizing the idea of moving to the home with this incredible view and imagining how wonderful it would be to live there. And Larry, with his hard-boiled New York sensibility, went straight for the reality of every day daily life. Of course, one of the main reasons his stuff can be so funny is because of his talent for putting his finger on things that can make us feel uncomfortable about ourselves but still make us laugh. Now idealization is often followed by something that is broadly termed "Buyer's Remorse." Before you get the object of your desire you still construct the idealization. But once you've actually had it for a while, you start dealing with the reality of it, which rarely, if ever lives up to the fantasy you had in your mind. It reminds me of something that happened to me about 25 years ago when our daughter was an adorable five-year-old and we used to shoot an enormous number of pictures of her.  The photo technology seems like ancient history now but this was before the digital age and we took pictures with cameras that had film.  You would shoot an entire roll of film and then take it to a camera shop to be developed into printed photograph. Every picture cost you money so you were operating within a bit of a limit on how many would take. It's hard to imagine such a primitive time now, right?  So, I always used the same neighborhood camera store and I became familiar with the young woman who worked behind the counter. I had probably been coming in for about three years and one day she told me I wouldn't see her again because she was about to take a new job. And she told me with enormous excitement that after years of trying, she had finally landed a job in a hardware store. It'd always been her dream and now it was coming true! She was incredibly excited. Of course, we each have our own playbook of desires and personally it didn't hit me as such a dramatic improvement to be making the move from working in a camera store to working in a hardware store. But what do I know?  Anyway, we had a nice friendly goodbye and the next time I came in someone new was behind the counter. Then a couple months later when I came back, to my surprise my former clerk was back behind the counter. When I asked her what happened to her job at the hardware store she said with a smile, "Well, I found out that the reason the grass was greener was because it was Astroturf." At first, I was struck by how simple and funny her comment was. But as you can see, it stayed in my mind for all these years because it pointed to a much more profound truth - the difference between the artificial and the real, which may just be that one tenth of an inch difference between heaven and hell. Maybe it's the celebration and appreciation for what's real, which is on the deepest level for life itself, rather than the constant chasing after the artificial fantasies of the mind's desires which never end, no matter what you have. Maybe that one tenth of an inch difference between heaven and hell comes down to the state of our consciousness as we live our everyday lives. Whenever I ponder the idea, I'm always struck by how simple it is - that it all comes down to where we choose to focus. And I'm going to leave you with two quotes that are so simple that you might not even notice them, but they're so profound that they always bring deeply positive changes to me. The first one is from the world renowned Indian guru Parmahansa Yogananda who said, "The minutes are more important than the years." And the second quote takes us back to the world of sports, which is where we first began. This one is from Bobby Jones, the great US champion of the 1920s, who is still widely regarded as the greatest golfer of all time. He was talking about a simple secret that he had discovered that had turned him into the great champion that he had become. And he said, "It's nothing new or original to say that golf is a game that is played one stroke at a time. But it took me many years to realize it." Now that is a deceptively deep concept.  No matter what has happened in the past or what you think may happen in the future, you have to focus on the present.  In golf it all happens just one stroke at a time. And in life it all happens just one breath at the time. The mind has to dwell in the past or the future. But the breath only happens in the present. And that is where the treasure of existence is. It really couldn't be any simpler but how many of us have realized that one tenth of an inch difference? Again, these podcast just present ideas for your consideration. So, let's just leave it there for now and let's call this the end of this episode. As always keep your eyes mind and heart open and let's get together in the next one.