What to Do With Our Assets in These Troubled Times

by Sevan Sensei


Interest is up and the stock market’s down,
And you only get mugged if you go downtown.

But I live back in the woods, you see,
My woman and my kids and my dogs and me.

I got a shotgun, a rifle, and a four-wheel drive.
A country boy can survive . . .
Country folks can survive.

-- Hank Williams Jr.



In these troubled economic times we regularly wonder if we will survive. We worry about our self, wonder about our home, job, family, status. We are concerned with our place in society. Are we slipping? Are we adequate?

We wonder spiritually too. Where we have always been somewhat self concerned – how many koans have I done, will I ever get anywhere in this practice – we now play these ego tapes even more, largely because we are beginning to consider everything in life as more of a struggle, and everything can be lost. We are growing more insecure about everything outside the zendo and off the mat, and so our more-or-less native insecurities about our spiritual “progress” start to grow too.

This breeds more self concern and even deeper insecurities. In economic terms, our stock starts to fall. Stock in the spiritual corporation we call “I,ME,MINE” starts a slow and steady decline. We seem to be failing and losing value pretty much everywhere these days. While our company used to borrow funds – take heart and encouragement, that is – from our teachers and the masters, from the tradition, and from the mat, we increasing feel as though we can’t raise much spiritual cash now. Our sitting suffers. And so we slough off more assets and personnel (effort), make fewer investments (sit less, sit with less vigor), make poor purchases (like books filled with gimmicks about practice instead of books by real masters, or workshops promising Great Mind in an afternoon), and we stop auditing ourselves as closely. We start subscribing to the “outside consultants” (magical thinking drifting in from the hustlers of the New Age).

While our bond rating suffers and we can’t even get credit, we complain to the teacher in dokusan that we are spiritually powerless, that outside market forces have somehow brought our I,ME,MINE company to near ruin. There we are, crying out in the interview room about how we are losing our spiritual market share. It is as an embattled CEO of an old and broken down ego firm that we ask, “What can I do?” Poor teachers may offer a “Now now, there” kind of government bailout while they hold our hand. Better teachers may offer tougher-to-swallow, bitter tasting business advice – sell out while there’s still time! Merge with a far better firm!

The teacher advises us (assuming for a moment that we are working on MU) to go with the smart money – sell all stock to MU Inc.