Hands Dirty Zen

Hello family,

This week’s Chuck’s Corner is the entire introduction of my book, Hands Dirty Zen. I was actually able to get it to readiness this week, and I am happy with how it has developed. Certainly my editor will have a few things to say when she reads it, but at least this offers a clue for its direction. I hope you enjoy the read! Feel free to offer some feedback as I am in the writing phase, and can easily make adjustments as needed. In fact, I may use all of you as a sounding board as I walk through this. That way, you can have influence on how the book is written, which would be fantastic. 

I will see you Saturday! Be sure to read chapter 1 of Goddesses!

Chuck

Hands Dirty Zen: A Companion and Friend

By Chuck Swindoll, Jr.

Introduction

This book is an amplifier of a sense of Things…which are no things.

Hands Dirty Zen walks alongside Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen like two friends having a conversation about Zen. It can be read by itself or as a companion to Watts, or even alongside my Zen video series available at my website, NatureCreature.net. The two books are for the same use: consciousness expansion and philosophical pattern forming. Watts wrote a map of Zen and these pages are the conversation that happens when you take that map outdoors, and get your hands dirty—my favorite way to learn: hands in the soil.

Zen is not a belief you adopt. It is a way of seeing that dissolves the furniture you are sitting in. Watts knew that. He spent the first part of his life inside the Western church, then spent the rest of his life trying to say, without converting anyone, what that seeing costs, and what it returns. This book stays close to that ethos—page by page when it helps, theme by theme when the spoken lecture needs more air than a paragraph in print. The aim here is not to replace Alan’s convictions, but augment them. To make the complicated world he loved a little more walkable for a person who grew up on verses, straight lines, and Western doctrine.

Zen opens you. Once you can see yourself with fewer costumes, you will know quickly whether you like what you see, and that changes everything. Difficult questions quickly follow new perspectives. Some of the answers will alienate you from the room you have lived in your entire life. That is not a sales pitch, nor a hint. It is a warning what Zen philosophy does when it is not turned into just décor.

For years I worked beside my father in a Christian evangelical church he had started called Stonebriar Community Church. I had grown up in a sanctuary, and this was Dad’s final go at being a lead pastor. I handled tech for Stonebriar, and ensured a weekly recording of the services that supported Dad’s international ministry, Insight for Living. Together with his undying support, we built a recording studio life I had dreamed of since high school. The job had the shape anyone would want in a career: respect for the position from all bodies, working with gifted people, serving your religion, a generous salary, full insurance for me and my family, a beautiful home with friends, coworkers, and support within 5 minutes in any direction. 

All I had to do was ride the career wave into the sunset and retire having served Jesus from the prime of my life (28) till the end. But in the winter of 2012 I contracted cancer, and the “perfect” world I had carefully formed dissolved into a puddle staring back at me. Bewildered…I stared back. When Death smiles at you, the best option is to grin back. 

Cancer strolled into my life smooth like a talented thief. No flinch on offer, no hand to shake. This inculcated friendship changed the order of affairs in my life, and I found myself in a battlefield tailored to wrench me out of illusions of security, pools of religion, and a guaranteed future.

I found myself listening to Alan Watts trying to understand why cancer had befriended me, unannounced. His book, The Way of Zen entered my life shortly before I contracted the disease like an omen of what was to come —some charity from Nature as a book to help for hell I was about to face. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, I careened into landscapes Alan had so carefully crafted for the individual that was caught in religious doctrine, and a disqualified Christian life strategy. Like milk, doctrine is sweet when fresh, but goes sour when paired with perspective criticism. 

Before realizing it, I saw too much. That is an experienced thief’s earmark—you don’t know your wallet has been picked until reaching for it undressing for bed. Zen had philosophically pickpocketed my mind, and I could no longer pay the fees at the door called religious conditioning. My only viable option was the sign, “This way to the egress”. I looked into the chasm it pointed, and Joseph Campbell whispered to me, “Dive”.

Zen can have major influence in a decision to leave everything because of its effect on human awareness. It shows the religionist too much. Alan’s intimidating insight along with Joseph Campbell’s wisdom render a world that no longer fits into the religious spiritual paradigm demanded by each western religion. When I read The Way of Zen, my life became a fire of cognitive dissonance that burned away all the reasons to stay while I watched, aghast. My world incinerated before I even realized it was gone. Cancer was just the contract to seal my departure—living or dead.

Red, in Shawshank redemption said, “Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time.” That time and pressure eventually lead Andy Dufresne to swim a 300 yard prison sewer pipe, his only option to freedom. Case in point: to free a human mind, put it into intense pressure that can’t be escaped easily, and it will do what is necessary to free itself. This is the level of psychological proof you are handling, friend. It’s so hard Alan himself died unable to finally apply it. 

For me, the pressure cooker was an eight month cancer inspired expiration date, 50 years before typical spoilage. The prescription for my mind was dancing with Watts of all things. Observe and learn the egregores, or lament them and die a coward. Nature has a way of getting to the quick by applying pressure in the right places. 

My options were clear, be a hypocrite and pretend to stay a Christian acting and behaving like I still believed I was a sinner, performing in the spiritual casts all sinners practice. Or, walk in shoes of my heart’s integrity, and resign in the dignity of the Truth that had cost me my life to discover. This became the point of my unexpected departure. Had I not contracted cancer or read The Way of Zen, I would still be in Frisco finishing out my career and Nature Creature dot net would not exist.

So before we get any further, let me be clear. The Way of Zen will illumine contradictions in the buildings you most frequent because that is where all the contradictions rest —in your mind. A larger philosophical floodlight will ignite the shadows holding hidden religious perspectives, and the unannounced entanglement with reason begins there. 

It was at that precipice I found myself standing, realizing cancer had shown me I was not a coward, and so I was willing to dive into the Abyss…the fools first move, and that is why the fool eventually becomes the Magician, because Truth is a flowing complexity, a figural known. The only way then is to dive into it, and only a courageous fool willingly dives into the Abyss — the unknown, the un-experienced Truth.

Integrity is a blunt instrument that cares not about fallout. It does not care if leaving looks like betrayal to people you love, and would never want to disappoint. The honest individual goes anyway. Honor is the integrity to accept and behave upon Truth as rendered, or run in denial and live the life of a coward. That’s why the real Truth costs life to find it just as it did me, Parzival’s, and Alice’s. Truth is like the bottle that says “Drink me”, you won’t know for sure if it, the Truth of the situation will kill you until you actually drink the bottle, and by then, of course, it’s too late. Such is Zen.

A little more backstory to increase the gravity here: I worked alongside my father in Christian ministry for 15 years at a place called Stonebriar Community Church. It was in Frisco, TX back in the days when the north side of Preston Road was still dirt, and traffic lights had not found their way yet. Dad started the church in 1998 when I was 28 years old and living in Franklin, Tennessee with my wife Jeni and our son Noah, and daughter Jessica, struggling to make ends meet as new parents. 

Dad invited me in July of 1998, and I started August 15th. I was the second employee he hired. I flew out each week for services to run sound and record his sermons which were used for his weekly international Christian broadcast ministry, Insight for Living—a company my mother had started in 1976, and by then was in over 100 countries, 16 languages, and reaching nearly half the worlds population. In the Christian teaching world, it did not get much higher than my Dad.

The church began on Wednesday’s as a bible study to see what kind of attendance Dad would attract. We met in a local assembly room for a few weeks and then after outgrowing the largest facility they had, we rented a Jr. High school gymnasium on Sunday’s for a few years until an actual church building was built and we moved in there. I watched the church start from 0 members and grow to thousands.

Needless to say, due to my fathers lifetime of work in the international Christian ministry, and unsurpassed talent at the pulpit, that the church grew in membership to over a thousand people within the first year alone. It exploded. This was without any internet support and only word of mouth that my Dad was starting a local church. In fact, we did not advertise the church and make it known locally, because we could not handle the amount of people that would show up Sunday as a result.

I walked with Dad through stratospheric growth from a hundred person bible study at a hotel, to two Sunday services in a gym, to an interim building, then a campaign and proper 2,500 count sanctuary with pipe organ, multiple services all weekend, thousands and thousands of members, and dozens of extended ministries that go along with any growing church in a bustling, young city like Frisco, TX. It was an amazing once in a lifetime setting to be alongside my father in his experiential prime as he started and grew his church, and I will never forget the incredibly good times I had serving with him all during that time.

We did all of this together over 15 years nonstop, and we never once had a cross word, or any argument for that matter. We laughed every time we got together getting along like peas and carrots. My office was right alongside him, and we together “did church” all through mine and Jeni’s parenting of our two children from ages 1 till high school. Family. Friends. Good schools. Safe environment. Beautiful home. I had it all. It was some of the happiest years of my life vocationally, and if you had told me I would walk away from all of it just a few years before I did, I would have said you were out of your mind…unbeknownst to me, that was exactly where I was going.

Now, each week Dad and I had a dedicated lunch together where we would talk about everything from family life, church dealings, to most often the NFL. Dad fostered in me a love for football that to this day I still enjoy. He and I spent countless hours laughing together at those lunches talking church, and living the churchman’s life. It was an incredible, bonding time with my father. I will remember those sacred lunches with him until the day I die. They meant more to me than the job or the security or even all my other relationships at the church. I loved my father, respected him, and I spent 15 years observing his integrity and public transparency shine through every day of my tenure at the church. His example to me was the greatest asset I took from my time at Stonebriar. 

Without getting into anymore of the very long story from my first day till my voluntary departure from the position, I will tell you of our last lunch together after my resignation. I was driving away in just days with Jeni for Washington state to abandon everything I had built with Dad over the course of a decade and a half, and that lunch would mark the end of my stay in Frisco. 

Our last lunch was quiet and somber—much different than our normal vibe. Dad still didn’t fully understand why I was leaving, believe it or not, as I had not shared any of my plans with him. My abandonment of the job involved my abandonment of Christianity, and I hadn’t wanted to have that conversation with him for fear I would lose my position too early, or disappointing him with my —what he would see as— offensive decision. Some dogs should remain asleep until the last possible moment, and that moment had come.

About 10 minutes into the lunch he formally asked why I was leaving, and I decided to answer by telling him a dream from the time while I was fighting cancer just months before. 

I told him that in the dream we were all in a dark forest together —family, staff, congregation, everybody we knew— all walking the same philosophical and spiritual loop that appeared in my dream as an endless path in Mirkwood Forest from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

We Christians had been wandering for years on a well worn path of doctrine: constant asking permission, seeking approval, and expecting reproof from an external God. This had lead to a circular path of spiritual and psychological developmental frustration that had lead to diseased thinking. These came across in the dream as feeling lost, frantic with nowhere new to go, and trying to find a way off the loop.

I must note here to clarify, identifying as a sinner causes developmental loops of theological spell-casting. it is developmental insanity that occurs when one seeks outside themselves for understanding since we can only know truth through personal experience, and as long as seeking for answers or fulfillment remains an external exercise, the seeker is attempting to steer the rudder of their boat from a rope on another ship. They think they are finding true north in Jesus when they are actually their own sextant — they are seeking for their glasses while wearing them. This is just one of the many navigational loops of Captain Stubing on the Christian love boat, the U.S.S. Blind Spots. 

I explained to Dad that I realized my awareness of the plight of our situation in Mirkwood was a forest of developmental constriction, and that this realization manifested from the purifying light cancer had offered me, and so if I was honest with myself, there was no way to continue the same path of spiritual inquiry without employing my new vantage personally. To persist in loops of doctrine attempting to cage a Wonder, I was choosing to reinforce the consequences of pursuing contradiction, and therefore disqualified myself as a human being, and a dishonest life would result. So I was not willing to stay any longer.

In the dream, like Bilbo, I climbed a tree that breeched the forest canopy, and it opened into a new sunlight that rendered a different course than we, and everyone in the dream were on. Light has a way of clarifying the situation. What I saw I knew my father would not like, and I looked him in the eye and had no words to speak to tell him because there is no words for that space. Furthermore, how do I tell my father, a 50 year veteran in Christian ministry, author of over 100 books about the religion, an international figure to boot who raised me to be a dedicated Christian my entire life…that I was abandoning what he spent all his time dedicated to for reasons I could not convey in Christian vocabulary because Truth is past words. I started crying. 

He said something that caught me off guard, “Was it beautiful, Chuck?” And this crushed me because it indeed was, but not in the way he expected, nor would appreciate. 

I said, “Dad, you will not like what I am about to tell you.” He looked at me with incredulity. “Dad, I saw that the path we and the church, mom, the family, all our friends, heck, the congregation are on, is the wrong path, and the wrong way, Dad.” 

He stared at me in disbelief, and said nothing.

I repeated, “Dad, everyone is going the wrong way. The way is north and we all are going south.” I was crying hard at that point because the implications of my words were relational and spiritual fatalities in his mind. I had fallen on my own sword right there at the North Dallas Country Club. I was a spiritual corpse performing the act of annihilation, and he was grieving the loss of the son he raised.

I looked down at my still full plate of food, and pondered the moment. My adolescent relations with my father died by my sword, and the course of spiritual initiation was now mine alone. Dad was not willing to cross the line of heresy. I initiated the walk onto the tightrope, and now I was standing there in the wind feeling my father dissolve as the sun set on my former life.

Everything was quiet. There was a long, pregnant pause and then he said so quietly I could hardly hear him (which is saying a lot if you know my Dad’s voice), “What do you mean Chuck, when you say we are all going the wrong way?” He stared at me in love, but regret. He knew it was too late. I was already melting into the Earth.

“Cancer has shown me things I cannot unsee, Dad. My philosophical work has opened chasms I cannot cross, and so I must jump to find an alternate way. I don’t want to go back, because there are more ways to spiritual realization than Christianity.” He just quietly looked at me like I was a stranger. Spiritually, I was.

He didn’t like my answers, and was disappointed in my decision, but he respected me as a peer, and we closed the conversation with some departing words in an atmosphere of grief. It’s hard to leave something that was so joyful an experience in a setting of death, but that was the way of Parzival, and is indeed the way of the dissenter, the fool who leaves for the calling of his own bliss.

The reason for my departure remained a rub despite his genuine gratefulness to me for 15 years of service alongside him building his dream. That’s just the way it ends when you leave a circle of trust by choice. The way of the 8th cup is hard.

My Dad is a fair man, and he knew trying to talk me into staying or changing my mind would not be good use of our last moments together after my words of departure. He didn’t want to talk about a world without Jesus, and he never will. That’s truly fine as we all need to pursue Spirit in our own way, and our variances are our contributions. 

We briefly reminisced about a few good memories from the last decade together, stood from the table, hugged, cried, and that was the end of my tenure at Stonebriar Community Church, and my relationship to my father as a Christian. Grief sat in the space where we had shared countless hours of laughter and commitment. The irony of my life was beginning to thicken.

One of the last clear memories I have of him is looking at me from across that table. I certainly was proud of myself for not sugar coating or dodging the Truth as I had delivered in a way he could hear, but it came with great cost. Some victories are pyrrhic when you’ve venture into the Deep. I’ve come to find that The Real, The Truth, is very costly, and the further you get on its ocean, the more black the Deep becomes. The depth eventually forms psychological whirlpools that swallow spiritual systems, and the collateral damage destroys religiously intoxicated families.

I tell you this story so you do not enter these chapters blind as I did long ago. It’s only fair that I fully divulge myself before you pack your bags and set off for an adventure in Zen. This book may lead you to vistas you cannot get out of your head, and once you see them, you may find you cannot keep living as you live now. That is what is called a life crisis, and at that point there will be no karma to deal with but your own.

Watts did something like this in his own life when he left a collar he could no longer serve with any transparency. So if someone does leave because of this book, my lectures, or Alan’s insight into Zen, let them leave because understanding left them no other door than the egress—not because some teacher collected a following, but because their own spirit was convicted. That sentence is the ethic and honest intent behind this book: follow your heart and what it renders. Do not follow Watts, and most certainly do not follow me, because we did not come to this beautiful Earth to obey or follow anyone, we came to follow our heart. Take what clarifies and trash what doesn’t, but for goodness sake, grow either way! Stay your own course and see the words you read here as simply a veritable of signs on a way of choosable options.

Ultimately, what you will find in the coming chapters is the same data I presented in my Zen series videos: Alan Watts history, Buddhism’s practical root, Taoist flow, the suddenness of satori, koans that will not explain their own joke, zazen not intended meditation, inflation, lead in the shoes, and art that hides the fisherman so Nature can speak. Words here are meant as parables and pictures, not as scriptures or doctrines. Hold everything you read loosely. Remember, Zen is a philosophical conversation, not a classroom of apologetics. 

There are no answers to be found in Zen, there are only perspectives. The universe Watts kept pointing at is a Wonder, and there are no hard points in a Wonder. In fact, any ontology that refuses to contradict itself at some point cannot hold a bearing in a Wonder. That is not a failure of thought, it is the subject of Zen, because Zen clarifies the situation.

To conclude, hands dirty means you do not keep Zen in the dojo. You walk, stand, sit, and lie in it. You get your hands dirty because Zen is the gloveless life. You sense dignities others fail to see. You practice in the perfection that is the world, not from presumptions cast about it. You walk without an end in view, because an end in the other eye is already insincerity. You let fire become a controlled accident. You take the lead out of your shoes and refuse to put it back. You discover, if you discover anything, that the Zen you were studying is your life already under way.

So, if this sounds like a friend talking rather than a master declaring, fantastic. That is the backdrop of the book title. Turn the page with me and Alan if you wish, and observe if you like. I will say this, the show is worth the read. It certainly will cost you any maps (presuppositions) you brought because unfortunately, they have begun to soil as you have kept reading. Look, your hands are getting dirty already with new thoughts I’ve been suggesting.