[Buddha-l] Let us get drunk and meditate

[S.A. Feite]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/10/ 
notes101007.DTL&feed=rss.mmorford

Let us get drunk and meditate
Here is your Zen green-tea liqueur and your
Enlightenment Visa card. Go forth and levitate

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Ah, Zen. Sweet little name. Delightful and austere and
hugely, strangely, wildly overexposed subset of lovely
Buddhist philosophy and also of course the
pseudo-slogan/catchword of a thousand products and
attitudes and cliches strewn all over American pop
culture, T-shirts to coffee mugs to wall calendars,
pretty much the epitome and the poster child of the
excessive and slightly annoying hyper-Westernization
of Eastern spirituality. Well, except for maybe
Tantra.

And now, a swell kicker: Zen is also the name of a new
booze product, a liqueur, something allegedly flavored
to taste like green tea and ready to mix with your
fave vodka or sake or whatever the hell you can think
of because nothing says "deeply calming ancient
spiritual practice" like, you know, knocking back
shots of artificially sweetened moss-green liquid
containing 20 percent alcohol by volume. Mmm,
nurturing.

Actually, I sort of love the silly audacity of it. You
almost have to. I mean, isn't it just the cutest
thing, the warped and shameless co-opting of all
things divine and succor-iffic to a crazed populace
starved for meaning and sustenance in every purchase
and in every desire and in every vice, and never
really finding it? It so absolutely is.

Seems the Zen people (the booze company, not the
monks) bought some ad space all over SFGate recently,
and hence I couldn't help but notice their ad
campaign, part of which is apparently a photo contest
wherein you send them Zen-inspired pix in an effort to
win a coach-class trip to Japan, the birthplace of Zen
(except for China, ahem), and the shots are presumably
not supposed to be of you getting completely hammered
on their product and then stripping naked and
molesting a cat and crashing your BMW into your
ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's Saab and then getting
arrested for peeing on the smooth and handsome stones
in the minimalist garden of the local Zen center where
she goes to meditate. Right.

But the simple brazenness of the ads, all modern
Japanese scenery and green tea history and hipster
electronica and faux-brushstroke kanji lettering, seem
to beg the obvious question: Should you be offended by
the notion of this ridiculous but probably quite
delicious product? Is there still any room to be even
moderately appalled at the swiping of a lovely
practice and muddling it with some mint leaves and
blending it with some rum and calling it a Zen Mojito?
What's next, Christ's Blood Cherry-Flavored Vodka?
Allah's Curry-Infused Rum? Muhammad's Manhattan? Mmm,
blasphemy.

But wait, before you answer, let us note another
modern classic of fantastic, ultra-warped spiritual
misappropriation, a perfect example of sheer
capitalist opportunism meeting alt-lifestyle absurdity
in the sticky back alley of Hypocrisy Lane, a product
otherwise known as ... the Enlightenment Visa card.

Oh yes. It's a beauty, really, a very special kind of
duplicitous marketing that's been advertised in all
the yoga and health and alt-lifestyle magazines for
months now, if not longer.

Yes, it's a just a plain Visa card. But here's the
"enlightenment" part: Every dollar you spend earns you
"points" which, when you finally gather enough, you
get to spend on all sorts of "free" happy hippie
feel-good stuff, like spa treatments and yoga classes
and carbon offsets and organic lube (!), which is all
cute and lovely and good until you discover the fact
that one point equals one dollar, and to get your
"free" yoga class you need to earn something like
20,000 points, which means you just put 20 grand worth
of 15-percent APR debt on your happy little card. Now
that's enlightening.

(There is some good news: a single pair of tiny little
"yoga socks" only requires 1,000 points/dollars.
Organic lube? About two grand. So, you know, bargain).

Best of all, these Visas are emblazoned with various
ancient symbols and spirituality icons, from Buddha
statuary to praying hands to the classic OM symbol,
representing absolute consciousness and manifesting as
the great universal sound of creation itself, which is
rather astonishing indeed, given how that's precisely
the sound I hear when I drop $300 on a pair of Diesel
Zathans and a leather iPod case and some digital
videotapes to make more homemade porn. Yay, eternal
divine creation! So satisfying.

Oh, I know, it's nothing new. The marketing cretins of
Madison Avenue long ago caught onto the
not-exactly-innovative scheme of sucking all joy from
a given cultural phenomenon or movement or honest
spiritual practice, from yoga to skater culture to
surf life to rap, and then co-opting it and rebranding
it and injecting it with sugar and corn syrup and
caffeine and sex and 5,000 silly Swarovski crystals
then selling it right back to you as a gold-flaked
diamond-studded $25 energy drink. Yawn.

Perhaps I should be more offended. Perhaps Zen liqueur
and the Enlightenment Visa really are insulting and
wrong. After all, I've been meditating and teaching
yoga for many years and practicing for at least a
decade, and hence maybe I should look at products that
would seem to maul and malign and molest the ancient
wisdoms and traditions I look to for inspiration as
some sort of dangerous attack, much like I see
organized religion harming gays or Dick Cheney
stabbing at the very heart of the life force itself.

But somehow, I don't. Somehow, in this case anyway, it
doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Because
somehow I fully — though perhaps idealistically —
believe all these timeless wisdoms and practices, most
of which pre-date Christ and most of which have been
though every sort of torment and abuse and insult and
cute cocktail the culture can hurl at them, they will
all merely see these modern mutations and shrug and
flutter their karmic eyelashes and go back to
slow-dancing with the cosmos. In other words, it's a
bit like tossing pebbles at a mountain. I think
they'll be just fine.

But it makes me wonder: Is there really a point you
can reach with your perspective and your attitude and
your spiritual health where you can, in fact, go out
and buy a case of Zen liqueur with your Enlightenment
Visa after your sweaty Americanized yoga class where
they played Led Zeppelin and Brazilian Girls and
talked to you about the importance of breathing
through your spine, and still smile at the irony of it
all while not being controlled by any of it? I am here
to suggest: absodamnlutely.

Maybe you just need to widen into it. Maybe it's about
sitting back and expanding your inner eye to encompass
a little bit more, to see trifles like Zen liqueur and
enlightenment Visas and even Dick Cheney as merely
cute little distractions you can enjoy at will, safe
in the knowledge that, no matter how hard they try,
they can't come anywhere near the real meaning of that
stone in the Zen garden. You think? Shall we raise a
glass of "Holy Hell" Jesus-Flavored Tequila in
agreement? Salud!