James Wood Teachings

A: Well, yeah. It’s a mistake to say I’m happy now. I don’t need to practice anymore. In the traditional Buddhist teachings, Gautama was tempted by pleasures and so on, and he said no. That’s a sort of subtle sensation there. There’s a movie I watched the night before I woke up: The Last Temptation of Christ. I was drawn to it. Jesus is tempted on the cross with visions of what his life may have been like if he had had a typical, happy married life. In the vision, he marries Mary Magdalene and has children. There’s something about accepting that kind of life, that there’s really no difference between a healthy, balanced family life and the awakened life. It’s not an obstacle. It’s not non-spiritual. It’s subtle.

The answer is not the white picket fence and all that, the American Dream, the house, etc. No matter how balanced or sane it gets, that’s not it. That’s not enough, and yet somehow, paradoxically, it’s important to accept it. There’s a deeper trust in being grateful for that. And you don’t take the house and the car and the kids at face value and that’s your value; there’s a gratitude and a letting go of even that. But paradoxically, it’s given to you. It’s like, you can have that. What the movie showed me in part was that ordinary life is spiritual life. A basic life. A household, maybe being married, having kids, maybe not. I have a stepdaughter. For me, embracing that has been a big part of my work. It’s like I was entrusted with it.

Q: So was it more like your attachments before that then to be spiritual or awake you needed to have a certain kind of austere or ascetic kind of life?

A: Yeah, as if the domestic life is a kind of trap, which it’s not, necessarily. You get the house on the hill and then you give that up, too. You’re giving it up as an absolute value and accepting it as a relative necessity. That had been one of my biggest terrors, the ball and chain. That’s an old expression about getting married: “the old ball and chain.” It keeps you grounded.