The Dude Abides

All this is nothing but space to be danced in. There’s no need to feel limited in any way... Life just blossoms. ~ The Dude ;)

“I met Jeff Bridges in Santa Barbara and we started hanging, as he likes to put it, often while smoking cigars. Jeff has done movies from an early age; less known, but almost as long-standing, is his commitment to ending world hunger. I was an aeronautical engineer and mathematician in my early years, but mostly I’ve taught Zen Buddhism, and that’s where we both met. Not just in meditation, which is what most people think of when they hear Zen, but the Zen of action, of living freely in the world without causing harm, of relieving our own suffering and the suffering of others. We soon discovered that we would often be joined by another shadowy figure, somebody called the Dude. We both liked his way of putting things and it’s fun to learn from someone you can’t see. Only his words were so pithy they needed more expounding; hence, this book. May it meet with his approval, and may it benefit all beings.”

~ Bernie Glassman, Montague, Massachusetts

“SOMETIMES YOU EAT THE BEAR, AND SOMETIMES, WELL, HE EATS YOU

JEFF: We’re making the movie The Big Lebowski, and everyone who’s seen the movie knows that the Dude and Walter dig bowling, right? Now, I’ve bowled a little bit in the past, but I’m not an expert like the Dude. So the Coen brothers hire a master bowler to teach John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and me how to bowl. The master bowler is a world champion and he brings his assistant along. I ask the bowling master, “How do you think the Dude might bowl? Does he prepare for a long time? Does he have to get his mind set? Is he like Art Carney in The Honeymooners?” Whenever Art Carney would be asked to sign something, say a document, Jackie Gleason would tell him, “Sign there, Norton,” and Carney would start twitching and fidgeting, carrying on for so long that Gleason would finally yell, “SIGN THE DOCUMENT!” So I ask the bowling master if the Dude might be like that. His assistant starts laughing so hard he just about pees in his pants. The master bowler shakes his head and rolls his eyes, looking embarrassed, so I ask him what’s going on. “Oh, nothing, nothing,” the assistant says. The master says, “Go on, you can tell him.” The assistant says, “No, you tell him.”

Finally the master tells his story. It seems that years ago he tried to bowl like in the book Zen in the Art of Archery. That book teaches the student to completely let go of his ego in order to hit the bull’s-eye. If the mind is settled and clear, the pins are practically down before the bowler cocks his hand back to throw the ball. So the bowling master tried to get into that mind-set and ended up like Art Carney. He had certain tics to release tension in his body and he’d do this little stress-relieving dance that would go on five, ten minutes, all in the middle of a tournament. Meantime, his teammates are sitting on the bench doing their version of Jackie Gleason: “JUST THROW THE BALL!” Things got so bad he couldn’t throw the ball at all. He would not release it from his hand because he couldn’t get into the right mind-set. Finally he went to a shrink and they worked it out. “So what do you do now?” I ask him. “I just throw the f**king ball! I don’t think.” I dug that. And isn’t it interesting that after all that, you never once see the Dude bowl in the entire movie. So is thinking the problem? We’re so good at it; our brains are set up to think, man. 

BERNIE: Thinking’s not the problem. We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect. We can get so fixated that we can’t do anything. Goals are fine; what I don’t like is getting caught up in expectations or attachments to a final outcome. So the question is, how do you play freely?

JEFF: Just throw the f**king ball! Yeah right, only sometimes I care so much. When I was a kid, I stuttered pretty badly. Even now I still stutter every once in a while, feeling like there’s something I want to share but I can’t get it out. I become anxious and that causes things to get jammed up. It happens in movies, too. I’ll often worry for a long time about a big scene: How am I going to do this? Meantime, there’s another little scene I’m not concerned about at all, I’m sure I know what to do there. Now comes the day when I’m filming, and the big scene is a snap while the little one is trouble. And I’m reflecting, All that time you were worried about the wrong thing! Mark Twain said, “I am a very old man and have suffered a great many misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

My brother Beau turned me on to Alan Watts by giving me his book The Wisdom of Insecurity when I just started high school. Later I read his other books and listened to his tapes. I’ve always liked Watts because he wasn’t pompous, didn’t think of himself as a guru or anything like that, didn’t want to convince you of anything, he just liked to share his thoughts with you. And one of them was that if you’re going to wait to get all the information you think you need before you act, you’ll never act because there’s an infinite amount of information out there.

~ Jeff Bridges, The Dude and the Zen Master

~ “Founded in 2005 by Oliver Benjamin, a journalist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Dudeism's official organizational name is The Church of the Latter-Day Dude. An estimated 450,000 Dudeist Priests have been ordained worldwide as of May 2017 and marriages have been officiated legally by Dudeist clergy in some US states.

Although Dudeism primarily makes use of iconography and narrative from The Big Lebowski, adherents believe that the Dudeist worldview has existed since the beginnings of civilization, primarily to correct societal tendencies towards aggression and excess. They list individuals such as Laozi, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Buddha, and the pre-ecclesiastical Jesus Christ as examples of "Great Dudes in History". More recent antecedents include pillars of American Transcendentalism such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and humanists such as Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain.”
~ Wikipedia

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