Ruminations-Seeing Through the Clouds of Red Dust (看破紅塵)

A personal exercise in formalizing a Buddhist reference into my set of rules for interacting with the environment and society that we live in.

"To see through the clouds of red dust," meaning to give up worldly desires and adopt a Buddhist monastic lifestyle.

看破紅塵 literally translates to “seeing through the cloud of red dust”. The phrase is most often used to describe Buddhist choosing to become nuns and monks having seen through the clouds of red dust of common life and are abandoning life in that realm to devote themselves to the spiritual life.

The phrase can also be used as a metaphor for those who are disillusioned with the secular society and culture in which they live, for they have seen beyond the façades that obscure and hide the true nature or surface falseness of people, institutions, and society. These are people who carry a wariness that comes from being disappointed by the undelivered promises made by people, institutions, and society. This world wariness had impelled them to consciously choose to discard the surface falseness of life and are willing to go beyond the clouds of red dust. This is the meaning that I chose to explore.

I am at an age where my friends and acquaintances are retiring from their careers and are enjoying the fruits of their years of labor. They have succeeded in the goals dictated by society which, in return, had given them a foreseeably comfortable retirement as they grow gracefully into old age. Many of those recent retirees have regaled me with how they are deriving joy from having retired that I, in my overeager over analysis, wonder whether they had contemplated their decisions to work the 9 to 5 grind for as long as they have, I wonder if there isn’t the tiniest tinge of regret, a wistfulness from the realization that they could and should have considered retiring earlier as they could be enjoying their retirement lives sooner rather than later. Parenthetically, I also wonder if there was buried deep within their subconscious the slightest bit of doubt over their decision to sacrifice so much of themselves for their employers and whether they had ever thought about the tradeoffs that they have made in favor of their employers over themselves. These thoughts about what my friends were feeling and thinking were what inspired my initial wandering into the meaning of seeing through the clouds of red dust as a metaphor.

My own path was in line with the same expected arc of a working life at one time, until I had to wound down my traditional working career before they did because I exited the traditional treadmill for personal reasons. Although I did not completely exit the working world, I just exited the high pain and stress world of corporate rat race. I started working in the gig economy as an adjunct professor.

­A few months after I exited the corporate world and after having watched months’ worth of NCIS, Law and Order, and Bones repeats, I happily realized that I was sleeping restfully through the night — except for those pesky middle of the night awakenings that are an unavoidable part of aging. I was getting more REM and deep sleep; even the middle-of-the-night awakenings were less abrupt. I no longer awaken in a cold sweat since my subconscious mind had ceased to anticipate the falling sword of Damocles that is symbolic of the pressures of work responsibilities. Even as I was going through my daily life, I no longer dreaded any appointments as a great weight was lifted from my shoulders because I had very few meetings.

It was then that I knew I had seen through the clouds of red dust, it was also when I started to look back upon my working life and questioned my decisions, motivation, and desires, those decisions, motivation and desires that I had allowed to be dictated to me by society, those decisions, motivation and desires which had caused me to aspire to what others wanted me to aspire to.

As a part of my process of remembering the times that I had seen through the clouds of red dust, I reached back to my first real exposure to decision making as an adult, when I started my gradual school journey.

I had started the path to a PhD with the intention of becoming a professor, but I did so with unrealistic expectations because I had created my own cloud of red dust through my own perception of academia, I had created an idyllic vision of what I thought an academic did daily. It was when I was interviewing for academic positions that my friend Prof. John Uyemura thought enough of me to have a private conversation with me. He asked me if I knew what I was doing just interviewing for academic jobs. He outlined for me what he, a research professor at a research university, did every day; he clearly laid out the priorities: top priority was to write copious amounts of grant proposals so that my graduate students get paid, but they are also the ones doing almost all the work, and he made sure that I understood the fact that the success rate of the grant proposal writing was low, i.e. I had to write a lot of proposals to get to the right amount of financial support for the graduate students; the second priority was to serve on all committees when asked as well as volunteer for professional committee work; and the last priority was to teach as little as permissible. He made me see through the clouds of red dust. I had identified the priorities he told me on my own, but I had not understood the weights that each priority carried within the research institutions.

I think John knew me better than I did, because he saw that I might not be cut out for academia in a research institution. I will forever owe him for prodding me to see through my own idealistic clouds of red dust and look at the truth. I started to interview to be an industry PhD soon after that.

My first job in industry continued to shake up many clouds of red dust. Perhaps it is my trusting nature, but I implicitly believe that any collective commercial human enterprise can still retain human nature for empathy, generosity, and being morally responsible that is true of most individuals. Over the years, I chose to believe in the happy ending, which was, much to my great disappointment, much too optimistic. My initial expectations of the corporate world were shockingly unreal, I had swallowed the corporate mythology completely, believing that corporations are structured to be meritocratic and reward the worker bees: do your work, do it well, and the cream will naturally rise. I learned the hard way about the corporate reality: about nepotism, personal vendettas, Machiavellian tactics, and the efficacy of having the brownest noses very quickly.

Yet I persisted in being naïve because I had confidence in my abilities and that I was capable to not only survive but to thrive in the corporate environment; I did not see the damage that the inertia of the status quo, fear of change, and good-enough-ism can do to derail any intentions of doing the right thing, those intentions didn’t stand a chance against the existential threat of losing one’s personal livelihood and the very human fear of becoming the nail that stood up only to get hammered down. Even as I have worked for many years for many different companies, those all too real accrued lessons did not stick in my memory for long. I persisted in my naivete, every new workplace I entered gave me new hope and every old workplace I left added to my wariness about human pragmatism and capacity for falsehood. I was ever the optimist, so the wariness never overcame the naivete.

My usual survival tactic after I saw through the cloud of red dust of the corporate façade at a new workplace was to circle the wagons as I focused on the technical challenges that awaited me as well as hoping for potential contributions to society. My father, in his career as an electric power engineer, focused on contributing to the people of Taiwan and Honduras while building the electric power networks in those countries during the first half of his career. He switched to championing the underdogs during the latter half of his career as a consultant: the small municipal-owned power companies in the US and utilities in developing countries. He consistently saw the glass as half full because he can always extract some beneficial outcome out of his work for the underdogs. I tried to emulate his optimism in my own work, except that is was difficult to extract salient contributions to society from working on products developed for the benefit the have’s: privileged consumers in the abundantly developed world. I eventually learned to derive personal satisfaction from the technical realm, but even that is limited as my milieu had been categorized as a “mature” technology by whoever’s job it is to that assign uninformed labels, which meant that not much R&D is expected from the R&D department.

I eventually saw through the clouds of red dust after I had left the corporate environment, which ironically reinvigorated my imagination, liberating me from the necessary but mundane tasks of cost-reducing or repeatedly reinventing the wheel using the same technologies. It gave me intrinsic joys of making connections between the old and new but without the extrinsic joys of being able to execute on those connections.

Looking back at my corporate work experience, I will only surmise that I am happy that I have survived, which is all I could have hoped for. I had some highs, and I had some lows, there is much to be said about maintaining a steady state that is above the waterline.

As I progressed through life, I have gained enough experiences which ended up training me to readily see through the clouds of red dust, I have become progressively better at identifying their tell tail signs, being able to identify the many modes of disguise and obfuscation. Seeing the clouds of red dust for people, institutions, or society has become a habit. Some clouds of red dust are thick and swirling, disguising and obfuscating the truth, while others are light, thin, and easily penetrable. However, my ability to spot the clouds of red dust is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because I have become more perspicacious and less easily fooled, and it is a curse because my natural response to the real world makes me seem cynical. A description which I accept because being cynical is much better than being a Pollyanna in today’s environment.

A cynical person is defined by Merriam Webster as someone:

Who has or shows the attitude or temper of a cynic: such as

1. : being contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives

2. : being based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest

Cynical perfectly describes my steady state of mind. I quote that great philosopher George Carlin as an explanation, “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist,” which rings true in my case. Some will regard Carlin’s quote as just an excuse for being negative. I think that is being too facile and dismissive, because I am a living proof of that quote, I am the counterexample to their assertion.

I was an idealist throughout my life as a young adult, a romantic idealist, someone with strong burgeoning senses of right and wrong, a believer of the Cosmo’s scales of justice naturally evening out the inequities of real life. In every situation that I have faced, I always hope that the ledgers eventually balances, that all the debts to society are paid for somehow. As my idealism is tested throughout my life, I have often been disappointed by human behavior, but my idealism has never waned, it has been tempered and constrained but has never disappeared; even though I guard my idealism ever more assiduously as my idealism has been repeatedly assaulted by reality.

Indeed, I am less a cynic — defined as someone with a terminal condition of cynicism — than just being a cynical person. Being cynical is to be in a continually dynamic state, a subtle but important distinction from just being a cynic; being cynical means being able to evolve my perceptions while also being cognitively adroit enough to adjust instantaneous perceptions with changing context, information, and knowledge.

This has been the evolution of my life. My attitude over my lifetime has evolved and hardened with every façade that I was able to see through, with every cloud of red dust that I had to acknowledge to be false; as each unpleasant seeing through the cloud of red dust experience happens, a little bit of my idealism disappears and a little bit of my wariness over the nature of my fellow humans grows. Fortunately, this does not mean that my idealism has completely disappeared, it has just been well protected to prevent further erosion.

Seeing through the clouds of red dust is thus a metaphor for being clear-eyed and mindfully filtering out the untruths in order to be able to clearly witness the truths. It is part of a continuous series of steps in a process to become enlightened.

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the façade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

I think of the quote as an appropriate framing device which places the acts of seeing through the clouds of red dust as small steps in the continuum of process of seeking enlightenment. Each act of seeing through the clouds of red dust helps us build progressively towards our overarching mission of enlightenment. The key part of the quote that resonated is: crumbling away of untruth, which is, in essence, what seeing through the clouds of red dust is: taking away the untruths so that we can arrive at the real truths. I had never declared that I was taking the judgmental vow to seek the “truth” in the spiritual sense, yet as I am increasingly moralistic in my old age, I subconsciously seek honesty, integrity, and truth during my interactions with people, institutions, and society. I have developed high expectations for truths.

This exercise has given me a tool and a frame to center my thoughts regarding untruths and truths. Seeing through the clouds of red dust is a convenient and simple device to remind myself that the act of seeing past the untruths needs to be acknowledged and recognized so that I can organize and categorize my experiences before moving towards the greater goals of enlightenment.