No Deer Urine Required

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford drawing a strange life lesson from ... Adam Sandler?!

But I will not take that route this time. Because I have learned. Or rather, I am still learning. I am learning to see people like Adam Sandler as not merely brainless grist to be mocked and mourned like one mourns the existence of Texas Republicans, or Antonin Scalia, or the Vatican, or Florida.

Rather, I am learning to flip it all around, to see Sandler and his ilk (hi, Judd Apatow) as shining examples, a beautiful beacon, a gleaming axis of negative possibility the around while I can revolve my deeper intuition of what life can really be.

In other words, I recognize, with all sorts of delightful, wine-enhanced epiphany, that Adam Sandler perfectly represents the thing not to become. And he does so brilliantly.

See, Sandler is the cautionary take writ large, the toxic place you avoid like karmic Chernobyl, a giant pothole made of spiritual vacuity and rotten asparagus and nails. His films’ casually venomous visions of America, of masculinity, of friendship, women, sex, kids, marriage, love, the human body and nay life itself, this is the perfect hell. It pretends at comedy, but it is really the Inferno. Simple.

And for this insight I now say, I am grateful.
...

The wise ones tell us that great teachers come in many forms. They are certainly not all the Dalai Lama, not all Thich Nhat Hanh, not all deeply humble or spiritually attuned beings willing to reveal to you hard and numinous truths via talks, or wise books, or a lifetime of quiet, powerful example.

Increasingly we find some of the most pivotal teachers are those from whom we recoil from the most. They are most callous clowns in life’s circus, the ones who do not even know they are teachers, for otherwise how could they show us the lowest and worst aspects of man, how low the vibration can go?

For them, we are grateful. From them, we can learn. We can see, with full clarity, the dark and cruel path. And then we can happily slingshot in the exact opposite direction. No deer urine required.

Oh swell. Now what do I do with all this deer urine?