The Sound of One Hand Slapping: The Tao of Will Smith

I watched a video this morning of Will Smith being interviewed by a young man.

Yes, THAT Will Smith. 

The video came across my Twitter feed. It was a small snippet of a larger interview but what occurred in that brief exchange struck me as noteworthy and profound. Will Smith offered something to his interviewer that I would describe as deep and wise. The usual Twitter hyenas in the comment section were having none of it though. 

“He seems broken,” one user responded.

“Pretending to be a deep thinker,” said another. 

“He’s so full of himself”

“I want what he’s smoking.”

The snark and cynicism were in copious supply.

To be fair though, a few commenters seemed to actually understand this mysterious exchange but they seemed to be the exceptions. Most people seemed downright oblivious to Smith’s point and eagerly leaped at the chance to pile their derision on a celebrity whose questionable past offers an easy target for condemnation and dismissal.

Personally, I witnessed a beautiful teaching in the brief exchange, transmitted a bit clumsily perhaps, but nonetheless grounded in a truth and understanding that can only be arrived at through experience. 

I thought, “Wow, Will Smith gets it too.”

The fact that his message went over so many people’s heads was a tad disappointing and I decided that some clarification might be in order.

I wanted to write about the moment, but I thought it best to get the full context so I looked up the full-length interview. It was titled “Will Smith breaks his silence.”

Before we delve into the content of this interview, some context is warranted.

By any metric- Will Smith has been successful in nearly every endeavor he has taken on. 

Long after the living existence of the man we call Will Smith, we will likely be digesting his work. As long as we dance or watch movies, it can be assumed that his body of work in both film and music  will find its way to appreciative crowds. He will be immortalized in a very flimsy sense- like John Lennon or Winston Churchill or Marcus Aurelius- assuredly dead but the ongoing subject of living conversations. Alive as anything our minds are resting in. But even with a resume as renowned and acclaimed as his is, Will Smith will always be known as the man that slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. 

In case you missed it, the infamous event was at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony.

Chris Rock was the emcee, and true to form, took to intermittent roasting jabs at the many celebrity attendees whose private lives are invariably made public by tabloid journalists. 

Rock made a joke about Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith who has been publicly dealing with alopecia- a hair loss condition. 

“Jada can’t wait for G.I. Jane 2,” he quipped, referring to the 1997 film in which Demi Moore shaves her head to play a female soldier. 

At first many people thought it was a skit.

Smith walked right up on stage and slapped Chris Rock across the face.

“Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth!” he yelled as he walked back to his seat.

It wasn’t a skit though. 

The world saw it all- a moment of unrestrained emotion that boiled over into a public display of cringe-worthy violence. 

The backstory behind the impulse to get up on stage is inconsequential at this point and has been discussed in great detail by pop-culture pundits around the world.

It made global news.

Yes, it was only a slap. That many said the slap was justified did not matter. In that brief spectacle, Will Smith completely torpedoed his career. There was no shortage of condemnation for the behavior. Contracts were cancelled, deals rescinded. Will Smith became persona non grata to the entire entertainment industry that, up until that moment, adored him and his contributions to the world of acting- he was actually awarded two Oscars including Best Actor for his portrayal of Richard Dove Williams that very night.

Accolades aside though, he was relentlessly vilified for weeks afterwards. Online, he was dragged by a vast population of social media citizens honed in the fine art of judging and heaping scorn. The memes were in endless supply. His public image seemed to crumble in an instant and many wondered if he could ever redeem it.

Many argued that there was something deeply human about a man defending his wife from public ridicule about a condition that she has no control over. Some say he did the right thing, that Rock did take things too far. Some say Rock had it coming. It was, some asserted, only a slap after all- a gesture of gentlemanly outrage that seems downright civil in comparison to other possible avenues of violent response. 

There is no need to weigh in on the validity of these perspectives at this point. It happened and everyone who was involved- Rock, Smith, and the entire population of witnesses have to contend with its happening. 

Smith has since expressed deep remorse for his actions and reconciled with Chris Rock over the incident. Both Smith and Rock have conceded that they took things too far. 

Journalist Anushka Bhattacharya recently reported “Given that both parties involved have reached a mutual agreement to forgive, it is anticipated that the incident will gradually lose its significance because of the overshadowing presence of positivity.”

Life goes on obviously, and Will Smith seems just as interesting and iconic as he has ever been. As this is being written, his fourth installment of the Bad Boys movie franchise is set to be released next week. The dust seems to have settled for Smith who is working through his own redemption arc. Sometimes a fallen hero is still a hero. Fame tends to do that for some people- it eventually washes them clean despite the ceaseless supply of dirt that we can’t help but dig up on them.

Smith seems to take the challenges of fame in stride. Queried about what it’s like being famous, Smith says, “I love being famous. It makes me feel safe. Somebody knows who I am anywhere I go on earth. Any street I walk on, somebody knows who I am and I believe in the basic goodness of humanity so I always feel safe. I feel like somebody will help me.”

Regarding the minutia of his private life being made public, Smith owns the reality with remarkable grace and enthusiasm. “I’m built for it. My goal is for my life and my experience to be firewood on everybody’s dreams. Use it to learn and grow and evolve. I’m not taking it with me anyways.” 

In the interview, Smith continues to talk about how money and the ability to purchase anything he could possibly want has not produced any real sense of lasting happiness. He says that happiness cannot be found in anything external. He says with complete conviction that it must be discovered internally by the “full-frontal contact with the dark night of the soul.” 

Of all the interview responses, the part that reverberated through Twitter came near the end of the session. Smith is asked, “What is the meaning of life?”

“Well, that’s a big one,” he replied. He paused, thinking about the answer.

“Even the concept of the meaning of life is your mind trying to fathom the unfathomable. Just sit her for 30 seconds.”

“Right now?” the interviewer replied.

Smith nods.

The interviewer seemed noticeably perplexed. He smiled awkwardly, folded his hands, and sank into his chair. It was clear that he was trying to relax, or at least appear relaxed. His eyes moved around the room as if looking for the point somewhere- waiting for something to happen in those 30 seconds. It seemed likely that this young man may have been so struck with the status and magnitude of his celebrity interviewee, that he was willing to tolerate 30 seconds of awkward silence even though it made absolutely no sense to him. The concept of just sitting and experiencing the present moment was not even in his language yet.

He continued to wait. Eyes darting.

Smith called him back.

“Look at me.”

He looked at Smith. Under his smile you could see his jaw tighten. His discomfort was palpable. 

He was certainly trying to understand what was being conveyed though it was evident from his body language that he did not. 

“Now look at you while you’re looking at me”

The interviewer squirmed, covered his face with his hand for a second.

“Damn, he just did it,” he mumbled as if Smith just performed some amazing mental kung-fu feat in real time.

You could see the young man trying to get the point. He nodded some more like he was sincerely engaging with the invitation. His eyes continued to rove though and it seemed that he was only thinking about looking at himself  instead of actually looking at himself.

“I’m trying,” he said through his gripped smile, “It’s not easy though.”

“You’re right,” Smith confirmed.

They hold the pause a little longer until Smith at last adds,

“That’s where you’ll find the meaning of life.”

The young man let out a puff of breath as if finally relieved from his 30 second torture. He nodded some more, did the classic “Mind blown” gesture with his fingers throwing a pair of tiny explosions off the sides of his head. 

“That’s where you’ll find it,” Smith reiterates to the young man. 

“Whatever that was, if you can make peace with it, that’s the meaning of life.”

“Damn,” the young man replied.

Mind blown apparently.

Or was it? 

You could see that the young man wanted something concrete. He wanted to hear the great Will Smith give up a pre-packaged formula for life’s meaning and instead got nothing but space, emptiness, and what broadcasters would call 30 seconds of dead air. The young man smacked his stack of interview questions against his thigh and seemed ready to continue on with the session. 

On video, the transition at this point is abrupt. Whatever transpired after that moment is edited out of the final video, and Martin Lawrence, Smith’s co-star in the Bad Boys franchise is brought out for a few moments to talk about their friendship and their upcoming film. The end.

I hesitated to reveal Will Smith’s identity before recounting this whole exchange.

I have observed a tendency for people to filter the credibility and complexity of celebrities down to small details that allow for an easy choice to accept or reject the truthfulness of what is being offered by them. 

Let us ignore the fact that Will Smith centers in this exchange. It is irrelevant. The fact is that Smith did not offer up anything that was particularly new or revolutionary. It was truth though- a kind of truth that cannot be spoken, only lived. You will find a similar teaching in nearly every religion and spiritual path- drop your need for comprehension and all is revealed. 

A famous line from Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, says “Those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know.

The 13th century Sufi Poet Rumi, famously wrote:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas,

language,

even the phrase "each other"

doesn't make any sense.

I suspect that Smith, like many of us non-celebrities, has had some coaching on meditation.

It is certainly suggested in the interview that Smith has been steeped in a number of spiritual paths and religious ideas, and it seems that Smith is still working out his own sense of what awakening is and embodying it more fully. 

“Even the concept of the meaning of life is your mind trying to fathom the unfathomable.” 

Smith was spot-on in not offering up some canned aphorism about life’s meaning, but instead inviting us to experience it directly in the space where talking and thinking are no longer centered as important. He tried to take the young man into that space with him but the attempt was a tad awkward. It is comparable to teaching a few phrases of a foreign language to a person who only knows how to replicate the sounds, not what they actually mean. Smith, to his credit seemed to recognize from this this young man’s body language that the man was still completely entangled in the act of thinking.

He tried his best to disentangle the young man- “Look at me.”

In retrospect, we could say this was a bit of a miscalculation on Smith’s part. The young man could very readily believe that there was something important about Smith himself, that looking at Will Smith the person, as opposed to a chair or the ceiling or simply empty space, was the point. It wasn’t. It was simply the looking.

“Now look at yourself while looking at me.”

This too could have been said better. 

“Be aware of yourself doing the looking.”

“Experience/watch/notice THAT which is looking.”

“Acknowledge that there is a constant presence looking from behind your eyes.”

There are other skillful and succinct phrases to point the way, and any of these reformulations might more effectively evoke what Smith was trying to reveal- the open, relaxed, spacious presence of awareness.

“I’m trying. It’s not easy though.”

A more seasoned instructor would have caught this rebuttal as evidence that the teaching was likely being misinterpreted. The young man likely could have benefitted from hearing it phrased another way. The denizens of Twitter certainly could too.

Watching yourself remotely is not the point at all. That IS hard. That requires effortful thinking- holding an image that is detached from your own authentic perspective. 

The point isn’t to try and force some out-of-body experience on demand. Even if you could accomplish this, you would not be able to sustain it, and you likely would have a hard time functioning very long in such a state. Though I cannot claim to know firsthand, I can surmise that it would not be advisable to try operating a motor vehicle in such a state. Let go of this idea completely. An out-of-body experience is not what we’re after if we are seeking a connection with source consciousness.

Experiencing the presence of awareness that is looking out from your own eyes is actually very easy. It requires no thought, no special technique or training. It merely requires an intentional shift of focus away from the content of our experience- thoughts, ideas, details, and data, and a shift towards to the space in which all this content appears. 

Be aware of simply being aware.

If you perceive that you are trying, applying effort, or expecting some profound realization from it, then you are likely overlooking something about this process and making it much more complicated than it has to be. 

There is nothing hard about experiencing the present moment openly. You do not have to quiet your mind. You do not need silence. You do not even have to stop what you’re doing. Awareness has no conditions under which it can only be experienced. You can drop into its always available spaciousness anytime, anywhere, under any conditions. You don’t have to do anything special except let go of your reliance on thinking and rest in the open space of simply being aware. 

I love that Smith only asked for 30 seconds. He could have said an even shorter duration. 

Awareness is immediate and is experienced instantaneously. It has no cooking time. 

You don’t need to “get there.” You are there- right here and right now. You are already aware. You don’t have to become aware. In fact, it is such an ordinary aspect of our being that we are often sure there must be more to this whole awareness/awakening thing. There really isn’t.  

People often equate longer meditation sessions as being more effective towards an outcome of realization or some form of “getting it.” This is an error that people often take years to see. They may meditate everyday, sometimes for hours. They may sincerely believe that they need a cushion, a quiet space, a feeling of ease in their bodies, or any number of other prerequisites in order to control their mind and achieve some mythical quality of being that we may have called enlightenment or realization. But enlightenment is not discovered through hours of practice. It is not found through any technique. You do not need copious amounts of instruction. 

What we call enlightenment is not about controlling anything at all. It’s not about positivity and good feelings. It is certainly not evoked by shielding ourselves from the negative experiences of distraction or stress.

A mind that has more consistently awakened to its own innate enlightened being operates in a more constant state of permissiveness. It allows the initial impression of what is happening to be exactly as it is- pain, discomfort, confusion, even the incessant chatter of our own thought production- awareness pushes nothing away. 

Awareness simply lets us stand with both feet in our living, present experience and operate fully within it.An enlightened person is simply a person who realizes this. You will find such people in great abundance in the world. They create things. They raise families. They run businesses. At their core they are exactly like you. They are not special. They can be wealthy and famous beyond anything you could imagine, or they can be completely poor and anonymous. Anyone, young or old, sick or healthy, smart or dumb, can experience being aware. And, they can still lapse into stunning moments of forgetting their true nature- like Will Smith walking up on stage at the Academy Awards and slapping the emcee in front of millions of viewers. 

You will hear this from nearly every teacher of Eastern philosophy. You do not need to try to become enlightened. You already are. You are the light of consciousness embodied.

Many of you may not know this yet, like the young man interviewing Smith. The interviewer seemed to be completely alienated from this truth about himself. You could sense that he was in new territory. He was being guided into a realization that can only be arrived at by the complete abandoning of thought and the need to comprehend, to a truth that lives outside our mental concepts.

When invited to take a moment to simply experience reality through the peaceful space of awareness, he looked around confusedly. Instead of just sitting with what was happening, he thought about what was happening.  He seemed hung up on the question, “What should I be experiencing?” He analyzed and concentrated. He tried to look at himself looking at the celebrity and decided it was hard.

I suspect that this young man will find his own awakened nature sooner or later and will ultimately realize exactly what Will Smith was pointing to in that moment. At the time though, he seemed confused, perhaps even a bit frustrated. He wanted a point- an idea about how it is. He wanted a meaning of life quote that he could hang his hat on. 

There really wasn’t one. There isn’t one.

The answer is in the silence of the moment and the space of simply being aware of being aware. An enlightened person rests comfortably in this lack of meaning.

Many of you may find that this is the hard part.

Dropping the need for meaning can be a frightening feat for a mind that wants to control its reality by understanding it. It wants to know why bad things happen. What’s the source of happiness? Why are we here? What happens when we die?

Our quest for life’s meaning only leads to more thinking and more concepts.

It uproots us from the direct experience of what is happening

and plants us in our ideas and interpretations about what is happening. 

A life that is contained by the need for meaning will ultimately be fractured.

An articulated meaning of life, that is, some meaning of life compressed into words, is fundamentally deficient. 

Not every moment can live up to the meaning. A person might decide that certain experiences are in support of this established point and everything else is just some procession of lesser, forgettable experiences that must be endured until we can get back to the meaningful bits.

If life is said to be about love, what happens when we experience or feel love’s absence? If life is about excitement, what happens when we are stuck in traffic or doing something unexciting? If life is about raising a family, what happens when the family is all grown up or estranged from us? If life is about doing what we love, what happens when we are tasked with something we don’t love?

One Twitter user suggested that the purpose of life is “to do good works and give glory to God.”

It’s a rather lofty proposition, but it excludes life’s ordinary machinations. What happens when we are just pumping gas or taking out the garbage? Are we to assume these are simply short but necessary breaks from a life of meaning? What about a person in a hospital bed who has become totally dependent on others? Is the whole doing good works thing something they must unfortunately forgo along with the use of their body? Must they constantly evangelize about the glory of God to the passing doctors and nurses to keep life meaningful?

For any meaning that we might contrive for life, we will likely find thousands of instances that fall outside that meaning. 

When we seek a meaning of life, we bypass life’s utter mysteriousness. Instead of simply being in awe of the incomprehensible, we retreat to safety and the comfort of our ideas. 

There is certainly something deeply human in our need to construct meaning in our minds. Will Smith seems to be finally letting go of this need. His interviewer, not so much.  

There is a zen teaching that says life is pointless, through and through.

This can be an absolutely terrifying message for some.

It might sound depressing even.

It might sound like a license for utter hedonism and self-gratification. 

So what? 

Despite our constant declarations of what life is all about (or perhaps because of it), fear, depression, hedonism, and self-gratification all certainly live on in the human condition. In our attempt to concretize life’s meaning, to collapse the unfathomable into a small manageable pile of ideas, we cut ourselves off from the flow of simply being swept along in life’s mystery. In the untold number of pronouncements we humans have offered up to explain what it’s all about, we certainly have not cleansed ourselves of any of the aforementioned afflictions. 

Maybe it’s time to try a different approach.

Will Smith is by no means the first person to suggest that we simply let go of the need for speakable meaning. Plenty of people understood what was being conveyed in the whole 30 seconds of just looking. Plenty of people could see past the biographical blemishes of one of humanity’s ultra-celebrities and digest his message. Truth is truth after all, even if it revealed by someone who has been admittedly impulsive and even violent.

Awakening does not erase the past. It only nullifies its weight in the present moment. Even if Smith’s infamous slap heard around the world cannot be undone, it is rendered inconsequential to a man who understands that right now is the only real moment that can be experienced. Everything else is just an idea. Creating meaning out of life’s vast ineffability is like trying to derive nourishment from eating a restaurant menu. It’s like trying to cool off by saying the words “swimming pool.” You will always come up short from the actual lived experience itself. Life’s meaning is found in simply opening to the reality of it happening- without the need to put it into a box of our own understanding. We are all capable of taking a short moment to bask in the recognition that there is this amazing thing we call presence, looking out from behind our own eyes, taking in with silent fascination the simple fact that any of this exists. 

Perhaps that might be the meaning of life- to simply be in awe of it. But awe cannot be conveyed in anyone’s words or thoughts. It must be lived and experienced directly. 

Try it yourself. Take a short moment to simply acknowledge that there is this awareness checking out what is taking place right now. It may not immediately blow your hair back. Our minds are often expecting an emotional charge to what we call amazement or awe. Let that go. Just rest as the witnessing, observing awareness. It is right there in plain sight- listening through your ears, seeing through your eyes, feeling and sensing through your body. It most assuredly does not need meaning to operate, and awareness doesn’t need to exert control over whatever is arising in its space by understanding it.  

Do you imagine a bear, or a bird, or a fish getting hung up on such existential gymnastics? Can you envision a bee asking “Why am I here?” These simple lower organisms, like us complicated human forms, are also imbued with presence. Unlike us though they seem to live their realities without the intense analysis that bogs us down. They live in the constant transactional space with their environments following their own unique path of harmony. They are born. They eat. They reproduce if they’re able to find a willing mate, and they die. All sentient creatures do this. Will Smith does this. You do too. In that regard, the mere fact that anything is aware is nothing particularly extraordinary. 

It is awesome though- that is to say, it evokes a true, palpable, and potent awe when we really stop to check it out. Awareness is, in its glorious simplicity, a mysterious intelligence imbued in each of us, taking into itself whatever is happening right now. It does this effortlessly. That is you- the natural unfolding of consciousness with the temporary experience of being alive in the form of you. You just are, and awareness simply is, and life itself simply is. Don’t overthink it. Just live it. 

And maybe take a few moments here and there to let in the sheer amazement of its occurrence. 30 seconds will do. 

Mind blown.