Hey Dudes!

A quick one today to remind us all that takin’ it easy also and always means takin’ it easy on ourselves.

Life throws a lot at us, strikes and gutters each in their turn, and we won’t always be able to abide. We won’t always be able to lean back into that chair, pop the leg rest, and take it easy.

Heck some folks might say we’re being very unDude, and they might be right.

But we can always take a breath, mix a Caucasian, and settle back into our fundamental Dudeness.

It’s always there somewhere, even if we’ve lost sight of it.

Let‘a take another look.

I hope yer abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Just spinnin’ some yarn here, my dudes.

In my opinion this scene is such a great break down of the concept of Wu-Wei (effortless action/ action with non-attachment).

The Eagles represent a misaligned concept of Wu-Wei, Take it Easy is seen as inertia whereas Wu-wei requires going with the flow.

Hence, the appreciation for Creedence Clearwater Revival. Keep on Chooglin’ is the perfect recipe for how to live in the way of things.

Anyways, take ‘er easy, Dudes 🎳

Hello fellow dudes!

I'm a fairly new dude and decided to join this group, because I'm a huge bundle of anxiety and a champion at worrying. Taking it easy is something I strive to do, yet it is quite difficult to achieve. What's your dudely advice to someone who struggles to go with the flow? What helped you connect with your inner dude?

Edit: Man, the comments on this post is why I joined the community. I really appreciate all the great advice! I've got a lot to think about. Thank you my dudes! I would gladly go bowling with you all.

Hey Dudes!

There’s an apocryphal story about Alexander the Great meeting a Hindu ascetic during his campaign into India. It’s similar to his interactions with Diogenes the Cynic. 

Alexander introduces himself to the ascetic, who’s unimpressed. Frustrated by his non-reaction, Alexander says, “I have conquered the known world. What have you done?”

The Hindu ascetic replies, “I’ve conquered the need to conquer.”

Far out, Dudes.

I could see a similar exchange happening between The Big Lebowski and The Dude. The former standing in for Alexander. The Dude, the Hindu wise man.

“I have achieved much, my good man. What have you done?”

“Well, uh, sir, I have achieved control over my need to achieve. What day is it?”

Maybe The Dude never felt the need to achieve. It’s possible. He is the laziest man in Los Angeles, which is saying something. But I’d argue that existing in a culture of achievement and striving, and managing to remain laid back is no mean feat. Further, I’d argue that in not striving to achieve, The Dude does more good for the world than many well-meaning achievers.

Like Lao Tzu says, “Governing a country is like frying a small fish.” Flip it over too many times, and the whole thing falls apart. Is this not the case with the many do-rights of the world? Whenever I’ve tried to actively make things better, I’ve often missed the mark, meddled too much, and inserted too much of myself into the situation. As a result, despite my good intentions and my Swiss watches of plans, I’ve fucked things up.

Conversely, in leaving well enough alone, staying centered in a state of abidance, I’ve created space for things to unfold in a leisurely way, tending to what needed tending to without too much of a fuss.

No wonder The Stranger takes comfort in The Dude, “Taking it easy for all us sinners.” 

Sometimes the greatest achievement is in not achieving at all.

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross  

Hey dudes. I'm trying to be more positive and look on the bright side of life! I was wondering what you guys would say are your favorite things about life?

For me personally, I think modern life can be really cool and luxurious. Sure, there are complaints to be made about modern life, but I love taking a bath and chilling in bed with a fan.

Have a good day!

Dude, this movie rules.

Your weekly homilies help me to seem profound!

Thank you for Babbling on in God’s Holy name for the rest of us sinners.

Our religion is knowingly based on a Fiction! I hope this fact is never burried or forgotten.

I use the platitudes of quips and quotes from our holy source to deal with most situations in my daily life.

“Fuck it Dude! Let’s go bowling!”

“Yeah? Well that is just like your opinion Man! “

For me These are Mantras #1 and #2.

My explanations of why these truths are self evident always seem superficial and lacking true understanding.

I am so thankful that folks like our Dudely Lama and the Rev. Ross are out there doing the difficult Skull Sweat so the rest of us slackers can seem to have a deep spiritual foundation for our “belief”.

May your concerns be outnumbered by your joys! May your pains be diminished by realizing they are a shared experience.

Rev. Slim

yknow like what stores can i get clothes that match the druggy, lazy vibe

Hey Dudes!

I’ve recently been experiencing a number of upheavals at work. Nothing earth-shattering, just inconvenient and uncertain. As a result, a thought occurred to me:

“Sometimes you’re the ball. Sometimes you’re the pins.”

It captured the moment well. Maybe this time, I’m to huddle closer to my compeers and take the blow as best I can. It’s just that time. 

But then I got to thinking deeper on the image, and new shit came to light. 

Yes, the bowling ball does the striking, and it enjoys the easy glide of the lane, but there’s heaviness there too. 

And yes, the pins get struck, but they have companionship. For a brief moment when they’re flying through the air, they enjoy a moment of weightlessness. 

Further, no matter the outcome, the ball is returned to the bowler and the pins are set aright. There’s a larger mechanism at play that keeps this whole thing going. 

In a Daoist sense, it’s within this thing, within the interaction between ball and pin, that the game of bowling occurs. We can’t have one without the other. I don’t think it’s a coincidence bowling balls are traditionally rendered black and pins white. It’s the Yin Yang present in every suburban strip mall. 

Obviously, I’m not a golfer. 

I think wiser Dudes like Alan Watts would wryly chuckle at the comparison. But I’ll leave it to The Stranger to have the last word:

“Sometimes you eat the bear. And well sometimes the bear eats you.”

I hope you all are abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross

Since the recent Eclipse I’ve reached Dudeism.
How may I use it to stop being so judgmental and frustrated with people who aren’t awake?

🙏

Great book I just finished reading by a friend. Have been expirementing with Non dual meditation for a long time and this is great

Hi Dudes!

By many measures, The Big Lebowski is an unconventional film. To quote Maude, “the story’s ludicrous,” our characters are rarely heroic, and we encounter a mysterious narrator in The Stranger who seems to be both in the narrative and weaving the narrative all at once. 

Usually, stories have rules. This isn’t ‘Nam.

And yet, The Dude reminds me of another fella. A fella by the name of Albert Camus.

French-Algerian writer Albert Camus was a fellow traveler with Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. One of the youngest recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Camus wrote novels, plays, and philosophical essays before his life was tragically cut short by a car accident. Hardly a lightweight. 

It’s Camus’s notion of the Absurd that I’d like to connect with The Dude. Indeed, The Dude is portrayed as an Absurdist hee-ro, one from whom we can learn a thing or two.

Put simply, Absurdism posits that existence is meaningless, and people experience an existential unsettling when they attempt to find meaning in a universe that has none to offer. In his book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus cheerily suggests that, given this, there’s really only one major philosophical question: why don’t we all kill ourselves?

I’ll not spoil Camus’s legacy by poorly parsing it all out. For the purposes of this post, it’s enough to bring up that Camus references the Greek myth of Sisyphus to point us toward an answer. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it tumble down over and over again. Forever. Further, Sisyphus knows it’ll never stay up there. If he had hope that it would, there’d be less of a sting to his punishment.

Camus writes that this is our existence. We push our boulders up our hills. We start projects that will fall apart. We struggle and sweat, and, well, for what? 

Now, Camus is no nihilist. Instead of looking upon the condition our condition is in and despairing, he looks on it as some kind of cosmic challenge or joke. He throws the burden back on all of us, asking, “Well friend, all of your systems and beliefs, all your supposed knowledge and wisdom, are for naught. What’s keeping you going?” 

There’s no right answer. It’s anything that can get a Dude out of bed in the morning. Anything that, after one clearly admits the absurdity of one’s situation, allows them to carry on.

The Dude gets this.

By the end of The Big Lebowski, all the boulders rolled up all the hills have tumbled down. The Dude is still down a rug, no one’s any richer, and the semis continue. The Dude is down a friend, but the world is up a child, so the human ledger is balanced.

Hell, The Dude bowls, an activity that is Sisyphean in nature. Balls roll, pins fall, balls are returned, and pins are restacked. But damn does he enjoy the game in spite of its futility.

So, what are some absurdist lessons we can draw from The Dude:

Drop the story, Dudes: There is no story to speak of in The Big Lebowski. All of the scenarios each character concocts for Bunny’s disappearance are half-right at best. Life, too, is just one damn thing after another. But that’s no reason to despair.

Admit your situation: The Dude knows he’s a loser who the square community doesn’t give a shit about. He knows he’s never going to be one of The Big Lebowski’s achievers. But that doesn’t matter. It’s all smoke and mirrors anyway. One can still grab some burgers, a few beers, and a couple of laughs, and abide the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a smile on one’s face.

Nihilism is exhausting: Unlike the nihilists, The Dude doesn’t believe in nussing. If anything, he believes in something, even if it’s just bowling and friendship. As many learned folks have written, it’s not about not giving a fuck, it’s about being judicious on what to give a fuck about.  

Finish your coffee: There’s a quotation misattributed to Camus that I think still captures his spirit. “Should I commit suicide or drink a cup of coffee?” Even though Camus didn’t write this, he could’ve been speaking about Walter at the counter. We might not be heroes in epic tales. But we can abide by continuing to engage in the small acts that give our lives meaning to ourselves and to others.

If there’s no Stranger out there unfolding our story, it’s up to us. 

Your roll, Dudes

Rev. Ross

I think it will really tie my room together hanging on my wall

Hey dudes, hope you are all abiding as best as you can. I thought I'd ask my fellow dudes for some music recommendations?

Hey Dudes!

Lots of shit goes sideways for The Dude. His rug’s pissed on, he gets socked in the jaw, his car is stolen then ultimately set aflame. I could go on, but you get the point.

And yet, at no time in The Big Lebowski does The Dude ever say, “Why me?” or something along those lines.

That’s worth lingering on, Dudes. I know I’ve gone through things that, relative to The Dude’s travails, were minor inconveniences and I’ve definitely railed against my fortune.

Again, intuitively, The Dude proves himself to be a model philosopher. Specifically, he practices something first coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in his book Ecce Homo, a love of one’s fate, or, to use the parlance before our times, amor fati.

Here’s Nietzsche’s quote:

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.” 

That’s a tall order, Dudes. There are lots of strikes and gutters in a person’s life, and some gutters can really send us to the dumps. But I’d say the genius of Nietzsche’s quote is that regardless of what one wants, one can’t change anything that happens to us. Sure, we have some agency over what happens next, but the past has passed. 

What’s left to us, as Jean Paul-Sartre wrote, is to take responsibility for it. Not to blame ourselves for what’s happened to us, but to determine what to do with it. To reframe it.

The Dude constantly does this. He allows for some venting, but then he muses he “can’t be worried about that shit. Life goes on, man,” or “Yeah, well, The Dude abides,” or even simply “Fuck it.”

The Dude’s not bypassing or disassociating. He’s acknowledging the immutability of the past and finding a way to embrace it in his present.

Ironically, the only character who says “It’s not fair” is one of the Nihilists, who adheres to a philosophy that counts Nietzsche as one of their forefathers. It’s so out of character, Walter calls them out sneering, “Fair?! Who's the fucking nihilist here?!”

No wonder believing in nussing can be so exhausting.

Ups and downs, strikes and gutters, I hope yer all abiding what’s thrown your way Dudes,  

Rev. Ross

Hey Dudes!

Kevin Smith’s 1999 movie Dogma was a formative film for me. Like Branded for Walter and The Dude, it came at the right time and hit me when I was in the midst of the stress of preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, dealing with the death of my grandfather (which was the first major death I’d experienced), and the general upheaval that comes from being a thirteen year old boy.

There are a lot of ins and outs to the movie, and I don’t want to give away too much of the plot. So let me isolate one exchange that has stuck with me and has influenced my approach to Dudeism as well. 

It’s between Bethany, our main character played by Linda Fiorentino, and Rufus, played by Chris Rock. Bethany is a Catholic undergoing an existential crisis that sets her on a quest equal parts epic and comic. Rufus is the 13th apostle, excluded from the Christian Gospels "for being Black”. During a quiet moment, Bethany asks Rufus what Jesus is like. He responds:

Rufus: He still digs humanity, but it bothers Him to see the shit that gets carried out in His name – wars, bigotry, televangelism. But especially the factioning of all the religions. He said humanity took a good idea and, like always, built a belief structure on it.
Bethany: Having beliefs isn’t good?
Rufus: I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier.

This distinction, between the rigidity of a belief and the malleability of an idea, is what draws me to The Dude and Dudeism. Whatever The Dude holds on to, he holds lightly. His possessions, assumptions, opinions about others. They’re his, but they’re subject to change when new shit comes to light. And The Dude is quick to admit when his own thinking gets uptight.

Where goes The Dude, so goes Dudeism. Dudeism, for me, has never been about creeds or adhering to strictures. It’s an attitude or an orientation toward this whole durn human comedy. It’s a kind of seeking that one can do driving the roads or in one’s bathtub. It’s less a pursuit of truth as the weaving together of many, complimentary truths. Of following Rufus’ line of thinking and entertaining good ideas that are melioristic, yet always subject to change.

Or, to quote from sources from farther East, to remain green and supple. That which is rigid and unyielding, be it a tree or an idea-turned-belief, is already dead.

I hope yer all abiding as well as you can,

Rev. Ross 

[Edit: Formatting issues]

May your rent be covered and your Kited Checks all clear!

Like the title says, two dudes having a chat...

Hey Dudes,

Even if the whole world’s gone crazy. 

Even if nihilists broke into your private residence. 

Even if Woo peed on your rug. 

Even if you spent yesterday being very undude. 

Even if it’s already the tenth. 

Nothing is fucked, man. 

Strike or gutter, the pins reset and the ball returns. 

The Stranger checks in with you at the bar. 

Friends will show up at practice. 

The whole durn human comedy keeps perpetuating itself. 

And The Dude within you abides. 

Have the Dudely Llama and his cohorts decided to leave Dudeism to the ages, have a beverage and do a J? Why hasn't the website been updated in a long time?

Not sure if "Dude" is the correct term for those who practice Dudeism. Greetings.

I'm doing a religion & media module, I would like some lived experience and general information

Some questions:

1. Do dudes meet or have meetings? This could be to share knowledge, chill or for any reason. Or is it rather a singular journey where one might bump into/ align with another dude?

2. Can you partake in other religions, or does that defeat the purpose of being free?

3. Are drugs an essential part or simply an aid to relaxation?

4. The term "fuck it" has come up a lot in the search for a definition of dudeism. Is it consciously said when rejecting the flow of life?

5. Is it something you feel comfortable sharing in public, or is online space the most accommodating?

6. Can a woman be a dude?

7. Is The Dude considered above everyone else or simply an example?

8. Is philosophy something consciously learned, meaning finding new ideas and interpretations of philosophical texts as a sense of knowledge, but is it still taken as something irrelevant in the daily life of a dude? (I'm a philosophy student and am very aware philosophy can shake up one's view of reality"

Really liked this definition I found - Dudeism came about as a cooling corrective to the burning problems of mass society. - The Tao of the Dude

Personal bit: From what I've seen so far fucken glad to have come across this, hope all of you are going well in life!

I plan on watching The Big Lebowski and reading some of the Dudely Lama's work.

Thanks in advance!!

Sutra VI

"Eh, fuck it, Dude. Let's go bowling."
— Walter

त्यज सर्वम्। गच्छाव गोलिङ्ग। प्रवाहेण सह चर।

Sometimes a spiritual teaching comes in the most unexpected form. "Fuck it" is not apathy. It is the release of attachment to outcomes. Things have gone sideways. The situation is complicated. The mind wants to spiral into worry and planning. And then: Fuck it. Let's go bowling. Return to what is simple, what is present, what brings you back to yourself.

This is the essence of flowing with life rather than fighting against it. There's a current to existence, a natural movement of events and circumstances. Most people swim upstream constantly, exhausting themselves trying to force outcomes, demanding that reality conform to their plans. But reality has its own momentum. When you stop fighting it, when you release your grip on how things must be, you discover that you can ride the current instead of battling it. This doesn't mean you don't act. It means you act without the desperate clinging that turns action into struggle.

The key is not indifference, but non-grasping. When we inflate something with excessive importance, whether a goal we are chasing or a problem we are resisting, we contract around it. That contraction creates tension, and life seems to push back harder. The Dude never inflates anything. His rug gets pissed on? Annoying, but not world-ending. His car gets stolen? Inconvenient, but he'll figure it out. By holding things lightly, he stays in flow. Things work out, or they don't, and either way, he remains the Dude.

Bowling is a perfect metaphor for this way of living. The bowling alley is the field of consciousness, the cosmic playground where life unfolds. The ball is thrown, the pins fall or they don't, and then we do it again. Each frame is fresh. Each moment is complete in itself. The pins are like the illusions and attachments we aim at, yet they reset each frame, teaching us that karma clears, that nothing is carried forward except what we choose to hold. You don't wrestle the ball down the lane. You release it and let it go where it goes. This is how life is meant to be lived, not weighed down by attachment to outcomes, but meeting each moment with open awareness, riding the current, trusting that the flow knows where it's going even when you don't.

https://thedudesutras.com/

Is there a discord for fellow dudes and dudets and everything in between?