Why zen is bullshit

Before doing this, though, I want to share something. If you try to talk about Zen, you will get into trouble with yourself. This is because Zen is beyond words. Even so, it is not very good to try to talk about Zen, to explicate its concepts to people not familiar with Zen practice and experience. The reason for this is because to speak of anything is always and necessarily to stay silent about something else.

To reveal one thing is to conceal another. So to say one thing about Zen is to conceal something else. So one could say that Zen is a liberation. However, anyone who has Buddha Mind knows that there is really nothing to be liberated from and that liberation and captivity are not distinct.

So there seems to be contradiction. Talk is karma, and karma is chains. To talk about things, to reason about them, one must first label and categorize them. At this point, the game is already up. You have lost sight of what you want to talk about.

Whatever you will say about your subject will be incomplete and in need of qualification, because the universe cannot be split up into fragments and categories and then labelled. It always spills over. This spilling over is contradiction. But for some reason, everything is supposed to go into a box.

People who do not practice Zen will, when hearing about Zen, accuse the speaker of contradictions. Such people are trying to box up Zen, as they imagine they have boxed everything else up. Those who practice Zen know that, if it is Zen, it will not fit into any box. Cuz it feels less meaningful. It is less meaningful. How can that be! I have to stumble on what I wrote like a drunk stumbles on his front door, reading it accidentally. What a strange thing. I think the concern Grand Canyon is that mindfulness will lead to people cooking super rice and brewing powerful tea.

Indeed, Brad believes that you gotta have the ethics to use the Zen Powers for good rather than evil…. I would have thought this was obvious. Tibetan Buddhism places a lot of emphasis on training in love and compassion and reducing egotism. A lot of people think that religion is something you believe. Religion is a discipline, something you DO.

Just believing Zen is cool or Brad is right might get Brad gigs, but it can hardly be called Zen. But we were there to listen to and discuss his words, nobody seemed to feel like dancing; ok. The anapanasati analysis and translation I linked to was interesting, for the number of learned monks, modern and ancient, who had no rhythm— IMHO. When the beautiful breath is established, it may appear that your breath has disappeared, that you have just this beautiful, stable peace inside but no breath.

What has happened is that you are still breathing, but the breath is no longer being experienced as a touch on the body, instead it is experienced as an object in the mind. You are switching from feeling to knowing. The sense base of physical touch turns off and the mind turns on… You are still breathing but the knowing is so focused that the experience is like a smooth flow in one direction only.

My experience is, that the activity that sustains pressure in the fluid ball in support of posture and the long or short of inhalation or exhalation become like the two sides of a coin.

As you calm the breath down, you get to the stage where the breath becomes very, very refined, very peaceful, and very smooth. It is the nature of such a mind state that it should be very happy… This is another type of happiness, and it takes wisdom to be able to recognize it…the Buddha taught the fifth and sixth steps to arouse that [unarisen] beauty.

The 5th step is the deliberate arousal of zest piti with the beautiful breath; the 6th step is the deliberate arousal of happiness sukha. The analogy given for zest and happiness here is like a person who is very thirsty who comes upon a body of water; seeing the water produces a feeling of zest, and drinking the water produces a feeling of happiness. I think the better translation is zest and ease; it is ease that I feel when my thirst is slaked, not happiness per se.

Having said that, I still find what Brahmavamso says about a happiness that is present when the activity of breath is subtle to be true, but this I would say is the happiness that marks all the meditative states, not the ease of the second. The ease of the first and second meditative states ceases in the third as stretch exceeds the bounds of ease, in my estimation ; there is a cessation of unhappiness in the second meditative state that carries into the third, but in the fourth this happiness ceases as the boundaries of the senses, including the mind, become distinct- again, in my estimation.

Maybe less like two sides of a coin, and more like the twist in the mobius strip, but when comprehension of the long or short in inhalation or exhalation allows the breath to take place, a trance state exists and there is a certain happiness. In this I agree with Brahmavamso. As ordinary as cooking rice or drinking tea? And it certainly requires belief. Meditation can be a discipline, believing in the words written down years after the life of a Buddha is part of a belief system.

People believe in Buddhism because it gives them a framework to understand their experience, here and now, regardless of who wrote it. And ethics, if you take it seriously, is a discipline that is more difficult to apply than daily meditation. The point of religion is meaning, essentially. Looks like there was an earlier translation of the whole book, under a different title, which is available here.

Do actions follow from beliefs? That which we believe is true at some point becomes our action, without intention, without the need of any exercise of volition.

American Buddhists are big fucking whiners, whining about everything with their whininess. Teachers having sex, bad! Teachers making money, really, really bad! Brad should start doing whinefulness-based attack-therapy retreats.

Indeed, this is how the crusty old zen master letch is able to grope the believers. Belief makes action possible.

A self believes that something is true. So what then is the source of instinct or habit? Beliefs can shape habit, in good ways and in bad ways.

Feelings of love, compassion, and egolessness that are triggered or more likely just imagined by visualization exercises seem even less authentic than the same feelings caused by MDMA. How can you be so sure? Meditation on loving kindness is a part of all Buddhist traditions and can be found in the Pali suttas. I first noticed the practice was working when I watched a news report on people exterminating rats in a vacant city lot.

One of the rats made a run for it and got smashed by a heavy object. What if they are full of shit? Can anyone prove this stuff to be true in any credible, objective way? No, I think not. This is where the F-word comes into play: faith. Some call it trust. Whatever you call it, I sometimes have a big problem with it. This is an example of what they call Great Doubt and it is very much part of the program, according to what I have been taught.

Doubt is encouraged. Doubt is your friend. The Buddha said, don't take my word for it. See for yourself. But it's still doubt and can be disconcerting, disquieting, distressing -- all kinds of dis-words. Do you say, you are crashing and burning because you trying to approach rationally something that works below the level of rational mind? Maybe so. But rational mind is something we need to carry around with us to function and survive, and for the most part it's a good and helpful thing.

Common sense -- prudence, if you will -- urges caution before investing decades of your life and incalculable amounts of energy and sacrifice in something this weird. Sometimes when I listen to one of the teachers speaking about such things as Zen and Reality and the One Absolute Truth, my inner voice tells me I might as well be listening to the demented ramblings of a lunatic.

One of these teachers has said that Zen is and always will be a minority practice because it is such hard work. Gee, could it be that it's a minority practice because it's crazy, and most ordinary unenlightened dumbass people are too sensible for it?

In my great arrogance and psychospiritual immaturity, I have other problems with this Zen stuff. I am about as unspiritual as a person can be.

You might even say anti-spiritual. For this devout atheist, the very word spiritual often sounds uncomfortably like agnostic code for religious. I'm all for bowing to people, but I think bowing to statues is silly, and do it only to go along with the crowd. At a weekend sesshin just the other day my samu task was to clean the bathroom.

As I was dilligently wiping the mirror my unmindful mind suddenly noticed something absurd. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

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