Zen and mind – opposites?
No, the same thing? Not really. Well, you can’t comprehend zen with your mind, but zen would naturally “include” mind……but because there is nothing to zen, there would be nothing to mind – so neither would exist. No, let’s start from the beginning.
In the beginning, there’s every single thing that exists. If you look really close at that, though, there’s not really much of anything. Maybe there’s a two-dimensional membrane of strings vibrating in such a way to make us and everything else appear to be so, in 3-D, and very mysterious. If you look closer at that, though, the two-dimensional string membrane might just be made of nothing. We’ll have to wait for human eyesight to evolve I guess.
The mind produces the necessity for something called zen.
The mind creates a problem and the solution to the problem is that there wasn’t actually a problem – there was just a mind. A tree grows, a river flows, and Xbox breaks, the pond reflects the moon, and the mind goes like this:
“All right what do I have to do today? Oh crap this is going to beI’ve got to pick up the man I don’t want to go and I’m just about out of toilet paperDMV! Oh no, the DMV, Maybe tomorrow You always say tomorrow You? Who is this? It’s you. You have to go to the DMV today can’t I go tomorrow? You could go tomorrow I guess but don’tI’ll go tomorrow. Do I need to get gas? How much do I- Oh no, what did I do last night? nothing Well I’ll be able to calm down what am I wearing today?” and so on…
And zen includes this, but it also includes everything else, but everything is always changing into something else, so you can’t really say everything. So the mind is just a bird chirping in the woods four miles from where you are, but you are paying extra close attention to it all the time, though the chattering and the attention to the chattering are both performed by the same mind.
There’s no way to be out of line with the zen, though, so no matter how ridiculous your mind sounds, that’s just what it does. That’s how the zen goes – or the tao – same thing, a different part of speech. So there’s nothing you can do about it. The mind will fight its fight, all products from Radio Shack will continue to break before you are done with them, the body will eventually die, the sun will stop burning, and Wal-Mart will go out of business one day.
To sum it up, zen is mind but also everything else, but because everything else is nothing really, there’s no zen and no mind, though there’s something – and that something is called zen. It’s not the zen that doesn’t exist. It’s the zen that does exist but as nothing. Not that there are two zens, because there’s just one thing, generally, and this article doesn’t have much to do with that thing. Or does it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQFLmvb2-Rg
