Broken Koans and other Zen debris
I know almost nothing about Buddhism, but I found this “broken koan” poignant: a student is complaining that other students, through various means, gain enlightenment, but he has been doing these things for two years, and things don’t make any more sense to him. The teacher replies:
Well you see, for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.I think I, and a lot of other people, are stuck thinking too much. Overanalyzing. Never being fully present in a moment, because our minds are also busy analyzing the moment as it’s happening. And how the fuck do we get out of that quagmire? Resistance is futile. Whatever we decide to do is going to be a method, and the whole point is not to look at the world through methods or analysis, but to simply live it. I’ve been meaning to write about that feeling, and may still do so, but writing about it is kind of futile, since writing about it is the kind of overthinking that I want to avoid. In the meantime, the broken koan will have to do.
See also phenomenological embodiment school of cognitive science, Burning Man’s tenth principle, etc.
i’d have to add that it’s the paradoxical fusion of the now and the analytical, the unmediated and mediated versions of any reality, that takes us to the heart of most human truths.
