low-tide, paranoid ppl, depressives, and drug-addicts who see something in zen

Table of contents:

1. short personal experience paragraph
2. quotation by Martin Gardner
3. Questions (feel free to skip to these if you are a naughty tl:dr kinda person)

I was once at a Soto Zen buddhist center was told that maybe buddhism or zen attracts crazyness. I definitely myself was attracted to it due to something of a depression at one point, a meaninglessness. I think “Life is suffering” one of the four noble truths about the world without enlightenment, without understanding, without bodhicitta - an all embracing awareness. I think all is crazyness outside of enlightenment - be it a workaholic life, or consumerism, or following some propaganda-implanted definition of success: All that is not merely twisted, not merely wrong or flawed in an ideological sense, it is indeed oblivion, not knowing yourself.

I wanted to quote the introduction to Alice in Wonderland:

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, neverending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death, and when we try to find out what the Castle authorities want us to do, we are shifted from one bumbling bureaucrat to another. We are not even sure that Count West-West, the owner of the Castle, really exists. More than one critic has commented on the similarities between Kafka's Trial and the trial of the Jack of Hearts; between Kafka's Castle and a chess game in which living pieces are ignorant of the game's plan and cannot tell if they move of their own wills or are being pushed by invisible fingers

This vision of the monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos ("Off with its head!") can be grim and disturbing, as it is in Kafka and the Book of Job, or lighthearted comedy, as in Alice or Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. When Sunday, the symbol of God in Chesterton's metaphysical nightmare, flings little messages to his pursuers, they turn out to be nonsense messages. One of them is even signed Snowdrop, the name of Alice's White Kitten. It is a vision that can lead to despair and suicide, to the laughter that closes Jean Paul Sartre's story "The Wall," to the humanist's resolve to carry on bravely in the face of ultimate darkness. Curiously, it can also suggest the wild hypothesis that there may be a light behind the darkness.

Laughter, declares Reinhold Niebuhr in one of his finest sermons, is a kind of no man's land between faith and despair. We preserve our sanity by laughing at life's surface absurdities, but the laughter turns to bitterness and derision if directed toward the deeper irrationalities of evil and death. "That is why," he concludes, "there is laughter in the vestibule of the temple, the echo of laughter in the temple itself, but only faith and prayer, and no laughter, in the holy of holies."

Questions: (10 points for each usage of a zen passage to illuminate the question)

1. What are the connections between mental health and enlightenment or zen?
2. What is more expensive: going mad, getting addicted to drugs, or getting addicted to work?
3. Do you care to listen to a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician? Do you care to listen to a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing?
4. Are you a grotesque, inconceivably complex pattern capable of reflecting on your own absurdity?
5. Are you able to laugh? If the patriarchs were as much wise as silly, can you claim to be zen if you are humorless?

Submitted September 22, 2020 at 07:17AM by 2bitmoment https://ift.tt/32SnsGY