That’s a great “Zen” line, Mathochist , because it’s pointing directly at the Truth. I’m going to put it in my quote box. Caught between “I think you’re thinking too much” and the imperial all inclusive “we know” and ending with the double “not a” you drive the reader out of his mind! Well done! And that name “Mathochist” will enhance the quote because I can’t help but sound like Donald Duck or Daffy Duck or even a guy with a lisp when I say it. And the implications of the name!
I still recommend anyone interested in the unique Enlightenment of Lin Chi (Linji at Wikipedia ) go to the web site and get a fuller understanding of the situation. My interest in posting this thread (#1) was to express my intuition that the One Hand Clapping koan created by Hakuin, “considered the father of modern Rinzai Zen” grew out of his knowledge of the unique Enlightenment of Lin Chi the founder of what was later named Rinzai Zen in Japan. This intuition, reposted at #8 grew out of my premise that:
“Significant events are often altered and morph into ritualized expressions that later interpreters find enigmatic and/or miraculous, even though there is a kernel of truth in them.”
I didn’t get a comment on the origin-connection, but it was fascinating to watch how some of your minds worked and that gave me some insight into this whole message board reality. There’s an old Irish(?) saying, “Is this a private fight or can anybody jump into it?” Fighting ignorance starts and ends with us.
The missing part of cleansing, negative, “not a” philosophies of Socrates and the negative nut case Nietzsche is not seeing the power of disillusionment to destroy the ego so that the “Divine” can spontaneously create through us in the celebration of this astonishing experience of being self aware in the middle of a miracle. Most egos use disillusionment to get pissed or to drag their woes across their stage floor to keep their drama and artificial sense of self going. Enlighten beings learned how to extinguish this immature set of emotional habits by putting it into disillusionment after disillusionment until it self-destructs and releases their genius to go out and play. Greed, hatred, anger, and delusional belief systems really are immature. Once we stop making and taking life personally we’re free. Imagination is too small to handle the implications of getting your genius out of the jug of conditioned thinking.
Your True Self Expression
A man returns home after a weary day of searching for himself. He sits still, frustrated and disappointed, and reviews the workings and the acquisitions of his mind. Suddenly he realizes that there is someone upstairs in the master bedroom and he turns to rush upstairs to confront the intruder. He stops dead in his tracks because he is living in a one room studio.
Heart pounding he sits back down on the brink of insanity because he realizes that the guy in the master bedroom is really Him and the guy he thought he was he’s not. Being a practiced meditator he brought his panicky mind under control and soon penetrated his own self deception and walked out of the Master bedroom. Now he is nobody going nowhere, happy to be out of it all.
I have been accused of being Zen (whatever that means) and a primary tenet of Zen is to “mine” your own happiness. The point is not to be impressed or impressing to anything outside of You and to know that Your Truest Self Expression is the only way out for You.