A boy and his coins...

“Tch tch… here birdie… over here.” The young boy tosses a slab of peanut butter at the tiny white birds. “It’s ok… I’m not going to hurt you…” The birds start to devour the peanut butter as the boy leans forward to try and pet them. He’s close now… merely inches away from the closest one, and it doesn’t seem like the bird is going to move. “It’s ok… I won’t hurt you.” The young boy makes contact and at the same time a fountain of coins spill out of his shirt pocket. The birds fly off in a hurry. The boy scrambles to collect his missing fortune, grabbing at everything that looks like a coin. He sits back down on the park bench and blinks away soft liquid. He blinks again and stares emptily at the wishing well in the center of the park. I’m never gonna see her… I don’t even know how much it’s gonna cost to get out to California. The woman on the T.V… the one that he sees every morning… the one that visits him every night in celestial darkness. He continues to stare emptily at the wishing well. A group of kids run up to the well with giant smiles. A mother follows reluctantly and sets her hand out to each child in turn. The children do their own little ritual that they believe will work the best in persuading the well to grant their wish and then there tiny little hands fly into the air. The coin spins around and the sun catches it and sends its rays to the boy on the bench. I need more money. I know it’s stealing, but… I need more money. I need to see her. The woman who stands on my dresser. The mother continues walking on her way and the children reluctantly follow. The boy on the bench stands up and begins walking towards the well. Thinking all the way about how he’s going to be able to see her. He begins jogging as the same birds from earlier snatch up the rest of the peanut butter. He arrives at the well in a pant and his face lights up with excitement. He doesn’t hesitate for a second and jumps right into the well. He takes his shirt off and sets it on the ledge… he fashions it into a sort of bowl where he can set his treasure. He dives in head first and opens his eyes to the unfamiliar world of muffled voices, distorted vision, and funny little creatures that stick to the bottom of the well. He picks up the tiny creatures and returns to Earth with another handful of the shiny coins. The pile starts to add up, so he takes his shoes off to use as bowls for more coins. He dives back into the water and into the world that is starting to take shape in his mind. Only this time it’s different. This time the bottom seems farther away and there is an over sized coin hiding in the very center of the well. He swims down to retrieve it. He gets there in time for him to want some air again… he grasps it with his right hand and pulls. But it doesn’t budge. He grabs it with two hands this time and begins pulling as hard as a young boy his age could ever pull. He soon gives up and starts swimming up to the surface. But he’s not moving an inch… the surface is just past the edge of his finger tips and he’s dying to get some air. He looks down and sees the giant coin holding down his pants. Ugh… I knew I should’ve taken them off. He starts struggling with everything that’s left over to find some oxygen. It’s too late for him to pick the coin up off his pants. He spins around wildly and flails his arms through the water trying to escape the coin. He continues to spin wildly around and he reaches down to pull himself out of his jeans. Now his air is really running low… and it’s starting to hurt his head. Instead of calming down he only speeds things up but still manages to slip halfway out of his pants. He reaches up again and gets his arms into the fresh air. I’m SO CLOSE!! He struggles even more but he just can’t spin out of his jeans. Danget danget danget danget… I’m gonna die. He screams with agony in the torrent of his struggle and only hears a faint cry. Something begins pulling at his arms. At first he recoils out of surprise but he accepts it and kicks with his legs again. Slowly… very slowly… he can feel his body start to come out of the water. He coughs violently as he feels a warm body against his. He feels a soft hand wipe away the drool and another hand hit him in the back. He coughs again and looks at his savior. His stomach clenches hard against his spine. “You’re…” It’s her… the woman from T.V. She smiles down at him and her eyes melt with a sadness that he knows he’s seen before. It’s her. “…Mom.” He whispers.

BlooP and FlooP and GlooP

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid... Sure, it may be a book about “science.” But honestly, this book inexplicably displays an art of thought, so to speak, that is not seen in any books that carry the same feared category. If you’re looking for a quick read, or just easy entertainment, you will not find it here. This book takes time, and when I say this book takes time, I mean this book literally takes a long time. Each page holds a sense of deep meaning that will make you dwell over the words until your brain swells and explodes all over the pages… in a good way.
From the perspective of an untypical high school student who loves learning new things, I thoroughly enjoy this book. I purposely use the present tense in order to declare the timelessness that GEB presents. It enables you to withdraw a seemingly infinite amount of information with only seven hundred pages to veil the surrealism of potential within the text. Then again, if you’re someone who set down a book because it’s too “difficult” or “there is just too much thinking,” than this book is not for you. Typical high-school students will pass over this book without much of a second glance, but I encourage you to give it a try. If you’re someone who looks a little deeper into things, than this is for you.
Through his first attempt at greatness, Douglas Hofstadter is like a modernized Aristotle. Meaningless symbols inherit meaning, despite being withdrawn to nothing through his elegant relegation of typical thought. The book also delves deep within unheard of psychological and philosophical studies such as Propositional Calculus, the art of thought, artificial intelligence, and strange loops that all together rival modernized ideas in order to establish a place for even newer ones. He somehow tunnels his way to tickle the parts of your brain that you know have never been ticklish before. Even to the point where you actually stop reading because you feel like your habitual method of logical thinking has been purged and violated into an unrecognizable heap of stinky dung. No other book has made me feel this stupid, and you may beg the question, “If it makes you feel stupid, than why do you like it so much?” It is for this very reason that I say; “I’m getting considerably smarter with each and every paragraph… I need this book.”
This book thrives as that habitual guilty pleasure for that small niche of readers out there. And in that sense, most people will probably find it to be a waste of time. But for those of you who give it a try and give it quite a bit of devotion… you will be grateful for the rest of your life. This is one of those books… one of the select few that you would take onto “Desert Island” with you.
GEB takes multiple questions of strange philosophy and sends them spiraling downward through paradoxical strangeness with your brain hanging on by the thread of a neuron. It even meanders drunkenly into the strange world of “Zen.” Where the art of “not thinking” arises as a noble and virtuous desire while still surrounded by “Typographical number theory” and programming languages of computer science. It uses paintings, carvings, musical pieces, mathematical theorems, and even some cleverly invented dialogue stories to engage and entertain an American audience that will probably claim to have an attention disorder.
If you do have the opportunity to purchase this book, please make sure to pick up the 20th anniversary edition. Listed at a mere $22.95, it includes an extremely well thought out attempt to clarify the intention of the author, by the author. This helps illuminate a lot of complicated ideas and gives you insight as to what Hofstadter was trying to do. GEB: 20th Anniversary Edition is worth the upgrade, at only a few dollars more than the original. Again, this book is for a very small niche of readers who enjoy untypical thought and exiled ideas. I would feel bad for revealing the ending to you, the grand conclusion, the amazing finale… but the thing is, this book holds a ruminating revelation at every single turn of the page.

Maybe...

(A note) I included in my evaluation many clippings from the book: GEB, which gives a very in depth look at Zen and its findings. Since this is just a loose discovery, I did not cite any of my sources. I did this so that you could properly see some of the deeper concepts, and to show you some Kōans which can speak for Zen more appropriately than any type of analytical jargon that I throw at you… so, haha. Enjoy :D

Maybe…

Zen is a kind of Buddhism which was found by a monk named Bodhidarma, who left India and went to China around the sixth century. Zen can be seen as a kind of religion.

Reality is one, immutable, and unchanging; all plurality, change, and motion are mere illusions of the senses.

In Zen, one seeks enlightenment, or SATORI-the state of “No-mind”. In this state, one does not think about the world-one just IS. *An interesting concept, I know that I sure have a problem with not thinking about the world. I tend to try to understand everything, and even the smallest of decisions can take up so much space in my head. It seems to me that all of this not-thinking would get terribly boring after a while, but I see that by just existing, a Zen student becomes a part of the system as a whole, shedding away all loneliness and fear. But it’s hard to imagine a Zen student still denying the world after being subjected to pain or even extreme joy. It is in the best and the worst of times that one’s own individuality can become most apparent; but it makes sense, if one is stuck in the lotus phase all day, I could see how the extremes could be avoided.* Also, a student of Zen is not supposed to believe in or depend upon any absolute, be it thought or person; even said philosophy of non-belief or non-absolutism cannot be believed in: a strange loop, I must say. So this leads me to believe that true Zen masters neither love nor hate any individual object, be it human or not. What about their mothers? Have they ever had a crush? It’s hard for me to think that they could give up EVERYTHING that they have established or even EVERYTHING that they perceive in their day to day lives. Example—it’s a beautiful summer day, a Zen student is meditating for a while, and someone next door decides that they want to bake up some fresh blueberry muffins. They use the knowledge they had gained from their mother, and her mother’s mother to make the most delicious and enticingly edible smelling muffins in the entire village. She sets them out to cool on a windowsill. The Zen student can clearly see the window from where he is meditating on the grass, but he keeps his eyes closed. The smell of the delicious muffins moves its way over to the young student. He hasn’t eaten in a while, his stomach growls; a natural human process that is not consciously controlled by the mind, albeit the mind of someone who is not thinking. Now, Bodhidarma… tell me your stomach wouldn’t growl and you wouldn’t receive even ONE image of what could possibly be carrying such a delicious scent. But, maybe Zen knows this… maybe it knows that it has cracks and crevices in its seemingly innocuous shell, maybe what it’s about is TRYING to avoid this at all costs, TRYING to just exist, to be. But what does trying require? Does it honestly take no thought at all… honestly? The fact that Zen even exists- as a philosophy of sorts- as something where you NEED to know its history in order to properly understand its concepts, renders it self describing false.

Going back to Zen being something where you are to just be, or exist… What is humanity? We are most certainly created to think, and to learn and to grow in wisdom. So is Zen denying humanity? It seems so… Maybe it’s just a place that you can visit for a few moments at a time, seeing as how if you don’t think, you will surely die. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong about this one.

A troubling matter is that Zen rejects any intellectual activity, yet it is meant to be studied rigorously. A possible solution to such a troubling matter is that though you’ve mistakenly lived your ENTIRE life free of Zen, it’s not necessarily a terrible thing. You can approach Zen in the way that you would normally approach a philosophy or conceptual idea, and then as you learn more about it, you can (very Zenly) drift away from the normal path and gradually become closer and closer to Zen. Maybe Zen isn’t necessarily supposed to be liked to the very core, but just used to counter-act the current day and age of Wikipedia and life long schooling in order to balance it on an invisible scale hidden in the minds of each human being, so that people who practice Zen can just enjoy their existence. ~Looking at infants, it seems to me that their first and only goal is to exist, or to just be. Yet, they certainly think about things; food, diaper rash, a bird’s squeak, a mother’s face, the smell of baby food. They are here, and that is it. But maybe they don’t fit the Zen category because their underdeveloped minds couldn’t properly think about deeper concepts, so they receive a conceptual pardon. ~

A common way of the Zen path is through short, weird, and fascinating parables called “Kōan.” A Kōan is a story consisting of characters usually representing a Zen master and their perspective students, oftentimes being extraordinarily short and strange. Riddles, fables, and strange stories could all be considered Kōan. Kōan can be used to get people much closer to Zen thinking compared to reading various volumes of philosophical jargon.

Student: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature, or not?”

Master: “MU”

He unasked the question, and by letting the student know that only by not asking such questions can one know the answer to them.

Tell me which one you feel is true.

A monk asked Baso: “What is Buddha?”

Baso said: “This mind is Buddha.”

Seems reasonable…

A monk asked Baso: “What is Buddha?”

Baso said: “This mind is not Buddha.”

Meta-enlightenment

Why did Bodhidarma come to China from India? Bodhidarma himself replied, “That oak tree in the garden.” “What is the principle of Zen?”

Zen is like a man hanging in a tree by his teeth over a precipice. His hands grasp no bench, his feet rest on no limb, and under the tree another person asks him: “Why did Bodhidarma come to China from India?” If the man in the tree does not answer, he fails; and if he does answer, he falls and loses his life. Now what shall he do?

Breaking the mind of logic (A Kōan):

The student Doko came to a Zen master, and said: “I am seeking the truth. In what state of mind should I train myself, so as to find it?”

Said the master, “There is no mind, so you cannot put it in any state. There is no truth, so you cannot train yourself for it.”

“If there is no mind to train, and no truth to find, why do you have these monks gather before you every day to study Zen and train themselves for this study?”

“But I haven’t an inch of room here,” said the master, “so how could the monks gather? I have no tongue, so how could I call them together or teach them?”

“Oh, how can you lie like this?” asked Doko.

“But if I have no tongue to talk to others, how can I lie to you?” asked the master.

Then Doko said sadly, “I cannot follow you. I cannot understand you.”

“I cannot understand myself,” said the master.

In general, the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.

Enlightenment is transcending dualism. Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories. Dualism occurs much lower than the upper strata of thought. Dualism is HUGE for me. It’s the very basis for the unavoidable truth that all human beings categorize and eventually stereotype via the applied categorization. Thus, the concept of Zen and denying dualism through enlightenment became a very attractive one for me. Haha, very attractive. Dualism cannot be overcome simply by suppressing thought, since it occurs on a much lower level than the high strata of thinking. Dualism is just as much a perceptual division of the world into categories as it is a conceptual division. So, hinting back at basic human nature, human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon. So, the quest for enlightenment is indeed very much against the grain of human nature and thus, an extremely difficult quest to undertake.

“At the core of dualism, according to Zen, are words- just plain words. The use of words is inherently dualistic, being that each word represents a conceptual categorization.”

A major part of Zen is the fight against reliance on words. A device to attempt to accomplish such a feat is presumably the Kōan, which (if you take them seriously) abandon all basic logic and reasoning in favor of complex and unintelligible sentences. But, considering all that Zen has to offer… Enlightenment doesn’t hate logic, nor does logic hate enlightenment; rather, dualistic and verbal thinking is enlightenment’s worst nightmare. This provides a semi-solution for the dilemma that I adhered to earlier; that being, sensory perceptions and completely avoiding any and all mental images and thinking. It is replaced with the idea that one is still able to think, but they mustn’t think with words, or apply words to images or sense ignition, thus categorizing the world in a dualistic fashion. Enlightenment’s worst nightmare can be narrowed down even further to an extremely almost unavoidable and generalized word, perception.

What is perception? And how can we as humans avoid it?

As soon as you perceive an idea, you immediately discern that the object is separate from the rest of the world, naturally. Words are like a formal system. A formal system will give you some truths, but a formal system- no matter how powerful- cannot lead to all truths.

A few more dilemmas, Mathematicians- What else is there to rely on, but formal systems? And the dilemma transcribed for Zen students – What else is there to rely on, but words?

It cannot be expressed with words, and it cannot be expressed without words.

Here is a Kōan which demonstrates the struggle against words:

Kōan:

Shuzan held out his short staff and said: “If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?”

Mumon’s Commentary:

If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. It cannot be expressed with words and it cannot be expressed without words. Now say quickly what it is.

Now, why would calling it a short staff oppose its reality? Because there are infinitely many facts and descriptions that belong or could be said about such a staff and no one answer can serve to satisfy all truths about the staff. Thus, words may lead to some truth, but not ALL truth.

A Kōan:

Hogen of Seiryo monastery was about to lexture before dinner when he noticed that the bamboo screen, lowered for meditation, had not been rolled up. He pointed to it. Two monks arose wordlessly from the audience and rolled it up. Hogen, observing the physical moment, said, “The state of the first monk is good, not that of the second.”

Mumon’s Commentary:

I want to ask you: Which of those two monks gained and which lost? If any of you has one eye, he will see the failure on the teacher’s part. However, I am not discussing gain and loss.

Mumon’s Poem:

When the screen is rolled up the great sky opens, Yet the sky is not attuned to Zen.

It is best to forget the great sky and to retire from every wind.

Another Kōan:

1) “What is the true Way?”

2) “Everyday way is the true Way.”

1) “Can I study it?”

2) “The more you study it, the further from the Way.”

1) “If I don’t study it, how can I know it?”

2) “The Way does not belong to things seen: nor to things unseen. It does not belong to things known: nor to things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or name it. To find yourself on it, open yourself wide as the sky.”

This last statement ensures that you will never reach the Way. For surely, “run around the house three times without thinking of the word ‘wolf’.” It is paradoxical in a sense as well, telling opposites and tying them together and requiring you to do them at the same time, without thinking, yet still thinking. Maybe this is just another puzzle left to rid your mind of logic.

A note from Douglas Hofstadter:

I have a name for what Zen strives for: ism. Ism is an anti-philosophy, a way of being without thinking. The masters of ism are rocks, trees, clams; but it is the fate of higher animal species to have to strive for ism, without ever being able to attain it fully. ((A note from Eric) So, what I said about babies earlier, I guess this means that they come close but that they are still not fully a part of ism, not fully in tune with the Way. Also, it is interesting to think about how we as humans have this higher log of thinking available to us; we are the most intelligent beings on the Earth. Yet we strive for something simpler, and I myself am a part of this Romanticism. It seems that though the trees and rocks are not able to experience and grow and change like us humans are able to, they aren’t the ones striving to become more like us. Now, as part of my belief, I am intrigued by a simpler existence and find that the current so called “lives” of humans are abound with too many activities which in turn activates a vast amount of stress to burst forth. But, I do not wish to become a rock, certainly not. I am grateful for my abilities and my gifts and wish to express this gratefulness in anyway that I can… and I guess that is another point which will keep me quite far away from any Zen-like qualities.) Still, one is occasionally granted glimpses of ism. Perhaps the following Kōan offers such a glimpse:

Hyakujo wished to send a monk to open a new monastery. He told his pupils that whoever answered a question most ably would be appointed. Placing a water vase on the ground, he asked: “Who can say what this is without calling its name?”

The chief monk said: “No one can call it a wooden shoe.”

Isan, the cooking monk, tipped over the vase with his foot and went out.

Hyakujo smiled and said: “The chief monk loses.” And Isan became the master of the new monastery.

To suppress perception, to suppress logical, verbal, dualistic thinking- this is the essence of Zen, the essence of ism. This is the Un-mode – not Intelligent, not Mechanical, just “Un.” That is why the monk who responds with ‘MU’ in a sense unasks the question. The Un-mode came naturally to Zen master Unmon:

One day Unmon said to his disciples, “This staff of mine has transformed itself into a dragon and has swallowed up the universe! Oh, where are the rivers and mountains and great earth?”

Zen is holism, carried to its logical extreme. If holism claims that things can only be understood as wholes, not as sums of their parts, Zen goes one further, in maintaining that the world cannot be broken into parts at all. To divide the world into parts is to be deluded, and to miss enlightenment.

A master was asked the question, “What is the Way?” by a curious monk.

“It is right before your eyes,” said the master.

“Why do I not see it for myself?”

“Because you are thinking of yourself.”

“What about you: do you see it?”

“So long as you see double, saying ‘I don’t’, and ‘you do’, and so on, your eyes are clouded,” said the master.

“When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, can one see it?”

“When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, who is the one that wants to see it?”

Apparently the master wants to get across the idea that an enlightened state is one where the borderlines between self and the rest of the universe are dissolved. This would truly be the end of dualism, for as he says, there is no system left which has any desire for perception. But what is that state, if not death? How can a live human being dissolve the borderlines of himself and the outside world? (Hofstadter 254).

Granted, Zen has its boundaries… and it recognizes these boundaries and adheres to them in a very respectable and a discernible way. If not for these flaws, which every system has, Zen would seem to be not only pure in form, but pure in the sense that it is unreachable in this lifetime of ours. The existence of flaws and the fact that we have them identified and clearly pointed out makes the whole thing a little bit easier to swallow. There’s just something about understanding that a system or even a person has flaws that makes them more approachable. I guess that’s part of who we are as sinners, “no unclean thing can dwell in the house of the lord.” There is always further to go; enlightenment certainly is not the end-all of Zen. Yet, we have nothing that tells us how to reach that circle that exists outside of Zen… no guide to transcendence. Hehe, though we have identified the flaws and finiteness of Zen as an idea… we have in a sense just proven that the paths to complete transcendentalism are infinitely many, and that there is no final trail. There is no eternal spring with which we may throw our bodies into at the end of it all. There is no apparent end. And this is what makes Zen so weak… the practitioners of Buddha-nature and enlightenment must feel some doubt and uncertainty about their religion and that what they are doing is truly holistic in nature, or if their missing the big picture… God. It seems ridiculous that along this entire traversing of the consciousness and mental states of the human mind that no one person has sensed some state of a higher consciousness overruling it all… First Buddha-nature, then enlightenment, then Zenhood in its entirety, it seems that what we may find lying beyond this outer circle of consciousness begins to transcend human thought in a way that would place limitlessness on what is possible. Thus depicting infinite attributes of “being”, such as omnipotence, ambivalence, omniscience… ultimately, Godhood. Practitioners of Zen certainly have some sort of higher understanding of the world, Holistic in it’s entirety, I believe that they are missing the ever-prevalent hum of God’s shaking head… since there is no end to Zen and enlightenment is not the end of it all: a quote, “Zen is a system and cannot be its own metasystem; there is always something outside of Zen, which cannot be fully understood or described with Zen,” (Hofstadter 255).

In a purely anti-dualistic fashion… the conceptual image of ‘Indra’s Net’ comes to mind. Though it is used to illustrate emptiness and interpenetration, it works quite well with Zen and the Holistic attitude of the universe, and being a part of everything. Yet it in this sense, the individual parts are recognized, unlike Zen, which strives to eliminate all lines and boundaries in light of a purely ‘oneness’ with the universe.

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." --Alan Watts^[1]

This is great! Out of all the paradoxical images that Hofstadter has thrown at me, none compare to the image of Indra’s net. It is endless, and it is fantastic to think about. Think about the sun being reflected in the dew drop, and in the reflection, you can see the sun reflected three fold within each sub-reflection… until you look further in with a magnifying glass, and see hundreds upon hundreds of sun’s staring brightly back at you. And you can apply this infinite regression of reflection upon any system you wish… Think about people, reflected in the minds of many others, who in turn are mirrored in yet others, and so on. You’re doing it right now… You are expanding the net. ;)

Mr. Hofstadter sends us his final note on Zen:

Let us conclude this brief excursion by returning to Mumon. Here is his comment on Joshu’s MU:

To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarchs. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the patriarchs or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost. You may ask: “What is a barrier of a patriarch?” This one word, ‘MU’, is it.

That is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it, you will see Joshu face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of patriarchs. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?

If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: “What is ‘MU’?” and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.

Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb man who has a dream. He knows about it but he cannot tell it.

When he enters this condition his ego-shell is crushed and he can shake the heaven and move the earth. He is like a great warrior with a sharp sword. If a Buddha stands in his way, he will cut him down; if a patriarch offers him any obstacle, he will kill him; and he will be free in his way of birth and death. He can enter any world as if it were his own playground. I will tell you how to do this with this Koan:

Just concentrate you whole energy into this MU, and do not allow any discontinuation. When you enter this MU and there is no discontinuation, your attainment will be as a candle burning and illuminating the whole universe.

This is empowering, to say the least. It really plays around with your ego, makes you think that by achieving enlightenment, you can honestly do anything. Or maybe it’s saying that you won’t really need to, or want to. Maybe once you’re enlightened, your greatest desires will become in essence part of who you are, you live them out as a Holistic part of higher understanding. Hmm… but it seems that these things cannot be the end of all your human wishes… being that Zen has flaws, and holes for falling into. Also, in my evaluation… I have found that Zen greatly resists Christianity. Christianity asks of selfless service, of pure thinking in the sense that by becoming more like Christ, who is in fact selfless and pure, we will strive to serve God in every way possible. And what does Zen ask of us? It merely asks us to serve selfish desires of intangible goals of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘holism’. If rocks are truly anti-dualistic, and those who strive for enlightenment are essentially striving to become trees or rocks… serving no one but themselves and offering neither a reply nor a listening ear. To completely cancel out any sense of a Christianity/Zen possible blending of cultures, one can relate the fact that if God did create the entire universe, then he created us. Just the fact that he created us means that we are not purposeless… though we may never discover this purpose; it is not for us to discern the will of the Heavenly Father. And since we are of purpose, becoming like the trees and the rocks is denying our purpose as humans and instead fulfilling our selfish human desires of transcending (or a more cowardly yet accurate term, escaping) our existence here on this planet. Now, paradoxically speaking, all humans are in nature corrupt and sinful. Thus, expanding the concept of overcoming our sinful natures, Zen certainly sits at the top of religions which combat sin… though it may be cowardly. Though sin isn’t the problem for Zen, thinking and perceiving is… this is truly a selfish desire. And back to paradoxes; since we as humans are sinful, then we as humans are also selfish. A quote from my economics book: “Over ninety-nine percent of the choices that people make day-to-day are based upon self-interest. And even those choices that we make that contribute to a cause unrelated to our own well being in the end only satisfy our wants and needs.” And then we get into “which is greater sin?”. I think I finally realize the purpose that God places on his words when he states that all sin is the same to him. Though it is true, I believe he placed those words here for us so that we may transcend past paradoxical loops of sin and selfishness to see his glory in full. Now, if one does not know God personally… I certainly see the attractiveness that Zen carries to its practitioners. It’s something that seemingly carries value in this valueless world, I certainly am attracted by it. Now, I do not see how meditating or even clearing your mind could be of dire consequence to the common Christian. I even believe that through clearing one’s head, one can become closer to the spirit of the lord. As long as you hold that God is the end to it all, all and everything, I think transcending thought and perception can be really healthy for the average stressed out human being. Oh, wow. I’m sounding awfully paradoxical right now; it seems that the human mind is prone to this type of infinite regress. It just exemplifies the power that God holds in his ability to see all things under one light. What an amazing being he truly is. Praise God! Hallelujah!