Having Zen in One’s Life
Oftentimes, it is difficult to relay a Zen understanding to a Western audience.
The fundamental mode of thinking in Zen is not goal oriented — it does not involve a linear “doing of things” until some tangible achievement is reached.
Zen does not judge a person, but it absolutely does test a person.
I will present my case for Zen practice in modern Western life, and I will demonstrate through various instances where it may be applicable. This practice involves spontaneity, patience, humility, and detachment from oneself.
Suppose that you are angry or depressed, and can’t fathom a way out of your circumstances. You struggle with yourself relentlessly, hoping to lose those negative feelings, but they only intensify, creeping in and lingering on.
A normal, rational response is probably to start analyzing yourself, listen to some music, crack open a cold one, maybe talk to a good friend of yours.
There are already solutions available, and they’re usually obvious. But do they get at the root of the matter? More importantly, do they actually make you feel better, or do they just numb the pain? Why run away from the feelings?
A Zen response is vastly different — you instead let yourself feel the emotions, but detachedly, as though they are able to see you, yet can’t quite reach. You let them slowly fade away, since they were never a part of you to begin with. Instead of observing your mind, you separate your mind from you.
One of the most important facets of Zen is the ability to quickly and fearlessly express one’s position, and risk being wrong, instead of spending time deliberating on an answer. Because the mind ultimately goes in circles anyway, one benefits from developing their intuition and making it sharper. Logic gets us far, but it cannot affirm our decisions, since the will is responsible for that.
We must have complete mental freedom.
A person who’s overly conscious of norms and rules may benefit from Zen, since they may come to realize how conditioned and unfree they feel.
Similarly, a person who has overly strong views on life would find that Zen clarifies the air between them and others, reducing their views to nothing.
It is because, as one lives a particular life, they either feel more free or less free over time, and that affects their particular paradigm of how to live.
It is not to say that Zen is an alternative to actual self-understanding. Indeed, I believe it merely provides a strong template for self-understanding — given that Zen operates in a meta-psychological way, and reveals us to ourselves, it is a meaningful mode of thinking. One may forgive themselves in this way, since they can begin to grasp why they are the way they are, and therefore, they can also grasp how to accept that fact. Zen challenges a person to let go of their own self, embrace the outside world, and comprehend the whole.
To-wit, the Zen Master is a person who is so attained and emotionally removed that they ascribe no importance to themselves; the only reason a Zen Master receives new students is that the students still ascribe importance to themselves, and therefore believe that they deserve all possible knowledge. The Zen Master quickly reminds them that, so long as they don’t know their own mind, they cannot possibly know anything. The Zen Master also informs students that any and all distinctions must be removed from one’s thinking.
Because the most meaningful mode of enlightenment is ‘sudden’, rather than ‘gradual’, Zen is often used to escalate the process of one’s self-consciousness. By shocking a person, puzzling them, and even demoralizing them, a Zen Master can figure out what they have and what they lack. That is to say, it is not done for cruel reasons — if one needs a certain kind of knowledge, does it make sense to call us ‘cruel’ for providing a person with that knowledge? Therefore, a person has to also be taught how to attain such a sudden leap in thought.
This is all I can say about Zen at this moment, and even this is far too many words. However, my hope is that you grasped something new.
Thank you.
