Right back at you like I promised with another fantastic ZEN FRIDAY’S post, hot off the press and ready to get
your brain bubbling!
Today’s ‘Zen Friday’ focuses on the idea of detaching oneself from outcome, material objects and even ones thoughts. For these things are not permanent just like human beings. We are taught not to let our thoughts control & dominate us, for they are merely passing through our lives, quick to be replaced with a new belief system and interpretation of reality. The man or woman who exercises healthy thoughts yet does not take these thought’s TOO seriously is the individual who lives a life of love, happiness, understanding, and fulfillment.
Enjoy!
PASSING THROUGH
One of the big concepts in Zen is detachment. Detachment doesn’t mean that you should just lose interest in every aspect of your life because of illusion, decomposition, and futility. Much enjoyment and happiness can be gained from worldly things. However, if you attach yourself to them, if you begin to DEPEND on them for happiness, or otherwise make them a cornerstone of your identity, you will inevitably experience suffering.
It is easy enough to see that biological organisms are impermanent. We are born, we eat, sleep, excrete waste, reproduce, and then die. So do most of the other biological forms that we share this universe with.
However, if it is often difficult to see that concepts, thoughts, and beliefs share the exact same nature. When we give the mind too much influence over our lives, it takes hold and floods our reality, tainting it with a lens of persistent illusory graveness. We take its thoughts and beliefs very seriously. They seem accurate, monolithic,
and authoritative. We can’t seem to step outside of them. They are, for all intents and purposes, the final reality.
But everything is fading from something to nothing. This is the ultimate fate of all things.
This includes our thoughts and beliefs. They start out as silent, mental words, but they fade with time. They always do. No matter how much you try to cling to a thought and give it authority in your life, it is only passing through temporarily. Everything you think and believe will eventually fade into the ether.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think thoughts or believe beliefs! These things are very beautiful and in many respects are absolutely necessary for a normal, healthy existence.
What it means is that we should stop taking everything so SERIOUSLY.
Thoughts should not have the final say. If your beliefs are limiting you, know with 100% confidence that they are merely ghosts that can be collapsed and pushed aside. They are strictly constructions of the mind…no substance behind them. So choose which ones you’d like in your life carefully! If you go about this process unconsciously, thoughts will dominate you with overbearing control. If you remain aware, you will be able to see the impermanent nature of mental phenomena, and they will cease to strangle your enjoyment of life.
So no matter how solid and immovable your mind may feel, it’s fate is dissolution.
Everything is simply passing through.
-Josh G.
Your enthusiasm and obvious respect for the topic (Zen) are commendable, heartening. Thank you for that. What does it mean, in one sentence or two orjust briefly, to deatch oneself from your thoughts? They used to believe there was a little homonculus in our heads. It was the I (the You). Now, it’s re-entrant loops in the frontal lobes, I think (see Gerard Edelman, “Wider Than The Sky”). They create “the executive” doneda daaa (pretty awful onomodopeaia (sp?). The executive is rational. In Zen, what “part” of your mind do you detach from? Just curious. Why do we wish to leave thought when it is what lets us know we are alive, what we will not be having 100 years from now. Why temporarily detach? Curiouser and curiouser.
Alice is busy so I’ll talk. NLP is just like cybernetics, dear readers, at least the popular conception of it. So I suggest all interested in NLP to also check out Cybernetics. The real meaning of the word is the command and contol of machines, the use of computinig machines to do this is a starting position. Norbert Weiner coined the phrrase and created the discipline. It was appropriated and changed, stripped of the mathematics and machine control aspect. Command and control. Think about it.
(Forgive me, please, those who’ve heard me say this before)
Life is too serious to take too seriously.
– my favorite anonymous aphorism
– montdor1
Do you really want to know what ZEN is? It’s baseball. American baseball. There’s the patience of both the players and the fans, the waiting, again both the players and the fans, then there is that moment — just before the ball is struck at an at bat, or missed — when anything is possible. A fly ball? Wait. It could be bumbled. The ball hangs and you and the players, coaches, owners all wait on what is going to happen. Chance and necessity combine to chart the path of least action (which we don’t understand, but just a water takes the easiest route, so does a baseball flying through the air (given the initial conditions of its trajectory). All natural things moving naturally follow this path of least action. Isn’t that what ZEN is about. The path of least resistance? Patience to let events come to their conclusions, etc. etc.