A Caution: One More Time
| I have no hidden metaphysical agenda here. I am not
aiming for "God" or "enlightenment," or "nirvana" or
"paradise" or "heaven." The experiment began and proceeds strictly out
of the assumptions I described, namely that language, now our tool to control and change
ever larger parts of the world, may have originally had other uses and other potentials as
well. To deal directly with metaphysics: I think it’s likely that our puzzlement and contentiousness regarding concepts such as "nirvana" (or even "God") have increased in intensity and divisiveness as our linguistic minds have gotten farther and farther into abstraction and farther and farther from our linguistic, physiological roots. I am very suspicious of all received religious or metaphysical instructions, filtered as they have been by abstracting, controlling minds bent more and more on imposing their own intangible concepts and wills on a stubborn and recalcitrant body of shared experienced called the world. Outwardly placid, at least most of the time, we all cling internally to wild horses running willy-nilly through a night of cold abstraction across a plain of unknown geography toward goals of our own self-reflexive devising. The experiment is to see if language, used differently, might give us the option and the ability to get off the wild horses and explore and create without the violence of our current long-running rampage of compulsive symbol-manipulation. The "non sequitur" nature of many Zen utterances appears to be particularly effective, perhaps because their apparent alogic throws a very big monkey wrench into the reductive abstracting mechanism of received patterns of thought and association. A widespread calming of mentation happens, like pouring oil on heaving waters. One’s flibbertigibbet mind seems to begin to relax, to focus more easily. |