I mentioned about the book called Zen and Reality by Robert Powell in the post written in June 2010. This is the book that is the official maiden work that opens my mind to the many teachings from great Zen masters; those that have gained enlightenment, obtained a higher level of consciousness, able to really see things as it is.
The idea of writing this post came out of the blue today while I was in my morning Tai Chi session. Or to be more specific, it resulted from me picking up this book yesterday night to reread it before I slept.
In my own understanding, the core of Zen addressess one thing that helps us to comprehend who we are today. Of why are the way we behave today and why we are such and such of a person. This one thing is thought. The approach through which this subject is explored is different from that explored in psychology or in the domain of personal development. Instead, it is philosophical and paradoxical at times.
Okay, I should pause for now. For to continue to explain the truth is to continue to not explain it. For if a truth were to be explained, it is not a truth. Everyone's experience is different; so everything is experiential. As such, we can't really explain our experience to others on a verbal level. Okay, I'd have to KISS now.
So here I leave for you ten quotes extracted from the book and let you explore more of it!
1. 'Nature abhors a vacum' - similarly thought abhors a void. In order not to have to face its empty nature - nothingness, thought invents the thinker to give itself substantiality. Yet the Void is the plenitude of all things; everything in phenomenal existence has its roots in that Void.
2. Let us live as though every day was our last, we would soon discover the difference between 'being' and 'becoming'.
3. The vital energy which in the ordinary person is drained off by the emotions to be converted into some form of action or thought, is in the awakened man conserved and accumulated for the final explosion of satori.
4. You want to get rid of the ego, the source of all suffering...Yet how can you get rid of it, this thing which is put together, without knowing it for what it is. Only when you can consciously put it together, can you take it apart and so do away with it.
5. The Void, Emptiness, Let-go, Desireless, Nirvana, Kingdom of Heaven, etc., whilst different on the verbal level, are in the essence the same experience - viz, that of the fusion of the thinker and his thought.
6. Our imaginative life is only real in the sense that a lie is real. Desire, imagination, the mind, is never Reality - it is always either past of future, for it always operates through memory, through recognition.
7. Zen is everyday life. if the quality of one's Zen improves, the quality of one's everyday life improves too.
8. Until the emptiness of all attachments, of all efforts at building 'security' is realised, there can be no cessation of the feeling of insecurity.
9. Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind in things, are you vacant and spiritual, empty and marvellous.
10. Let your heart be wholly empty, then only will it be filled. The mind is an efficient instrument only when in this condition.
Please don't complain that it is difficult to understand or that 'it is Greek for me'. Else I will give you a Tai Chi slam courtesy from a new Tai Chi student.