On Jun 23, 2005, at 12:05 PM, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
On Jun 22, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Dave Land wrote:Lovely thoughts to cool impassioned minds from "Hsin Hsin Ming," (Verses on the Faith Mind): The tao is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail. I'll try to remember this -- and avoid the disease of the mind -- when one or another of my brothers or sisters here decides to tell us all How It Should Be.That's one application of the meaning of the passage; a more traditional interpretation is that we're meant to understand there is no dualism.
That's going to cause some difficulty come election time...
I've carried on with Dan a little about the idea of relative evil, or that social context provides the backdrop against which actions are judged to be meritorious or wrongful. This dovetails with the above passage in the sense that as soon as we pass any judgment we're missing the big picture; we're immersing ourselves in context.
I've just read Bishop John Shelby Spong's "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism," which has as a major theme that the Bible -- and every spiritual experience that has ever been put into words -- mires the inexpressible in the subjective. We do not *have* objective language, he says, and we fool ourselves when we act as though we do. A theologian of the early 20th century said that we needed to "demythologize" God. Spong counters that we can only "remythologize" spiritual experiences: as soon as we put them into words, they become locked into our prejudices, experiences, world-view. In a couple of years, generations, centuries, our "demythologized" explanation will be just as ridiculously dated as the "heaven is just above the dome of the sky" ideas that underlie the Biblical authors' explanations.
Spong's conclusion is that the Bible is nothing more or less than a particular, peculiar peoples' record of *their* experience, rooted as in their world-view. The Bible doesn't tell us as much about God as it tells us about the writers' abilities to express their experience of God. It is for us to try to "inhabit" their world-view so we can attempt to discern the experience was that their limiting words point to.
It bears noting that this is an extraordinarily liberal view of the Bible, which puts a lot of people off.
Taoism in China eventually colored Ch'an, which in Japan is better known as Zen. There is a deep Taoist flavor to all Zen teachings, and of all the traditions in the Buddhist lineage Zen seems to be the most difficult to grok. Koans don't help; they're deliberately formulated to be inscrutable. Even getting past the idea of dualism is extremely difficult, and Zen makes it muddier by avoiding explication. That's part of the Zen perspective: When you speak of something you are discerning, and discernment takes one away from enlightenment or realization of the essential nature of life.
You root it in the subjective, to root this in the subjective. Thanks, Warren. Much better than "Zen is evil and should be eradicated." Dave _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
