Thank you Cal for the comment on the essay, Archaeology. It was odd how the essay got around to race: my idea of this problem in America is to let it go - but it will not be let go, and apparently I cannot let it go, either, for my mind went to that incident with the older lady, even as I had intended on mentioning only that the invisible can be traced - that clues are everywhere for what has happened, even for the flight of a bird. And the race problem is much like that - always looming, like the flight of a hawk that makes the birds and small mammals hunker down under its shadow. I should add, though, that this is not a guilt trip. I do not feel responsible for injustices of the past and I do not think anyone NOT responsible should take that responsibility because of one's tribal membership. I should also add that it takes at least two to tango - that the reverberations of past negativity echo back and forth from all sides of the divide, whatever one's born genetic type or learned religious type - and that it is this echo that keeps it going. In that, although none are guilty for sins of others, we all affect how the shadow of the invisible works in today's world. It is everyone's responsibility, and we could end the negativity right now if we all wished. But the momentum is too strong. In the essay I talked of a change of climate that wipes everything out from the past, and I do believe we are heading towards such a change. I often mention the bad things that this change is bringing and might bring; but it will also bring with it some good (and potentially lots of good). The old lady in the essay is no doubt dead now. I am not glad for her personal demise, for she probably loved and was loved by many others, but that story, that trace of racism is long overdue for a burial in the sands - the sands of time, from a changing climate and a risen tide.
I cannot justify a smooth segue to the movie, The Matrix, so I won't try - it is merely the thing that has been on my mind since I saw it again this weekend. I recalled little from the first time I saw it for some reason, but did remember that it was 'Zen' to perfection - and I remembered that correctly, and how. Being a movie, it was full of unlikely scenarios and many shoot-em-ups, but it had perhaps the clearest example of Zen enlightenment that I have ever seen.
For those unfamiliar with the movie, we begin with a computer wiz/hacker (Neo) who suspects something is very odd about the patterns he is beginning to recognize in his computer. He is led to a mysterious character, Morpheus, who gives him a decision to make: take a blue pill and forget that anything weird is happening, or take a red pill and come to know "The Truth." Of course he takes the red pill, and soon learns that the life that humans live is really only a computer simulation piped into the brain by AI (artificial intelligence). Humans created AI, but then it (they) got out of control and waged war against its makers. It won. But to keep its energy supply intact (here comes one of the dubious stretches), AI farms humans, keeping them in tubes to extract their energy, and eventually to kill them to feed the other humans. They - we - never leave the tubes, but our brains are made to think that we are living this very reality that we movie-goers live in. It is all a simulation. Morpheus, his band, and now Nemo, live outside this "matrix" and plot ways to undermine the AI and free humanity. But to do so outside the matrix is nearly impossible, being outnumbered billions to one (however one might count AI). They must then work inside the matrix, but this is very difficult, because AI controls the program. They know where everything is and what will happen because they have written the algorithm.
Ah - so we approach Zen. Our hero, Neo, must learn to operate in the matrix with his True Mind. To do this, he has to understand to his very fiber that the matrix - all those people, his friends, relatives, his history, everything - is phony baloney. No one has been able to do this before - but Morpheus thinks Neo is "The One." Once the core being, the True Mind, understands the fallacy - that it lives completely apart from the matrix, or what appears to be real life - it has complete control, over and above the program. It (you - the one who has mastered it) can have, then, apparently magical powers - and even mastery over life and death (for what is death but the end of the program? Live outside the program and you cannot truly die within it). One can also not be traced within the matrix, as one no longer is its puppet.
The reader will not be surprised that Neo proves to be The One. On the path, many religious truths and symbols are crossed. For that, I need another day, but for now we will focus on the Zen part - what the movie did so very well.
Zen is maddening, to everyone but particularly to the western (and now pan-modern) mind. We have a linear concept of time, with cause and affect leaving us in three time dimensions at once - in the past, present and future. But only the present is True - our sense of time depth is really a fiction, a fantasy that we live in, and what keeps our ideas of self and reality intact. It is only a function of the superficial mind - the mind that is like those poor deluded souls caught in the Matrix.
Now, what Morpheus teaches Neo as he trains him in martial arts is this: don't think, do; that is, put action and intention together to get outside the illusion of mind that we have created. Act in the instant of the presence, the only reality. Within that, past and future do not exist, nor the whole link of causality. Intent and action can change what is possible, then, as reality is not written in stone, but only is what it is at the moment.
Morpheus is teaching Neo about how to think outside the matrix while inside it, but it is an exact analogy to life. Not the AI stuff, for our reality is controlled by a higher and nobler intelligence, but the stuff of our reality. We can say that we, too, live in a matrix - in this artificial world that is kept together by a shared past and ideas about the future - that is, in sum, made by mutual agreement about reality that is not reality itself, but thought of reality. In Zen, one becomes the moment - and so is freed from the matrix reality. Better than super powers and being able to fly, however, is that in this "Now" we are eternal at every moment, and truly free. No longer controlled by the desires and fears of this make-believe world (that is to say, how we have reconstructed it in our mind), we can now find the True Self - that which is contact with, or part of, the divine. We can thus flow with the Will of Heaven in blissful harmony, and meet death without fear - for our inner nature, our True Self is eternal, a part of or in accordance with the Absolute, just as the enlightened soul is united with the True Self. That is to say, our True Self is beyond our own version of the AI matrix.
At another time, perhaps tomorrow, we will see how the movie incorporates ideas of Christianity as well - and how Buddhism and Christianity coincide, or share basic elements. And I have just seen that The Matrix does have something to do with the invisible things that are traceable in their affects (from the essay, above). But for now, to end on this: in the New Testament, Jesus used analogies of slaves and masters, of wheat and grapes and sheep. Most of us have little to do with such things now. Zen uses similarly old analogies, and worse, from another culture or cultures. In The Matrix, they use OUR analogy - computers - and get the idea across very well. Such updating is what we might expect as the old falls into disuse - done, of course, with greater genius than Hollywood writers. Such it is that religion might become fresh. FK
I cannot justify a smooth segue to the movie, The Matrix, so I won't try - it is merely the thing that has been on my mind since I saw it again this weekend. I recalled little from the first time I saw it for some reason, but did remember that it was 'Zen' to perfection - and I remembered that correctly, and how. Being a movie, it was full of unlikely scenarios and many shoot-em-ups, but it had perhaps the clearest example of Zen enlightenment that I have ever seen.
For those unfamiliar with the movie, we begin with a computer wiz/hacker (Neo) who suspects something is very odd about the patterns he is beginning to recognize in his computer. He is led to a mysterious character, Morpheus, who gives him a decision to make: take a blue pill and forget that anything weird is happening, or take a red pill and come to know "The Truth." Of course he takes the red pill, and soon learns that the life that humans live is really only a computer simulation piped into the brain by AI (artificial intelligence). Humans created AI, but then it (they) got out of control and waged war against its makers. It won. But to keep its energy supply intact (here comes one of the dubious stretches), AI farms humans, keeping them in tubes to extract their energy, and eventually to kill them to feed the other humans. They - we - never leave the tubes, but our brains are made to think that we are living this very reality that we movie-goers live in. It is all a simulation. Morpheus, his band, and now Nemo, live outside this "matrix" and plot ways to undermine the AI and free humanity. But to do so outside the matrix is nearly impossible, being outnumbered billions to one (however one might count AI). They must then work inside the matrix, but this is very difficult, because AI controls the program. They know where everything is and what will happen because they have written the algorithm.
Ah - so we approach Zen. Our hero, Neo, must learn to operate in the matrix with his True Mind. To do this, he has to understand to his very fiber that the matrix - all those people, his friends, relatives, his history, everything - is phony baloney. No one has been able to do this before - but Morpheus thinks Neo is "The One." Once the core being, the True Mind, understands the fallacy - that it lives completely apart from the matrix, or what appears to be real life - it has complete control, over and above the program. It (you - the one who has mastered it) can have, then, apparently magical powers - and even mastery over life and death (for what is death but the end of the program? Live outside the program and you cannot truly die within it). One can also not be traced within the matrix, as one no longer is its puppet.
The reader will not be surprised that Neo proves to be The One. On the path, many religious truths and symbols are crossed. For that, I need another day, but for now we will focus on the Zen part - what the movie did so very well.
Zen is maddening, to everyone but particularly to the western (and now pan-modern) mind. We have a linear concept of time, with cause and affect leaving us in three time dimensions at once - in the past, present and future. But only the present is True - our sense of time depth is really a fiction, a fantasy that we live in, and what keeps our ideas of self and reality intact. It is only a function of the superficial mind - the mind that is like those poor deluded souls caught in the Matrix.
Now, what Morpheus teaches Neo as he trains him in martial arts is this: don't think, do; that is, put action and intention together to get outside the illusion of mind that we have created. Act in the instant of the presence, the only reality. Within that, past and future do not exist, nor the whole link of causality. Intent and action can change what is possible, then, as reality is not written in stone, but only is what it is at the moment.
Morpheus is teaching Neo about how to think outside the matrix while inside it, but it is an exact analogy to life. Not the AI stuff, for our reality is controlled by a higher and nobler intelligence, but the stuff of our reality. We can say that we, too, live in a matrix - in this artificial world that is kept together by a shared past and ideas about the future - that is, in sum, made by mutual agreement about reality that is not reality itself, but thought of reality. In Zen, one becomes the moment - and so is freed from the matrix reality. Better than super powers and being able to fly, however, is that in this "Now" we are eternal at every moment, and truly free. No longer controlled by the desires and fears of this make-believe world (that is to say, how we have reconstructed it in our mind), we can now find the True Self - that which is contact with, or part of, the divine. We can thus flow with the Will of Heaven in blissful harmony, and meet death without fear - for our inner nature, our True Self is eternal, a part of or in accordance with the Absolute, just as the enlightened soul is united with the True Self. That is to say, our True Self is beyond our own version of the AI matrix.
At another time, perhaps tomorrow, we will see how the movie incorporates ideas of Christianity as well - and how Buddhism and Christianity coincide, or share basic elements. And I have just seen that The Matrix does have something to do with the invisible things that are traceable in their affects (from the essay, above). But for now, to end on this: in the New Testament, Jesus used analogies of slaves and masters, of wheat and grapes and sheep. Most of us have little to do with such things now. Zen uses similarly old analogies, and worse, from another culture or cultures. In The Matrix, they use OUR analogy - computers - and get the idea across very well. Such updating is what we might expect as the old falls into disuse - done, of course, with greater genius than Hollywood writers. Such it is that religion might become fresh. FK
RSS Feed