So many concepts and ideas and crap. There is no "world", no "humanity" and no "enlightenment". There aren't any stars or space or matter. A translation:
“You don’t exist. Nothing matters. There is no truth. All is perspective and all perspective is limited and skewed. All that is there are the internal and external sensory representations of individual minds...present moment consciousness.” “Anything beyond this is irrelevant and wrong.”
I say, wonderful. But where do you go from there? Are we to expect that with the snap of the fingers, we will magically eradicate years of conditioning and zap ourselves to primary consciousness (or whatever word you want to use)?
You’ve said that ‘there is no enlightenment’. Yet what you describe as the only reality IS enlightenment--realizing you’re the universe, direct experience and all that.
Also, you’re decrying intellectual notions with an intellectual notion. Ha!
Further, why are you ‘sickened’ by words when you claim to be experiencing the ultimate reality? Shouldn’t you be beyond all that? Shouldn’t the yinyang have turned into the zen circle? Shouldn’t you be existing beyond the realm of duality?
You’re just a barrel of contradictions, aren’t you?
No matter what you correlate it with, and no matter how clever you think you are at representing it, your are wrong.
Yes, yes, we know. We all know that words are not the thing. They are representations of the thing—words are a finger pointing at the moon... it is folly to mistake the finger for the moon. Any fool can see they are not the same. But is using symbols to represent reality the same thing as mistaking the symbol for the reality? I don’t think so. If that were so, Zen monks would never communicate, they would never speak, they would never write, they would never think. Symbols, perceptions are useful. You’ve used them in crafting your post. If you truly lived by the ‘words’ you just related to me, you should be walking around like a beast-- breathing, eating, sleeping, nothing more, like Rousseau’s Natural Man. But you’re not. You think, you talk, you write... you use symbols to express your perceptions.
Realize that it is no sin to talk about what cannot be perfectly articulated—as long as we don’t confuse the word for the thing.
Indeed, how did you arrive at your current understanding of the Tao? I’ll wager it was either through a book or through a master...you were taught through representations, through words. Eventually, you may have, through mindfulness and meditation, begun to experience what those words represented. But it began with an intellectualization.
I agree that EXPERIENCE IS ALL. But how do you get there from here? Intellectualization is part of the process. If you don’t believe me, do a search for the ’10 Bulls’ on yahoo—a 13th century Zen classic chronicling the path toward XXX. Go to the second Bull. ‘Perceiving the Bull’ it’s called if I remember correctly. It is step two on a ten step journey toward what you describe.
Cheers,
Brian
