Bohemian Slapfight: do you know that it's cheaper for me →
to fly to New Delhi and stay in India for a month getting my teaching certificate and living in an ashram with food and accommodation paid, than it is to go to most places in the US? Most less than a 2 or 3 hour flight from here. They don’t even offer accommodations or food or any of that stuff.
By a lot
The Way of Zen is done
I have finished the book. I’ll choose another book next week.
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. Until this has become clear, it seems that our life is all past and future, and that the present is nothing more than the infinitesimal hairline which divides them. From this comes the sensation of “having no time,” of a world which hurries by so rapidly that it is gone before we can enjoy it. But through “awakening to the instant” one sees that this is the reverse of the truth: it is rather the past and future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
One must simply face the fact that Zen is all that side of life which is completely beyond our control, and which will not come to us by any amount of forcing or wangling or cunning—strategems which produce only fakes of the real thing.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
Rocks picked out by the sensitive eye of the bonseki artist are ranked among Japan’s most precious national treasures, but, except to move them, they are untouched by the human hand.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
The intention of the best Japanese gardens is not to make a realistic illusion of landscape, but simply to suggest the general atmosphere of “mountain and water” in a small space, so arranging the design of the garden that it seems to have been helped rather than governed by the hand of man.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present—normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is not time for anything to happen.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
But the non-Japanese listener must remember that a good haiku is a pebble thrown into the pool of the listener’s mind, evoking associations out of the richness of his own memory.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
In poetry the empty space is the surrounding silence which a two-line poem requires—a silence of the mind in which one done not “think about” the poem but actually feels the sensation which it evokes—all the more strongly for having said so little.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
Live Reading The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 10)
It’s time again. I’m going to live read The Way of Zen by Alan Watts again.
I won’t be broadcasting on Twitter anymore. It just adds to the noise. To follow along, just subscribe to this tumblr.
Today, I’ll be starting at 4:30pm central. Check it out.
Where the mood of the moment is solitary and quiet it is called sabi. When the artist is feeling depressed or sad, and in this peculiar emptiness of feeling catches a glimpse of something rather ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible “suchness,” the mood is called wabi. When the moment evokes a more intense, nostalgic sadness, connected with autumn and the vanishing away of the world, it is called aware. And when the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered, the mood is called yugen. These extremely untranslatable Japanese words denote the four basic moods of furyu, that is, of the general atmosphere of Zen “taste” in its perception of the aimless moments of life.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result, we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an “order” from which the element of spontaneity has been “screened out.” But this order is maya, and the “true suchness” of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles—except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of the universe break down, and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a “principle of uncertainty.” We find such a world meaningless and inhuman, but familiarity with Chinese and Japanese art forms might lead us to an altogether new appreciation of this world in its living, and finally unavoidable, reality.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
