Zen Koan

As a child, I was (and still am) severely fascinated by the vary nature of understanding; how and why people understand what they do and that came to be.  Though the physical aspect of this has an appeal of its own, it was the psychological and philosophical side that thoroughly captured my young imagination.

In my own way, as I was growing into more and more angst against the circumstances of what I was experiencing around me, I would escape into the world of the mind, my own little oasis where my fascination with how things worked would keep me occupied and distracted from the family fights and stresses that my tween mind didn't yet understand how to deal with.  This world of literature, art, math, concepts, was the perfect playground for me, where I especially didn't have to confront the awkwardness and anxiety I had developed at the sudden attraction I was realizing was growing for the girls around me.  As I was changing, this world of the mind had the appeal of being concrete, ironically speaking, for the very fact that it was always evolving and through it, I was always realizing more, thus a sense of change, but one that I was in control of instead of being dragged through.

As I imagined many budding rebel children pursue, I started seeking more radical reads and things generally shunned by others, the more an idea or story scared someone, the more I had to know why.  This lead me through Wicca, Kaos, Satanism, Nhilism, Rules for Radicals, Buddhism, Taoism, and so many other -isms, all parts of the puzzle that was to become my prism for viewing things.  There were so many great ideas, so many great questions and possible answers and even un-answers, but none ever stood out quite like a Buddhistic koan that instantly burned itself into me as a very sage thing to always keep in consideration.

A koan is small story but one who's point to trigger a realization in it's reader.  As such, they are generally puzzles that require one's own contemplation to figure out and are usually of a nature that when explained, they lose their value.  Sometimes longer, but usually short and to the point, the koan would tell of something that in and of itself didn't mean much until you looked deeper into the story to find that there's a hidden message in it and once the revelation of this message is achieved, the koan's purpose is fulfilled.  It's genius.  And fascinating.  And exciting to know that there are such creative minds that can not only observe the existence of the intangible mindscapes of others, but also play with that mindscape to help craft roads to enlightening states.

In a way, by attempting to use this koan as an analogy or metaphor for the question I wonder about our society, I'm doing those who've never heard of the koan the disservice of ruining and tainting the moment of "Ah HAH!" that comes when they realize it's lesson.  For that, I'm sorry. For everyone else who's crying out that I'm butchering the koan, you are right.  For that, I'm sorry as well.

Here goes,

To the child, The grass is green, The flowers are red
To the student, The grass is not green, The flowers are not red
To the master, The grass is green, The flowers are red

I'd like to apply this koan to what I see a question we should be asking ourselves as a society, but are not.  In the state of our culture and our closeness to our icons, we have dehumanized the notion of icon so much that it's inherently self-destructive.  

OOOOH!  What if instead of writing this out all boring like, the approach was instead something about How a koan can help us understand the state of our pop-culture.  Using reference to the Bill Cosby thing

Reflection of 2015 - preamble

There's this voice, deep in the back of my head, that I do my best to keep quiet.  I distract  myself daily, an almost constant battle of one stagnant waste of life to another, bouncing from games to porn to work to worry to anxiety to anything that keeps me from hearing what it has to say.  It's not that it tells me anything bad, per se, but that it tells me I'm meant for more and it calls me out on everything I do.

It's a stupid "I'm special" kind of voice that tries to remind me that I come from a psychic blood line and that I'm supposed to be a warrior in the grand scheme of the war that's happening on this planet right now.  Now the wars in the Middle East, or even the War on Terrorism, but the war that is happening between very powerful yet very selfish people who have taken the common flaws of humanity and exploited them to keep the general member of society in a happy bubble of consumeristic 21-century American life style dreams, one that has just enough stress and drama to keep people from ever wanting to look outside of their mental shackles.  This voice mocks me for pushing myself so hard to conform to this very lifestyle I despise, by use of numbing it with drugs and video games and grand ambitions outside of my reach, ambitions that I sometimes deceive myself into believing that if I attain, will be the middle ground between this shell of me that walks the days and the hidden me I keep locked up.

It's the hidden me that yearns to be human, in all of it's magical aspects, yet the shell of me just wants to be a member of society and has spent so long learning to silence parts of myself that I know nothing anymore but the act of shutting myself up.

I didn't really realize this until recently when I started trying to express.  When I went into the dungeon in my mind to visit the old friend that used to shock and awe others around me, the one that always told me I was lazy and focused on all of the wrong things.  I went to see if he would help me speak and all he could say is that 15 years ago, I was on the right track, but then I let the road go in a desperate attempt to have friends with all the wrong people and my own insecurities ate me up and got the better of me to where I had drug myself up to cope and not act out with the angst I was filled with.

Blah. I'm too tired.  Too many thoughts are racing by too fast and I can't finish a sentence of one idea before twenty different tangents spawn from it and run their course.  And being able to only type a letter at a time, I can't keep up with trying to stick with one path as all of the tangented thoughts have merit and need to be told.

It's time I start a diary.  It's time I get back to writing.  If anyone is reading this, I apologize now for the horrible way this is all coming across.  Hopefully in time, as I practice letting these outbursts of stories flow from me, they will come out with better structure and more focused.