NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/alt/conscio/715

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-22 | 4.7 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Tom Lord)
Newsgroups: alt.consciousness
Subject: Re: I like consciousness
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Nov 92 03:58:23 GMT
References: <[e-mail]:<[e-mail]>
    <[e-mail]>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
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  From: [e-mail] (Lorenzo Farris)

  The 'goal' of Zen is intuitive understanding of existence. This is
  beyond any conceptualization. The state of 'no-mind' is the state in
  which you are not telling yourself, or showing yourself, anything
  about how you think experience is. In the state of no-mind is the
  fullness of awareness of experience with no mental modifications.


Explanations like this bother me a little, because they rely on terms
that are a bit vague or misleading.  If we could truly suspend all of
the effects of our previous training -- turn off all our mental models
of the world, then we would be like infants.  I don't mean that we
would be wide-eyed and full of wonder, but that we would be helpless,
entirely dependant organisms lost in an overwhelming sea of sensation.
This might be fun for a few hours, but it isn't a healthy way to live :-)

Personally, i've taken the message of zen to be this: all of our
scripts, models, and stock behaviors are there in our brains.  They
are not the product of will that brings them to bear -- they are
well-worn paths through the statespace of brainstates -- they are
potential wells.  The nice thing about these paths, and our brains in
general, is that they are self-optimizing.  Given lots of past
experience and data about the present, our brains will tend to fall
into helpful states.  The zen stories often strike me as reminders
that it is almost never worthwhile to anticipate or second-guess or
direct what one's self will do.  The process is automatic and,
generally speaking, better served by a `will' that wants to observe
than one that wants to control.  Zen, i think, is about the boundries
of the self and about tactics for harmonizing with the other.

I think that nowadays we might consider talking about zen, not only in
phenomenological terms, but also in physiological terms.  I'm not sure
it would work out -- but i think that instead of talking about the
state of no-mind we could try to talk about ideals for how our
attention should be directed.  Not that we could just place our
attention arbitrarily, but having an ideal gives us something to
notice about ourselves.  Its a source of, hopefully useful, feedback.
Consider a person working some well-developed manual skill: no motion
is wasted, the person is relaxed and alert, and the work is subtle,
useful, and beautiful.  These things come about not because the person
has no-mind, but because their attention, the work, and their library
of skills are all feeding back on each other -- and the person is not
trying for any more or less than is happening.

I think we might also talk about zen politics.  After all, given the
description above, its hard to see any action that wouldn't conform to
the zen ideal...because after all, the control we are advised to give
up is really an illusion, and no matter what else is going on, our
brains are still just following their own rules.  Political thought
resolves the paradox, i think.  When we are focused on control, it is
not that our attention is operating outside of zen principals -- but
it is the case that our attention is focused on conformance to social
constructions.  When our attention is turned inward in such a way as
to interfere with our own organisms there is still a zen craftsperson
at work -- but that craftsperson is a social construct, a
transpersonal phenomenon, and not necessarily one whose projects
include the nurturing of human lives.

I won't try to draw it out in this post, but i also think of zen
teachings as similar to classical greek attitudes about moderation;
also as similar to musical instruction that focuses on listening and
reacting rather than on drill and control.


  The 'goal' of Zen is intuitive understanding of existence. This is
  beyond any conceptualization.

An intuitive understanding of where one is at is different from a
conceptualization.  For one thing, a conceptualization can be
communicated while an intuition can not (without first being reduced
to a conceptualization).  But i think there is hope that we can come
to a conceptual (and ultimately technical) understanding of the
processes that make up intution.


-t