asia
15 Agosto 2018

Panic, boresome, depression and Zen

Look at anything beyond its functional duration. 

For example get your mouse and hold it in your hand beyond the time needed for its functional use, without doing anything: its appearing will start being filled with holes of meaning and sense.
Try to broaden such a “contemplation” to include your arm and then your body. Continue adding the environment around you and …your own thoughts.

Even the act of contemplating itself.

There you are, you have accomplished an epoché, i.e. enclosing in brackets the meaning and the sense of the “world”.
Dogen, the great Zen master, would instead have said, “Let mind and body collapse”.

Flashes of emptiness.

Nowadays this happens spontaneously to several people and it is termed as panic attack or, sometimes, depression.

There is nothing clinical in that, it is just existence disclosing itself, crude and bare.

Such a condition is often related to a bad forbearance, to suffering.
We look for a solution constructing a sense that can be mental, emotional or in activity.

It regards all “suffering beings”, i.e. capable of feeling pathos.

It is what you are trying to do right now, me too.

But, at last, a grounded sense does not exist. But we know it and such knowledge cannot become completely empty.

Becoming acquainted with “senselessness” is in fact a very deep path of awareness. It is mostly necessary and relevant to the present time.

The Buddha claims that in this very senselessness also lies the end of suffering, not only its origin.

It is the basis of many important Zen schools.

When you will find yourself in a panic attack, in boresome or depression think that existence is declaring its mute, eternal, mysterious discourse.

It will become interesting.

---

Why are you there, Moon, in the sky? Tell me
why you are there, silent Moon.
You rise at night, and go
contemplating deserts: then you set.
Are you not sated yet
with riding eternal roads?
Are you not weary, still wishing
to gaze at these valleys?
It mirrors your life,
the life of a shepherd.
He rises at dawn:
he drives his flock over the fields, sees
the flocks, the streams, the grass:
tired at evening he rests:
expecting nothing more.
Tell me, O Moon, what life is
worth to a shepherd, or
your life to you? Tell me: where
does my brief wandering lead,
or your immortal course?


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