The era of touch screens.  Still sick, the day off comes, what to do.  Slept all day yesterday, and today, awake early, not feeling well, but not knowing what to do.  I cannot resist poking on to Google news, nor Facebook.  The Presidential train wreck, hubris, egotism, hypocritical, lashing out at any perceived slight...  The devices match, and the bizarre desire to know something in the vacuum of words or arranged activity finds its mark, time and mental energy frittered away.  We asked for it, and we got it, just what we deserved with our hits and rapt curious zombie attention.

Sins merge, become all the same, sexism, nationalism, bigotry, environmental degradation, selfishness...  the quest for power, for security, for strength that does not exist as such at all, beyond to that which is freely given to the world anyway.

An email from First of the Month.Org saves me from plunging into the superficial.  Perhaps I can return to Suzuki's The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk as I lay on the couch with a vague headache.  I was never that happy here in this veil of city life, not knowing what to do with it.

There are many senses to bring into play, and many deeper understandings, quite away and apart from the logical and the practical.  People, when sensitized, can sense things about other people, and feel some sort of bond, even if the economic practicalities of the situation would laugh at you, like an old folktale.

One wakes up in the same situation he has always woken to.  Life.  A feeling of disability, a lack of energy or comprehension of serious matters of the professional world.

Zen comes to mind.  The answer is in no answer.  Almost the same thing as what I learned in Benjamin DeMott's English 11, taking apart a poem to see what the deeper thing was so that you could answer questions about it.  The closest thing one could get to a direct understanding, the questions, asked, then answered.  As close as you could ever get to the poem's mind.

I just feel really stupid these days.  Is this in part due to my own bored addiction, my laziness, letting my mind wander the easy dull path and not the inner focussed one.

And yet, looking upon the news, a constant parade of garden variety human ridiculousness.  If anything, the zen buddhist urge to retreat from such noise, to concentrate on the important stuff, rings truer and truer as an effective way to practice living.

The mind, the attitude, these things change a thousand times a day.  Therefore you wonder if you can trust these flights of mind and fancy and mood.  It's all just panic, needlessly so.  And the modern world of commercial materialism and progress is profoundly unsettling enough to poke and prod our poor minds into all kinds of things.

None of this is new.  All of this is known.  The sound of one hand clapping.


Perhaps it is when you are feeling really stupid that simply must turn the matter around.  Fateful it is that you are not wrong.  Rather you are in that ballpark the confines and fences of which are never really known, not through the intellect, but perhaps simply by being born, itself not an easy thing, but a natural one.

Less Biblical, "go forth and multiply"--it's not that simple--and more of Zen mind.


The world is made sick.  The individual sickness of Harvey Weinstein, figure of media power, bleeds out upon others and the innocent.  One recent news piece described his condition as one of self-loathing, and I'm coming around to seeing that.  His sickness is not that of some dumb college kid's heartache trying the romantic dance out for the first time, but of a power grab, of intimidation and damage inflicted upon perceived rivals.  The sickness of Anthony Weiner fits in there too somehow, somewhere on the power ego chain.  The sickness of such individuals makes us readily self-protective, even where perhaps we are as weak as ever.

 Accusations hit the mark too late.  Those flourished early as practice in adolescence are more mini acts of trying on power and ego, to some extent.  Do we go on with accusations, or do we see the light?  Take the beam from thine own eye.

But that is harder to put into words.  The worst evils, remember, are done in the name of domination, not in the name of peace.

Powerful lessons take a long time to absorb.  The mind, the ego, still plays tricks on you, meddling in the past, disturbing its peace, its form of the real education we receive be living life.  The rain falls on the just as well as the unjust.

Fear and cowardice is, perhaps, as much a sickness as aggressive coercion.  Everyone wants to be at peace, victim and victimizer.  A mind clean and clear, not burdened with the thought formations that are based upon illusions of the solid fixed self.

It is hard for the fearful of mind to stand up for peace.  Like they've had to be in a room with a bully, either expectedly or unexpectedly.  No one is really clear from such illnesses, and that's why the mental habit of finding peace and koan is of use.