What is Zen?

Thoughts

This is the first Alan Watts book I’ve picked up. I’ve listened to many of his talks multiple times, I keep watching and rewatching his essential lectures. And I’ve always been interested in learning more about zen due to Watt’s influence on me. And what I’ve read so far is what I would consider exceptionally good. The notes I’ve created myself while reading this book have helped me develop some ideas I’ve been trying to form for months.

Notes

So.. read this one on my eReader, which obviously the pages & fonts aren’t the same as the physical book, so I’d basically be referencing pages blind. So I just decided to mark it by percent!

18% ”You, of course can become quite ‘hooked’ on the form of life that you are now living. I can consider myself as ‘Alan Watts’ to be an immensely important event -- and one I wish to preserve and continue as long as possible! But the truth of the matter is that I knoew I won’t be able to, and that everything falls apart in the end. But if you realize this fundamental energy, then you know you have the prospect of appearing again in innumerable forms, all of which in due course will seem just as important as this one you have now, and perhaps just as problematic too.”

I think that what Watts is saying here is that you could focus on holding on, or letting go, & when you let go, you open yourself up to ther world, & can therefore flow with it, & your influence will spread. But if you let go for the purpose of spreading your influence, then you’re not really letting go, are you? The most effective prophets are the ones who let go of the idea that they’re any more important at all.

20%

”And so you go again and again to the zen master, but he knocks down every formulation that you bring to him, because you don’t need one.”

The world has no logical purpose, it just is. So by attempting to analyze it with the intention of finding purpose, we only find friction. Zen masters just amplify that friction to help you find the fundamental truth:

”...there are no final truths.”
-- Exurb1a

20%

”But when you do see it, it is totally obvious that there is jsut one energy, and that conscioussnes and unconsciousness, being and not being, life and death are it’s polarities, it is always undulating in this way. Now you see it, now you don’t -- now it’s here, now it isn’t. Because ‘on’ and ‘off’ is the enrgy, and we wouldn’t know what the energy was unless it was vibrating, the only way to vibrate is to go ‘on’ and ‘off’, and so we have life and death, and that’s the way it is from our perspective/ That is waht zen is about, and that is all it is about.”

Fundamentally, zen is about energy. Daoism calls it the Dao. (I’m spelling it the way we should ffs.) The beating heart of it all. To practice zen is to accept that & help others do the same. Just as the heart beats, the dog barks, and the bird chirps; so too does the heart stop, and the dog calms down, & the bird goes to sleep.