You Just Don’t Get It, Jean-Luc, What Moves? And the Social Message of Zen

Last updated on: July 15, 2009 at 10:38 am by Dosho Port

You Just Don’t Get It, Jean-Luc, What Moves? And the Social Message of Zen 2009-07-15T10:38:00-06:00 Dosho Port

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Above I’m moving in the water with two of my favorite people – my son and my brother. Three Ports in a lake.

Somehow that might be connected to the Genjokoan theme of the week:

If a person riding in a boat watches the coast, the person mistakenly sees the coast as moving. If the person watches the boat, then the person notices that the boat is moving. Similarly, when we conceive our body and mind in a confused way and grasp all things with discriminating mind, we mistakenly think that the self-nature of our own mind is permanent. When we intimately practice and return right here, it is clear that all things have no self.

Dogen returns us to the illusion of the normal way humans perceive the world – upside down or inside out. That’s why we have the logo for Wild Fox Zen that we do (see the right sidebar or this post from a while back – click here). Look at it one way, it’s a fox, look at it another and it’s what? Same lines and such a subtle turn of perception is required to see it differently.

The logo is just like the perceptual illusion of the person in the boat seeing the coast move. The normal way of seeing the world is to see ourselves as constant experiencing a fleeting world. In order for perception to shift, we must study the boat itself rather than distract ourselves with the scenery.

Earlier in the Genjokoan, Dogen implores us to study this self, the subject in our internal drama. It is this fascinating study that points to the social message of dharma practice.

The utter futility of directing our search for fulfillment at the coast, at the myriad distractions that we use to avoid studying the boat (drugs, sex, rocknroll, etc.), is certainly an important step in dharma practice. The next step is to intimately study the body/mind so that our perception can flip. That flip isn’t something we control but something that flips through focussed, relaxed attention.

What about the social message? Well, the way that our society has taught us to be is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and might just go all the way there. But maybe we’re close enough to collapse now so that we will realize more fully that there is another way to find fulfillment – through intimately coursing the way together.

One way, the Zen path, offers a lot that seems fitting right now – simplicity, working our dynamic edge, vividly hopping along, directly facing birth and death. These are even edgier pursuits than driving a car at 110 mph or mastering the “Crossfire” video game (which my son is into right now).

Thich Nhat Han used to say that we needed to discover how the path of peace is really more interesting than the path of war. There have been several times in history when societies turned on a dime and made spiritual practice the central organizing principle. Tibet in about the 11th Century, for example (granted, it’s been a while … still …).

Dharma practice undertaken with diligence, unfolds such a path.

It’s just like the last episode of

Star Trek: Next Generation,” All Good Things…”. The last conversation between Q (click here if you are unfamiliar with Q

) and Captain Picard.

“

You just don’t get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.”
“When I realized the paradox.“
“Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae [or mastering Facebook and Twitter], but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIGxezrlj2I

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