Relevantly Irrelevant
Remember when StumbleUpon was all the rage? Recently they sent me a newsletter with brand new timesink suggestions tailor-made for me from all my Stumbling preferences from 2007 to 2009, when I mostly used it.
Some things haven’t changed, thankfully, and one of them is my love for puzzles, most especially these elegant, zenny ones.
Try Curvy in HTML5 and see what I mean.
Thank you StumbleUpon. You never cease to amaze me.
The Way of Zen by Alan Wilson Watts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Alan Watts is considered by many as the bringer of eastern philosophy to the west, a Marco Polo or Carlos Castañeda of Zen and Buddhism. This honour is by no means unwarranted; I don’t think I’ve ever read anything on the subject which was this clear or in which the author read as if he really knew what he was talking about. Raymond Smullyan and Ray Grigg come close but Alan Watts takes the cake if only because he did it decades before anyone else. I honestly can’t think of anyone else who has notes on the subject in the original chinese ideograms (not that I’ve read that many books on all this) and goes into so much detail –sometimes just a bit too much– on all the different ideas and traditions. By the end it’s all come nicely together but the occasional trudging robs The Way of Zen from its fifth star. This guy obviously had had an inside look on everything he wrote about but at times his explanations were a bit too dense. Could it have been any other way?
Read The Way of Zen and feel as if you are one step closer to understanding the whole philosophy of Taoism, Buddhism and Zen. Understanding is not knowing and being mindful about it defeats the whole purpose, but it’s a start for going beyond the stereotypes and for actually trying to understand these completely foreign philosophies that are gradually disappearing even in their lands of origin. As Smullyan puts it: just read chapter 1 of The Way of Zen in which he introduces Taoism. If you like it, chances are you’re going to find the rest of the book equally agreeable, highlight- and nod-worthy.
I especially liked the parts in which he explained Zen’s connection to haiku, calligraphy and the ceremonial serving of tea. Quite nice and cosy.
It’s quite appropriate that this book played no small part in the cultural revolutions of the ’60s. One has to wonder though why no reconciliators of western and eastern mentalities haven’t really made a difference since.
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Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 1957
Λίστες των εκατό· ένας ωραίος τρόπος για να βάζεις σε τάξη τις σκέψεις και τις προτεραιότητες σου για οποιοδήποτε θέμα. Απαιτoύν συγκέντρωση και είναι τόσο αποτελεσματικές γιατί ακριβώς είναι τόσο πλουραλιστικές. Το εκατό ακούγεται πολύ μεγάλο και ακριβώς γι’αυτόν τον λόγο πιάνει: αφού γράψεις τα προφανή, αν αναγκάσεις τον εαυτό σου να φτάσεις στο 100, σου σκάνε σαν πυροτεχνήματα θαμμένα θέλω και ιδέες στα οποία μπορείς να φτάσεις μόνο αν κάτσεις εκεί για μερικές ώρες, χωρίς να αποσπαστείς, έχοντας μπει in the zone, έχοντας οιρμό.
Την πρώτη φορά το είχα κάνει για πράγματα που μου αρέσουν: είχα γράψει εκατό πράγματα που με κάνουν πραγματικά χαρούμενο, μια περίοδο που ένιωθα κενός, χωρίς ενδιαφέροντα και κυρίως χωρίς πάθη. Από τότε, το κάνω κάθε τόσο με εκατό στόχους. Μέχρι τώρα, καταφέρνω και εκπληρώνω λιγότερο από τους μισούς στους προκαθορισμένους μου χρόνους.
Αυτούς τους μήνες νιώθω ξανά ένα χάσιμο, μια στασιμότητα, αυτή την έλλειψη πάθους που νιώθεις όταν βλέπεις τη ζωή σου να κυλάει χωρίς να την πιάνεις από τα αρχίδια και να την κάνεις αυτό που θέλεις, γκρινιάζοντας ταυτόχρονα. Είναι ντροπή να έχω τόσες ανέσεις, τόσο χρόνο και τόσες δυνατότητες και να αναλώνομαι. Προσβλητικό για όσους δεν έχουν, για την ανθρώπινη μου υπόσταση, για τη ζωή (πωωω το έκανα πολύ έπικ). Κάτι τέτοιες στιγμές έρχεται η ώρα για τέτοιες λίστες.
Για πρώτη φορά δημοσιεύω εδώ μία. Το κάνω για τρεις λόγους:
1) Δημοσιεύοντας κάτι κατα κάποιον τρόπο το επισημοποιείς, έχεις κάτι για το οποίο κάποιος μπορέι να σου πει «Επ! Είπες ότι θα έκανες αυτό και κάνεις το άλλο!» Και ναι, (και) αυτόν τον ρόλο θα ήθελα να πάρετε, αγαπητοί αναγνώστες, του ελεγκτή.
2) Διαβάζοντας τη νομίζω θα με μάθετε καλύτερα ή θα ανακαλύψετε κάτι που δεν ξέρατε για μένα — είναι σίγουρα κι αυτός ένας απ’τους λόγους για τους οποίους έχω αυτό το μπλογκ, ως διέξοδο για αυτά τα οποία δεν λέω σχεδόν ποτέ. Ως γνήσιος INFP [2] [3], η πρωταρχική μου γνωστική λειτουργία είναι εσωστρεφής και αόρατη σε όλους εκτός από εμένα. Σε αυτό το ποστ, δημοσιεύω και πράγματα για τα οποία μιλάω ακόμα σπανιότερα και σε άλλες περιπτώσεις μπορεί να έβρισκα άστοχο να γράψω ακόμα κι εδώ. Εν μέρει είναι απελευθερωτικό και απ’την άλλη… πραγματικά, σε αυτή τη φάση, δεν με νοιάζει τι θα σκεφτεί ο καθένας. Είμαι αυτός που είμαι και είμαι περήφανος — μόνο έτσι μπορώ να χαράξω τη δική μου πορεία, αυτό που πιστεύω ότι όλοι μας οφείλουμε στον εαυτό μας, αλλά και στον κόσμο, να κάνουμε.
3) Νιώθω ότι είναι κάτι καλό για να γράψω μετά από μια περίοδο θα έλεγα σχετικής αδράνειας στο Cubilone’s Dimension αλλά έντονης αόρατης εσωτερικής διεργασίας. Ελπίζω πως η παρακάτω λίστα θα φανεί και σε εσάς χρήσιμη· θα σας δώσει ιδέες για μια δική σας λίστα, ή στην καλύτερη περίπτωση, πραγματική έμπνευση και δύναμη για αλλαγή.
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Τα παρακάτω είναι αντιγραμμένα κατευθείαν όπως τα έγραψα στο χαρτί χωρίς καμία αλλαγή ή βελτίωση.
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Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life by Joshua Fields Millburn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was my Audible registration freeby. Because of the service’s horrible DRM I had to go through a multi-step procedure to get the files in MP3 on my mobile phone to listen to while walking around. Many thumbs down for counterintuitive marketing and copyright infringement boogeymen.
I first got to know about The Minimalists through their blog, their essays and their links to and from other awesome people with awesome blogs like Julien Smith or Leo Babauta. I thought they had some advanced ideas and wanted to get more in-depth. I thought, (mis)guided by the way they advertise the book, that by reading it I would be getting to enjoy content they don’t have on their blog. That is true to a certain extent: the complete backstory of Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus isn’t presented very clearly on the blog but the book features a whole chapter on the way the minimalists quit their six-figure salary jobs and set out on their quest for happiness and meaning. This chapter was the only one that contained information that was unknown to me. If one has already read their blog, their disection of the meaning of life into five pillars and related material won’t be very enlightening. It has some solid advice inspired by their lives and experiences as well as exercises anyone can do to find out how they can contribute more, be healthier, have more meaningful relationships etc. — all on the basis of minimalism. This information is geared, I felt, toward people that have never looked into minimalism before and works as a self-help, change-your-life guide, just like what the subtitle so magnanimously promises. If again one has read and enjoyed their essays, they might be disappointed by the lack of focus and depth. That is why I’d much sooner recommend their blog than this book.
Nevertheless, there is some value to this “finest, most important creation to date”: having a concise, basic yet radical handbook on the steps one must take to cut off the excess (the “excrement”, as Shevek would have it) is always useful if only for the connection the reader can have to the book, the physical presence which can work as a reminder for one to act on what they’ve learned. I might not own the printed book to look at and remember what I’ve learned, going through the notes the authors had asked me to make if I wanted to see progress and inspire change. I can appreciate, however, the fact that there is significant value in this kind of connection, a relationship which is much more difficult to cultivate on the web due to its apparent weaknessses: distractability, pluralism and low retention among them.
Detaching onself from material posession, bringing less stress and trouble into one’s life (just because there’s fewer stuff to worry about!), producing less trash… Zen. Like, like.
Ineresting posts:
21-day journey into minimalism (the whole process!)
Everything I own: my 288 things (sounds like a lot? think again)
The troubling nature of pop culture
The short 16-step guide to getting rid of your crap
Insert compulsory, relevant Steven Wilson song here:
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My copy of The Tao of Zen has a bit of a story. When writing my paper on Heidegger and Haiku I’d been looking everywhere on the Web for Taoism, Zen, and pages that would help me understand Eastern Philosophy. It wasn’t that I had no idea about what Taoism or Zen were. My interest has been long-lived to say the least; I’ve owned the I Ching and Tao Te Ching (or Lao Tzu) a few years now and have generally messed around with the ideas from time to time. That doesn’t mean however that I necessarily understood the point these books and texts were trying to make.
Then I found The Tao of Zen. “Zen is Taoism disguised as Buddhism. When twelve hundred years of Buddhist accretions are removed from Zen, it is revealed to be a direct evolution of the spirit and philosophy of Taoism.” I had felt at times that dogmatic Buddhism was somehow foreign to the Chinese environment but I couldn’t really put my finger on it. This sounded perfect!
I found a single used copy of The Tao of Zen on eBay and promptly bought it. It came all the way from the US, complete with underlining and side-notes in Chinese! I wonder who might have owned it previously and then decided to give it away to some online bookshop or whatever its trip might have been.
This book did everything I thought it would and more. It finally “cleared” the different concepts and beliefs of the various “Eastern Philosophies”, if such a thing is even possible in the end. It’s obvious that while yes, Buddhism does have a strong religious element in it that is sometimes not attributed to it by us Westerners, Taoism and especially Zen have only had such an element implemented by contemporary oversight. This book shows that, at their core, not only Tao and Zen are speaking of the same things, they ARE, more or less, the same thing.
The first part of the book shows the cultural and historical connections of Tao and Zen throughout the millennia, linking the traditions using citations and alternative readings of classic texts. To be honest I could not follow it very much, though it inspired confidence in me that Mr. Ray Griggs knows his stuff. The second part was a whole different story. It, too, inspired me. But the kind of inspiration you find when you read things you feel are essentially true, that have shed the veil off your eyes, that are, even though Taoism rejects the insignificant truth that can be conveyed through language it, words that ARE connected to some greater truth.
The Tao of Zen, by connecting the two, has taught me the fundamentals of both: Wordlessness, Selflessness, Softness, Oneness, Emptiness, Nothingness, Balance, Paradox, Non-Doing, Spontaneity, Ordinariness, Playfulness, Suchness. Each a concept and a chapter of the book filled with wisdom. Now I know what I must un-know. Now I can say with all honesty that this philosophy is something very wonderful and special that sounds true to my heart, a worldview that is fully compatible but totally absent from the Western world and, sadly, by extension, the lands that gave birth to it.
This book is so dense in deep meanings I could not grasp it all at once, so I’m sure I’m going to read it again, and again, and again, if only as a reference to Tao and Zen. It’s a rare book and one that I definitely want to keep. Whoever might want to read it however — and I think that everyone might find some kind of worldly connection in it — is free to borrow it from me. I’ll be more than happy to share the deep and elusive stuff cramped in this beautiful little tome!
