bernie
Posts: 212
Joined: 11/22/2007
From: TX
Status: offline
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Inasmuch as our orientation is towards the machine, production, consumption, and manipulation of things and people rather than in creating and disseminating culture and ideas, therefore, individuals - Everyman - are not apt to strive for excellence - i.e., cultivation of human potential to the utmost, the farther reaches. And without the productive inner-activity one cannot discern the roots of personal being - our ground of being. Thus, the basic human experience - good, gut, God! - which can so vitally integrate, strengthen, and solidify the cosmic inner-man as a truly human, loving, rational person in a world racked by insensitive greed, anxiety, chaos and horror is lost sight of.
One's whole being cries out to love and to work, if man does not find a relevant, meaningful answer the person is an automaton - apathetic, anomic, frustrated, and desperate with much actual and potentially destructive impulses underlying his/her behavior. One must be free to shape one's existence, to develop one's abilities; if you take life seriously this will also apply to love. And love must be creative to be deeply satisfying and fulfilling, otherwise it is a sham and cannot serve the function of producing genuine joy and growth. Indeed, happiness is mainly a by-product of work as Ashley Montagu states in his Humanization of Man, and Montagu's (noted anthropologist, educator, lecturer, behavioral scientist) philosophical premise is very pertinent: Education should be the nourishing and the causing to grow and develop of the capacity for humanity. And by humanity I mean the ability to relate oneself in a loving, creatively enlarging manner to all other human beings and to oneself. The techniques, the skills, of reading, writing, and arithmetic - all the knowledge that the college takes for its province - should be taught to the highest standards of excellence, but always with reference to, and in the service of, the individuals and the groups: humanity.
In a word, you can only really heal and teach by being. Hence, Zen Buddhism and experiential education are alternative ways of returning to ourselves and reexamining, cross-examining, our nature and reality by lifting the mask, the persona, and attaining release from the cave existence by enlightening the darkness and increasingly expanding knowledge and perception. It is a ceaseless endeavor to surmount dead wood, dry rot (though repetitions and contradictions are inherent in Zen, paradoxical logic), distortions, biases, misinformation and lies by seeking out, discovering, and finding the essence (evermore light -> Essence, Presence), the real-life issues and problems (intellectually and affectively) confronting us. However, not as we would like them to be ideally, but "as it (really) is" with, of course, the purpose of gradually affecting constructive change through psychological and ethical insight of the self and the world attuned to the Cosmos (the cosmic process, its natural, universal, eternal laws and principles with their vital forces).
The world is experiencing a completely unprecedented type of explosion - we are not going to solve social problems of the community unless we solve them in universal terms... and to contribute that there may be a kind of dialectical development towards a more universal consciousness... What we all have to get to is this idea of becoming universal men. We are not going to solve our problems unless we are more and more and more thoroughly universal. And that's catholic in that sense of the word, catholic people (Fr. Thos. Merton). In Mystics and Zen Masters by Merton there's an extremely interesting quote by Suzuki, the eminent Zen expert, which were his final and concluding words written the day prior to his death: ' Let us not forget that Zen always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itsef, that is, be Reality itself so that we can say with Meister Eckhart that: 'Christ is born every minute in my soul' or that 'God's Isness is my Isness.' Let us keep this in our minds as we endeavor to understand Zen...'
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If healing is to genuinely take hold, the body-mind-spirit (ontopsychosomatic) entity or continuum, must evolve holistically, nondually, meaningfully, transformatively ad infinitum, amen, not perseverating ad nauseam.
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