I collect here my thoughts on what is called “zen” by western people, like me, and in keeping with the genre of zen writings, in no order. One comment is not necessarily connected to the next, just like your thoughts arise from darkness, speak, then settle back and are gone.
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Much of the popularity of zen in the west, and of its contemporary form “mindfulness”, lies in the escape from accountability to a personal Creator which the literature assumes. And there are actual moments of felt integration from both the worldview and from the mindfulness practices. This should not surprise anyone, and more and more as the psyches in the west break down into unique expressions of insanity. A feeling of integration has become quite a low-hanging fruit.
The opposite of “alienation” is “integration”. Yet integration has little positive meaning; it is experienced as a cessation of fragmentation, an oblivion. Everyone notices the self seems less fragmented when attentive to something. Sitting zen might seem like attentiveness to nothing, and might be described as such by some practitioners, but this is dubious.
The mistake in zen is to ontologize the experience of integration. It is typically the listener at the feet of the adept – not the master – who ontologizes. The suggestion that the self is an illusion is no less an unsupportable assertion than that the self opens out into the Oversoul.
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By “Adept” we mean a master of almost any human activity, from sitting meditation to ping-pong, or painting the fence or waxing the car. With skill at anything comes states of flow, when the thinking mind is less needed in deference to muscle memory or what some call tacit knowledge. Zen literature is a cluster of reports from the adepts about their own perceptions. It has nothing to do with any particular belief system.
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To be aware of the self is to be anxious about it, because the more we focus on the self as object, the more it fragments in real time, right there in the field of perception. To be aware of the possibility of alienation is to be already fragmented, already anxious about the psyche, and so already self-absorbed.
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There is massive unwarranted anxiety in conservative Christian circles the first moment one types the word “zen” or maybe “yoga” or maybe “mindfulness”. Or “meditation”. There are audible gasps and splutters of outrage, as if a devil suddenly materialized in their pulpit. This reaction holds a host of poorly understood motives.
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