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come to reality -- otherwise you will never come to know what reality is.
Unburden. That unburdening is Zen.
A minister of the Gospel was conducting religious services in an asylum for the insane. His discourse was suddenly interrupted by one of the inmates crying out wildly, 'I say, have we got to listen to this tommyrot?'
The minister, surprised and confused, turned to the keeper and said, 'Shall I stop speaking?'
The keeper replied, 'No, no, keep right on, that won't happen again, not at least for seven years. That man has only one sane moment every seven years.
It is really very difficult to be sane in an insane world.
Zen is simple and yet difficult. Simple as far as Zen is concerned -- it is the most simple thing, the simplest, because it is a spontaneous thing -- but very difficult because of our conditioned minds, because of the insane world in which we live, by which we have been brought up, by which we have been corrupted.
The second thing: Zen is not a philosophy, it is poetry. It does not propose, it simply persuades. It does not argue, it simply sings its own song. It is aesthetic to the very core, it is not ascetic. It does not believe in being arrogant, aggressive, towards reality, it believes in love. It believes that if we participate with reality, reality reveals its secrets to us. It creates a participatory consciousness. It is poetry, it is pure poetry -- just as it is pure religion.
Zen is very, very concerned with beauty -- less concerned with truth, more concerned with beauty. Why? Because truth is a dry symbol. It is not only dry in itself but people who become too much concerned with truth become dry also. They start dying. Their hearts shrink, their juices flow no more. They become loveless, they become violent, and they start moving more and more in the head.
And Zen is not a head thing, it is a total thing. Not that the head is denied, but it has to be given its right place. It is not given any dominant status. It has to function with the totality. The guts are as important as the head, the feet are as important as the head, the heart is as important as the head. The total
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