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Main Index
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blow to the mind: it cuts it in a single blow, it destroys it, it takes you beyond immediately. Zen is a device of sudden enlightenment.
Mind wants to be slow, gradual, it wants to move carefully, cautiously, guardedly, thinking about the pros and cons. Zen is a jump into the very thick of life. And life surrounds you within and without. Just as a fish is in the ocean you are in life. Don't wait for the next moment, live it now. Zen is a challenge, a risk, a gamble: putting everything at stake for the moment.
The religious people cannot understand it -- I mean the so-called religious. And the world is full of them: there are Christians, and there are Hindus, Mohammedans, Jews, Buddhists, and Jainas -- these people cannot understand Zen at all. Unless you get rid of all these ideologies you will not understand what Zen is.
Zen is not an ideology, it is not a philosophy, it is living in an existential way, not in an intellectual way. Zen is not concerned with words, concepts, theories, hypotheses, assumptions, beliefs, its total concern is with the immediate reality. The reality has to be encountered without any barrier. Unless your whole mind is put aside you cannot understand Zen.
Samadhi, it certainly is full of zest, zip, zap and zing.
James Broughton has said: 'Zen is another word for Zest. For zip and zap and zing. If you have no appetite for life as it is, and are not excited by the koan of what this here life is about, then Zen is not for you.'
What I am doing here is pure Zen. I am helping you to get rid of your mind.
Mind has many characteristics, many aspects. And each religion has chosen one aspect of the mind and made much fuss about it, has dragged that aspect to its ultimate, logical conclusion. This is something to be very deeply understood because it is fundamental for the understanding of the Zen approach.
Ordinarily you think somebody is a Mohammedan and somebody is a Hindu and somebody is a Jaina. That's not really true. Every human being in his unconsciousness carries all these characteristics within him: he is a Hindu, he is a Mohammedan, he is a Christian, he is a Jaina, he is a Jew, he
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