My favorite resting places are home and the library. I find quite a few really good ideas in books and in thinking about new ideas. But I am also reminded about how there is really no final resting place for mind. There isn't a place to which we can point and say, "this is the mind". I guess you can say that mind doesn't have an object. So I can also analogously say that the library and the study are stopping places. They are resting places for mind to rejuvenate and cultivate itself, but they are not final resting or staying places. When I stop to think about it, even academia is just a temporary place to incubate knowledge and form one's own ideas. It is never a final resting place where the mind can fully disclose or define itself.
How does my current process of thinking about ideas differ from the past? I believe that when I was an undergraduate in university, I sought ideas to paint a grand picture of life--almost like a unifying metaphysics. I am pretty sure that a lot of people were doing the same thing as myself, sort of looking for answers to fundamental questions such as whether human nature is inherently good, whether people have free-will, what is the best kind of life, etc. But recently, I have come to feel that the quest for certainty is almost like avoiding dissolution and impermanence. Certainly my recent readings of Ernest Becker only confirms my feeling there. It's true that people can get enraptured in books and in thinking about the self, because they have been socialized to see that they need to build a solid wall around themselves and cultivate an ideology. It's like saying, "I don't know too much about the future, but I do know I am this or this is me". But over time, people start to realize that even the most effective beliefs only apply to some situations, and not to all.
Some people might say the same about Zen or Chan, that it is a kind of unified system of beliefs. I tend to feel that Chan practice is different because it is looking at the way thoughts are formed and how people relate to thoughts. It doesn't necessarily matter too much what the content of the thoughts are, but Chan explores how mind approaches thoughts--with attachment, with rejection or with a neutral state. In other words, I think Chan practice looks at the process of experiencing and thinking itself, rather than saying 'this is true', or 'this is not true'. That's because as soon as I say something is 'true', I reject anything that goes against it, and it then becomes a kind of dogma from which I refuse to budge. So Chan doesn't say anything absolute: it doesn't say, 'this is true', 'this is right' or 'that is wrong.' I think it's quite process oriented in that it explores the workings and reflections of mind itself.
The practical implication for me is that it's not so important to find out what is 'true', because most things we call true are in a continual state of flux. They are conditioned experiences. Is 'the grass is green' true? Well, only if we happen to have the right conditions can it be seen as true, such as sunlight, eyes, conscious recognition of this as 'grass', etc. What is grass without the label of 'grass' from previous memory? I think the important thing is to see that all phenomena are conditioned, so saying that something is true is really only saying something in a particular instant of time, education and circumstances. Even what we see and don't see is conditioned by previous experiences. I might discover later that what I thought would absolutely always apply to every situation turns out to have only specific contexts. I don't consider myself as wise, but I suspect that a big part of wisdom is having insight into the tentativeness of views.
After reading Ernest Becker, I am reminded of the question: is the 'fundamental' existential condition of human beings the terror of death? I think that it depends, and it seems that Becker is suggesting that the awareness of death is the cornerstone of how people form personality defenses. Nobody wants to be overwhelmed by the knowledge that things are continually in flux, passing from life to death, so they start to form categories and perceptions of fixed selves. But my question is: if one psychologist says that death is the basis for all personality, then another says instincts, then another says social adjustment, which one is 'true'? What is 'fundamental'? I think it depends on our understanding of what is undeniably true of all sentient life forms. But I am not too sure if 'death' of the body is the fundamental end of sentient being. I am also not too sure if death is the only kind of suffering we have. I suspect that it's a big part of human suffering to be aware of death, but is it the only suffering there is? If people could live forever, would they simply stop suffering? Here again...I am inclined to say that as long as people are looking for any kind of certainty to protect themselves from being overwhelmed by experience, there is going to be the suffering of attachment.
No answers in this blog...only questions. Keep going!
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