Tag: Zen

  • Naturally good

    Towards the end of The Way of Zen, Alan Watts has a line that creates a binary between natural and good. I must admit that I felt some validation there!

    Over many years and experiences, the resident (and dominant) cynic in me has come to believe that “naturally good” in terms of a person’s character and behaviour can only be an act. This is also coming from the unoriginal observation that we have a “delusion of free will”. The choices we make are less based on a conscious free will, and controlled more by a combination of genes which have fought and survived over millennia and one’s own experiences and environment. While cooperation and goodness are indeed a part of the survival toolkit, they are not the dominant aspects. We’re selfish, the only difference is in the degree of the act, and how much we have trained ourselves.  (more…)

  • Books and Labels

    Not sure if a lot of people do this, but sometimes I ‘drag’ my reading. Not because the book is boring, but just because I want it to go on for some more time. 🙂

    The last recipient of this treatment was Pico Iyer’s “The Lady and the Monk”, which is part travelogue, part human journey, part Zen primer, part romance and possibly several other things too. I think this book will come up many times in this blog in future too, because it gave me multiple feed (foods didn’t sound right) for thought.

    Among other things, it has left me with a great interest for the Zen school of Buddhism. I have started looking for more information on that. Meanwhile, in the book was this guy who had a seemingly simplistic approach to ‘labeling’ things – ‘necessary’, ‘useful’ and ‘useless’. When I think about the things I own/ am passionate about/ spend a lot of time on, and try to categorise it on those labels, it gives tremendous perspective, and I wonder if applying these labels regularly and mindfully would make me more, or less human. Try it out 🙂

    until next time, non zens?