From Thinking to Sensing, Feeling or Experiencing Directly...

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I'm certainly no expert, but I've read some of the old Zen texts and practiced a small bit, and what it boils down to is the movement from experiencing the world and our life in terms of our thinking to sensing, feeling or experiencing it directly. This is what the central practice of Zen, zazen, is about - 'dropping off body and mind'.

It's a simple idea, but it has profound implications when we actually do it, because so much of what we generally consider our life is based on thought, on memories and values and the implied narratives that we may take to be 'me'. And much of our society and culture may be based on the erroneous acceptance of human thought as our ultimate reality ('I think therefore I am').

What we feel/ encounter/ experience when we practice dropping all that for a while is the quick of our dynamic, ungraspable life as it happens spontaneously here in the open, fleeting present moment.

The seeming incompatibility between the solidity of thought and identity and the formlessness of our direct experience in the present moment is why many Zen texts and koans, including Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, may seem strange and contradictory - they are trying to express this unusual, antagonistic relationship between form (ideas and identities) and formlessness (the basic ungraspability of things left in the present moment of our experiencing).

It seems like a contradiction, and in terms of thinking and ideas and language it may be, but in reality there's not a single contradiction in the whole universe, and there's infinite room for every contradiction we can imagine.


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