Just musing on this at work today. I have plenty of time. Imagine putting a part on a machine press, pushing a button, taking the part off and putting it in a box and doing it over and over again for eight hours. The mind tends to drift. Fortunately, it drifts toward positive things.
My epiphany at the top of Yosemite Falls was in the context of immersion in the Dao De Jing. Not exactly Zen but I was well on my way.
I have healed in the context of the Christian path and was thinking about the similarity/difference. From my Christian point of view, I think of it as the light shining in darkness and exposing it, a bright light yielding insight and clarity that comes in a flash. Though I can't process the entirety of it, I "see" it.
In the context of the Dao or Zen, it isn't a light, as such, but a moment of insight and clarity that comes "in a flash." No light. It just is.
In Zen we find there is no "thing" there. It is a stripping away of the layers and layers and years and years of accumulation, of attachment and desires.
In Christianity there is some "thing" there and that "thing" is a Person. We might say we find some "one" there.
But is this 'person' merely a projection of our deepest needs and desires collectively? Is it personalizing the impersonal? Or is there a real person there to whom we conform?
Is this what makes people uncomfortable (or comfortable)?
In Christ, our nature is replaced, admittedly broken.
In Zen, there is no new nature, merely dusting off the original one. There is no admittance of broken. There is nothing to be separated from. There is no relationship.
So there is a point in which experience, at the depths of two traditions, seem to bare similarities. And yet there are differences. The two opposing poles of similarity and difference swirling around the strange attractor beyond which can only be experienced.
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