What Zen is not? Zen is not some antique asian hocus-pocus mysticism.
In precocious individuals Awareness has been emerging from the hypnosis of consciousness for thousands of years. Many of those individuals reached out to their fellow beings in the attempt to make possible this metanoia. Some of them became great religious leaders. Some of them became philosophers and sages of great renown. Some of them lived lives of obscurity, and some were executed as heretics. Zen had the good fortune to emerge in a culture where a monastic tradition made possible the cultivation of its emergent technologies of transformation.
And this is what Zen is. Zen is a technology constellated to awaken Awareness from the hypnotic trance of consciousness, and bring about a new creature emerging from the cocoon of biological make-work.
