The Shock of the Absurd

The existential silence we enjoy in meditation opens a door to a remarkably complete understanding of the ultimate nature of Existence, of Life, and of humanity. And such an understanding lays bare the absurd presumptions which are the foundation of humanities relationship to the field of its existence.

The temporal center of my high-school years was 1960, and in a high-school science class we were made familiar with the classic fruit-fly experiment where a male and a female fruit-fly are introduced into a five gallon jar with five pounds of sugar. The population expands exponentially and then crashes to zero. There is still plenty of sugar left.

The Earth is our jar, and we are the fruit-flies. and some of the more precocious flies want to somehow breech the lid of our jar and escape the mess we have made of it into.....what

We have king fruit-flies and queen fruit-flies, and industrial magnate fruit-flies, and garden variety fruit-flies, and we all busily go about our business smashing things that don't need smashing, and solving problems that don't exist while ignoring problems of existential immediacy.

It is absurd.

The period of the great masters of Zen was roughly 1,500 years ago. To Awaken in those days of rustic simplicity resulted in a chasm of being between the animal human and the creature of whom it is the larva stage. The absurdity of tribal presumptions and the inconceivable natural beauty of existence are simply self evident when as living organisms we enter the sacred realm of Awakened Pristine Awareness.

The charming absurdity of those rustic years has descended into catastrophe. But the opportunity for Awakening can not be distanced

The Fog of Normalcy

Strolling the garden of the regional governor, an ancient master remarked "Your Highness, when the people of the world look upon these flowers, they see them as if in a dream."

The fog of normalcy blurs the sharp outlines and brilliant colors of ever unfolding Eternity. 

A famous teacher from the early twentieth century stressed the importance of fresh impressions.

All impressions are fresh impressions

Enchantment

Common to all cultures, tales of enchantment find us looking into a mirror that is looking into a mirror back into the dimmest reaches of human narrative. These tales speak of one will becoming the sleeping slave of another for good or for ill. These tales tend to be cautionary or explanatory.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Burnays, has been considered the father of modern advertising and propaganda. He realized that Frued's discovery of human primitive psychological imperatives could be used to introduce subconscious motivations and mental imprinting. In the early nineteen hundreds he began a concerted effort to develop techniques of psychological manipulation at industrial scale. It's like playing a piano: press the keys and a chord is struck, and our will unknowingly falls into possession of forces not our own, but which call themselves by our name.

When Pristine Awareness awakens it is glaringly obvious that many of the dominant prods to ordinary everyday behavior are naturally occurring forms of enchantment. In fact it could be said that awakening from the enchantment natural to creature hood is the very fact of Satori.

With the awakening of Pristine Awareness the liberated natural energies of the animal become a magic wand of creativity.

Nature's Default State

The default state of nature has been described as "The Law of the Jungle"

In the absence of a moral culture any society will naturally revert to nature's default state