Spiritual Warfare, a chorus and Zen

Natasha at the watch has long essay on the current bad spiritual warfare that is externalized when the spiritual battle that needs to be fought is within.

You can tell me all day about security this, and safety that. But if you think that being a bully and antagonizing people makes you safe, tell me a time in your life when you got into a big fight with a co-worker and felt that your job was thereby made more safe. Got into a shouting match with your partner and felt that it reduced the chance of a broken relationship. Got physically attacked and immediately felt more kindly towards the person who attacked you? When?

She also reveals that she is the founder of The Bokononist Illuminati Order of the Holistic Association of Zen Anarchistic Reform Discordians (BIOHAZARD) membership, 1.

Bokononism says that everything is a lie, Discordianism that it is all true, and Zen, that it doesn't matter.

The permalink to this isn't working now, blogspot sometimes has problems with recent posts, this was April 9th. What follows is some other stuff with no links.

"Zen is one continuous mistake." -Zen Master Dogen, 13th-century Japan

calm

A pine fragrance
Fresh from meditation
Raise the curtain
Receive the evening’s cool
Exquisite, nestled in green bamboo,
The moon, wordless
Crossing the eastern wall.

- Ts’an Liao Tzu (c. 1077)

The Lotus Sutra stresses the point of skillful lying. Throughout its three hundred or more pages, there are several parables in which the main character tells a lie, or tricks the people into doing something that they would not ordinarily do. There is a parable of the skillful physician whose sons took some of his powerful medicine when he was away. When he returned, they were all rolling on the floor poisoned, and he made a remedy. Some of them took the remedy quite readily and returned to normal. His other children refused to take it. "I don't like the smell of it. I don't like the color of it." They are in delusional toxicity! They think that it is important that it smells bad or that they do not like the color! He told them, "Children, I am going to die soon. I am leaving. I have some last business to finish. I leave the remedy here with you." He went away and sent a messenger back who told the children, "Your father has died." He was not dead. So that was a lie and he was breaking one of the five precepts. Hearing this lie about their father's death, they were shocked and in anguish. They felt that they should take the medicine of their father. So, they took it, and then he returned. Likewise, the phrase "profound enlightenment" or "satori" or "kensho," or any of these phrases are big lies. But they are skillful lies. If people are stubborn as a mule, you have to beat them and then they practice! Or if others like candy, candy is offered. "Enlightenment" is only a teaching word. "Enlightenment," that's bullshit. "Profound enlightenment," that's elephant shit! "Deep, profound enlightenment," that's rhinoceros shit! But it helps some people, so it is medicine. The problem is that if you get too attached to the notion of it, or think that practice has to always be fierce and hard and difficult in order to get some moment of profound breakthrough, then that stands in your way like a big iron gate.

Old pond,
frog jumps in--
plop.