East by east east

One of my favourite books is ‘The Empty Mirror’.

It’s the story of a Dutch guy who in the 1950s went into a Japanese Zen monastery.

He was very frustrated that they didn’t just tell him all their ‘secrets’ and that he had to learn them all through contemplation, meditation and basic routine.

Eventually he realised that they were showing him to learn through the body and subconscious mind, and that engagement of the everyday mental faculties just gets in the way.

In the West we are time poor and many that try and learn the calm and centralised ‘other’ ways are taught with methods that engage the highly developed brain with gobbledygook such as energy paths, chakras and any number of conceptual structures pilfered from old Eastern practices.

The assumption is that we are unable to let go of beliefs and therefore need to adopt a suitably untestable set of beliefs in order to start the journey and eventually let go of them.

I suspect that many get part of the way along the journey but get stuck in the belief structures, never to escape.

And then they become teachers because they have to eat and pay rent, thereby promulgating the problem.