| There are koans to that effect, as Dr. Suzuki points out in this textbook. |
Read a koan, the salesman/sage told me. Go on, open the book, pick any koan.
|
| Codger: Show me this I that worries. |
| I laughed. This was fun, better than the hairsplitting of analytical philosophy that redefines life=pain, after a long academic merry-go-round, a degree or two, a career, birth-middlelife crisis-death, into life=pain without ever showing a way out, except by suicide maybe. |
| But does suicide put an end to life=pain? |
| Doesn't suicide rather lead to more suffering in the bardos, after-earth limbos where we still carry names, identities, worrying I's? |
| What else can the astral spheres be than more pseudo-substantial hells where we are still looking for the light, while we are the light? |
| Heed Allen Ginsberg who sang, squeezing his harmonium May 1994: die when you die. |
| Codger Ginsberg sang through the Sony speakers, all over Sheep Meadow, (Central Park, Manhattan, New York, USA, World, Just Another Universe, Void) that we should die when we die. |
| No kidding. Let our I's die. |
| "But," Sariputra asks, "how to do that?" |
| We all know it now, there are five million Buddhists in the western world, cracking their koans. |
| (What's a koan again? A 'public case.' A case, a non-intellectual publicnothing exclusive hereriddle that anyone solves instantly, when the time is there.) |
| The year was 1958 when Suzuki's book found me. I was reading existentialism at University College but the despair of western egocentric doomthought depresses. |
| Sartre (I read) says: "We are condemned to freedom." |
|
