Today, I offer a blog-post-y sort of post. Strange, I know; medium-appropriate? Me? Never. It was just one of those remarkably non-event eventful days, so you get a taste of biographical history from a stubborn aesthete.
The aforementioned Brad Warner made his appearance at the Tuesday night open Zen meditation sit at the UVic Interfaith Chapel and was bequeathed Venerable Eshu's normal space for Dharma talk. It was a fascinating audience inversion; Ven. Eshu (as I learned in my Intro class) directs his speech traditionally to the butsudan (sp?), modelling a sort of practical dialogue with the universe -- or this is as close as I can come to approximating the experience as I understand it. Warner, though (Venerable Brad? I'm not sure, so I'll pretend this is an essay), faced the community practitioners and deferred as quickly as he could away from speech. His approach gave me food for thought (as much as that may have been what he was trying to avoid) in a way that is actually much less comparative than it may at first appear.
My impressions were reinforced when, in the tea circle afterward, he touched on a Zen interconnectedness in seeming opposition with the divisive manifestation of tangible reality. He spoke of them as more or less unfathomable intellectually, deferring instead (much deference, I see) to what I understand as an emotional, impulsive (in a more literal, denotative sense than it is usually applied) understand of insuperable interconnectivity of all things. Inter- and intra-personal relationships, human, nature, culture, biology, ecology, thought, action...all of these things are interconnected and indivisible in a sort of fundamental existential sense, and yet...and yet there are individuals, and they can be distinguished (and extinguished, for that matter), and the words "you" and "I" exist, so we must be able somehow to differentiate.
To me, it makes more sense to think (yes, THINK -- sacrilege!) about our place in the world as cells of an organism. Each functions as an individual, differentiated from the others, but is also intimately intertwined and inseperable from its role within the whole. Yeah.
On another, though related, note, I had a tarot reading on Sunday that was particularly inspiring. One thing that Lion said that stuck, though, was his description of me as guided by a polarized sort of life path, explicitly (in his analysis) at apparent odds with that of the Buddha. This was completely unprompted; he has no idea that I have taken up a personal practice, so his analogy (wrong word, but it's late and my brain is fuzzy) was unintentionally apt. What he said about it, though, was especially interesting to me: he explained that each individual's path, even if not "the middle way," was potentially harmonious within it. That the extremities or poles could potentially be incorporated, rather than merely cast aside or studiously avoided, was conceptually very appealing to me. Thoughts to chew, swallow, and digest, I suppose. Warner meets the Lion -- film conglomerate orgiastic success!
