Alan Watts on Liberating Yourself through Zen

The goal of Zen stories is to make you smile more than to appeal to your logical side. But if a normal joke is aiming to get you to laugh, Zen stories wants you to get enlightened. To act like shock therapy for the spirit. 

They always pose very confusing dilemmas. And the story emphasize giving up trying to solve the riddle logically, and relying on spontaneity to solve it. 

The ultimate goal is to be nonplussed, so that one does get into attachments with society's rules. Zen is about flowing with the Dao. 

Translates to “mind-without-mind.”

We all begin life as babies with an intuitive understanding of the world. As we mature, we discover the validity of our emotions. As adults, we graduate to primarily using logic to navigate our lives. Most people stop here, thinking that they mastered the art of thinking.

Mushin states that intuition, not logic, is the highest form of understanding. Emotions & logicact as biases if overly relied upon. Paradoxically, it is only when we make the leap from using analytical logic to intuitive understanding that we become thinkers of the highest order.