deepstash
Beta
Deepstash brings you key ideas from the most inspiring articles like this one:
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
6
Key Ideas
Save all ideas
Evil cannot be destroyed, any more than good can, because they are polar opposites of the same thing. Destruction and creation, chaos and order; opposite aspects of reality, in tension with one another, are necessary to keep the whole going: the unity of opposites.
Zen makes no judgment about good or bad besides saying both are necessary to make the universe dynamic. Zen has no particular moral code and The Noble Truths are not moral teachings.
970 SAVES
2.12k READS
For Zen practitioners, life is transitory and insubstantial. There is no security and thinking otherwise is a waste of time.
They also don’t believe in an afterlife. Reincarnation can be more accurately thought of as a constant rebirth, of death throughout life, and the continual coming and going of universal energy before and after death.
746 SAVES
1.66k READS
The word 'Zen' means emptiness or void. This is the basis of Zen — that all that exists is based on a dynamic emptiness. Which is also what quantum science says.
In this view, there is no difference between matter and energy. Look at anything closely enough and you will see that it is an event, not a thing. Furthermore, there is not a ‘multiplicity of events’. There is just one event, with multiple aspects, unfolding.
825 SAVES
1.52k READS
Western philosophical traditions tend to distrust spontaneity since it supposedly clears the way for the dominance of brute animal instincts and dangerous passions.
Conversely, Zen thinkers believe that intuition, in a healthy soul, is more important than conscious reflection and that evolution has made the human unconscious wise, not reckless.
670 SAVES
1.31k READS
Westerners find Buddhism frustrating as it deemphasizes language, reason and logic as tools to transform the self or to ‘know’. The riddles, or koans, that Zen thinkers speak in are intended to confuse and expose how inadequate words are in making sense.
Zen emphasizes intuition and mushin, an empty mind, over plans and thoughts. The ideal is that your mind can be unblocked from maya (illusion and play) and thus acquire a kind of resonance or instant reflection, or munen, which translates roughly as now/mind/heart.
675 SAVES
1.16k READS
933 SAVES
1.69k READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
4
Key Ideas
Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy(1945) is an extraordinary work of synthesis, introducing global (particularly eastern) spirituality into mainstream western culture.
The Phi...
The Author and Philosopher's fresh take on religion, shaping it as an 'empirical spirituality' was a huge influence in the 1960s and which has since then led to more people (now 27% in the US) being 'Spiritual but not Religious'
Aldous Huxley was heavily criticized after his death by newer philosophers who didn't subscribe to the Perennial Philosophy.
While the author insisted that the ultimate mystical experience is the moment of pure oneness with God where the concepts of 'I', language, image and culture are dissolved, his critics argued that all religions are true and some of them are truer than the others.
One of the critics states that human beings construct reality using their bodies, rituals, words, actions and cultures.
13
Key Ideas
Education is largely the process of removing fears, be it of ideas, people or happenings. Ignorance is not bliss, as the mind will invent explanations that are far more terrible than realit...
Chaos is the natural state of the universe. There are more ways things can go wrong than ways things can go right. But chaos is a potential threat and that’s why we like orderly and ordering things.
Understand that there will always be problems in your life. Don’t expect to solve every problem or to always do the right thing. Simply do the best in your power, but don’t try so hard that you create more problems than solve.
Meditation is a place to view consciousness in its entirety, to see problems as they arise, and to watch them pass. Through it, is easier to see that all those who do bad things, small or big, are like ourselves except in different stages of development.
Knowing that and that we all need to minimize problems, achieve our desires and cooperate makes it easier to accept and deal with things as they come.
1
Key Idea