About those alternate views.

I zipped back through "Hardcore Zen" at the end of last week, and this time some commentary at the end caught my attention. Warner says (and I paraphrase) that Ken Wilbur (Yes, the great KW, specifically) and his alternate consciousness states are spiritual fantasies, and not reality.

I want reality to be no more than this, but I want there to be more.

On the other hand, I've spoken with this other Zen master (not my label), who has claimed some interesting unexplained experiences, that would invoke some unconventional acts of physics. He doesn't claim to understand the mechanism or be able to repeat whatever-happened, so there's not much scientific value to be had.

I've no reason to doubt the sincerity of either "expert", but if asked about the ultimate reality, I suspect they'd have very different views. I think they'd both say that they are the universe, and vice versa, or something like that.

Faced with such opposing views, I tend to want to reconcile them, or pick a side, or something. But all I have is my own experience.

My own observations are varied. They're primarily of the mundane, but of beauty in the mundane. The morning sunlight casts shadows into Lower Randolph that are mesmerizing. I've never known anything to vanish without explanation, found myself instantaneously transported to another place, or walked with someone into a different dimension. I have felt the wind on my skin, enjoyed laying in bed on a Saturday morning, and slowly chewed a fresh-baked bagel. I've been threatened by strangers and recieved malevolence from coworkers. I've closed my eyes and felt what seemed like the depths of the ocean of reality, opened my eyes and felt as though I were standing at the bottom of it. I've opened my eyes and everything's been exactly the same, but completely different. I've opened my eyes and the same damn things are still there. Each was real to me when it happened.

One thing about Hardcore Zen that's so wonderful is that it encourages us to focus on what's going on right now, rather than pining for something else, somewhere else. A seeming tenet of Christianity is a tendency to look toward later - Jesus is gonna come during our lifetime! - rather than looking, wide-eyed and wondrous, at what's already here, now. The teachers who encourage people to think that getting somewhere else is desirable, do just the same thing.

What a ramble. The office has gotten loud so my train of thought is gone. Honestly, it's like being trapped in a Seinfeld episode, sometimes.

Accepting whatever comes along, not striving, seems to be a very Zen thing, but is there room in Zen for when the things that come along are just a little... odd? (In other words, does any existing system have room for reality-as-I-experience-it? Does it matter, and do I care?) There's a lot of pressure out there to fit in.

Sometimes I wish somebody would just tell me I'm on the right track, but there's nobody from whom I'd trust that proclamation.... save myself.

Enough. I can't think during this cacophony of voices.

There will probably be more on competing views: Pronoia is an odd chaser to Hardcore Zen.