Tag Archives: zen

Modern Zen

by Jon Rappoport

August 28, 2018

(To join our email list, click here.)

One thing I’ve learned from giving lectures to audiences over the years: never meet expectations.

“Expectations” is a large container waiting to be filled up. People have these containers. They lug them around with them. They want them to be filled up.

For example, if they expect shocking information from the speaker, and they get it, their expectations are met.

Audiences train themselves to be audiences, and their expectation-containers are ready when they sit down to listen.

There is something missing. Something monumental.

The present moment. The present now. The alive moment. Because, for all its fanfare and interest, the event is not really in the present.

This is by design. No one wants the moment. People’s whole lives are devoted to avoiding the moment, because it is spontaneous. That’s what a moment is. Spontaneous.

“Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become ‘stage-worthy.’” (Viola Spolin)

No one is used to spontaneity. No one is prepared for it.

No one knows what they would do or how they would react in the spontaneous moment. That’s why it is avoided.

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves.” (Viola Spolin)

Yet, the paradox is: people yearn for the spontaneous moment. They yearn for that freedom. It’s not freedom as an idea or concept, but freedom as a living thing.

I bring all this up because passivity is the universal effect of living for most people. In that state, they still have expectations and those big containers, but the way they receive information—they certainly don’t intend to climb up out of their own passivity. That’s the last thing they would do.

“It [spontaneity] creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.” (Viola Spolin)

So when I speak to audiences at live events, I find a way to remind them that we’re in a kind of false relationship. It’s interesting and false at the same time. There we are in a room, and I’m the speaker and they’re the audience. I’m active and they’re passive.

Those are our roles. Those are our functions. It’s accepted, but it’s unworkable. It’s self-defeating, unless we all want to be existing in a dead space outside the living present moment. And I don’t.

This means I have to readjust things. I have to let people know that I know they’re there. Right now. I know they’re listening, and I know they’re absorbing, and I know that beyond a certain point (10-15 minutes), they’re going to shift down into passive mode.
Finding a way, an interesting way to let them know is a challenge.

It’s really a challenge that extends to the whole world.

Are we alive or are we doing it by the numbers?

Look at any set-up, which is “the way things are supposed to be,” and “the parts that people are supposed to play,” and you can see light. The light is what could happen to upset that situation and turn it into something else. Something that would bring people in from the cold, into the moment itself.

Spontaneity means everything is created now.

That’s why I keep writing about imagination, because imagination will change a life. It won’t only change the content. It’ll change the way life happens.

Here’s something I can guarantee anywhere in the universe where beings populate planets, where they think, plan, strategize. They’re not living in the moment, but they claim they are. They’ll say, “How could I be anywhere else? We’re all in the present. That’s all there is.”

But they’re wrong. Their big containers are in the moment, and they’re waiting outside to accept the flow of information from the containers.

If a person (usually a hard-headed realist) thinks he’s already in the moment, have him go up on a stage with another person and take on the role of a galactic cop on patrol, questioning a suspect who is accused of stealing a planet. If the realist can eventually improvise and do it, he’ll experience being in the moment in a way he never has before.

Likewise, if he painted 200 paintings, something different would happen to him. He would come to the edge of what he already knows (which he’s expressing in the paintings), and then he would step off. He would do something on the paper or canvas which is not what he knows. It would arise spontaneously, and he would feel a new space, a new energy, a new now.

Imagination. Alive imagination. That’s the key. The key to the door that leads out of the Matrix.

What’s wrong with Zen?

Nothing is wrong with Zen, except the people who practice it.

That’s a joke. Sort of.

In the modern style, especially in America, Zen is mostly meditation, and more meditation, and more meditation, and the point of it seems to be to get to a zero point, where you can watch your own mind, your own thoughts, and finally, without effort, stay separate from them, separate from all that radio static, and separate also from your own unbidden parade of emotions that swing by with tooting horns and crashing cymbals and clacking drums and gawking dancing clowns.

A laudable goal.

But on the whole, how many people who do this wind up becoming passive? That’s the thing. People tend to opt for quietness.

Whereas, the whole idea ought to be: launch a tremendous amount of dynamic action from the platform of zero-stillness.

Because stillness as a way of life sooner or later begins to disintegrate.

In original Zen, there were ordeals. The teacher gave the student things to do, tasks which eventually became absurd, without discernible purpose. The teacher spoke to the student in riddles and wisecracks. The teacher drove the student into a state of desperation, because the student’s rational faculties, which were obsessively involved in systems, couldn’t supply answers to questions which defied logic.

The teacher did whatever he had to do to bring the student out over the edge of the cliff, where in mid-air, there were no foundations…and the student felt terror. But the teacher persisted.

And then, in one explosive moment, the student found himself floating in the air. He saw there was no need to explain his existence. There was no need to place a veil between himself and the present moment. He didn’t die. He was, finally, alive.

Who knows how this radical approach actually worked out in the many cloisters and huts and cottages where it was practiced, where the stories grew and expanded in their retelling.

Those old teachers were tough characters. They weren’t merely meditation instructors.

There was another aspect of Zen, which survives to this day. It could be summarized as: “become the other.” The archer becomes the target. He becomes the bow, the arrow, and the target.

The runner becomes the road and the air and the sky and the clouds. The artist becomes the canvas.

The theater of merging with the other.

And as in any theatrical setting, the actor can, by choice, merge with, and un-merge from, his role.

But again, in these times, the main thrust of Zen teaching seems to be meditation, and the culture of stillness, quietude, and passive acceptance.

I’m not saying the meditation is easy to do. It isn’t. But somehow, its environment has become circumscribed.

This is unsurprising in America, where every philosophic and spiritual import from Asia has been distorted and watered down for the seeker-consumer. The overriding intent has been to create The Quiet Person.

The world of action has been painted as too disturbing to the “student seeking inner peace.” Therefore, retreat. Therefore, set up a buffer zone within which all is harmonized and balanced.

Where is the Zen now that sends people out into the world to revolutionize it down to its core, that stimulates the desire to find and invent a Voice that will shatter delusions and create new realities that have never been seen before?

If the moment of insight, satori, doesn’t instigate this, what good is it?

How can satori be “seeing into one’s true nature,” if the result is a wan gaze out on a uniform landscape of soft-boiled bupkis?

The answer is obvious. Breaking apart, exploding the primary illusions and fears that hold an individual in check is not the goal of most Zen as it is now practiced. That objective has been replaced with the false promise that some ultimate “consciousness” will reconcile the soul with itself.

The way this promise is offered and the way it is taught and the way its surrounding social culture is embroidered is a dud. Dead on arrival.

It’s time for a few new koans.

What is the real sound of David Rockefeller? What does Henry Kissinger say when somebody finally puts him in a small bottle with a cork on it? How does an android disguise himself as a human?

If I need a Zen teacher, I’ll go to Henny Youngman: “A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn’t pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.”

In the beginning, the whole point of Zen was to shake things up, not calm them down.

The master assumed a new student was an annoying clod. But that doesn’t comfortably mesh with today’s “tolerant culture.” Today, annoying clods are a special interest group.

Silence, as a key Zen feature, isn’t only about a desired inner condition now. It’s about a synthetic attitude. So show me a temple where the meditation room is outfitted with a few dozen giant TV screens. The students do their meditation while CNN, Christingle Matthews, Sean Hannity, Oprah, news-boy-on-a bike Brian Williams, Hawaii Five-O, the Shopping Channel, Pawn Stars, Jimmy Fallon and his screaming pubescent audience, and four or five Spanish soaps are going full blast.

That would be a start.

Or throw on 20 or 30 TED lectures simultaneously—prancing grasshoppers extolling the future of technology.

I submit that if the one of the ancient Zen teachers walked into a modern American Zen cloister today, that’s exactly what he’d do. Turn on a few hundred TV sets, computers, and mobile devices and say, “Okay, try being quiet in the middle of this!”

Zen is sacred? What? When was it ever sacred? Soft bells, empty halls?

No, you must have Zen confused with a funeral home.

Every age has its massive collection of heavily loaded apple carts, and the job of Zen is to overturn them. When up is down, and insanity is called normal, that’s where you begin…

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Leaving Matrix: the Zen of Zen

How civilization short-circuits overflowing life

Language, desire, and mystery

by Jon Rappoport

July 27, 2016

(To join our email list, click here.)

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.” –Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human

A system is like a dream that always plays out the same way. Start to finish.

A robot would be a system. He can perform 100000000000 operations and each one is specific and bounded. And that’s all he can do, no matter how you dress him up.

There are a whole lot of two-and-three wish people in this world. A whole lot of five-and-ten wish people. Grant them their wishes and they’re done.

And that’s because they’ve made desire into a kind of system. It’s a sort of closed network. It’s tight. You walk in there and give them what they want and boom, they’re done. They’ve really got nowhere to go after that. Their energy peters out.

This is interesting—because it suggests—and you might want to chew on this for a while—that there is another version of desire that isn’t so tight and bounded…and if that is so, we are looking at desire as possibility. Not in the sense of “I see all the possibilities,” but in the sense of implication, metaphor, suggestion, open-ended X.

People tend to recoil from this. They want the Caddy with the big fins, and they want it now. They want the prettier fingernails, the new nose, the butt implants, and the island in the Pacific with the yacht.

At least that’s what they think, because they don’t have them, and they tend to define their future in those terms. So they’re yearning and longing and drooling.

But what if there is a whole other space, a whole other future that isn’t so simple? And what if its uncertain shape makes it even more attractive?

What if the poem you’ve read a hundred times, the one you never quite understood, is the one you admire the most? The one that sends your mind and imagination off in so many directions.

And what if this has something to do with what magic is really all about, and is a kind of magic that normally escapes attention? What if magic can be like this, can be a road with thousands of forks that take you into undiscovered territory you’ve never dreamed of before?

What then?

What if our programmed sense of what reality is, the precision and the definition and the thing-ness, is a diversion from what, underneath it all, we want?

What if the most subtle illusion about reality is the conviction that reality is an absolute IS separated from an absolute ISN’T?

What if that keyboard on your computer, which is so THERE on your desk, is only one KIND of there-ness? And another kind of there-ness is implication-not-fully-realized…and although you’ve always been quite sure you want the THERE of that keyboard and the yacht and the villa, you also want the implication-not-fully-realized…and you want it so much that it would fulfill the requirement of magic?

In other words, for all this time, desire has been, for you, a kind of closed system that is leak-proof and bulletproof, and that’s why it has remained unfulfilled.

Let’s say there are levels of desire. Level One is those things you obviously want. Level Two involves the exploration of undiscovered territory.

Analogy: you’re an archeologist, and all your life you’ve wanted to dig up a lost city—and then you do. There it is, all laid out in the desert. It’s what every archeologist is supposed to want. You’re supposed to feel a sense of finality. This is it. This is the realization of your prime wish. But instead…

You feel boundaries. You feel you’re inside something that has walls. You feel there must be something more.

And then you uncover, in a sealed repository, a dozen volumes of writing in a language you’ve never seen before. This language is built on mysterious connections that seem to be untranslatable.

Instead of hundreds or thousands or millions of nouns that name things; instead of verbs that show how these nouns are acting on objects; instead of that familiar pattern; you see this old civilization approached reality in a completely different way:

There are hundreds of words that refer to “flying.” Some of these words are involved with flying into other people’s consciousness and seeing the alive, electric energies that flow and move there. Some of these words mention persons having views of the earth from above and at ground level simultaneously. Some of these words refer to enormous poems that were written centuries earlier, and these poems were, for a time, ARBITRARILY frozen in mid-flight. Short selections were extracted and used to form the basis of organized religions, whose leaders were bent on control of populations—and then there were reformations and revolutions, and the original wild and free poems were sprung from their graves and brought out into the light again, and the religions fell and disappeared…

And now you, the archeologist, feel something bursting up in your own mind, a desire to explore THIS and go where it leads. You feel energized and galvanized in a way that far exceeds your experience of digging up the city and seeing it laid out end to end.

You sense implications that have no limits.

You wake up from a dream in which reality was defined and cataloged and shaped into systems.

For the first time, you understand how limited that dream was.

You realize you have been hearing the sounds of robots marching from horizon to horizon—and now those sounds are gone.

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Simultaneously, you now experience a gorgeous peace and a Niagara of many unnamable cascades of desire.

The premise of limited desire is gone.

You are UNDENIABLY alive.

Finally, you see why you’ve never fit in, why you’ve never been able to accept the structures of society. Those structures are claustrophobic.

They are built to regulate and define desire.

Society expresses the average of all desires. But society also describes the numbers and types of desires that could possibly exist. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And in this program and prophecy, society comes up short. As short as any number does, when contrasted with infinity.

You have never considered these things before. But now you do.

And you discover they are more real than rocks or buildings or planets or all the things you were quite sure made up the sum of all you desire.

Now you’re out in the open sea, where you never thought you would be, where you always thought you would be.

You’re there.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Zen is: never meeting expectations

Exit From The Matrix

by Jon Rappoport

One thing I’ve learned from giving lectures to audiences over the years: never meet expectations.

“Expectations” is a large container waiting to be filled up. People have these containers. They lug them around with them. They want them to be filled up.

For example, if they expect shocking information from the speaker, and they get it, their expectations are met.

Audiences train themselves to be audiences, and their expectation-containers are ready when they sit down to listen.

There is something missing. Something monumental.

The present moment. The present now. The alive moment. Because, for all its fanfare and interest, the event is not really in the present.

This is by design. No one wants the moment. People’s whole lives are devoted to avoiding the moment, because it is spontaneous. That’s what a moment is. Spontaneous.

“Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become ‘stage-worthy.’” (Viola Spolin)

No one is used to spontaneity. No one is prepared for it. No one knows what they would do or how they would react in the spontaneous moment. That’s why it is avoided.

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves.” (Viola Spolin)

Yet, the paradox is: people yearn for the spontaneous moment. They yearn for that freedom. It’s not freedom as an idea or concept, but freedom as a living thing.

“That which is not yet known comes out of that which is not yet here.” (Viola Spolin)

I bring all this up because passivity is the universal effect of living for most people. In that state, they still have expectations and those big containers, but the way they receive information is colored by passivity.

They certainly don’t intend to climb up out of their own passivity. That’s the last thing they would do.

“It [spontaneity] creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.” (Viola Spolin)

So when I speak to audiences at live events, I find a way to remind them that we’re in a kind of false relationship. It’s interesting and false at the same time. There we are in a room, and I’m the speaker and they’re the audience. I’m active and they’re passive.

Those are our roles. Those are our functions. It’s accepted, but it’s unworkable. It’s self-defeating, unless we all want to be existing in a dead space outside the living present moment. And I don’t.

This means I have to readjust things. I have to let people know that I know they’re there. Right now. I know they’re listening, and I know they’re absorbing, and I know that beyond a certain point (10-15 minutes), they’re going to shift down into passive mode.

Finding a way, an interesting way to let them know is a challenge.

It’s really a challenge that extends to the whole world.

Are we alive or are we doing it by the numbers?

Look at any set-up, which is “the way things are supposed to be,” and “the parts that people are supposed to play,” and you can see light. The light is what could happen to upset that situation and turn it into something else. Something that would bring people in from the cold, into the moment itself.

Spontaneity means everything is created now.

That’s why I keep writing about imagination, because imagination will change a life. It won’t only change the content. It’ll change the way life happens.

Here’s something I can guarantee: a conspiracy that is taking place anywhere in the universe where beings populate planets, where they think, plan, strategize. They’re not living in the moment, but they claim they are. They’ll say, “How could I be anywhere else? We’re all in the present. That’s all there is.”

But they’re wrong. Their big containers are in the moment, and they’re waiting outside to accept the flow of information from the containers.

If a person (usually a hard-headed realist) thinks he’s already in the moment, have him go up on a stage with another person and take on the role of a galactic cop on patrol, questioning a suspect who is accused of stealing a planet. If the realist can eventually improvise and do it, he’ll experience being in the moment in a way he never has before.

Likewise, if he painted 200 paintings, something different would happen to him. He would come to the edge of what he already knows (which he’s expressing in the paintings), and then he would step off. He would do something on the paper or canvas which is not what he knows. It would arise spontaneously, and he would feel a new space, a new energy, a new now.

Imagination. Alive imagination. That’s the key. The key to the door that leads out of the Matrix.

exit from the matrix

In response to that, here are the contents of my collection, Exit From The Matrix:

First, my new audio presentations:

* INTRODUCTION: HOW TO USE THE MATERIALS IN EXIT FROM THE MATRIX

* EXIT FROM THE MATRIX

* 50 IMAGINATION EXERCISES

* FURTHER IMAGINATION EXERCISES

* ANESTHESIA, BOREDOM, EXCITEMENT, ECSTASY

* ANCIENT TIBET AND THE UNIVERSE AS A PRODUCT OF MIND

* YOU THE INVENTOR, MINDSET, AND FREEDOM FROM “THE EXISTENCE PROGRAM”

* PARANORMAL EXPERIMENTS AND EXERCISES

* CHILDREN AND IMAGINATION

* THE CREATIVE LIFE AND THE MATRIX/IMAGINATION

* PICTURES OF REALITY AND ESCAPE VELOCITY FROM THE MATRIX

* THIS WOULD BE A VERY DIFFERENT FUTURE

* MODERN ZEN

* THE GREAT PASSIONS AND THE GREAT ANDROIDS

Then you will receive the following audio seminars I have previously done:

* Mind Control, Mind Freedom

* The Transformations

* Desire, Manifestation and Fulfillment

* Altered States, Consciousness, and Magic

* Beyond Structures

* The Mystery and Magic of Dialogue

* The Voyage of Merlin

* Modern Alchemy and Imagination

* Imagination and Spiritual Enlightenment

* Dissolving Stress

* The Paranormal Project

* Zen Painting for Everyone Now

* Past Lives, Archetypes, and Hidden Sources of Human Energy

* Expression of Self

* Imagination Exercises for a Lifetime

* Old Planet, New Planet, New Mind

* The Era of Magic Returns

* Your Power Revealed

* Universes Without End

* Relationships

* Building a Business for Success

I have included an additional bonus section:

* My book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies (pdf document)

* My book, The Ownership of All Life (pdf document)

* A long excerpt from my briefly published book, Full Power (pdf document)

* My 24 articles in the series, “Coaching the Coaches” (pdf document)

And these audio seminars:

* The Role of Medical Drugs in Human Illness

* Longevity One: The Mind-Body Connection

* Longevity Two: The Nutritional Factors

(All the audio presentations are mp3 files and the documents and books are pdf files. You download the files upon purchase. There is no physical ship.)

What has been called The Matrix is a series of layers. These layers compose what we call Reality. Reality is not merely the consensus people accept in their daily lives. It is also a personal and individual conception of limits. It is a perception that these limits are somehow built into existence. But this is not true.

What I’ve done here is remove the lid on those perceived limits. This isn’t an intellectual undertaking. It’s a way to open up space and step on to a new road.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

What’s wrong with Zen?

By Jon Rappoport

April 5, 2014

(To join our email list, click here.)

Nothing is wrong with Zen, except the people who practice it.

That’s a joke. Sort of.

In the modern style, especially in America, Zen is mostly meditation, and more meditation, and more meditation, and the point of it seems to be to get to a zero point, where you can watch your own mind, your own thoughts, and finally, without effort, stay separate from them, separate from all that radio static, and separate also from your own unbidden parade of emotions that swing by with tooting horns and crashing symbols and clacking drums and gawking dancing clowns.

A laudable goal.

But on the whole, how many people who do this wind up becoming passive? That’s the thing. People tend to opt for quietness.

Whereas, the whole idea ought to be: launch a tremendous amount of dynamic action from the platform of zero-stillness.

Because stillness as a way of life sooner or later begins to disintegrate.

In original Zen, there were ordeals. The teacher gave the student things to do, tasks which eventually became absurd, without discernible purpose. The teacher spoke to the student in riddles and wisecracks. The teacher drove the student into a state of desperation, because the student’s rational faculties, which were obsessively involved in systems, couldn’t supply answers to questions which defied logic.

The teacher did whatever he had to do to bring the student out over the edge of the cliff, where in mid-air, there were no foundations…and the student felt terror. But the teacher persisted.

And then, in one explosive moment, the student found himself floating in the air. He saw there was no need to explain his existence. There was no need to place a veil between himself and the present moment. He didn’t die. He was, finally, alive.

Who knows how this radical approach actually worked out in the many cloisters and huts and cottages where it was practiced, where the stories grew and expanded in their retelling.

But compare the image of silent monks in robes, their heads shaved, gliding through temples, with this old Zen story about a teacher and a prospective student (from AshidaKim.com):

A soldier named Nobushige came to Hakuin, and asked: “Is there really a paradise and a hell?”

“Who are you?” inquired Hakuin.

“I am a samurai,” the warrior replied.

“You, a soldier!” exclaimed Hakuin. “What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? Your face looks like that of a beggar.”

Nobushige became so angry that he began to draw his sword, but Hakuin continued: “So you have a sword! Your weapon is probably much too dull to cut off my head.”

As Nobushige drew his sword Hakuin remarked: “Here open the gates of hell!”

At these words the samurai, perceiving the master’s discipline, sheathed his sword and bowed.

“Here open the gates of paradise,” said Hakuin.

Those old teachers were tough characters. They weren’t merely meditation instructors.

There was another aspect of Zen, which survives to this day. It could be summarized as: “become the other.” The archer becomes the target. He becomes the bow, the arrow, and the target.

The runner becomes the road and the air and the sky and the clouds. The artist becomes the canvas.

The theater of merging with the other.

And as in any theatrical setting, the actor can, by choice, merge with, and un-merge from, his role.

But again, in these times, the main thrust of Zen teaching seems to be meditation, and the culture of stillness, quietude, and passive acceptance.

I’m not saying the meditation is easy to do. It isn’t. But somehow, its environment has become circumscribed.

This is unsurprising in America, where every philosophic and spiritual import from Asia has been distorted and watered down for the seeker-consumer. The overriding intent has been to create The Quiet Person.

The world of action has been painted as too disturbing to the “student seeking inner peace.” Therefore, retreat. Therefore, set up a buffer zone within which all is harmonized and balanced.

Where is the Zen now that sends people out into the world to revolutionize it down to its core, that stimulates the desire to find and invent a Voice that will shatter delusions and create new realities that have never been seen before?

If the moment of insight, satori, doesn’t instigate this, what good is it?

How can satori be “seeing into one’s true nature,” if the result is a wan gaze out on a uniform landscape of soft-boiled bupkis?

The answer is obvious. Breaking apart, exploding the primary illusions and fears that hold an individual in check is not the goal of most Zen as it is now practiced. That objective has been replaced with the false promise that some ultimate “ordinary consciousness” will reconcile the soul with itself.

The way this promise is offered and the way it is taught and the way its surrounding social culture is embroidered is a dud. Dead on arrival.

It’s time for a few new koans.

What is the real sound of David Rockefeller? What does Henry Kissinger say when somebody finally puts him in a small bottle with a cork on it? How does an android disguise himself as a human?

If I need a Zen teacher, I’ll go to Henny Youngman: “A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn’t pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.”

In the beginning, the whole point of Zen was to shake things up, not calm them down.

The master assumed a new student was an annoying clod. But that doesn’t comfortably mesh with today’s “tolerant culture.” Today, annoying clods are a special interest group.

Silence, as a key Zen feature, isn’t only about a desired inner condition now. It’s about a synthetic attitude. So show me a temple where the meditation room is outfitted with a few dozen giant TV screens. The students do their meditation while CNN, Christingle Matthews, Sean Hannity, Oprah, news-boy-on-a bike Brian Williams, the vampire Scott Pelley, don’t-cry-for-me-America Diane Sawyer, Hawaii Five-O, the Shopping Channel, Pawn Stars, Jimmy Fallon and his screaming pubescent audience, and four or five Spanish soaps are going full blast.

That would be a start.

Or throw on 20 or 30 TED lectures simultaneously—prancing grasshoppers extolling the future of technology.

I submit that if the one of the ancient Zen teachers walked into a modern American Zen cloister today, that’s exactly what he’d do. Turn on a few hundred TV sets, computers, and mobile devices and say, “Okay, try being quiet in the middle of this!”

Another Koan for our times: What did Bill Gates look like before he was Alfred E Neuman?

Zen is sacred? What? When was it ever sacred? Soft bells, empty halls?

No, you must have Zen confused with a funeral home.

Every age has its massive collection of heavily loaded apple carts, and the job of Zen is to overturn them. When up is down, and insanity is called normal, that’s where you begin.

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.