Wed, 27 Sep 2006
Only One Thought
I've only got one good thought in my head today, and I've used it already on Flapping Mouth. So please forgive me for posting here what I posted there. My post was a comment on this remark and follows it.
The problem is not the 'pearls of wisdom' in themselves, but rather the thinking that such pearls are so important, at the expense of all other knowledge, and definitely at the expense of critical thinking.
You value critical thinking now because that's all you've got. And critical thinking is a fine tool and I don't mean to disparage it. But thinking rests on some assumptions about how the world is. Critical thinking is linguistic and all languages embody assumptions about the world. For example, the agent-action pattern is fundamental to English. All this makes it extremely difficult to overcome our delusions solely by means of critical thinking.
So we have meditation, zazen, or whatever you wish to call it. And there are teachers, roshis, senseis, and so forth. Now the catch is, since meditation is a tool that doesn't use critical thinking, critical thinking can't be totally conclusive in who is a good teacher. And different teachers will say different things to try to lead their students to understand what can't be expressed in words. What you call dogmatism is really is just the inability to fit what the teacher says into a conceptual scheme. Really, it's nothing different than when your parents told you, "When you grow up, you'll understand." Didn't you always hate that?
I'm not suggesting you suspend critical thinking. Trust shouldn't be given blindly, it's something that grows over a period of time. But some sort of trust in the teacher is necessary, absolutely necessary. Because the truth is simple and obvious and we've heard it all before. But without meditation practice and trust in the teacher you'll pass it right by.
