Meaningless Reality

 I've been trying to process a few thoughts about all this, but difficult amid certain confusions and demands of my day to day life. Obligations and demands. But really, not much to complain about.

But thoughts on "meaning" or the lack of it, of Love having no why. What is the alternative to there being in fact, NO meaning as such? The alternative to our not knowing why?

In some quote that I cannot trace there was some guy who said that he would rather pursue/seek Truth than to know it, or be handed it on a plate. I get his drift, and yet this still seems to imply that there is in fact A truth out there somewhere waiting to be discovered. And what when it is? When it is found and known?

I think of dear old Spike Milligan who would often at the end of a comic sketch in Q6 simply stand still, hands by his sides, and mutter:-"What do we do now? What do we do now?" Very funny. But after discovering truth, what then? Is our own purpose determined?

These questions suggest to me why I find the more "eastern" ways of seeing/knowing more suggestive of answers. Where "Being" is more "emptiness" than substantial in any sense.

For Dogen mind was at once knowledge and reality, at once the knowing subject and the known object, yet it transcended them both at the same time. In this nondual conception of mind, what one knew was what one was —and ontology, epistemology, and soteriology were inseparably united. (I thank Hee-Jin Kim for this summation)

Or:- "We are what we understand" and our acts flow accordingly.

Hee-Jin Kim again (deep stuff, but I have found it worth pondering in between cracking further levels of Soda Candy Crush Saga).....

To cast off the body-mind did not nullify historical and social existence so much as to put it into action so that it could be the self-creative and self-expressive embodiment of Buddha-nature. In being “cast off,” however, concrete human existence was fashioned in the mode of radical freedom—purposeless, goalless, objectless, and meaningless. Buddha-nature was not to be enfolded in, but was to unfold through, human activities and expressions. The meaning of existence was finally freed from and authenticated by its all-too-human conditions only if, and when, it lived co-eternally with ultimate meaninglessness.


"Love has no why" (Meister Eckhart)

Atheist nihilism meets the Faith Traditions of our world! True seeing true knowledge is not to believe some Truth. Faith is not belief. Faith lets go, belief clings. Faith unites, beliefs divide.

About 20 or so years ago I read a quote, this from a zen guy Yun-men. He was asked:- "What are the teachings of a whole lifetime" and he answered:- "An appropriate statement." I never really understood and yet as Dogen has said, where we do not understand, there is our understanding. I think I can see it now. Each moment is new if within radical freedom, we answer each moment according to our understanding, and the answer we give is absolute, there, then - but for no other moment. Which in a certain way answers the conundrum of "absolute" v "relative".

Well, thats it. The grandchildren will be there when I get home. Chaos! Lunches to get, dinners to cook.

To anyone stumbling upon this waffle, and perhaps thinking "what a load of crap", that is just the way it is. Complex? No, I think the Bible is correct when it predicts that "a little child shall lead them." Things are very simple, yet sadly we tend to complicate everything.