Rob’s Blog

I don’t really have anything interesting to say. I think it was on this bog not long ago that I referred to posting as “Writing on the men’s room wall in a women’s college.” Which, incidentally, is not something I’ve done. What I meant, of course, is that there is no way that someone would stumble upon this blog, and, if they did, it’s not like they’d stay and have a chat in the comments.

Still, I have an update of sorts vis-a-vis the LoA. It seems like I have had some success at attracting things. One of the things I’ve attracted was being happy with what I have.

It’s a work in progress, what with all the Zen that’s flying ’round this place and the holidays coming up fast, but I think it’s cool that things are moving along.

So, I have been listening to Alan Watt’s The Way of Zen read by some British guy who sounds like a newsreel. What I have learned so far is that Westerners, myself included, of course, think differently than Easterners about the nature of reality. This is because symbolic languages in general, and Chinese in particular, use the same words to denote both a thing and an action.

Now, I of course have no idea what that means in a semantic sense, but what I get from it is a clarification. Namely, that there are no things as such, but only states of being. The thermos is at this moment, but it is an event, rather than a thing.

OK, I need some time to sort that out. The idea makes sense to me. We are pretty good, in Western thought, at describing things, but not very good at explaining things. We are at the mercy of our observations.