Rob’s Blog

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.