Zen and Tao

Scott Bradley

"That was Zen, this is Tao." — A bumper-sticker

I love this silly play on words. If it seems to trivialize the concepts themselves makes, so much the better. Less seriousness, more playfulness. How could that not be helpful? Purr more, bark less. Once we've found our inner cat and dog, of course.

There is a more serious point I wish to make here, however. I am writing this on the 29th of September; when are you reading it? Somehow I have managed to accumulate more than a month's worth of yet-to-be-posted posts which Trey has graciously lined up for posting. From my end, this takes off the pressure of having to come up with something every day. Yet, it also creates the eerie feeling of seeing a 'me' which I no longer am.

Am I really changing all that much? Probably not. More likely, it is my ideas which are changing. That was then, this is now. But those ideas are probably also a reflection of attitudinal shifts, and that is change — and that I interpret as growth. And the reason this is important to me is that I've got lots of growing to do. I'm into this because I need it.

One reason I am sharing this is that it helps to put what I write here in perspective. If "that was then, this is now", so also is this now and not tomorrow. I may be silly enough to say today that this is how things are, but they won't seem that way tomorrow. Nothing is fixed. Life is a pilgrimage. These posts are a reflection of my pilgrimage. So, please don't hold me to my past words; I will deny everything!

There is an 'enlightened' guy who wrote that his past seems like someone else's home movies. I love that image. He is not his past. Nor is he his future. Nor even is he his present. Nor is he. He has “yet to begin to exist”. To truly live now is to transcend time altogether, and this, it would seem, is to be no fixed someone at all. When Zhuangzi says, "It is just being empty, nothing more", this, I believe, is what he means. I wrote previously of Jill Taylor's experience of neurological enlightenment and how that translated into the loss of 30+ years of emotional baggage. She lost her past. Or rather, she lost the burden of being her past. For me, that sounds pretty liberating.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.