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Zen

Marshall McLuhan and Zen

In Kung Fu, Qi Gong, Zen and a lot of other disciplines we have a great emphasis on direct personal experience to prove assumed knowledge. Now who is experiencing directly, the mind? The mind itself is said to be phenomenal, you can experience even that directly.

So what is real? I have experienced a lamppost to be an illusion, this experience yet was somehow physical. There would be 10, 100 or 1000 people who would state that I have experienced the truth, but there are also billions of people who would say that this was an illusion and the lamppost is definitely true.

Who now am I to believe?

Some kind of doubt is important, a view on a bigger scale is important and after all reassurance is important. We will get back to these points later.

Why after experiencing the lamppost as an illusion, physically, do I still bang my head if I want to walk through it? Is it still my mind that wouldn’t let me do so?

Where does illusion start and where does it end? Is the experience as such an illusion and if, how can it be an assurance of anything? If further experiences appear as foresaid are they a reassurance of the first or do they just appear because after all it is my mind that creates them by the mean of lining its own pocket.

Do you know where your legs are, or your teeth, fingers, instincts etc.? Oh, really?

Then you might not have experienced yet that they have, at least partly, been outsourced a long time ago.

According to some of Marshall McLuhans theories we have been outsourcing a lot of parts of our body, memory and mind. We have replaced our fist with a hammer, our feet with wheels our teeth with knives and our fingers with a fork etc.etc. We tempt to call this culture sometimes, as we do not tear pieces of meat out of a cow with our teeth. We have even outsourced growing the cow, slaughtering it and cutting it in to pieces. Sometimes we even outsource preparing it. Then if it is a Chinese restaurant, we realise that Asian food merges perfectly with the system of outsourcing, everything is chopped in to fiddly bits, perfect to handle with an outsourced thumb and index finger which now are called chop sticks.

Some people may think that it is a way of getting back to the source by having dinner at McDonalds, because there is no cutlery, but this again is just an illusion. Food at such places is often prepared to be in a state of convenient structure, so that it could even be eaten without any teeth. So the hands are used but the teeth remain externalised.

If we meditate on objects, this is a way of getting all the things we have evacuated from our body and mind back in…….

If we meditate for example on a pencil and finally become the pencil, we are getting back the finger that originally was drawing pictures in the sand.

If we meditate on the ghosts, demons, fairies and angels, whom we have outsourced, we take back the negative and positive parts of ourselves that we have been projecting on the outside.

Also according to Marshall McLuhan the TV set has become the modern version of the campfire in ancient times.

In ancient times all generations of families or clans, were sitting around a campfire or chimney fire at least occasionally. There they would tell stories and socialise. The stories would differ from clan to clan or even from storyteller to storyteller, because they would be adapted to the needs of what the teller wants to transport.

Today, if there are different generations at all, they are likely to sit in front of the TV set most of the time and listen to stories told in exactly the same way to everybody, or to news which actually do not affect them at all.

We are getting deeper and deeper into a web of psychological replacements and outsourced parts of our own, of which each and every one is taking us a bit farer away from the source.

This web, not coincidentally, corresponds with the web of karmic reality.

With everything we are taking back in again, we are getting one step nearer to be whole again, nearer to the point where we can attain oneness.

Doupt is important because we have to figure out what we are going to belive………………….

A View on a bigger scale is important because there is no absolute truth until we reach complete oneness. ………………

Reassurance is important because we have to make sure not to leave the path we decided to walk………………………….