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KidZen articles are meant especially for young adults, but anyone can gain insight from reading them.

Do you ever have the feeling that the world is much more mysterious than anyone thinks? We usually believe that as we grow up we learn more and more about the world, and that’s why the world is vast and strange and adventurous when we’re young, and by the time we’re 30, we may feel like we’ve ‘seen it all’. Yes, a lot of people actually are bored by life by the time they are 30.

But what if we discovered that everything we had ‘learned’ about the world was actually just a bunch of made-up fantasies? That the world was actually still mysterious and magical, but that adults just lose the ability to see the magic?

In a very real sense, this is true. Adults lose the ability to see the magic because they’ve been taught how to divide the world into pieces. But these pieces don’t really exist! They are only in our minds. As an example, let’s imagine that we’re standing on a road in Colorado, looking out at the great Rocky Mountains. In the distance we see two craggy peaks – Mount Rose and Mount Henry. Now, watch carefully, and you’ll see how this fantasy-creation works.

Standing there, you can easily point to the two mountains in the distance. Because we ‘know’ what a mountain is (even though we’ve never really thought about it), we simply point to each mountain and call one Mount Rose and one Mount Henry.

At this point everything is clear. We rest assured that the two mountains are just two mountains, and we stop thinking at that point.

But what happens if a helicopter picks us up and deposits us on the top of Mount Rose? Still, we will say “I’m on the top of Mount Rose, and over there is Mount Henry.”

Now, let’s start hiking down Mount Rose. Our mission? Since we are sure there are two mountains, we merely want to know where Mount Rose ends and Mount Henry begins. We walk down the slope, and as we get toward the bottom, we find that there isn’t really a ‘bottom’. There are all these foothills, and huge fields, and small valleys. In fact, it becomes really confusing, and we don’t have any idea where one mountain ends and the other begins! There simply isn’t a clean ‘line’ between them. In fact – and here is the important part – any ‘line’ we are going to use to divide the two mountains is one that is decided by human minds – not by nature. In other words, the division between the two mountains is real only in the sense that money is real (we all agree on its value, thus it is valuable – otherwise it would just be paper with fancy designs).

When we begin to understand that the two mountains aren’t really two mountains, but are only two mountains in our imaginary fantasy world, then we get a clearer understanding of what the two mountains are. They are both one thing, and they are also two mountains (in the human mind), and if we start to think about how animals and rain and geologic forces and sunlight and the whole universe help to make the mountains what they are, then we start to see that the mountains are really indescribable – any description we put onto them is only a way of making the ‘reality’ of the mountains into a ‘fantasy’ in our minds. To see the mountains as they really are, we have to see them without putting any of our labels on them. This is why Zen folks sometimes describe reality as ‘nothingness’. Because if we call reality something, we start to divide it from the rest of the world. And the world isn’t really divided except in our minds.

This doesn’t apply just to mountains, either. Take two people – say, you and a friend of yours. We think it’s obvious that we’re two different people, but how much does your friend affect who you are? Would you be the same person if they weren’t in your life, or have they taught you things or helped to shape your interests and behavior? What about your parents, or television, or the food you eat? What is ‘you’ and what isn’t?

These are important questions to answer for ourselves. If we don’t, we end up merely following everyone else’s opinion, and never discover for ourselves what the world really is, and who we really are.

You can follow this link to another teaching that helps us explore what we mean when we call something an individual ‘thing’.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 1:53 am and is filed under Zen for Young Adults. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.