Zen, that is, modern Zen has turned into almost a farce. It’s like obese people writing books about how to diet and stay thin.
Carrying this one step further, dieting is actually easy if you know the mechanics, so to speak. Basically, you have to eat fats to lose fat, that is, you have to go into ketosis. This is where your body turns fat into ketones for use as energy. It you want to put on weight just keep yourself in a state of glycolysis in which blood glucose provides energy. The dieter always fails because they never get off of the glycolysis addiction. End of story.
Zen explained or taught by the common person, that is, a person who has never achieved kenshō, is almost as absurd as reading books on dieting authored by people who are obese; who say they speak from experience having dieted hundreds of times! In Zen any experience is almost useless if one fails to achieve kenshō. Kenshō occurs when we have transcended this mortal coil we call our body including the metal activity that buzzes around in our skull. Said again, suddenly, in kenshō plurality returns to the point of origin this being One Mind.
From this most sublime vantage point, over time, what we once took to be real, namely, our body and this world, turns into an illusion. What was transcended during our awakening was actually the illusion, and what this illusion was composed from, kenshō showed us clearly. Using the ancient Indian allegory of a rope in the dark being mistaken for a deadly snake, we can understand that the rope could easily be mistaken for a deadly snake in the dark. But when the light is upon it, there is only a length of rope—no deadly snake. The One Mind being universal shines like a light upon the universe—to even the most distant galaxies—so that what appears is illusory. Only Mind is real which is not an appearance.
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