The Zennist: The intellectual is more interested in words than actual reality

We could say that the intellectual is more interested in words themselves than the actual reality these words are pointing to. Building a real barn, for example, is much different than thinking about building a barn or fantasizing what it might look like through the imagination.

It is fairly obvious that intellectuals can easily be changed into ideologists and fall prey to their very own ideological fantasies. Marxists and sort-of-Marxists fall in to this category. I forgot to mention that when one mixes their feelings with their intellect they become ideologists or ideologues. The entire communist revolution was a dangerous fantasy that didn't want to wake up to the horrific consequences of its delusional thinking. The intellectual and worse, the ideologues, never want to wake up to the consequences of their ideations.

Buddhism could not care less about an intellectual path or a particular ideology. Buddhism is concerned with the exercise of intuiting ultimate reality which is a religious act (praxis) rather than a cerebral occupation.

You cannot look to the intellectual West and expect to find too many great minds that have directly intuited their knowledge. The West is not the India of the Buddha or the China of Huineng 惠能. We live in a nihilist age where even the word “meaning” has lost its real meaning (the thing that is meant or intended). Nevertheless, the drive for power and control in such a nihilist age is everywhere. In speech, especially, where the discourse is controlled by hidden powers. Yes, even in Buddhism it is there with its ridiculous theory of a kind of anti-self.