Mirror of Zen Blog

They Do Get It

The last word here freaks people out. But it shouldn’t, and it ain’t some sort of easy nihilism, either.

Because of this word “mistake”, Schopenhauer’s quote is a flawed (as all words are) attempt to describe the fundamental condition of now, when conceptual thinking drops away, or is “seen” — through practice — to melt back to its original condition, and the nature of absolute “reality” becomes clear as unhindered universal substance, the infinite and unending borderless “space” in every direction can only be “worded” as “nothingness”. Yet without the negativity of the “no”- part. Yet this is the very view, in Schopenhauer, as in The Heart Sutra: “No this, not that, and nothing else…” Then what? Someone else tried to describe that with “only don’t know.” And that is also pithier and more spot-on than even Schopenhauer, and yet also a big, big mistake — people get sent in different conceptual directions by the words, if they don’t have the experience of practice.

And the great Romanian gets the same point with his characteristic dark humor, expressed from another angle of seeing:

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