Under certain circumstances,
profanity provides a relief
denied even to prayer. - Mark Twain
Men are afraid to forget their minds...
The Void is not really void,
but the realm of the real dharma.
- Huang-po
"In the Beginning Was the Story. You get older, and you realize there are no answers, just stories. And how we love them...
Believing we’ve moved beyond religious myth, we mistake our culture’s newest story for the world itself...
We can look for better ones, better because living according to them would reduce social dukkha, or suffering. Collectively as well as personally, our stories can change, and in this case must change, so that we can better respond to the economic and ecological challenges that now confront us.
In the pluralistic climate of contemporary life, the foundational narratives that served us in the past—religious and secular—can no longer be understood in the same ways. We can retreat into a parochial framework that views only one worldview as true, or we can embrace the multiplicity of stories and perspectives in a spirit of playful nonattachment.
Knowing that we live in a world made of stories, we can, in the words of the Diamond Sutra, “let the mind arise without fixing it anywhere.”
- David Robert Loy is a professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism.
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