Secret secrets of the Secret

 

My earlier treatment of the Law of Attraction was rather erudite, and I found this excellent video, which, while not as erudite as my treatment, does involve a man with the magical ability to attract antique meat grinders to his head, Mark Day. This is probably the direction my studies have to take in future. Thank you, Mark.

The Zen Paradox

When I set up the precursor to this blog a few months ago, it was about Zen, but all I could write was either paradoxical or the rational observation that Zen is paradoxical.

I gradually meandered towards Zen in my ’spiritual search’. Zen was where I stopped, or rather, where I set off in a very different direction, as though I had come to the end of the spiritual alphabet and fallen off. It’s hard to say whether I have dropped Zen: I still hold some of its major tenets as likely truths, if one can actually say it has any. In a sense, that is the strength and the weakness of Zen: the truth is unspeakable; hence there is nothing else to agree or disagree with (though one can, of course, agree or disagree that truth is unspeakable).

Here immediately the paradox is evident: did I mean ‘unthinkable’? Did I formulate that central proposition in the right words? Of course, if you understand what it means, there is no way to answer that: all dualities, in fact, fall away or are abandoned, along with all categories. Zen is unspeakable and unthinkable because it is – fundamentally – silent.

A Tale of Two Paradigms

I decided to write this blog for a number of reasons: first of all, I felt that I had something interesting to say; I was writing a lot of stuff on forums and thought it would be good to put my ideas together somewhere; I wanted to write a book, but never seemed able to organise it logically and kept finding new perspectives; I’ve always kept a journal, so blogging fits the style I’m used to writing in; if I want to publish a book (or just more of my writing), it’s probably best to use electronic means for environmental reasons.

In fact, this is my second attempt. When I took the plunge for the first time, thinking that I had gained enough clarity about my work to dare to publish it, the whole edifice seemed to fall apart within a matter of weeks. One of my tasks is to reassess what, if anything, is still valid from that earlier philosophy and what must be ditched, as well as to educate myself on subjects that have opened up to me within my new worldview.

I made a paradigm shift. That process itself was not entirely unexpected. My philosophy involved paradigms and paradigm shifts very centrally. I was not at all surprised to move through one myself, indeed I was working towards deliberately inducing one, it’s just that I hoped it would be a very different kind.