![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
George Bush is a table
Nov. 11th, 2007 01:50 pmI’ve been reading an excellent book called Zen Keys (amazon.com | amazon.ca) by the famous Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, and there’s a small section in it on nonduality. It’s so terribly dense that I couldn’t even follow it though, so I’m not going to bother writing about it here.
He did, however, continue with a common concept of his called “interbeing,” which is a term he coined to reflect the intrinsic interconnectedness of the whole of life on Earth and in the universe. The examples he commonly uses are a table, and an apple. A table is not just a table if you can see beyond its current physical state and recognize the carpenter who assembled it, the miller who cut the wood, the logger who felled the tree, the tree which grew in the forest, the sun and the rain and the air which cultivated the tree in the first place, and so on. A similar chain of causation can be drawn with the apple, starting with the grocer who laid out the apples in the store for you to buy, the trucker who brought the apples to the store, the shipper who packed the apples for freight, the grower who cultivated and harvested the apples, and so on.
I really like this concept, and it’s useful to meditate upon if you’re ever feeling down about all the bad shit that’s going down in the world. It’s easy, for example, to get upset by the news I’ve been hearing that Bush and Cheney are planning to bomb hell out of Iran before they leave office, even though the conventional wisdom would dictate that they’re at least 3 years away from refining enough heavy metal to make their first warhead (or nuclear power plant, as it were). But if I recognize that Bush and Cheney are my true brothers, and that we come from the same place and breathe the same air and are directly related through our interbeing in the universe, then it’s a little easier to assuage some of my latent hatred for them. I mean, they’re clearly the product of a first-cousin union or something -- don’t they have to be genetic mutants or something, to be as nuts as they are? -- but they are still my brothers, and I love them.
Sort of.
He did, however, continue with a common concept of his called “interbeing,” which is a term he coined to reflect the intrinsic interconnectedness of the whole of life on Earth and in the universe. The examples he commonly uses are a table, and an apple. A table is not just a table if you can see beyond its current physical state and recognize the carpenter who assembled it, the miller who cut the wood, the logger who felled the tree, the tree which grew in the forest, the sun and the rain and the air which cultivated the tree in the first place, and so on. A similar chain of causation can be drawn with the apple, starting with the grocer who laid out the apples in the store for you to buy, the trucker who brought the apples to the store, the shipper who packed the apples for freight, the grower who cultivated and harvested the apples, and so on.
I really like this concept, and it’s useful to meditate upon if you’re ever feeling down about all the bad shit that’s going down in the world. It’s easy, for example, to get upset by the news I’ve been hearing that Bush and Cheney are planning to bomb hell out of Iran before they leave office, even though the conventional wisdom would dictate that they’re at least 3 years away from refining enough heavy metal to make their first warhead (or nuclear power plant, as it were). But if I recognize that Bush and Cheney are my true brothers, and that we come from the same place and breathe the same air and are directly related through our interbeing in the universe, then it’s a little easier to assuage some of my latent hatred for them. I mean, they’re clearly the product of a first-cousin union or something -- don’t they have to be genetic mutants or something, to be as nuts as they are? -- but they are still my brothers, and I love them.
Sort of.
