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From: wfs@mgweed.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.sport
Subject: Zen and Intuitive Response(part 5)
Message-ID: <1963@mgweed.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Jul-83 16:06:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: mgweed.1963
Posted: Wed Jul  6 16:06:09 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Jul-83 17:30:33 EDT
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                     Zen and Intuitive Response(part 5)

       The study and application of a Zen perspective can excite and attune
     consiousness to those sparkles of truth or glimpses of foreboding that
     give us pause in our thoughts during the course of our lives. How many
     times  have  we had a premonition flash across our mind and refused to
     give it credence, or acted upon it only to be rebuffed  later  by  our
     ignorance,  and  feel  doubly  scorned  because we neglected our inner
     perception? Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses this notion in his essay  on
     Self  Reliance.  A  man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of
     light which flashes across his mind from within more than  the  luster
     of  the  firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
     his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius  we  recognize
     our  own  rejected  thoughts;  they  come  back  to  us with a certain
     alienated majesty. In its truest sense  Zen  is  neither  a  religion,
     philosophy, nor an ideology. Zen is an attitude of self, the universe,
     and the inherent harmony of each. Zen wants to clean the dust from the
     mind's  mirror,  to  return  it to its original state of simplicity so
     that it can reflect reality in all its vivid, dynamic immediacy; as  a
     present  tense  experience  instinctually  felt  and  expressed in the
     spontaneity of this moment, and the next and the next.  To help in the
     preparation of consciousness for its intuitvie leaps of understanding,
     Zen employs the use of koans-short paradoxical  riddles  or  questions
     designed  to  confuse  and stagger the rational mode of consciousness.
     Some favorite ones included: "What was your original face  before  you
     were  born?",  "What  is  the  significance  of Buddha coming from the
     west?" and of course, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?".......
     ...........................(to be cont'd. in part 6)