Music and Life - Alan Watts

Christless Christmas

At Slate.com, Torie Bosch has a fun and insightful essay explaining a Christmas joy without the accoutrements of religion: "No Reason for the Season: the joy of celebrating a godless Christmas." This notion, so boldly stated, has been slightly liberating. Indeed, why can't I just enjoy the fun parts of the season without the need for Christian "meaning" ruining everything. Sure, for Christians, this is the primary "reason for the season," but the rest of us can also enjoy it, guilt-free - no matter what the screaming, indignant, religionist pundits think! -

There was no one moment that crystallized my thinking or relieved me of my guilt. Rather, it was a series of observations: Most of the classic songs and movies that celebrate Christmas don't even mention God or Jesus. Santa doesn't check church attendance to decide whether he's going to give a child a present—he checks whether she's been naughty or nice. He's the perfect secular judge of moral fiber. To say that the secularists injure the Christmas spirit is much like the claim that two men getting hitched will besmirch the sanctity of marriage. Why should the way I mark Christmas bother anyone? Christians appalled by my secular holiday will no doubt argue that I am depriving myself of the greater joy that comes with accepting Jesus into your heart. But I'm not attempting to take away anyone's right to go to church or to display a Nativity scene. All I need to celebrate Christmas is a tree, stockings, baked goods, some people I love, and some gifts to give (and, yes, receive).

And, of course, there's the idea that so-called "pagan" festivals preceded the modern Christmastide, and that symbols we now associate with it (eg, the Christmas tree, yule log) also had other origins. So, I say enjoy the holiday season any way you want (I recently reread Dickens' "A Christmas Carol), and practice tolerance of the ways others celebrate. It's a time for fun and reflection...and presents!

Mind At Peace

When the mind is at peace,

the world too is at peace.

Nothing real, nothing absent.

Not holding on to reality,

not getting stuck in the void,

you are neither holy or wise, just

an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.

P'ang Yün (龐蘊 Hõ Un) (The Enlightened Heart 34)

 

Quote of the Day

"As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind. " - Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Mystery

Atheism, says Adam Frank, is not incompatible with the sense of life's mystery, of  the magic I've spoken of here. Speaking at a public debate with another scientist, he encounters the other man's refusal to see any hint of mystery in life:


  I had made it pretty clear that, being an atheist, I was not arguing for a "God" of the gaps. Neither was I arguing that limits to knowledge (if they exist) imply we should be worshiping before some choice of deity. Instead I was simply pointing to that fundamental weirdness, that "stranger-in-a-strange land" quality of being human. I was pointing to that mystery because I think its best part of the whole trip.
 We just find ourselves here. With our individual birth we just "wake-up" and discover ourselves in the midst of an extraordinary world of beauty and sorrow. All around us we see exquisite and exquisitely subtle orders played out effortlessly. From the lazy descent of fall leaves to the slow unfolding of cloudscapes in empty blue skies, it is all just here and we are just here to see it.
  Day after day we wake again to find the world still here, waiting for us as we play out our own small dramas with their small triumphs and terrible heartbreaks. And then, remarkably, astonishingly, just here just ends.

This is just remarkable. While reading it, I experienced something that happens so seldom: the recognition of a fellow thinker, a person who experiences life in much the same way myself. I have often spoken of the "Mystery" as that Ultimate Reality I sense and at times experience. Frank discusses this as entirely compatible with the project of art and science, and is something we can experience regardless of our religious affiliation. It is the essence of Awakening.

 For me that is the mystery. No amount of explanation, be it a "Theory of Everything" or a religious theology, will reduce the power of its experience. The primitive quality of feeling, the presence of life and its luminosity, is the mystery and I am damn thankful for it.
 It is the essential and unalterable question mark saturating the verb "to be" that makes science worth pursuing and gives art its potency. It sets our loves and loss into a context that has no context and somehow makes it all bearable.

Quote of the Day

Zen and the Art of Landscape

The magic of Chinese sumi-e landscape painting...

I've put pictures of Zen landscapes here, but little in the way of the artist's rendition of landscape. Here's one in motion, creating an evocative scene with a few sure brushstrokes in ink. Magic!