God 4.0 by Robert Ornstein

Author:Robert Ornstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: transcendental experience, neuropsychology and religion, perception of reality, psychology of spiritual experience, origins of religion, religion and evolutionary psychology, science and religion
Publisher: Institute for Study of Human Knowledge
Published: 2021-05-26T14:43:58+00:00

Puzzles, Koans and Paradoxes

If someone who is teaching you sets the homework assignment for next week as “show me your face before your father and mother met,” you might just quit or, better, knit your brain into a knot trying to figure it out.

In a Zen school, the “answer” to a koan such as this cannot be addressed through scientific or logical analysis. The “answer” might be just as strange as the “question,” and could well be to slap oneself or the teacher in the face and shut one’s eyes. Our normal reaction to being asked these kinds of questions might well be “Huh!?” But these puzzles — and there are many of them — are meant to tie the regular processes of the mind into knots until the whole thing snaps, a way of breaking through the “clouds” that surround us. The desired answer is not verbal or logical; ideally, it should communicate a new level of awareness brought about by the process of concentrating on the koan.

In one such story, a boy walks by with a lit candle and a man asks, “Where did that light come from?” The boy blows it out and says, “I’ll tell you, if you tell me where it went.” Again, these unanswerable questions are different from most kinds of questioning. They require a shift away from normal reason and step-by-step, sequential thinking, to a different mode, one of expanded perception.

Paradoxes such as this are used in spiritual studies. We’ve already mentioned the injunction of Muhammad to “die before your death,” but there are others from different traditions, such as “the way up is the way down,” “no answer is an answer” and “here are the rules: ignore all rules.” They are all designed to make one think and get a new answer; not to destroy thought itself, but to help occasion a breakup of normal consciousness.

As were Zeno’s famous paradoxes. To update a familiar one: If Usain Bolt and a turtle were to race, and the turtle got a head start, Bolt could never catch him (because each time Bolt reached a point where the turtle had been, it would have already moved further ahead, in successively small increments, ad infinitum.) In another paradox, this one about millet, Zeno noted that if one drops a ton of millet on the ground, it makes a thud, but dropping one grain of millet doesn’t make any sound. He asks: How could all of it make a noise if each of its parts doesn’t?

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