Duck, Duck, Soup - The Role of Altering Brain Chemistry in Achieving the Profound Goal of Supreme Enlightenment

It ain't there.

If this be error and upon me proved.
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

1. The brain is a complex tangle of nuerons (Ikkyu's garden of weeds, no doubt) sitting in a soup. 
2. Yes, you can alter the soup so the nuerons function differently. 
3. The different functioning can feel like something. It can affect emotions so that it feels quite profound and special. 
4. The spectrum of soup recipies across humanity is the result of evolution.
5. Do not consider the romanticized, anthropomorphicized version of Darwins "survival of the fittest", think of the more pragmatic reality... "what can exist, will. What cannot, will not". 
6. The way society is structured now allows all sorts of soup recipes to be effective that would not have been many years ago. 
7. A "drunk" can be protected by society for a long time. 
8. A "drunk" when drunk probably could not survive a wolf attack. A sober person might. 
9. Thinking of the basic things you might like to be capable of in any moment - fucking with your natural soup recipe in ways that takes you away from being fit for them. Best not do it. That is what underlies the intoxication precept. 
10. The soup affects how you feel. 
11. Feelings are different from consideration (wisdom?). 
12. Taking action because of feelings can cause trouble directly to you or comming back atchya later on.
13. You might have experience differentiating the feelings you normally experience and managing the actions you are motivated to take with your consideration. In most people it takes a long time to even appreciate the difference between feeling driven actions and consideration. 
14. If you fuck with your soup too much you might have feelings that drive you to actions and have no experience to moderate those urges. That way there be beasties. 
15. There is one single reality as it is. It is out there. It is rather boring though quite majestic in its incomprehensibility. 
16. Our bodies are not able to apprehend reality as it is. There's all kinds of stuff going on that we can't sense, or can't sense with complete resolution to see how all be bits work. 
17. We are indeed fish looking out of a fish bowl. Frogs in a well. 
18. Altering your soup can only mess with the perception's appearance in your consciousness. It does not open any magic doors. You can dick with the horizontal, you can dick with vertical, but the picture you get is still limited by your flyback transformer.  
19. You remain separated from complete full spectrum, exact detail experience of reality as it is. Even language separates you as it puts borders on things that have no borders. 
20.  As a side note, "the mind waves" was the third truth not a correction of the first two. 
21. You are on no journey to anywhere that can be actually facilitated by messing with your soup. 
22. You are just here. A bowl of soup sitting in reality as it is, trying to make sense of reality as it is. 
23. It's like it's night and you have a cluttered porch sitting in darkness. "enlightenment" is turning on the porch light. You can see the clutter more clearly, but that's all you get. A better, perhaps longer lasting, view of reality as it is.
24. Best not mess with your soup too much. Learn to discern how your feeling and your consideration work with the soup you normally have (and its inevitable variations in the course of a day, based on all kinds of influencers from diet to biom to sleep, etc....).  
25.   

A Silly Song of Fundamental Zen Concepts

The other morning I saw this posted on a Zen FB group "Please don't post silly memes on this page - it may not seem so to you, but it is somewhat demeaning to the question or issue that someone is posting. The ZD Page is about dialogue or discussion - there are times you may just want to not respond rather than respond with silliness. I would define silliness as different from humor, btw, which is a hallmark of Zen. You probably know the difference."

My immediate reaction was to recall a lovely silly thing from my daughter's childhood, and post it in reply.

As I drove into work I realized what a surprising piece of Zen that lovely thing was.

Later in the day I saw that my post was deleted, by the ZD admin(s), I can only assume.

The lovely thing came to me many years ago from some direction in our social circle in Texas, when someone had gifted my young daughter a VHS cassette of "Veggie Tales" -- a sweet and simple exegesis of Christianity in the form of the mad-cap capers of cartoon vegetables. One of the hosts was Larry the Cucumber, a lovable Gilligan of sorts, who interrupts the story line in many episodes for a moment of "Silly Songs with Larry".

The lovely thing I had recalled was "The Water Buffalo Song".

Here are the lyrics, and the surrounding script for your appreciation. Note the interruption by the much more conservative stalk of asparagus, Archie, who shares a distemper for silliness with the Zen group administrator.

---

NARRATOR:
And now it's time for Silly Songs with Larry. The part of the show where Larry comes out and sings a silly song. So without further ado... Silly Songs with Larry

LARRY:
The Water Buffalo song
[singing]

Everybody's got a water buffalo
Yours is fast but mine is slow
Oh, where do you get them I don't know
But everyone's got a water buffaloooooo [sustained howl]

I took my buffalo to the store
Got his head stuck in the door
Spilled some lima beans on the floor
Oh everybody's got a...

ARCHIE: [interupting]
Stop it! Stop! Stop right this instant!  What do you think you are doing?
You can't say everybody's got a water buffalo when everyone does not have a water buffalo!
We're going to get nasty letters saying "where's my water buffalo? Why don't i have a water buffalo?"
And are you prepared to deal with that? I don't think so!
Just stop being so silly!

NARRATOR:
This has been Silly Songs with Larry. Tune in next week when Larry sings...

LARRY:
[singing]
Everybody's got a baby kangaroo
Your's is pink but mine is blue.
Hers was small but...

ARCHIE: [running Larry off the stage]
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.........

---

Here is a link to the performance, but it might be removed for various copyright reasons, so I am also including an image of the first page of the sheet music (which itself might get snagged), cause it's important for you to fully realize the majesty of the song....

Anyway.... In pondering the song, I appreciated many Buddhist connections, none of which were intended.

1. Larry is a cucumber --- David Chadwick wrote a well known biography of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi called "Crooked Cucumber". From the introduction: From the Introduction: "From the time he was a new monk at age 13, Suzuki's master, Gyokujun So-on Suzuki, called him Crooked Cucumber. Crooked cucumbers were useless; farmers would compost them; children would use them for batting practice. So-on told Suzuki he felt sorry for him, because he would never have any good disciples. For a long time it looked as though So-on was right. Then Crooked Cucumber fulfilled a lifelong dream. He came to America, where he had many students and died in the full bloom of what he had come to do. His 12 1/2 years here profoundly changed his life and the lives of many others." .... So we can imagine Larry as a proxy for Suzuki-roshi. Worth paying attention to!
2. A water buffalo is a kind of ox --- The 10 Ox Herding pictures are a famous representation of ones travels toward realization.  
3. We each travel at our own speed --- The lyrics declare "Everybody's got a water buffalo, yours is fast but mine is slow". This is clearly a message of the fact that we are all on a journey of discovery, but each of us must move at our own pace. We each must take responsibility for our own direction and learning. 
4. "Only don't know!" --- This is a famous answer of the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn to question of life, the universe, and, well, everything, and Larry uses it too when considering the fundamental question we all have of how did we get placed on this journey, what is the meaning of all of this, as represented in the water buffalo. His reply; "Where do you get them, I don't know" - Only don't know. 
5. The universal truth --- These are tough questions for Zen masters and for Larry, but it is a situation common to us all... "everyone's got a water buffalo!"
6. The gateless gate - as you probably know well, koans are those little Zen stories that help puzzle us into understanding. One of the great collections of koans is the forty-eight cases gathered in the Gateless Gate. The thirty-eighth case is a quite short somewhat awkward answer to a question that is not captured in the case. It is as follows: "To give an example, it is like a buffalo passing through a window. Its head, horns and four legs have all passed through. Why is it that its tail cannot?”. Another famous koan has a novice monk asking Master Tozan, “What is Buddha?” to which Tozan replies, “Three pounds of flax.”. In the silly song we see Larry skillfully combine these into the buffalo stuck in the door and spilling the lima beans on the floor (my guess is three pounds worth). Where is Buddha in this? What comes next when the head is stuck in this trap!? Just spill them to find the freedom!

Why the ZD admin(s) deleted reference to this vehicle of fundamental Buddhist principles is beyond understanding.... at least, clearly, theirs.

I'll finish with further defense that silliness has not just an important role, but a fundamental role in Zen. The silly puzzles the mind away from normal modes of tired, formal and normal thinking and opens it to new essential non-sequitur of reality as it is. 

1. The first transmission occurred when the Buddha silently picked up a flower and twirled it. Among hundreds of serious arhats gathered, only Mahakasyapa apprehended this special transmission outside of the scriptures. Please do not try to convince me that the Buddha twirling a flower silently in that audience was anything but a silly thing to do!
2. In another Koan Master Joshu famously put his slippers on his head and walked out...
3. Kodo Sawaki warns "We cannot exchange even a fart with another, can we?..."

Silly is fundamental to Zen.