An Eye for an Eye Leaves the Whole World Blind.

I read something the other night which is haunting me lately. Not in a bad way, but it just got stuck in the brain and won't go into the purge cylinder. It had to do with Buddhism and Zen. It was the term "Mu", which basically translates to "Unask the Question". The thing that got it stuck there is how cool of a concept it is. The way it was described in the book I reading was one disciple asks the teacher about the afterlife. There is no afterlife in this faith and in turn she tells the student the answer is "Mu". Almost as if the question doesn't need to exist because there is no answer, and not like a rhetorical question, but truly no answer. It's like saying the answer to two plus two equals pomegranate. The question and the answer simply do not relate to each other, and there is no answer to the question because the question has no basis. Ughh. I hate it when things in my brain don't translate to paper.

Maybe mu is the answer to some of the questions we deal with every day. Maybe the questions don't have any basis, and we should teach ourselves to unask the question before we can proceed along our path. This is one of those concepts that is very hard to put down on paper. I'm by no means a Zen ideologist, and that's probably half the reason I can't get this down on paper properly. I can only think of one example that is bound to piss some people off, but when has that ever stopped me. One of the oldest questions that has been asked is "How can God allow this to happen?” If you use the idea of mu it becomes clear as day. By unasking the question it becomes, god does not allow this to happen. God doesn't exist, therefore, how can he allow it to happen?. You must unask the question to try to come up with an answer that makes sense to you. I've been thinking that maybe that the reason that so many people sit there miserable all their life is because they are looking for answers to a question that doesn't correlate. Sometimes we have to spend time figuring out exactly what question we are trying to answer before we can get an answer for it. I've been just as guilty of this as anyone else. When the answer to a question isn't coming to you, maybe you have the question wrong and need to re-examine the facts, or the answer is just forty-two, and you have to accept it and move on.

Short entry today. I just had to get the mad gerbil that was running around in my head down on virtual paper before it consumed me. I'm going to quote James Thurbur today, one of the most underrated writers of all time. Check out The Thurber Carnival if you are interested in finding something new to read.

"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
James Thurber