Crazy Wisdom by Wes Scoop Nisker
Crazy wisdom is the wisdom of the saint, the Zen master, the poet, the amd scientist, and the fool. Crazy wisdom sees that we live in a world of many illusions, that the Emperor has no clothes, and that much of human belief and behavior is ritualized nonsense. Crazy wisdom understands antimatter and old Sufi poetry; loves paradox and puns and pie fights and laughing at politcians. Crazy wisdom flips the world upside down and backward until everything becomes perfectly clear.
Crazy wisdom is the skeptical voice inside us that doubts our importance in the wolrd and questions our belief in a higher purpose. It is the nagging suspicion that both our reasons and our reasoning are mistaken.
Crazy wisdom laughs at our ridiculours ways and shows compassion for the suffering that results from them. It presents us with the bigger picture, as well as ways to step lightly through it.
Crazy wisdom is the humbling knowledeg of immensity of the cosmos and inevitable change and transformation that will ultimately wear away all our achievements. It is the grinning face of death, and the hollow sound of our question "Why?" echoing back at us from the void.
Conventional wisdom is the habitual, the unexamined life, absorbed into the culture and the fashion of the time, lost in the mad rush of accumulation, lulled to sleep by the easy lies of poltiical backs and newspaper scribblers, or by priests who wouldn't know a god if they met one. Crazy wisdom is the challenge to all that; it dismantles assumptions accepted as truth, unmasknig oruselves and our societies.
Crazy wisdom is usually perceived as a threat to powers of church and state - those instutions that claim to own the truth and then sell it to people through persuason or force. Often, followers of crazy wisdom challenge the established order through protest, personal sacrifice, art, or guerilla theater. At other times, they wlak away into the mountains to live a simple life away from the insanity of institutions and the madness of mobs.
Another principle of crazy wisdom is that humans don't know how to think. Or maybe we just think too much. In either case, what passes for reason often turns out to be unreasonable in the end. Our so-called rational mind is deeply conditioned, psychologically and culturally, and what is labeled rasoning is often just the mind making excuses for emotional needs and reactive behavior. Reason has become our ideology, but we may not yet be able to tell it apart from wishfrul thinking. It may also be that the intellect is overvalued and even overdeveloped. It may be that we think so much we can't think, and know so much we don't know anything.
By force of habit, unyielding vanity, or perhaps a genetically encoded belief, we still think and behave as though the whole show was created for our sake and that our own history is somehow the major concern of the cosmos. Such a belief might be reasonable if we also still believed that the sun goes around the earth. We should know better by now. As science pushes back the boundaries of space and time, it also puts us in our place, shrinking our significance relative to the uncountable solar systems and the light-years of time.
What makes us believe that things are advancing? Who is to say that we are better of now than we ever were? For that matter, who is to say that we are better off now than before we were at all?
The crazy wisdom of tao believes that the illusion that we are separate and special is the root of our suffering. The Self is false. Most things will come by 'non-doing'. The only struggle is to stop struggling.
// Now I wonder where can one empty the mind in this era.
The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. Therefore he can win out over things and not hurt
himself.
//Zen requires much craziness.
Alone of all the animals, terrestrial, celestial or marine, man is unfit by nature to go abroad in the world he inhabits. He must clothe himself, protect himself, swathe himself, armor himself. He is eternally in the position of a turtle born without a shell, a dog without hair, a fish without fins. Lacking his heavy and cumbersome trappings, he is defenseless even against flies. As God made him he hasn't even a tail to switch them off.
Man is constantly inflcited witha defect.. the Moral Sense. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the quality which enables him to do wrong. Without it, man could do no wrong. He would rise at once to the level of Higher Animals.
If an alien were to hover a few
hudnred yards above the planet
It could be forgiven for thinking
That cars were the dominant life-form,
And that human beings were a kind of
ambulatory fuel cell:
Injected when the car wished to move off,
And ejected when they were spent.
The First Church of Science
Saint Isaac and Albert's CAthedral. The circular ceiling is a large revolving planetarium. It displays a continously accurate viwe of the heavens to the very limit of astrnomical exploration, billions of light-years away.
In the cathedral's alcoves stand holograms of the Saints of Science, each captured at the moment of revelation: Heraclitus stands in his ever-changing river; Galileo looks through his telescope at the stars; Euclid holds his ruler and traingle; Newton poses, a ripe apple on his head; Einstein stands in front of a curved mirror, sticking out his tongue; Schrodinger has his cat on his shoulder; Heisenberg looks uncertain.
The chapel's stained-glass windows portray scenes from the story of evolution. Present-day homo sapiens is presented as we first enter the church; as we move down the aisle through teh altar, we move backwards through time. The last window before reaching the altar shows a one-celled organism.
On pedestals flanking the altar sit two giant statues - replicas of a hydrogen and a helium atom. Across the sanctuary wall, electrified models of otehr atoms (enlarged of course) spin in their orbits, crashing into each other, and exploding in flashes of light, giving church-goers a sense of the dyanmic reality of charged particles.
Where the Christians cruxifix or Ark of the Torah is normally found stands the sacred symbol of the First Church of Science - an emblem of six white dots on a black field, a representation of the six known quarks. The Holy Sextet: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange, and Charmed. The basic reality. AMEN. The black field represents the emptiness from which everything sprang, or the black hole from which it emerged, or perhaps the "dark area," the first cause - the mystery that remains to be solved.
We enter the church during a serivce. Each member of the congregation, dressed in a white lab coat, recites the liturgy - hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, and so on, through the periodic table. Then, the supplicants bow their heads and pray that the Theory of Everything will soon make itself know, Finally, the congregation will chant the First Church of Science's own Hail Mary, its Shema Yisreel, its great mantra - atom ah hum, atom ah hum, atom ah hum...
Even if all gods and goddesses are only figments of our imagination, it doesn't mean that they are not "real." They are at least as real as we are. Furthermore, it is more likely that all belief systems are true than that just one of them is true. Every god and goddess helps to define and to refine us; therefore, each is our "creator." Each religion gives the solace of a "higher meaning," a place to rest our questions and oru heads. Whether we worship the sun or the Son, we always worship life itself; we worship ourselves.
It would be nicer to crawl into Nu-gua's lap for some Great Mother nurturing than to beg mercy or await judgment from a wrathful, jealous, "thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before-me" male deity, whose name we shall not utter.
if Jesus came back today, he would be killed again. But this time he would probably be electrocuted. And from that moment on, people would start wearing little electric chairs on chains aronud their necks.
No, - what is God?
The impossible, the impeachable
Unimpeachable Prezi-dent
Of the Pepsodent Universe
But with no body and no brain
no business and no tie
no candle and no high
no wise and no smart guy
no nothing, no no-nothing,
no anything, no-word, yes-word,
everything, anything, God,
the guy that ain't a guy,
the thing that can't be
and can
and is
and isn't.
If all things are constantly transforming and will eventually die, then perhaps the best way to lvie is not by holding no, but by letting go with all our might - letting go of our impossible craving for uncertainty or significance; letting go of our impossbile craving for certainty or significance; letting go of our demands on the universe for perfect happiness and everlasting life. Our only option may be to learn what Alan Watts called "the wisdom of insecurity" and to discover that which Camus sought - a way to be comfortable with unfamiliarity. We are then free to leap with Chaung Tzu into "the boundless" and make it our home. Accepting uncertainty as our philosophy might allow us to honor each other's stories more, delightly in all the bizarre and wondrous interpretations of the mystery. We might also show more toelrance for those who appear to be fools, and for those who speak truths we don't wish to hear.
Crazy wisdom is the wisdom of the saint, the Zen master, the poet, the amd scientist, and the fool. Crazy wisdom sees that we live in a world of many illusions, that the Emperor has no clothes, and that much of human belief and behavior is ritualized nonsense. Crazy wisdom understands antimatter and old Sufi poetry; loves paradox and puns and pie fights and laughing at politcians. Crazy wisdom flips the world upside down and backward until everything becomes perfectly clear.
Crazy wisdom is the skeptical voice inside us that doubts our importance in the wolrd and questions our belief in a higher purpose. It is the nagging suspicion that both our reasons and our reasoning are mistaken.
Crazy wisdom laughs at our ridiculours ways and shows compassion for the suffering that results from them. It presents us with the bigger picture, as well as ways to step lightly through it.
Crazy wisdom is the humbling knowledeg of immensity of the cosmos and inevitable change and transformation that will ultimately wear away all our achievements. It is the grinning face of death, and the hollow sound of our question "Why?" echoing back at us from the void.
Conventional wisdom is the habitual, the unexamined life, absorbed into the culture and the fashion of the time, lost in the mad rush of accumulation, lulled to sleep by the easy lies of poltiical backs and newspaper scribblers, or by priests who wouldn't know a god if they met one. Crazy wisdom is the challenge to all that; it dismantles assumptions accepted as truth, unmasknig oruselves and our societies.
Crazy wisdom is usually perceived as a threat to powers of church and state - those instutions that claim to own the truth and then sell it to people through persuason or force. Often, followers of crazy wisdom challenge the established order through protest, personal sacrifice, art, or guerilla theater. At other times, they wlak away into the mountains to live a simple life away from the insanity of institutions and the madness of mobs.
Another principle of crazy wisdom is that humans don't know how to think. Or maybe we just think too much. In either case, what passes for reason often turns out to be unreasonable in the end. Our so-called rational mind is deeply conditioned, psychologically and culturally, and what is labeled rasoning is often just the mind making excuses for emotional needs and reactive behavior. Reason has become our ideology, but we may not yet be able to tell it apart from wishfrul thinking. It may also be that the intellect is overvalued and even overdeveloped. It may be that we think so much we can't think, and know so much we don't know anything.
By force of habit, unyielding vanity, or perhaps a genetically encoded belief, we still think and behave as though the whole show was created for our sake and that our own history is somehow the major concern of the cosmos. Such a belief might be reasonable if we also still believed that the sun goes around the earth. We should know better by now. As science pushes back the boundaries of space and time, it also puts us in our place, shrinking our significance relative to the uncountable solar systems and the light-years of time.
What makes us believe that things are advancing? Who is to say that we are better of now than we ever were? For that matter, who is to say that we are better off now than before we were at all?
The crazy wisdom of tao believes that the illusion that we are separate and special is the root of our suffering. The Self is false. Most things will come by 'non-doing'. The only struggle is to stop struggling.
// Now I wonder where can one empty the mind in this era.
The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. Therefore he can win out over things and not hurt
himself.
//Zen requires much craziness.
Alone of all the animals, terrestrial, celestial or marine, man is unfit by nature to go abroad in the world he inhabits. He must clothe himself, protect himself, swathe himself, armor himself. He is eternally in the position of a turtle born without a shell, a dog without hair, a fish without fins. Lacking his heavy and cumbersome trappings, he is defenseless even against flies. As God made him he hasn't even a tail to switch them off.
Man is constantly inflcited witha defect.. the Moral Sense. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the quality which enables him to do wrong. Without it, man could do no wrong. He would rise at once to the level of Higher Animals.
If an alien were to hover a few
hudnred yards above the planet
It could be forgiven for thinking
That cars were the dominant life-form,
And that human beings were a kind of
ambulatory fuel cell:
Injected when the car wished to move off,
And ejected when they were spent.
The First Church of Science
Saint Isaac and Albert's CAthedral. The circular ceiling is a large revolving planetarium. It displays a continously accurate viwe of the heavens to the very limit of astrnomical exploration, billions of light-years away.
In the cathedral's alcoves stand holograms of the Saints of Science, each captured at the moment of revelation: Heraclitus stands in his ever-changing river; Galileo looks through his telescope at the stars; Euclid holds his ruler and traingle; Newton poses, a ripe apple on his head; Einstein stands in front of a curved mirror, sticking out his tongue; Schrodinger has his cat on his shoulder; Heisenberg looks uncertain.
The chapel's stained-glass windows portray scenes from the story of evolution. Present-day homo sapiens is presented as we first enter the church; as we move down the aisle through teh altar, we move backwards through time. The last window before reaching the altar shows a one-celled organism.
On pedestals flanking the altar sit two giant statues - replicas of a hydrogen and a helium atom. Across the sanctuary wall, electrified models of otehr atoms (enlarged of course) spin in their orbits, crashing into each other, and exploding in flashes of light, giving church-goers a sense of the dyanmic reality of charged particles.
Where the Christians cruxifix or Ark of the Torah is normally found stands the sacred symbol of the First Church of Science - an emblem of six white dots on a black field, a representation of the six known quarks. The Holy Sextet: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange, and Charmed. The basic reality. AMEN. The black field represents the emptiness from which everything sprang, or the black hole from which it emerged, or perhaps the "dark area," the first cause - the mystery that remains to be solved.
We enter the church during a serivce. Each member of the congregation, dressed in a white lab coat, recites the liturgy - hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, and so on, through the periodic table. Then, the supplicants bow their heads and pray that the Theory of Everything will soon make itself know, Finally, the congregation will chant the First Church of Science's own Hail Mary, its Shema Yisreel, its great mantra - atom ah hum, atom ah hum, atom ah hum...
Even if all gods and goddesses are only figments of our imagination, it doesn't mean that they are not "real." They are at least as real as we are. Furthermore, it is more likely that all belief systems are true than that just one of them is true. Every god and goddess helps to define and to refine us; therefore, each is our "creator." Each religion gives the solace of a "higher meaning," a place to rest our questions and oru heads. Whether we worship the sun or the Son, we always worship life itself; we worship ourselves.
It would be nicer to crawl into Nu-gua's lap for some Great Mother nurturing than to beg mercy or await judgment from a wrathful, jealous, "thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before-me" male deity, whose name we shall not utter.
if Jesus came back today, he would be killed again. But this time he would probably be electrocuted. And from that moment on, people would start wearing little electric chairs on chains aronud their necks.
No, - what is God?
The impossible, the impeachable
Unimpeachable Prezi-dent
Of the Pepsodent Universe
But with no body and no brain
no business and no tie
no candle and no high
no wise and no smart guy
no nothing, no no-nothing,
no anything, no-word, yes-word,
everything, anything, God,
the guy that ain't a guy,
the thing that can't be
and can
and is
and isn't.
If all things are constantly transforming and will eventually die, then perhaps the best way to lvie is not by holding no, but by letting go with all our might - letting go of our impossible craving for uncertainty or significance; letting go of our impossbile craving for certainty or significance; letting go of our demands on the universe for perfect happiness and everlasting life. Our only option may be to learn what Alan Watts called "the wisdom of insecurity" and to discover that which Camus sought - a way to be comfortable with unfamiliarity. We are then free to leap with Chaung Tzu into "the boundless" and make it our home. Accepting uncertainty as our philosophy might allow us to honor each other's stories more, delightly in all the bizarre and wondrous interpretations of the mystery. We might also show more toelrance for those who appear to be fools, and for those who speak truths we don't wish to hear.
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