Usually, non-enlightened people like me wants to talk about enlightenment. It combines with my own ignorance, in trying to describe what is undescribable. Combines with using heavy words to describe the subtlety of an art, religion, and way of life, that seems puzzling, almost disturbing, way to attain illumination. Well, if I were illuminated in some way, I wouldn't lose time to try to convince people that they are in the way of having a satori. I myself have many "satori", sometimes. It is a fleeting moment that your mind understands something that is so blatantly honest, that you become happy at that moment, and that happiness is suddenly destroyed by watching the news, or deepening into someones life events on a social network infinite rolling feed. I don't know, but the sensation is close to a light alcoholic drowsiness. It's no coincidence that people enjoys drinking.
But, what is Zen? Zen is an undefinable state of bliss, where you are totally present at the moment. It can be anything you do with the correct attention, eating, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, or contemplating the clouds forming odd shapes in the sky. It's the moment that save us, that set us free from the deceptions of the past, and the angst of the future that never seem to come as we wished it to come. In the Buddhist four noble truths, the first one says this world is a world of suffering. It is everywhere around us, plagues, wars, fake news, etc. And this world enslaves our souls and slowly poisons the heart and the mind, demolishing the will to live. For this reason, we need a way out of suffering, and Buddha taught to his disciples, the way of liberation. Liberation from craving, pain, illusion and death.
There is a Buddha's allegory of the muddy waters of a river.
"Once the Buddha was thirsty and said to a disciple to fetch
water for him in shore of the river in front of them. The disciple were one to be known as being an impatient
fellow, when got to the river a herd of oxen passed by disturbing the river's water, mixing the water with mud.
The impatient monk went back and said to the Buddha what happened. After a while, the Buddha said to him to go
back to the river and fetch him water, but in getting there the water's still was muddy. The monk related his
unsuccessful task, complaining that the water wasn't good enough yet. After another while, the Buddha asked
the monk to try again, and annoyed, the monk went back to the river, and for his surprise the water was clean
again. So he finally comprehended."
The intellect is like the oxen herd. Whenever we face a fact (the water), the intellect questions that fact,
and start to conceptualize, categorize, and reaches a point where the fact is just known by a question,
that puzzles us, and the intellect cannot answer to that question anymore by pure analysis, always raising
another questions that it cannot answer, requiring a higher instance of thinking, and that instance is only
possible if we annihilate the influence of the intellect between us and the facts, that can be grasped by
this higher power of being.
For this reason, the training of zazen is important to remove the mind from the
apprehension of the facts, by giving us the necessary MINDFULNESS, the fundamental tool for grasping
the facts as they are, instead of intellectualizing things.
And the Zen starts from daily life facts like bathing, doing the dishes, strolling, eating, sleeping, etc.
When a Zen master was asked what Zen was, he replied "I eat when I'm hungry and sleep when I'm sleepy",
that seems trivial to us, but how many of us "knows" for fact that we are hungry? Instead of thinking
where I'm going to eat at lunchtime, to stop planning life at every step, and let us be hungry first,
and to eat the apple them, or to go to the restaurant we like.
The problem is that society (I believe in all places) are governed by a machine called clock. If I don't
reach the restaurant at 3 p.m., I will starve all day, because the restaurant closes at that time,
even if I'm not hungry at that specific time.
So, it isn't for the fact that the society has become a sort of machine, that I have to become one too.
Anticipation and surviving are rarely required for living a day in our lives. The hunting behavior of
surviving implanted by modern capitalism is ruining our lives, as if everyone was a homeless person,
always seeking for the minimal means to survive the day. It is an irrational life, and like animals
we live today's world, like we have to struggle for each moment in life, always anticipating more and
more events to an infinite chain (like infinite rolling in social networks) that imprisons us by draining
all our capacity for attention.