I’m reading Julian Baggini’s How the World Thinks. He compares our Western philosophy that is Greek based with Indian, Chinese and Japanese versions of similar thought. East and West seem incompatible.
The Indian, Chinese and Japanese thought is based on the existence of another realm that is ineffable. The Western approach accepts only experience that is mutually agreeable to reasoning. These seem irreconcilable.
I am a person, firmly grounded in Western thinking as a Jew. I am also a practicing Zennie.
I have found a reconciliation that is satisfactory to me. I have been sitting zazen daily for decades and sat without interruption for weeks in sesshins; I am comfortable with the non-mind, non-linguistic world of the ineffable. There is an immediacy to the world that I experience. I live in the present.
I owe it to the late Rabbi Alan Lew for the reconciliation he taught . The basic Jewish prayer is the Barucha. Alan taught me to read this as Blessed are thou the sound that fills the universe. Transliterated from Hebrew as: Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Haolam.
He didn’t need to explain the other great daily prayer, the Shema. Hear o Israel, the sound that fills the universe is One.
So we Jews have a way to treat God as an agreed upon reality. The 3k cosmic background radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang that pervades the universe is God.
It is interesting that one of the people who found the 3k background radiation was Arno Penzias (co-founded with Robert Wilson) whose grandfather was a rabbi and whose daughter is a rabbi. Arno escaped from Hitler’s Germany on the Kindertransport.
When my mind is blank in zazen I hear the sound of the universe, it pervades me and is ineffable. East and West in one place, one person.
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