Zen and the Art of /.*/

Zen and the art of what?!

Yes.

What?!

Yes.

“Yes”?

No.

What?

Never mind.

No seriously, did you fall asleep on your keyboard?

Not exactly. Long story short, that jumble of characters at the end is a “regular expression.” A regular expression is something computer programmers use to find something in a string of text. This one is about the simplest (and most useless) regular expression possible. The two slashes are merely delimiters that mark the beginning and the end of the regular expression–kind of like quotes. The real business is just the dot. The dot says, “match any character.” This can be a letter, a number, punctuation, space, tab–anything, just not nothing. The star says, “match the thing just before me (the dot, in this case) zero or more times.”

Well isn’t that completely useless?

If you are trying to find something particular, yes. For my purposes here, it’s perfect. What it means is that it matches everything, any one thing in particular, or nothing at all. That’s exactly what this is: my take on anything and everything (and sometimes nothing). A bit like panning for gold, it will often be painfully mundane, banal, and trite. Other times it may be interesting or useful, but obscure or irrelevant. With any luck it will, on rare occasions, be transcendent and sublime.

So how am I supposed to say it?

Good question.

Thanks. No, really, how am I supposed to say it?

The easy answer is: however you want. “Zen and the Art of Everything,” “Zen and the Art of Nothing,” “Zen and the Art of Excessive Verbosity,” “Zen and the Art of Staggeringly Mediocre Writing,” just “Zen and the Art,” or, for the profoundly lazy (like myself), “ZATA,” which I pronounce like the Greek letter Zeta. Really, call it whatever you want.

Now wait a minute; haven’t you identified yourself as a “free-thinking, rational, anti-theist” or some such thing? What’s this Zen business? Isn’t Zen a religion?

I’ll let Alan Watts answer that:

“Zen is a method of rediscovering the experience of being alive. It originated in India and China, and has come to the West by way of Japan, and although it is a form of Mahayana Buddhism, it is not a religion in the usual sense of the word. The aim of Zen is to bring about a transformation of consciousness, and to awaken us from the dream world of our endless thoughts so that we experience life as it is in the present moment.” Alan Watts, from the introduction to “What is Zen?”

But c’mon, I know you. You’re no Zen master. You’re an uptight, self-conscious, left-brained, concrete-sequential, anal-retentive, excessively-hyphenated sonofabitch.

Touché.

As Oscar Wilde said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

And, you know, life is a journey, not a destination and all that. Hey, I’m working on it.

But really. You claim to be rational and opposed to things not supported by evidence. That makes you look rather hypocritical to be tilting at windmills under the banner of something as mystical as Zen.

Well, Zen and Taoism, really. As Alan Watts says in “The Way of Zen,” “The origins of Zen are as much Taoist as Buddhist.” Taoism is merely a way of looking at the world and the Tao Te Ching is nothing more than a “manual on the art of living.” From the description on the Mitchell version:

“The Tao Te Ching looks at the basic predicament of being alive and gives advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit. [It] is about wisdom in action. It teaches how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao (the basic principle of the universe) and applies equally to good government, sexual love, child rearing, business and ecology.”

Now, there’s nothing in there that requires that anything be taken on faith. We don’t have to believe that there are any magical forces at work, just principles–Good Ideas. (And insofar as they do not describe the real universe or are in any way contradicted by evidence, they are, by definition, not Good Ideas.)

So, on the one hand, the term Zen can be used to describe a method or technique for effecting one’s consciousness. On the other hand, it can be used to describe a set of universal principles and perspectives. In neither sense is it religious or mystical.

But you’re still abusing the term. Anybody that knows anything about real Zen can see that there is nothing here that remotely resembles it.

Correct. I’m abusing it in the same worn-out way that it has been abused by other folks in the internet culture. I stand guilty of this charge.

In fact, it’s worse than that. I’m abusing an abusive use of it. It was perhaps originally co-opted by Robert Pirsig for his book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” I will go one step further and offer the same disclaimer he does at the beginning of that book:

“Author’s Note: What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.”

This is not about Zen proper, but about my version of Zen. The act of cherry-picking parts of an idea, ideology, or school of thought is this very thing that allows human progress. If everyone always subscribed to every tenet of every doctrine, humanity would never take one step forward. The most progress has always been brought about and will continue to be brought about by those thinkers who are able to use their reason to take what is true about one school of thought, discard the rest, combine it with truths from other disciplines, and articulate a more complete, coherent truth.

It is this process of weighing, separating, comparing, discarding, and combining of ideas that also leads to the understanding of universal truths. And we should not be surprised to be able to draw useful parallels between disciplines that may seem to have nothing in common, for as Douglas Hofstadter so eloquently argues in “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” if there is anything we can say about the universe, it is that it is self-similar.

It is this kind of seemingly far-fetched analogue that Pirsig employs in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” He says:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

In this context I take “Buddha” and “Godhead,” not to be any actual god, but instead these universal principles. Why should we be surprised to find the beauty of the stars in the elegance of software? Why should we be surprised to be able to achieve the serenity of a wilderness lake amidst the cacophony of a city?

It is these connections and this sort of transcendence that I think is worth seeking and developing. Pirsig goes on:

“The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner piece of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.”

Both in this work and his follow-up, “Lila,” he beautifully lays out the argument that what we are so often seeking in life is quality in its purest, most objective form and that, if we are conscious enough, everything we do in our lives, from the most inane to the most sublime can be experienced in such a way as to further our understanding of the universe and to improve ourselves.

“The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called ‘yourself.’” –Robert M. Pirsig

It is in this spirit that I would like to use this venue to share my thoughts with anyone who cares to read them.

Despite all of this suggestiveness towards something very spiritual, it is, in fact, thoroughly scientific. This process is exploratory and critical, not dogmatic and obedient; it is a process, not a conclusion; a discussion, not a decree. I am as interested in sharing my ideas for the sake of eliciting interesting and enlightening responses as I am for the sake of having my own ideas heard.

If one thing is sure, it is that I will be misunderstood at times. I am passionate about what I believe, but I try to make sure that my passion for and belief in the correctness of my ideas is in direct proportion to the amount of evidence I have for them rather than my wish for them to be true or a need to bolster my ego.

In this task I will surely fail from time to time, but I have the distinct advantage of having as my ultimate goal, not the advancement of any one idea or the buttressing of my ego, but a greater understanding of the truth about the universe in general and about those topics of particular interest to me.

On this issue I will again defer to someone smarter than I. Richard Dawkins, when accused of being as much a fundamentalist as those he criticized, replied:

“No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe”, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.”

So what exactly are these ideas? What is the point? What is the theme here?

Ahh, but you see, I’ve provided myself a carte blanche. That’s the whole /.*/ bit, remember? I’m sure I’ll talk about politics, religion, science, current events, philosophy, economics, culture, technology, and the internet. Perhaps I’ll get in to open source, productivity, business, firefighting, government, and community. Odds are, I’ll sometimes have something to say about music and literature. I may even venture into discussions of sex, relationships, family, sports, health, gardening, cooking, and whatever else strikes my fancy. You can bet that if I know even the slightest bit about something, I’ve probably got an opinion about it.

But then who on earth is your audience? Who seriously wants to read about both religion and firefighting?

Well, me, for one. Perhaps I’m the only luddite, software engineering, small-town, Austro-libertarian, free-thinking, gardening, urban, firefighting, recovering-Catholic, technologist, bibliophile, anarcho-capitalist, anti-theist schmuck around, but, not surprisingly, I think that the things that I think matter–matter.

This is no time to start being original, so I will end my introduction here with the thought with which Chuck Klosterman ended the introduction to his book “Drugs, Sex, and Cocoa Puffs”:

“In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever ‘in and of itself.’”