Wow, a wonderful technique

I'd never been interested in Stoicism, but I recently came across this:

If you're fond of a jug, say, 'This is a jug that I'm fond of,' an then, if it gets broken, you won't be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you're kissing; and then, if one of them should die, you won't be upsetting.
                                   Epictetus

And it seems to work even when it comes to kissing yourself. 

ZEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS - 5

ONE THING I WANT TO WARN YOU ABOUT


I now dwell on our entanglement with environment and what it takes to be unentangled; and for that I start with the most banal kind of it: our entanglement with material things. In fact, very often it's the main obstacle to enlightenment since for many material things are not only the main source of their self-worth but even part of their identity. (In this regard, the walking meditation described in this blog* can really help: when you move the earth with your legs, everything on it comes and goes except you.)

Then the question you have to answer is this: how can you make sure that your possessions will always remain just a tool, not an emotional entity?

To answer this, we have a new perspective: the idea that freedom means being unentangled. It's not an abstraction; it's your practice and way of living; it's freedom from and freedom to at the same time. You may not even realise how unusual this perspective is for the majority (at least these days, people in either the East or the West simply can't afford the luxury of having such a lifestyle). Exploring it, you enter uncharted territory so don't be surprised if you find something that defies common sense and would never occur to a 'normal' person. For example, does wealth always make us free? (Note that once we start to analyse our relationship with wealth, it's not only about things but also people since wealth is a social phenomenon.)


One of the reasons why I bring up this topic is because I want to worn you that if you make decisions based on Zen intuition as I describe it,** you'll wind up in a wonderful but unstable state (the state is really wonderful: I'm almost 60, but I still feel free and happy like a teenager skipping school).


As far as I'm concerned, following this path, I did quite well in an unstable and even chaotic environment -- in Bulgaria in the 1990s -- at least much better than the majority that would stick to their permanent jobs; for them, it was a disaster. There was absolutely no security, but on the flipside, there were a lot of opportunities. I was pretty good at spotting and taking advantage of opportunities but bad at the next stage that many believe busyness is abot: creating a permanent state of codependency with clients (creating bonds, in a world). The former and the later are of completely different nature and require completely different skills. And then when I came to Europe (Bulgaria wasn't in the EU at the time), I found a completely different environment: that they'd traded opportunities for security and didn't realise that the former is always at the expense of the later.


And perhaps one of the most surprising things I've discovered is the fact that if you think of freedom as being unentangled, then wealth makes you free only to a certain point, but then the richer you get, the more you get entangled with others if only because you need to protect your possessions -- it's up to you to prove me wrong -- investing money into realising your ideas can be a solution, of course.

In this view, it's okay to be a hunter and go hunting every day, but for some reason it always tends to end up in some stable state of codependency. Psychologists even say that codependency is a sign of maturity. I'm not sure that 'maturity' is the right term here. (I once read a Zen master describing his teaching experience; he says that enlightenment is hardest for emotional women and psychologists to achieve -- perhaps because they can't imagine what it's like to be unentangled.) Stuart Kauffman, I already mentioned him,*** in his At Home In the Universe: the Search for the Laws of Self- Organisation and Completely claims that complex systems, including living organisms, naturally tend to evolve to thrive right on the edge of chaos -- the ordered state is too rigid, the chaotic, well, too chaotic -- one must add if they're independent players of course.
.

And of course the question arises: can such unentangled individuals unite together to cary out projects, especially long-term ones, to defend themselves, to cooperate in a word? I bet they can, which for many may be quite revolutionary: Freud, for instance, believed that the only force that could unite us into society was Eros; I mean that his division of human instincts into Eros and Thanatos is fundamentally wrong. Because they're indeed two tendencies, but there're: a tendency to merge and a tendency to detach. Once you start thinking in these terms, everything falls into place.

To be continued

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* https://0zen1.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-main-trick-walking-zazen_22.html
** https://0zen1.blogspot.com/search/label/intuition
*** https://0zen1.blogspot.com/2024/06/zen-from-perspective-of-quantum.html