Zen and the Art of Rationalization

by effenheimer at 11:57 AM on October 29, 2002

Being a cynic in a fast food culture, one is routinely proven a hypocrite, usually while in the drive-thru. It is hard to be critical AND enjoy something at the same time. It can be done, however, using Olympian mental gymnastics.

In the Zen philosophy, there are three stages of existence and I, as a man, could be in any of those stages while on the road to Nirvana (who I saw once in Chicago; they rocked). The path is difficult to explain, but thankfully with Zen, simple, mind-blowing examples work better than lengthy discourse.

The first stage is living naturally, like an animal but not quite that insulting. The natural man comes home from a hard day at work and says, “I’m hungry. What’s for dinner?”

The second stage is enlightenment. The enlightened man comes home from a hard day at work and says, “Why am I hungry?”

Now most people think enlightenment is the goal of spiritual development, but that is where they get hung up. You see them harping about meat and they pretend they understand the hardships of developing nations because they wear Birkenstocks, eat tofu and have anxiety attacks. Enlightenment can be confused with false enlightenment or premature enlightenment when movement screeches to a halt before ...

The third stage. Self-realization. This is the beauty part. The self-realized individual comes home from a hard day at work and says, “What’s for dinner?”
Sublime isn’t it? You may ask yourself, isn’t that a whole lot of work just to end up where you started? Yes and no. Think of it as a spiral stair case. You may be going around in circles, but if you do it right, you end up on a higher plane of existence ... or at least you manage to get out of the basement.

This is all very Eastern, but I am feeling kind of effete today so bear with me. Similarly, in Western terms, Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living to a human.” We drop the “to a human” part all the time and that is unfortunate. Sometimes, the greatest meaning in a sentence is not in the subject or the verb, it’s in the prepositional phrases. Just ask the NRA.

What I believe Socrates meant was that our ability to self-examine is what makes us human. Animals can suffer and they can know they suffer and react, but they don’t know they know it, you know? At least we assume animals don’t know that they know what we know or lack that extra level of awareness known as sentience.

For example, if a man and a coyote are both caught in a trap, the coyote will chew its own leg off to escape. That’s hard-core, but a man will lie in wait for the person who set the trap. Whether he does it to avoid cutting his own leg off or to get revenge on the guy who set the trap in the first place takes an awareness animals do not exhibit.

As human beings, we begin life as little more than animals. We have needs and we want them filled. We grow and sometimes we reach beyond that level. We can sacrifice even our lives for a greater cause.

Sometimes we can get confused and believe our willingness to sacrifice is evidence of our advancement. We can have goals beyond instant gratification, but sometimes a little gratification isn’t so bad either. What is really important is that we can think beyond the straight line from A to B sometimes.

This applies to all aspects of life. Consumerism, what we buy, what we need and what we want. Local, state, national and world politics. Race, gender, ethnicity. Class struggle, who has what and how did they get it? Movies, books, music, sports, food. What do we like and why?

Asking why is essential if we want to do more than roll around the primordial muck hitting each other with our chewed off limbs. Answers are in short supply and we may not have been put on this earth “to get it,” but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking the questions.