Word: zenning
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OSWALD SPENGLER ONCE SAID that a sure sign of the decline of the West would be its increasing preoccupation with religiosity rather than religion. Today, with pop monstrosities like Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway, Jesus freaks on the cover of Life, and cheap return tickets to Zen Satori available only Saturday night, we seem to be substituting an elaborate facade of images and facile spiritualism for any real commitments to spiritual growth. Our culture seems to be providing more and more channels for what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace," personal fulfillment, or the illusion of it, with no trial...
...mostly young, blue-jeaned audience, but after nearly three hours, had them cheering for more. After Newman played Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on the pedal harpsichord, he trotted onstage for a curtain call, shoulders hunched in a simian crouch, folded his hands in a Zen gesture of thanks. Grabbing his score from the harpsichord, he waved it over his head, signaled for quiet and asked, "How'd you like to hear the same piece on the organ?" When the audience roared, he clambered up to the organ and obliged. After his final scheduled piece...
...verve and intense rhythm, sprinkling musical embellishments like roman candles being tossed from an express train. This startles those who learned their Bach straight, but Newman conquers the doubters with sheer personal conviction. There is something reminiscent of Schweitzer in the way Newman's intellectual and religious philosophy, Zen, permeates his music making and mesmerizes his youthful audiences. Even on the shrill organ at Philharmonic Hall, which at top volume sounds for all the world like a herd of angry Buicks, Newman is enormously compelling...
...going on now is that the culture has split into mechanism and mysticism, and the people who are thinking of problems on a planetary scale are moving in opposite directions. Their solutions are different in content but have similar structures. So that planetary mysticism-the countercultural movement, Yoga, Zen, Subud, Sufism and all of the other newly popular religions-is trying to create an ideology for the planet that can relate to the limits of growth: non-aggression on nature; different relationships between men and women; a mysticism that is rooted in the physical, as it is in, say, Yoga...
...only thing that can make you small is to have eternity in a grain of sand, you know. Some religions would say one can strive, but Zen would say even to strive is to miss the satori. The goal is being rather than becoming. This is again where I feel that the mystical movements are the most technologically sophisticated political movements now operating. They make everything in Herman Kahn and the Club of Rome seem incredibly naive...