Did you ever wish you could become One with nature?

Have you ever wondered how Zen could help you to become absorbed into the flora and fauna of the forest? 

Is the idea of making your mind One with an oak tree or merging your soul with a sapling something you'd enjoy doing--so long as it gets you out of having to play canasta with your Aunt Sadie on Friday night?

Believe it or not, Zen can teach you to do this, and much more. Zen is the art of dropping your intellect and seeing the world through new eyes.

However if you do drop your intellect, remember where you left it, since chances are you will need it again to do important things like counting to 10 or saying "will you hve fries with that?"

Zen.

Everybody talks about it, these days, but do they really know what they are talking about? What the heck is Zen anyway?

Let's deconstruct the word and see if that helps. Zen is originally a Chinese word "Chan" which, when pronunced by non-Chinese speaking persons comes out more like Zhan...which eventually evolved into the anglicized 'Zen'.

Still, we are no closer to understanding what the word means. It eludes us. It escapes us into the far regions of mystical thinking where it hides in the cupboard waiting for us to open it so it can jump out and say BOO!

Zen, in other words, is not definable by the intellect. Hence the need mentioned above, to 'drop the intellect'.

If only it were as easy as dropping your pants, say. But it is not.

To drop the intellect you need to spend years and years in a Buddhist monestary wrestling with your Ego and pinning it to the mat over and over. Even then it won't give up easily and will come back time and again, like Kato in those old Inspector Clouseau movies, who delighted in jumping out at unexpected moments and using his moves to exercise the hapless Peter Sellers.

The best we can hope for is to get one over on the Ego for limited amounts of time. But like Kato, it always comes back when you least expect it.

Become One with nature, but don't expect it to last.