Dropping Things, Adding Things

In my last post in July, I quoted Lao Tzu. "To become learned each day add something. To become enlightened, each day drop something."

I guess the thing that I dropped that day was posting on this blog. 

In fact, it was also about that time that I dropped zen buddhism.

It wasn't on purpose, it just happened. Perhaps as a result of having added other things. 

But strangely, looking back over the years that I studied zen, and worked so hard to become zen, it's within the past 6 months or so that I feel more zen then ever - although I rarely, if ever, think about trying to be zen. 

It was through the other life experiences that I was finally able to put into play the concepts that I read about in all the Buddhist literature, message boards, and blog posts. 

I can't name the 8 fold path anymore, nor could I explain half of the terms that I had in my pocket even last year. I don't have that vocabulary in my lexicon anymore. Yet, I feel far more zen, balanced, and non-attached than any other time in my life. And also more engaged and alive more than ever.

Those years of study and talking about the concepts of Zen laid the ground work, and then I embraced life and with trial and error, the two together, worked out so far, I think.

I have toyed with the idea of starting a new blog or two based on my new interests, since I no longer write about my journey with Zen or meditation. One of the blogs I was going to start would be about atheism, with some politics thrown in for fun, as it relates to that. But then I looked back at this blog's last few posts, and I see that I was already going down that path here. 

So maybe I'll start posting again here, for my 3 or 4 readers. Perhaps it won't appeal to the zen enthusiasts anymore (if it ever did in the first place), but I think I will start writing in more depth about my slow public embracing of atheism, and some of the more controversial opinions I have about god-based religions, and see what happens.