I had a professor who pretended to be a Zen master, and asked our class what 2+2 is. Of course, some genius said that the answer is “4”, and instead of a gold star, he got five “whacks” with a stick, since Zen masters have been known to whack their disciples with sticks for giving stupid answers. (They were pretend whacks, don’t worry.) Someone else said, “0”, but that was wrong, and he got “whacked” five times as well. Having counted how many whacks each would-be Zen student got, I answered, “5”, and I, too, was hilariously “whacked” five times. I never knew maths to be so difficult, but then again, what do I know? I was never a brilliant maths student. For a long time now, I’ve been a student of the humanities, but right now, I was failing in both subjects. “2+2=5”? Idiocy. Oh, the games Zen masters play!

We all failed to answer correctly, and then our professor asked us, “What is the Zen master trying to say by doing this?” We paused a moment to think, but then if we’d known the answer, we wouldn’t have suffered such heavy casualties. So, he told us: “Get out of your fucking minds!” The point was that we shouldn’t be overly intellectual and should be radically simple. For this reason, Zen masters discuss paradoxical questions with their students, called koans. The point isn’t to arrive at an answer: the point is to “get out of your fucking mind”. We all laughed, and I thought, “I love this guy”! That day, the winners were the people who only laughed and not those who tried to solve the problem.

There is a counter-intuitive wisdom to this kind of teaching. I’ve spent a lot of time asking complicated questions in philosophy and theology, and while this is fun, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. More often than not, you’ll find yourself asking, “Who cares?” Some of these, after all, are so complex and high-minded that it’s impossible to see their relation with a meaningful life at all. I’ll never forget, for example, the day my metaphysics professor asked us whether a chair is what exists or whether what exists are the atoms that comprise the chair. Some philosophers would answer, “neither”, and say instead that what truly exists is the “form” of Chair that embodies the properties of Chair-ness, and that the chair you perceive is only a shadow of this ideal of Chair. You see? I got bored just writing that, and I studied this stuff. All of which is to say that one cannot confuse their intellectual pursuit with an encounter with God, or enlightenment—which I shall group in the category of meaningful experience.

What is meaningful experience then? The answer to that would depend on who you ask, but I would be tempted to describe meaningful experiences as a kind of mysticism. As the poet Rumi says, “There are a thousand wines that can take over our minds”, and this is given as a metaphor for ecstasy. However, he also cautions us not to think that all ecstasies are like, saying, “Jesus was lost in his love for God. His donkey was drunk with barley.” Thus, one should be discerning about what is truly a meaningful experience. For me, this presents an odd dilemma, as I am clearly someone committed to my intellectual pursuits. Not only in my studies, but even on my own time I am consumed by this “wine that moves [me]”, as Rumi says. The proof is in what I am writing, but there is a confession about my writing that I must make:

On the surface, my writing is entirely about these big questions that occupy the minds of philosophical and religious minds, but have a conversation with my therapist, and you will see that, in fact, everything I say has subliminal meaning that would go unnoticed unless you are privy to my personal life. Much of what I write is simply a mirror of my own experience. I call this a confession, but it really shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’m quite honest about my experiences in my writing, whenever I bring it up. However, there are often specific events in my life that drove me to write these things. They are like pages out of my journal, masked by the veneer of philosophical thinking because that is how I process things, but these thoughts are nothing in themselves.

Near the end of his life, St Thomas Aquinas had a mystical experience, after which he said, “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” The thought pales in comparison to the experience. A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts about my conversion to Catholicism. I’ve tried many times to write about what sparked my religious conversion, but I failed every time, and that project was no different. Expressing my frustration to my mother, she sounded surprised at my failure, and said that she thought it was truth that motivated me. Truth be told, truth itself had little to do with it, as it has little role in the narratives of many religious testimonies. I won’t share with you now what I believe my reason was. Rather, I’ll say that reason is a useful faculty, but we should not delude ourselves into believing that knowledge is what we really want. “Reason”, Hume said, “is and ought only to be the slave of the passions”, and he was right.

Of course, I have my own experience that confirms this, but I will think I will keep it to myself. Suffice it to say, the happiest moment of my life was not spent in a classroom, with my nose in a book, or writing about some epiphany I’ve had—and I do enjoy all of those things. They are a part of who I am, at least on the surface. But buried beneath those layers of thought and analysis is what I imagine as a river, and as I picture myself moving along its banks, I can feel the wind on my face and I feel terrifically free. Here, “the world is too full to talk about,” but I don’t care. Here is a treasure beyond understanding. Here, I am literally out of my fucking mind.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Rumi

*whack, whack, whack, whack, whack*