The pataphysician -

       Pataphysics was defined by the man who invented the term Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) as “the science of imaginary solutions”. Raymond Queneau has described 'pataphysics as resting "on the truth of contradictions and exceptions." It is described as the physics beyond metaphysics. What better description of a Zen practitioner than that of the pataphysician. Once you have become saturated in Zen I can see no other way to see the world and history than as a pataphysicist.
       Perhaps the real defining characteristic of social and religious movements throughout human history has been each group’s belief in a specific and clearly defined Utopia. Every mass movement in our recorded history seems to have had a Utopian ideal.
       The word utopia was invented by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. It has entered our language as a name for an ideal community or society possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system. Clearly Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Christianity and Islam all have their own versions of Utopia. These ideals of a kind of heaven on earth act as the foundation of each of these systems of belief and as a “Holy City on the Hill” that each group’s core of “true believers” has firmly fixed in their minds.
       Now in this first decade of the twenty first century I seem to find myself surrounded by a world of willing and enthusiastic victims. This world could I think be described as a maelstrom of crumbling utopian beliefs. It is a world were the last desperate priests of each world view is swinging wildly in all directions trying to save the shattered idea’s upon which their beliefs are based and in which fewer and fewer people take seriously anymore. These true believers have become defined by a remorseless savagery, an obsession with blood and death, and a utopian vision of purity and power.
       Across the Muslim world the majority of Arab Muslims are more and more just the victims and dupes of repressive regimes and power-hungry, rabble-rousing clerics. The Glen Becks of our world continue to show their tattered wares of demagoguery. But there is now more often than not little to distinguish these leaders of the true believers from psychopaths or “con men,” who consciously claim to endorse and exploit any belief system for financial or political gain. These men are nothing more than disingenuous cynics who have seized the opportunity of a dying belief system to obtain to power.
       Cut adrift from their ideals as a serious reality regardless of their intelligence, these true believers cannot permit in themselves the freedom of cognitive speculation that is a requisite for imagination or creativity, as that would be too threatening to the stability of their brittle and limited base. Thus the poor and lower middle class line up to fight for the rights of the rich and powerful to exploit them. They fight with the moral indignation of the true believer and as Eric Fromm said; “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”

       I have tried to find the Utopian ideal of Zen, and have happily been unable to locate it. In our belief system  (Ok, he mumbled to himself, go away I can hear you sensei, we have no belief system we are in fact a non belief system)   there is no reason to panic, no call for desperate measures in times were ideals are crumbling.

        I wonder if that is our fate to simply sit through the end times as the world as they know it crumbles around their ears.