Week 2: 1
The Storied Self:
Religion and the Depth/Vertical Dimension

Horizontal Dimension

Time: Past --> Present --> Future

Agency and “Victimicy”: Past <----> Present <----> Future

Counter-story: Critical Mass: Community of choice Found community

Vertical Dimension: Religious experience

Religious depth/transcendence intersects Socio-historical time

Daoism (Zhuangzi): Story of Harmony and Disharmony with Nature/Cosmos

Time: Momentary, Rhythmic, Cyclical

Reality: Myriad Appearances and Wordless Dao (Way)

Zen Buddhism (Shukman): Story of Oneness, Awakening, Liberation of suffering

Time: Momentary, Episodic, Epic/Mythical

Reality: Form & Emptiness; Words & Beyond Words; Manyness & Oneness

Protestant Christianity (Morton): Story of Belief in God, God’s love: agape/eros

Time: Historical, Transcendent/Mythical, Intervening

Reality: Profane & Sacred; human sin & divine perfection

Week 2: 1
The Storied Self:
Religion and the Depth/Vertical Dimension

Zhuangzi: Early Daoism (ca. 4^th century BCE)

The Book of Zhuangzi: 33 Chapters: inner, outer, miscellaneous

Philosophy, Stories of Daoist Adepts, Mythical Beings

Human Dilemma: Individual: Too much thinking, wrong-headed thinking (p. 32).

Communal Dilemma: Complex, intellectual, centralized urban society

Lost connection with body, intuition, rhythms of nature

Creative Response: Individual Intuition in Nature; Oneness with Nature

Embodied Awareness, Decentered, Periphery as Center, Yin-Yang, Useless-Useful

Decentered: Perspectivalism Dissolution of Boundaries  Oneness in the Dao (40-41, 44, 38).

Decentered: Multiple characters populating the Dao: Cripple & Madman (60-62), Woodworker Qing (129).

Living in the Dao: Living in the moment rather than living for the moment

Love and Death: Zhuangzi’s wife and his own death (115-117).

Dao as the Way of Undoing, the Way of Natural Flow

Week 2: 1
The Storied Self:
Religion and the Depth/Vertical Dimension

Zen Buddhism

Henry Shukman (b. 1962): Zen Buddhist teacher, Jungian psychotherapist

Zen Buddhist philosophy, hidden undercurrents, limits and power of stories

Human Dilemma: Individual: Attached thinking, dead-end stories

Communal Dilemma: Everyone caught in attachments, dead-end stories

Lost connection with body, emotions, intuition, rhythms of nature, cosmic oneness

Creative Response: Nonduality of form and emptiness, words and beyond words

Embodied Nondual Awareness of mind, heart, and body: subject & object, self & other

Initial Story: Oneness of inner & outer, self and cosmos (15-16)

Koan: Zen puzzle: “How do you realize oneness with the pine tree?”

Requires embodied response, realized in zazen, seated meditation: Pure awareness

Everyday world: form, words; World of awakening: emptiness, oneness wo/ words (16)

Broken story: family background (17); Broken feelings (21).

Healing feelings & stories, liberation of unknowing. Love, death, & rebirth (22-23).

Dreams on the way. Dropping into timeless, spaceless reality (23).