Friday, April 15, 2011

Outbuddhisted

So I was eagerly telling a Buddhist friend that my jury duty experience had been "Buddhisty" at the new Joe's coffee shop opposite Teachers College this afternoon. The more we had sought a stable reality independent of ignorance, sensation and feeling, the less stability we had found! Our minds worked overtime to crank out ever more outlandish press releases that everything made sense, fiction in the service of the myth of fact! And all the while the twelve of us worked out in fear and trembling our impossible mission to judge and speak as one, unable to command assent or dissent! We came together as one only in declaring ourselves hopelessly divided, then truly came together only when the Zen master judge told us we were enlightened already and to get back to work! And then dissolved...!

His response to my performance?

I'm hearing so much suffering, he said, in the plaintiff and defendant, and then spread out to all the jurors. So much suffering!