Art Reboot

51 and ego to unite with luminescent comprehension. He likened this brightness to a mirror, and it is worth recording what he wrote when he returned to his hut, as it sums up our two realms of reality rather well: When the mind keeps tumbling How can vision be anything but blurred Stop the mind even for a moment And all becomes transparently clear The moving mind is polished mud bricks In stillness find the mirror The Chinese quest for such profound experience is a perennial one. Failure to achieve enlightenment is also recorded, as in the melancholic words of Xie Lingyun (385–433), a noted wilderness poet who, politically inept, was executed for his transgressions: What does a happy life amount to, after all? I am not troubled by its brevity. I only regret that my resolution as a gentleman could have brought me to my end among the mountains, to deliver up my heart before I achieve enlightenment. Neither I nor anyone else can prove what exists in a realm where proof has no meaning. Perhaps the enlightened are involved in a millennial, collective delusion. Atheists claim exactly that of monotheists, who, in turn, believe that it is the atheists who are tragicallymistaken. Our minds tend to cognitive bias, to believing what we would like to believe. But there is, I think, enough