Choose wisely

The Japanese master Nan-in gave audience to a professor of philosophy. Serving tea, Nan-in filled his visitor's cup, and kept pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could restrain himself no longer: "Stop! The cup is over full, no more will go in." Nan-in said: "Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup."

You have come to an even more dangerous person than Nan-in, because an empty cup won't do; the cup has to be broken completely. Even empty, if you are there, then you are full. Even emptiness fills you. If you feel that you are empty you are not empty at all, you are there. Only the name has changed: now you call yourself emptiness. The cup won't do at all; it has to be broken completely. Only when you are not can the tea be poured into you, only when you are not is there no need really to pour the tea into you. When you are not the whole existence begins pouring, the whole existence becomes a shower from every dimension, from every direction. When you are not, the divine is.

 Interviewer: Where do you see the limits of the western worldview?

Bohm: Well, just in the way that it focuses too much on analysis and it tends to lead to fragmentation. Now what I mean by fragmentation is not just division, distinction, because the parts and the whole are correlative concepts. A part is a part only because it’s part of the whole like a machine or a watch. Now a fragment is something you mean to break it up, to smash. So if you smash the watch you get fragments. Now the western view, it aims at getting the true parts of the universe, but in some ways perhaps it gets fragments. To some extend in physics it’s much more so, in fields like biology, psychology, sociology and so on.

"Not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that can be counted counts"