BEATING THE POISONED DRUM

To survive into an integral era, Rinzai Zen must learn to market itself as state-based adulthood training: the systematic, process-driven assimilation of attentional skills into self-conscious mental habits. Someday we will be shocked that any adult could choose to bring another life into this world before they had themselves fully digested their own “karmic baggage”; this kind of prosocial concern will be built into our most naive and everyday assumptions about maturity, but in ways currently inconceivable to people who think of themselves as being on a “spiritual journey” and whose interior map actively precludes coming to terms with their own self-infantilisation.