koan

Do you still doubt my assertion that text is the highest technology that human beings have attained, containing the power to hack the only engine that claims the ability to alter physical reality, the human mind? Don't lie to me: I can see it in your eyes. So consider the case of the koan.

For those of you too wrapped up in the culture of fast food and teevee to open your minds to the broader horizons of human understanding, a koan is a sort of riddle, a traditional question used in the practice of Zen Buddhism as an aid to enlightenment. The most familiar is perhaps what is the sound of one hand clapping. Whether one credits such things or not, the fact is that, transmitted through the medium of text, koans have caused a sudden and irreversible change in the minds of millions of human beings: they are cosmic zingers that tip the balance and force the participant into a dynamic relationship with the unknowable. And all contained in a few dozen intrinsically meaningless symbols. Find me an animated gif that can say the same.

On the face of it, koans seem meaningless: constructions that are syntactically sound but semantically empty. Yet it's incredibly difficult to craft a good koan. Trust me, I've tried. Not just anything will work. Because they are not, in the end, meaningless phrases. They are amazingly dense encodings of the central mystery of symbolic representation: that point where seemingly sound semantic principles lead to apparent paradox. Which may seem like a lot of gibberish, until you get into Wittgenstein and Godel, and suddenly it doesn't seem so sure. There are more things in heaven and earth... And damn if a lot of them don't come popping out of this strange human mystery of text.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.