Areligiousness

To begin, I must clarify this has nothing to do with Bill Mahr's new film that allegedly sucked. Check. This entry is about the ball smashing realization I just had:

Ayn Rand's Objectivism very nearly fits in line perfectly with the eastern religions of Zen and Taoism.

Holy shit. I know. Just what everybody in the world cares about right now. But this isn't meant to be a social experiment or lecture outline--not yet anyway. Right now it's just for me.

Antireligion
So, for starters, Rand is antireligion. For her, this is for a couple reasons: firstly, she's atheistic; secondly, because she detests the control religion puts over peoples minds. And not just their minds, but their creativity, their will, their lives.

Zen is also antireligion. This is because the principles of Zen aren't found in a church, or in a single person, or in a pope or choir, but they are found in every person, in every sunrise and every thing. Subsequently, attending church once a week is counterintuitive to the practice of spirituality, because, if a church is the place where a person's mind and heart is open to God, then a person should be in a church every day, for as much of the day as possible. The simple existence of a church admits the failure of religion at reaching its people.

Ultimately, I believe that the antireligousness of Zen and Objectivism coincide because they both are opposed to the rules and regulations of one person over another. People with a religious affiliation will claim that the rules found in a church are not established by people, but by God. Of course, I must then bring up the fact that different churches and religions disagree with each other, clearly showing that the rules are not consistent across religions. This leads me to the another strong point of Zen: the fact that religions disagree with one another shows their falliability and their baselessness.

(As an aside, I recently saw the movie Ghandi for the first time, and if you'll excuse the fact that I'm getting historical information from an Oscar winning film, I will say I was most impressed with Ghandi's ability to fuse religions. He would never talk specifically about Hinduism or Islam--because in the film he was raised as both--but he would instead talk of God in the beautiful and romantic way that pagans and poets have done before and since. I of course believe that this is the truest answer for those looking for God, because instead of being swept up in the politics of religion, one can simply find the way to bliss by treating everything with love and compassion.)

Individualism: the ego
Rand lives--literally and figuratively--for the individual. The 'I'. My opinion is that she was an intellectual who was so moved by the power of a single person's conviction, that she took it as her religion. And I don't use this phrase to be trite, but I use it in the same sense she uses it in the Foutainhead, where she refers to Howard Roark as 'religious in his own way'. Of course, she was an atheist. But she believed, she had faith, in the individual.

And hence, we happen upon Taoism, the most straight forward and beautiful example of a religion that believes solely in a person being themselves. The notion of 'the uncarved block' is a thought that permeates all of Taoism, and from the best of my recollection, it only means that a person must always try to be pure, simple, exactly what they are, and nothing besides.

Using a little mental gymnastics, I would say that Buddhism, Zen or Hindu--or any religion that is founded on meditation--must therefore agree with the principle of the uncarved block, becuase the purpose of meditation is to reduce one's self to the mind, and let the mind be as empty and expansive (synonyms by way of the diamond sutra, read on) as possible, and let the mind's owner be as true to the mind as possible.

Connectivity: the road block
It's as simple as this: Rand ultimately believes that every mind is distinct and there is no interconnectedness; Zen, Taoism and Buddhism belive in the interconnectedness of everything. However, I have a hard time believing that Rand's faith doesn't fit into these Eastern style religions, so I'm going to use the Diamond Sutra to fit the peg into the hole.

The diamond sutra states that a rose is a rose because it is not a table, it is not a person, it is not a tree: it is not anything else, but a rose, and subsequently it can be defined as a rose. Therefore, when you define a rose, you can only define its true character when you elaborate completely on its context. In my own words: a plant will be the same plant if you dig it out of the forest and put it in your house, but when you do so you change something else about the plant: the context. And therefore it can be completely the same yet completely different, just because of what the plant ISN'T. That example kind of sucked. But if you read over this paragraph a few times, you might get it.

So the diamond sutra applied to Rand's idea of the mind, here we go. A person's mind is a person's mind because it is just that, it is not a table, it is not a coffee bean, it is not another person's mind, and so on. But it is the mind because it is not these other things, and therefore it has a relationship to all other things. The relationship is simply: the person's mind is not any of these other things. So although it is a very basic comparison, there exists a relationship. Furthermore, a person's mind exists in stark contrast to all other minds (Rand would voraciously agree with this); and therefore a person's mind is connected to other minds, because in contrast to the others, it is different (Rand would probably slap me for saying this, but out of respect I hope).

It's a simple claim--and that is the extent of the 'interconnectedness' of Buddhism (to be honest, I'm not certain that Zen or Taoism follow the diamond sutra). Albeit, in this mish mosh of religion and spirituality, I think that I would have said things that Rand would have agreed with, or found points that we would agree to disagree about. And ultimately, that is the point of any debate, to find the points of truth that people actually agree about, but use different words or choose to disagree socially, but I digress.