Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

  “Protagonist” is not a syndrome, but it does exist as a condition. Life is narrative; the finest ethicists, psychologists, and playwrights (MacIntyre, Jung, and Shakespeare) have agreed upon this fact. Each one of us is the protagonist of one’s own story; “All the world’s a stage”.   The functions Others serve within this story are quite secondary, as supporting roles. That’s not to say that we ought only to regard them as the means to our private ends. Each one of them must be acknowledged as the lead role in that person’s narrative, although that person’s narrative is not one’s own. Yet all these narratives comprise a larger narrative which lends an objectivity to every anecdotal subjectivity. Without this narrative, no objectivity is possible, since it is narrative which lends a meaning to existence.   Nor is this position to deny irrationality as something of a universal constant. No protagonist exists without antagonists; the Universe Itself provides an endless train of

In an age of rampant media consumption on all fronts, the danger of forgetting to distinguish fact from fiction is too real. Yet often those who draw the heaviest and darkest line between the factual and fictional are those most prone to be deluded by their “realistic” worldviews.   This especially is true of those who make too stringent a distinction in between “objective” and “subjective” facts and notions. The distinction in between these two dimensions of experience is simply a distinction of dimension, not of substance; saying something is “objective” rather than “subjective” is like saying something is the width but not the height; this mathematically is the truth, and it is crucial to the recreation of a figure, yet one can’t divide a table purely into height and width. Subjective and objective facts are inextricably connected and, at heart, they are one and the same. We only make a point to tell the two apart depending on the context.   Much like separating Church and State, th