Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

“However well-meaning and strong the individual man may be (if he could only use his strength), he still has not the passion to be able to tear himself from the coils and seductive uncertainty of reflection. Nor do his surroundings supply the events or produce the general enthusiasm necessary in order to free him. Instead of coming to his help, his milieu forms around him a negative intellectual opposition, which juggles for a moment with a deceptive prospect, only to deceive him in the end by pointing to a brilliant way out of the difficulty — by showing him that the shrewdest thing of all is to do nothing.”   -    S.A. Kierkegaard.   The Present Age , by Soren Kierkegaard . Consider three good premises for narratives; you’ll find they have a lot of shocking, almost (dare we say it?) Archetypal Similarities:   I.             A Boy falls down a well (or well-like fissure in the ground) and finds ...

  “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 end...