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BROKEN ARROW now available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com! Follow the link:

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NOTE TO THE READER

        I began studying Zen and practicing Zazen (seated Zen meditation) at around eight years of age. The principle point of Zen, the central and guiding theme is to be capable of facing the human condition without illusions, particularly without the kind of illusions that cause harm either to oneself or to others. Zen is all about seeing past those illusions that distort our understanding of reality – a task much harder to accomplish than you might think largely because the very reason we often cling on to those illusions is to avoid dealing with reality in the first place! Nevertheless, the Zen perspective became a standpoint engrained in my mind, one that has served as a guiding principle throughout a life lived with great intensity and extensity. It is a standpoint that is very much reflected in all my works and particularly, in the broadest framework possible – what it means to be human – in the text you have before you today. That makes this book, in a rather paradoxical manner, a Zen book: its purpose is to guide the reader towards facing the illusions consistent with many traditional Western cultural beliefs by leading the reader to face the harmful nature inherent to many of them.

        In order to assist their disciples towards achieving satori – Zen enlightenment –  Zen masters often resorted to drastic measures to shock their students into giving up the illusory standpoint from which emerged their perspectives and expectations concerning reality. In that context, I am reminded of a famous Zen parable that teaches what is known in Zen as shoshin or “the beginners’ mind.” The parable, known to virtually all readers, consists of a university professor who went to visit a Zen master in order to enquire about the nature of Zen. The professor arrived and immediately wished to get to the point. The Zen master, however, insisted on first having a cup of tea. While being served by the Zen master, the professor observed how the cup filled and filled and filled, until it overflowed. “Stop! Can’t you see it’s full already? No more can fit!” exclaimed the professor. “This is you,” stated the Zen master, “how can I teach you Zen when you are already filled with your own ideas?”

        As is the case with the professor in the Zen parable, readers are often filled with expectations even before they begin reading a book – expectations about the nature of reality, about right and wrong, about life and death, about politics, about religion, and so on. With “Broken Arrow” you must empty your cup and set aside those expectations. This is a book which introduces and applies a new theory of the human condition – a Biopsychocultural Theory. It is a theory which not only cuts across more than a dozen conventional disciplines but which does not respect the traditional “textbook” formats – or “traditions” themselves for that matter. Hence, unless you wish to be like the professor of the parable, start emptying the cup of your expectations and open your mind to learning. As far as “who is the implied reader?” this is ironically both an excellent as well as a ridiculous question. Keep in mind that this book presents a revolutionary theory about the “human condition” itself, about what it even means to be human, only to then apply that theory to critically evaluate several of the dominant cultures, religions and sociopolitical ideologies of the Western world. Hence, the answer to the question, “who is the implied reader?” is quite frankly “any human being” – any human being, that is, with sufficient curiosity to care about his condition as such, and sufficiently educated to act upon that curiosity; in other words, a functionally literate reader. The difficulties of the text are not to be found in the complexity of the ideas presented – I don’t think – but rather in the manner in which those ideas force the reader to question and challenge those illusions upon which he has constructed his perception of reality all of his life.

        That said, read, then read again, and when you think it all makes sense and you have figured it all out, forget everything you think you learned, and start all over. That is the way of shoshin – the Zen beginner’s mind.

Shodai Sennin J.A. Overton-Guerra