Kind of funny, I guess… I had just finished setting up a guitar I had just picked up and I thought I’d take a few moments and kick back. So, I sat back and flipped on the TV and did a bit of channel surfing. I popped over to MTV Classic. Just as I did, the song, Everything Zen, by Bush started to play.
 
I guess it was kind of like a precursor premonition, or perhaps a projection, as I had recently been thinking about that song over the last couple of days. You know how it is when you get a song in the back of your mind and you think you really have got to play it. You remember how good it was, and you just want to hear it again. Though I hadn’t got around to doing that yet, I was lucky enough to hear it and/or see it on the TV screen. Great song!
 
I totally remember the first time I heard that song. My lady and I were driving out of Monterey, heading down the coast back down to L.A. It was the afternoon, and that song came on the radio. But, you know how the radio is sometimes, as you’re driving away from the source, the music starts to get all broken up. But, from the moment I heard that song, I was shook. I thought, what a great song. And though it faded in and out, I was really excited about it. Plus, also, I guess I was a little bit worried that I wasn’t going to ever be able to hear it again, as this was long before the days of Shazam and stuff like that. So, I didn’t know who the song was by. Luckily, however, it became a big hit.
 
You know, it’s kind of like I say to people a lot of times, when they’re either asking me questions or interviewing me or something like that. I tell them, you’re asking the wrong questions.
 
The thing is, people always seem to have an answer. They have an answer for a question that hasn’t been asked. And, if they do have a question, they’ve already made up their mind about what answer they expect. Thus, pretty much no answer you give them is going to be what they want to hear. This is especially the case with something like Zen. So many times, people ask me about my involvement with things like Zen. And, what does it mean to me?
 
When that occurs, I always respond to their question with a question. To their question, my question is, “Tell me, what is Zen?” What I do is to turn it around. Because everybody already has an idea about what they think they think about, but they never really know. They never really take the time to investigate what they believe. They just want to project their own opinion onto what other people believe. So, when they asked me about Zen, I ask them to define what they think Zen actually is. The responses I have received are, in some cases, pretty comical. I could list a whole long plethora of the answers I’ve received. But mostly, people just dodge the question because they don’t have an actual, well thought-out answer. They just want me to answer it for them so they can like, dislike, praise, or criticize what I say.
 
But, think about it, isn’t the ultimate truth of Zen is that there is no all-encompassing definition of Zen? Thus, for anybody, including myself, who tries to lay a definition onto it, inevitably, it’s wrong.
 
How can there be a definition to something as abstract as Zen?
 
So, “Everything Zen. I don’t think so,” as the lyrics from that song plainly state. I disagree, the ultimate truth of life, “Everything is Zen.” There’s no definition. There are just people attempting to try to find a definition. Because in the ultimate truth of our reality, nobody really knows anything. At most, they just believe they know. And, in that belief, they lose the true essence of anything that actually is. Because all they are doing is projecting belief, which is based upon nothing more than a speculation, perhaps predefined by some scripture composed by some person who did or did not actually exist thousands of years ago. At best, they are attempting to define something that can never truly be defined, or even understand; namely: the completely abstract reality of life.

Thus, Everything is Zen. And, in Zen, there is No Definition.