"Pop" Zen

I was taken a shower- a place where I find answers to most of life's odd puzzles and problems- when I started thinking about "thinking outside the box". It's a popular phrase these days- heard throughout many a classroom and coffee shop. It's the purported pathway to answering life's muddles and puzzles. Personally, I think it's just silly. Does this box that we all supposedly think inside of actually exist? Can we think outside a non-existent box, or, perhaps some would say we all think outside the box b/c there simply isn't one. Does anyone besides me think I'm going in circles? Is it maybe a simple matter of our perceptions of what reality consists of. If we were to "think" or "believe" that this so-called box exists and act as though it were there, then would it exist (at least in our version of reality)? But people who think they think inside the box, wouldn't they be the same ones thinking outside of it because they constructed the box in the first place? Hey, maybe I can make my own box nad think inside OTHER people's boxes. can I tell you to "think outside your box, and think inside mine?" hehe...this is fun.

It's strange that so many people seem to find solutions to life's puzzles in zen. Well...at least the pop zen sold on TV and your local walmart in the form of funky candles, asian scrawlings on thin paper scrolls, and incense sticks. It's full of phrases that inherently contradict each other. "to be wise one must realize that one is ignorant." or "all that is black has white and all that is white has black" or that "to find oneself you must lose yourself". These phrases have a certain charm and appeal for sure, and probably make sense to many of us, but why shouldn't they? Isn't the world gray? Since when was it black and white? Why do people paint the world this way? Defining and compartmentalizing life into little ordered "boxes"( hehe...back to this again). When nothing fits in these boxes ( rarely anything does) we feel cheated and disillussioned. Nothing is rational...not really...we make it so, don't we? Does anything really fit into Iff p1, and p2, therefore q? I think the world IS gray, and it IS full of contradicitions. I spent the longest time in college trying to figure out why everything I studied in school never really made sense or fit into anything i had to apply to life. I'm not sure where this brings me...

*sigh* Yet another fruitless review session. All i hear in class are possiblies and probablies, nothing is for sure. ¶ 14:49