Zazen is strange, but makes a profound point about our psychological and philosophical attitude toward the world and life.
The world/life is just the world/life. It is what it is.
It is only human beings who judge this world/life as satisfying/dissatisfying, complete/lacking, legitimate/illegitimate etc. This life and world leap beyond all such human scales and judging. The world does not feel anxiety about being the world or about the state it is in. Only human beings feel such anxiety about the world.
Thus, we sit Zazen dropping away all human measures of satisfying/dissatisfying, complete/lacking, legitimate/illegitimate etc.
When we do so, a surprising thing happens:
One discovers that the dropping of satisfying/dissatisfying, and the willingness to just sit as what is, is most satisfying!
Putting aside measure of "complete vs. lacking" reveals a wholeness which is complete as it is.
Zazen legitimizes itself when we just drop the question from mind "is this legitimate or not"?
There is something pure and whole, positive and complete about the world when we simply rest, dropping all pursuit of "satisfaction, completion, legitimacy" and the like. This life "as it is," for all its apparent faults, reveals a wholeness beyond all the mental divisions, frictions and feelings of lack. Thus we sit, dropping our wallowing in divided mental categories, frictions and measures of lack. It is the little self which has a head full of categories, divisions, judgments etc, so that sense of self softens or fully drops away. What is to be anxious about?
Sit as "what it is," and life is "what it is." One might say that Zazen is self-legitimizing ("non-self legitimizing"?
) when we simply sit dropping such subjective measures and concerns such as whether it is "legitimate or not."
Gassho, J
STLah