Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.

I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.

You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.

We're all more or less interested in the 'swinging sixties', of course, but that's not what I mean. I'm interested in the particular naive glamour that clings to the post-war and pre-Hendrix era.

I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.

In the meditation, of course, the question is repeated and repeated until you run out of answers - or so I hear.

When we fail to live up to our ideals, for instance, we might begin to wonder who we are - most people are aware of a discrepancy, I think. There are idiosyncrasies and foibles, but we're not sure if these are essential. Some people think they are the most essential things of all.