Can Meditation Change Your Appearance?

On a related note, for the past few weeks, they've been demoing a building near me at the corner of Peachtree and Collier Road.

As I write tonight, about a third of the building is still standing, and in the open, exposed scar where the building's been torn down one can see pipes and wires hanging out.  Jumbled-up slabs of concrete, flooring and ceiling materials.   The guts of the building spilling out for all to see.

Some may consider the demolition an eye-sore but I find it beautiful.  It shows us the building as it really is, not a polished monument to architecture, but just a big pile of steel and wires and pipes and conduits and tiles, once barely organized and holding it together, but easily reduced to rubble and chaos.  It shows us the building as it really is, but in a way we're not used to seeing it.  The unfamiliar view.

Zen teaches us to see things as they actually are - the thing itself - not perceiving things by the role they play or by the values we imbue them with.  It teaches us to look at the self the same way.  

As I'm coming to understand it, Stoicism encourages the same, unromantic view of things.