Zen (a.k.a. Blog Wars)

Edit: It has come to my attention that the friend to whom I'm referring and who I thought had accused me of being an unwilling recipient of spiritual guidance was not referring to me in his blog entry. Interesting. If this is indeed so, then I apologize for what was intended originally to be my scathing response to what I thought was the passing of hasty and unfair judgment. Instead, you may consider my remarks here of a more general nature, applied broadly to those believers who would seek me out as a misguided soul in need of their worldly spirituality.

I have a friend who has become increasingly engrossed in self improvement and self realization. I'm more than willing to admit that there are innumerable world perspectives out there in the world, many of which I'm sure I am completely unaware and many more with which I may disagree. I will also be the first to admit that I have no problem with these individual pursuits of enlightenment, self improvement, pageantry, glory, self flagellation, or gobbledy gook; each person ought to be free to pursue his or her own path to happiness, contentment, or dissatisfaction (if you're of a masochistic tendency). As long as you're not hurting anybody, you can worship navel lint for all I care.

However, that being said, I do have a huge problem with didactic dissemination of these individual world views and the subsequent arrogant expectation of the audience's adoption of such perspectives as their own. Because of my lack of interest in being converted, I have been called an unwilling recipient of generously offered and shared mental "gifts" of wisdom and spirituality. My ignorance of the value of these gifts then was compared to the unwilling audiences of various spiritual leaders over the course of history. Here's a question: Did these spiritual leaders actually seek out audiences and actively convert or did they just live their spiritual lives and gain followers as the wisdom in their beliefs and actions was observed, evaluated, and accepted?

Let me just say this: Your world view is your world view. Good for you. Just don't try to convert me and then we'll all just get along.