As to D.T. Suzuki and all the who’s preaching the real Zen or the real Buddhism — that’s as messy a business as the real Catholicism or the real Christianity.

Zen is not simple and it certainly has its warts. A strong criticism of D.T. was his support for Hitler and Japanese nationalism, but then most Zen masters of that time were in that camp.

An exception was Shunryu Suzuki, who couldn’t get with the program and eventually moved to America and started the San Francisco Zen Center, which became the mother ship of American Zen.

S. Suzuki wrote an utterly stripped-down, landmark account in English of Zen practice titled, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” which I’ve never seen criticized. It might not fit in with your phenomenological quest, but you will be drinking milk from the cow.

“DNW: I have no idea how you put that together. No, I am not a Buddhist.”

Yes you are. How dare you deny it! LOL

Oh … The mention of yoga, and probably Zen. San Francisco, pot, hippies, a commune … possibly an unjustified surmise nonetheless. But a more or less reasonable impression, eh?

Now, I never studied Zen. But I was given a copy of D.T Suzuki’s famous book on Zen and read it through a couple of times.

I was impressed, and thought that there might be some possibility that the discipline could be integrated with or related to phenomenology; which had a theory and a procedural outline, or at least program, but no real method so far as my classroom work revealed.

Maybe, staring at an object until it disappeared – or rather until its familiar socially contexted aspect disappeared – could be an insight into a process – if not of peeling back the layers of consciousness, then at least a kind of route to something analogous to epoché.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/phen-red/#SSSH5a.i.1

I was not even thinking of satori or any of that.

Then much later, I read that Suzuki, whatever it was that he was preaching, was not considered to be preaching real Zen, much less Buddhism. And from what little I know of Tibetan Buddhism and all its weirdness, a stripped down, abstracted method akin to experimental epistemology, with no spiritual dimension to its metaphysics, would have been just fine with me anyway

However, I was friends, and there were so many of us, with a Zen priest, Darlene Cohen. She was something special. She died eight years ago. So loving, yet upfront and human. “Right. Now that I’m dying, everyone wants to be my student!” Or words to that effect. She was something special.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130619145416/http://sweepingzen.com/still-manifesting-dharma-darlene-surei-kenpo-cohen-october-31-1942-to-january-12-2011/

Darlene developed terrible arthritis in her thirties such that she was in chronic pain for the rest of her life. I saw her when I was dealing with chronic pain, though not like hers.

She was so full of life and kindness. I only wish Noa Pothoven could have met Darlene or someone like her. Or maybe she did and couldn’t open to the gift.

DNW: I have no idea how you put that together. No, I am not a Buddhist.

Pleased to meet’cha. Hope you guess my name. But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.

I read so many articles they tend to blend together and I cannot access my history at the moment.

Nonetheless the critical term here palliative sedation which is implied as admitted in passing, while”euthanasia” is voluminously rebutted. as you can see by accessing the BBC article at the link below

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48541233

You might also find this article interesting. https://www.gelderlander.nl/home/noa-16-uit-arnhem-is-nu-al-klaar-met-haar-verwoeste-leven~a01a7bd1/ Google will translate it.

To get the full flavor of the problem, you have to read the girl’s “bucket list” which is so thoroughly and trivially secular that it almost leads one to believe that that is part of the problem.

Furthermore, she apparently refused to tell the police anything about the two men who supposedly raped her. And whether it is an artifact of translation or something else, her description of the “sexual assaults” she experienced read very strangely.

She is very vehement that her will was violated as well as her body, but at the same time she will do nothing about seeking justice.

“In her book, Noa writes that she was assaulted at a school party when she was 11 and another year later at a teenagers party.

“It is the second time that a man was sitting against me, against my will, in intimate places.”

At the age of 14, she writes, she is raped in the Arnhem neighborhood of Elderveld by two men. At home she says nothing about it. “Out of fear and shame,” she says now. ,, I relive the fear, that pain every day. Always scared, always on my guard. And to this day my body still feels dirty. My house has been broken into, my body, that can never be undone. ”

At the time, she did not report it. But recently she did report the matter to the police. ,, No, I have not made a declaration. I can’t, “says Noa.

“She has to tell the police in detail what those men have done to her,” her mother says. ,, She still finds that too difficult. Too confrontational. She doesn’t get the word ‘rape’ out of her mouth yet. “”

Lisette hopes that the perpetrators will be caught someday. ,, They should know what they did. ” …

DNW [Discussion of the lack of institutionalization therapy in the Netherlands is reviewed, followed by ….]

” …She has almost completed her bucket list, her list of things she wants to do someday. Fourteen of the fifteen wishes have been fulfilled. ,, No big things, though. Such as riding a scooter for the first time, smoking a cigarette, drinking alcohol and having a tattoo. I have the text ‘You should not believe everything you think’ put on my body by Loesje.

,, There is one wish left: eating a bar of white chocolate. That is my favorite candy, but I haven’t tasted it in years. That is because of my anorexia. I don’t dare to eat it yet. That is because of the fear of getting fat. “”

The book
Noa’s book is ready, it is printed. But it is a book with an open end, she writes at the end. She gives trauma therapy ‘one last chance’. She hopes for ‘a miracle’, but she thinks it is probably hope against knowing better. If that also fails, then life has nothing to offer her.

Her parents are afraid that she will harm herself. Two weeks ago another suicide attempt was thwarted. Noa’s death wish is stronger than her urge to survive. The parents therefore live by the day, hoping that Noa will ‘see bright spots again’, ‘perhaps fall in love’ or learn to discover that ‘life is worth living’.

Yeah, maybe they could tell her that it is wrong to kill yourself. But then again, that is probably going a bridge too far in Holland.

I haven’t read that she was given drugs, but I certainly haven’t read everything written about her death, so I don’t know. Do you have a link?

If the drugs were self-administered, do you think that’s different?

I find almost all aspects of her case troubling. I agree that there is the possibility of its having been mishandled on almost every level. That said, it is astoundingly difficult to treat someone profoundly depressed and determined to die. In her case, I don’t believe everything was tried (particularly electroshock). But other than that, I really don’t want to speculate because I just don’t have enough information.

I would assume that if I read her book I’d know more. I agree that it’s possibly troubling that her book was published in the first place, but I’d have to know more about that, as well. I don’t think it was translated into English.

No, Art Deco, the term does not mean what YOU think it means.

This is what it means. I am sure you can find some more restrictive meaning that suits your fancy and your purposes, but this is what it means [emphasis mine]:

1.(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.

short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

Saying an argument is “lawyerly” is not refuting the substance of the argument at all. You made no attempt to refute my point with logic or evidence, merely with what you consider to be an insult about style reflecting in some supposed way my training in law and legal argument. Nothing to do with substance; everything to do with another “attribute of the person making the argument.”

I have a great deal of tolerance for the foibles of regular commenters here, but gratuitous insults are treading on troll territory, and at this point you’re wasting my time.

DNW:
Pothoven committed suicide, which isn’t relevant to the question of what is done by the medical profession under more ordinary conditions of imminent death and not taking in fluids.”

I don’t think we actually have much of an argument here.

I’m not for pouring water into the lungs of people who cannot swallow; nor for keeping people who are obviously “end of life” on IV’s indefinitely.

But Pothoven at 17, was, I have read, given drugs to make her suicide by self-starvation and dehydration more tolerable. That, is what I am condemning. She was enabled.

A couple or three stipulations.

1. I don’t know anything about her real situation. All I know is what I have taken away from a number of articles on her.

2. If the assertions printed about her case were true, then I think that there was something incredibly creepy (morally disturbing, not just medically unusual) going on with her psychology and her parents’ and her government’s handling of her.

3. In a sense I don’t really care what she, personally, did. What I do care about is ensuring that this demented, thanatic urge, (with its apparently huge dollop of drama) is not turned into some kind of social phenomenon like homosexuality, which people then start demanding we affirm as a respectable moral choice, just because they say they have an itch which in “their reality” requires scratching.

Yeah … so what …

I do of course recognize that some people are in love with, perhaps theatrically in love with, death. I care, but not too much, about what happens to them.

I care much more about the spillover effects of their demanding that their nihilism be affirmed and participated in.

Aren’t you a Buddhist?

The term ‘ad hominem’ does not mean what you think it means.