Censorship [with Japanese pornography as the hook to keep you interested]. Oh, and zazen, which is actually the important bit.

Hardcore Zen: CENSORSHIT:

"The problem with censorship is that it’s always completely arbitrary what gets censored and what doesn’t. Japan’s attitude towards pornography is a great object lesson. Japan has always had a tradition of erotic art. After WWII, when MacArthur and his posse came in to fix up the country, they knew something had to be done about that. I’m not really sure what happened next. But I assume it went something like this. MacArthur and his boys tried to explain to the Japanese that all this nasty stuff had to go. But the Japanese didn’t really get what was wrong with that stuff. Since the Americans could not explain why porn was sinful to people who had no concept of what a sin was, they gave the Japanese some specific guidelines which were meant to achieve the aim or eradicating pornography in spite of the public’s utter lack of comprehension about the reasons for doing so. The solution was to denote specific parts of the human body that were forbidden to be portrayed in works of art.

...The thing is, though, the Japanese still don’t really seem to get why these things are nasty. Thus Japan produces a huge amount of truly hardcore porn, some far more explicit than would be acceptable in America or Europe, while scrupulously avoiding the display of sexual organs. In other words, you can show anything at all as long as the human reproductive organs are covered, usually with digital filters. Um, not that I would look at any of this stuff except for, erm, research purposes.

This seems funny to we Westerners who understand the underlying reasons for this censorship. We’re also baffled by societies that take censorship to its ultimate extreme by forcing women to hide their entire bodies from public view, while at the same time allowing citizens of all ages to enjoy public beheadings. But it really shouldn’t. Our own criteria for what should and should not be hidden from public view are just as arbitrary.

The problem with censorship is that it cannot possibly work. When you hide something from public view, people just desire it more. If we didn’t allow people to look at photos of tangerines, the Internet would be full of illegal newsgroups for downloading the juiciest pictures of luscious, ripe, young tangerines. It’s especially true in the days of instant communication via computer networks. Censorship hasn’t become just difficult. It’s become absolutely impossible. The concept of parental controls on computers is a joke. Kids today know more about computers than their parents can even dream of.

That’s one level of censorship, the public level. There’s another level of censorship which most of us are not aware of. We censor ourselves constantly. And I’m not just referring to the way we don’t say or write certain things. We have to do that or society cannot function. Not to mention that if we did say all those things, we’d be spending all day nursing black eyes and picking our teeth up out of the gutter. There is also a much quieter more personal form of self-censorship at work. There are many things that cross our minds that we do not allow ourselves to think of. This self-censorship often works so well that we are not even aware that these thoughts and ideas are part of our psychological make-up at all.

One of the strange side effects that people who practice forms of meditation occasionally report is the feeling that they are experiencing thoughts that are not their own. If this is handled badly, the person will sometimes get the idea that they are experiencing psychic communications from demons and even from God. But what is actually happening is that you have stopped censoring the things that cross your mind... All the nasty stuff you ever shoved into your brain comes flying out. And even more worse, all the beautiful things you ever imagined start to come out in gorgeous three-dimensional Technicolor®. Lots of folks get swept away by that stuff and stay swept away for the rest of their lives, all the while amassing hordes of followers eager to learn the secret of how to get swept away for themselves.

...This is why I remain convinced that Zazen is the only way to go. Any level of arbitrary censorship you introduce into the situation just causes more trouble. We believe we are censoring wrong thoughts while allowing right thoughts to come through. But like the Japanese laws on pornography, our own criteria for what should and should not be hidden from ourselves are completely arbitrary. They are developed through years of conditioning. Some of this conditioning comes from outside, but most of it we do to ourselves.

And yet, you need to be able to practice some kind of self-regulation. We do need to know right from wrong. Otherwise you’d end up like Hunter S. Thompson or somebody like that. Or you end up just buying loads of porn and never doing anything else. Zazen is the perfect exercise of true self-regulation. You force yourself to sit there and not move or do anything about it while allowing your mind to go about what it needs to do without any fetters at all. Eventually it settles down of its own accord. This can take a long time depending on how thoroughly you scrambled things up before you sat down on your cushion. But in time, with practice, right and not right become absolutely clear and all forms of censorship are unnecessary."