Mountains of Verbiage vs. Going into the Mountains

Here is a photo I took with my lousy old cell phone in 2010. 
That's Mount Hood, Oregon, off in the distance.

Q: Roshi, I get more confused about what Zen is every time I go onto the Internet to talk to other people about it. Everybody has a different idea, & the arguments become tiresome. Sometimes I am tempted to just give up & play Xbox games in my basement. Can you resolve this for me?

A: Zen as it exists on the Internet seems to be mainly about shoveling mountains of argumentative verbiage into your mind.

In old school Ch'an (Chinese Zen), people who wanted to be adepts did not behave like this.

So what did they do? They went up into the mountains to live in monasteries & grass huts. There, they withdrew from argumentation & dispute, renounced the way of the discriminating intellect based upon words, faced a wall, & emptied their minds until the "mysterious realization" dawned upon them.

You cannot taste water & analyze its chemical composition at the same time. Human beings now live "all in their heads." But one has a body & senses also. Enlightenment is merely recovering your natural state.

Yuanwu, who compiled The Blue Cliff Record, advised Ch'an students to just sit on the meditation bench & empty & clarify their minds:

Let go of all your previous imaginings, opinions, interpretations, worldly knowledge, intellectualism, egoism, and competitiveness; become like a dead tree, like cold ashes. When you reach the point where feelings are ended, views are gone, and your mind is clean and naked, you open up to Zen realization.