The Zennist

The great human illusion

In these blogs I have mentioned before that we are in a trap, a very subtle trap, one conceived within the human mind itself.  It is not surprising therefore in Buddhism to find that we are enclosed in the five grasping aggregates which the Buddha speaks about which are owned and operated by Mara the evil one! 

Furthermore, these same aggregates are without a self or anātman (P., anattā) which is supposedly the doctrine of the Buddha! Put the Buddha taught no such doctrine. However, he did teach that we are deceived by these grasping aggregates into believing that they are our self.  Thus the human problem is one of misidentification: mistaking the self for what is not the self. 

The highest truths of Indian religions including Buddhism is that the world and the human beings within it are an illusion.  Spacetime is an illusion including this human body in which we are immersed.  But perhaps even more deceptive, the imagination of beings contains within it both birth and death.  Liberation then as a matter of intuiting directly what transcends the great human illusion. 

 

Mumon’s clever Mu trap

Our saviors, gods and lofty utopias will not save us from what we do not know, or from our own innate power to deceive ourselves.  We have the choice (P., sankhārā) to stay where we are, about which we know nothing, or go forward into something of which we know nothing (but imagine we do). 

Either choice brings us to the final trap which says it all about Zen koans, that they are unanswerable through human convention try as we might to force an answer from them.  No matter how much we ponder them we will always end up in Mumon’s Mu trap only to be reborn again and again in a samsaric cycle.

You must take my words seriously.  I am trying to help you escape from Mumon’s clever Mu trap.  That is all my book The Secret of Zen is trying to do.  Including Siddhartha, only a few Zen masters figured it out and even I figured it out. And I am on my last leg!

Seekers on this inscrutable path, what you seek will never match with the enlightenment which you seek!  It ever lies beyond the scope of perceiver and perceiving.  Think about Mu and you are at once lost. 

You must go to your wits’ end.  In a split second you’ll forget your dualistic consciousness and converge instantly with the Buddha-nature.  The released drop of water has become a boundless ocean of bliss.

The most difficult of all to let go of

There is a kind of original sin in Buddhism.  It is called avidya (destitute of knowledge).  Human beings come into the world under the dominion of avidya.  It's like waking up in a virtual reality game but have no idea how you got there or how you might escape when the going gets tough.  We are only a blank. 

Now you are feeling hunger and fright and all those things that go along with being an infant.  You begin your life being totally dependent on things outside of your control.  You desperately cry for help like an abandoned kitten.  You depend upon the love and care of those who brought you into this world — this not so kind world as you will one day find out.

Admittedly, life is always giving you hope but in the end you have to give up your carnal body.  You have no idea where you're going to be after it passes away.  Your imagination works overtime to create some kind of utopian world whether it's a heaven or a materialist utopia in which you will live forever in a temporal body.

Obviously, no great creator God is going to come down and help you (here your imagination is working overtime).  You are on your own.  But there, according to Buddhism, lies the escape route.  It is where we transcend all appearances and conditions, even the perceiver and the perceiving which got us into this mess (avidya).  

Letting go

Letting go, by following the way of the wild monkey, is really about letting go of one branch only to grab on to another; living in a jungle full of branches. 

Under these circumstances it is easy to let go.  We just grab onto something else.  We leave one tough life-event behind then get involved in a new one.  Offhand, the late Mickey Rooney comes to mind.  He was married eight times.

Do we ever kick the monkey habit of letting go and grabbing onto another branch?  Probably not. 

In Zen and Buddhism (really the same thing) it's all about letting go of our attachment to the big VR game we call life, that is, conditioned existence.  In fact suffering only comes from living in a condition world in condition bodies unable to see what exactly transcends the world and the corporeal body.

Unfortunately, biology has hard wired us to the belief that our human bodies and the world we perceive through them is absolutely real and final.  We will not be convinced otherwise even though science today suspects that our universe is really a kind of fractal based illusion (māyā).

Today we believe this is the real world.  We’re not going to change our belief.  If we continue swinging from one branch to another like the wild monkey one day we will arrive at the right branch or so we hope.  At least it seems better than the previous one.

Not anything empirical but real nevertheless

Without being truly integrated into the big picture of Buddhism we dare not try to come up with an assumption of what Buddhism is.  We will most likely be wrong. 

The bulk of Buddhist books these days are wrong if they teach that the Buddha denied Ātman.  According to these people the Buddha was supposedly teaching a kind of benevolent nihilism as in, there is only emptiness!

The ātman problem goes much deeper in Buddhism.  Ordinary beings assume the temporal body that they were born with and will one day perish is their ātman.  Others assume that there is no self whatsoever (they are something from nothing). 

But this is what makes Buddhism so unique.  It teaches ordinary beings that what they cling to as who they are is not ātman.  It is only a simulacrum of ātman.  The real self or nature is only attained by transcending all phenomena including even consciousness which is always dual as in perceiver and perceiving.

This debate in Buddhism which has been going on for well over 1000 years is really a battle between the materialist/nihilists and the gnostics/ intuitionists.  The materialists, however, have little in the way of evidence from the Buddhist canon to rest their argument on.  Siddhartha realized under the bodhi tree something transcendent and unthinkable.  It was not anything empirical but real nevertheless.  

The very nature of the three refugees (Buddha, Dharma, Saṃgha) is the true self or ātman.

At the core of the Heart Sutra 心經

Basically, the Heart Sutra/心經 is saying the world as viewed through the five aggregates is an illusion.  Do not cling to any of it but transcend it. Thus will bodhi be attained.  But what is this mystery of transcendence?

The Sutra is not telling us to cling to this mortal, conditioned world nor run away from it.  The solution to the problem is transcendence:  to go through all illusions and come out the other side!

But then we have to admit that all of mankind is worshiping at the shrine of samsara where we are always making sacrifices to this illusory corporeal body with its sensuous needs and extravagances. 

Maybe you believe that old pains can be washed away by new pleasures.  But this is not true. 

Illusion binds us to the same old patterns although each existence seems new and different.  We are always caught in the net of samsara because we are unable to transcend it completely.  Some of us get right to the edge of liberation then fall back.  Falling back is what we humans do best.  Always asking for forgiveness.  We even invent saviors to save us from ourselves and our own misdeeds.

We don't need your stinkin’ utopia

The religious life is a struggle that is interior.  It is an adventure nevertheless, but fraught with great danger.  In the Buddhist sense, struggle is specifically oriented toward achieving direct intuition of the absolute or the same, Buddha-nature.  But also it is about giving up false assumptions and beliefs.  That is difficult to do. 

In any religion or ideology (politics in the form of religion) the lie is propagated along with the truth.  But the unawakened are usually deceived by the lie while fervently denying the truth.

The practice of Buddhism amounts to valuing enlightenment rather than striving one-sidedly and blindly for a new utopian world.  In the Buddhist form, however, we don’t have to pay the collective price (often in blood and terror) for the mistakes of a few mentally deranged ideologues.

While these ideologies are often youthfully enchanting in the beginning this enchantment is often lost very early by an ideologically possessed bureaucracy that demands obedience and conformity.  Those with the most wealth are still in power who still control the government while the government makes it possible for them to hide their presence and iniquities.  At the same time people eventually become disenchanted with the religious life.

 

The great mystery revealed

Buddhism (bauddham) soon loses its appeal when it goes beyond the six senses and especially the last sense which has to do with mentation (manas).  In this sense Buddhism is all about complete transcendence.

The ordinary person does not realize that the world they put together, including their body of birth and the environment it lives and dies in is a mental representation albeit very real looking. 

Key to locking on to this representation is consciousness (vijñāna) which is always dichotomous or the same, perceiver and perceiving.  Such consciousness is never absolute, most primordial or first.  This is reserved for spirit or ātman which excludes anātman (not spiritual, corporeal, empty of spirit).

Buddhism has changed significantly from what Siddhartha Gautama realized after he transcended consciousness.  Having merged with spirit, he could distinguish ātman from anātman.

He said that an anātman refers to the five aggregates, namely, material shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness.  They are always suffering and conditioned.  The most troubling aggregate is consciousness which I have said earlier is always dichotomous:  we are always stuck in the perceiver and perceiving mode.

It would safe to say that modern Buddhism is a distortion of what Siddhartha Gautama taught.  It nowhere approaches the problem of consciousness, especially, the transcending of consciousness which leads to the elimination of rebirth since consciousness is the transmigrant from one life to the next.

Consciousness is always an unresolved tension.  As mentioned earlier, it is the difference between perceiver and perceiving. There is a seeming unity between the two, even a harmony, but no transcendence of this duality.  As with the example of an asymptote, the line that continually approaches a given curve can never meet it.  When consciousness is transcended then is the great mystery revealed.

The hypocrisy of spiritual materialism

The term “spiritual bypassing: was coined in the early 1980s by psychologist John Welwood.  It's another one of those terms which is really about our materialistic/nihilistic world.  In Welwood’s treatment it is about faking virtue (hypocrisy).  How I can appear spiritual without really being spiritual.  This leads me back in time to Chögyam Trungpa’s book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which boils down to how I can become enlightened without giving up my materialism.

In light of this, back in 1965 when I began my own spiritual journey into Zen Buddhism it didn't take me too long, maybe a couple of years, to realize that those with whom I studied had no idea what satori was or, for that matter, what Buddhism really was about.  It was fake spirituality all the way. 

Finally, at 76 I can see Buddhism without the fog in front of me.  And this also allows me to see our modern culture in the radiant light of Buddhism and just how dark and evil this age has become.  I wrote this to myself not too long ago.

“Darkness was in the beginning, then we learned, eventually, to see in the darkness and make shapes from the darkness and live our entire lives in darkness.  Only in great myths and legends were the bringers of the light made known to us.  Such was mankind’s terrible fate. Today, mankind is still trapped in darkness which it believes is illumination!”

I can see that today in America spirituality and with it religion has little meaning except in doing some superficial practices or spouting off a few words of wisdom that we don't even understand much less care about.  In a few short years, it has all become politicized.  

We are supposed to become moved by politics and resentment.  We hate those, we imagine, who caused us to be born into poverty and with a gender we are unhappy with.  They are always oppressing us or so we imagine.  We want justice, that is, revenge at any cost.  But this is not fertile ground to sow the seeds of future illumination.  This kind of belief rots the human spirit.  Faith and intuition are religion’s two pillars without which it soon transforms itself into something less than religion.

Abortion from a Buddhist POV

On the subject of an abortion, speaking from a Buddhist point of view, a fetus consists of three intertwinings, namely, the XX-f and XY-m chromosomes and a unique consciousness (S., vijñāna) which is from a previous life. This might explain why DNA contains something like a functional fractal antenna. 

Consciousness can be transmitted through the sex act.  It eventually takes over the growing fetus beginning with the fertilization of the ovum.  It is the preservation of this unique consciousness that concerns the issue of abortion, mainly, deciding whether or not to allow this consciousness to develop into a corporeal form.

When the monk Sāti put forward his erroneous theory that consciousness transmigrates unchanged, he is at once admonished by the Buddha.  The upshot is that the re-linking consciousness does not transmigrate unchanged (anañña).  In fact, it transmigrates changed.  Just like a radio signal, it has a unique signature.  In this wise, consciousness comes to embody itself in relation to the six senses.  This is somewhat like the player in a video game who manifests itself through the avatar body.

We can see from this that the Buddha did not teach that each person is the sum total of the parent’s chromosomes which would be a form of materialism.  Very much consciousness is like a radio signal that is broadcast to the DNA antenna enabling the fertilized ovum to begin developing, satisfying the drive of a unique consciousness.