The Zennist

Loneliness

Loneliness is a form of alienation. It is the natural result of a long term attachment to the person of flesh constituted by the Five Aggregates. By this attachment everything spiritual is excluded except that to which we are deeply attached. Even more troubling, that to which we are deeply attached is transitory and pain begetting. As a result of this attachment we not only remain lonely, but we also live in fear. It seems that any day now, some catastrophe might befall us.

The spiritual side of our being lies buried deep within us, as it were, beneath our level of awareness and metation. We are only aware of the mind of appearance which is gross. This mind includes the senses. It also takes the form of our emotions. In fact, it is our entire body. This mind is attached to itself; moreover, it has no wish to acknowledge the pure Mind which is quite subtle. In many respects, it is contrary to the pure Mind.

It needs emphasizing, at this point, that pure Mind is universal. It is beyond both life and death. It, therefore, knows nothing of loneliness. It is independent and lord of itself. It is a friend of itself, too. All who at least acknowledges it will end their loneliness. All who don’t acknowledge it are plagued with loneliness from this life unto the next, without end.

If our practice is a true spiritual practice in which we bring forth the pure Mind as an actual fact, the result will be to lessen our loneliness. If our practice is worldly, in which we continually engage with the person of flesh, we will become even more alienated and lonely. In fine, there is no panacea for ending the feeling of loneliness except to transcend that which is not the pure Mind.

The red pill of Zen

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill...the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill...you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

— Morpheus, The Matrix

Some times good cinema gets it right. A good film can sometimes open the third eye just a little bit. Perhaps just enough to see the light so that we don't mistake this world for the true world. In the example of The Matrix, by taking the red pill we see things as they really are. Maybe for a moment we are able to come out of the trance and catch a glimpse of true reality. Then the eyelid of the third eye closes. But not completely. We still remember the transcending experience. We are now convinced there is more than meets normal vision.

When we take the blue pill all that we are capable of perceiving in our head are, feelings, thoughts, concepts, mental images, free floating anxiety, and an internal dialogue. Our so-called head world, in addition, faces the outer world which is coercive. If we play the outer world's deadly game we can have some leisure and put our worries to rest for a while. If we keep swallowing the blue pill, thereby becoming drug dependent, any thought of not having our blue pill causes deep anxiety. We get angry. Our neck hurts as does our lower back. Everything is chaotic without the blue pill.

Much of Zen is going through cold turkey. We just stop taking the blue pill and gut it out. There is no radio blasting away, or iPod earbuds in our ears. The cell phone is turned off. All routes to cheap diversionary entertainment are blocked off. We are alone in a small cabin in the mountains. Our nearest neighbor is 7 miles away. We are sitting on an old rice bag stuffed with cotton in front of our shrine with two small candles glowing. There are no distractions. All our anxieties begin to rush forward—they need our attention. The blue pill is still in us. Our thoughts demand our attention. But we ignore them. It is only the blue pill. Next week we go into the abandoned mine at night and sit alone with a small candle glowing. The blue pill's power is getting much weaker. We are able to cone down our concentration.

One night our concentration becomes 'one-pointed' during meditation. It is like seeing a pixel on the computer monitor from which the images on the monitor screen are composed. We have blasted through the phenomenal light cone, so to speak. We just took the red pill. It is our first time. In a matter of minutes are body is bathed in an invisible magnetic-like light. It is beautiful, awesome, powerful, and silent. We don't know quite what it means or how it relates to phenomena or even our eventual death. Maybe one day we will. In the meantime, we are overwhelmed by the power of this light. We remember the words of Zen master Rinzai: "The pure light in a moment of awareness in your mind is the Buddha's essence within you." We weep with joy. No words can describe this. Then we go down the rabbit hole of Mahayana to see just how powerful this light really is because we want to save all sentient beings.

Can you experience it?

To cover heaven and earth, To distinguish the subtlety, To transcend all conditions of the world, How can you attain this state?

— Yun-men (tr., Yi Wu)

Awakening to pure Mind will surely answer Yun-men’s profound question. What else covers heaven and earth except the pure Mind which is universal? To distinguish this subtlety means to see the pure Mind. And what transcends all conditions of the world? Only pure Mind.

But now, what is pure Mind? Have you directly engaged with it? Can you experience its immaterial light pervading your entire being including your thoughts? If not, you will have to look much deeper until you can actualize this Mind. Just reading about pure Mind won’t suffice. Attending ceremonies won’t help either. Putting on robes and sitting on a pillow are worthless activities. They only lead one astray.

And now we come to the real task of Zen. Here we must set aside both heaven and earth. To do so, we can’t be satisfied with just words and phrases, or hours sitting on a pillow all blanked out. We need to come into the presence of this radiant, pure Mind. If we keep our mind empty of preconceptions, it will surely meet us halfway. Only then can the light of pure Mind be ascertained if we make every effort to open ourselves up to its animative power. But how do we open ourselves? Isn’t it by first exhausting all of our presuppositions about this Mind? And strange as it sounds, when all our horizontal roads are blocked or come to naught, a vertical one appears. It is somewhat like looking at an image in a mirror, then seeing the mercury coating upon which the image depends. The horizontal road is the world of images. But upon what do they subsist?

My first instructions

When I began my Zen training (too many years to almost recall), my first instruction was not to stare and to set my tea cup down without making any noise. The staring part was a shock to me. I was unaware that I stared so much. I was told that it was like turning on the lights without a lightbulb! I can also remember many attempts trying not to stare; trying to keep engaged with the immediate world around me.

As time went on, learning not to stare got easier. When sensei (Jp., teacher) asked me to clean out the Japanese style garden I could generally keep my focus up without staring. Three months later I was aware that I didn’t stare at all. Fixing the roof, hauling stones, or the simple act of sweeping the front of the temple was all done without staring.

Then one day sensei asked me to tell him what I was thinking about at this exact moment. Oops! It was a girl whom I knew in high school. In my mind she wasn’t wearing anything. I was so embarrased to have to confess this, but I did. After this episode, I watched my mind like a starving hawk. I watched my mind so carefully that I could begin to allow certain thoughts and push back others. I had no idea what a crazy place the inside of my head was. I soon found out. I noticed that much of the time my mind was not engaged. It was like the problem with staring. My mind was bored.

After this kind of practice, by which I came to view the inner part of myself, I was better able to get a grasp on Zen’s methodology. But the reader must know, it was only a baby’s grasp. After forty years, I have a lot better grasp. It is very much like reading a very difficult book when you were a teenager; then reading the same book again at fifty. You know so much more.

It is easy to learn a lot of facts, but it is not easy to become spiritually mature. Learning not to stare, being aware of what is going on in your mind, are aspects of this maturation process. Still, it was only the beginning. I had many more baby steps to take. The most difficult one was to become aware of the mysterious animative power which gave my body its life. This path began when, one evening, alone in my cabin with a small kersone lamp by which to read, the Lankavatara Sutra began to glow. I rubbed my eyes. “No way!” I said to myself. “This can’t be real.” Yet, no matter what I said or did, the Sutra continued to glow for a few minutes. I knew this meant something important. I realized that I’d better study this Sutra.

Really doing nothing

Bodhidharma said that the Buddha was a lazy man. And this, by and large, is true because ambition never wins the genius prize. To quote Gertrude Stein:

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

This might raise some eyebrows among those who are addicted to the frenzy of the modern world; who believe, almost as a matter of faith, that our greatest saints were neurotic workaholics, unable to sit still for even a minute; feeling guilty that they’re wasting their lives. The shock then of discovering that the greatest of all prizes, viz., awakening (buddha), goes to a lazy genius who sat at the base of a tree.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I am not advocating laziness for its own sake. But when we begin to sit around—really doing nothing—in a matter of time we will be able to ponder the depth of our own being.

This depth lies below the surface of our mental images and our emotions. While we ponder it, we have to disengage from action—external action, that is. In this respect, our life is a kind intersection that exists between the horizontal surface of the everyday reality that we take for granted and its true vertical nature which is hidden from us. It is precisely at this intersection that we decide to take action: to either tarry in the horizontal, fictitious world, or be still and ascend vertically to the true nature of reality.