One morning, after your usual morning cup of coffee, you read the header on Huffington Post. Wikileaks has just revealed that the U.S. never went to the moon. It was all a hoax. NASA always knew that in order to go to the moon it would require a spaceship that was 266 times larger than the Saturn 5 rocket! The next day there is more bad news from Wikileaks. 9/11 was an inside job. The Bush Administration needed a pretext by which to take control of the Middle East and Central Asia. This was it. In fact, Osama bin Laden is on the CIA’s payroll! “Oh my God,” you say trying to control your emotions. You imagine the whole world is coming apart. Everything you believed in turned out to be a fucking lie. The only thing that could be worse than this would be to learn that your certified Zen master is not really enlightened at all. In other words, he has never realized pure Mind—nor has he ever discussed it in the past that you can recall; and you’ve been at his center for over twenty years. Pure Mind is off his radar unlike with the great Zen masters of the past who tirelessly taught their students about Mind and helped them to realize it.
But in reality nothing has changed. Only your staid beliefs have changed. For a number of reasons, you were deceived. Deception is a major part of modern life. Or let’s be nice and call it fiction. At best modern life presents a useful fiction—that’s all. There is really no big bang. There is no string theory. It’s mathematical fiction at its best. Ready for more? Medical doctors are the third leading cause of death. For the most part they don’t cure disease. For the most part they just suppress the symptoms of a disease then send you a huge bill. It’s all one big profit making scheme. That you believe in this medical fiction is useful. It helps you get through life. It gives you hope.
Religion, specifically Buddhism, is not immune either. One Dharma center after another is staffed with deceivers. Do you really believe they’ve been to the other shore? Look into their eyes. Do you really believe they have crossed the vast ocean of birth and death and stand on yonder shore of nirvana? Their whole scam rests on authority—yes, authority—in addition to your obedience and credulity. Obedience is pretty much what you learned during those years of K thru 12 in which your brain was scrubbed clean of critical thinking skills and spirit. If you were lucky, you escaped. You ran to the arms of nature and found her solitude. You sat still under a large granite overhang and let her wind, like a leaf blower, blow away the debris of civilization which incrusted your heart.
In raw nature there are neither lies nor deceptions. In this exquisite solitude, you can search for the mysterious substance of reality. It is the stuff space is made of, including electrons and positrons. It is what your thoughts are made of including every fiction you lived in or chased after. See this substance, otherwise called ‘pure Mind’, and you’ve crossed to the other shore. Then on that shore looking back over the crossed waters you will, for the first time, learn what the world is—but not until then.
It seems to me the muse has befriended you again. Good article. One could say, fair and balanced news from the other shore.
Posted by: minx | December 29, 2010 at 06:41 AM