Returning from the Steady Hand Pour House (my local coffee shop) I kept hearing faint, hardly audible music—choir music to be exact. I couldn’t locate its source. I even went up into my attic. I checked my portable radio. It was off. The computer was silent. I kept searching for the source of the music. Then I realized my iPhone that was in my right pocket was playing the music!
I said to myself, there has to be a blog here. Yep, there was. It is all about looking within after you’ve spent a long time in the external pursuit of truth, obviously not getting anywhere.
So what does looking within actually mean? It is not about just listening to one’s internal dialogue or dealing with one’s emotions, let’s say trying to calm them down. In a way, this is still external. Even sitting in zazen is external. Real looking within is more about seeing or beholding the very substance of our thoughts.
As I keep stressing in these blogs, we are intrinsically the absolute substance (i.e. Buddha-nature). But here’s the problem: we don’t recognize ourselves in a phenomenal mode or the same, in antithesis, which includes this human body together with its psychical life which also includes thoughts, internal dialogue, mental images, and emotions.
Yes, we’re clueless unwakened Buddhas wandering (samsarana), going from one illusion to the next without seeming end.
The way out of this mess is by looking within, that is, by deep introspection. This means that all phenomena has a limit. While we may think that there is only birth and death, what is really happening is there is an ongoing rise of phenomena followed by its cessation and then a return-to-self or as a physicist might put it, we enter zero-phase for a split second. Then the cycle begins anew. As you, the reader, might guess at this point the properly trained Buddhist adept doesn’t miss the zero-phase. The adept yokes with it. His whole being suddenly becomes illuminated as a result. The adept just hit the spiritual jackpot! This is Zen’s transmission of Mind to Mind or the awakening of pure Mind to itself (bodhicittotpada). From here the adept then enters the path to Buddhahood, which constitutes a huge magnification of this initial awakening (bodhi).
Nice post, though it also strikes me as a "waste of time" to separate/label internal/external in order to point this out.
Create false target, destroy false target. Repeat...
Can illusory appearances be wasted?
Posted by: K Grey | August 07, 2011 at 02:24 PM
see the movie "magdelene sisters" about the sick peverse catholic scum and their jew-on-a-stick insane nuns/demonic whores
Posted by: Java Junkie | August 04, 2011 at 02:10 AM
sorry coot, but there is external truth, socalled the logos "as above so below" by which the Platonists abductively deduced the Absolute and the means towards same
specificity and clarification is a mark of wisdom to wit your arrow didnt fly true
there is external truth just not ultimate truth
lux et veritas
Posted by: Java Junkie | August 03, 2011 at 09:17 PM