The Zennist

Compassion

I know this may shock some, but there is no compassion in the modern world.  Yes, there are acts of kindness—many in fact.  There are people dedicated to helping others by the millions.  But this should not be confused with compassion or karuna.  

The ideal way to describe compassion is that when the ultimate essence of one person meets with the ultimate essence of another, compassion is experienced.  It is like light coming together with light.  But if we have not found the necessary depth within ourselves how might we be compassionate towards others?  The honest answer is that we can’t.  This doesn’t mean that we can’t be kind or gentle, caring or loving.  But this is not compassion.

To the extent that we live shallow lives never once going beyond the level of thoughts, internal dialogue and emotions, it is not possible to be open to compassion or to be compassionate.  On this same note, a Buddha can be compassionate for obvious reasons, extending compassion directly to someone’s inmost self who is even unaware of it.  And it is true to say that Buddhas are always extending compassion to worldlings (prithagjana) helping them to awaken; to see the absolute and end their suffering

It is only when we move beyond the threshold of thoughts, internal dialogue and our every changing emotions that we begin to sense, for the first time, the compassion of the Buddhas which never stop. 

 

Are we all just automata?

I was struck by this story yesterday from Agence France-Presse.  Researchers declared the Buddhist monk, Mathieu Ricard, the happiest man they had ever tested. 

“Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard’s skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.”

Okay, so what's the big deal?  The monk, Mathieu Ricard explains it this way.

"It's a wonderful area of research because it show that meditation is not just blessing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are."

If you missed the big deal, what drew my attention was that the monk turned neuroscience on its head: meditation changes the brain!  First, this is a strike against T.H. Huxley who believed each of us was no more that an automaton.

“The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be completely without any power of modifying that working, as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.... The soul stands to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck ... to the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men.... We are conscious automata" (William James, The Principles of Psychology Volume One, p. 131).

In a nutshell, Huxley believed that it is the brain that acts; consciousness is an illusion; an epiphenomenon if you like.

Following in the footsteps of T.H. Huxley—and not out of step with cognitive neuroscience—we learn that Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner,

“rejects entirely the noiton of human beings as free agents, asserting that all behavior is in fact involuntary and that the notion of conscious will is simply an illusion that facilitates social life” (Kelly & Kelly, Irreducible Mind, p. 345).

But if all this boils down to the conclusion that we are automata, why consciousness in the first place, or why the illusion of self-agency when our actions are involuntary?  As for the Buddhist monk, Mathieu Ricard, are we supposed to believe that one day his brain just decided to meditate while another brain decided to kill itself while still another brain decided to drop out of school and sell drugs?

 Let me conclude with this.  One of Bishop George Berkeley’s detractors said to him that the "ideas" were simply phenomena of the brain.  To this Berkely rejoined: "But is not the brain itself only a sensually percepted thing?  If it is so, the brain itself can be reduced to the "ideas"" (i.e. to the elementary units of perception).  Maybe the good Bishop’s dictum, "esse est percipi"(to be is to be perceived) is more true than we think. 

The need for teachers and a group

Q:  Could you share some of your thoughts on teachers.

A:  Yes, of course.

Q:  If a person is a beginner do they need a teacher or can they teach themselves?

A:  It really depends on the individual.  Not everyone is the same.  Some people have good karma sufficient to allow them to understand what the Buddha’s discourses are pointing to—others don’t.  Some people, let’s say, need a teacher for five minutes; for others, a lifetime wouldn’t be long enough.  Again, it’s really an individual thing.  Now if you want to learn various rituals—yeah, join a Tibetan group.  If you want to do sitting, join a Soto Zen group.  A beginner can try different Buddhist groups.  No harm in that.  But a beginner shouldn’t close off their mind either believing that doing zazen is the way, or chanting the title of a Sutra.

Q:  Didn’t you have a teacher?

A:  Yes I did.  For a 20 year old he was okay at the time.  But looking back now, he didn’t know very much.  He was basically trained by his teacher to do funerals for the Japanese community.  How much Buddhism do you really have to know to do that?  About zip.  I can teach anyone what I learned in under five minutes.  Don’t stare.  Be very mindful of everything that you do and daydream about—be mindful all the time.  But this won’t even get you to first base.  I was thankful I found the Lankavatara Sutra in the temple’s library.  For some strange reason I was drawn to it.  I was like a blind person and this Sutra was like the cure, although I had a difficult time understanding any of it at first.  In those days I was a real dunce.  Spiritually, I was asleep snoring away.  My teacher wasn’t any brighter when it came to really grasping what the message of the Buddha was.  He was just farther down the road than I was at the time.  I think most beginners are just looking for another mom and dad.  They are not at the stage of asking, “When I look into my own crazy, disheveled mind what does this pure Mind look like?”  It’s not yet a matter of life and death like you’re in a prison and need to escape or get hung by the neck.  To one degree or another we are all spiritually lazy.  It doesn’t help having a teacher letting you spiritually snore away, either.  A good Buddhist group has to be more like a military boot camp it terms of trying to get you to spiritually wake up.  But that requires a teacher who at least has awakened to pure Mind, if only for a split second.  These kind of teachers are rare.

Q:  Some Buddhists I have met say that a person really needs to have a teacher and be in a Buddhist community.  What’s your take on that?

A:  Again, it is an individual thing.  If someone said that to you—well, they’re just telling you more about their own personality.  They need a family.  Maybe they just need a place to hang out because they are lonely.  I don’t want to judge these people—maybe that’s what they need and all they can do.  Fine, join the club.  But is this real Buddhism?  I don’t think so.  If a person spends five or ten years with a teacher and a group, are they able to grasp what the Lankavatara Sutra is saying—do they have Bodhicitta or the Light of Mahyana?  Have they entered the current, sotapatti?  The answer is pretty obvious. They are not even close.

Q:  Do you think that maybe beginners rely too much on teachers?

A:  Yes—and they don’t know it.  But here is the weird thing, they don’t really want to learn about Buddhism.  If the teacher acted like a university professor and asked the students to write up a summary on chapters of a Sutra, they might all quit.

Q:  So when is a person not a beginner?

A:  When they have awakened to the pure Mind, even for a finger snap.  If you are thinking that this means a person could be a beginner for fifty years you’re right.  As I stress on this blog, Buddhism is all about seeing pure Mind.  If I can get one or two blog readers to awaken, I am a happy old dude.

Q:  Do you have your own group?

A:  Yes, all the people who visit this blog and all the kids who hang out at the coffee shop I go to everyday. 

Q:  So how do you teach somebody at a coffee shop?

A:  You’d be surprised.  The light of Mahayana works in mysterious ways.  The kids in the coffee shop are struggling to graduate, to get a job, find someone to be in love with and so on.  My job is just to remind them of compassion and spirit; that essentially we are all spiritual beings who have always been free of suffering—we just got sidetracked by desire for what is really not us—and it's hard to give up.  When they are ready for more, I give them more.

A fool's path

Many of us are on a path of self-discovery.  We really want to answer the question, “Who am I?” sufficiently to be happy and free of the burden of suffering and our eventual death.  With such an insight, we hope to live a life that is open to life; having the smile of an old Zen sage.  

Some of us hope to find such an answer by going from one religious teaching to another, hopefully to find the one that best suits us.  But this is not the way to find out who we really are.  It is a kind of fool’s version of self-discovery that consists of one failure after another failure with no end in sight.  

Besides religion there are, in fact, many kinds of fool’s paths, from following the path of consumerism, to raising a family, joining the military, or becoming an artist—you name it. 

To really find out who we are demands, above all else, that we seek out the one who asks the question who is beyond mental imaging and internal words.  This is very subtle.  For if we don’t begin to look deeply in this direction for the source of this voice that asks the question, we will be on another fool’s path.  Always we have to keep in mind that very deep within us is the very fountain of life.  To be more precise, deep within us is the Buddha-nature.  

Taking this all together, Buddhism should challenge us in a huge way.  It should demand of us to accomplish the seeming impossible; to go beyond a limit we imagine cannot be traversed.  Without such a challenge, the path we are on is more than likely one for fools who only want to remain fools, never to learn who they really are; never to answer the question, “Who am I?”

 

Two questions that science can't answer

For its 125th anniversary, a celebratory edition of the magazine Science (1 July 2005) was published which explored some important unanswered questions that face contemporary science.  From a Buddhist standpoint (I have in mind the Lankavatara Sutra) the first two questions are very interesting.  They are: "What is the universe made of?" and "What is the biological basis of consciousness?"

I should not surprise anyone who reads this blog by saying that the stuff of the universe is pure Mind (cittamatra).  This is not merely a hypothesis, it is self-verifiable, although it takes some effort to get to where Mind is realized to be absolute.  Without this realization, we are stuck with just another hypothesis.  

I need to mention that the theory of Mind being the substance of the universe has not escaped Western thinkers.  William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879), the great English mathematician and philosopher, postulated that our material universe is essentially “mind-stuff” (Clifford coined this term in 1878).  Both Max Planck, a theoretical physicist, and Arthur Stanley Eddington, an astrophysicist, were on the same track as Clifford.

If science is forced to come to the conclusion that Mind is the very stuff of the universe; that the physical world is no longer observer independent, we will find ourselves on square one of a new world unlike anything in recent historical memory.  Although this is not likely to happen next week a paradigm shift seems to be occurring when we look into some of the startling implications of quantum mechanics.

“It is therefore possible to assume that the unitary mechanics applies to the entire physical universe and that wave function collapse occurs at the last possible moment, in the mind itself. This, of course, assumes a non-physical mind” ( Zvi Schreiber, The Nine Lives of Schroedinger's Cat).

To use Buddhist terminology, what is essentially being said is that our physical universe is a dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) of pure Mind which, itself, never gets originated, that is, fashioned into a some thing.

Turning to the second question: "What is the biological basis of consciousness?" the raw fact is that there is no biological basis for consciousness.  Consciousness, for example, can act on brain tissue in the example of the placebo effect or using a meditation exercise.  In fact, in quantum mechanics we could say that it is consciousness that measures the brain.  But as we might expect from a hardcore physicalist like the late Carl Sagan this can't be.

"The cerebral cortex, where matter is transformed into consciousness, is the point of embarkation for all our cosmic voyages."

This is just patent nonsense, not to mention the fact that it has never been proven that consciousness is transformed matter.  We have no cosmic voyage to make where by it is necessary to transform matter into consciousness.  The only real cosmic voyage is to realize, eventually, bodies made of mind (manomayakaya); to see that our life is not limited by a clump of finite biological matter—far from it, it is eternal.

Bodhicitta: a close encounter

Q:  I gather from The Zennist blog that Bodhicitta is a major milestone in Mahayana Buddhism.  Without it you’re no Bodhisattva. So what is bodhicitta like?

A:  In my own case, and I am not ashamed to say it, Bodhicitta is more like a UFO encounter of the 5th kind.  What I have to tell you is only a general overview of it, but one that is helpful and needed in today’s Buddhist culture which is dangerously drifting  into the rocky shoals of materialism.  If you have any aversion to the supernatural, Bodhicitta won’t happen.  When I had my first glimpse into Mind in 1969 I kept meditating on it nonstop.  There wasn’t a day that I didn’t.  Then in 1976 something strange began to happen, the clear light began to grow in me for some unexplained reason. To make a long story short, a spiritual being entered me and demanded of me, “You have something to show me.”  Well, the only thing I had to show was my meditational practice—my glimpse into Mind.  I demonstrated it to this spiritual being.  I must have hit the jackpot.  The clear light really increased, my friends who happened to be there at the time felt it also.  All of us were blissed out.  At this point being skeptical is not an option.  The three of us were blissed out—and I had this being communicating with me, a female-like personality who, by the way, had a great sense of humor.  At times the bliss was so powerful I couldn’t do anything but sit.  My other friends had to do the same.  Over several days I could ask the spiritual being to leave or to come back.  I had to do this because I couldn’t even drive or run errands.  I mean the bliss is powerful.  Then one night the being told me to stand up and hold my arms in a certain way.  Suddenly a great being came in front of me.  I showed him my meditation practice.  Then another one came, and still another.  They empowered me with such energy, I was almost terrified.  The spiritual being instructed me to stand there until they were finished with their empowerment (I had no idea what they were doing).  The next day, I realized like Dorothy in the movie, The Wizard of Oz, that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.  From that point on, I was seeing the world from a non-human perspective.  Everything I beheld, including my ordinary thoughts, were bliss-like.  The food I ate was bliss, the trees I saw were bliss—even the sun was, which I could look into for as long as I wished (my friends could also do this).  I thought to myself that this must be how the Buddha and his disciples saw things. What a cool way to live!  During this time I learned that death really didn’t exist.  One could even heal the sick and become invisible to others (my friends could do all of this).  But most strange was the fact that when you looked at people, only a few seemed to see you.  The rest looked like Zombies.  The ones who could see you were smiling and beautiful—just so happy. During this time I was told many things, even where I would be in exactly ten years and the fact that I would be sustained by these beings who were my teachers.  Okay!  I went along with the program.  I turned my life over to their teaching.  I was convinced. 

Q:  Did you ever doubt this afterwards?  Did you ever think you were crazy?

A:  It was not at all subjective.  Anyone who was with me either felt this powerful light and could do what I did or they were like Zombies—the walking dead.  The spiritual being who was with me made sure nothing subjective was ever the case.  

Q:  So did this state eventually go away?

A:  Yes, and for the simple reason that these beings could only push back my all-too-human perception of the world for about two weeks.  Then the force of my old habits took over.  After that, the path I entered was one of self-development.  I had to figure out how to be like them—back engineering what had happened to me, in other words.  An empowerment such as this, I discovered much later, let’s you see what a Buddha sees.  The only problem is, is that you are like a baby Buddha at the time.  You still have to grow up. This is the path of the Bodhisattva, of keeping faith with Bodhicitta never forgetting it.  It is also learning about desire for material things, that it occludes the spiritual light.  The Zombie-like people were just the spiritually blind.  You might talk to these people for years, they would never be anymore than spiritually blind.  I saw them as being deluded, hateful, and desirous of the wrong things.

Q:  So you had no compassion for these spiritually blind people?

A:  Compassion is always going out, like the rays of the sun.  And like with the sun, you can close your eyes or open them.  The spiritual beings only teach those who will fully accept the spiritual path—make the required leap for it, in other words.  It is a fool who imagines that a Buddha or a Jesus seeks out special, hardcore assholes to awaken.  I write this blog to benefit spiritually oriented people—not assholes.  Unfortunately, there are too many assholes in Buddhism—the dog in the manger—who want to destroy the true teachings of the Buddha.  They will insinuate that what happened to me doesn’t happen in Buddhism.  Well, they are the crazy ones.  I guess they’ve never actually studied Buddhism.

Q:  What happened to you makes Buddhism seem difficult for the average person to understand let alone accomplish.  Do you think that this is the reason why people much prefer to have a dumbed down Buddhism?

A:  Sure, one very much in agreement with their own stupid views of the world.  That is like a fly who wishes a Buddha fly would make a world of great smelling shit.  But it’s not going to happen.  Buddhism is really about awakening to the absolute substance of reality—the substance that makes up thoughts, space, electrons, gods, ordinary humans, animals, ham sandwiches, and so on.  This substance is Mind.  When these beings empowered me, what I saw after that was all phenomena, including even our sun, are just compositions of Mind.  To see the world that way is truly beautiful. To see it otherwise is samsara.

Q:  Do you worry about having shared this experience with me?  I mean it is strange.  I don’t think a lot of people who read this are going to feel comfortable with what you’ve said.

A:  At my age I can’t worry about such things.  What happened to me happened to me.  Anyone who says it didn’t is certainly a liar—and has bad karma.  The amazing thing about this experience that I shared with you is that for me the Buddhist canon makes perfect sense.  Admittedly, at times it is like a jigsaw puzzle.  But all the pieces fit together.  What makes Buddhism difficult to comprehend is the fact that we have never entered the spiritual stream.  We are clueless as to what spirit is.  So we don’t know how to read the canon—not in the right way.

What Zen is not

For the curious and for beginners it is much easier to understand Zen by ascertaining what it is not.  For example, Zen is not a science of behavior, which falls under psychology.  Nor is Zen, when we look back to its historical roots, just about sitting.  Zen does not embrace agnosticism, either, or materialism.  Zen is not theological.

Zen, as with Buddhism, in general, is an enigma for the modern West.  It could be argued that Zen has more in common with Plotinus (204/5–270 C.E.) and Meister Eckhart (1260–1328 C.E.) than with anything modern such as psychology or materialism.  

Moving in the same direction as Zen, Plotinus and Eckhart point to a thoroughly transcendent state which is beyond the reach of the human sphere (in Buddhism the human sphere is prithagjana-bhumi) including the human body.  Plotinus speaks of the One which transcends all manner of being and knowledge; while Eckhart speaks of the desert, the divine abyss, and the naught.

Such language, which is intended to point even beyond language, is hard for many Westerners to comprehend, who are habituated to sensuality and materialism as if there is nothing else besides.  Why they bother with Zen is difficult to figure out (at least for me it is) given its mystical background.  The only plausible reason is modern Zen is no longer the ‘mystical’ Zen of its homeland, China.  Over time, it has been transmuted into a kind of minimalist religion in which experiencing the immediacy of the temporal body by means of ‘just sitting’ is the highest goal of Zen.  Arguably, this is not the unique Buddhist meditation (jhâna/dhyâna) the Buddha described to Aggivessana in the Mahasacaka Sutra (M. i. 247) consisting of four meditations or dhyanas.

 

The average person is like a dog on a leash tied to a post

Why should the Buddha harp so much on the Five Aggregates of form, feeling, perception, habitual tendencies and consciousness that, fundamentally, they are not the self or in Pali, anattâ?  Obviously, somebody believes the Five Aggregates are the self which the Buddha thinks is wrong.  So the next question is this:  “Just who are these people who believe the Five Aggregates are the self?”  Well, here appears to be the answer.

“[Like a dog on a leash tied to a post] the uninstructed worldling (assutavâ puthujjano) ... regards form as self ... feeling as self ... perception as self ... volitional formations as self ... consciousness as self ....  He just keeps running and revolving around form, around feeling, around perception, around volitional formations, around consciousness.  As he keeps on running and revolving around them, he is not freed from form, not freed from feeling, not freed from perception, not freed from volitional formations, not freed from consciousness.  He is not freed from birth, aging, and death; not freed from sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair; nor freed from suffering I say” (S. iii. 150).

The simple answer, it is the average person (including the average Buddhist) who believes the Five Aggregates are the self, or the same, believes that the psychophysical body is the self.  All the actions and thoughts of the uninstructed, average person (assutavâ puthujjana) revolve around the psychophysical body.  They know nothing else besides this condition.  It matters not whether they believe in an âtman or not, their self, i.e., their frame of reference, is their temporal body consisting of the Five Aggregates.

The Buddha treats this situation as a serious mistake.  The Buddha then teaches his disciples (ariya-savaka) something quite different.  They are not these Five Aggregates.

"But the instructed noble disciple ... does not regard form as self ... nor feeling as self ... nor perception as self ... nor volitional formations as self ... nor consciousness as self....He no longer keeps running and revolving around form, around feeling, around perception, around volitional formations, around consciousness.  As he no longer keeps running and revolving around them, he is freed from form, freed from feeling, freed from perception, freed from volitional formations, freed from consciousness.  He is freed from birth, aging, and death; freed from sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair; free from suffering, I say" (S. iii. 150).

The Buddha is teaching his disciples that, fundamentally, they are not these Five Aggregates.  Is this a teaching of the self or âtman (P., attâ)?  Yes it is.  What we truly are has nothing to do with our psychophysical body. We transcend it.  Our problems begin with mistaking our self with what is not our self.  This not-self (anattâ) is never other than impermanent and suffering. 

While a great deal of ink has been use to tell the general public that the Buddha denied the self, these two passages from the same discourse tell us who it is that regards the Five Aggregates as their self and, specifically, who doesn’t regard the Five Aggregates as their self.  This leads to the conclusion that the subject of self is not as important as knowing what is not our self.  

Is Zen dead?

The underlying spiritual message of Zen is not dead because what it has to teach is unborn—what’s unborn doesn’t die.  As for the Western institution of Zen—well, yeah—it’s dying.  But it’s been dying for a long time, beginning back in the 1950s.  The death of an institution is usually a slow death.  In the case of Western Zen, it is not yet in the intensive care unit (ICU) on life support, but it’s getting there.  There is nothing much anyone can do to change the fact that the institution of Zen is going to be dead in a generation or two.  The institution is quite adept at destroying itself.

 Wrongly, in the West, the focus of Zen has been on building up an institution of formalists.  These pious formalists work hard at preserving the rituals of Zen in which zazen, itself, has become nothing more than a ritual.  Nothing is really achieved by doing zazen.  If anything, it produces a placebo effect.  Again, what the West has preserved is the form of Zen—not its content. 

It is not all of Zen’s fault that it is failing, either.  The Japanese form of Zen can be adapted to the West but there has to be a spiritual content added to it which, regrettably, the Japanese form of Zen has too little of because it, also, is dying.

What is astonishing in an ironic way, is that the literature of Zen, which includes the Zen literature of China and Korea, has one continuous, underlying message: realize absolute Mind which goes by many different names.  Zen, in fact, is founded on the Lankavatara Sutra which is all about pure Mind (cittamatra).  But why isn’t this taken up in a major way in Western Zen? which should have the realization of Mind at its center—not zazen.

I have had to conclude over these many years that Western Zennists, the bulk of them, are spiritually retarded when it comes to really and truly understanding what Buddhism and Zen Buddhism are about.  Perhaps it shall ever remain a mystery as to why Western Zennists and Western Buddhists, in general, to this day fail to see Buddhism’s monism in which absolute spirit is the substance of the universe.  In addition, we can verify this  for ourselves.  The intrinsic spiritual substance, that we have never once ceased being can, in fact, awaken to itself.  But it cannot do it through an institution which prizes and rewards formalism to the exclusion of genuine spiritual gnosis.

Beginner's meditation

Q:  What kind of meditation do you recommend for a beginner like myself?

A:  There are many different approaches to meditation.  Various schools of Buddhism have their own particular kind of meditation.  Not all are the same.  Generally speaking, all require that you sit with your legs crossed with your spine straight like a plumber’s line with a bob on the end of it.  Next, your hands are to be put into a particular mudra.  Some schools teach that the dominate right should cradle the left hand with the tips of the thumbs touching making a flattened oval-like shape.  Overall, this comes under the heading of meditation for a beginner which takes some time to accomplish because we in the West are chair-sitters.  Beginners need to keep in mind what the maid goal of meditation is.  It’s trying to discover pure Mind in our own mind which is like a madhouse with a never-ending internal dialogue going on, not to mention a lot of weird mental images—oh, and I forgot to add emotions.  In a word, meditation begins by identifying all this crap.  By doing this we observe that our mind is anything but calm and controlled.  For a beginner it is important to become familiar with the territory of their crazy human mind.  Hopefully, the beginner learns not to get caught up in it—not to feed it.  If, for example, we fly into a jealous rage just having learned that our lover is sleeping with someone else, the only means of controlling or taming this emotion is by non-action towards it.  It is like having the flu.  We just wait it out and eventually it subsides.  Sitting in meditation helps us to tame this wild emotion as with other emotions such as anger.  Basically we observe the theater of our mind.  Next, we try not to feed what is going on in it.  Then we focus our attention on something other than the craziness going on in our mind.

Q:  What would you recommend I focus upon?

A:  Again, there are different approaches as to what, in particular, a beginner might focus on.  A beginner might focus on the mental image of a Buddha statue or just focus on the Buddha’s crown or his face which is always calm.  The beginner could also focus on the dharma wheels of his hands and so on.  If you wish, put a Buddha statue in front of you or a picture of the Buddha and focus on some aspect of it.  According to the beginner’s ability to focus, there are various things to focus on some gross; some not so gross.  Keep in mind that by bringing the mind under control—taming it—we can then begin to do real meditation which is about trying to discover pure Mind which is luminous and pure—being thoroughly empty of any and all determinations.  It’s here right now—but with a wild mind, fed on gross images, we can’t possibly see it.  An important point to bring up is that beginners meditation deals only with consciousness which is the fifth skandha and the fact that it is also mutually conditioning.  If the beginner gets caught up in anger, as consciousness, it can quickly end up in a vicious circle affecting the body.  On the other hand, if the beginner puts his attention on something like the image of the Buddha, in time he will calm down.  Call it a placebo/nocebo effect but this is the way consciousness works.

Q:  That is interesting.  I never thought of meditation that way.  So if I am around circumstances that are anything but calm—say at my job—I can get sucked into it and become anxious.  Or if I engage in focusing on the Buddha or chanting his name, I will calm down.  Is that right?

A:  For all practical purposes, you’re correct.  Think about reading verses from the Dhammapada for a solid hour—or just sitting in zazen.  Eventually, you become aware that you are more relaxed and calmed down.  But when it comes to real meditation we have to transcend consciousness.  Whatever grade of consciousness we are in, it never escapes samsara.  No state of consciouness is perfect.  Consciousness is absolute Mind split into subject and object.  We have to go beyond the bewitching power of this split being always deceived; chasing after illusions.  This split or duality hides Mind.  But what happens when we really see absolute Mind?  Because it is the fundamental substance of our thoughts and also external things, everything is seen to be illusory.  Things are just configurations of absolute Mind.  This is what the Buddha’s meditation is about: overcoming subtle grades of consciousness until pure Mind is uncovered.  Right now, you might not be ready for this.  That time comes when you can’t give up looking for this pure Mind in your crazy, all-too-human mind.