The Zennist

Why we have to look within

The truth which Buddhism wishes us to realize is not found on the outside. Why is this so?  It is because our human senses are far too limited.  They are only for the purpose of species-specific biological adaptation (Darwinian fitness). Vision, for example, is only one octave when in reality there are many higher octaves. Hearing is also limited as with the rest of our human senses.  The only place where there is no such sensory limitation is within in the very self (S. pratyâtman).  

Within, we have the potential to look beyond the fabric of space/time discovering a proto-field which cannot in anyway be described except to say it is unconditioned—kind of like 'superposition' in Quantum Mechanics.  This field, if we can call it that for now, is a very real state which lies beyond the range of our human conceptualizing intellect to disclose.  The Buddha taught this realization as a fact.  There is an actual attainment.  There is also verification—a subject which tends to be overlooked in Buddhism.

Verification assumes that beings all have the Buddha-nature or âtman which is the absolute criterion.  Presently, beings are just asleep—they don't yet see the Buddha-nature face to face.  It is somewhat like saying we are all rich, we just have to figure out a way to earn wealth.  Right now, we are just getting by.

Given that we are this absolute criterion which makes verification possible, it is also a given that nothing chimes with the absolute criterion or the same, Buddha-nature.  Everything is more or less unsatisfactory or off kilter for us.  We seem to never meet, perfectly, with what perfectly agrees with this criterion.  

We never found truth on the outside as mentioned earlier because our senses are inadequate.  So we decided to look within, but this doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere either, since we are stuck on the human conceptualizing intellect—it's our makeshift criterion.  We can't seem to escape its bewitching power which goes so far as to deceiving us into believing we've realized our Buddha-nature.  Try as we might to talk ourselves into it (self-deception) we come away disappointed.

Buddhism: strict determinism or indeterminism?

The Buddha neither subscribed to what we might call in the West strict determinism which implies that every event has a previous cause; that all things are unchangeable and invariable (niyata) in their course; nor did he uphold the theory of complete causeless arising (adhicca-samuppanna) which in the West we call indeterminism (the universe is governed by blind chance). 

Buddhism's position is between the strictly determined (niyata) and the undetermined (adhiccasamuppanna). For example, birth requires sperm, egg and the consciousness of a discarnate spirit called a gandhabba (M. i. 265).  Only then can death follow which means there in an inevitability in this: we who are born will all die.  With our death our consciousness is now laden with our volitional patterns (or karmic impressions) which will connect with a nama-rupa (the third nidana in the 12-Nidanas).  We will experience some kind of birth again either, hopefully, as a god (deva) or a human, or maybe some kind of lower being.

Our present psychophysical body that we inhabit, we need to keep in mind, was previously willed out according to the Buddha.  Our birth was not the result of blind chance—a roll of the cosmic dice.  On the same track, we are willing our next state of being in which consciousness is being continually modified by our actions and desires. At this very moment we are capable of profound change or we can stick with the same old pattern of behavior. 

Meditation: complete transcendence

Meditation as understood by the Buddha is based upon an ontological foundation that goes much deeper than what classically oriented natural science has been able to provide.  To be sure, the depth of the human mind goes beyond the brain.  

The mind-brain connection is a very real connection except that the mind cannot be described in physical or biological terms.  No amount of forcing mind to be subservient to the brain, or just ignoring it, will work anymore.  It is like trying to get people to believe that music comes from the single radio sitting on the book shelf.  Such a view ignores the ubiquitous radio signal.  Likewise, those who postulate that the human brain is primary ignore mind.

The real goal of meditation is to penetrate through the psychophysical body, even going beyond its space and time position, all of which amounts, simply, to a return-to-self (absolute verification).  But this is also not only a return, but also seeing, for the first time, that mind is all-penetrating.  Nothing stands in its way insofar as all things are its configurations.  This is mind as absolute.

Hitherto, the adept was bound down to phenomena, even the adepts own subjective world.  The adept's mind was in a state of dependence; attached to the psychophysical organism.  The adept lacked the right vision/insight to get beyond the configurations of mind including both the outer and inner world.

Buddhist meditation really has nothing to do with physical positions such as sitting.  It has everything to do with complete transcendence; or realizing that we are free, immaterial spiritual bodhi-beings.  Nothing can bind us because everything is of a spiritual substance which is what we are. Things are our projections.

 

Your homework :)

The Lankavatara Sutra shall ever remain a difficult discourse to comprehend because, mainly, it is suggesting that we do the impossible which is to transcend our species-specific world.  Of this species-specific world Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Science at University of California at Irvine, has this to say:

"We must recognize that all of our perceptions of space, time and objects no more reflect reality than does our perception of a flat earth. It's not just this or that aspect of our perceptions that must be corrected, it is the entire framework of a space-time containing objects, the fundamental organization of our perceptual systems, that must be recognized as a mere species-specific mode of perception rather than an insight into objective reality."

This is quite an amazing statement but then Donald Hoffman is quite an amazing dude who is doing is own 21st century version of a Copernican revolution.  Instead of trying to prove that our consciousness comes from our brain, in which every major university is trying to do, it would be much easier to prove that human brains—in fact, our entire species-specific world—comes from consciousness.  Yes, it's what the Lankavatara Sutra is teaching.  Donald Hoffman is just giving the Lanka the scientific power to attack the materialist defensive position and destroy it.  Here is a lecture by him which I have watched several times.  When you are done, read his paper, Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem. 

 

 

The early days of my voyage of discovery

Anyone who makes a new discovery not inline with the status quo such as some settled scientific theory always runs the risk of being laughed at, persecuted, ostracized, or even murdered.  Real substantial change is a frightening thing for 99% of humanity.  Especially, for those who have a vested interest in not letting change happen, since change represents for them a loss of their power and wealth.  Fear of change drives their behavior and cruelty.  

When Buddhism entered the West certain parts of it were acceptable for public consumption insofar as Buddhism appeared to deny a spiritual content or anything of a transcendent of super-worldly nature (later this was found not to be true).  Over time, it became psychologized offering meditation to the world; a sure fire means of dealing with day to day stress.  The effectiveness of meditation seemed to have been proven by the extensive efforts of Transcendental Meditation (TM) which being somewhat of a pioneer in meditation for the West, conducted a number of scientific studies (needless to say the hardcore materialists don't buy any of this since in their opinion brains, not minds, control us). 

Coming to my own encounter with Zen Buddhism over these many years, I took Zen further which, historically, went only as far as one-pointedness of mind.  I learned from this particular experience that this permits one to go to a much higher level where there is a direct encounter with a super-essential being, a spiritual friend, and what can only be described as an empowerment by Buddhas. This is verified by the Lankavatara Sutra under the phrase "light of Mahayana".  I have been more or less secretive about this because the modern disposition is pretty much barbaric when it comes to the subject of spirituality.  It is as if there were some kind of unseen demonic force or thought police governing the hearts and minds of people.  Step out of the norm and you soon find out who the thought police are.

Coming back to my own experience, I had a super vision of how the world really was which lasted for what seemed like two weeks (there is no sense of time).  This was to my amazement real Buddhism, the kind expressed in the Lankavatara Sutra.  Everything was a configuration of Mind/light for want of a better term.  I also saw first hand the implications of this which were, needless to say, astonishing.  This, to be sure, was a future world not yet here but, hopefully, a world that will be here one day where the light of compassion is unceasing.  During this period, this super-essential being who guided me, which seemed to be female, explained the Dharma to me, told me what I would be doing ten years in the future and even told me I would be using an Apple computer (yes, it was Apple).  This was around June, before or after the time Jobs and Woz coined the term in 1976 for their company.

Eventually, I found that the Internet was a good place to show the corrected Buddhism using my Apple computer!  This is when I realized just how dominated Buddhism was by counterfeit Buddhism and fake Buddhists, none of whom could understand Buddhism in countless lifetimes.  The single most thing they resisted, waging war against, was the simple fact, which I discovered, that what animates us is deathless, eternal and compassionate whereas the animated is finite, being always subject to birth and death; trapped within a vicious circle.  From this the most simple and basic deductions about Buddhism come.  The most notable is do not cling to the animated!  The other is connect (samadhi) with the animative.  When I looked at the Pali Nikayas and the Lankavatara Sutra I laughed.  It was not a laugh at these marvelous discourses but a laugh at the abject spiritual poverty of the human race which made ever effort to maintain their poverty.

Those who defend the status quo are perhaps the most mentally ill of all our species; who are just defending a vast prison system with its wardens, prison guards and brainwashed inmates.  Those who wish to escape this vast prison system can do so but the animated is not the vehicle for such an escape.  We first have to learn to recognize the prison then to psychically renounce it.  Then one day we will catch a glimpse of true freedom by one-pointedness of mind.

The factor of woo woo

The "woo" or "woo woo" factor generally refers to any belief in the supernatural which "big science" has not proven. It can include many religious beliefs and the use of pseudoscientific explanations.  Those who generally accuse someone's belief of being "woo woo" are generally skeptics, materialists, naive realists, or those who believe science is infallible.  The use of it during a debate is an effective tactic of putting a stop to any serious discussion as to the merits of a particular issue such as NDEs (near death experiences), rebirth, karma, spiritual experiences, UFOs, alien abduction, and so on.

 Over the years, just concentrating on a few pet beliefs which rest upon the supposed infallibility of big science I have found that the so called big bang theory has not been verified.  To this day it remains an unverified hypothesis; and yet, it is marketed on the MSM as a settled theory.  The same, I hasten to add, goes with how the sun works and black holes.  Another, is the belief that mind or consciousness is a product of the brain.  This theory is also unverified.  Almost verified is really never verified.  The list goes on of science posturing itself as being more or less infallible when the facts speak differently.  We have only to recall Copernicus who proposed that the Sun was the center of our Solar System, not the Earth.  The settled theory of that period in Western history, the Ptolemaic system, used time to prove that the Sun and the various planets orbited around the Earth.  Copernicus used distance, instead.  Some forty-five years after Copernicus published his work, De Revolutionibus, his theory was still not widely accepted.  Yes, we can call his theory when it first came out to be woo woo.  And so was Max Planck's 'quantum of action' which he announced to the world in 1900 which put an end to 300 years of classical physics which had carelessly excluded the observer.

 Just the other day, on YouTube, I watched Deepak Chopra in a debate get woo wooed for using the term "quantum healing" which he had earlier coined.  In light of what Max Planck said in 1931 to the reporter J. W. N. Sullivan that, "Consciousness, I regard as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness," Chopra still got woo wooed for advocating mind's important role in healing.  That the subjective observer of disease plays no part in their own healing is quite absurd, yet this is still where modern medicine is coming from.  Modern medicine has all but made the use of placebos illegal (they deceive it claims) despite the fact that the placebo effect is just another word for the effect of self-healing!

 If we redefine the "woo woo" factor to mean all unverified claims which, incidentally, can be put into a file named "refined opinions," then almost all of science is pretty much woo woo.  Buddhism's verification, on the other hand, rests upon the notion that the experiences which the Buddha predicts in his discourses, such as the attainment of nirvana, actually obtain.  This is somewhat like saying Tesla's patents, which he claims work, are verified if we can reproduce them.  This is not woo woo. 

Waking up Sam Harris

The author Sam Harris who is a philosopher and a neuroscientist is an interesting guy. On the one hand he has a strong dislike of religious institutions but finds something worthwhile in spirituality such as meditation, for example.  Still, I believe, at bottom he is a diehard materialist as most neuroscientists are.  He also has a certain fondness for Buddhism.  Just guessing, but from what I have read on his blog he moves in the direction of secular Buddhism.

 Yesterday I was reading the first chapter of his book, Waking up when I came across this paragraph.

 That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.

 Taking the Buddhist standpoint, I will say that it is true that as unawakened people we are always dealing with illusion and, most of all, self-deception.  We do it so much day in and day out that the illusion becomes our reality while deceiving ourselves becomes how we deal with the problems of living with illusion.  In light of this, we eventually come to regard our psychophysical body as this is mine, I am this, this is my self.  Illusion, at this point, becomes concrete—it's all too real and painful.  

 How we disengage from the psychophysical self is a core issue in Buddhism.  It is no easy task to get out of such a mindset. 

 Harris is not wrong in saying that spirituality is cutting through the illusion of self.  But the self he is referring to is the psychophysical person who came into the world through their mother's birth canal.  It is the one I am glomming onto believing: this is mine, I am this, this is my self.  This is also the self the Buddha says, again and again, is not the self!  Let me say it again, the psychophysical person that I am glomming onto is not who I really am.  It is not my self or in Pali, anattâ.

 The problem that many Buddhists face and those like Sam Harris is in realizing that complete, all at once disengagement from the psychophysical person, lands one in a positive, spiritual state of being which is indescribable in terms of the former psychophysical person.  One has awakened, in other words, to the animative principle (in Sanskrit, âtman, citta, cetana) only to discover that they are spiritual agents.  From this we can say that we live in the psychophysical body but we are not of it.

 Of those who are disposed to materialism but who like Buddhism they still don't understand the notion of transcendence; that fundamentally we are clinging to what we are not; that if we let go we return home to our true nature which is also the essence of our universe.

A target for discordant comments

The comment section of this blog is for supporters of this blog and for those who have constructive countervailing opinions about what I post. Yes, I could be wrong about things. I make typos and grammatical errors.  I appreciate the corrections. From time to time, I have to ban certain people.  To date I have only done it twice.  Not a bad record.

I was on chat rooms before Netscape came out with their browser.  Back then, the debates were academic which means, among other things, the wrangling was kept to a minimum.  I could only manage to be a spectator as big name scholars fought bloodless battles with their peers.  I must say, it was exciting; like watching a great chess match.  I learned from the debates the importance of first getting the 'big picture' which can only be reached by dhyâna.  Lucky for me back in the late 1960s and in 1976 I had some incredible 'awakening experiences' by which I was able to get the big picture. 

1976 was a watershed time for me, which proved to be extraordinary.  I had a spiritual event like no other which allowed me to see how the pieces of Buddhism's puzzle fit together in which, almost paradoxically, not a single part could explain the whole but the whole (our big picture) could explain the 'why' of the parts.  From this I could see that modern Buddhism had become a contest of the parts against each other.  The big picture was almost always lacking.  No one saw the importance of first having a direct insight into pure Mind.  It was as if the parts were saying, "I am sufficient, don't go any further, dude." 

With the opening of the blogosphere, I saw my chance.  I decided to encourage learning about the big picture (that is, gnosis of pure Mind) and hopefully, at times, show the 'why' of the part[s] most notable why the five aggregate/skandha system was developed as a way of teaching us what is not our true self (the via negativa).  For example, don't confuse material shape (rûpa) with your true self (we find our true self only through gnosis of pure Mind).  Looking back, The Zennist blog was not about what Western Buddhists were learning in their Dharma centers from their teachers.  Students, to be sure, were not learning that the Buddha taught his doctrine (dharma) for the sake of final nirvana without clinging (SN 35:75).  Nirvana, in fact, is something very seldom discussed in Buddhist circles except in an offhand manner.

Because The Zennist is in a weird position, in which it is looking at the big picture—top down—to the parts, it has been accused of being Vedanta.  This criticism, therefore, assumes that Buddhism contains nothing transcendent.  There is no going beyond the pale of the five aggregates/skandhas.  And if you do (Buddha forbid!), that's Vedanta!  To meet this vacuum (the outlawing of the transcendent in Buddhism) modern Buddhists have taught emptiness—the big Void—with their star Nagarjuna leading the charge.  But this is only putting nihilism in place of positive nirvana.  To drag in a line from the movie Star Wars this is only the dark side of the force; said otherwise, it's the worship of absence.

This is not a healthy position for Buddhism to be in.  For The Zennist it means it can become, sometimes, a target for discordant comments which become over time increasingly more personal and outrageous.  In any event, life goes on and so does this blog.  As for the RAM issue, I am working on it. :)

 

My computer has a major RAM problem

I had only 4 G of RAM. I think my 'puter has reached BAM capacity. I am going to the pub to see Tim the university's expert. Bear with me. I have no idea how long it will take. Hopefully, soon.

 

Overcoming suffering

As experiencers coupled with a finite psychophysical body (i.e., the five grasping aggregates), we are always the victims of duhkha (in Pali, dukkha) which is often translated as suffering or pain. 

Duhkha happens to be the first noble truth; it is also the five grasping aggregates (skandhas) (SN 56:13) and also what is not the âtman (yad duhkham tad an-âtmâ). (It is rather odd that modern Buddhism makes an-âtmâ/anattâ the pillar of Buddhism when it is duhkha/suffering—not non-suffering!).

Our rebirth into another suffering body has made us all victims, struggling to avoid duhkha, seemingly, only free in death.  But even that is not a sure bet.  Paradoxically, we will endure hardship and pain in the present to, hopefully, avoid pain in the future.  Only youth seems unaware of duhkha, living as if it were somehow invincible and immune to duhkha, blindly, caught up in desire and passion.

The Buddha defined duhkha this way:

"Painfulness (duhkha, dukkha), painfulness! is the saying, friend Sariputta. But what, friend, is painfulness? There are these three form of painfulness: the sort caused by bodily pain (dukkha dukkhata), the sort caused by psychological change (sankâra dukkhata), the sort caused by the changeable nature of things (viparinama dukkhatâ)" (S. iv. 259).

The overcoming of duhkha was not an easy task even during the time of the Buddha.  It involved seeing beyond the veil of duhkha to that yonder shore where there is no duhkha; connecting with that new world such that one can experience what can only be described as transcendental bliss, called nirvana.