Temporal reality which relates exclusively to the earthly, worldly life only provides us with the illusion of truth. This illusion of truth is not something that is obviously an illusion, either. We can't see this kind of illusion. The illusion of truth begins with the belief this is true or the same, this is real, i.e., actually existing. My life, including the world around me is, for me, true or real. Now the Buddha comes along and says temporal reality is illusory and unreal. By my glomming on to it I have made it seem necessary and all-too-real. The Buddha wants me to believe that I have been deceived by appearances; that I do not know this because of primordial ignorance. In fact, maybe I have confused sense certainty with truth.
Few wish to go down the Buddha's "rabbit-hole" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) which is a metaphor for entry into the unknown which can easily become disorienting; a land where our cultural compass doesn't work anymore. Unlike Lewis Carroll's Alice, few are "burning with curiosity" to go down the rabbit hole. For those burning with curiosity, life in the Buddha's rabbit hole is intended to undermine everything they once believed in as being truth. But for those who are only committed to going down the rabbit hole a few yards:
"Like those of us who do not understand the basic premises of psychic life, Alice insists on applying the rules of logic, the laws of time and space, the assumed fundamentals of the world above the rabbit hole. That is her familiar world, the world of everyday consciousness, manners, routines, things known and loved. But once down the rabbit hole (which Freud would call a “parapraxis, ” an unconscious slip of the foot), she leaves all that and enters a realm where subversion is the order of the day, inversion is normal, logic has completely different premises, and Alice, because she doesn't understand any of this, is the only one in Wonderland who doesn't make sense" (Lyn Cowan, Tracking the White Rabbit: A Subversive View of Modern Culture, p. 14)
Naturally, we would expect the Buddha's Wonderland to be viewed and understood through his discourses including the more recondite ones like the Lotus Sutra, Lankavatara Sutra and the mysterious Avatamsaka Sutra. In this particular Wonderland, everyone is awakened to the One Mind, except us. We are still trying to use our cultural compass to orient us. It still hasn't dawned on us that everything we were taught is probably wrong in respect to the Buddha's teachings. Our education was merely useful—not truth everlasting. It helped us to get from point a to point b in an illusory world. It did not, however, disclose the illusion we lived under. The odd thing about our illusory world is that one day we find a venerated truth cast down (just recently Kirchhoff’s law of thermal emission was cast down). Everything we thought to be true is sooner or later found to be false from big bangs and black holes, to genetic determinism. We deal with this by cognitive dissonance, actively avoiding situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.
Lastly, the seeming irrational quality of Zen koans evoke in us the need to put these koans into a kind of ordinary or everyday logic although this is not where koans are coming from. We fail the see the golden thread which unites all these koans and the so-called Mind to Mind transmission. If we which to be part of the Buddha's Wonderland we have to have kensho: we have to see our true self or nature which is unconditioned; which is beyond the ken of our temporal world. This alone is absolute truth; the ultimately real which cannot deceive us. One final note, the means for getting us here to the Buddha's Wonderland is going to be a Wonderland discipline which takes us to our wits' end (yes, I have mentioned this before).
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