The Zennist

A path of self-learning

Most people it seems need some kind of external motivation or influence to get them to learn.  At some level they have concluded that they can't learn on their own, for example, they haven't the patience to stick with a subject more than a few hours or days. They may then decide to go to a university or become a Buddhist monk or join a Zen center or just hangout on some Buddhist chat forum. The good news is most people want to open themselves up to a learning experience—maybe adding to one's store of knowledge, or accepting new perspectives; yes, even questioning oneself.  How far this goes is another matter.  Even with a university degree most people's commitment to learning slows down without external motivation.  Also, going to a Zen monastery in South Korea or Japan might end with lots of experiences but no profound gnosis of the unconditioned Mind.

At some point I contend, we have to learn on our own if we are going to achieve credible kensho.  A university education, or being a Zen monk for a few years, may help to jump-start the self-learning process.  We can learn many valuable skills.  Even being a carpenter can be of help in that direction.  We might be able to build a small retreat cabin in which to begin our voyage of self-learning and, hopefully, the discovery of our true nature (kensho).  Even if we can't manage this and have a family to take care of, we can still benefit from having learned discipline: to stick to the task at hand until it is complete.

Getting to the stage of self-learning takes commitment, too, which is a kind of internal pledge that one makes to oneself to carry out some action.  It helps to have no other place to turn to except a commitment to seeing one's unconditioned, true nature (kensho).  It certainly facilitates and advances self-learning especially when it comes to meditation.  It helped me.  I can remember meditating in an old abandoned copper mine, beside many unnamed waterfalls, under trees, and even where coyotes often congregated.  I quickly learned that in a few minutes I began to resonate with the immediate world around me which was not a human world.  The wind blowing through the dry grass, the rocks and the stream helped to purge old habits—old ways of seeing which were too oriented to the intellect and artificial.  This is what I learned on my own: a kind of spiritual self-responsibility.  When it came to learning what the Buddha taught, I had to rely on myself which meant I had to change myself sufficient to understand the words of the Buddha.

The world as a virtual reality

The meaning of "virtual reality" has several meanings but for this blog, I put it closer to Plato's parable of the cave in The Republic (514a–520a) where human prisoners live their entire lives chained to a false reality; bound to shadows, who know nothing else but shadows created by a fire.  Only those who escape from this virtual reality dungeon see true reality.  We can also understand the five skandhas or aggregates consisting of shape, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness, to be a virtual reality. Like Plato's prisoners, our self or ātman is chained to the five skandhas by desire for it, from which there is no apparent escape.  Despite the pain that grows and grows from such bondage, in which the Buddha repeatedly warns us that the skandhas are not our true self, we continue to cuddle our chains.  We desire even more of this virtual reality. 

From the Pali Nikayas to the Lankavatara Sutra it is clear that the Buddha is calling our all-too-human world a virtual reality world—not the true world or nirvana which we have yet to realize.  He is telling us also to abandon desire for it or the same, stop coveting it!  True reality is unconditioned and transcendent.  You can't find it in the frame of this virtual reality.  Don't bother looking, either.  Meditation is about transcending virtual reality, not adoring it. 

Neuroscience even tries to convince us that our virtual reality body creates mind.  Mind, they tell us, is an epiphenomenon of this virtual reality body rather than the virtual reality body is an epiphenomenon of mind!  Unable to explain how hard bits of matter create mind from scratch—the so-called "hard problem"—they just ignore the problem.  In fact, science has too many "hard problems", for example, mass, electricity, space, and time, to name just a few, that one has to seriously wonder if science is just not a highfalutin word for the fine art of bullshit, bullshitting being "the indifference to how things really are" (Harry G. Frankfurt).

I realize it is unsettling for many new to Buddhism to accept the fact that Buddhism regards this world as a virtual reality, including our psychophysical bodies.  I suppose even more unsettling is understanding that meditation is about seeing our true nature or self which in the Nikayas is described as "knowing what is true and false" and "the noble witness" (cf. A. i. 149).  Most unsettling, because of our ignorance of true reality, we will ourselves by means of our consciousness into one virtual reality after another "looking for the maker of this dwelling" (Dhammapada), never finding it.

Passing through all darkness

The universe falls within the mode of consciousness (S., vijñāna).  Not only the universe, but all the objects we perceive, including our psycho-physical bodies, fall under the mode of consciousness which the Sanskrit, vijñāna, implies, is a bifurcation of the One into subject and object.  Every observation (object), for example, requires an observer (subject); just as every recording instrument (the object) also requires an observer (the subject) to read the measurement.  Even our thoughts require a thinker just as much as our psycho-physical body requires a soul, although this soul or ātman cannot be observed or measured insofar as it is totally non-local and unconditioned. 

What is consciousness?  For now let's think of it as a difference-from-self, the pronoun "self" standing for the noun ātman or in Pali, attā.  All that is perceived and experienced from object-shapes to thoughts and desires is the difference-from-self which is our innate Buddha-essence still unrecognized.  This, incidentally, is not the lower self that I associate with which has a name and shape; which I was born into.  In fact, as a temporal, biological body, I am also a difference from this self or ātman.  The Buddha constantly reminds us in the Pali Nikayas that we are not the psychophysical body this being the five khandhas.  He warns us that these khandhas are not our attā or self, for these khandhas are illusory and ultimately harmful (coveting the khandhas only increases difference-from-self).   

The world is a multitude of differences; yet all these differences seem to stem from the self or subject, itself, of which I know nothing.  Strangely, I know that I am this self but what it is I cannot know, precisely, because to know or to perceive it, is to make it an object-determined-something like everything else.  What, therefore, I must do is to penetrate through all the differences-from-self—all objectifications, like flying through dark clouds until I clear them all and see the radiant sun, the One.  Here then is the overcoming of consciousness as difference.  It is a return-to-self which best describes true meditation.  A passing through all darkness and illusion; through this illusory body which the Buddha says is old karma which I am bound to, which is not mine.

The difficulty of a profound intuitive leap

In lower animals, their brains are hardwired to enable a repetitive pattern.  As humans we think of this as habits.  It is something akin to Pavlov's dog.  Unfortunately, this kind of brain or mind which is reflexive in nature is not going to help us see our true nature.  Such conditioned behavior might be good for a few things but to see our true nature it is out of the question.  The mind we need is one capable of a profound intuitive leap.  This comes from the self-conscious, self-reflective mind.  Such a mind can also override our habits and the programmed behavior we've been engaged in for a long time.  It can even acquire new perspectives and perceptions and ways of looking at things and reality.  And yes, it can even become awakened to itself.

On the other hand, this same self-conscious, self-reflective mind can delude itself.  It can become a victim and a fool of falsehood believing something to be true when it is not.  It can also be easily deceived by other self-conscious, self-reflective minds.  It reminds me of Mark Twain's saying, "It is easier to fool the people, than to convince them they have been fooled."  In fact, many people suffer from what is called "pathological disbelief" which is to say, "Even if it is true, I don't believe it."  Such people we can say have beliefs that are hardwired.  They can't make the intuitive leap that Zen requires by which one is able to see through the veiling clouds of their thoughts seeing what they are composed of which comes in an instant.

Such people we could say are stuck in a cage of habits and wrong views which they have the key to open.  Judging by how such people respond to change, they don't want to change.  They keep their cage door locked and hide the key.  The best that a good Zen teacher can do is smile, be kind, and give them a little Mahayana Buddhism medicine in small, medicine dropper amounts.  Such people can also learn how to be mindful and meditate which might amount to keeping a fixed seated posture for twenty to forty-minutes.  Eventually, they can learn to be mindful of the breath as it enters; as it exits; whether it is long or short, and so on.  None of this qualifies as nirvana since it is only dealing with the conditioned—not the unconditioned, the unchanging, and the undying.  Nevertheless, it is a start with lots of baby steps.

In my life, I've only met a half dozen spiritual race horses.  In five minutes these people 'get it' while the rest require what could be five rebirths!  It is not because they are exceptionally brilliant at playing chess or doing calculus, far from it.  They are just smart when it comes to understanding the Buddha's true teaching on its own terms—not theirs.  

One free miracle

In the continuing paradigm war between the mechanistic Newtonian paradigm (i.e., materialism) and the emerging paradigm of consciousness/mind which is the source and superset of all matter, this war would not be possible without tacitly begging the question.  As the late Terence McKenna observed so well, science requires "one free miracle" by which they can then go on to explain everything from their 'miracle matter'.  As history informs us, the major problem the mechanistic Newtonian view of the world has encountered is consciousness.  It can't explain it except to hoodwink the public, as when Carl Sagan said, "The cerebral cortex, where matter is transformed into consciousness, is the point of embarkation for all our cosmic voyages" (Cosmos, p. 229). 

What is clear in all of this is that the mechanistic Newtonian view of the world takes matter as a given—the miracle.  Matter then somehow turns into biological matter.  This eventually evolves into a brain from which emerges consciousness!  But from the side of the contending paradigm in which consciousness/mind is proclaimed to be the source and ground of all, it can just as easily use Terence McKenna's one free miracle card.  With a free miracle this new paradigm can deduce matter, and its material world, from consciousness putting it somewhere closer to the metaphysical state of 'resistance' along with other such metaphysical terms as time, probability, wave, energy, acceleration, velocity and mass.  Make no mistake about it, it is much easier to see matter and with it our material world as a virtual reality born of consciousness. 

And this is the way physicists like Max Planck and the other pioneers of Quantum Mechanics saw what was happening in physics when the reign of Newtonian physics was drawing to an end, unable to account for consciousness.  In fact, Quantum Mechanics was much more successful than its predecessor Newtonian mechanics.  But this more successful perspective brought with it an equally different vision of reality turning everything in the past upside down.  According to Henry Stapp commenting on the new theory of Quantum Mechanics,

"Any notion that your conscious choices make a difference in how you behave was branded an illusion: fundamentally incorrect. During the first part of the twentieth century, that classical-physics-based conception of nature was replaced by a new theory that reproduces all of the successful predictions of its predecessor, while providing also valid predictions about a host of phenomena that are strictly incompatible with the precepts of eighteenth and nineteenth century physics. No prediction of the new theory has been shown to be false" (Mindful Universe).

We are moving to the point in our human history where we have to treat our everyday world, not as real, but as a virtual reality.  In light of this, the only true reality is consciousness or mind.  We are, truth be told, conscious agents that have wrongly over-attached to illusory, virtual bodies (I call them our protien jumpsuits), not remembering our true super-abode which is undying.  This certainly agrees with Buddhism.  But with our use of Terence McKenna's one free miracle card, making consciousness the superset and the physical world we live in the subset, a great revolution is happening. 

The former Newtonian-Darwinian world view is not going to give up easily—they have a legion of trolls who will go to any length to keep consciousness subordinated to the old materialistic ontology.  Even now, it is marching under the banner of "globalism" which is just another name for corporatism which is the merger of the state and corporate power according to Benito Mussolini.  We see it in the form of the so-called, Military Industrial Complex and the Medical Industrial Complex.  Not only this, it controls the media and the universities.  Here the armies of backwardness are gathering their forces.  This reminds me of something out of J. R. R. Tolkien's master work, Lord of the Rings which is a war between light and shadow.