There is only one important teaching we must have full faith in: Zen is the direct experience of seeing pure Mind. This experience is a profound gnosis which is not the same as an intellectual understanding. If you think to have achieved this gnosis, chances are you haven't. You are just deluding yourself.
At some point in your youth you have to un-delude yourself. That means cutting off outside influences. The best way to do this is to become a hermit. Stay physically away from others as much as possible. Learn to enjoy solitude especially in nature. This way you will eventually find out that you have not awakened to pure Mind. It is vital that you know that you don’t know!
Once you fully realize that you are not awakened to pure Mind, it should shock you and send you into a crisis like no other. Without being in such a crisis, no awakening. The crisis comes as a warning to you that you have to give up everything and most of all the cunning intellect that has misled you into believing that you are even partially awakened.
This crisis is not in anyway connected with depression. It is the result of a long search when our intellect finally admits to itself that it can go no further. But for the intellect to admit this means that thinking about pure Mind is no longer a road that leads anywhere except in a circle—and this circle has repeated itself a number of times.
Because awakening to pure Mind is so extraordinary and unexpected there is no other way to get there except by the total failure of our contrived methodology. If there is a path of Zen it certainly isn’t like a cow trail or does it have markers. It would be more like a path that is vertical at right angles to the horizontal plane of birth and death. For those who are creatures of habit, the path of Zen is all but closed off to them. This means that habits can be habits of blindness.
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