The Zennist

The Importance of Mysticism in Religion

Perhaps the main difference between mysticism and mainstream religion is that mysticism says the key to personal salvation lies with gnosis, that is, direct intuition of what is absolute and most primordial.  We personally awaken and, at the same time, we awaken to what is absolute.  

Only when our mind is fully open is it capable of receiving the illumination of the absolute.  But our minds are seldom open enough—even being 99% open is not enough. They are more often closed to any possibility of seeing the absolute.  It is a great irony of history that people consider the Buddha or Jesus as saviors who will forgive their stupidity and save them.  In reality, we have to save ourselves.

A path where the Buddha or Jesus saves us is a path of deception.  Such a path encourages people not to give up their mundane lifestyles or make meaningful changes.  The savior is going to do it all for them!  But real change is about no longer attaching or desiring the five aggregates, seeing that they are void (rittaka), hollow (tucchaka), and coreless (asāraka) and most of all not our true self.  

While the components of an intelligent being are the five aggregates beings, nevertheless, remain conditioned along with the world of the senses which includes mind or manas/mano which oversees the five physical senses.  The knowledge-world that beings amass by studying the conditioned sensory world is always inadequate but, nevertheless, is also useful and practical in some cases . Still, it can never shine a light on the real world.  Only Buddhas do that, and they do it, mystically. 

 

 

Culture and the Mind Ground

Is there a way to truth or ultimate reality in this postmodern world?  The answer is a resounding yes but here is what we are up against.  It is radical relativism which is fed to us under the guise of tolerance, openness to alternative perspectives and lifestyles.  This means that we are, basically, to accept and celebrate diversity.  This smell, if we can call it that, is from the stew of postmodernism.  One quickly learns that the search for truth or ultimate reality is folly.

This opens the door to nihilism where self initiative becomes a problem.  What is ultimately real is little more than the product of one's imagination.  Why do anything in such a postmodern world?

As far as culture is concerned, the absence of a search for truth and truth, itself, produces a kind of narrative that comes from the purveyors of postmodern culture.  Here, the narrative begins to undermine the distinction between facts and opinions.  Even if we admit to a kind of everyday truth, each person's truth-view is as good as any other.  We fall prey to credulity or believing in nothing.  

The way to truth is very important because if we take the wrong way or no way, we will never find the truth.  If we choose the interpersonal way, that is, modes of social adjustment and third-person knowledge (knowledge that does not require a knower/ātman), our account of reality will always be incomplete and in adequate.  On the other hand, if we choose the intrapersonal way, that is, knowledge occurring within the self we would be expected to get closer to the truth and maybe even attain truth.   

What Buddhism teaches is the intrapersonal way which involves the contemplative activity of setting aside all conditionality.  This culminates in the direct intuition or gnosis of the unconditioned which we can think of in modern terms as something like a non-spatiotemporal reality which grounds our spatiotemporal reality. 

The Right Attitude for Awakening

Siddhartha discovered within himself, intuitively, the mysterious origin or source from which to raise himself above his own finite self (asmimāna) together with its corresponding temporal world.  

Siddhartha’s transcendent perspective sees that order does inhere in the seeming randomness and chaos of the temporal world and its psychophysical man.  But to reach this vision certainly requires faith in transcendence.  One must go beyond or outside of what is perceived or presented in one’s sensory experience.

Accepting the world as it is does not carry with it the need to have faith in its eventual transcendence.  This is Dōgen’s Sōtō school of Zen which believes that just sitting in meditation accomplishes the natural unfolding of one's a Buddha nature.  Intuition (dhyāna)) does not play any significant role.  

Yet so much of Zen bears witness to a sudden awakening (頓悟) by means of intuition.  Without realizing the primordial essence of one's thoughts, memorizing countless passages of Zen passages is useless.  Study never gets beyond thinking about Zen, that is, the generation of thoughts about Zen.  

Ordinary beings only experience thoughts which are impure; which make up the deluded mind as their normal state.  On the other hand, the luminous essence of one's thoughts is a state in which the adept’s true nature transcends conditions or samskrita and the suffering associated with conditions. This is the enlightened state of a Buddha. 

Surviving the End Times Unperturbed

Important in the Judeo-Christian belief is the understanding of history as, implicitly, salvation history which falls within the sphere of eschatology (i.e., concern with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind).  

This eschatology alludes to the eventual salvation of the flesh—the carnal man.  There is no transcendence of the temporal here:  seeing beyond samsara which is the repeated birth and death cycles that are always conditioned.

When Marx wrote, “The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world.”  Marx couldn't help but see that truth is always this worldly.  What lies beyond us cannot be our world.  Maybe one day the flesh can be genetically modified into an undying flesh by science!  

Marx’s words, I must say, are not lost on any generation in the first stages of physiological adulthood.  None today really believe the words of the Buddha who taught that “rejecting the other world (paraloko), there is no evil that could not be done.”

This naive rejection leads, inevitably, to activism or at least a call for activism that first falls on immature ears.  This can only be accomplished by indoctrination which transforms nascent sensations and feelings into a political perspective that can be scaled up at some future point into rebelliousness.  

But salvation never comes.  Eschatology does not include the fleshy man who is always mired in the senses.  He must be transcended.  This includes even his thoughts which are the biggest problem Zen faces.  The transcending attitude is difficult to inculcate in the student’s mind.  Yet, while seemingly impossible it can be accomplished.  This is what Zen’s history teaches us. 

The Menace of Mentation

Our thoughts are enclosures of spirit.  This enclosing is illusory so that by taking up thought we cannot enter unenclosed spirit which Zen calls on us to do.  In light of this, our thoughts are produced only seemingly, not in reality.  Their unreal appearing, or dependent origination is, in other words, a fictional existence we have become deeply invested in.

 

How our fictions become true reality (spirit) in Zen is a difficult question to answer.  Letting go of our thoughts to reach the state of no-thought (無念) is not easy which tries to represent enlightenment—but the thought of “fire” is not the real caloric fire.  The same is with enlightenment. 

 

Blocking our thoughts is not the way either which beginners often do in their meditations.  Zhang Rinpoche said that “blocking thought is itself a delusion of troubled thoughts, a great darkness veiling the Dharma Body.”  Our thoughts make up our discrimination.  But it is only when one is suddenly released from discrimination (forming thoughts) that there is liberation.

 

The way to no-thought has been explained in the past and the way has been well trodden by past Zennists.  Whether we discover that no-thought is the sudden transcendence of thought or detachment from thought, altogether, the long road ends at the same indescribable spot where all things disappear.  And where, so to speak, the drop of water returns to the great ocean.

 

Our awareness is never pure because it is always attached to thought.  Zen teaches us how we delude our self; that taking up thought is not the way.  Moreover, just being aware cannot be liberation because thought conditions our awareness.  Only when our awareness suddenly beholds no-thought only then does our awareness becomes unconditioned and pure.