The Zennist

A different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotions

According to Buddhism, our consciousness (vijñāna) is deeply engaged with the flesh where, as a result, we have become emotionalized (for want of a better term) suffering under the precarious conditions of the body together with its unfulfilled drives. 

This suffering that we sense in the body which we have identified with becomes, automatically, an emotionalized burden for us.  And we have become the bearer of this emotionalized burden.  With a little bit of self-reflection we know what it means to bear this burden.  Moments of frustration, anger, passion, resentment, etc., arise from this burden.  We want to pin the blame on somebody else or some other kind of misfortune that has befallen us.  But for the recluse it is a different picture.

At some point the recluse understands that consciousness free of the body is a different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotional travails of the body. 

“Where consciousness is unmanifest, eternal, luminous all around, that's where earth, water, fire, and air does not exist.  Here long and short, fine and coarse, beautiful and ugly, name and form, cease with nothing remaining.  With the transcendence of [manifest] consciousness this is all ended” (DN 11).

This unmanifest consciousness, however, even for the recluse remains as yet unrealized (a Buddha has realized it).  In fact, manifest consciousness is always polarizing.  This condition makes the intuition of unmanifest consciousness that much more difficult because of the subtlety of this polarizing process.  We keep deceiving ourselves at ever finer levels.       

The intellectual is more interested in words than actual reality

We could say that the intellectual is more interested in words themselves than the actual reality these words are pointing to.  Building a real barn, for example, is much different than thinking about building a barn or fantasizing what it might look like through the imagination.

It is fairly obvious that intellectuals can easily be changed into ideologists and fall prey to their very own ideological fantasies.  Marxists and sort-of-Marxists fall in to this category.  I forgot to mention that when one mixes their feelings with their intellect they become ideologists or ideologues.  The entire communist revolution was a dangerous fantasy that didn't want to wake up to the horrific consequences of its delusional thinking.  The intellectual and worse, the ideologues, never want to wake up to the consequences of their ideations.   

Buddhism could not care less about an intellectual path or a particular ideology.  Buddhism is concerned with the exercise of intuiting ultimate reality which is a religious act (praxis) rather than a cerebral occupation. 

You cannot look to the intellectual West and expect to find too many great minds that have directly intuited their knowledge.  The West is not the India of the Buddha or the China of Huineng 惠能.  We live in a nihilist age where even the word “meaning” has lost its real meaning (the thing that is meant or intended).  Nevertheless, the drive for power and control in such a nihilist age is everywhere.  In speech, especially, where the discourse is controlled by hidden powers.  Yes, even in Buddhism it is there with its ridiculous theory of a kind of anti-self.    

The Power of Intuition

Truth is never realized when it is always a product of our imagination including our linguistic imagination (the intellect).  Direct intuition of the truth (kenshō) is more important than an intellectual grasp which comes through the imagination.  We could even say that direct intuition bypasses our intellectual imagination and its attempt to reify what is only imaginal.  

Zen (dhyāna) is only a path to direct intuition.  While it includes all the literature found in Buddhism it fundamentally understands that Siddhartha's revelation can only be achieved by intuition, a sudden direct seeing of the absolute, which certainly surpasses the imagination and all that comes from it.

Scarcely is the subject of intuition taken up in today's Zen Center and very seldom written about in the academic literature if at all.  This fact suggests that intuition is being ignored as the royal road to enlightenment having been replaced by just sitting which becomes more of a therapy for relaxing the body, somewhat like a massage.  Does such a practice reveal our true nature or the same our Buddha nature?       

The mystical tradition is also ancient in origin.  The oral teachings recorded in the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, and similar records go back thousands of years and provide evidence that mystical teachers of widely different cultures say remarkably similar things.  Also concerned with human suffering, they propose that human beings are ignorant of their true nature and that ignorance leads to the lives of pain and futility.  The sages describe a Way that leads to a higher level of existence, one infinitely more desirable than the level on which most people conduct their lives.  The mystical tradition does not offer therapy in the usual sense of the word, but achieving the goal of mysticism — experiencing the Real Self — is said to cure human suffering because its very basis is thereby removed (Dr. Arthur Deikman, The Observing Self, p. 3 ).

 Intuition is the mystical tradition and the mystical tradition is intuition. The problem we face is how to keep ourselves open to intuition and not close it off by overuse of intellect.  There is no reason to believe that Siddhartha found a way other than by direct intuition.  Such intuition is independent of just sitting or any physical effort for that matter. 

Existential Angst Arises From Embodiment

Suffering (duhkha) in Buddhism is not so much about pain, itself, as it is about an underlying sense of foreboding.  A few examples include worrying about one's death or worrying that one may have a fatal illness, or that one may die in combat.  Suffering casts a foreboding shadow over our entire life; there is no escaping it as we grow older.   

This foreboding is only related to the corporeal body (rūpa).  Under the spell of ignorance each individual identifies mainly with their corporeal body.  They know of no higher state of being which transcends the corporeal body. They only know how to follow the fate of the corporeal body.  They cannot understand words like these:

“This body is inert, like the earth; selfless, like water; lifeless, like fire; impersonal, like the wind; and non-substantial, like space. This body is unreal, being a collocation of the four main elements. It is void, not existing as self or as self-possessed. It is inanimate, being like grass, trees, walls, clods of earth, and hallucinations. It is insensate, being driven like a windmill. It is filthy, being an agglomeration of pus and excrement. It is false, being fated to be broken and destroyed, in spite of being anointed and massaged” (Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra).

In contrast with this negative view of our corporeal body we have more or less set our sights on finding pleasures for this body of ours.  Those who study Buddhism expect to learn how to have bodily happiness or at least make it through life without much suffering.  But being dependent upon our corporeal body makes us always subject to a feeling of forebodingness.   

Our culture is not all that open to a conversation about postmortem survival.  We tend to rely more on the interpersonal than the intrapersonal where we look within to see what is immortal or finite within us.  Siddhartha's revelation came intrapersonally:  we are fundamentally a transcendent, spiritual body that is free of suffering unlike our corporeal body.