The Zennist

A continuity abides in all sentient beings

If we look deep enough within ourselves there seems to be an absolute continuity which abides in all sentient beings despite their differences from each other, including death (yes, this continuity surpasses death).  There are many names for it such as soul, One Mind, pure Mind, Buddha-nature, ātman, Spirit, or God (theos) or Christ. 

That we cannot conceive of this continuity with thought or by conceptualizing it, is to be expected according to the great mystics like Siddhartha.  Still, we try to do it which turns into religion, philosophy and metaphysics.  Here, we are using thought as an equivalent of the unthinkable and inconceivable. 

Thought is useful for our imagination which can be used to make a virtual world (ancient Rome, Paris, London or St. Petersburg are good examples) which we fall prey to in the sense of attaching to this architecture when there is nothing fundamentally real to attach to.

Ultimate reality is always found in this continuity although very few get that far so as to have direct knowledge of it.  Everything else is an appearance which is transitory, which is the snare of suffering, and is not real.  But we are already entangled in this snare during rebirth.  Joy is short-lived while suffering is long-term.

Religions like Buddhism and Christianity offer mankind an escape from the world of appearance.  But this escape usually becomes only hope which is just another kind of appearance (even secular progress rests upon hope). 

If there is any kind of escape it has to be direct intuition or gnosis of ultimate reality hidden in this continuity which entails a process of negation of all appearance including thought, upon which our human world is based.  And since there is nothing higher than ultimate reality there is no way to see it except to merge with it, completely.  This mergence, the noun, is absolute knowing but nontransferable (mergence cannot be transferred by teacher to student).

Beware of political solutions

Cultural Marxism, by its very name, suggests destroying a culture by gradually undermining its sanity.  To accomplish this end the Marxist must first aim at the degradation of long established cultural norms. 

Eventually, a passive or quiet kind of mental unsettledness becomes the new norm.  Moreover, there is no way to distinguish between sane and insane, even moral and immoral behavior.  The intellect, itself, changes where it begins to inject emotions into what is meant and valued.  Context is eventually lost inasmuch as the text, itself, becomes a jumble of implied contexts that require emotional filling.

But the degradation of an old culture cannot last long without its replacement by a new kind of culture.  In this regard, cultural Marxism is only about the destruction of an old culture.  The replacement culture for cultural Marxism may never emerge.  In fact, it might be unable to emerge.  One has to think along these lines:  Is mental unsettledness self-healing/self-correcting?

It may even be possible to destroy a culture by making it insane in the guise of normal.  But this insanity almost guarantees that it can neither heal nor correct itself.  Instead, the survivors of the former culture must gather its remains together and self-awaken.  It may take several generations to do so.

Buddhism cannot do this because those who have come to Buddhism are, sadly, too far gone to awaken.  They much prefer meditational quietude.  In this predicament, they are unable to get out of their arm chair or pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  Their youth is lost to them which is supposed to be a period of enculturation.  Youth is certainly not a time for making a person weaker, or making a person insane which could be what is happening today.

Buddhism, and of course Zen, has its own particular form of enculturation.  One is expected to imitate the awakened life.  This does not mean that we are awakened.  We are only expected to imitate this awakened life to the best of our abilities.  Then, as in my example, you have to go off into the wild to live alone even meditating, as I did, in an old abandoned mine.  The path, by the way, has always been intrapersonal. 

The unimaginable essence of the universe

Looking inwardly, the maturity of our soul is what is important as if to know our true nature which transcends all thought formations (P., citta-sankhara).  Framing the soul this way makes it the same as essence or in Buddhism the unconditioned which we are but as mere humans have no knowledge of.  

For others, the eradication of this soul is what is important leaving only the corporeal body with its organs.  According to this theory, the soul is only an epi-phenomenon of the brain.  When the organ of the brain perishes so does the soul.

But for the Buddha the soul is not a product of the brain but actually transcends the brain.  Our entire human body is nothing more than a composition of this ultimate reality which we call in the West the soul.  In effect, we are looking through an all encompassing illusion hoping to find the non-illusory, that is, our real nature. This is a fool’s journey.  But the greatest of all fools are those who have dismissed ultimate reality or the soul.

Our biggest adversary is the sixth sense which in Buddhism is the imagination.  According to the Paṭhamasamugghātasappāya Sutta the Buddha’s proper path is the eradication of all imagination (maññita) so that what remains is the unconditioned, unimaginable essence of the universe—there is none higher than this.  Since the soul is un-imaginal it does us no good to rely on our imagination to affirm it or deny it.  It must be intuited, directly.  What stands in our way is what is not the soul (anatman) which we cling to, tenaciously.  This explains why the Buddha tells Kotthita, "you should abandon  desire for whatever is not the soul." 

 

Eventually lost in a psychological wilderness

Modern religion has not given up its reliance on the emotions, on feelings, on the belief that the conditioned life is the only life possible.  Modern religion must also satisfy secular consciousness.  It must help me in achieving my worldly goals but also help me to cope with my unhappiness and misfortunes.  If religion cannot do this then what good is it? 

It seems that modern religion is unknowingly undermining itself by its over willingness to please those who have not renounced, sufficiently, the secular or worldly life. 

What hope religion at one time offered has shifted over to the miracles of technology.  Unless religion can out miracle technology it doesn't have much of a chance of winning the hearts and minds of the people.

But wait a minute, during the period of the golden age of Egypt, India, China, Greece and Rome religion was very important.  What we have today is an extremely watered down version of what the religious mind actually was. 

What has been substituted for the religious mind over time has been the ecclesiastical mind which has been allowed to merge gradually with the secular mind and its demands in which the interpersonal life overshadows the intrapersonal life in which the contemplative life has its existence. 

Everyday life eventually falls into a kind of conformism as a result of degradation of the intrapersonal.  As a result, the socio-cultural landscape becomes all too mechanistic.  Human existence becomes confined to what is biological and physical and therefore measurable. 

This limitation eventually finds an escape.  It expands itself into a kind of psychological wilderness in which people anchor themselves in the imaginal and the ideological, that is, filling fiction with a density of feeling tones and emotionalizing the formation of ideas.  Incidentally, perhaps this gave rise to the popularity of the novel, a work of narrative fiction which we fill with our own personal feelings which originated from our life experiences. 

Those who are destined to walk in this psychological wilderness (most of us) cannot escape from this wilderness because even the escape, itself, is imagined.  The truly real is absent from it.  And so we turn to Buddhism and with it, especially, Zen.  It is a search for true reality or the same, ultimate reality, which necessitates the religious mind.

Our overindulgence in the corporeal body

How we relate to the corporeal body is critical in Buddhism.  Sex, for example, is not the problem so much as the love of sex is the problem: the frequent need to engage in it.  It is the same with eating.  It is our love of food that is the problem which leads to gluttony.  In other words, the big problem with our corporeal body is our overindulgence in it.

With our overindulgence in the corporeal body our spiritual life is put on hold.  Our love or preference is not for the spiritual but love for a bowl of Ben & Jerry's ice cream or a slice of pizza.  These many moments of indulgence add up to a growing love for the corporeal and much less love for the spiritual which we are trying to realize.

Those who are serious about Buddhism first understand that they must give up their love for the corporeal while turning their mind to the spiritual hoping to realize spirit, directly.  This sounds simple enough but is it?  It almost goes without saying but serving the needs of the corporeal and being on the path to spiritual intuition do not often agree.  In fact, there is a great deal of conflict between them.

No matter how ideal our words are they can't erase the fact that we live in a world primarily based on Darwinian fitness.  Nor should we draw from this as biological creatures that we see reality the way it really is. 

The data that we receive through our senses only relates to the creature and its survival and whether it will be successful at reproducing its kind.  But for those on the spiritual path this is not their goal. Their goal is to Intuit absolute spirit, the very substance of the universe.  This leads to seeing the universe the way it really is which is an illusory composition as far as appearance is concerned.

 

Deciding which way to go

There is so much mystery in Zen Buddhism that those who read and study it do so rely on a contemporary standpoint.  But it is almost impossible that Zen should speak for itself through modern ideas and various contemporary meanings we give to Zen’s words.  We have only ourselves to look into to begin to find the portal or the same the path of Zen.  Ultimately, Zen wants us to look within. 

The more we look within, there is a more subtle world to be examined but this examination is not about looking at something other than the onlooker.  The fundamental difference between the onlooker and the examined is precisely zero.  It is somewhat like saying the difference between thought and extension is precisely zero.  Still, we do not understand how there can be this zero difference.

Zen will suggest to us that this zero difference is spirit or absolute Mind before it becomes manifest as thought and extension.  Thus, in essence, there is zero difference.  At this point, what the adept is missing is the direct experience of spirit, itself, which is unthinkable and infinite.

Faced with a lack of experience, the Zen adept must either fish or cut bait.  The adept must either take up the more difficult mind, the religious mind, which works by direct intuition or gnosis, or take up the ecclesiastical mind which is observant and intellectual.  Most who come to this crossroad either consciously or unconsciously choose to go with the ecclesiastical mind.  It is here that the practitioner comes to see Zen as   consisting of robes, ceremonies and rituals, and seated meditation or zazen—and an institutional enlightenment.

The dualizing work of consciousness

If it is true as Dr. Donald Hoffman suggests in his book titled, The Case Against Reality, that matter and spacetime arise from consciousness, then what are we to make of this consciousness from a Buddhist perspective? 

The English word consciousness is often used in Buddhism to translate vijñāna.  Does consciousness work?  No, I don't think it does.  It leaves out something very important in vijñāna which is the dualizing work of consciousness itself:  there always has to be separation between subject and object as implied with the prefix “vi”.

It hardly ever dawns on the human mind, or maybe I should say human consciousness, that it is always looking at the world in two parts, that his, subject and object, or if you prefer, observer and observed.  During satori or enlightenment this duality is transcended.  The adept goes back to original, non-duality, or advaya.

Any trace of an ‘other’ or object is gone; there is no subject either.  In about 1/10 of a second duality has gone back into the original state.  In Zen we might call it One Mind or pure spirit or pure Mind.  In light of this, thought, which brings with it duality (thinker and thought) only serves to falsify and distort the original state which is absolute, inexpressible, and  indeterminate.  It transcends every kind of thought, thought being only a construction of spirit or the same, the One Mind.

 

The conditioned is empty

Śūnyatā should represent emptiness of essence/intrinsic nature (svabhāva) in what is conditioned.  On the other hand, the unconditioned is svabhāva.  Related, one should understand that ‘no-thought’ (acitta) is the domain of the supreme essential nature (paramārthikaḥ svabhāvaḥ) which is never other than unconditioned.  If this sounds confusing then perhaps the reader is reading these words with a nihilistic bias.

Unfortunately, the modern understanding of Buddhism is for the most part nihilistic and quite extreme.  The Buddha preached against nihilism.  He did not deny the transcendent or absolute spirit which was unconditioned and non-dual (advaya).  In fact, I should add that enlightenment or gnosis proves this.  One, in fact, attains this transcendent state which is totally unthinkable. 

Trying to explain this with words which give rise to thoughts is a fool’s errand that a good teacher, nevertheless, has to partake in.   Our human form is like the 305-meter-wide dish at Arecibo Observatory into which data enters but the absolute is not one of those things.  No matter how subtle our thoughts are, our thought/reasoning stops us from entering the so-called kingdom of heaven.

Being replaced by the ecclesiastical mind

It is inevitable that the religious mind should eventually be replaced by the ecclesiastical mind.  The religious mind’s focus is on the spiritual which transcends the flesh or the corporeal whereas the ecclesiastical mind is set on the church:  the institution of community worship which has not attained the religious mind.  The ecclesiastical mind can only venerate the religious mind.

With this shift or change by which the ecclesiastical mind comes to power, the religious mind gradually sinks into the background.  In one respect, the religious mind is closer to the world of heresies because it is difficult to understand by the ecclesiastical mind.  Still, the religious mind is never heretical if it has realized spirit or the same the One Mind. 

Generally speaking, most religions fall into the snare of the ecclesiastical mind which can be highly intellectual and at the same time emotional.  Yes, Zen Buddhism fell into this trap long ago in which seated meditation became a substitute for gnosis or the same, intuition.  Yet truth tries to tells us that nothing fundamental can be gained by either rituals or by physical sitting.

Still, stubbornness pushes on hoping that it can turn the ecclesiastical mind into the religious mind.  What eventually happens is that, overtime, the ecclesiastical mind grows tired of religion and chooses to go back to the secular life.  What then becomes of religion?  It falls back to the religious mind.  It alone is capable of understanding religion, religion being the discovery of spirit which has been hidden by the corporeal or the same, the flesh.