The Zennist

Transcending misidentification

Fundamentally, what Buddhism is trying to tell us is that who we really are cannot be found within the psychophysical being, that is, the five aggregates (P., pañcakkhandha).  Our search in other words will be in vain.  It is only with the transcendence of the psychophysical being that one returns home, so to speak, and finds their true identity.  All the rest is misidentification.

Transcending misidentification, however, is no easy task.  It cannot be accomplished through the intellect or by the imagination.  These are the only tools we have or are aware of.  Delusion is our world.  Who we are is who we are not.  We are constantly deceiving ourselves.  It is like we have the sense of making forward progress but we're only going around in a circle.

All this is implicit in the literature of Buddhism although at first it doesn't seem like it.  In our eagerness to understand Buddhism we often misread it.  The Buddha’s message gets mixed up with our own expectations of what we imagine Buddhism to be.  In other words, we don’t read Buddhism with an open mind.

For Buddhism, a human being is illusory or void in the sense that it is comprised of the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness).  These aggregates can be characterized as impermanent, suffering, and without a self.  In this light, nirvana is the transcendence of these aggregates; logically, the awakening to our true nature or self. 

One must consider also that this transcendence includes the transcendence of subject and object or the same the experiencer and the experienced.  Enlightenment or awakening is not a matter of me experiencing the absolute.  It is really a matter of me transcending myself and its journey to experience what it imagines the absolute is.  You in the absolute become single for about 1/10th of a second!  

We must even overcome harmony?

The division of our world into utopian and dystopian have their origin not so much in the human heart as they do in the human brain with the asymmetry between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. 

By the way, this division is not always diametric; rather the division arises because there is little or no harmony (a kind of corrective oscillation between two differing sides is lacking).

In this regard, it is entirely possible to live a life of harmony in which a kind of corrective oscillation is going on between, let us say, the husband and the wife or the teacher and the student.  But I dare say this is seldom achieved as one might wish.  It seems that one is always viewing the matter from their own position:  either accept my position or we remain opposed.  Thus comes the sudden or gradual rise of disharmony.  It rests on side-taking rather than transcendence.

In the matter of Zen, we must even overcome harmony since it can be easily transformed into disharmony.  When we look at suffering or in Sanskrit, duḥkha, it is a kind of disharmony.  This disharmony is the inevitable outcome of a life lived in maladaptive oscillations with others and one’s own being.  We may escape others but we cannot escape our consciousness even in death.  The inherent disparity within consciousness (vijñāna), itself, continues unbroken which makes individuation/nāmarūpa, inevitable.  Only achieving nirvana is the answer which at the very least shows us the limits of even harmony.

One last barrier remains: the point of no return

On my youthful journey to see what Siddhartha saw and gain the necessary intuition of Zen masters I came to a place that you could call the point of no return in which reversal is not possible.  I came to realize that I was in Zen too far to give it up but I had also failed to uncover Zen’s secret having exhausted my all-too-human means for discovering Zen’s secret.

I had inadvertently put myself between a rock and a hard place.  I was stuck in a real life and death koan that I couldn't see the way out of.  Even an answer was not forthcoming of what a person should do in a situation like this. 

Looking back to that time I can see that this is the path of intuition that inevitably leads to a kind of cul-de-sac.  Human consciousness (vijñāna) can go no further.  Still, one last barrier remains which bars the way home.  But nothing can be done.

Finally this barrier unexpectedly disappears.  In that moment of disappearance, consciousness is not there anymore—still something is there, though not of an empirical nature which consciousness demands.  You have just merged with something that your six senses cannot perceive much less your consciousness frame.

Few practitioners get this far .  Instead, they substitute the experiences found in their imagination for enlightenment.  This is a process of reification where the imaginary becomes seemingly real.  It seems to work for a while but then fades away.  One has still not escaped avidya, that is, non-knowledge.

As strange as it sounds what we can measure or observe with the senses including the last sense which is the intellect/imagination is all an illusion—the seemingly real.  It is like turning a piece of lit incense in the dark so fast it appears to be a circle.  Yes, we humans are very good at creating virtual realities and deceiving ourselves.  But our consciousness demands subject and object, observer and observed, experiencer and experience.  But take away this consciousness one lonely night—there is much more that is beyond the grasp of human consciousness. 

Caught in the trap of this consciousness

It seems paradoxical to say this but desire for conditioned things and desire for enlightenment (the unconditioned) are virtually the same.  How is this so?  Suffice it to say that according to Buddhism we operate in a world of duality that is subject-object consciousness or vijñāna.

The average seeker is really seeking, if you can picture this, with a butterfly net trying to catch air.  This seeker is having no success because the seeker’s imagination holds onto the belief that air is something the butterfly net can trap.

Buddhism will say that we cannot seek the unconditioned with subject-object consciousness.  Enlightenment is not an experience for the experiencer or knowledge for a knower.  We are still stuck in a dualizing  mode.  Still stuck in Samsara.  Without the transcendence of this dualizing consciousness we cannot hope for an escape.

A brief aside, most of us recall the the Ten Oxherding Pictures (十牛圖) that were first popularized in China during the Song Dynasty.  What is significant here is that one of the stages is a circle in which oxherder and the ox have both disappeared.  In other words, the Zennist has converged with the primordial one so that there is no duality left.  The other term for this convergence is samādhi.

Returning to the one (P., ekatta) is always possible but the chances are zero if we go by way of our dualistic consciousness or vijñāna.  At some point in our spiritual career we must confront this duality which is in Zen called the great doubt 大疑.

Of course, it almost goes without saying, but our passion/desire for life is our greatest obstacle.  Facing this, we modern people always try to meet the challenge by serving God and mammon at the same time (appearing outwardly moral but craving wealth and power on the inside). 

This dualistic consciousness is also diabolical.  It always betrays us.  Even our immature hope that death will clear our sins away betrays us.  Even when we think to our self, well, I will just let go of this dualistic consciousness.  We are caught in the trap of this consciousness.  Paradoxically, we cannot grab the object or fully let go of the subject.  A path of intuition is the only answer by which we transcends both subject and object suddenly.

Perfection is the enemy of the good?

I think it was Voltaire who said that perfection is the enemy of the good.  His words can be at first a kind of head scratcher.  But putting his words into a Buddhist context maybe like, conduct is the enemy of the good, works better. 

We can imagine this conduct to be like virtue signaling or a standard of proper behavior.  It's about trying to appear perfect in conduct as if conduct and the good are one and the same.  We can even imagine zazen to be perfect enlightenment.

But conduct, no matter how perfect, is not the same as seeing our true nature or the good.  Maybe we can think of the problem another way when we look at sports in the example of diving.  Even with a perfect score in which all the judges agree that the dive was perfect this has nothing to do with enlightenment or the good. 

Even a Buddhist monk or nun of long-standing who has never had any problem with obeying the regula of the order does not translate into enlightenment.  In all religious communities there is that species of human being called holier than thou.  These are people who are pretending moral superiority.

In the religion of Buddhism nirvana counts most (realizing the unconditioned).  And on the path to nirvana, Zen or intuition counts most.  It's not conduct or perfect conduct or even perfect moral behavior that gets us to the other shore of nirvana.

I will say that good conduct is necessary to lead a happy interpersonal life.  But when we turn to look within at our self it doesn't work so well.  All of our weaknesses and strengths lie within us as does enlightenment and our ignorance of it.

Consciousness is especially adapted to live in an illusory world

The past world of man and the future world of man will always be in the imagination (an illusion) where true reality is kept at bay.  But what does this really mean? 

Man's consciousness (vijñāna) is especially adapted to live in an illusory world and to even reproduce itself.  It has not gone unnoticed by the Indian subcontinent that the world is an illusion and man, himself, is an illusory being who by his consciousness unknowingly clings to the illusion although intrinsically free of it.

A dualistic mind or consciousness is necessary by which to anchor itself in an illusory reality and to even survive it after the death of the illusory corporeal being, only to be reborn into another illusion. 

In light of this, modern man tends to ground himself on one side of this duality that is the subject side (you could call it the knower, the observer or the experiencer).  This side is always non-objective yet implicitly connected to the objective, a kind of negative unity.

Also desire is part of this duality.  We could even say the desire of the subject to unite and become one with the object.  But this too is an illusion.  It is like looking at railroad tracks in the distance where they seem to converge, but really don’t.  Thus it comes to pass that life is unfulfilling.

It was through Siddhartha's awakening that he saw the way out of this almost hopeless predicament.  Both subject and object were simultaneously transcended.  This is naturally inconceivable for consciousness to wrap itself around or to even understand faintly.  In terms of western consciousness it does not yet realize that it cannot ground itself on self-reflection.

The postmodern world where reality is only a social construct

Somehow atheism (anti-Christianity) morphed into anti-religiousism and with it a dangerous fall into nihilism.  Here, I become a problem for myself in that I don't have any identity other than clinging to this physical body and its sensory experiences (mainly sexual).  This problem is further highlighted by the conclusion of Richard Rorty:

"Nothing grounds our practices, nothing legitimizes them, nothing shows them to be in touch with the way things are" (From Logic to Language to Play, 1986).

This view lands us in the postmodern world where reality is only a social construct including even the intuitive wisdom of the Buddhas.  But this view, from a Buddhist perspective, is really saying that we have found no absolute truth with our five senses nor the sixth, which is our theoretical imagination.

Our choice of how we look for truth has brought us finally to nihilism.  But in this failed journey we have never trusted intuition.  We gave that up very early with the rise of the modern age.  We turned our back on intuition and sought, instead, technology.  But our technology has only amplified our own immaturity even our decent into nihilism.

While our theoretical imagination has yet to find absolute truth, but is still looking, our everyday imagination has become a kind of fantasy world where there are no restraints or morality.  This anchoring of our identity in the sixth sense or imagination is certainly not without some serious dangers.  It turns into a kind of magical thinking even denying the biological facts of gender. 

Even the divide between sanity and insanity becomes blurred.  We cannot tell one from the other.  If as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, then the line between sanity and insanity also cuts through the human heart.  We have yet to play out our imagination and find its limits.  Right now it is open to exploration and with that opening we are subject to many delusions.