The Zennist

Consciousness blocks our intuition

Consciousness for Buddhism involves the production of thingness, that is, objective reality and subject which is non-objective.  It always blocks the intuition that Zen aims for.  This subject is always coordinate with an object but it is never the object nor can the object subsume the subject (notice this non-unifying duality?).   

Both of them reflect the absolute but neither individually nor together constitute the absolute.  Rather they are an illusion of the absolute like the moon in the water.  The Buddha said that consciousness is like a magician’s illusion.

The very chemistry of this relationship leads to dissatisfaction.  We could even say that there is a desire for the object but the object is always inadequate when compared with the subject.  In light of this predicament, consciousness cannot be our net for catching the big fish of enlightenment although we use it to try and penetrate the mystery of enlightenment.

The story of Zen is also the story of overcoming the spell of consciousness and directly intuiting the absolute.  We can also think of it as a leap into the abyss if not also a total and complete loss of faith in consciousness and its use.

We begin to get a clearer picture of Zen and its inscrutable mystery when we learn what it is actually trying to overcome as in overcoming the darkness to see the light.  Such darkness in Zen is also the five aggregates made up of form, sensation, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness.  There is no light here only reflected light (reflected light from things).  We are mistaking reflected light for light in and of itself.

The wonder years (wondering what happened)

Our youthful years have made us attached to something that we should not be so attached to.  We are not fundamentally this fleshy body.  We will journey through this body’s many changes and emotional ups and downs having to learn to let go of what we once held tightly to.  It's not an easy ride and can be quite painful.

The optimists among us are trying to make a bad situation seem better or, in the end, no problem.  But this is not the way Buddhism sees this human life.  Its frightful message is that when you release this body you will undoubtably take up another one.  The stream or current of rebirth only ends with nirvana.

Our dependence upon our fleshy body is profound, the degree to which is unknown to us in our day-to-day life.  Yes, we have to live and learn the last part being the most difficult because most of us never really learn.  It is this lack of learning that becomes our karmic burden which we cannot escape.  In fact, we are always learning the wrong lessons so that we never truly learn.

This optimistic side of us cannot read the future; it cannot see the big picture either.  It only amounts to wishful thinking.  The optimistic side is only attending to the needs of the temporal body.  It has a very bad track record.  Still we rely on it too much especially when things are not going our way.

When Buddhism comes into the picture for us, our ability to learn from its teachings is at a very low level.  We have no practical experience with how to live the right way.  Buddhism can teach us.  But a lot of the teaching involves our undivided attention and a willingness to face obstacles that we once feared which most people are reluctant to do.

Where does evil and corruption begin?

Evil and corruption begin in the human heart.  Think of the real cause of evil and corruption to be like a weakened spiritual system within the human heart, much like a weak immune system.  We have been feeding our human heart a lot of feel good nonsense.  And we wonder why we are caught in the web of evil and corruption.

Every human being has a natural predisposition towards good and evil without much wisdom to be able to distinguish one from the other.  In Buddhism this is the condition of ignorance or avidyā.  Even the finest education will not help us to do good and avoid evil.  Nor will following Buddhist regula enable us to distinguish between the unconditioned and the conditioned. 

Deluded perceptions of this world into which we have been cast at birth only serve to operate against us in the long run.  At best we can only hope to survive without having to bear too much pain.  Still, within us at the core of our being lies a continuity that ensures our rebirth, in fact, many more rebirths. 

Our strong desire for the conditioned has made us what we are.  This desire has given us much evil that cannot be easily dissolved by the goodness we have accumulated since it is so little.

We insist that we don't deserve it.  Yet, we know so little about our universe and even less about our Earth and ourselves.  Human history has perhaps more downturns than upturns.  Nations fail has do humans.  As long as we continue to believe that evil is external rather than watch over our own heart we will continue to fall prey to our own deep-seated ignorance.

Realizing the unimaginable

There are two questions we are reluctant to spend much time dwelling on.  There is the questions of what were we before we were born and what are we after we die?  Naturally, we are asking these questions from the position of having already been born and we are still not dead.  But what if these questions could all be answered from the perspective of imagination? 

In other words, what if imagination is not limited by either birth or death but is, so to speak, the theater in which births and deaths occur but also rebirth?  As for first-person experience of this I think near death experiences (NDEs) are pretty impressive. 

The infinite universe of imagination is difficult to fully grasp but not too difficult for us to assume that we are always reborn into an imaginary condition.  This could also mean that the very stuff from which the imaginary is built remains ever unimaginable despite the fact that it is very real and authentic.

It is also to be understood that this infinite universe of imagination is a bad infinite universe insofar as we are unable to escape from it.  This is to say, in other words, we must remain in it without any hope of finding a way out.  If there is any idea of a heaven in such a world it would be the loss of our memory of how long we have been trapped in it.  Every life would seem to be the first time and be the last time upon death.

I think all of this expresses the Buddhist idea of saṃsāra and also nirvana which is beyond the ken of saṃsāra.  This reminds me of what Nagarjuna said:  The ultimately true nature of the Tathagata eternally stays.  The world of imagination is constantly changing, it never stays eternally.  We only transcend the world of imagination when we intuit our true nature.

A withdrawal from the intense addiction of experiencing?

Enlightenment is not a social construct.  There's nothing to be constructed; it only needs to be uncovered because it is already present.  What needs to be transcended are the five aggregates (pañca skandhāḥ) which comprise the experience of form, sensation, perception, volitional formations and consciousness. 

All such experiences are an illusion (māyā).  They comprise the world of suffering.  These five experiences amalgamate into the grand illusory experience I call my self, the experiencer.  But with all such experiences they are illusory.  Yes, it's true that experiences seem real and substantial but they are not. 

Fundamentally, there is no ontological truth to be realized by way of experience.  But this is not to say or to suggest that Siddhartha did not uncover the truth so as to awaken to something profound, beyond even the realm of experiencing.

But then the question needs to be asked how does Siddhartha propose to teach his wisdom to people who are addicted to experiences who may even imagine that enlightenment is some kind of super experience?  Obviously, there has to be some kind of withdrawal from the intense addiction of experiencing.

Without a withdrawal from experiences, especially sensuous experiences, one is simply accumulating more addictive behaviors.  The path that Siddhartha took to achieve Buddhahood was a path of gradually weaning himself off of experiences which tied him more to world of flesh and becoming.

The problem that everyone sooner than later faces

The pressures we feel remind us that the world has its problems and so does our life we have been living since birth.  But being young and healthy keeps us optimistic in most cases.  I am feeling happy what could go wrong?  The problem that everyone sooner than later faces is what do you do when reality finally confronts you with the finitude of your life?

For some of us it is a wake up call; for many others it adds up to a kind of ongoing depression that becomes more difficult to live through.

For some of us this wake-up call leads to religion or studying Buddhism while for many others they become more or less addicted to sex, drugs and alcohol.  What all these routes have in common is they rely on hope and the imagination.  But what if there is a place we all fear to go to when even hope and our imagination must be transcended?

In the final analysis, Buddhism prepares us to go to this place after our large net of hope and imagination fail to catch the big fish!  But to get to this place we must first have a great deal of hope and a good imagination.  We must keep casting our net over these waters again, and again until one day we accidentally fall down becoming entangled in our net.

So that we don’t deceive ourselves we must go through this last process in solitude, like a hermit.  It is a desolate world where self-deception does not triumph and is easily seen through.  Forsaking all hope and the imagined, only then can we become open to the singular way.  Maybe one night we see what truly lies beyond the burning house.

Enlightenment stopped by consciousness?

The Buddha taught that the false self (the self of the five aggregates) is not our true self.  But then how does a Buddha wean people off of their attachment to the false self?  The simple answer is not easily!  Culture with its dominant assumptions prevails, many of which act as a barrier to finding our self.

While it is true that the Buddha taught us to abandon desire for whatever is not the self, namely, the five aggregates, this is not enough to take us to the other shore which is never other than unconditioned.  Our attachment to the false self remains strong. 

Regrettably, the interpretations of modern Buddhism have shifted the Buddha’s message to the belief that he taught that there is no self.  Just reject the self that's all you need to do.  It's just a construct.  But he never said to reject or abandon the self.  He said, more precisely, abandon desire for whatever is not the self.

The truth of human life is that it is a grand illusion from which we have been unable to find an escape.  Death is no more than the passage from one illusion to another.  A continuity of consciousness exists which the Buddha says is like a magician’s illusion.  The continuity of consciousness also guarantees a subject and object duality which is inimical to enlightenment.

The central problem that we face is not the problem of self, whether or not it is real or just a construct, but the problem of consciousness or vijñāna. It guarantees the continuity of this life to yet another life and many more. 

What enlightenment is really all about is overcoming this consciousness thus being able to converge, directly, with the true self.  This process is always stopped by the imposition of consciousness which splits and distorts the original one into subject and object which then beholds a pluralized illusory World.

What is going on in the inside?

Many of us are still immature (bāla) and do not fully realize it.  In such a state we easily build up a system of misunderstandings and wrong interpretations of life, including fault finding and blaming others for what in reality is our own immaturity that we wish not to confront.  It can very easily lead to a kind of delusional state of mind.

In such a state of mind one lives almost entirely on the outside whereas their inside is laden with emotions/feelings and a lot of changing mental images.  From this position, it is much easier to be aware of things on the outside and pay much less attention to what is going on in the inside.

In Buddhism we must bring our awareness more to what is going on in the inside in terms of the emotions/feelings which mark the level at which we are attached to the psychophysical body (skandhas).  This attachment is more apparent with regard to anger, even short temperedness, and sexuality.  While the outer may trigger the inside forcing it to react, it is from the inside that our emotions/feelings emerge as well as our spiritual ignorance.  This will be the main focus of Buddhism and especially in Zen where the effort is totally dedicated to intuiting the Buddha nature.

The immature person is continually fixated on what goes on outside and pays scarcely any attention to the inside except to the emotions/feelings, desirees, impulses and sexual urges which continually move an individual.  This immature individual never sees the inside as a spiral staircase that goes down into a much different world than what is on the outside.

The biggest mistake beginners make when they enter the world of Buddhism to confront their immature selves is to believe that the teacher is capable of addressing their needs and cleaning up their mess.  This is not true.  Buddhism only equips us at best on how to confront our immature self and the stages we will go through when we begin to change our self.  If a person can't manage this then probably they need to go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist for additional help.