The Zennist

Taking a deep dive into "who am I?"

Self-awareness is not the same as direct reception of the absolute through intuition/gnosis which is the aim of Buddhism.  Self-awareness means being involved with one's daily mental life, most notably, their thoughts, feelings, and their imagination. 

Also it is a limited awareness.  It only concerns the individual:  the being that passed through its mother’s birth canal, to the being that will one day die.

Another way to look at self-awareness, it means understanding myself in such away that I am reasonably certain that I know who I am without being involved in a, strictly, first person perspective.  Such a perspective is very much like the mystics of old who immersed themselves in the seeking of transcendent knowledge; who were also hermits.

To seek enlightenment involves first person immersion.  First person immersion is not accomplished by being just self-aware, as strange as this may sound to the modern ear.  It is like a deep dive into "who am I" in which one even surpasses self-awareness. 

Ultimately it is accomplished by giving up even the first person perspective in a moment of absolute helplessness in which there seems to be no more path, while at the same time, absolute openness prevails.  This leads to the moment of satori when, unexpectedly, Mumon's barrier 関 is transcended.  Zen's mystery is solved.

Neither Buddha nor Christ were born

Looking at Christianity from a Buddhist perspective I see that Spirit (πνεῦμα) is never crucified.  Only the flesh that is painful passes away because it is intrinsically empty (illusion-like). 

Our passion (πάθημα) causes us to cling to the flesh so that we remain blind as to Spirit.  Christ, who transcends flesh, is beyond all passions.  The crucifixion is the wisdom that knows flesh is not Spirit (L., caro non est spiritus).

The true Cross, itself, is empty of all corporeal things.  It symbolizes transcendence of the flesh.  Jesus represents the mortality and pain of the flesh which in the final mystery vanishes so that only Spirit remains free of its former hiddenness.

In Buddhism, the Buddha represents the state of unconditioned Spirit that transcends all conditioned things.  Both the Buddha and Christ also represent the transcendence of time and space which is always conditioned. 

In a much deeper understanding, Spirit is undualized energy that is free from all dualizing patterns (e.g., observer in the observed).  Hence, it cannot be in any simulation, yet it retains the inherent capacity to receive and transcend all simulations operating in the universe.  This is what Buddhists call prajñāpāramitā in the sense of wisdom that transcends simulation which is never other than empty and illusory.

Whether we attach to the simulation out of desire or let go of the simulation so as, hopefully, to find a better one we, nevertheless, remain bound to it.  We never cease being crucified because we never awaken to our true nature.

The Buddha said: Ānanda and all of you should know that living beings, since the time without beginning, have been subject continuously to birth and death because they do not know the permanent True Mind whose substance is, by nature, pure and bright. They have relied on false thinking which is not Reality so that the wheel of̧ saṃsāra turns. ~ Śūraṅgama Sūtra

The way of every great downfall

Our transformation into a dystopian world, controlled exclusively by the left hemisphere of the brain, is already taking place.  But what is not realized is that this transformation is going against the right hemisphere of the brain which is better at leading the way. 

The left hemisphere always has a limited view of reality.  The right hemisphere leads the way because it knows that the map is not the territory.  At the same time it has a special ability to intuit what the real territory is.  Mystics like Siddhartha Gautama and Plotinus were driven by the right hemisphere to uncover the absolute: to know it firsthand. 

Unbeknownst to the average person, by their worship of technology, they have inadvertently become open to manipulation.  Their life education mainly concerns the left hemisphere of the brain.  Little do they realize that authentic leadership only comes from the right hemisphere which sees the big picture and truly knows what terra firma is. 

The average person only listens to false leaders who continually make excuses for their incompetence.  In this case, deception comes from the left hemisphere of the brain which constitutes much of our education and modern knowledge.  I hasten to add that brains can store wrong information. 

Those oriented predominantly to the left hemisphere of the brain are the techies and the virtue signalers who think it is necessary to impose a meritocracy.  They, naturally, will be the overseers.  This is who is paving our modern road which, ultimately, leads to dystopia.

Some of us have become the Cassandras fated with the gift of prophecy but never to be believed.  This is the way of every great downfall.  And then we have to contend with many false prophets.  From religious charlatans to political opportunists.

Supplemental reading.

Reifying the illusory

When I listened to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s song, A Thousand Kisses Deep, it suddenly came into my mind that this was about the reification of illusion.  Whether it's being in love with another or doing Tibetan Ngöndro 500,000 times or even sitting in zazen we are attempting to reify the illusory.

This almost automatic process of reification has no clue that it is building a prison wall that separates us from the absolute, that is, from our true self or Buddha nature.  The human being , you might say, lives in a kind of psychosis in which it has learned to over-value and turn illusion into a quasi-reality.

Buddhism intends, in a compassionate way, to throw the illusion back upon itself so that we pass through it by unexpectedly intuiting the ultimately real which is non-illusory.  Thus we discover our true nature or atman which is not the five skandha, namely, form, sensation, perception, volition, consciousness.

The Buddha states, unambiguously, that the five skandha are not the true self.  Still we cling to them which is the basis of suffering.  In our ignorance we know nothing other than these five skandha.  This leads me to say that Buddhists delude themselves when they believe that the Buddha taught the rejection of the true self.

In fact, it was Saccaka (Cūḷasaccaka Sutta) who postulated that the five skandha are the self.  This is what the Buddha rejected, the skandha cannot be the self since they are perishable and above all illusory.  Inadvertently, the Buddhist has thrown out the baby with the bathwater!

Buddhism has its share of boneheads

Buddhism, I am sorry to say, has its share of boneheads like any other religion.  You can find the boneheads in scholarly works and in common conversations among Buddhists on the Internet or in person.

Whatever our expectations about Buddhism happen to be we have to do enough reading, research, and thinking about the subject to see if our beliefs about Buddhism hold water or not.  Most of them don’t.  And when Buddhism doesn't match our expectations we dump it and find another religion that meets with our beliefs.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that our beliefs are difficult to give up.  For some people they are not going to give up their beliefs no matter what — and there lies the problem.

Buddhism's problem in the West is that many Westerners who are curious about Buddhism think that it is a form of religious nihilism in which some guy in India discovered that there is no soul, and nothing divine.  Life is all about suffering and learning to cope with it.  And when you die you're dead!

Buddhism for the serious and the mature is a different subject.  It is not about some guy in India who denied the Atman; who also denied the unending cycle of birth and death.  Far from it. 

Upon his awakening Siddhartha realized that the true self or atman is beyond the six senses and beyond all conditioned things.  Key to enlightenment is overcoming the dualizing consciousness or vijñāna.  Experiencer and experience are transcended.  Observer and observed are transcended.  Subject and object are transcended.

A prisoner in Plato's cave

So now you're a prisoner in Plato's cave.  You have no idea what's going on.  The reality before you is all you can perceive.  You don't know true reality.  You have no idea that escape from this world is even possible.  For all you know this is the true world, there is no other. 

Then you manage to read about some fellow named Siddhartha who escaped from this cave.  He claimed to have beheld the true world of divine light—not a false or reflected light but the light of lights.  But this is hard to accept much less believe in fully.

Your skepticism returns you to the shadows cast on the wall by a fire.

From a Buddhist perspective we are born and die within this cave countless times until we attain nirvana.  Putting this into another perspective we are born into an imaginary world and die in an imaginary world, being reborn in it countless times.  In the Assu Sutta the Buddha said:

“From an unfathomable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries — enough to become disenchanted with all fabricated things, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released.”

Death is certainly no release.  One is simply reborn into a womb or abides for a certain length of time in a more vivid imaginary world than the present one, call it a heavenly world.  Release can only be attained by intuiting what is unconstructed and unconditioned.  Nor can release be attained by the use of the imaginary mind which is a constructor of illusion.

The wave is not the water?

Unexpectedly you wake up in the morning before the alarm goes off.  You stare at the ceiling and realize that you will one day die.  So what do you do?  Go back to sleep or lie awake worrying about it?  Unfortunately, neither dreamland nor worry can̍t solve the problem, it goes much deeper. 

That evening after work you manage to find some degree of solace by going on the Internet.  You take comfort in the fact that many like you share the same problem.

Eventually your life of small, accumulated pleasures and sensual excitement begins to turn into anger and becomes more frustrating.  One day you happen to be in Moe’s Bookstore and have to go to the restroom.  While sitting there you read on the wall, the wave is not the water.  It doesn't make any sense to you but still you can't get it out of your mind.

Much of the greater story of Buddhism has to do with overcoming the allure of an imaginal world observing it with a mind under the domination of imagination.  Buddhism really consists of intuiting reality the way it really is before it becomes imagined.  No imaginary construct will suffice from the simplest thought to an elaborate and vivid world of great beauty.

How does this connect with the wave is not the water?  It is the same as, the ring or bracelet is not gold and the brick is not clay.  On the same score, your thoughts are in no way the pure Mind or absolute spirit which Siddhartha awaken to.  Still having a problem?

So what is the problem?  Buddhism says it's consciousness or in Sanskrit vijñāna, literally, in two parts knowing.  This is more at the division of the one (spirit) or the splitting of the one in which appearance is born which, nevertheless, remains intrinsically empty (śūnyatā).

Abiding in the world of appearance or the same, conditionality, we cannot reify any of this.  It always remains empty.  To do so is a fool’s errand.  The intention of Buddhism is to break us of this habit.  Nevertheless, Buddhism has its fools who then want to say that emptiness itself is the absolute just as Judaism and Christianity have their fools who try to imagine the divine through the flesh.