The Zennist

Looking within and seeing darkness

Meditation is a great opportunity to look within and see the prison we have made for our self by desiring what is not our self.  It is a strange kind of darkness but a darkness, nevertheless, that keeps the light from coming in.  In a way, it is a true picture of our incarnated life a life that will one day be filled with a great deal of suffering. 

“Think that this body is like a plantain, a mirage in the hot season, watery foam, a phantom, a transformed body, the castle of a gandharva, an unfired brick, lightning, a picture drawn on water, a prisoner facing death, ripe fruit, a piece of meat, the warp on a loom which is about to end, and the ups and downs of a mortar. You should think that all created things are like poisonous food and that anything made is possessed of all worries” (Mahaparinirvana Sutra).

A great Buddhist teacher like Ajahn Chah (Phra Bodhiñāṇathera) might tell us that meditation is a time to see what's inside our cage:  the cage of birth, aging, illness, and death.  As we might guess, looking within is a difficult task for those of us who are used to accumulating desires.  Yes, each desire keeps the light from penetrating the thick, impenetrable wall of our desires.  Such people will attain nothing in their halfhearted search. 

Beginners of meditation always believe that meditation is going to lead them to some profound vision.  What is really at work here is their imagination, not profound gnosis.  Meditation helps us to sober up from our last round of intoxicating desires.  It reminds us that we are still in samsara; we're not going to escape it by having a good time!

Entering the light of heaven

Interestingly, what separates our direct access to the Buddha-nature are the layers and layers of āsrava: a lust for the flesh, a passion for existence, and the defilement of ignorance.  This could be all summed up with one word which is materialism.  This constitutes a drive within each person for what is not their self (anātam) rather than what is their true self or Buddha-nature (which by the way is immaterial). 

As a result of this drive sentient creatures are bound down to samsara having to experience one rebirth after another.  In fact, they don't have the slightest knowledge about rebirth and least of all how to break the terrible cycle of rebirths.

For several years I have been following what are called near death experiences or NDEs.  What I have noticed with each one is that seems universally clear that the various people are in a state almost without āsrava after having left their body.  They experience a kind of radiant embracing love that is all around them, almost like they are fish swimming in spiritual waters.  Without the interference of āsrava the light of spirit shines through.

When they return to their human bodies, let us call them āsrava bodies, they seem to be affected by the NDE experience to work tirelessly to return to that state of utter bliss and well-being.

What we can gather, thus far from NDEs, is that the corporeal body acts like an interference barrier blocking spirit.  From this we can gather that the life of human beings is about progressively building up this barrier to a point where spirit is absent (the dawn of evil).  On the other hand religious teaching is how to bring this light into the world to give sentient creatures true hope and faith that beyond the temporal body there is truly a heaven (S., svarga).

 

Remembering the 1960s

People at the top tried to make what was happening in the 60s into a movement, something political.  It never was that. The young people of  that time (I graduated from high school in 1963) were tired of the so-called “establishment" of being in the so-called "rat race". 

An inner-voyage had begun sort of haphazardly in the late 50s and early 60s.  Still, each person was on their own.  They had to make a decision: follow the herd or look deeply within.  Many went crazy along the way.  Most were expecting help along the path.  Maybe some great guru or Messiah, or even a few awakened space aliens!  Most of the wisdom was from charlatans.

That era was only a beginning, not a particular arrival at any great insight or accomplishment.  We were still very much materialists involved in a kind of sensual materialism:  doing our own thing, getting high, having a good time.  With the proliferation of birth control pills the good time was often sexual.

Those who left the inner-voyage had decided to go back to the establishment and become, like their parents, rats in the system.  By that time I realized that Zen had failed to inspire anyone to go beyond the Tinseltown materialism that dominated the cultural landscape. 

Too soon everything shifted back to politics.  We had to save our Earth.  Mankind was killing it by pollution although it turned out that man had an insignificant part in climate change.  The bulk of of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere came from nature (97%).  Our carbon footprint is minuscule.

Today we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.  It's a kind of limbo or Bardo.  It will always be this way if we are materialistic and don't seek a real spiritual path in which we have to look deeply within and arrive at a mysterious, transcendent place.

 

A limit to the power of magic

Magic’s power lies in dominating the five senses so as to control the person.  It can influence the sixth sense, too, which in Buddhism is manas which I translate as mentation.  But there is a limit to the power of magic. 

Magic itself has no effect on what transcends the six senses.  While our life can be a life of delusion dominated and controlled through magic, when we study Buddhism we understand that there is something beyond the senses, something even beyond mankind.

In this brief treatment of magic, it is easy to see that it has a tremendous influence over people.  A person can hardly ignore its power.  Even the magician falls prey to magic. 

Magic is an integral part of our modern world.  It makes things charming and alluring, even bewitching, attractive and desirable.  Love affairs are born of magic but so are evil leaders who doom their people to misery. 

In modern culture another name for magic is advertising, education, propaganda, ideology, mass culture, drugs, the placebo and nocebo effect, sexual attractiveness, etc.  Madness is born from magic.  Sooner or later everyone is caught by magic.  Few escape its power.

Religion is the nemesis of magic or should be in so far as it enshrines the comprehension that transcends creation.  In Buddhism the goal is the full realization of the transcendent which is beyond the senses.

“There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore you do know an escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned” (Tatiyanibbānapaṭisaṃyutta-sutta).

Only in the created world is magic possible.  But from magic we also have to understand that there is a magic associated with evil which endeavors to keep people attached to the senses especially the sixth sense.  We should not forget that Siddhartha battled with the evil demon Mara and that the five aggregates which comprise the psychophysical being belong to Mara!

Still too burdened by consciousness

Materialism requires the splitting of the transcendent one into perceiver and perceiving, which we understand in the West to be consciousness or what Buddhists call vijñāna.(lit. in two parts Knowing).  Such materialist cognition cannot take place without a split in the original nature of reality which is indivisible.  The resultant split is an illusion, however.

The pluralization (including appearance) which results from the illusory split is not real relative to the indivisible one.  As fundamentally unsplit, nevertheless, we are immersed and enclosed in illusion to live as materialists.  The path and the goals we have chosen are strictly within the confines of illusion.

Put into Zen, with Mind-only (unsplit spirit) there is no real spacetime world.  Thus, the adept is released.  What hid the illusion making the world seem all too real is gone. 

Those who are new to the world of Buddhism will use their imagination to help them believe that the world they're in is illusory, but it doesn't work that way.  They have not actually gone beyond the vijñāna-split to see true reality.  It's like telling a mentally ill person just to imagine they're normal (trans-normal?).

Such people are incapable of gnosis, or the same, direct intuition of the unsplit absolute.  They are still too burdened by vijñāna.  This is where Zen’s way comes in.  Overtime it destroys the perceiver and perceiving dichotomy until the Zen adept has lost even perceiver and perceiving to rely on.  Suddenly and unexpectedly the adept beholds the original one.  Ox herding pictures illustrate this in VII, VIII, IX.

The great human illusion

In these blogs I have mentioned before that we are in a trap, a very subtle trap, one conceived within the human mind itself.  It is not surprising therefore in Buddhism to find that we are enclosed in the five grasping aggregates which the Buddha speaks about which are owned and operated by Mara the evil one! 

Furthermore, these same aggregates are without a self or anātman (P., anattā) which is supposedly the doctrine of the Buddha! Put the Buddha taught no such doctrine. However, he did teach that we are deceived by these grasping aggregates into believing that they are our self.  Thus the human problem is one of misidentification: mistaking the self for what is not the self. 

The highest truths of Indian religions including Buddhism is that the world and the human beings within it are an illusion.  Spacetime is an illusion including this human body in which we are immersed.  But perhaps even more deceptive, the imagination of beings contains within it both birth and death.  Liberation then as a matter of intuiting directly what transcends the great human illusion. 

 

Mumon’s clever Mu trap

Our saviors, gods and lofty utopias will not save us from what we do not know, or from our own innate power to deceive ourselves.  We have the choice (P., sankhārā) to stay where we are, about which we know nothing, or go forward into something of which we know nothing (but imagine we do). 

Either choice brings us to the final trap which says it all about Zen koans, that they are unanswerable through human convention try as we might to force an answer from them.  No matter how much we ponder them we will always end up in Mumon’s Mu trap only to be reborn again and again in a samsaric cycle.

You must take my words seriously.  I am trying to help you escape from Mumon’s clever Mu trap.  That is all my book The Secret of Zen is trying to do.  Including Siddhartha, only a few Zen masters figured it out and even I figured it out. And I am on my last leg!

Seekers on this inscrutable path, what you seek will never match with the enlightenment which you seek!  It ever lies beyond the scope of perceiver and perceiving.  Think about Mu and you are at once lost. 

You must go to your wits’ end.  In a split second you’ll forget your dualistic consciousness and converge instantly with the Buddha-nature.  The released drop of water has become a boundless ocean of bliss.