The Zennist

A fall into what we are not

From a Buddhist point of view, even the wealthy have a hidden burden in life which they can't see.  Being wealthy they have little or no opposition to their desires; they can buy or finagle their way out of many predicaments.

But with such temporal power most choose degrees of evil.  And so it is with the death of a human being.  They are relieved of the heavy burden of the flesh and experience the wonderful illumination and compassion of the Buddhas.  But what do they opt for? to go back to the world of suffering!

But they have only deceived themselves again because the world they wish to go back to is more like a virtual reality game which has no limit, which can go on forever.  An unending soap opera.

True reality is not to be found in a virtual reality like existence in which we become a successful avatar but lose more often finding suffering always at the end of our desires.  Happiness is not in the created world. Far from it.  True happiness is before creation, even before the observed and observer! Always a fall is required into what we are not.

Man, the thinking creature

There are actually six senses the sixth being in Sanskrit "manas" which includes all forms of mentation.  The human being is a thinking creature who is caught up in a kind of cosmic virtual reality game.

What links this creature to all previous lives or lives yet to come is consciousness which is dichotomous or in Sanskrit vijñāna. To put it simply, humans suffer because they are attached to this virtual reality game.  We must fully surpass the human being (avatar?) in order to be totally absorbed into the transcendent or Spirit.

A deeper dive into this we find that the DNA molecule is a fractal antenna which if all the DNA antennae were extended would reach to the heliopause.  This gives us a hint into something truly profound and being that we are essentially a system of antennas means that we can both receive and send.

The world around us and the world within us are all emergent coming from what today we might call "superposition" which is immeasurable and transcends analysis.  It is where the broadcast is coming from to our antennae.  Yet we know that it is real.

In simpler terms we are its broadcasts, like music coming from a radio in which the antenna picks up the invisible signal then amplifies it. In this analogy our ignorance is about the source of the signal.  We have no idea how to directly communicate with it.  All that we do as humans is superimpose our ideas over this mysterious source.  There is always a lack of integration (samādhi) between the superposition and the superimposition (adhyāsa) because of the intrusion of vijñāna.

The three modes

Just like our universe we humans have three modes of being, namely, the dark mode, the glow mode, and the arc (luminous) mode. 

The first mode is chiefly animal existence, being enveloped by a dark covering which puts us into a hostile world.  The second mode is when we can put a little light on the subject as if seeing through a glass darkly, establishing a kind of order out of chaos.  The last mode, the arc mode, is transcendence, an awakening to true reality.  In such illumination there is no darkness or even a glow.

Very few get to the arc mode while the many creatures live and die in the dark mode with a few advancing and taking shelter in the glow mode.

The great sages of history, like the Buddhas, have told us of the arc mode.  By their own effort and struggle they transcended darkness and glow.  And were it not for the illumination of these sages there would not even be man's civilization, his community, and safety. 

From this we can see that man's greatest enemy is his own darkness and glowing thoughts which he mistakes for illumination.

We are absolute spirit having a human life

Can we see or at least intuit true reality when we seem to be lost in illusory existence, including this body that came through our mother's birth canal?  Materialist say no but the Buddhas say yes.

According to the materialists we only have sensory knowledge to rely on.  But according to the Buddhists sensory knowledge, which includes mentation which is the 6th sense, can be transcended.

However mankind's science also falls within mentation, this includes his imagination, his fantasies, even his dreams.  From the six sense arise all kinds of fictions many of which are useful for staying alive in an illusory world in an illusory body.  Still, all sensory knowledge is relative knowledge not absolute.

Said differently, as we participate more and more in the illusory world through our illusory body we acquire relative knowledge.  But what lies beyond illusion and the relative knowledge that we depend upon?  We do not know because we have rejected absolute knowledge or the same, transcendent knowledge.

Man (S., manu) is a thinking creature who is immersed in a relativistic or illusory existence.  For man to transcend man requires that he go beyond himself:  beyond subject and object, beyond perceiver and perceiving, beyond thinker and thought, etc.  Transcendence itself cannot be imagined, to do so is to fall into the barrier of Mumon.

祖關不透心路不絶、盡是依草附木精靈。

If you do not pass the barrier, and do not cut off the way of thinking [all ways of knowing], then you will be like a ghost clinging to the bushes and weeds. (Brackets are mine.)

Foremost, Zen is about transcending this temporal life, intuiting at once the absolute before it is transformed into this illusory existence.  Echoing the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we are absolute spirit having a human life. 

But to go back to spirit we must transcend all that is human.  As the reader may have noticed there is a subtle difference between letting go and transcendence.  Knowing this difference is crucial.

Meditation (dhyāna) is for those who practice transcendence.

How much we are deceived by her own ignorance and therefore have to rely on others based upon their authority is astonishing to say the least.  Add to this problem that we have come to believe that a hypothesis, like the sun and the stars revolve around the Earth.  But as Einstein pointed out it only takes one person to overthrow a hypothesis believed by many.

Suddenly we come to the problem of science by consensus.  We all agree this hypothesis must be true.  And then we come to Buddhism and the belief that the Buddha rejected any kind of absolute or ātman.  He was an agnostic and certainly not a mystic who transcended the thinking creature called man. 

But humans, especially, Buddhists have been deceived by their very ignorance.  The Buddha was a mystic who had transcended the thinking creature called man.

To come to the limit of man who is merely an instrument is to be absorbed, for an instant, in the absolute.  There is no man here or what man sought for.  It's all been transcended.  The barrier or stumbling block all along was man, this thinking creature, whose thinking is always dichotomous or dual.

It is impossible for a human being to return to the first principle by thinking dichotomously (vijñāna).  And this is what Zen is really about.  We have to let go of this two sided mind where there is a perceiver and perceiving which make up the fundamental part of the human being.

Meditation (dhyāna) is for those who practice transcendence.  This can mean:  what is most intrinsic in us seeks to go beyond what it faces in the way of being immersed in a temporal body with its imaginary thoughts (manas).

The practice of Zen or Buddhism, just going through rituals and the seated meditation, is not practice.  Nor is transcendence going on.  To get to dhyāna which is real transcendence, first involves exhausting dichotomous thinking (vijñāna); going to our wits’ end.