The Zennist

Thou shall not have any all too human Gods before me

The mental concept of ‘God’ is inevitably limited to anthropomorphism in which the highest reality is more human than transcendent.  But the great minds throughout human history did not conceive of a God that was anthropomorphic.

We ourselves occasionally get glimpses of this reality but these glimpses are far and few between because we are located in a world of illusion in which our self is not itself but other than itself (anātman).  We have the sense of wanting to move to a higher reality, but never seem to arrive.  And if we imagine we have arrived it often turns out to be a delusion if not delusions of grandeur.

In light of these problems, which seem intractable at times, we have an odd hunch that we're going in a kind of bad circle, around and around, and getting no place.  Maybe this is the pattern of samsara.

With such a pattern, the atheistic mindset of denial can only pertain to mankind’s habit of inventing all too human Gods who cater to mankind's daily needs but only serve the purpose of keeping mankind in a circle.  This is what precisely atheism really intends: thou shall not have any all too human Gods before me.  However, the atheist cannot deny a base reality which is beyond man.  To do so it's going too far.  One, however, can say the base reality (superposition?) is transcendent after fully merging with this reality.

Each human being's secret dream is to go beyond the merely human. We are kind of like a ladder which is intended to take us beyond ourselves.  Still the great majority of us still fear to go too high.

The critical difference between Christianity and Buddhism

Perhaps the most significant difference between Buddhism and Christianity is that the former asks its followers to see what Siddhartha the Buddha saw, whereas in Christianity it asks its followers to believe so as to have faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

If Jesus Christ, on the other hand had said, “I have realized God and so can you,” the religion would've taken a different turn.  Instead, what we have is a religion strictly based on the firmness of one's belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. That one may treat him as God’s equal.

Jesus Christ then becomes the intercession between man and God such that one need only faith.  He will take care of the rest, even forgives us of all of our sins so that in a way we don't really have to know God as Christ did. 

The critical difference between Christianity and Buddhism is that with Buddhism there is no salvation except that one attains Nirvana and becomes a Buddha.  Christianity essentially believes that Christ will take care of our problems since we have so much faith in him.

The immaturity of Christianity is evident in its teachings.  It's really looking for followers and will say just about anything to get the attention of the masses.

Who you are

True reality is already here, in fact, it has never left.  However, as we approach it with our ideas of what we expect it to be like, we become more confused.  The first road eventually branches off many, many times.  At this point, we are more lost and confused than ever.

Then the Buddha’s teaching comes along.  It talks about awakening to something that even Māra, the Buddhist devil, couldn’t recognize.  Little did Māra know that the Buddha gave up perceiver and perceiving (dual knowing).  He entered a transcendent state in which there was no division or constructs.

Māra, was in a way, a god of the six senses which required a perceiver and perceiving whether it was visual, auditory or even mental (manas) which includes the imagination and intellect.

Even if we take a voyage into our own mind we are more like the people in Plato's Cave facing an artificially constructed world, while the true light is always behind them, in such a way that they are unable turn around and see it. 

Our inner thoughts and emotions arise as do our mental images and what our various senses perceive.  We are facing an illusion not true reality.  Even our fleshy body we inhabit is an illusion.  Transcending illusion is extremely difficult.  Most will be unable to transcend illusion.  Nevertheless, it is important to start the journey of transcendence, of going beyond all illusion where you realize, finally, who you are.

Same teaching just a different way of explaining it

God is SPIRIT or in Lakota "Wakan Tanka". Composite phenomena blindly arise from Spirit and return to Spirit, leaving their desire-seeds for a future composite life filled with pleasure, anxiety and suffering.  And still they have no true vision or even a vague understanding of Spirit.  It is mixed with their strong worldly imagination. 

Those spiritual warriors who abide with Wakan Tanka always in their hearts will enter heaven (S., svarga) when they leave their earthly vessels.  Long ago did they behold the incomposite seed of eternal life (S., tathāgatagarbha).  It was their lodestar; to it they gave their life energy.

When still in the flesh it is a wonderful event when Spirit meets you. It saw your incomposite seed and knew that you were its scion.

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.

 

The most difficult of all to let go of

There is a kind of original sin in Buddhism.  It is called avidya (destitute of knowledge).  Human beings come into the world under the dominion of avidya.  It's like waking up in a virtual reality game but have no idea how you got there or how you might escape when the going gets tough.  We are only a blank. 

Now you are feeling hunger and fright and all those things that go along with being an infant.  You begin your life being totally dependent on things outside of your control.  You desperately cry for help like an abandoned kitten.  You depend upon the love and care of those who brought you into this world — this not so kind world as you will one day find out.

Admittedly, life is always giving you hope but in the end you have to give up your carnal body.  You have no idea where you're going to be after it passes away.  Your imagination works overtime to create some kind of utopian world whether it's a heaven or a materialist utopia in which you will live forever in a temporal body.

Obviously, no great creator God is going to come down and help you (here your imagination is working overtime).  You are on your own.  But there, according to Buddhism, lies the escape route.  It is where we transcend all appearances and conditions, even the perceiver and the perceiving which got us into this mess (avidya).  

We don't need your stinkin’ utopia

The religious life is a struggle that is interior.  It is an adventure nevertheless, but fraught with great danger.  In the Buddhist sense, struggle is specifically oriented toward achieving direct intuition of the absolute or the same, Buddha-nature.  But also it is about giving up false assumptions and beliefs.  That is difficult to do. 

In any religion or ideology (politics in the form of religion) the lie is propagated along with the truth.  But the unawakened are usually deceived by the lie while fervently denying the truth.

The practice of Buddhism amounts to valuing enlightenment rather than striving one-sidedly and blindly for a new utopian world.  In the Buddhist form, however, we don’t have to pay the collective price (often in blood and terror) for the mistakes of a few mentally deranged ideologues.

While these ideologies are often youthfully enchanting in the beginning this enchantment is often lost very early by an ideologically possessed bureaucracy that demands obedience and conformity.  Those with the most wealth are still in power who still control the government while the government makes it possible for them to hide their presence and iniquities.  At the same time people eventually become disenchanted with the religious life.

 

The great mystery revealed

Buddhism (bauddham) soon loses its appeal when it goes beyond the six senses and especially the last sense which has to do with mentation (manas).  In this sense Buddhism is all about complete transcendence.

The ordinary person does not realize that the world they put together, including their body of birth and the environment it lives and dies in is a mental representation albeit very real looking. 

Key to locking on to this representation is consciousness (vijñāna) which is always dichotomous or the same, perceiver and perceiving.  Such consciousness is never absolute, most primordial or first.  This is reserved for spirit or ātman which excludes anātman (not spiritual, corporeal, empty of spirit).

Buddhism has changed significantly from what Siddhartha Gautama realized after he transcended consciousness.  Having merged with spirit, he could distinguish ātman from anātman.

He said that an anātman refers to the five aggregates, namely, material shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness.  They are always suffering and conditioned.  The most troubling aggregate is consciousness which I have said earlier is always dichotomous:  we are always stuck in the perceiver and perceiving mode.

It would safe to say that modern Buddhism is a distortion of what Siddhartha Gautama taught.  It nowhere approaches the problem of consciousness, especially, the transcending of consciousness which leads to the elimination of rebirth since consciousness is the transmigrant from one life to the next.

Consciousness is always an unresolved tension.  As mentioned earlier, it is the difference between perceiver and perceiving. There is a seeming unity between the two, even a harmony, but no transcendence of this duality.  As with the example of an asymptote, the line that continually approaches a given curve can never meet it.  When consciousness is transcended then is the great mystery revealed.

The hypocrisy of spiritual materialism

The term “spiritual bypassing: was coined in the early 1980s by psychologist John Welwood.  It's another one of those terms which is really about our materialistic/nihilistic world.  In Welwood’s treatment it is about faking virtue (hypocrisy).  How I can appear spiritual without really being spiritual.  This leads me back in time to Chögyam Trungpa’s book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which boils down to how I can become enlightened without giving up my materialism.

In light of this, back in 1965 when I began my own spiritual journey into Zen Buddhism it didn't take me too long, maybe a couple of years, to realize that those with whom I studied had no idea what satori was or, for that matter, what Buddhism really was about.  It was fake spirituality all the way. 

Finally, at 76 I can see Buddhism without the fog in front of me.  And this also allows me to see our modern culture in the radiant light of Buddhism and just how dark and evil this age has become.  I wrote this to myself not too long ago.

“Darkness was in the beginning, then we learned, eventually, to see in the darkness and make shapes from the darkness and live our entire lives in darkness.  Only in great myths and legends were the bringers of the light made known to us.  Such was mankind’s terrible fate. Today, mankind is still trapped in darkness which it believes is illumination!”

I can see that today in America spirituality and with it religion has little meaning except in doing some superficial practices or spouting off a few words of wisdom that we don't even understand much less care about.  In a few short years, it has all become politicized.  

We are supposed to become moved by politics and resentment.  We hate those, we imagine, who caused us to be born into poverty and with a gender we are unhappy with.  They are always oppressing us or so we imagine.  We want justice, that is, revenge at any cost.  But this is not fertile ground to sow the seeds of future illumination.  This kind of belief rots the human spirit.  Faith and intuition are religion’s two pillars without which it soon transforms itself into something less than religion.