The Zennist

The side of the brain that makes politics and Zen difficult

As noted in an earlier Zennist blog, there is a natural antagonism in the human brain between the left and right hemispheres.  Eventually, this natural antagonism externalizes itself in the public discourse as a sharp political divide between the political Left and the Right. 

The left hemisphere of the brain creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world (utopia) which only serves to bar reality and continue with its ideological fantasies which typifies the political Left, especially Marxism.  It is the right hemisphere of the brain that enables us to wake up and leave this fantasy world of the left hemisphere and deal with reality: the way things really are.

This view I suspect is a bitter pill to swallow but it is supported by scientific research.  Also, I hasten to add, there is a bias in the brain that favors the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere.  This bias involves two proteins, namely, Fgf8 and Nodal.  Their action ensures that when the antagonism develops, it usually favors the left hemisphere of the brain.  

In Zen’s intuitive path this means the harder we try to awaken to our true nature, the more we employ the left-hemisphere, and the more difficulty we encounter.  Paradoxically, once we stop forcing our self to awaken, satori comes to us spontaneously and unexpectedly, which Zen’s history reports.  Nevertheless, getting to that point is no easy matter or an easy cakewalk.  Satori is never easy.  We are usually deluded by the left hemisphere with its penchant for fantasy.  It is more at home with an unrealistic imagination which conjures up fake enlightenments. 

The left hemisphere can only deal with what it already presupposes: the world that it has already made for itself. This is not helpful when we elect to explore what we do not know which we seek to know.

Zen naturally favors the right hemisphere of the brain, with its greater integrative and unifying power that is constantly allowing itself to enter the world of the unknown to find and to know ultimate meaning on its own terms.  

Addiction and attachment

Modern culture has no problem with wallowing in the flesh.  In Buddhist terms this is the life that is addicted to the material world, sensations, ideations, choices and a dualizing consciousness.  In short, these are the five aggregates that belong to the Buddhist devil Māra.  I hasten to add that being addicted to something is different than being attached to something. Modern man is certainly addicted to his passions which comprise the five aggregates. 

An addiction is much more difficult to give up than an attachment; in fact, the majority of people who try to give up their addiction or addictions fail.  A relapse is often the case.  Even moderation of an addiction is difficult to achieve for the addict.  For those addicted to the flesh they want to save the flesh.  Ultimately, they have no real intention on giving up their strong addiction to the emotions which the flesh arouses. 

Having a passion for Buddhism is really the antidote for our addiction to the five aggregates.  With this kind of passion we see the aggregates as foreign to our true nature.  This nature or essence prompts us to attain gnosis of it, which is a sudden and direct intuition of this essence.

This is like the difference between a teenager who is addicted to drugs and sex versus a teenager who has a passion to become a pilot.  As we come to see, an addiction brings us down while a passion, in the higher sense, can elevate us above the need for an addiction which leads to a downturn.

But not all who take up Buddhism or its variants have this kind of passion and will likely not succeed.  Such practitioners still harbor a deep addiction for the life of the five aggregates which includes the ways of the world.  By comparison, giving up an attachment is relatively easy we do it every day.  We don't eat the same food day in and day out or wear the same clothes day in and day out.  If someone cuts in front of us on the freeway our anger is short-lived.  We detach from it.  So we roughly understand what detachment means.  But a life of addiction to the five aggregates is far different.

Transcendence is all that is necessary

There is an antagonism in the inner life of man in which his brain even struggles with itself.  More exactly, there is a biological opposition between the two hemispheres of the brain which causes this asymmetry and with it an unsettledness which cannot be overcome (duḥkha?).  

At this point you might be wondering where does Buddhism, and for that matter Zen, fit in?  There is a transcendent world (lokuttara) beyond this unsettledness. If you wish to catch a glimpse of it (satori) you must go through a rigorous training which helps to make this world accessible (i.e., the making of the religious mind).  It involves belief in the midst of doubt, faith in the way or means, and above all, intuition/gnosis of ultimate reality. 

Spoken about earlier, this antagonism in which the inner life struggles with itself, cannot be overcome except to transcend the corporeal person which is only an instrument for perceiving samsaric phenomena.  This specific use will not yield to anything except an instrumental use.  The instrument user is not in the equation.  The human mind is in a privileged position to detach from the corporeal instrument.

The antagonism within the inner life of man cannot for too long be neglected without serious repercussions.  Research has shown that a competition exists between the two sides of the brain that causes this antagonism.  Harmony is not the answer — transcendence is all that is necessary.

Life is not free from servitude to the organism

Life in a biological organism is constrained by the organism itself.  Life, in this regard, is not free from servitude to the organism.  The want of food, water, sexuality, all belong to the organism.  Buddhism is not a religion that wants us to be servants of the corporeal being because it is so limiting and painful, misleading our vision to what is only finite and transitory.    

Because of mankind's ingenuity we are able to give our self leisure by which to think more about the world that is constraining the greater part of mankind’s life.  We are also able to get a glimpse of the authentic religious life where the greatness of spirit is first encountered by direct  intuition.

Of the estimated 37.2 trillion cells that comprise the human body not a single cell knows what gives it life.  Nor does the human brain.  The tendency of humans to name it “God” or “spirit” without direct intuition only leads to the dominance of the sign over the signified, something the intellect does quite often if not all the time. 

This intellectual treatment of religion is in fact the beginning of the demise of the religious life, a life that is more about opening up the way for direct intuition of the absolute rather than conceptualizing it, either through speech or the written word.

That we are constrained by the organism means we are embodied including our thoughts.  As far as we know our body will not give us a way out of this limitation.  We are doomed to repeat this condition in countless variations.  Ultimately, our biological organism cannot free us because we are unable to transcend it.  The act of transcending it is intuition. 

What replaces religion?

The question that should be asked in these modern times is what replaces religion?  It should be fairly obvious that right now it is nihilism in which the soul has become a problem for itself.  Man no longer regards himself as being greater than the sum of his biological parts; he is simply a byproduct of those parts. 

In light of this, death has become the hard and difficult truth of nihilism.  It is our complete extinction (uccheda).  By death, we assume that the anatomical structure of the human no longer works, that is, no longer produces the sense of a self who is the operator of the body.

This also has also led us to political nihilism and, of course, moral nihilism and with it a kind of sexual perversity.  In addition, we have been taught to hate the religious path which is the quest for ultimate reality which is also immortality. 

If Buddhism has one central goal it is the quest for ultimate reality which is beyond the range of our human senses but not outside of our ability to directly intuit ultimate reality. 

We are only fettered by nihilism and for Zennists our drive to conceive of ultimate reality when we are told that it is inconceivable (無念).  What disappears during enlightenment is the subject-object condition/polarity that thwarts intuition.  With intuition the original one is reached before it is split into the illusion of subject and object (appearance).

We have two souls?

When we die our body (now a corpse) is no longer animated.  It has become incapable of producing any of its former activities which we called “life”. 

This lifeless body has no blood circulation, respiration, digestion, speech or thought.  Some will say that the soul has separated itself from the body but none of us know what this soul is.  We cannot see it now even when our body is fully animated. 

According to the Buddha this body is empty, there is nothing real about it.  It is a soulless thing.  A person who is greatly attached to this body is sunk in delusion; they are far from complete detachment where the unconditioned is revealed.  But since we are not detached we are still tied to the senses and their respective fields being subject to rebirth as a consequence of this attachment. 

The road to our eventual freedom is one that is transcendent that can only be accomplished by the refinement of intuition which leaps beyond the six senses, the sixth being the most difficult which is our bondage to thoughts (manas) and all this implies (yes, even imaginary thoughts). 

You could even say we have two souls.  One is conditioned, for example, the five aggregates (skandha).  The other is spiritual which transcends all things including the five aggregates.  It is unconditioned.  This soul is also the Buddha-nature 佛性.

A different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotions

According to Buddhism, our consciousness (vijñāna) is deeply engaged with the flesh where, as a result, we have become emotionalized (for want of a better term) suffering under the precarious conditions of the body together with its unfulfilled drives. 

This suffering that we sense in the body which we have identified with becomes, automatically, an emotionalized burden for us.  And we have become the bearer of this emotionalized burden.  With a little bit of self-reflection we know what it means to bear this burden.  Moments of frustration, anger, passion, resentment, etc., arise from this burden.  We want to pin the blame on somebody else or some other kind of misfortune that has befallen us.  But for the recluse it is a different picture.

At some point the recluse understands that consciousness free of the body is a different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotional travails of the body. 

“Where consciousness is unmanifest, eternal, luminous all around, that's where earth, water, fire, and air does not exist.  Here long and short, fine and coarse, beautiful and ugly, name and form, cease with nothing remaining.  With the transcendence of [manifest] consciousness this is all ended” (DN 11).

This unmanifest consciousness, however, even for the recluse remains as yet unrealized (a Buddha has realized it).  In fact, manifest consciousness is always polarizing.  This condition makes the intuition of unmanifest consciousness that much more difficult because of the subtlety of this polarizing process.  We keep deceiving ourselves at ever finer levels.       

Interpersonal versus intrapersonal in Buddhism

The goal or scope of moderators on various Internet platforms such as Reddit, which among other things hosts a number of discussion groups and forums, is to shape emotions, motive, reasoning and behaviors, all of which can take on a certain ideological contour.

In this regard, ideology can be thought of as knowledge drawn from our sensations or feelings (i.e., emotional states) that can be transformed into political action.  Ideology makes possible justification for evildoing if only indoctrination at first (violence coming later).

Marx, for example, believed that he had ample justification on his side but it was only ideological certitude which for him would, eventually, bring about the highest antagonism of the proletariat (the exploited and oppressed class) against the bourgeoisie (the exploiting and ruling class) leading to revolution.  But modern society is no longer split between two warring classes. 

Hacking the information network of a culture so as to modify a person’s interpersonal relations doesn’t require a Marxian revolution.  Avoidance of certain traditionally excepted norms can be induced through an implicit demand for “political correctness”.  As a result, one may wish to avoid certain interpersonal transgressions that a group finds offensive.

Buddhism for the most part avoids all this since it is intrapersonal insofar as its path or way takes place within the individual mind or self in the general form of introspection and direct intuition.  Interpersonal relations are minimized and, ideally, have to be brought to a close through an extended solitary retreat.

Buddhism cannot long survive with the admittance of the interpersonal where it becomes decisive or crucial in a Dharma center.  Buddhism’s upending is hastened by a shift to the interpersonal in which the words of the Buddha are likewise shifted.  Eventually, behavior and ritual come to dominate practice.

Then with the interpersonal psychologization of Buddhism, over time, as opposed to its traditional intrapersonal teaching, Buddhism is secularized.  It exists in name only.

Being content with reification is not Zen's way

The tendency to reify our concepts runs deep in our modern culture.  We do it automatically without realizing it.  The noun “reification” comes from the the Latin res, thing.  When we reify our concepts we are trying to imbue them with realness — thingify them, in other words. 

If someone asks what Zen is they learn that it is seeing one’s true nature.  But this really says nothing about our true nature.  It might be thought provoking but this nature is still a mystery.  We have yet to intuit it directly.  That could take a lifetime. 

Those who are content with a reification of Zen will walk away believing that they fully understand it.  They might add that this true nature is simple sensory awareness or “just sitting”.  But they are just beating the cart and not the ox.  The cart doesn’t move.

Polishing a brick to make a mirror is a waste of effort.
So how can practicing Zen meditation to become a Buddha ever succeed?
Beat the ox or beat the cart—which should one do?
Using the false or using the true—which one will bring the dragon?
The mind-ground holds the seeds, but they need irrigation.
Our nature is like an untainted sky—clear for ten thousand miles.
The precious flower of samadhi is apart from all marks:
The wonder of its response, creation, and transformation is unfathomable.

Those who are content with a reification of Zen will walk away believing that they fully understand it.  This is using the conditioned to find the unconditioned.  Relying on concepts words evoke as if the concept is the intended reality is a grievous error.  Just as bad, is sitting in the body of birth and death imagining this to be the Buddha’s body.

The narrative must be let go of, replaced by 'great doubt' (大疑)

Today, the narrative often precedes the reality it is supposed to represent.  The narrative, in other words, has superimposed itself over reality.  It is like the longitudinal and latitudinal lines on a map or on a world globe.  They are useful but not real.  Many things help to illustrate and solidify the narrative even ceremonies and rituals, or even a documentary about the big bang.  We seem to always fall for the deception.  

So where does true reality begin?  With a CNN news flash?  With unverified claims (opinions); with an event like 9-11?  But truth or true reality is almost always silent.  No narrative can pretend to speak for it.  No Zen teacher can hand it to us unmodified, the way it really is.  Even Zen master Dōgen used deception (the shisho document supposedly given to Dōgen by Rujing and now designated a national treasure by the Japanese government most certainly is a medieval forgery).

Still, we remain too easily persuaded by the narrative.  This can be more of a hindrance than a help.  We seem to have time for the narrative but not for the truth which is more difficult to attain.  It seems like you have to dig for the truth, which can be difficult, whereas the narrative is just handed to you.  You can learn all about Zen by reading books by Alan Watts — or can you?  But even Watts is skeptical of the "trickster guru" and may very well be such a person.  

In the matter of Zen, its own narrative prevents actual transcendence (kenshō) from manifesting itself and thus represents a dangerous form of idolatry.  In the study of Zen it conceals the most holy by claiming to practice it.  But how do you practice that which transcends all humanly efforts to reach it?  In other words, how do you practice hitting a target that neither you can see nor anyone else?  The narrative must be let go of, replaced by 'great doubt' (大疑).  This is a process of emptying-out not retaining.  Only then will clear light come which is the very substance of our ordinary thoughts.