The Zennist

A battle between emotion and reason

In recent times the world has been taken over by a search for cosmic justice and the Higgs Boson particle, the so-called God particle.  Both groups have found neither cosmic justice nor the Higgs Boson particle but seem to have managed to gain the world's attention at the possibility of finding both.

At this time, the depth of Buddhism is too much for the bulk of humanity.  They prefer a Quixotic quest for some artifact of their imagination; at least to reify it enough so they can publish academic papers about it.

While it is true that mankind has not set foot in reality for a long time or wishes to cross the waters of samsara to reach the Isle of Nirvana, he has managed to eke out a living making mechanical and electrical devices but still suffers from the inability to control his emotions which eventually leads to a life of great suffering.

Making this matter worse is when we put emotional dynamite into ideas so that people will feel compelled to get very physical if not violent to get their ideas across.  The emotions themselves become the justification for doing all kinds of evil things in the name of the search for cosmic justice.  And despite all the evidence against modern science that the physical universe is not physical but electrical they continue to push their insane projects spending vast sums of taxpayers money on making high-energy particle colliders.

It could be that emotions have triumphed over reason to a point where we are in a place where emotionality and reason are facing off for a fight to the death.  Agree or disagree, nevertheless, our daily life consists of watching this battle between emotion and reason play out in our everyday life.

Living in an unfiltered world

We carry around many brain filters. They are capable of letting in certain ideas more freely than others.  In the digital world filters can block access to certain online materials. Seeing the world without filters is almost impossible.

This might be the reason why LSD-25 was so popular during the 1960s.  We hoped to see the world without filters maybe to see it with child-like eyes.  But there were still filters left in our brain.  And we could even add more filters later on in life.

In Buddhism and especially Zen, the filter problem is a big deal because when we enter the temple, so to speak, our entire brain is somewhat over-filtered.  Much of it works against the context of Buddhism but includes, nevertheless, our expectations of what Buddhism is about in our filtered world. 

This condition in the long run only helps with our gradual absorption into the world of appearances which, naturally, runs counter to Buddhism.

This all comes down to the question of how do we see true reality minus the filters?  Even using our imagination we are presented with the problem of filtering and it's a deep problem.  It seems to me that in the beginning we have to bring up filters but then see through them. This is not as easy as it looks.

The ingenious trap

Our human birth is immersion into illusion and with it samsara.  Still we have the potential or capacity to transcend this illusion.  Ultimately, we can transcend the subject-object relationship or the same, the perceiver-percept duality and forgo samsara. 

By the way, this dual knowing (vijñāna) is what is necessary to produce an embryo that will leave its mother's birth canal in approximately nine months. 

But most of don't negate the subject-object relationship.  We don't because we are still deeply tied to our previous memories.  These memories have their own realness and allure.  These memories always point back to samsara.  They cannot go beyond it.

The trap of samsara is ingeniously made by us.

 

Lost in appearances, looking in the wrong direction

We could call the Buddha the conqueror of appearances or the same, illusion.  His triumph was to overcome the human belief that our world is real when in fact it is unreal and painful.  We might even call our world a high definition illusion. 

Maybe the pixels in our illusory world that make it appear are, precisely, the smallest composition or combination possible which is a dyad (a unit = “as if” one).  This in Buddhism is vijñāna.

While the ‘I’ conceit is the first to arise in the mind of the seeker it is already combined into a unit.  There is an implicit dyad-ness in this unit.  When the inquiry “Who am I?” is pursued we can’t get beyond this dyadic condition.  Even being in the moment or in the here and now is this implicit unit but one dyadic, nevertheless.

We have reached, let us say, the minimal unit of appearance or the same a pixel.  In no way have we transcended it.  Here begins the so-called spiritual journey of the seeker.

With regard to all appearances whether outside of this body of flesh or inside of it, according to the Buddha, all this is not mine, I am not this, it is not my self or ātman.  So we might ask, “Who then am I?”  To find the right answer to this question is the most subtle journey of all.

Whether we call it nirvana, satori, or kenshō it means the same thing, we have arrived at the transcendent or tathatā.  I should add that this arrival cannot be shared with others least of all by language.  Language, we could say, is directional.  It cannot mysteriously produce the object of our search or transport us to the revelation of our Buddha-nature.  Our true nature is always here but we are always looking in the wrong direction.

The ring pass-not

Our life as sentient beings is actually more like an unending simulation game than anything else.  Being unawakened we continue endlessly in a ‘stream of consciousness’ (viññāṇasota) also called the stream of becoming (bhava-sota) or the wheel of becoming (bhavacakka) in which appearances are always changing but we are forever trapped within the sphere of appearance, what is called the ring pass-not.

What happens to characters who die in a simulation game; is there a heaven or hell for them?  (It depends if the heaven or hell is written into the game.)  On the same card, as a game player can I play other games going on to be other avatars? The right answer should be obvious. In dealing with illusion usually anything goes. 

But there is a catch to this.  Once I make the decision I am bound to my decision, especially, if I elect to play in another life simulation game. I think we could call this attachment to playing games.

However, once I break the spell of being trapped within a game, seemingly unable to escape from it, this applies to all games.  In other words, I can can overcome the need to play games. Welcome to the Buddha's message.

 

Beyond power

Power itself is difficult to define because it offers nothing.  This offering is totally empty and hollow like a plantain tree.  It gives no support except the illusion of support.  Yet, almost all beings desire power. 

They put their manipulative intellect to the task of achieving power while the thirst for it never ends.  A source of strength and fulfillment is not found within power itself, that is, within its own world.  Still, it must have dominion over others.

Enters a kind of black magic.  One lives in houses of power, drives cars of power, and dresses in the fashions of power.  Those who flock around people of power are awestruck by their power who do the bidding of the powerful.  It seems true to say that power always desires more power.  There's no end to power's craving for more power.

Humans cannot see the illusory world in which they are immersed where nothing is real.  Yet strangely, this is where they begin their search for enlightenment, within the illusion itself, as if enlightenment confers infinite power.  If anything enlightenment is about being free from the need for power.  Men of power and those who have gone beyond the need for power are truly a sight to behold.

Such beings remind me somewhat of Star Trek's "Q" entities who all belong to the "Q Continuum" which is an ultramundane world. We see the Q entity in the Bodhisattva:

"How is it that a Bodhisattva acts perversely and lewdly?  In that he elicits thoughts about perversity of the sensual desire of sentient beings" (Mahāyānasaṃgraha, Taishō no. 1593).

 

The burning house matrix

Many liked the 1999 film The Matrix.  The main takeaway of this sci-fi film is our reality is an illusion, a matrix.  It is only a secondary reality.  Those who run it are trying to repress the first reality.  In fact, the secondary reality has almost managed to erase remembrance of the first reality which is most primordial.

Buddhism is actually paving a way to the first reality, the one most feared by those who run the second reality.  But even Buddhism has been changed by those who run the second reality.  They fear the transcendent which goes beyond nescience, formations, and consciousness (vijñāna).  These are the necessary prerequisites for rebirth: to become deeply involved once again in the suffering of the flesh and the second reality.  

But weaning people off of the the second reality proves almost impossible.  They are trained to be hostile to the transcendent and to the means of reaching the first or primary reality. 

Let us not forget that the Buddha reminds us in the Lotus Sutra that this world is like a burning house and we're like the children in this burning house who haven't yet been devoured by the flames.  We don't want to leave. We are too self-absorbed in the matrix.

First get the magic sword

Gaining direct insight into nirvana or the same, the unconditioned, is really the beginning of Buddhism not its end.  Why is this?  Transcendence of this illusory existence (samsara) is not possible if you don't first know what precisely to transcend.  You will eventually be deceived.  In the words of one Zen master, you'll be throwing away the eggs keeping the chicken shit.

This helps the paint a somewhat different picture of Buddhism than is presently marketed.  For example, one who has awakened to the unconditioned knows perfectly well that the five aggregates lack self nature (svabhāva) insofar as they are conditioned.  They are illusory, not real.

It's somewhat like being a great warrior who receives a magic sword which is able to slay all that which is illusory.  And there is a lot there to slay.

“If you want to achieve early fulfillment, brandish the precious sword given by the mind king and march right ahead: if you meet buddhas, kill the Buddhas, if you meet Zen masters, kill Zen masters, if you meet your parents, kill your parents, if you meet the masses of living beings, kill the masses of living beings.  Totally massacre everything animate and inanimate, all forms and appearances, mountains, rivers, and earth, all times and all places, good and bad, right and wrong, plus anything else that appears and disappears, coming and going through the doors of the six senses and the alleys of the seven consciousnesses.  Having killed it all completely, when you turn a flip and appear in the realm of cosmic space, you can be called a real hero.  When yo get to this point, you will not doubt that Buddhas and sentient beings, enlightenment and affliction, samsara and nirvana, heaven and hell, are all illusions” (Bannan Eishu 萬安英種).

But without this magic sword we can’t even slay our false, conditioned self (anātman) much less our imagined Buddha.  Of course, there are ignorant Buddhists who suffer from pride and hubris, who believe that they possess this magic sword, but they don’t.  They uphold the lineage of paper Zen with its paper transmissions but they have no real prajñā /wisdom sword.

The spiritual broadcast continues

Most religions escape religion.  They are quick to turn religion into some kind of orthodoxy that resists a fuller spiritual understanding of mankind, more precisely, resists the truth that human beings are spiritual creatures living entrapped in a biological structure that is limited, being subject to death (and rebirth).

This is the main problem facing mankind which eventually forms itself into materialism which creates an impenetrable curtain around mankind's spiritual inheritance.  This materialism takes on new forms such as Mao’s Four Olds or postmodernism which is essentially the same thing, getting rid of the old to make way for the new.  Whatever that is.

With Christianity, eventually came orthodoxy which tried to get rid of any mystical approach to early Christianity especially a gnostic or intuitive approach.  Buddhism tried its hand at orthodoxy and went so far as to erect a kind of there is no self doctrine thus hiding the more mystical side of Buddhism which understands there is a self that transcends biological being.

But the fog is beginning to clear.  Maybe a new Buddhism is coming. Already we know that the DNA molecule is optimized to be a fractal antenna.  We are more like some kind of electric device that receives and sends a signal like our cell phone.  And when finally the old heart flatlines it may be that the broadcast continues.  Shall we reside in Svarga (P., sagga) or come back to this planet?

Leaving the all too human magic show

We are not born with the knowledge that the world and the body we are connected with is an illusion.  What is real for us is this illusory world and the body that is born and dies within it.  We know no other way than this. 

When we enter into the study of Buddhism we begin to examine this belief of ours.  If things are always changing how can they be real?  If all our efforts ultimately miss the mark how can we find fulfillment?  If we believe this body is our true self why is it always changing and subject to pain and unhappiness?

Here we come to the entrance of Buddhism.  We are attached to what is conditioned and illusory.  We have not the slightest bit of awareness, understanding, or direct knowledge of the unconditioned (true reality), even though the unconditioned is immediate with us.

What we assume to be our self is not our self because an illusion is not real and therefore cannot be a real self.  This perfectly explains why the Buddha said each of the five aggregates is not the self or anattā.  The aggregates themselves are vacant (rittaka), hollow (tucchaka), and coreless (asāraka).  True reality (dharmatā) is a different matter.

When people say that the world has no soul or Ātman or there is only death after this life, they are unconsciously alluding to a fictitious world.  Buddhism takes a much different attitude.  Fictions or illusions just don't happen like a rabbit coming out of the hat during a magic show.  Buddhism exposes the magic act.  When we transcend the human being we leave the magic show.  We enter true reality.