The Zennist

Buddha-Dharma and Rock n Roll

If pop music from the 1960s deserves high marks for its sophistication then today's pop music gets a flunk.  It lacks tempo variation.  Too many repetitive sounds.  Cords from the same key.  Very little dynamic variation.  The list goes on.  What does this say about the minds that enjoy today's pop music?  There is very little depth to them; certainly not enough to enter the mystical world of Zen Buddhism, and for that matter Buddhism in general.

It is only when we couple such shallowness with the religious endeavor to see ultimate reality that we have a problem.  This opens up a path to the anti-epiphany, a kind of reverse transcendence; of mistaking illusion for enlightenment but more, it is the acceptance of the false self as the real self or the belief there is no self at all.

This thought goes even further when it falsely believes the mundane world is the Buddha-nature.  In fact Dōgen Zenji held that "impermanence is in itself Buddha-nature”.  

“Therefore, the very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are the Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is impermanent, is the Buddha nature.”

This is like seeing a mirage in the desert with a pool of water.  Although there is no water there it still looks like there is water.  But let's call it what it is, it's fake water.  Likewise, the mundane world is a fake reality and just as much this Buddha-nature also is fake.  It is not the authentic Buddha-nature.

Can our enjoyment of today's pop music be likened to being taken in by a musical mirage of sorts?  In that regard it is fake music although we believe otherwise that it is very good music.  And so it goes with today's Zen in which people believe that the mundane world is the true world.  These same people will say, but I like it, and keep on following mirages. 

The Importance of Mysticism in Religion

Perhaps the main difference between mysticism and mainstream religion is that mysticism says the key to personal salvation lies with gnosis, that is, direct intuition of what is absolute and most primordial.  We personally awaken and, at the same time, we awaken to what is absolute.  

Only when our mind is fully open is it capable of receiving the illumination of the absolute.  But our minds are seldom open enough—even being 99% open is not enough. They are more often closed to any possibility of seeing the absolute.  It is a great irony of history that people consider the Buddha or Jesus as saviors who will forgive their stupidity and save them.  In reality, we have to save ourselves.

A path where the Buddha or Jesus saves us is a path of deception.  Such a path encourages people not to give up their mundane lifestyles or make meaningful changes.  The savior is going to do it all for them!  But real change is about no longer attaching or desiring the five aggregates, seeing that they are void (rittaka), hollow (tucchaka), and coreless (asāraka) and most of all not our true self.  

While the components of an intelligent being are the five aggregates beings, nevertheless, remain conditioned along with the world of the senses which includes mind or manas/mano which oversees the five physical senses.  The knowledge-world that beings amass by studying the conditioned sensory world is always inadequate but, nevertheless, is also useful and practical in some cases . Still, it can never shine a light on the real world.  Only Buddhas do that, and they do it, mystically. 

 

 

The millennial problem

I have been looking over the 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey.  One interesting find is that the millennials more than any preceding generations make up the largest share of the US labor market which means that a growing number now occupy senior positions and could have an unpredictable impact on future generations.

The survey represents a broad brush stroke of the world’s millennial population which essentially says nothing seismic.  It reminds me somewhat of the so-called "Millennial Whoop" that has dominated pop music for a few years.  Don’t look for Beethoven here.  The Whoop simply signals that pop music is in a state of transition—it's in an uncreative holding pattern at the moment.  This is also where many millennials are today: an uncreative holding  pattern.

This time reminds me of the pop music scene in the late 50s and early 60s that was also in a state of transition, just before the Beatles came onto the pop music scene along with other groups that were played on what then was called “underground radio” (always an FM station).  This was the signal of a new creative period that was to last into the late 1970s. 

Back to the millennial population.

There are profound cultural and political changes taking place in the US and the rest of the world.  They have been to a certain extent sanitized and even ignored by the corporate media but they are profound, nevertheless, and can be detected if you know how and where to look.  What is now taking place would make a Tom Clancy novel seem boring. 

Many millennials are just waking up to their ideological conditioning by the multinational corporations—the high cabal—that represents a new comitern but one with a completely new jargon, but dangerous to the human spirit, nevertheless.  In this world, each millennial is more like a node than an individual. 

This node-being stands somewhere in-between the group (tribal or national) and the isolated individual.  If the group pressures our node-being he or she usually caves in.  Any resistance is felt psychologically and that is where it usually stays in which drugs often become an outlet for frustration and depression.

As odd as this sounds, this might be good for Buddhism, in general, offering the individual a way to transform their limbo like state into an active search for the self (i.e., who am I?) and the self’s place in the world among other dedicated seekers.

This is what, initially, Zen Buddhism did for me back in the mid 1960s.  I was aware of the socialist ideological conformist push as well as the nationalist conformist push but I was also aware of the frailty of life and the need to answer a few, important existential questions which the Zen masters seemed to know from my reading of their words.  This put me on a spiritual adventure which through the practice of Zen became an experiential journey.  This journey was not without amazing rewards such that I could see what the Buddha was actually teaching and how it has been totally distorted and has become something it was never meant to be.  This includes Zen as well.  It is truly a case of the inability to see the forest for the trees.  A few will see the forest for the trees turing away from the conditioned.  They will look straight into the face of the unconditioned and be amazed.

How to feel enlightened without really trying

Having gone through the 60s and more, I had occasion to witness what I shall call for now, the rise of guruism as part of the great, cosmic transformation of spirit many of us were expecting.  It was not always associated with Indian gurus, although there were a few very popular ones in the West.  During the 60s and early 70s, my generation was always looking for the new but not just ordinary new or a superficial new (and there was plenty of that).  It was new in the sense of being transformative like the time I saw the Led Zeppelin in 1969 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco.  These guys weren't the Beach Boys.  While the music was powerful and beautiful to listen to, it took off on hidden orders from something deep inside of you that always wanted the music to uplift your spirit!  It was like Richard Wagner had discovered electric guitars.

Looking hard for the right guru, many of us wanted to join in the cosmic transformation.  But our youth and immaturity gave us a lot of ordinary charlatans and some really not so good ones.  It seemed to get worse after the Vietnam War.  The transformative new seemed to be dipping back down into the superficial new, more and more, as time went on.  

Buddhism, in light of all this, was pretty much the same and conservative.  Even Zen was, which had only passed its torch onto a few Westerners—a torch as big as a lighted match as I look back.  But what Zen lacked our imaginations filled in.  My imagination did that for me to the point where I was credulous.  My teacher, a Western Zen abbot was an interesting fellow who had a wife and a daughter.  He was also gay.  In those days, because of the stigma of being gay, many gay men married and stayed in the closet.  They tried to look straight.  Usually, being a Western Buddhist monk in San Francisco meant that some of the monks were gay.  I didn't mind it.  I figured that it had nothing to do with Zen.

Others found Indian gurus like the Lord of the Universe, Balyogeshwar Paramhans Satgurdev Shri Sant Ji Maharaji. Or sort of Indian gurus like Subramuniya and Franklin Jones, an American master.  There were many more.  The way I saw it, even if some of these gurus were close to being charlatans what they lacked my generation's great imagination could fill in the holes.  We could find wisdom in stupidity and ignorance in wisdom all because of our imagination.  I know this because I owned a commune in Oregon by a little place called Takilma. I usually hung out at the gas station (see painting upper left).  I had occasion to meet some truly noble characters and some downright idiots.  Still, we had a lot in common from our drugs of choice like LSD to music.  

It didn't take me too long to conclude after enough human samples at Takilma that the transformation we were hoping for was closer to, how to feel enlightened without really trying.  To try, that is, to earnestly seek for the truth, was not something my generation believed was necessary.  Besides, it was too much of a hassle.  No, instead, the transformation many of us were hoping for would come from some Jesus-like dude or Maitreya.  Just seeing this guy would be all that it would take.  He or she would make us feel enlightened.  And if you feel enlightened ain't it the same as being enlightened?