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 sudden transcendence of presuppositions about the absolute

For us to have direct source knowledge or direct knowledge of the absolute, it demands that we become absorbed in the absolute, completely, so that there is nothing left of us.  Even our perception or consciousness (vijñāna) must go because it belongs to us. 

As strange as it sounds this is the way the absolute remains absolute.  As a thought experiment if, for example, the wave phenomenon wishes to know what pure water is then it must be absolutely waveless, in which case, no waviness can be detected in the water itself.  (The mere looking causes waviness.)

I think this helps to explain why enlightenment cannot really be transmitted, not in the way the average person imagines the process.  Let us imagine that A is absolute where B is the transmitter.  How is it to be transmitted to C?  The very act of transmission, itself, is non-absolute (anātman= wavy). 

The total and sudden transcendence of presuppositions about the absolute is extremely difficult to accomplish.  Without exception, people who take up Buddhism and with it Zen depend upon perception or consciousness.  This is their tool by which they hope to unearth enlightenment.  But they must also give up the tool. 

By the way, this is what koans (Hua Tou 話頭) are all about.  They are intended, in a way, to drive the student to their wits’ end.  To know the secret of the koan means that one has given up perception (vijñāna).  For a brief moment they became the absolute.

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.

The amazing maze

Pure Mind or absolute spirit is invisible to the six senses, most notably to the sixth which is manas which includes our imagination and speculations.  Thus, what we seek in the way of enlightenment hides and eludes us even while we read about it or contemplate it.  It will not show itself to us no matter how hard we try. 

Still those who have actually mastered Zen behold this spirit singularly and straightforwardly.  It comes suddenly and unexpectedly.  Yes, it’s like seeing something that you never thought was possible.  Before kenshō all your pathways came to dead ends.  The truth which you sought nonstop exceeded your cunning powers.  Strangely, it will awaken you.

Even now we, the unawakened, realize that we may have entered into a maze (since our birth) with no exit.  Maybe we should call it the maze of samsara.  This maze might as well be darkness.  Little do we realize that we are creating this maze.  Every birth we have experienced brought us into this maze from which there was no escape, only to find ourselves in another maze.

Every Zen koan that you study asks you, fundamentally, who put you in this maze?  You draw a blank.  You have no answer but lots of diversions.  I remember those hopeless nights by the kerosene lamp stuck in this maze.  And I also remember the night I broke down and knew I could not obtain enlightenment. How hopeless it was.  (I've met deluded people who even fake this crisis.)  But, figuratively speaking, the door suddenly opens and there it is.

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.

 

A limit to the power of magic

Magic’s power lies in dominating the five senses so as to control the person.  It can influence the sixth sense, too, which in Buddhism is manas which I translate as mentation.  But there is a limit to the power of magic. 

Magic itself has no effect on what transcends the six senses.  While our life can be a life of delusion dominated and controlled through magic, when we study Buddhism we understand that there is something beyond the senses, something even beyond mankind.

In this brief treatment of magic, it is easy to see that it has a tremendous influence over people.  A person can hardly ignore its power.  Even the magician falls prey to magic. 

Magic is an integral part of our modern world.  It makes things charming and alluring, even bewitching, attractive and desirable.  Love affairs are born of magic but so are evil leaders who doom their people to misery. 

In modern culture another name for magic is advertising, education, propaganda, ideology, mass culture, drugs, the placebo and nocebo effect, sexual attractiveness, etc.  Madness is born from magic.  Sooner or later everyone is caught by magic.  Few escape its power.

Religion is the nemesis of magic or should be in so far as it enshrines the comprehension that transcends creation.  In Buddhism the goal is the full realization of the transcendent which is beyond the senses.

“There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore you do know an escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned” (Tatiyanibbānapaṭisaṃyutta-sutta).

Only in the created world is magic possible.  But from magic we also have to understand that there is a magic associated with evil which endeavors to keep people attached to the senses especially the sixth sense.  We should not forget that Siddhartha battled with the evil demon Mara and that the five aggregates which comprise the psychophysical being belong to Mara!

Still too burdened by consciousness

Materialism requires the splitting of the transcendent one into perceiver and perceiving, which we understand in the West to be consciousness or what Buddhists call vijñāna.(lit. in two parts Knowing).  Such materialist cognition cannot take place without a split in the original nature of reality which is indivisible.  The resultant split is an illusion, however.

The pluralization (including appearance) which results from the illusory split is not real relative to the indivisible one.  As fundamentally unsplit, nevertheless, we are immersed and enclosed in illusion to live as materialists.  The path and the goals we have chosen are strictly within the confines of illusion.

Put into Zen, with Mind-only (unsplit spirit) there is no real spacetime world.  Thus, the adept is released.  What hid the illusion making the world seem all too real is gone. 

Those who are new to the world of Buddhism will use their imagination to help them believe that the world they're in is illusory, but it doesn't work that way.  They have not actually gone beyond the vijñāna-split to see true reality.  It's like telling a mentally ill person just to imagine they're normal (trans-normal?).

Such people are incapable of gnosis, or the same, direct intuition of the unsplit absolute.  They are still too burdened by vijñāna.  This is where Zen’s way comes in.  Overtime it destroys the perceiver and perceiving dichotomy until the Zen adept has lost even perceiver and perceiving to rely on.  Suddenly and unexpectedly the adept beholds the original one.  Ox herding pictures illustrate this in VII, VIII, IX.

The great human illusion

In these blogs I have mentioned before that we are in a trap, a very subtle trap, one conceived within the human mind itself.  It is not surprising therefore in Buddhism to find that we are enclosed in the five grasping aggregates which the Buddha speaks about which are owned and operated by Mara the evil one! 

Furthermore, these same aggregates are without a self or anātman (P., anattā) which is supposedly the doctrine of the Buddha! Put the Buddha taught no such doctrine. However, he did teach that we are deceived by these grasping aggregates into believing that they are our self.  Thus the human problem is one of misidentification: mistaking the self for what is not the self. 

The highest truths of Indian religions including Buddhism is that the world and the human beings within it are an illusion.  Spacetime is an illusion including this human body in which we are immersed.  But perhaps even more deceptive, the imagination of beings contains within it both birth and death.  Liberation then as a matter of intuiting directly what transcends the great human illusion. 

 

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).