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.

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.

 

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 three modes

Just like our universe we humans have three modes of being, namely, the dark mode, the glow mode, and the arc (luminous) mode. 

The first mode is chiefly animal existence, being enveloped by a dark covering which puts us into a hostile world.  The second mode is when we can put a little light on the subject as if seeing through a glass darkly, establishing a kind of order out of chaos.  The last mode, the arc mode, is transcendence, an awakening to true reality.  In such illumination there is no darkness or even a glow.

Very few get to the arc mode while the many creatures live and die in the dark mode with a few advancing and taking shelter in the glow mode.

The great sages of history, like the Buddhas, have told us of the arc mode.  By their own effort and struggle they transcended darkness and glow.  And were it not for the illumination of these sages there would not even be man's civilization, his community, and safety. 

From this we can see that man's greatest enemy is his own darkness and glowing thoughts which he mistakes for illumination.

Near death experiences

NDEs are very real and very spiritual. They show us how much we have hidden from Spirit by way of the flesh.  NDEs separate us from corporeal body which acts like an interference barrier blocking Spirit.  From this we can gather that the life of human beings is about building up this barrier to a point where Spirit is absent (the dawn of evil & suffering).  On the other hand religious teaching is how to bring this light into the dark world to give all beings true hope and faith. NDEs are very real and very spiritual. They show us how much we have hidden from Spirit by way of the flesh.

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.

Sexual pleasure and rebirth

From Buddhism, as strange as it sounds, I have come to the conclusion that the meaningfulness of human life seems to rest upon the bedrock of the repetition of sexual pleasure and reproduction through repeated births and deaths. 

Sexuality is a bait that never grows old even though it brings sorrow with it and delusion.  Whatever cultural restraint is placed upon it there's no stopping it.  It can only be limited to a certain extent.

With each new birth not only is the framework of delusion passed on but also sexuality which even includes the newborn’s sexuality which extends nonspecifically over the entire infant.  While sexuality specific to reproduction has not manifested itself, it soon will.  In the infant it is there in all its potential and natural capriciousness/perversity.

The sexual drive is an every human being.  It is inserted in the very biological architecture of the human being.  Neither human culture nor human religions can contend with this power and hope to win in the end. This is why we see the birth of new cultures and new religions because the old ones have been defeated by innate sexuality that lives and thrives in biology.

Present day technology will do nothing in the long run to stop the eventual triumph of sexuality with the life of delusion that comes with it.  Soon the Dharma gives way to practical psychology and how to cope with the vicissitudes of daily life.  Most religions today minister to the flesh and the worldly imagination for both control and profit.

Mistaking our biological body as our true self is a grievous error

It is difficult to distinguish the lie from truth especially when truth and the lie are put together becoming information that obscure's the truth and deceives the reader. 

From Buddhist scholars to war historians assumptions which often lead to works of half-truths, where you can't tell the lie from the truth, are typical.

One might even say that the road to truth is never paved and could be mistaken for a modern highway leading to any number of towns and more deceptions.

For the curious reader of Buddhism and Zen much of what they read consists of half-truths.  For example, did the Buddha actually teach that there is no self or attā/atman (P., natthattā)?  No, of course not.  The Buddha is only telling us to "Abandon desire for whatever is not the self” (P., anātman).  We are only to reject whatever is not our true self this being dependent originations which are derivative phenomena that make up the biological body. 

Our entire biological structure originates from our parents and their parents, etc.  After the sperm joins the egg, our very perceiving follows a biological process that leads from the mother’s womb to birth, and develops on its own until the very death of the body.  Wanting to live again the perceiver takes up another body which can be formed in a woman's womb. 

This is the beginning of our wrong association with our biological body as if it is our true self and refuge.  To mistake our biological body as our true self is a grievous error according to the Buddha.  The truth of Buddhism is that the Buddha affirmed that the true self is transcendent and is beyond the biological person's grasp but still can be attained by an intuitive path. 

We are participants in consciousness

From Zen Buddhism's perspective we are participants in consciousness (vijñāna = dual/vi knowing/jñāna).  Mankind is a conscious being of extraordinary intelligence.  But what consciousness is derived from is unknown to this conscious-ness being. 

We cannot use consciousness to find the origin of consciousness.  What consciousness depends upon shall always be unknown to us if we use consciousness as our means to find ultimate reality. 

We are so immersed in consciousness that we have no idea where it begins and where it ends.  And being in this predicament we are unable to transcend it, much less understand what we are facing which is consciousness which will not allow us to transcend it on its terms.

Still, consciousness is giving us hints of the difficulty we are in which is the difference between the unenlightened and enlightened; between the ones who are immersed in consciousness and the ones who have transcended it like the Buddhas.

Also, this consciousness is in the form of what the unenlightened sometimes refer to as relativism, that is, observer/knower and object/known duality.  They are mutually dependent upon each other.  This is Buddhism’s dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). 

But ultimate reality, that is, nirvana is not to be found here.  The Buddha's is dependent origination only speaks to the conditioned not the unconditioned where consciousness is transcended.

The main problem with westernized Buddhism and Zen

I was wondering a few years ago why westernized Buddhism and especially Zen did not comport well with the words of the Buddha and the Zen masters.  And then I came across Iain McGilchrist's works which explore the asymmetry of the left and right hemisphere of the brain.  His exploration also opens up a can of worms when the left hemisphere tries to undermine rather than cooperate and harmonize with the right hemisphere.

When our thinking is dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain it is like we're trying to understand Buddhism and Zen through certain pre-positioned algorithms.  Or simply fixed biases such as political correctness.  This of course shuts the door on an open mind which one needs to access the right hemisphere.

Accessing the right hemisphere of the brain is really about having access to direct intuition which is probably the best translation of what Buddhism and Zen mean, as regards “dhyāna.”  This is evinced clearly in Soothill and Hodous' Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms.  Buddhism and Zen are intuitional systems.

Understandably, intuition is not mediated by reasoning or the sensory organs.  Yet, it doesn’t reject them.  They are useful, but intuition goes much further.  It transcends them.  The real danger that Buddhism and Zen face is when there is mistrust in the intuitional, and this is what is happening both in Buddhism and Zen.

It is as if our culture is teaching people the truth is always propositional and found explicit somewhere within the pages of human literature.  In other words, there is a proposition that we can test out to see if it accords with the left hemisphere.  We might agree with it and we might not.

For Buddhism, the right hemisphere has to first intuit the whole, that is, nirvana before any proposition can come out of it like, for example, nirvana is the end of all suffering.  The Buddha it could be said teaches from his awakening, not from human values or various cultural values.  Mankind's ultimate goal then is to awaken to the true nature of the universe upon which all things depend.