The Zennist

Stuck in the house of mirrors: a world gone dark

I found myself this morning humming a Beatles’ song, “Eleanor Rigby” trying to recall the lyrics. For me is like stepping into a time machine.  This period in my life was before I set off on my enlightenment quest to eventually sit in meditation in an abounded copper mine searching for pure Mind, which at the time I believed was possible to attain.

This is only a guess on my part based on what I have seen on social media and elsewhere, but this age has gone dark.  It seems to have lost or sold its soul having exchanged it for a maze-like house of mirrors in which images of the false self dominate but not a single image in this house is who any of us really is.

These images are, in fact, obstacles which make up the house of mirrors not unlike the one found in the 1928 Charlie Chaplin movie, The Circus, when Chaplin is chased into the ‘Mirror Maze’ by a thief then a policeman.

Looking at our self in a mirror is the first loss of one’s path to the authentic self which, by the way, is imageless.  Next, add to this the house of mirrors where now our image can be stored electronically—a fixed mirror at a particular time.  I am the young teenager. I am now the aspiring college student. Now I am married.  Here is our first child.  So many images and not one is our true self.  But who is the real self?

This reminds me somewhat of Mumon’s comment to the koan, Zuigan Calls His Own Master.

Old Zuigan sells out and buys himself. He is opening a puppet show. He uses one mask to call "Master" and another that answers the master. Another mask says "Sober up" and another, "Do not be cheated by others." If anyone clings to any of his masks, he is mistaken, yet if he imitates Zuigan, he will make himself fox-like.

Mumon could also be saying, “If anyone clings to any of these images, he is mistaken.”  There is, of course, a right answer to this koan.  It is eternal and invariant and most certainly unconditioned.  But it never appears the way an image does in the example of this corporeal body from birth to old-age and death.  Fa-Yung  Niutou Farong (594-657) said: 

“The Ultimate Essence of things is what is most important. But in the realm of illusion it becomes different from what it is. The nature of Reality is invisible and cannot be understood by our conscious mind.”

Zen is a barrier—only pure Mind can pass

At sometime in our brief life, in our study of Zen, we have to pass through the world of the conditioned to apprehend the transcendent (the unconditioned).  Metaphorically, in Zen it is like a gate or a checkpoint that acts as a barrier.  It will not permit us to go through to the other side which is unconditioned called the “no-gate”.

In Zen we come to face this gate with a special word of phrase like “Mu” or “One has it, the other hasn’t.”  It could even be Jōshū’s, “Go wash your bowl.”  We could repeat Mu for a lifetime and never would we be able to pass through the barrier gate to the no-gate.  Likewise with the various mysterious other phrases and gestures.

In working with these mysterious words and phrases that come from the Zen masters it’s like we are butting our heads against an invisible barrier.  No matter how hard we try—no success.  It’s also like we are approaching the edge of a dark and terrifying abyss, fearing to fall into it.  At this point, no one can help us.  We have become our own obstacle. 

The next phase is to further delude ourselves and imagine that we’ve solved a koan or at least can understand the sense of it.  Ironically, this is where most beginners are stuck making no advance whatsoever.  No matter how many koan books they've read even with good translations they are no closer to the no-gate.

We cannot gain access to the no-gate by words and concepts.  This means our ordinary understanding cannot enter.  This includes our intellect, too.  Not even a single thought can enter or silence and stillness.  If this is disheartening it is meant to be.  In Zen we are supposed to give up our presuppositions not cling to them.  You can have nowhere to run and no place to hide.  In truth, there is only one koan: See pure mind.

Don't bring your resentment to Zen Buddhism

Let’s be honest, some of us will eventually go through a phase of being incredibly disillusioned with life when our hopeful assumptions are shown to be false, or life as we hoped it would be took an unexpected turn for the worse which we cannot handle right now.  Any number of events can lead to eventual disillusionment, from the death of a parent or friend to betrayal.   

With disillusionment there is always the risk that it can eventually manifest in resentment.  This could happen during the transformation of our youth into adulthood, if there is no positive and helpful rite of passage which is a personal test but more, the development of authentic selfhood which is less vexed by disillusion and almost immune to resentment.

Establishing an authentic self usually involves putting our still youthful immaturity into sort of a crucible in which the gold is separated from the dross.  This self is still one of outward act and encounter with culture and society until it reaches a state of spiritual maturity, having gone well beyond the superficiality, crudity and awkwardness of youth.

But what if in the West those still in the process of being disillusioned, undergoing one let down or disappointment after another, enter Buddhism or Zen showing signs of resentment which might be a dissatisfaction with the way their life is going right now, or even dissatisfaction with the way the world is in terms of justice and injustice?

But how is Buddhism supposed to heal the festering wound of resentment in which one feels angry much of the time or frustrated with his or her present life; whose dreams are not coming true as expected; whose self-esteem is also not doing so well; who sees injustice all around them which they believe is the cause of their misfortune? 

How would a Buddhist monk, for example, have healed the festering wound of resentment that found its way into a young Karl Marx who eventually developed an ideology of resentment we know as Communism? 

Resentment contained in Communism can also become a complex emotional strategy serving, mainly, to make actions, even violent and cruel actions, more excusable as in the end justifies the means. 

These days I see too many of today’s youth suffering from resentment perhaps caused by their sudden exposure to the real world coupled with being victims of poor to bad parenting.  I see it gaining traction in Buddhism in the form of social activism.  An entire new ethics has been built upon the emotion of resentment.  We only see resentment’s raw forms, for example, in the idea of ‘hate speech’ (i.e., don’t say things that displease me). 

As we can see, resentment can turn into an “x vs y” antagonism that serves to reify resentment and with it a kind of false fatalism.  This antagonism is only a way of reinforcing my resentment such that I don’t have to change—real change being another way of allowing myself to see and to solve the problems at hand without having to be resentful.

In Robert C. Solomon's book, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great "Immoralist" Has to Teach Us, besides being one of the great books on “resentment” he has something interesting to say which touches, directly, on those full of resentment who come to Zen.

“But it then becomes clear that objective strength or success cannot be the issue; the poison of resentment works only on those who have frustrated ambitions and desires, whose self-esteem depends on their social status and other measures of personal worth and accomplishment. But then it is easy to see the wisdom of the Zen master and the Talmudic scholar who are never poisoned by resentment because they never allow themselves those desires and expectations which can be frustrated and lead to resentment.”

This all ties in with tricycle’s recent article by Lama Jampa Thaye, The Dangers of Diluted Buddhism. 

A huge part of us is a demon

We are inhabiting a system of conditioned being called the five skandhas or in Pali the five khandhas. (They consist of physical form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.)  As presented in the cannon, they belong to the demon Māra which the Bodhisattva (Siddhartha) fought and defeated and later became enlightened after going through the four meditations (dhyānas). 

As a matter of spiritual discovery, this really boils down to overcoming the powerful influence of our conditioned organism that we took birth in which is called ‘former karma’ (we made the bed, now we can lie in it). The pressing work before us, is to escape our predicament so we don't end up reborn in another body under the same conditions or something even worse.

A huge part of us is a demon—yes, it’s true.  Let’s put it this way: we are immediate with Māra.  The Tibetan Lamas say this demon is rooted in our primordial ignorance (avidya) which I hasten to add is always conditioned—never unconditioned.  Because of avidya we live in a world of confusion.  We can’t distinguish the conditioned (samsara) from the unconditioned (nirvana) which is our goal.

And who is helping us to stay confused and remain a demon?  Why it’s our close buddy Māra who is very good at overriding our conscience, so that lying and hypocrisy seems like a natural way of life, even though it is not natural, and needs to be corrected—which is what Buddhist training is all about!

Very good Buddhist teachers are good at showing us our demon nature; who make it obvious to us that we are not the good and holy person we imagined that we were.  And this is troubling for a lot of beginners who don't like to be admonished, who are frankly too immature at this point in their lives to be serious Buddhists.  About all they can do is seated meditation, take their meds to calm the demon down, and maybe join a Buddhist chat room.

 

Real meditation, the kind the Buddha taught

There is nothing unique about meditation in Zen Buddhism (P., jhāna; S., dhāyna).  In fact, it is taught in all Buddhist traditions and has been that way for a very long time.  Perhaps the only new twist, it is being taught to lay people who haven’t a clue as to what it really entails.  The meditation they practice has only a remedial purpose.  It’s deeper purpose, seldom taught to lay people, is simply to discover who the “breather is” (this would be the practice of breath meditation) or to discover the source and substance of mentation (this can only occur with the sudden cessation of mentation or 無念).

This is where meditation usually ends up these days—not advanced at all.  A kind of lay person’s Zen practice that goes no further.  It even applies these days to monks and nuns who are more serious than a lay person.   

For those who wish to venture deeper into the heart of Zen Buddhism—certainly not with a lay person’s shallowness—without the requisite awakening or kenshō, they are entering a world which cannot be fully unpacked by the intellect which can extend all the way to a philosophical understanding of Zen diving, intellectually, into the world of metaphysics. 

This is good for a while.  Hopefully, not too long.  At some point, the adept realizes that ‘talking the talk’ is not enough.  It’s too superficial.  One also has to ‘walk the walk’ which means actually having kenshō (we westerners love to ‘talk the talk’—entering into the world of metaphysics without ever awakening). 

At some point we have to discover that Buddhism, as far as meditation goes, demands of us that we achieve gnosis of the absolute, i.e., asaṃskṛta (the unconditioned) which is the very substance of things (dharmā) which are mere constructs of the absolute, itself.  This is what Zen is demanding too, but through the world of Chinese culture.

It is here that the lay person’s idea of meditation proves awkward and inadequate.  Real meditation, the kind the Buddha taught consists of setting aside all conditionality (saṃskṛta) so that only the unconditioned remains—which is what we really are.  All along, the conditioned world was never other than antithetical to us, i.e., marked by direct opposition to us in the form of suffering and disharmony.  Even our human body proved antithetical (old age and death).  To overcome this is where the real meditation is required—not the zendo type.

 

Facing our passions

The somatic side of us is in a constant state of breakdown and reconstruction whereas the deepest part of us, which is psychical and extra-somatic, seems unchanging and constant.  It is also invisible to the senses.  This is the part we can’t get at.  It defies observation.  We only observe conditioned arisings such as our thoughts and feelings or the inner voice.

With the arising of the existential question of, who am I? we are only aware of the question, try as we might to see its source.  It always ends up that we have no direct perception of the actual source (wherein lies the answer).  Still, something deep within us tells us that we know this as yet unobserved source.

In the meantime, we have to face our passions which stem, it appears, from the somatic part of us.  As every human soon realizes as they mature, nature has made sexual desire the strongest and most exciting of our feelings, which is difficult to control.  By comparison, sexual non-gratification, while we are young adults, seems to be the most dismal and depressing part of our life. 

But if we were to take away the sexual side which, by the way, being in your 70s or 80s manages to do, our psychical and extra-somatic being—the inner person—becomes much more apparent and pronounced.  But then we have only a few years left in the flesh by which to take advantage of this situation.  And that is not going to work in most cases very well.  Starting Buddhism at this time is like digging a well when you are thirsty.

If we are going to get involved in Buddhism when we are young adults (which we should do), we have to focus on controlling our sexual passions and especially the urgent need for sexual gratification.  This is not easy.  It is just one more obstacle in our way but no doubt one of the biggest since it can divert us from the path.  It also needs to be kept in mind that the ways of the world in which our sexual passions can come to fruition runs contrary to Buddhism's path so that when we enter this world we have to be on guard so to speak.

The Western view of man is not the same as Buddhism's

I have noticed over the years that empirical science, when it comes to the human being, is operating under the bias of third-person knowledge, looking and observing the human being from the outside to the inside.  However, most of the data is from the outside.  To really look at the inside of a human being one must enter the world of first-person knowledge.  But so far this is impossible.  As close as empirical, outside-to-inside observation can go is maybe an fMRI scan of the brain, assuming that the first-person somehow originates from brain tissue.

On the other hand, Buddhism is just the reverse.  We are observing man from the inside to the outside, who lives within a bio-physical body with its senses, observing feelings, ideations, volitions and consciousness.  Moreover, it is understood that we have, out of ignorance, identified with all these constituents as being our self although not one of these constituents is our self which is extra-physical.

Much of the reason that Buddhism still remains a mystery to the West is that the West treats man as a physical object whereas Buddhism treats man as an ‘inwardly dwelling, extra-physical being’, that is, a sattva, a term which has a spiritual connotation.

The difference between the two positions is striking.  One imagines scientists looking at an fMRI scan of the brain, studying the  cerebral cortex in the belief that the brain somehow transforms matter into consciousness.  In the other, we can imagine Siddhartha sitting in meditation awakening to the very essence and truth of the universe which is Mind (G., Geist); seeing that all phenomena are configurations of Mind—configurations, that are empty, being only illusions.

In the case of morality, the Western view encourages duplicity and hypocrisy insofar as individuals are judged by certain external signs which then allows them to hide their real intentions.  In Buddhism, moral behavior begins within, with one’s ability to control their sensual passions and desires, including greed and hostility.

The world will no longer be physical but, instead, mental

Well, my iMac just experienced the black screen of death.  I am glad that I have two iMacs. Why I am telling you this my blog for Monday was on the iMac that went dark.  Not too long after that, another idea popped into my head.  It was the words “materialism is not fundamental” which is essentially what Quantum Mechanics wants to say but it too cowardly to outright say it.  It would put an end to dogmas espoused by Hugo Elliott, “there exists no kind of spiritual substance or entity of a different nature from that of which matter is composed. . . .there are not two kinds of fundamental existences, material and spiritual, but one kind only. . . . (Burr and Goldfinger. eds., Philosophy and Contemporary Issues (1972), p. 259).  Truth be told we are not machines—not in the Buddha’s teaching. 

During the first part of the 20th century, the wave of mechanistic science was about to come crashing down on the West and with it the darkening of the Newtonian horizon.  The particle-material model of the universe was suddenly bedridden. The new kid on the block, Quantum Mechanics, seemed to be saying that the world we commonly experience through our senses is really an appearance which has no objective existence independent of the observer who may turn out to be very important.

The accepted belief that matter refers to all that exists outside of and independently of the observer remains a tentative theory in the face of Quantum Mechanics.  It may well prove in the future that the observer is not only extra-physical but creates our physical world in which matter is rather something derivative.

And if this is true, it doesn’t mean that our world is less real for us and that living in such a fictional or māyā like world is not without suffering.  Even if tomorrow some physicist said that our reality is a fictional creation of consciousness, which means it is fundamentally immaterial, but is real enough for all of its conscious agents, life as we know it would still go on as usual.  Darwinian fitness would still captivate us and be a major part of our life.

Thousands of years ago many believed in another fictional world.  It was a world in which the earth was flat and the planets, including the sun, circled the earth.  What is more, both types of knowledge worked.  Some would even argue, and rightly so, that we still accept the sun rises and sets although it doesn’t really do that.  Later this fictional world turned out to be illusory. 

From the perspective of Buddhism the world is an illusion and so is our psychophysical body which we adhere to in the belief that it is our true self although it is not.  It is all an illusion relative to enlightenment but still very real when our self remains, unenlightened, attached to the psychophysical body and knows no other way of existing.

Buddhism is the next phase of human wisdom which is far above the primitive words of Hugo Elliott.  We will look back upon our primitive beliefs like we once did understanding the illusion of the flat earth.  We will see that bigger picture that we are spiritual creatures and gain control over appearance.  The world will no longer be physical but, instead, mental.

The mommy mind

We are all provided with what I call the “mommy mind” which is in us as far back as our memory goes. 

Remember your mother bore you in her womb.  It was in her womb that you met with your body of flesh.  In your childhood, your mother was the closest thing to you.

As a child, remember when you hurt yourself? While you are crying mommy hugs you, then looks at your knee.  She assures you that everything is alright even though you are releasing a flood of tears.  Next, mommy says to you let’s have some ice-cream.  You forget about your skinned knee.  Ice-cream sounds better!

Welcome to the mommy mind which over the first part of your adult years will be a significant part of your life.

The mommy mind, like your mother, is mainly concerned with nurturing your temporal body.  Put another way, the mommy mind cares for your temporal body and also encourages its growth and development.

As you grow up and get older, the mommy mind sees to your physical comfort and may even spoil you.  The mommy mind is always trying to keep you happy.  Any stress or anxiety you feel within yourself calls up the mommy mind to take care of the problem in the way your mommy did when you were a child, for example, feeding you comfort food.

But what about the daddy mind?

This is a tough question to answer.  I will have to go with my own memory at this point.  My daddy was like a phenomenon of nature when he entered the front door after work.  He was powerful and fearless (he used to be a professional boxer, even sparred with Jack Dempsey).  When he looked at you, he was really scanning your brain to see if you were growing up, or just staying stuck as a little boy with a mommy mind.  Later on in life as I grew to manhood my daddy mind finally kicked in.  I knew that life could easily become brutal and that one day I would die.  With this mind I learned to endure discomfort and physical pain.  It is with the daddy mind that I discovered Buddhism and went against the stream to try and see what the Buddha saw under the Bodhi tree.

As I look around at this generation I see the mommy mind as the dominant mind which seems to be at war with the daddy mind.  An understanding of how the two minds are coordinate has been all but ignored in favor of antagonism between the two minds.  This is the real tragedy.

Still, the mommy mind has to eventually give way to the practicality of the daddy mind because children grow up, always getting closer to the unpleasant side of reality.  And also, they begin to see life’s vicissitudes; that their bodies are fragile if not protected in the right way—and friends and family members die.  But wrongly they use the mommy mind to cope with life forsaking the daddy mind.  These are the same people who expect Buddhism to help them when their lives start to fall apart; wanting Buddhism to be their crutch when, truth be told, they don’t need a crutch.  What they need is more daddy mind which looks into the future; which tries to avoid behavior that eventually turns out to be a disaster.

Meditate as much as possible in a solitary place

In the Essential Secrets of Dhyana Sutra 襌秘要法經 and in other sources in the older Pali tradition, we learn that one should practice meditation 襌 or Zen 襌 in a solitary place where there is the least possible distraction for the mind insofar as sounds cause disturbances in meditation, like entering a jungle of thorns.

It doesn’t seem to me that today’s Zen center where groups of people meet and meditate together is close to being a solitary place where there is the least possible distraction for the mind.  For one thing, “solitary” means being alone.

Sitting quietly together is not the same as, in my example, meditating alone in an abandoned mine (we called it the ‘tunnel’) or meditating alone in a grotto with a small waterfall and many other places where I was always alone.

Oh sure, I admit that today’s meditators don’t have the time to be alone although there are a some opportunities when you are actually alone in your apartment or for the weekend you manage to get away and find a nice spot to meditate alone.

For the beginner, just imagine being alone in my abandoned mine one night doing your zazen.  Yes I would walk you there after the sun has set.  It is only a hundred feet or so away from the house.  I would light the candles for you and give you a flash light.  And there you could set for about forty minutes and then come back to the house.  I guarantee this would not be like sitting with a group.  Far from it.

The stillness and the silence soon becomes out of the ordinary.  Whereas normal is always the external noisy world which is a distraction that you get used to, it is now severely limited so that you, the subject, stands out much more.  This means that everything going on between your ears seems loud.  But in time the loudness begins to settle down.  Also you begin to notice the tensions in your body begin to settle down.  It is as if you mind and body are trying to adapt to the silence of the mine which over time imparts a stillness in you.

This experience is not like entering a jungle of thorns!  When you get used to doing this a number of times and your meditation muscles get stronger you begin to look forward to sitting this way. 

For me, this experience on a daily basis in which I had dedicated myself to finding ‘pure Mind’ within myself helped to still my thoughts as if to come closer to my goal although I had not yet experienced pure Mind and could not imagine it.  What I can say is that one should meditate as much as possible in a solitary place.