The Zennist

Falling into the imagination and with it the flesh

The Bible is not one book but a compilation of many books so that trying to find the red thread of Christianity is next to impossible.  Buddhism has not lost its red thread.  It's still very much alive and well.  But finding this red thread involves intuition and not one's mastery over words. 

What Siddhartha awakened to can only be found by direct intuition (Zen = dhyāna). It transcends words and the six senses; all conditioned things including even thought.  Still, it serves as the basis of all his discourses: they invariably hinge on that intuition.

Unfortunately, our secular age depends upon the flesh or in Buddhist terms, leading a conditioned life which guarantees continuation in samsara.  Most of us are aware of how the modern mind prioritizes things. Its first duty is to having a good time, followed by sex, then marriage and finally the baby!  Dharma is last.

With Christians it is about the same. God and prayer are there to get them out of jams due to their love of the flesh.  They hope to be constantly forgiven having yielded to the temptations of flesh.

Those who believe in the afterlife will only return to a world of imagination, the sixth sense.  While those who believe in absolute death or annihilation will go back to the womb from whence they came.  But Siddhartha taught us the transcendent which is the true antidote to desire by which we fall into the imagination and with it the flesh.

The wonder years (wondering what happened)

Our youthful years have made us attached to something that we should not be so attached to.  We are not fundamentally this fleshy body.  We will journey through this body’s many changes and emotional ups and downs having to learn to let go of what we once held tightly to.  It's not an easy ride and can be quite painful.

The optimists among us are trying to make a bad situation seem better or, in the end, no problem.  But this is not the way Buddhism sees this human life.  Its frightful message is that when you release this body you will undoubtably take up another one.  The stream or current of rebirth only ends with nirvana.

Our dependence upon our fleshy body is profound, the degree to which is unknown to us in our day-to-day life.  Yes, we have to live and learn the last part being the most difficult because most of us never really learn.  It is this lack of learning that becomes our karmic burden which we cannot escape.  In fact, we are always learning the wrong lessons so that we never truly learn.

This optimistic side of us cannot read the future; it cannot see the big picture either.  It only amounts to wishful thinking.  The optimistic side is only attending to the needs of the temporal body.  It has a very bad track record.  Still we rely on it too much especially when things are not going our way.

When Buddhism comes into the picture for us, our ability to learn from its teachings is at a very low level.  We have no practical experience with how to live the right way.  Buddhism can teach us.  But a lot of the teaching involves our undivided attention and a willingness to face obstacles that we once feared which most people are reluctant to do.

A withdrawal from the intense addiction of experiencing?

Enlightenment is not a social construct.  There's nothing to be constructed; it only needs to be uncovered because it is already present.  What needs to be transcended are the five aggregates (pañca skandhāḥ) which comprise the experience of form, sensation, perception, volitional formations and consciousness. 

All such experiences are an illusion (māyā).  They comprise the world of suffering.  These five experiences amalgamate into the grand illusory experience I call my self, the experiencer.  But with all such experiences they are illusory.  Yes, it's true that experiences seem real and substantial but they are not. 

Fundamentally, there is no ontological truth to be realized by way of experience.  But this is not to say or to suggest that Siddhartha did not uncover the truth so as to awaken to something profound, beyond even the realm of experiencing.

But then the question needs to be asked how does Siddhartha propose to teach his wisdom to people who are addicted to experiences who may even imagine that enlightenment is some kind of super experience?  Obviously, there has to be some kind of withdrawal from the intense addiction of experiencing.

Without a withdrawal from experiences, especially sensuous experiences, one is simply accumulating more addictive behaviors.  The path that Siddhartha took to achieve Buddhahood was a path of gradually weaning himself off of experiences which tied him more to world of flesh and becoming.

The problem that everyone sooner than later faces

The pressures we feel remind us that the world has its problems and so does our life we have been living since birth.  But being young and healthy keeps us optimistic in most cases.  I am feeling happy what could go wrong?  The problem that everyone sooner than later faces is what do you do when reality finally confronts you with the finitude of your life?

For some of us it is a wake up call; for many others it adds up to a kind of ongoing depression that becomes more difficult to live through.

For some of us this wake-up call leads to religion or studying Buddhism while for many others they become more or less addicted to sex, drugs and alcohol.  What all these routes have in common is they rely on hope and the imagination.  But what if there is a place we all fear to go to when even hope and our imagination must be transcended?

In the final analysis, Buddhism prepares us to go to this place after our large net of hope and imagination fail to catch the big fish!  But to get to this place we must first have a great deal of hope and a good imagination.  We must keep casting our net over these waters again, and again until one day we accidentally fall down becoming entangled in our net.

So that we don’t deceive ourselves we must go through this last process in solitude, like a hermit.  It is a desolate world where self-deception does not triumph and is easily seen through.  Forsaking all hope and the imagined, only then can we become open to the singular way.  Maybe one night we see what truly lies beyond the burning house.

What is going on in the inside?

Many of us are still immature (bāla) and do not fully realize it.  In such a state we easily build up a system of misunderstandings and wrong interpretations of life, including fault finding and blaming others for what in reality is our own immaturity that we wish not to confront.  It can very easily lead to a kind of delusional state of mind.

In such a state of mind one lives almost entirely on the outside whereas their inside is laden with emotions/feelings and a lot of changing mental images.  From this position, it is much easier to be aware of things on the outside and pay much less attention to what is going on in the inside.

In Buddhism we must bring our awareness more to what is going on in the inside in terms of the emotions/feelings which mark the level at which we are attached to the psychophysical body (skandhas).  This attachment is more apparent with regard to anger, even short temperedness, and sexuality.  While the outer may trigger the inside forcing it to react, it is from the inside that our emotions/feelings emerge as well as our spiritual ignorance.  This will be the main focus of Buddhism and especially in Zen where the effort is totally dedicated to intuiting the Buddha nature.

The immature person is continually fixated on what goes on outside and pays scarcely any attention to the inside except to the emotions/feelings, desirees, impulses and sexual urges which continually move an individual.  This immature individual never sees the inside as a spiral staircase that goes down into a much different world than what is on the outside.

The biggest mistake beginners make when they enter the world of Buddhism to confront their immature selves is to believe that the teacher is capable of addressing their needs and cleaning up their mess.  This is not true.  Buddhism only equips us at best on how to confront our immature self and the stages we will go through when we begin to change our self.  If a person can't manage this then probably they need to go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist for additional help.

We must even overcome harmony?

The division of our world into utopian and dystopian have their origin not so much in the human heart as they do in the human brain with the asymmetry between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. 

By the way, this division is not always diametric; rather the division arises because there is little or no harmony (a kind of corrective oscillation between two differing sides is lacking).

In this regard, it is entirely possible to live a life of harmony in which a kind of corrective oscillation is going on between, let us say, the husband and the wife or the teacher and the student.  But I dare say this is seldom achieved as one might wish.  It seems that one is always viewing the matter from their own position:  either accept my position or we remain opposed.  Thus comes the sudden or gradual rise of disharmony.  It rests on side-taking rather than transcendence.

In the matter of Zen, we must even overcome harmony since it can be easily transformed into disharmony.  When we look at suffering or in Sanskrit, duḥkha, it is a kind of disharmony.  This disharmony is the inevitable outcome of a life lived in maladaptive oscillations with others and one’s own being.  We may escape others but we cannot escape our consciousness even in death.  The inherent disparity within consciousness (vijñāna), itself, continues unbroken which makes individuation/nāmarūpa, inevitable.  Only achieving nirvana is the answer which at the very least shows us the limits of even harmony.

Perfection is the enemy of the good?

I think it was Voltaire who said that perfection is the enemy of the good.  His words can be at first a kind of head scratcher.  But putting his words into a Buddhist context maybe like, conduct is the enemy of the good, works better. 

We can imagine this conduct to be like virtue signaling or a standard of proper behavior.  It's about trying to appear perfect in conduct as if conduct and the good are one and the same.  We can even imagine zazen to be perfect enlightenment.

But conduct, no matter how perfect, is not the same as seeing our true nature or the good.  Maybe we can think of the problem another way when we look at sports in the example of diving.  Even with a perfect score in which all the judges agree that the dive was perfect this has nothing to do with enlightenment or the good. 

Even a Buddhist monk or nun of long-standing who has never had any problem with obeying the regula of the order does not translate into enlightenment.  In all religious communities there is that species of human being called holier than thou.  These are people who are pretending moral superiority.

In the religion of Buddhism nirvana counts most (realizing the unconditioned).  And on the path to nirvana, Zen or intuition counts most.  It's not conduct or perfect conduct or even perfect moral behavior that gets us to the other shore of nirvana.

I will say that good conduct is necessary to lead a happy interpersonal life.  But when we turn to look within at our self it doesn't work so well.  All of our weaknesses and strengths lie within us as does enlightenment and our ignorance of it.

The postmodern world where reality is only a social construct

Somehow atheism (anti-Christianity) morphed into anti-religiousism and with it a dangerous fall into nihilism.  Here, I become a problem for myself in that I don't have any identity other than clinging to this physical body and its sensory experiences (mainly sexual).  This problem is further highlighted by the conclusion of Richard Rorty:

"Nothing grounds our practices, nothing legitimizes them, nothing shows them to be in touch with the way things are" (From Logic to Language to Play, 1986).

This view lands us in the postmodern world where reality is only a social construct including even the intuitive wisdom of the Buddhas.  But this view, from a Buddhist perspective, is really saying that we have found no absolute truth with our five senses nor the sixth, which is our theoretical imagination.

Our choice of how we look for truth has brought us finally to nihilism.  But in this failed journey we have never trusted intuition.  We gave that up very early with the rise of the modern age.  We turned our back on intuition and sought, instead, technology.  But our technology has only amplified our own immaturity even our decent into nihilism.

While our theoretical imagination has yet to find absolute truth, but is still looking, our everyday imagination has become a kind of fantasy world where there are no restraints or morality.  This anchoring of our identity in the sixth sense or imagination is certainly not without some serious dangers.  It turns into a kind of magical thinking even denying the biological facts of gender. 

Even the divide between sanity and insanity becomes blurred.  We cannot tell one from the other.  If as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, then the line between sanity and insanity also cuts through the human heart.  We have yet to play out our imagination and find its limits.  Right now it is open to exploration and with that opening we are subject to many delusions.

  

From immaturity to maturity

Youth almost always with few exceptions eventually betrays its own causes and aspirations.  Such youth is not so much about being in a young, still developing body, as it is being immature where practical experience is lacking. 

Such immaturity suffers from the Dunning-Kruger Effect in which one is so incompetent that they don't know they're incompetent.  There are even shields youth puts up which prevents them from looking at their own likely incompetence thereby overcoming it to some degree.

This effect is not lost upon those who come to study Zen.  For the most part they are young adults who are making a transition from youth to maturity.  A lack of awareness governs their conduct as does a lack of conscientiousness.  It is not surprising that they often fail in the first stages of Zen which I would characterize as learning what Zen’s path is about.

As expected, learning about Zen Buddhism, at first, has to do with reading a lot of Zen literature and thinking about it.  But this is not the same as mastering Zen having walked its mysterious path finally overcoming one's spiritual ignorance; having met and passed through Mumon’s barrier (無門関) which is closed off to human thought. 

While it is true that human ingenuity can pass beyond the barrier of thought few are able to do this.  It is a feat like no other.  For a Buddhist it is like seeing the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta), directly, where spirit has not been formed into thought, that is, Mumon’s barrier. 

In other words, our own imagination and thoughts cannot pass through imagination and thought!  Whatever faces the barrier of imagination—it cannot pass through.  And whatever we think, nevertheless, is still a thought that cannot pass through.  The human mind produces thought while the mind of a Buddha transcends thought.  The youth and immaturity that come to Zen have to be forged into maturity and that is a difficult task. 

Wokeism vs Siddhartha's awakening

Does the political term being woke carry any trace of Siddhartha's awakening under the Bodhi tree whereby he realized absolute spirit which is unconditioned?  The answer is, of course not!  Wokeism comes from a political ideology.  It does not require the religious mind which seeks the attainment of ultimate reality.

Still, wokeism is somewhat like a religion insofar as it contains a redemption narrative which seems to speak to people who feel resentment:  that they have been taken unfair advantage of (it's the opposite of gratitude).  With this, wokeism offers to restore to people what secular society has been unable to provide because it has been dominated by a white male patriarchy.  But unlike with religion in wokeism there is no forgiveness for the wrongs done to other people which still must be avenged (resentment never ends). 

The religious mind has its narrative arc, too.  But overcoming the misfortunes in one’s life is not through pointing the finger at society, but through first recognizing that the human heart contains both good and evil which is cloaked in ignorance.  Until the cloak of ignorance is removed, good and evil remain a problem that begins in every individual.

Complicating this matter if we lack enough empathy then it follows that everything we do is selfish.  We might unconsciously treat others with contempt or even injure them to get our way.  Having our away is of paramount importance.  This cloak of ignorance that all beings have makes possible both good and evil but seldom realized by the doer.

In fact, there is an ongoing struggle going on beneath this cloak.  In the midst of this struggle we are not sure whether we are becoming good or becoming gradually more evil.  It is only when the cloak of ignorance is removed so that the light comes in that we can truly see what is good and what is evil thus avoiding the latter.

But in the world of wokeism where the cloak of ignorance has not been removed good and evil are relative to each other so that they become confused.  Doing good which ends up as evil or doing evil because the cause is good are both possible and likely.