The Zennist

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.

There is an underlying duality in our brain

There is an underlying duality in our brain between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.  While they tend to cooperate they can also not cooperate so that there exists an inharmonious tension between the two.  Needless to say, they both have their place:  one side leans towards the individual while the other side is towards the big picture that the individual dwells in. 

When the squirrel eats the acorn on my front lawn the squirrel also has to be aware of the hawk that could be circling overhead looking for a meal.  In other words, man's day-to-day life needs to be also aware of the big picture. 

Some big picture questions are:  Where is this life of mine going?  How do I know if I am on the right path?  Am I is really as smart as I think I am? 

There are many more such questions that arise from the big picture which relies on the right hemisphere of the brain.  We could even say for the religiously minded that the left hemisphere is oriented to the fleshy individual, whereas the right hemisphere is oriented to spirit or the divine.  It truly is Lord (S., Bhagavān) not the left hemisphere.

Leading a balanced life really means living a life where the left hemisphere has to be subordinate to the right hemisphere just like a ship must be subordinate to the direction of travel otherwise it will not get to its destination. 

Keeping with this, Buddhists have always subordinated the individual or left hemisphere of the brain to the Lord hemisphere or the right hemisphere.  The lodestar of the Buddhist is nirvana that is direct intuition of the unconditioned.  In so doing the Buddhist must also realize the perishable nature of the flesh; that it is suffering and there is no spirit to be found in it.

As history shows us, mankind is not all that interested in taking the right hemisphere seriously.  The pleasures of the flesh grab mankind's attention more.  In fact, mankind it seems is always trying to usurp the natural leadership of the right hemisphere, the Lord, that leads us to the other shore.

Buddhism, the last religion

I think that ideology stems from the effort to secularize religion—bring it down to the fleshy emotions and passions thereby replacing gnosis.  What is gnosis about.  It involves transcending the power of māyā which belongs to the mind/imagination (manas). 

In this light, the secularization of Buddhism can only mean the conversion of Buddhism into an ideology. 

All significant concepts of the modem secular world are religious concepts that have been repurposed to fit with a globalist agenda where the self or intrinsic nature of man is lost.  This is what ideology is really about.  Lenin and Stalin used ideology to destroy Russia.  Mao used it to destroy China's ancient culture.

Ideology then becomes more like a deceptive dream or vision.  It only brings with it misfortune.  It is far from being a beneficial vision.  But for those who have a powerful thirst and would even attempt to quench their thirst with salt water, such is the alluring power of the evil dream.

Ironically, evil is destroyed by the black-winged dream, the enticing vision that sinks one deeper into darkness.  This is where the secularization of religion (ideology) is leading us.  You might even call Buddhism the last remaining religion because it transcends thought and with it the imagination which keeps us bound to samsara's dreams.

Overcoming desire

The notion of desire is difficult to put in to meaningful words.  It can only be understood in a kind of haphazard way.  In Buddhism it is a mistake to understand desire as anything more than a preference for the conditioned.  One ,for example, cannot desire enlightenment because enlightenment is unconditioned.  It is beyond all expectations.

Overcoming desire by the sheer force of will is next to impossible. The very human body is constructed for the purpose of desire and to consummate that desire through procreation.  But from a Buddhist perspective desire can be transcended.  But this radically entails awakening to what is beyond desire, this being nirvana, or the same, the absolute which is unconditioned.

To pause and think about this, desire cannot be stopped except through transcendence.  The path of transcendence is to be found in Buddhism.  Here one must first awaken to their true nature or essence which transcends all conditionality (enlightenment is beyond all expectations, all things human, and conditioned).

None of this is meant to suggest that resisting desire or going along with desire are the same as transcendence.  We can only transcend desire when we see through it.  And what makes us able to see through it is the fact that we see, directly, the unconditioned which is desireless.

Those who have been taking the path of Zen (dhyāna) for a long time come to realize that the path is one of learning to let go of expectations about what the unconditioned is.  The adept goes to the end of their wits.  A desirelessness overtakes them.  But woe unto those who have put all of Zen's path into their imagination.  They will never come to illumination.

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.