The Zennist

The side of the brain that makes politics and Zen difficult

As noted in an earlier Zennist blog, there is a natural antagonism in the human brain between the left and right hemispheres.  Eventually, this natural antagonism externalizes itself in the public discourse as a sharp political divide between the political Left and the Right. 

The left hemisphere of the brain creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world (utopia) which only serves to bar reality and continue with its ideological fantasies which typifies the political Left, especially Marxism.  It is the right hemisphere of the brain that enables us to wake up and leave this fantasy world of the left hemisphere and deal with reality: the way things really are.

This view I suspect is a bitter pill to swallow but it is supported by scientific research.  Also, I hasten to add, there is a bias in the brain that favors the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere.  This bias involves two proteins, namely, Fgf8 and Nodal.  Their action ensures that when the antagonism develops, it usually favors the left hemisphere of the brain.  

In Zen’s intuitive path this means the harder we try to awaken to our true nature, the more we employ the left-hemisphere, and the more difficulty we encounter.  Paradoxically, once we stop forcing our self to awaken, satori comes to us spontaneously and unexpectedly, which Zen’s history reports.  Nevertheless, getting to that point is no easy matter or an easy cakewalk.  Satori is never easy.  We are usually deluded by the left hemisphere with its penchant for fantasy.  It is more at home with an unrealistic imagination which conjures up fake enlightenments. 

The left hemisphere can only deal with what it already presupposes: the world that it has already made for itself. This is not helpful when we elect to explore what we do not know which we seek to know.

Zen naturally favors the right hemisphere of the brain, with its greater integrative and unifying power that is constantly allowing itself to enter the world of the unknown to find and to know ultimate meaning on its own terms.  

Addiction and attachment

Modern culture has no problem with wallowing in the flesh.  In Buddhist terms this is the life that is addicted to the material world, sensations, ideations, choices and a dualizing consciousness.  In short, these are the five aggregates that belong to the Buddhist devil Māra.  I hasten to add that being addicted to something is different than being attached to something. Modern man is certainly addicted to his passions which comprise the five aggregates. 

An addiction is much more difficult to give up than an attachment; in fact, the majority of people who try to give up their addiction or addictions fail.  A relapse is often the case.  Even moderation of an addiction is difficult to achieve for the addict.  For those addicted to the flesh they want to save the flesh.  Ultimately, they have no real intention on giving up their strong addiction to the emotions which the flesh arouses. 

Having a passion for Buddhism is really the antidote for our addiction to the five aggregates.  With this kind of passion we see the aggregates as foreign to our true nature.  This nature or essence prompts us to attain gnosis of it, which is a sudden and direct intuition of this essence.

This is like the difference between a teenager who is addicted to drugs and sex versus a teenager who has a passion to become a pilot.  As we come to see, an addiction brings us down while a passion, in the higher sense, can elevate us above the need for an addiction which leads to a downturn.

But not all who take up Buddhism or its variants have this kind of passion and will likely not succeed.  Such practitioners still harbor a deep addiction for the life of the five aggregates which includes the ways of the world.  By comparison, giving up an attachment is relatively easy we do it every day.  We don't eat the same food day in and day out or wear the same clothes day in and day out.  If someone cuts in front of us on the freeway our anger is short-lived.  We detach from it.  So we roughly understand what detachment means.  But a life of addiction to the five aggregates is far different.

Transcendence is all that is necessary

There is an antagonism in the inner life of man in which his brain even struggles with itself.  More exactly, there is a biological opposition between the two hemispheres of the brain which causes this asymmetry and with it an unsettledness which cannot be overcome (duḥkha?).  

At this point you might be wondering where does Buddhism, and for that matter Zen, fit in?  There is a transcendent world (lokuttara) beyond this unsettledness. If you wish to catch a glimpse of it (satori) you must go through a rigorous training which helps to make this world accessible (i.e., the making of the religious mind).  It involves belief in the midst of doubt, faith in the way or means, and above all, intuition/gnosis of ultimate reality. 

Spoken about earlier, this antagonism in which the inner life struggles with itself, cannot be overcome except to transcend the corporeal person which is only an instrument for perceiving samsaric phenomena.  This specific use will not yield to anything except an instrumental use.  The instrument user is not in the equation.  The human mind is in a privileged position to detach from the corporeal instrument.

The antagonism within the inner life of man cannot for too long be neglected without serious repercussions.  Research has shown that a competition exists between the two sides of the brain that causes this antagonism.  Harmony is not the answer — transcendence is all that is necessary.

Life is not free from servitude to the organism

Life in a biological organism is constrained by the organism itself.  Life, in this regard, is not free from servitude to the organism.  The want of food, water, sexuality, all belong to the organism.  Buddhism is not a religion that wants us to be servants of the corporeal being because it is so limiting and painful, misleading our vision to what is only finite and transitory.    

Because of mankind's ingenuity we are able to give our self leisure by which to think more about the world that is constraining the greater part of mankind’s life.  We are also able to get a glimpse of the authentic religious life where the greatness of spirit is first encountered by direct  intuition.

Of the estimated 37.2 trillion cells that comprise the human body not a single cell knows what gives it life.  Nor does the human brain.  The tendency of humans to name it “God” or “spirit” without direct intuition only leads to the dominance of the sign over the signified, something the intellect does quite often if not all the time. 

This intellectual treatment of religion is in fact the beginning of the demise of the religious life, a life that is more about opening up the way for direct intuition of the absolute rather than conceptualizing it, either through speech or the written word.

That we are constrained by the organism means we are embodied including our thoughts.  As far as we know our body will not give us a way out of this limitation.  We are doomed to repeat this condition in countless variations.  Ultimately, our biological organism cannot free us because we are unable to transcend it.  The act of transcending it is intuition. 

What replaces religion?

The question that should be asked in these modern times is what replaces religion?  It should be fairly obvious that right now it is nihilism in which the soul has become a problem for itself.  Man no longer regards himself as being greater than the sum of his biological parts; he is simply a byproduct of those parts. 

In light of this, death has become the hard and difficult truth of nihilism.  It is our complete extinction (uccheda).  By death, we assume that the anatomical structure of the human no longer works, that is, no longer produces the sense of a self who is the operator of the body.

This also has also led us to political nihilism and, of course, moral nihilism and with it a kind of sexual perversity.  In addition, we have been taught to hate the religious path which is the quest for ultimate reality which is also immortality. 

If Buddhism has one central goal it is the quest for ultimate reality which is beyond the range of our human senses but not outside of our ability to directly intuit ultimate reality. 

We are only fettered by nihilism and for Zennists our drive to conceive of ultimate reality when we are told that it is inconceivable (無念).  What disappears during enlightenment is the subject-object condition/polarity that thwarts intuition.  With intuition the original one is reached before it is split into the illusion of subject and object (appearance).

We have two souls?

When we die our body (now a corpse) is no longer animated.  It has become incapable of producing any of its former activities which we called “life”. 

This lifeless body has no blood circulation, respiration, digestion, speech or thought.  Some will say that the soul has separated itself from the body but none of us know what this soul is.  We cannot see it now even when our body is fully animated. 

According to the Buddha this body is empty, there is nothing real about it.  It is a soulless thing.  A person who is greatly attached to this body is sunk in delusion; they are far from complete detachment where the unconditioned is revealed.  But since we are not detached we are still tied to the senses and their respective fields being subject to rebirth as a consequence of this attachment. 

The road to our eventual freedom is one that is transcendent that can only be accomplished by the refinement of intuition which leaps beyond the six senses, the sixth being the most difficult which is our bondage to thoughts (manas) and all this implies (yes, even imaginary thoughts). 

You could even say we have two souls.  One is conditioned, for example, the five aggregates (skandha).  The other is spiritual which transcends all things including the five aggregates.  It is unconditioned.  This soul is also the Buddha-nature 佛性.

A different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotions

According to Buddhism, our consciousness (vijñāna) is deeply engaged with the flesh where, as a result, we have become emotionalized (for want of a better term) suffering under the precarious conditions of the body together with its unfulfilled drives. 

This suffering that we sense in the body which we have identified with becomes, automatically, an emotionalized burden for us.  And we have become the bearer of this emotionalized burden.  With a little bit of self-reflection we know what it means to bear this burden.  Moments of frustration, anger, passion, resentment, etc., arise from this burden.  We want to pin the blame on somebody else or some other kind of misfortune that has befallen us.  But for the recluse it is a different picture.

At some point the recluse understands that consciousness free of the body is a different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotional travails of the body. 

“Where consciousness is unmanifest, eternal, luminous all around, that's where earth, water, fire, and air does not exist.  Here long and short, fine and coarse, beautiful and ugly, name and form, cease with nothing remaining.  With the transcendence of [manifest] consciousness this is all ended” (DN 11).

This unmanifest consciousness, however, even for the recluse remains as yet unrealized (a Buddha has realized it).  In fact, manifest consciousness is always polarizing.  This condition makes the intuition of unmanifest consciousness that much more difficult because of the subtlety of this polarizing process.  We keep deceiving ourselves at ever finer levels.       

The intellectual is more interested in words than actual reality

We could say that the intellectual is more interested in words themselves than the actual reality these words are pointing to.  Building a real barn, for example, is much different than thinking about building a barn or fantasizing what it might look like through the imagination.

It is fairly obvious that intellectuals can easily be changed into ideologists and fall prey to their very own ideological fantasies.  Marxists and sort-of-Marxists fall in to this category.  I forgot to mention that when one mixes their feelings with their intellect they become ideologists or ideologues.  The entire communist revolution was a dangerous fantasy that didn't want to wake up to the horrific consequences of its delusional thinking.  The intellectual and worse, the ideologues, never want to wake up to the consequences of their ideations.   

Buddhism could not care less about an intellectual path or a particular ideology.  Buddhism is concerned with the exercise of intuiting ultimate reality which is a religious act (praxis) rather than a cerebral occupation. 

You cannot look to the intellectual West and expect to find too many great minds that have directly intuited their knowledge.  The West is not the India of the Buddha or the China of Huineng 惠能.  We live in a nihilist age where even the word “meaning” has lost its real meaning (the thing that is meant or intended).  Nevertheless, the drive for power and control in such a nihilist age is everywhere.  In speech, especially, where the discourse is controlled by hidden powers.  Yes, even in Buddhism it is there with its ridiculous theory of a kind of anti-self.    

The Power of Intuition

Truth is never realized when it is always a product of our imagination including our linguistic imagination (the intellect).  Direct intuition of the truth (kenshō) is more important than an intellectual grasp which comes through the imagination.  We could even say that direct intuition bypasses our intellectual imagination and its attempt to reify what is only imaginal.  

Zen (dhyāna) is only a path to direct intuition.  While it includes all the literature found in Buddhism it fundamentally understands that Siddhartha's revelation can only be achieved by intuition, a sudden direct seeing of the absolute, which certainly surpasses the imagination and all that comes from it.

Scarcely is the subject of intuition taken up in today's Zen Center and very seldom written about in the academic literature if at all.  This fact suggests that intuition is being ignored as the royal road to enlightenment having been replaced by just sitting which becomes more of a therapy for relaxing the body, somewhat like a massage.  Does such a practice reveal our true nature or the same our Buddha nature?       

The mystical tradition is also ancient in origin.  The oral teachings recorded in the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, and similar records go back thousands of years and provide evidence that mystical teachers of widely different cultures say remarkably similar things.  Also concerned with human suffering, they propose that human beings are ignorant of their true nature and that ignorance leads to the lives of pain and futility.  The sages describe a Way that leads to a higher level of existence, one infinitely more desirable than the level on which most people conduct their lives.  The mystical tradition does not offer therapy in the usual sense of the word, but achieving the goal of mysticism — experiencing the Real Self — is said to cure human suffering because its very basis is thereby removed (Dr. Arthur Deikman, The Observing Self, p. 3 ).

 Intuition is the mystical tradition and the mystical tradition is intuition. The problem we face is how to keep ourselves open to intuition and not close it off by overuse of intellect.  There is no reason to believe that Siddhartha found a way other than by direct intuition.  Such intuition is independent of just sitting or any physical effort for that matter. 

Existential Angst Arises From Embodiment

Suffering (duhkha) in Buddhism is not so much about pain, itself, as it is about an underlying sense of foreboding.  A few examples include worrying about one's death or worrying that one may have a fatal illness, or that one may die in combat.  Suffering casts a foreboding shadow over our entire life; there is no escaping it as we grow older.   

This foreboding is only related to the corporeal body (rūpa).  Under the spell of ignorance each individual identifies mainly with their corporeal body.  They know of no higher state of being which transcends the corporeal body. They only know how to follow the fate of the corporeal body.  They cannot understand words like these:

“This body is inert, like the earth; selfless, like water; lifeless, like fire; impersonal, like the wind; and non-substantial, like space. This body is unreal, being a collocation of the four main elements. It is void, not existing as self or as self-possessed. It is inanimate, being like grass, trees, walls, clods of earth, and hallucinations. It is insensate, being driven like a windmill. It is filthy, being an agglomeration of pus and excrement. It is false, being fated to be broken and destroyed, in spite of being anointed and massaged” (Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra).

In contrast with this negative view of our corporeal body we have more or less set our sights on finding pleasures for this body of ours.  Those who study Buddhism expect to learn how to have bodily happiness or at least make it through life without much suffering.  But being dependent upon our corporeal body makes us always subject to a feeling of forebodingness.   

Our culture is not all that open to a conversation about postmortem survival.  We tend to rely more on the interpersonal than the intrapersonal where we look within to see what is immortal or finite within us.  Siddhartha's revelation came intrapersonally:  we are fundamentally a transcendent, spiritual body that is free of suffering unlike our corporeal body.