Ego death?

Our mind is an amazing reality that emanates through a brain composed of different cells and neurons which function differently, yet results in a seamless understanding of the world and our selves. 

In a balanced way, our right and left hemispheres function so that we bring together very different modalities to form a balanced worldview, which is both analytical and compassionate. 

Unfortunately, most of us are not balanced due to a host of reasons and tend to be either overly analytic, reliant on symbols, concerned with differences, or overly affectively sensitive stemming from sensed assaults on our egos. For the most part, our left-brain rules the day and this hemisphere is the home of our ego (sense of self).

Our ego-mind perceives the world in a possessive and resistant way, which creates attachments and judgments. If we like (a judgment) something, our ego attaches in a favorable way. If we dislike (a judgment) something, our ego attaches in an unfavorable way. This clinging to conditions results in a brittle, judgmental, and inflexible perspective of our selves, others, and life. Whereas a balanced mind recognizes our interdependent union with all life, our ego-mind denies this and treasures exclusivity and independence.

The three poisons of the mind are manifestations of this out of balance ego exclusivity. As we grow and mature these poisons create strife for our selves and others. We respond to this strife in one of two ways: Blame and denial or learning. The first response just exacerbates the poisons whereas the latter choice moves us to the realization they are rooted in our out of balance ego-mind.

Life, in essence, is structured so that we either awaken or we continue to suffer. If we live long enough, are open-minded, and determined to see things as they truly are, we will eventually come to see the truth. And when this transformation happens, our ego (as the exclusive judge) dies—so to speak. The fact is this sense of self never dies but it is transformed in a balanced way so that we see the world in an enlightened fashion.

This transformation can be facilitated through Zen whereby we learn to quiet the constant chatter that emanates from our ego with its judgments and critiques, which normally overshadow our compassionate nature. This chatter is so loud and relentless, we could easily go through life with very little, if any, understanding of our pure and true nature which makes life worth living. It is unfortunate that few of us follow this path toward breakthrough and remain ignorant of our vast human potential.

Breaking through occurs when our left-brain chatter comes to a halt and we become aware of our always present true nature. This is a matter of subtraction—a sort of shedding—rather than adding or seeking. Lao Tzu put it this way: 

“Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.” And this...“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped. Less and less is done until non-action is achieved. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.”

Addiction

As the Covid-19 pandemic rages out of control, addiction once again is rising to the top of the news feed. Whenever crises rise, addiction rises in tandem and those so inclined scrambles for relief.
 

This post is thus particularly relevant in light of the present day problems to a wide variety of a host of objective “stuff.” Our common-coin manner of understanding addiction is too limited. When we think of someone addicted we see images in our mind of drug addicts or derelicts who were unable to overcome excessive opioid consumption. Maybe we’ll even go so far as to include someone who can’t control his or her consumption of food or sex. Whatever object is chosen—another person, drugs, alcohol, food, the greed for money or sex, becomes the god we must have to fill a sensed emptiness. Rarely, however, do we consider the average person exhibiting expressions of addiction, and that’s a problem.

Addiction, properly understood at the base level is craving: an excessive desire. Everybody falls victim to that. Whenever our normal comforts are disrupted, such as now, anxiety goes wild and we crave their return. We either crave what we like or resist what we don’t. Both are forms of craving (excessive desire). To get to the bottom of this dilemma we need to ask, “which part of me is craving and why?” Someone who is complete, doesn’t crave anything, so it must be the incomplete part of us—the part of us that says, “I need that to experience myself as complete and satisfied, and without getting that I will suffer.”

Meister Eckhart (the 14th century Christian German theologian, philosopher and mystic) said, “To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God. Man’s last and highest parting occurs when for God’s sake he takes leave of god. St. Paul took leave of god for God’s sake and gave up all that he might get from god as well as all he might give—together with every idea of god. In parting with these he parted with god for God’s sake and God remained in him as God is in his own nature—not as he is conceived by anyone to be—nor yet as something yet to be achieved, but more as an is-ness, as God really is. Then he and God were a unit, that is pure unity. Thus one becomes that real person for whom there can be no suffering, any more than the divine essence can suffer.”

A while ago I heard a man say, “I can understand how Christ can be in me, but how is it possible for me to be in Christ?” Clearly, this person had a rather limited view of both himself and of Christ and apparently didn’t believe what his own scripture told him about the nature of God. Christian scripture says that the nature of God is omnipresent. If this man truly believed this, the answer to his question would be clear: there is no place that God is not, so how is it possible for anyone to not be in Christ? The entire sea in which we swim is God. Fish are in the water and we are in God.

In our unknowing, we imagine that we are separate from the fullness of our creator, that we are not a unit and this, in turn, leads to a deep desire to become what we are already, thus we suffer. The Buddha also spoke in the Nipata Sutra about what happens due to ignorance:

“What is it that smothers the world? What makes the world so hard to see? What would you say pollutes the world and threatens it the most?’ ‘It is ignorance which smothers’ the Buddha replied, ‘and it heedlessness and greed which make the world invisible. The hunger of desire pollutes the world, and the great source of fear is the pain of suffering.” 

All people fear the pain of suffering and this makes us blind to the suffering of others. While locked in the grip of our egos, we think we’re the only ones suffering, and in that state of mind, we become greedy and uncaring. At the center of suffering lays this idea that we are separate and incomplete and that leads to the craving for what we have already.

The ancient Daoist admonition applies here, “Resist nothing and embrace everything today. The perfect day and night are within you. Let it all unfold like a blossom.” Picking and trying to retain only the good, while resisting what we imagine will darken our day, is the true addiction and that leads inevitably to suffering.

Birds of Paradise.

The natural way.

A recent blogger said she was tired of waking up to the litany of gloom and doom economic news but instead has been taking refuge in the simple recognition of migrating birds. I find this perspective refreshing. 

It’s so very easy to fall into a reactionary mindset of what comes our way. On the one hand who can deny the harsh result of billions (if not trillions) of dollars being drained away reacting to one crisis after another— that we create? Lives are being destroyed. On the other hand, all is well. How is it possible that such polar opposites could co-exist? Without diminishing broad-spread mortal suffering I would like to provide some insight.

Birds fly south when they deem a changing of the season, and north when it goes the other way. They do this without recognition of economic news either good or bad. Migration has been happening since the dawn of time. Animals and people move when necessary. It’s a natural way. 

This natural way puts the expression “bird brain” in the most different light. The unnatural way is to first create conditions that prompt a survival mode to move (e.g., wars, violence, the devastation of means to exist such as global warming, withdrawal of support to nations that won’t do things our way, trade wars that destroy jobs—on both sides) and then build walls to stop the natural way to move. 

A dog will not live in the same space where they defecate, yet we humans seem determined to so destroy our habitat it is turning into much the same thing. There are times when it seems we humans are the most brutal and stupid of all creatures! 

Every day the sun rises and sets without consulting our opinions, judgments, or the news. And it’s a good thing. Think about what would happen if this was not so. Maybe the sun would rise (or not) dependent upon our mood that day. Maybe birds would fly south, or not, dependent upon economic ups and downs. If life depended, we’d all be in deep trouble since we never seem to agree on anything. We are enslaved by our differences and the results of those enslavements. We are attached to the way things should be and ignore the way they are and that creates very big difficulties.

Where is it written that the stock market always moves upward? Who says that goodness is perpetually inevitable? Where is it written that those we love will always move in directions we think they should? That one vector continues without fail? These fixed ideas (and our attachment to them) is what creates euphoria and fear, which in turn creates the ups and downs. Life is change. Birds know this and we don’t. There is a season for flying south and another for flying north. Seasons change and we need to adapt. Yet we don’t. Why?

The answer is ego possessiveness and attachment (to what we desire) and resistance (to what we repudiate). We go by way of what we see and ignore what we can’t. Birds don’t do that but we do. What we see is either beautiful or ugly (on the surface) and we respond to such appearances. If we were wise we’d notice that even our own forms are in the process of decay but our true nature is eternal. 

The truth is that there was a time when I was a mortally handsome fellow and now I’m just a decaying and wrinkled bag of bones. Does it matter? Not a whit! Nobody gets out of here mortally alive anyway. It happens to us all. What can be seen will always fade but what is eternal and immortal never fades. Paradise is either here and now, or it isn’t. It all depends, mortally. And it doesn’t, immortally.

Living in a world of “alternate-facts.”

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”—Mark Twain

In prior times deception was the exception (or so it seemed). Now it appears to have become the norm, and more than ever we need to be able to discern truth from lies, but since liars lie it is not so easy. And when statistics get involved, there are many ways to spin the truth. It is the nature of a liar to lie. There are many reasons liars fabricate and distort the truth. But the most important reason of all is, liars think they are something they are not—an ego. 

According to the dictionary, an impostor is one who assumes a false identity, or title, for the purpose of deception. It is somewhat irrelevant if a liar knows they are an impostor. So long as liars lie, they are impostors. Until such time as we truly know, who and what we are, we are subject to deception, and I will be the first to admit, I have deceived and been deceived many times in my mortal lifetime, never realizing I too was an impostor. I thought I knew who I was, but I didn’t. Only when I knew I wasn’t what I thought—an ego, did I discover my true immortal self. Until then I suffered greatly, and like an impostor, inflicted suffering upon others. 

In the West, much of the wisdom of the world has been lost to us, as it was to me until I began to study and practice Eastern Wisdom from some of the world’s greatest sages. I have thus been exposed to many of, what must be considered from a Western perspective, outlier treasure conveyors from the East, a few of whom I wish to share in this post so that you too might begin to find your hidden, immortal selves, cease being a mortal impostor and begin to discern the truth.

Since I’ve been blessed with the study of wisdom from the East, I’ve become familiar with some Buddhist vocabulary, and corresponding, underlying meanings, which are also foreign to the West. Foremost among this Eastern Vocabulary is the word “Dharma” and Dharmakāya—Sanskrit, which means “truth body” or “reality body.” The Dharmakāya is the wellspring of all truth and discernment of what is real. It is neither eastern nor western.

Shantideva, an 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar and an adherent of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nāgārjuna said, “All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself. All the happiness in the world comes from seeking pleasure for others.” And the driving force that produces this suffering is the ego: the idea we hold of our selves.

In similar fashion, Zen Master Hakuin Ekakuin in his Song of Zazen wrote, “How near the truth, yet how far we seek. Like one in water crying, ‘I thirst!’ Like the son of a rich man wandering poor on this earth we endlessly circle the six worlds. The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.” 

When mediated through the illusion of an ego, morality becomes simplistic, inflexible, abstract and unjust, in spite of mortal intentions. In that case, the criteria are “what’s in it for me?” And from that vantage point, there is only a single sense of justice: Mine. 

In the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, Chán Master Sheng-yen illustrates the relationship between the fabrication of our egos and our true nature by saying, “We practice (meaning meditation—zazen) until the self (ego) is gone. When the self disappears, all obstructions will be gone too. There cannot be a self (ego) that is free from all obstructions. If there is a sense of self, then there are also obstructions. There cannot be obstructions without a self to create and experience them, because the self (ego) is an obstruction. This is nondiscrimination of the highest order.” 

Our egos are an illusion, it tells us the half-truth that we are incomplete, not whole and imperfect and this, in turn, initiates desire: a greed response. What may (or may not) be known is that slowly, but surely, Eastern Wisdom is becoming human wisdom, lacking boundaries of either east or west. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, captured the essential point when he said, “We are not human beings having spiritual experiences. We are spiritual beings having human experiences.” Some may say, I am not spiritually inclined but instead rely upon facts. 

Now facts are alternate, but the truth remains the truth, with no alternatives. Our mortal egos desire. Our immortal selves are already full and desire nothing. Truth has no boundaries. It is always whole, complete and perfect.“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”—The Buddha

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The Impossible Dream

I admire intelligent people and try to profit from their words of wisdom. Shakespeare is one of my favorites, and one of his quotes is a “go-to” for me: “A rose by any other name smells as sweet.” 

Now for the topic of the day: The perfect is the enemy of the good. Many wise and famous people have said as much…

• Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.”

• Confucius: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”

• Shakespeare: “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”

I know; I’m repeating myself and thus beating a dead horse, but I can’t escape my past (e.g., education and experience in the advertising business). While working within that industry, I learned an important and fundamental principle of persuasion: Frequency. 

The more a person hears the same message, the better the odds of breaking through barriers and making a difference. And this issue is important with significant barriers. And yes, I am aware of the psychology of the “Backfire Effect,”—The tendency for us all to dig in and defend an opinion that appears to be at odds with, and contradicts, opinion of our own. 

It is really tough to break through the barrier of tightly held dogmas for a simple reason: Egotism. It is an unfortunate aspect of human nature to resist admitting error since it seems to threaten our egos. That barrier is what keeps us all locked in, hunkered down, and ready to defend to the death (sometimes literally) our ideologies, preconceived notions, and biases. 

Those matters constitute adornments that define our egos: We become our ideas (or so it seems), and one of the most destructive, and instructive, ideas is this business of The perfect is the enemy of the good. That idea, without exception, leads to a lack of progress unless we can be persuaded that our pursuit is a Don Quixote quest of jousting with windmills and singing The Impossible Dream of perfection, or nothing at all.

The Four Horses of Zen

In the Samyutta Agama sutra, the Buddha told a parable of four horses. There is an excellent one, a couple of lesser horses and a bad one. He said the best horse runs before it sees the shadow of the whip.  The second best will run just before the whip reaches his skin. The third one will run when it feels pain on his body, and the “bad” one will run after the pain penetrates into the marrow of his bones.

I was an unfortunate and stubborn horse, a glutton for punishment, as the saying goes. My ego was huge, and it took a long time and much beating before I was broken. Zen has many aphorisms. One fits this beating process. The saying is, “No suffering. No enlightenment. Little suffering. Little enlightenment. Great suffering. Great enlightenment.” 

The point of this aphorism is that there is a relationship between the depths of suffering and motivation. We, humans, are problem solvers par excellence, but we are also pragmatists with big egos. If we don’t acknowledge problems, there seems nothing to solve, and we don’t fix things we think are not broken. Our egos hate this idea of brokenness, but it’s the key that unlocks the mystery of awakening. Winston Churchill apparently said of Americans, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.” 

Bodhidharma said that without suffering, there is no awakening, and he is quite right. When life is sailing along, and all is rosy, why bother fixing what’s not broken? In such a state, the last thing we want is to rock the boat and “see the shadow of the whip.” All of us want to preserve the good and avoid the bad, and while life is good, who needs to think about everything turning south? We’re not so wise in such moments. We imagine our state of prosperity will last forever and, consequently, rarely plan for the rainy day. Instead, we wait until we’re underwater and hoping for the Queen Mary to come sailing along.

In psychological terms, we are swayed by what’s known as The Normalcy Bias. We get used to what we assume are fixed norms and resist change. This is a particular problem in our world today and has led us all into political tribes, unwilling to even listen to others. 

The problem is, everything is in a state of change, norms included. A wise person will acknowledge change, learn about pulling up anchors, sense approaching tsunamis, and riding waves. Few of us have the foresight to anticipate coming catastrophes, but the truth is physical life doesn’t last forever. Sooner or later, we all end up broken and become fertilizer. By then, the opportunity to awaken this time around is gone.

Already, not yet

The culmination of every spiritual journey is the realization of completion and unity. Many religions claim we are incomplete and must find the road to a far distant heavenly home. 

Johnny Cash made famous the song In the by and by there’ll be pie in the sky, meaning there will be a reward waiting for us in heaven if we do God’s will here on earth. Because we imagine incompletion we seek completion. Because we misunderstand our source and ourselves, we desire fulfillment even though we are from beginning to the end already full. Our cup runs over with goodness and we remain thirsty for what is already ours.

Acceptance of the already and not yet is a seeming paradox. How can both be true at the same time? The answer as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, is, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Our true nature is spiritual, complete and there is nowhere to go. Our mortal nature is phenomenal, in a process, and we search for the already. We are like the man who looks through lenses, searching for the eyeglasses that sit upon his nose.

It was Zen Master Huang Po who expressed the doctrine of One Mind: “All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning: is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it  transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons.”

Thus the idea of mind over matter is absurd. The mind is the matter in the exact same way that Emptiness is form (The Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sūtra). Every atom of our material body is nothing other than the perfect integration of the One Mind and looking elsewhere for what is already ours is a fools journey.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is a story that reveals this truth.  The message of the Prodigal is the same as contained in the Song of Zazen written by one of the Zen giants (17th-century Hakuin Ekaku). Here are his words: 

“How near the truth, yet how far we seek. Like one in water crying, ‘I thirst!’ Like the son of a rich man wandering poor on this earth we endlessly circle the six worlds. The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.”  

What can be seen blinds us and keeps us ignorant of what is unseen. So, on the one hand, we are deceived by the conditional, discriminate nature of what we can perceive and on the other hand, our true nature is unconditionally indiscriminate, ineffable but full. And out of our sense of incompletion, we are consumed by desire, not realizing that we already possess what we seek.

The noble winning poet Rabindranath Tagore captured the journey beautifully when he wrote, “The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.” 

So on this spring day, reflect on the labor of your life. Are you laboring for becoming complete? Or are you laboring to accept your never-ending completion? It makes a difference.

Mirror, mirror on the wall who’s the fairest one of all?

In a mirror, everything is reversed and all that can be seen is a reflection of something. What is right out here is left in there. Reality and an image are reversed and all that can be seen is a reflection of something. We can’t reach into a mirror and pull out anything real, but what we see looks very real. 

What seems incomprehensible is that we have a mirror in us and like any other mirror, everything is a reflection of something real but only discernible as an image.

In our mind’s eye, we see an image of ourselves, and we call that image a “self-image.” It’s a product of our unseen mind. But since this image occurs in our mirror it is reversed and we take it to be real. Our ego is who we imagine our self to be and in our estimation, we are the fairest one of all. But in a mirror what we see as the fairest is reversed. In truth, our ego is our worst enemy. 

Our ego is greedy, vain, vengeful, vindictive, vulnerable, defensive and willing to do anything, however awful to fend off perceived threats. And all the while the real us lies hidden beneath these illusions waiting to be unveiled. 

Our mind is like an iceberg: The visible and tiny tip (ego mind) and what lies at the vast depths of us all is our true, and unseen mind without limits. The real us lies on the other side of that inner mirror and the qualities of the ego are reversed. Whereas our imaginary self is greedy, vain, ignorant, vengeful and possessive, the real us is complete, humble, kind, wise and compassionate, but the real us has no identifying characteristics.

Every means of perception functions internally. There is no such thing as external perception. Perception by every means occurs in our brain and is a reflection, but not the real thing being perceived. In truth, the entire universe exists only as images reflected in our brains. There is no perception of a self, no perception of a being, no perception of a soul and no perception of a person because a perception is only an image, a reflected projection that occurs in our brain. 

We are real and not real at the same time. The images are unreal. Our reality is unseen. The images we see and take to be real are actually just perceptions. The reality upon which these images are based can never be directly accessed, yet we are here. Hermann Hesse, the author of Siddhartha, rightfully stated: 

“There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.” 

We live within the sea of unreality, which we understand as reality and never question this process.

Manifestations and mystery.

Do you drive a car? Wear clothing? Buy groceries at the store? These are everyday experiences that everyone knows well. We take such things for granted but no one is silly enough to think any of these just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. 

Every objective thing—food, clothing, tools…every single thing comes from a source. Your car was manufactured in a plant somewhere. The parts to assemble it came from many different places, and the raw materials were dug from the earth. Where did the raw materials come from? We don’t know nor care so long as our car works we are satisfied.

How did anything become available? Because of desire. Somebody, at some earlier time, wanted things and they then began to think: How, they imagined, can such a thing be made? Who besides me might want it? How much will they pay? Can I make a profit? 

Desire is the engine for production, thinking is the tool for bringing it into existence and your mind is the source of thinking, yet your mind can’t be found. 

 It’s a mystery! But the question must be asked: What is the taste of happiness? Do these ideas, these manifestations from our mind make us fulfilled? After a long time of indulging ideas and things, we develop an experience of being un-fulfilled. Then we are ready to let go of the engine of desire. Then we are ready to find the mystery that can’t be found.

The road to an imaginary nowhere.

I recently came across a statement that suggested that a precursor to moving beyond our egos was to first have a good or healthy one. There was something that troubled me about the suggestion that may have appeared worthy until thoroughly examined. 

Good egos/bad egos are both judgments, but to first make such a judgment, it’s necessary to describe the nature of ego and to distinguish it from our true self. In another post (Irrational exuberance and the tradition of silence), I shared what Chán Master Sheng Yen, said (Complete Enlightenment—Zen Comments on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment) about the self/ego. He said:

“… there cannot be a self (e.g., ego) that is free from all obstructions. If there is a sense of self, then there are also obstructions. There cannot be obstructions without a self to create and experience them, because the self is an obstruction.” 

To pick and choose one phenomenal condition in contrast with another and feel righteous about our choice runs the risk of becoming self-righteous. So it is with care and sensitivity that I approach this matter.

In spiritual vernacular, noumenality (in contrast to phenomenality—known by our senses) is known as our true spiritual nature and is understood as the wellspring source of all. Noumenality is neither good nor bad. It is just what it is until contaminated with judgments. Whether we are aware of this nature being universally imbedded in all sentient forms is somewhat beside the point. We have a human history of being unaware of many matters that changed our view of the world, for example, the idea that the earth was the center of the universe. This was, of course, not true despite our belief to the contrary. It is likewise analogous that the world does not revolve around us either.

Noumenality is translated as a-thing-unto-itself of which the senses give no knowledge, but whose bare existence can be intuited from the nature of experience. It is our seed—our jewel of great value. The name we choose to articulate this transcendent seed is arbitrary. Any and every name is as good or bad as the next. No name can adequately define what is transcendent and every name chosen leads us to conceptual error.

I’ve used the following quote so often in my writing I run the risk of over-kill. But it is so insightful that I find it difficult to resist repeating. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is quoted as having said: 

“If those who lead you say unto you: behold, the Kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will be before you. If they say unto you: it is in the sea, then the fish will be before you. But the Kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then shall you be known, and you shall know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty.”

Contrast this teaching with the ordinary understanding—That the Kingdom is in fact in the sky somewhere (e.g., in heaven) or just about any place other than indiscriminately distributed—transcendent to space-time. Here Jesus was saying that the Kingdom is not limited to space-time, not even singularly within or outside. But instead, we find the Kingdom everywhere and then we come to know ourselves as sons of the living Father. He closes this verse by saying if we don’t know who we are then we are indeed poor. We could easily travel for an eternity, trying to find what is always the Kingdom’s spiritual air we breathe. We would be like fish not knowing they swim in the water.

This is a startling teaching, only because it is so radically different from the ordinary dogmatic Christian view. In fact, it is very similar to the Buddhist teaching about enlightenment. That teaching says that our only reality emanates from the body of truth, which is not limited or restricted in any way, and it is the loss of ignorance, which reveals our true nature. 

This body of truth was known as the Dharmakaya (The One Mind—pure, unrestricted, consciousness), equivalent to the Kingdom. Indeed this teaching says the same thing—we are poor because we have not discovered who we are. We are deluded (and poor) because we mistakenly believe that we are a shadow (an ego) of our real self. When we awaken to our true nature then we join the ranks among the Buddhas—The Awakened ones and are recognized for who we truly are: as sons of the living Father.

Meister Eckhart, a German Christian theologian, philosopher, and mystic who lived 700 years ago clarified this distinction between God and the idea of God. He said, 

“Man’s last and highest parting occurs when for God’s sake he takes leave of god. St. Paul took leave of god for God’s sake and gave up all that he might get from god as well as all he might give—together with every idea of god. In parting with these he parted with god for God’s sake and God remained in him as God is in his own nature—not as he is conceived by anyone to be—nor yet as something yet to be achieved, but more as an is-ness, as God really is. Then he and God were a unit, that is pure unity. Thus one becomes that real person for who there can be no suffering, any more than the divine essence can suffer.”

My use of this quote underscores the important distinction between ideas and what is represented by ideas, or more aptly, an image, and what is represented by an image. This distinction is as meaningful for expressions of the ineffable as it is to tangible, measurable life. The philosophy of Zen does not require belief as blind faith. It considers this as an obstruction to the discernment of truth. To hold onto ideas, good or bad—however pious or well-intentioned—is considered part of the problem. 

It would seem that Eckhart would have agreed. Any and all givens are pieces of our own self-constructed prison bars, which reflect closed-mindedness and obstruct a-thing-unto-itself.  When we refuse to see what lies clearly before us, we forgo clarity in the interest of obligation and blind allegiance. These are mental anchors responsible for creating friction and emasculating our ability to adapt to changing circumstances, which in the nature of change determines genuine truth and justice.

The goal of Zen is to strip ourselves of illusions so that we can embrace life as it is, not as we decide it should be, and the means prescribed by the father of Zen (Bodhidharma) was simply to not think. Thinking is probably the greatest form of all delusion since is based on perception, which is completely phenomenal (as things appear through our senses).

Dogmatic constraints are gilds that distort life by requiring it to conform to artificially imposed constraints or suffer the consequences of rejection and condemnation, and the most pernicious shoulds are those, which we impose upon ourselves. 

Self-judgments result when we internalize the votes of others or impose judgments upon our selves and make them our own guiding force. In many cases, it takes years to break this cycle of self-judgment and recrimination, which lies at the heart of the manner in which we judge the world. By and large, we see life as a reflection of our own biases. Zen is a process, which can aid us in that endeavor by helping us to experience the contingency and emptiness of our egos and thus strip away the fences we create to set us apart and exalt us from others.

When we succeed in coming to terms with the fragile and fabricated nature of ego construction and dependency, we begin to notice that every other aspect of life is linked to this phantom entity, which drives the process. Pressed through the collapsing floors—dropping mind and body— to the ground of our being, we finally see our true linkage and are forced to accept union with our fellow humans and every other dimension of life. 

The result is deeply rooted compassion and desire to join with the unending ranks of those who have likewise plumbed the depths, survived the trip and found peace. When that occurs we realize that such discriminations and judgments like good and evil are nothing more than prison bars, which obstruct and diminish life and our relation to it.

The perversion of our correct selves into good or bad images degrades both our sense of the world and ourselves. An image of who we are, taken in one extreme direction results in feeling special and exalted compared to others. Taken in the opposite extreme, results in feelings of being worthless and lesser, compared to others.

Regardless, a rotten fish by any other name smells as bad. An ego is by nature a phantom idea or image of our true self and thus called a self-image. An image is a product of our imaginations: an unreal projection and can be nothing other than an image regardless of spin, and its nature is greedy, self-centered, and defensive. 

The perversion of our true noumenal nature is like a cloak masking our immaculate selves or a gild on a lily. It is not only not needed it is destructive. Eckhart reminded us that, 

“Humanity in the poorest and most despised human being is just as complete as in the Pope or the Emperor.” And we know what sort of clothing the Emperor wears—none.

Thus a good ego or a bad ego is in truth an oxymoron. If we wait until we have a good idea of self there would be no motivation to be rid of it. Chan Master Sheng-yen once pointed out, 

“Generally, unless a sleeping person is having a nightmare, he or she will not want to wake up. The dreamer prefers to remain in the dream. In the same way, if your daily life is relatively pleasant, you probably won’t care to practice in order to realize that your life is illusory. No one likes to be awakened from nice dreams.” And as one who had years of bad dreams about the despicable person, I thought I was, I can assure you I was very eager to wake up from the nightmare.

The scholastic trap.

Most people regard themselves as smart and have consequently fallen in love with the rational model for dealing with and solving our challenges and problems. We want to understand our world and the issues relevant to us. If we can’t fathom the reasons, we seem powerless to move. This is both a distinguishing aspect of being human and a threat to our existence. When someone is holding a gun to your head, you need to set aside the desire to rationally resolve the dilemma and come to terms, not with the conceptual reasons and understanding, but instead to first deal with the reality of the threat.

Scholasticism was developed as a method of critical thought, which dominated teaching by the academics (scholastics, or schoolmen) of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500 CE. This model was employed to articulate and defend orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context. 

It originated as an outgrowth of, and a departure from, Christian monastic schools (the forerunners of current universities). Not so much a philosophy or a theology as a method of learning, scholasticism put a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference and to resolve contradictions. 

Scholastic thought is also known for rigorous conceptual analysis and the careful drawing of distinctions. In the classroom, and in writing, it often takes the form of explicit apologetic disputation. A topic drawn from the tradition is broached in the way of a dialogue with a question, opponent’s responses are given, a counterproposal is argued, and opponent’s arguments rebutted. Because of its emphasis on rigorous dialectical method, scholasticism was eventually applied to many other fields of study. 

John Calvin stands out as the prime example of the logic of proof-texting, so convoluted that you need a step-by-step scientific roadmap from the beginning of time to endless eternity to fathom his disputations. His seminal work “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” published in 1536 CE, is his most significant contribution to hyperbole: the standard by which most Protestant (meaning “to protest”) theology continues today. I know this personally since I studied Calvin and reformed thought extensively while attending seminary.

Scholasticism began as an attempt to unify various contradictions on the part of medieval Christian thinkers: to harmonize the various authorities of their own tradition and to reconcile Christian theology with classical and late antiquity philosophy, especially that of Aristotle but also of Neoplatonism.

The main figures of scholasticism were Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s masterwork, the Summa Theologica, is often seen as the highest fruit of Scholasticism. Important work in the scholastic tradition has been carried on; however, well past Thomas’s time, for instance, by Francisco Suárez, Molina, and among Lutheran and Reformed thinkers.

This entire approach, by design, is based on conceptual, abstract thought, assuming that a transcendent God could be converted into an object for theological study. The Age of the Enlightenment was a response to the scholastic movement and continued the tradition which it initiated. This movement is a manifestation of the Western attempt to rationally grasp reality but is by no means the only movement. 

In the East, a completely different model arose based on trans-rational vision and was best exemplified by the man who has been acknowledged as the father of Zen and known as Bodhidharma. This was the name given to him by his spiritual teacher (Hannyatara Sonja). His real name was Bodai Tara (surname Chadili), and he lived during the 5th century CE. This places him 1,000 years after the time of The Buddha and roughly 500 years before the scholastic emergence in the West. As nearly as anyone can prove, Bodhidharma transmitted Zen from India and into China and was a towering giant in the long history of Zen Masters. Reading what he had to say can be somewhat daunting.

One of his most profound teachings comes to us from what is now known as the Wake-up Sermon. In this sermon, Bodhidharma addresses the matter of “understanding.” In light of our ordinary grasp of this matter, what he has to say seems startling. Consider this—“People capable of true vision know that the mind is empty. They transcend both understanding and not understanding. The absence of both understanding and not understanding is true understanding...That which exists, exists in relationship to that which doesn’t exist.” 

What does “...the mind is empty” mean? Emptiness (in a Buddhist sense) has two meanings which are: (1) nothing is self-existing but rather depends upon something else, and (2) form is fundamentally lacking substantial existence. While similar, these two ways of grasping emptiness are subtly yet notably distinct.

Our mind has two aspects. One aspect is our “conditional mind”—our ordinary mind of thoughts and emotions, which we employ to manage and negotiate our conditional/relative world. This is the aspect of mind used by scholastics and the model standard in our world that is leading us into a quagmire of grief. 

The other aspect is our “unconditional mind”—fundamental consciousness atop which sits our ordinary mind of rational thought. In Buddhist vernacular, “unconditional mind” goes by many different handles, one of which is Buddha-mind (bodhi)—awakened mind. These two aspects are interdependent, and as Bodhidharma says, “That which exists, exists in relationship to that which doesn’t exist.” 

It would not be inaccurate to say that an “unconditional mind” doesn’t exist since the only way it could be perceived is by objectifying it (which renders it unreal). In its unmodified state, bodhi is real (yet imperceptible), but when objectified it becomes an abstraction (a delusion/unreal) in the same way that God becomes unreal when objectified. So, on the one hand, we can say that one aspect (it doesn’t matter which aspect we refer to) exists together with the other aspect (the first way of understanding emptiness) and that our unconditional mind is truly lacking substance—there is nothing there objectively (yet everything) except when manifested: the second way of understanding emptiness. It is important to understand this latter point.

Something (anything at all), which is unconditional, can’t possibly be defined or rationally understood since understanding is itself a set of conditions. If we objectify something real (make it perceptible), we strip it of life and make it abstract. The opposite is to reify something unreal (an object), which is to engage in delusion, believing something to contain life, which doesn’t. Our imaginary ego is a case in point of this latter, and our ego is fundamentally corrupt. The illusion of ego blocks access to bodhi since, in a delusive state, we make two errors— (1) We mistake our self-image for who we are, and in so doing (2), we remain blinded by ignorance and don’t have access to who we are genuinely.

Any object, by definition, is limited by conditions of time/space and circumstances, whereas bodhi (since it is unconditional) is transcendent—without limits. When we say “I understand,” what we are really saying is that we have a set of ideas under consideration, which we then accept as “understanding.” That is our conditional mind at work, and our conditional mind is incapable of real understanding since it is constrained by conditions perceived by our rational thought processes (left brain stuff). This is a conditional mind looking at unconditional mind and falling prey to delusion—believing its own PR. 

Contrast this with what Bodhidharma says: “The absence of both understanding and not understanding is true understanding.” If I said “I don’t understand,” this would be no better than saying that I do understand. Both of these expressions are manifestations of rational thought processes (different only by alternative conditions). What we ordinarily grasp as understanding is not understanding at all. It is a rational surrogate—an abstraction, which is rooted in the idea of “self”—a delusion.

When we say “I understand,” we are making reference to something which, in fact, doesn’t exist. There is no “I” except what we conjure up in our imaginations (a product of our conditional mind) which we consider as our identity, and this is grasped as separate, distinct, uniquely defined, and set apart from every other set of ideas belonging to other “not me’s.” 

The practical, everyday impact of this way of seeing is that proper understanding is beyond isolation and belonging to any individual, however intelligent. We are all, in truth, united and bound together at the level of unconditional mind (how could it be otherwise?). Individually we are a piece of this whole but just a piece, and while we may think it is possible to see the whole picture all by ourselves, this is a delusion of ego which is always joined with arrogance and defensiveness. True understanding is beyond the limitations of a conditional perspective.

Mahayana Buddhist thought (Zen belongs to this branch) stresses that bodhi is always present and perfect, and simply needs to be “uncovered” or disclosed to purified vision. We find in the “Sutra of Perfect Awakening” The Buddha teaches that, like gold within its ore, bodhi is always there within our mind, but requires obscuring mundane ore (the surrounding defilements of samsara and of impaired, unawakened perception) to be removed. Thus The Buddha declares:

“Good sons, it is like smelting gold ore. The gold does not come into being because of smelting...Even though it passes through endless time, the nature of the gold is never corrupted. It is wrong to say that it is not originally perfect. The Perfect Enlightenment of the Tathagata (A Buddha: our true mind) is also like this.”

The task, therefore, is not to create—enlightenment but rather to allow the afflictions of suffering to burn away the dross. To do otherwise is to reify reinventing an already existing wheel, leaving the go intact.

 Our desire to contain understanding within a scholastic framework only is a trap that threatens our existence. True understanding is not limited to conditions, which come and go. True understanding is beyond all limitations. Many will say that until we rationally understand a situation, our analysis is incomplete. It is only complete (the definition of τέλος) when we move beyond the conditional mind, reach the end, and embrace the unconditional mind.

Such a critique is like asking to have a conversation with a murderer holding a gun to our head and inquiring about his motives. The first step is to disarm him (or her). Then we can explore his or her reasons. This one-sided rational approach is what got us into the out of control entanglement we find ourselves in today. To continue down this road of conditional limitation and ideological opposition is a surefire prescription for disaster.