How to save the world.

It's up to us.

In the Western world, the term “sentient being” is not your every-day word. We think in terms of human beings or other kinds. But sentience is more descriptive since it denotes the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively, not to overlook thinking. Any conscious being is a sentient being, including all creatures capable of sensing and responding to its world.

Unfortunately, being human has caused us to evolve into being human-centric and set aside our connections to other creatures and the environment that enables our existence. We forget (or if you prefer, went unmindful) of the food chain that begins with the tiniest of creatures and goes all the way to the top—us humans. Cutting that chain and destroying the environment within which all sentient beings live is an unfailing prescription for our ultimate disaster. We are well down the road toward that end for a simple reason—unmindfulness of our aggregate interconnectivity with the rest of life. Our priorities are going south fast. While we are distracted with lesser matters, our support systems are not. They are progressing toward ultimate demise due to our negligence. And if we wish to continue as a species, we need to quickly get back to basics.

What is the most basic of all? It is the matter that connects us to all other creatures—THE MIND, the human-mind being one part of that larger whole. If we can get a handle on that, everything else will fall into proper alignment, and we will survive.

If you haven’t yet watched the Netflix documentary (The Social Dilemma), it is high time you did. There is no other informative communication I am aware of that emphasizes the critical importance of finding your anchor within. We are now living in a sea of turbulent manipulation, waging a losing battle with AI machines designed to draw us into a spider web, from which there is no escape. And with no anchor, we will all be swept into a collective nightmare. Our progress as a human society has risen to the point leading to anarchy and ultimate destruction. This excellent film tells you the truth when few others will about just how lost we are and paints a terminal annihilation portrait. It is a must-watch!

Western civilization has taken us a long way toward the “good life,” but it has, at the same time, brought with it our lack of being mindful of the most important of all: THE MIND, that has given us those good things. To make needed corrections takes us to the other side of the earth and the wisdom that has evolved there (and largely ignored here). 

A towering giant of Eastern Wisdom was Bodhidharma—the man credited with starting the movement of understanding THE MIND. This credit (given the long view) has been misplaced since what he “started” goes back many thousands of years preceding his life. The name of that movement has, like everything else, changed, but the codified essence has remained the same. What began as dhyāna (going back in recorded history, and probably earlier) changed into Chan (Chinese Buddhism), eventually into Zen when the movement traveled to Japan and then to the rest of the world.

Zen is not, nor has it ever been, a religion (even though it is known as Zen Buddhism). Instead, it is the most thorough-going exploration of THE MIND ever conceived. Properly named, it should be called “Buddhist Zen” because this was the method employed by The Buddha to realize his Enlightenment (which Westerners mistake for the European form—The Enlightenment that occurred in Europe during the intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and continues to this day. That form of enlightenment was centered on rational thought. Enlightenment in the East was the opposite: Not thinking—that aspect, common to all sentient beings—intuition, which goes to the core of THE MIND, what we all need to grasp if we wish to survive.

In the West (going back to the Greek philosophers), we consider the mind as thoughts and emotions, never considering that these aspects must originate from somewhere. And that, “somewhere,” is THE MIND, not my mind nor yours. THE MIND is not up for ownership. It can’t be possessed or even found through rational thought since it is the source of what follows—thoughts and emotions. All sentient beings share this mind, along with us humans, and once understood, brings about a radical transformation needed to save us all.

Bodhidharma said this about understanding THE MIND: “If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both. Those who don’t understand, don’t understand understanding. And those who understand, understand not understanding. 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.”

For Westerners, a translation is needed. Trying to grasp THE MIND with the rational mind is like a fish trying to grasp water, forgetting how to swim, and not even aware of water. Both reality and THE MIND are beyond our limited rational faculties to grasp. What does Bodhidharma mean about “understanding understanding?” He means just that: “Both reality and The Mind are beyond our limited rational faculties to grasp.” True vision must arise from the more fundamental aspect: where the rational faculties originate (where the anchor within resides). And from that aspect, we all have the same untapped potential to realize that nothing—absolutely nothing, can exist apart from the opposite, in this case, “not understanding.” Neither understanding nor not understanding must come from a MIND that is neither.

When we understand that, then only will we have the true vision—a vision that links all sentient beings together as a single unified being—THE MIND that is empty of all either/or. True vision is unified, and it isn’t. It is ultimately unified (realized through intuition) in an empty MIND, and it is divided rationally. Humans are so excessively left-brain, rationally oriented that we are quickly becoming so smart it is killing us to our discredit. Think about that. Better yet, don’t think about it. 

“Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.”—Bodhidharma

The power of hate?

In spiritual annals, rarely is hate seen in a positive light. Often times hate is seen as the antithesis of love: the natural foe to be overcome by love, but few times indeed is hate seen as a positive matter. And more times than not hate is aligned with demonic activity, while love is seen as the essence of divinity. 

However, neither hate nor love has any independent existence. Instead, these two, powerful emotions are forces that yield an understanding of the opposite. Truth and falsity are two sides of the coin of knowledge. A coin, of any kind, has two sides, just as a roof does. Neither a coin nor a roof would be possible if one side was removed. By so doing all of it would cease to exist. 

That principle goes by various names: relativity, perceptual contrast, and dependent origination. Not only do these two sides determine existence and nonexistence, but they make possible the understanding of both. What is true is only understood as true when given a comparison of falsity. Likewise, hate and love define one another, so too adversity, and the result of hope, growth in character, and endurance. The challenges of life afford us all with opportunities to experience, build strength, and discover for ourselves what is false and true.

Nothing, by itself, is either good or bad. No one overwhelmed with adversity or failing health sees either as desirable. But there is value in first experiencing both. Bodhidharma correctly observed, “Your body and mind are the field. Suffering is the seed, wisdom the sprout, and Buddhahood the grain…Every suffering is a buddha-seed, because suffering impels mortals to seek wisdom.” In that sense, sickness breeds wellness. Suffering breeds wisdom and compassion. And the opposite is true: anyone who experiences constant abundance has no motivation to empathize with those less fortunate nor awareness there is a higher level of spiritual enlightenment.

When we were children, our parents led us to believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. The parental intension was to fill our children with a sense of awe. It worked for a time but eventually, we found out the truth. For centuries all (probably) humans believed the Earth was the center of the universe and this view was reinforced by the Church. When Galileo discovered the truth, he was imprisoned by that authority and forced to recant the truth. 

We oftentimes hear that a substantial amount of self-talk is negative and hateful. Thus we are led to believe this is always a bad thing. The critical issue here is which “self” is the reference point? A proper understanding of the self is essential to this issue. If self is understood as the ego (an image of our true self) then negative and hateful self-talk is exactly what is needed because truth and falsity are relative matters. Before true self-awareness dawns like the rising sun, the false self must set like the setting sun. The false self (ego) remains unaware of anything beyond, and thus must fall by the weight of everything hateful. 

In the words of the North Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Śāntideva:

“All the suffering there is in this world arises from wishing our self to be happy. All the happiness there is in this world arises from wishing others to be happy.”

Just as the Earth is not the center of the universe, the world does not revolve around our egos. It is the very nature of egotism to exhibit as qualities of selfishness, greed, anger, delusion, alienation, hostility, and every other bad thing, and it is essential to spiritual awakening to hate these characteristics of behavior. So long as they remain acceptable dimensions of behavior they become normative and we, and the cultures within which we live, begin to die. It is the growing awareness that these qualities are true to be hated that become the power that fuels the engine of spiritual evolution, awakening, and universal brotherhood. And when at last the ego implodes because of the crush of self-hatred and discriminate love, the flower of unconditional love bursts forth from the all-embracing, non-discriminate source of our true self, and self-hatred transforms into universal self-love. 

The Wall—Emptiness

Image via Wikipedia

The enlightenment of The Buddha introduced an entirely new vantage-point to the human experience. 

In summary, his grasp of reality addressed two, apparently different views which he said were the same thing looked at from alternate perspectives. Those two dimensions were the conditional and the unconditional realms of form and emptiness, which according to him arose dependent upon each other. 

Today and tomorrow we’ll consider these two, metaphorically through a model of a wall and a ladder that leans against that wall. The metaphor came in a dream following a day of contemplating the various understandings of the word dharma. 

I discovered in my research that dharma was derived from the Sanskrit root dhṛ, which means to support or hold, and often referred to cosmic law. In my dream, I saw a ladder leaning against and supported by a blank wall.

The story is told that Bodhidharma sat in meditation staring at a blank wall for nine years. What did he see? Let’s take a walk into a realm almost too strange to imagine. In fact, it is only possible to enter this realm through the imagination. It is the realm of a transcendent wall, which strips conceptuality down to the ground of all being. Think essence—pure essence, infinite essence, 100% essence, without any otherness. Such a realm is impossible to imagine because to imagine it requires separation and otherness: an imaginer as well as what is being imagined, and such essence is transcendent to all divisions. It is a realm where subjects and objects melt into one another. It is non-dual in any and every way. 

Form requires dimensions of at least the aggregation of time, space, and circumstances. Not the imagination. Essence is the sentient eye seeing itself beyond all time, space, and circumstance. This essence is what Eckhart said was, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” 

Form content needs context within which to exist but essence is both content and context at the same time, which is a contradiction already. Essence is entirely “+” and “-” fusion and such a thing cannot exist except in the imagination, or so it seems to conventional wisdom.

What would such a realm approximate? The closest thing imaginable would be a black hole, which instead of sucking in otherness, sucks in itself (symbolically an Ouroboros—expressing the unity of all things). An infinitely large (or infinitely small: size is a contradiction) sucking machine without motion or any defining characteristics. Why? Because this is the primordial seed essence before mother and child. Form mother and children come next. “Large” is a defining characteristic. “Small” is a defining characteristic. “Motion” is movement from one space/time circumstance to another and this requires otherness which in the case of essence is so profound it cannot exist.

Defined thusly, in a dream, essence is transcendent to both life and death. It is beyond time, space, and circumstances. Such a condition is non-conditional, non-contingent, and non-everything. In fact, it is transcendent even to that prior statement since “non” is otherness and pure essence is non-non and is indefinable. It is wholly beyond; even beyond imagination and logic and every other frame of reference, which requires discernment. This would be 100% potential energy without even a glimmer of kinetic energy. Conceptually it is impossible to imagine. All concepts fail to capture essence. 

I think this way of envisioning essence is a fairly accurate description of something that is 100% ready: neither alive nor dead but ready for either, neither or both, only this is transcendent to all such defining characteristics which imply life or death. Readiness is unborn and never dies. This would be an independent, wholly essential, unconditional non-thing with no other purpose except existence itself. This is a Self with no other. It would be the womb of creation without a child, forever and ever: another with no otherness, yet transcendent to such distinctions. It would be completely empty of everything, yet completely full at the same time. It would be everything and nothing at once. It would be completely meaningless and completely meaningful—The Big Bang before either bang or big—pure singularity of the essential kind.

Is this what Bodhidharma saw? We’ll never know but countless Zen Masters have spoken about this ineffability using names like Mind Essence, Ground of Being, Original Face, and Purity. Some have called it Buddha—the Dharmakaya. Others have used the word, God. The founder of the Rinzai Zen (Lin Chi) used the idiom, “True Man of no rank” because, within this ineffable sphere, there is no discrimination and discrimination is conditional, only possible when otherness is present. 

Bodhidharma simply called it “The Void” or the primordial mind and what he was experiencing for nine years was a view of his own mind. Names are mere handles to represent what can’t be, and never will be, adequate to describe what is utterly transcendent. Exodus 20:4 speaks clearly about the admonition of God: “You are not to make an image or picture of anything in heaven or on the earth or in the waters under the earth.” 

And the understanding of this admonition is clear: any and every word or handle harkens a conceptual image engraved in the mind: a shadow—a surrogate, of the energy which inhabits and moves all of life. Essence is things exactly as they are, sans any and all defining characteristics. This is suchness. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. “Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know.” — Stanza 56, The Tao Te Ching.

Preparing the soil.

As a boy living in the Kansas heartland, I learned about farming. My grandmother reared me, and her first rule was “good soil.” Consequently, we used a fair amount of fertilizer, and before ever planting a seed, she had me till the soil. After that, the soil had to sit a few days, and then we planted seeds. That lesson stuck with me all these years and I employ that method in teaching and writing. Tomorrow I intend to fertilized your mind to be receptive to a few seeds and expose you to an innovative way of exploring creativity.

Creativity depends on input just, like the soil depends on fertilizer and seeds. The more information the better, but eventually, all of that input needs to be digested, assimilated, and processed for creative output to emerge. Fortunately, we are quite capable of both rational analyzing and creative insight, but they are different. People who are predominately analytic may not be the most creative and vice versa. Others seem to be more balanced and excel at both.

People who engage in Zen meditation are trained toward the middle road of balance, and in one tradition (Rinzai Zen), a device is employed to foster this balance. The device is known as a koan, which is essentially a means to force you to move beyond the limitations of the rational mind and use another part of your mind to tap into insight and intuition. 

A koan is a riddle, and the only way to solve it is by using your intuitive mind. There is no rational solution to these riddles, and the harder you try, the further away you get. That results in frustration and reaching the point of yielding. If you immerse yourself in the koan process long enough, you eventually “break open,” the struggle ends, resulting in a flash of insight and an intuitive answer, unexpectedly leaps out. 

The opposite way (incorporated in Sōtō Zen) is to engage in an extensive intellectual study until you become saturated with the ingredients, and then hopefully experience enlightenment. In either event, both the intellect and intuitive faculties are important. The Rinzai way fuels the sudden way, and the Soto way fuels the gradual way but common to both practices is zazen—the meditation process of calming and emptying your mind, which causes a shift to the intuitive side of you brain.

So tomorrow, I will walk you through a particular koan to demonstrate how this process works.