It ain't my job!

Some years ago, my teacher painted calligraphy for me that said, “A single drop of rain waters 10,000 pines.” While not literally true, it was a metaphor that spoke to this idea that all it takes is one ray of light to cut through the darkness and open up the possibility that other lights will follow. This morning I came across a similar expression: “Everything was impossible until someone did it.” I like that idea, but unfortunately, too often, many essential matters remain impossible because we are waiting for someone else to do what is needed.

Maybe it is just human nature to have this attitude that it ain’t my job and assume that what needs doing is undoubtedly being done by somebody else. But is that assumption correct? It’s been my experience during a reasonably long life that the premise is wrong. The evidence of the fallacy is everywhere around us. I see it with the growing volume of mail asking for donations to help those in need. The lines of people standing in soup kitchens keep growing while wealthy politicians suck the financial life of our nation off for themselves and make decisions to cut off support for the needy. I’ve seen it since childhood when I noticed people going to church and listening intently (or so it seemed) to sermons but then going on with their ordinary lives of selfishness. The earth’s atmosphere keeps getting hotter and hotter, and many people stay in states of denial for the same reason—surely somebody else will solve this problem. Still, the prevailing attitude of, I’m too busy with more important matters remains a dominant force.

I remember a story from childhood about the little red hen who kept asking for help baking her bread, and nobody offered assistance, yet when it came time to eat, everyone wanted a portion. Then, of course, there is the Aesop Fable of the grasshopper and the ants. The grasshopper played away the time of harvest while the ants stored food away for the hard times of winter. Then there is the story of a dog in the manger who wouldn’t eat what was offered but sure as heck didn’t want to share what he saw as “his.” Supposedly Aesop lived roughly 2,600 years ago in ancient Greece. The dog in the manger story appeared in both the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Matthew, so it would appear that human nature hasn’t changed much in a long time.

In the East, it is called karma. Colloquially we have the expression, “What goes around, comes around.” The principle addresses what follows actions (either for the good or bad) and is universal, regardless of time or place. We know the guide yet mostly ignore the wisdom. The question is, why? More than likely, the answer comes from a conflict between continuously changing conditions and priorities stuck in time. When sea changes occur, we all have the choice either clinging to preferences that fall in the grand scheme or adapting.

I’ve written about this latter matter and observed, “The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.” You can read about it in my post of Small Steps. Nobody can drink the whole ocean at once, but one sip followed by another, with patience and perseverance, enables us to move mountains.

The point of my post this morning is that our assumptions are, more times than not, merely delusional. What needs to be done to make our world a habitable and desirable place to live for our selves and our loved ones into the future depends on what we do today because collectively, we are creating our tomorrows’ moment by moment. Each day we have the opportunity to create a better world or a worse one. We make either heaven or hell with a single drop of rain, or not. Every positive action, however small it may be, makes a difference. Contrary to the title of this post, it is my job, because there is nobody but me’s of this world to do it.

The wisdom for solving our irreconcilable problems.

Meet Nagarjuna

Our world is drowning in a sea of rights vs. wrongs, governments trapped in ideological deadlocks, conflicts and wars, based on the same, religions likewise immersed in egocentric, self-righteousness (that results in an ever-increasing division of sects), news spun as fake, political alienation, and of course, a global pandemic that is decimating both people and economies. And lest we not forget: Global climate changes, that if not addressed soon, will eliminate us all. It is thus time to pull Nagarjuna out of the closet and dust him off.

We begin this dusting off in a familiar fashion; I need to introduce readers to Nagarjuna. He was a wise sage who lived a long time ago, roughly 1,800 years ago (150–250 CE), about 600 years following The Buddha’s death and, according to modern scholars, was thought to have resided in Southern India. In the Zen tradition, he is the 14th Patriarch. He is also recognized as a patriarch in Tantric and Amitabha Buddhism.

While considered a philosopher of incomparable standing, he put no stock in philosophy, claiming his mission was the apologist of the Buddha’s transcendent wisdom—Beyond any rational articulation. In that sense, he was a sort of Apostle Paul of Buddhism. The Buddha attempted to convey, with words, matters beyond words. The Buddha, like The Christ, was consequently recondite and rarely understood. Nagarjuna set out to correct that and, in the process, created what is now known as The Middle Way—of the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

The reason he is so critical to today’s world is that he was able to show, in a less mind-boggling way, that we live within a world of seeming contradictions that, when carefully examined, are not contradictory. To most, we live in a relative world, governed by conditional rights vs. conditional wrongs with nothing beyond. Nagarjuna used the logical method of his era to articulate how there is no contradiction. At that point, ancient Indian scholars employed a method of logic called a tetralemma: an algorithm with four dimensions (affirmation, negation, equivalence, and neither). In terms of conditional rights versus conditional wrongs, it would look like this:

1. Explicit absolute right exists: affirmation of absolute right, implicit negation absolute wrong.
2. Explicit absolute right does not exist: affirmation of absolute wrong, implicit negation absolute right.
3. Explicit absolute right both exists and does not exist: both implicit affirmation and negation.
4. Explicit absolute right neither exists nor does not exist: implicit neither affirmation nor negation.

He thus created the Two Truth Doctrine of conditional truth and unconditional truth. That doctrine stated, so long as this tetralemma method of logic is used alone, there is no way to reconcile either a conditional absolute right or a conditional absolute wrong since all conditions are contingent. That is where Nagarjuna began, but it is not where he ended. He then went to the next level—to the unconditional, which has no contingencies (beyond rational understanding) and pointed out there was a fifth dimension: none of the above.

“The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths: a truth of worldly convention and ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the distinction drawn between these two truths do not understand the Buddha’s profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth, the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, liberation is not achieved.”

Allow me to translate for you. We ordinarily consider truth as conditionally contingent (e.g., one thing contingent upon something else, such as right and wrong). Still, there is an ultimate truth beyond contingencies, and these two (while appearing as two), are actually two sides of the same thing. They arise dependent upon one another, and neither can exist without the other, sort of like the inside and outside of a roof. One of these truths is a truth of discriminate opposition (e.g., this vs. that; right vs. wrong—the core dilemma), but the other is the truth of indiscriminate union. We must use the conventional truth to lead us to the higher truth since the conventional is the coin of standard logic and communications (words), and we use this truth to know how it is different from the higher. But unless we experience the higher truth, we will forever be lost in a conditionally, contingent, rational trap.

Then he stated a subset of this doctrine. That conventional truth was a matter of tangible form, but the higher truth was of imperceptible emptiness (thus, what the Buddha had said in the Heart Sutra/Sutra of Perfect Wisdom: Form is emptiness; Emptiness is form). Nagarjuna reasoned that if this ineffable dimension of emptiness was valid, then it must apply to everything, including emptiness, thus empty emptiness, which creates an inseparable feedback union back to form again. The two are forever fused together.

So how does this affect the problems of today? It “can” revolutionize the dilemma of egotism and self-righteousness. When properly understood and experienced, it means that the obstacle standing in the way of the higher truth is the perceptible illusion of the self (ego: the contingent, conditional image). Once that illusion is eliminated, we experience our true self (unconditional non-image) that is the same for all people. 

There is no discrimination at this higher truth level (e.g., distinction), and consequently, there is no absolute right vs. wrong, but neither is there not an absolute right nor wrong (independent of each other). Everything is unconditionally, indiscriminately united, yet not conditionally. Thus it can neither be said that truth either exists or does not. If all of us could “get that,” the conflicts of the world would vanish in a flash, and we would at long last know peace and unity among all things.

Karma and Predestination

Fate vs. Karma

I’m somewhat of a hybrid anomaly. I never consciously intended to become spiritual, yet it happened anyway. Nor did I ever plan to study religions, yet that too occurred. It all began with a seeming mistake that led me into Yoga (Hatha at first), and have discovered how well it worked physically, I decided to explore further and found that Hatha was one of many forms of Yoga, one of which is Dhyāna Yoga (The Seventh Limb of Yoga). It was/is also known as the means of emerging Samādhi (mystical absorption), the aim of all Yogic practices, and the eighth step of the Buddha’s Nobel Eight Fold path toward enlightenment. I later learned that Dhyāna was the ancient Sanskrit name for what we now know as Zen.

And that became the path I followed (the Rinzai form) that changed my life. I never saw it coming. It’s similar to being blindsided by COVID, but with a different outcome. And once I had experienced and reaped the fruit of the path of awakening, I chose to return to school and obtain a degree in divinity as an ordained Christian Minister. This all happened after I had lived a lot of life, much of it challenging and full of suffering.

Fast forward forty-plus years later, and during recent times, I have wondered if all of this was just a fluke of destiny or perhaps a reflection of something unseen, more profound, yet nevertheless real—may be an extension of karma, or maybe even predestination, both of which I had learned through my own experience and in-depth study.

There is something I don’t like about either the idea of my destiny being predetermined or paying the price for my errors. Nevertheless, when I examine my life in hindsight, it is hard to ignore how it could have happened by serendipity or happenstance. So the question I have recently pondered whether there could be any validity to either idea (karma or predestination). Both rankle me, yet both might be true despite my distaste.

Karma makes much sense as cause and effect on a conditional plane. Feedback loops surround us everywhere—from an interpersonal level all the way to nature. It happens in the water cycle, and it happens when we attack someone. And it does not appear to be limited to individuals who seem separate and apart from other people. Still, as chaos theory tells us, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in South America eventually becomes a hurricane moving across the Atlantic from the coast of Africa. We must call that “collective karma”—The impact of everything linked together. What goes around comes around, and it’s hard to ignore the obvious. 

What could be more obvious is how karma continues from mortal life into the next. Once we die (mortally), logically, it is less evident that we carry forward what was incomplete in a previous mortal life. However, much of what I have experienced in this incarnation doesn’t seem possible to have occurred through happenstance. So there is some substance to continuing karma.

Predestination is somewhat akin to karma in that our mortal vector appears as a continuation—a righteous one that stems from the residue of previous mortal incarnations. If you buy into reincarnation, then why would it not make sense that we begin with a residue of unfinished business (e.g., karmic seeds carried forward within the eighth consciousness—Sanskrit, alayavijnana, thus the “pre” of destiny. Buddhist thought affirms that notion, and I can see the wisdom: A sort of do-over-opportunity to advance in our quest toward completion and enlightenment.

I do, however, question the validity of the sort of predestination proposed by John Calvin: Double predestination—the belief that God appointed the eternal destiny of some to salvation by grace while leaving the remainder to receive eternal damnation for all their sins. That notion directly contradicts the doctrine of unconditional love in the New Testament unless you see eternal damnation as “tough love.”

The final analysis comes down to belief and dogma, which The Buddha was adamantly opposed to, as expressed in the Kalama Sutra. The people of Kalama asked the Buddha whom to believe out of all the ascetics, sages, venerables, and holy ones who passed through their town like himself. They complained that they were confused by the many contradictions they discovered in what they heard. The Kalama Sutra is the Buddha’s reply.

• “Do not believe anything on mere hearsay.

• Do not believe in traditions merely because they are old and have been handed down for many generations and in many places.

• Do not believe anything on account of rumors or because people talk a great deal about it.

• Do not believe anything because you are shown the written testimony of some sage.

• Do not believe in what you have fancied, thinking because it is extraordinary, it must have been inspired by a god or other wonderful being.

• Do not believe anything merely because the presumption is in favor or because the custom of many years inclines you to take it as true.

• Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers or priests.

• But, whatever, after thorough investigation and reflection, you find to agree with reason and experience as conducive to the good and benefit of one and all and of the world at large, accept only that as true and shape your life in accordance with it.

The same text, said the Buddha, must be applied to his own teachings.

Do not accept any doctrine from reverence, but first, try it as gold tried by fire.”

Surrendering from vengeance.

Tit-for-Tat

Quite a while back I wrote of post called, “Surrendering from inflexible positions” and a reader responded with a suggestion that I write about surrendering from vengeance. I didn’t take the advice at the time but given the current state of affairs, with so much at stake, maybe it’s time to track this human tendency through to its logical conclusion. 

I don’t have much wisdom to offer on the topic since the downside seems rather obvious. However, since the dominant forces today seem locked into this pattern of back and forth violence, perhaps the downside isn’t so obvious after all. Antifa and White Supremacy have locked horns with clear political spin. Curiously, Antifa is getting labeled as “radical socialists.” Nothing could be further from the truth, but nowadays political spin outranks truth. 

And then I recently wrote about the findings of Peter Cathcart Wason, the English cognitive psychologist, who discovered that we humans are much more interested in our egoistic desires to protect our preconceived opinions than to seek truth. So maybe vengeance has more to do with covering our vested flanks than anything else. If so, then this post probably won’t succeed in chipping away at that crusty vest. We seem to be slow learners and our collective ignorance leads us all to more suffering.

In one of my books, More Over, I wrote about this idea called kleshas (or afflictions; causes of suffering). The five following kleshas were described by Patanjali at the beginning of Book 2 of the Yoga Sutra (1, 2, 4). So I don’t claim any special knowledge. I just took the time to read because learning about the causes of suffering seemed like a good thing to do. When these kleshas are laid out end-to-end the logic of vengeance can be fathomed.

The first of the kleshas was called ignorance of the true nature of reality (avidya in Sanskrit). However, Patanjali’s perspective here is contrary to Mark Twain’s advice who said: “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Perhaps so, but thus far evidence is lacking.  Then comes misidentification (asmita), attachment (raga), anger following a loss (dvesha), and finally misunderstanding life and death (abhinivesha). Having identified these five, Patanjali makes it simpler yet by saying that all of these five are contained in the first: ignorance of the true nature of reality. 

As a human species, this simplicity seems to be lost since we proceed to go forward with this tit-for-tat practice of violence (otherwise called vengeance). The downside is rather simple when viewed in terms of one person in a relationship with another. If someone strikes you, the immediate response is to strike back. This response leads to their response to a strike back at you, and this unending pattern leads to where we are today: nowhere. The lure to right all wrongs is magnetic and we gnash our teeth struggling to find wisdom for solutions to raging conflicts around the world. The carnage is unquestionably awful but the essential question is this: How does meeting violence with more violence lead to anything other than more responsive violence? 

According to Patanjali, the entire flawed tendency can be reduced down to the first klesha: a misunderstanding of the true nature of reality. The untrue nature of reality is what we have today (and apparently have had all the way back to a beginningless beginning) and that understanding is that every person on earth, and beyond, views him or her self as purely an individual with no meaningful connection. We have a term that fits the bill for this view. It’s called mutual discretion and is the basis of the entirety of human failings.

Just for the sake of consideration, let’s think about the consequences of this view. If I am mutually discrete from you, then I will do as Patanjali suggests and misidentify myself (and you, and all others) as an image, which we call a self-image (otherwise known as ego). The nature of an image is unreal and the nature of the ego is individual self-preservation. And we have an infinite number of ways of preserving a separate self. The number one way is to attach our sense of identity to stuff we like (power, material possessions, other people, ad infinitum) and bulwark ourselves from stuff we dislike. The problem is that stuff doesn’t stand still. It moves and changes, one moment here, gone the next. And with the demise of what we have clung to (or resisted, which has the nasty tendency to find its way to us anyway) comes a sense of loss or precarious identity, self-worth and power. Then we get royally ticked off, blame others for our pain, and strike back at the perceived source of our suffering, thus vengeance.

So if that is the pattern (and who can deny that it is) then what’s the alternative? Simple: That we are not, at the core,  mutually discrete. Feedback loops define our existence  Instead we are essentially united with everything. That, of course, is easy to say and very difficult to experience. Just saying it is not enough. Unity must be experienced to be of any worth, otherwise, it remains a figment of our imagination. The experience of unity is what goes by the handle of transformation or enlightenment: where the sense of being an individual, separate identity melts into an irrevocable unity with everything. And when that happens the image we previously held of ourselves (self-image) evaporates into thin air.

From that point forward vengeance becomes an impossible matter because we realize that striking another, or destroying our world, is the same as destroying ourselves and we come to understand, in a new way, a commandment offered by Jesus when asked which commandment was the greatest. He answered by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

There is just one tiny, yet all-important issue here. All of these: God, soul, mind, neighbor, and self are single, never born, never die, united entity. If this is not so, then the commandment falls apart and we are left with mutual discretion, all of us claiming, with self-righteous indignation, that individually each of us is justified in preserving our egocentric identity and never-ending vengeance continues forever. The arms race never ends, nor does the associated cost in blood and money.

The high price of choice: winning battles, losing wars.

My way or the highway?

The boundary line between sleep and wakefulness is anything but clear. Ordinarily, we think we know the difference. When sleeping, sometimes we dream, and it isn’t clear. But when we wake up, we say to ourselves, “Oh, that was just a dream.”  

Dreams can seem very real and sometimes terrifying. Research has shown that between 25% to 50% of people die while asleep. While not conclusive, evidence suggests that little difference exists between such things as heart rate, blood pressure, anxiety states, and stress hormones produced due to wakeful states of stress and sleep states of stress. The body doesn’t distinguish. Our reasoning is that one state (wakeful state of consciousness) is real, while the sleep state is not. 

To fathom the Buddhist understanding of highest, or ultimate reality, it is necessary to come to terms with the basis of differentiation. And when this is explored the conclusion is that the vast majority of the human race is never awake but is instead in a state of perpetual sleep, not knowing the difference between reality and unreality. 

To unlock this mystery, we need to examine this matter of discrimination. Why do we see things as mutually discrete and different? Isn’t it sufficient that they appear that way? Things are different, at least perceptually. We see, smell, taste, feel, hear, and imagine them as being different and mutually discrete. How could it be otherwise? That alone should justify discrimination—shouldn’t it?

According to the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, this is seeing only one half of the picture—and not the important half—of reality which is transcendent to perception. There is a state of consciousness, referred to as the highest (or ultimate reality) where all differences do not appear. It is not a state based on normal means of perception but is rather experienced intuitively. It is the root consciousness from which all perception arises. This state is not determined logically, accessed philosophically, or described by words or other symbols. It’s discerned directly—by-passing all conditions which restrict and limit reality. In this sense, it could be said that discrimination both exists and it doesn’t exist.

At the level of conditioned, mutually discrete life, which we routinely enjoy, there is no question that discrimination (e.g., differentiation) exists. Objectively things are perceived to be different, and it is impossible to avoid making judgments and expressing preferences about these objective forms. And from the basis of unconditional, the highest reality, it is equally clear that discrimination does not exist. 

At this level, all objective forms simply don’t exist. So, on the one hand, we perceive differences, make preferences, fight over such differences, and are unavoidably trapped by the choices we make—as a monkey reaching into a jar with a narrow neck to latch onto a piece of food with a closed fist. The only way the monkey can become released is to let go of the food, relax the fist, and withdraw its hand. On the other hand, we can see that there is ultimately only unity where discrimination-based choice is pointless. If there is no difference (and we imagine that there is), we live in a dream world, believing that differences are real, making choices based on that imaginary dream, and paying the karmic price.

While this view of reality may seem strange, it is eminently practical. When we see responsive, feed-back violence occurring around us, we need to take a step out of the fray and notice that no one is winning. That should be our clue to which state of consciousness is prevailing. It doesn’t necessarily mean we can step out of the unreality of our realm of perception and into the ultimate realm, but it will alert us to the price we will pay by continuing to fight battles and lose the ultimate war. 

Each side can justify retributive responsiveness. The question is always, who started it, and how do differences fit with our preconceived convictions—who took the first shot? This line of argument can be (and often is) taken all the way back to the beginning of beginningless time. In The Lanka, the Buddha, correctly points out that in the realm of ultimate reality there is no cause and effect which functions within ordinary, objective life. Cause and effect, like all of ordinary life, is an illusion with roots in our mind. One way leads to a never-ending cycle of winning battles, losing wars, suffering, and the other leads to compassion, harmony, and tranquility. The choice is always before us, and we must accept the benefits and consequences of our choices. Karmic results are unavoidable in the realm of one opposed to another. While asleep, we are all monkeys; trapped by our grasping.

Does might make right?

The part of us that looks beyond immediate crisis has one answer and the part of us which takes over moment-by-moment has a different one. There is hypocrisy in this divide which seems to go by without recognition. 

It is somewhat easier to see this split in others than in ourselves. The oil that greases the machinery of our culture—money, says “in God we trust” but sadly a significant portion of that oil is devoted to buying tools of domination and this split shows up everywhere in our culture.

It shows up in Presidential debates when candidates get high marks for aggressive behavior. It shows up amidst audience cat-calls of “send her back” or “lock her up.” It shows up in comments of the pundits when they applaud one side with “taking the fight to the enemy.” It is bizarre for the “United” States to exhibit such behavior and maintain an indefeasible posture of unity. The proof of our unity (or not) doesn’t lie in campaign slogans and sound bites but rather in how we treat one another. It is telling that the candidates say one thing from a distance and another face to face. The disparity between this message split creates and inflames divisiveness amongst people who are already divided into hunkered down bastions of tribal self-righteousness.

When we attack another—whether that other is a candidate, our close associates, or other nations—we invite retaliation and get stroked for our “might makes right” behavior. It is very troubling that we have grown into a nation of divisive aggressors who seem to think that we should wear such behavior as a badge of honor.

We know the justification for this divide. It started when we were children— “He started it. It’s not my fault.” And that justification then becomes, “Let me hit him first before he hits me.” This entire give and take is flawed and is rooted in the mistaken idea that we are all separate, individual selves who, out of perceived necessity band together into tribes and packs of conformed aggression. Yes, we are different. We look different. We think differently and we hold opposing viewpoints, opinions and beliefs. And at a deeper level...the level not seen...we are united as one.

When we go to war because of our differences, without accepting our common humanity, we end up not only destroying others but ourselves as well. A long time ago someone very wise said, “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” We didn’t take that counsel to heart then and seem incapable of doing so now. Shantideva, an 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar, took a different view. He said, “When I act for the sake of others, No amazement or conceit arises. Just like feeding myself, I hope for nothing in return.” 

This view, of course, was offered not in singular acknowledgment of our differences but also in recognition of our sameness. We can’t help but wonder if perhaps our founding fathers of “A More Perfect Union” had Shantideva’s view in mind instead of the rancor we have settled upon.

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.

Connecting the dots.

The talent of connecting relevant dots (not all dots are relevant) is a critical one. In a good many cases, what seems as disconnected and independent is instead the opposite (e.g., connected and interdependent). We can quickly lose the sense of the whole tree when our noses are pressed against the bark. Throughout history, there have been those who could stand back and see the big picture of lots and lots of dots. But to then see the emerging pattern, when the dots are connected, is an even more rare talent.

One of the more profound dot connections was an East Asian Sūtra known as the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. Upon thorough investigation, this sūtra reveals that it was constructed over a long period and is actually a sūtra of other sūtras, a sort of supreme dot connection. What the sūtra says is that the entirety of the cosmos, from top to bottom, is an interconnected web known as “Indra’s net.”

In our time, a branch of mathematics has arisen called “Chaos theory” that showed these interconnections, to the smallest of detail, within the apparent randomness of complex, chaotic systems, contain underlying patterns, feedback loops, repetitions, self-similarities, fractals, self-organizations, and reliance on programming at the initiating point, are sensitive to dependencies of initial conditions. The butterfly effect describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic, nonlinear system can result in substantial differences in a later state, e.g., a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas.

On a less ambitious plane (which some see as less complex but instead more practical) are those who see dots in our world of economics, migration patterns, immigration, climate change, etc. And among this branch are the likes of Todd Miller, journalist, and author of his latest book, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security. What Todd has to say, could not be more timely and essential to the understanding of the interconnected variables driving our modern world. His book may be found by clicking here. It is highly worth the time it will take to read, grasp, and enlighten your understanding.

Tick, tick, tick.

The invisible connected links.

Observation—seeing clearly—should not be confused with making judgments. It is simply seeing what’s present, right now and acting appropriately. What was present in times past is now gone and what may have been an appropriate action then, is no longer. 

Why is it that we cling to yesterday’s decisions and feel compelled to justify, or even apologize, for those past, now-gone conditions? Then was then and it is now today, replete with a brand new set of circumstances—opportunities to make choices based on what is now present. We can release ourselves from both errors (which may not have been errors) and victories (which in hindsight could be seen as errors) by noticing the tick, tick, tick of changing space/time.

But alas we are not noticing that tick, tick, tick except when we pause, look inward, and track the dots that lead us all to where we are today. Disparaging our, perhaps, poor choices, of the past with thoughts about, “If I had it all to do over again” is somewhat delusional and a waste of time, since such a thing is an impossibility. We can’t return to the past, and even if we could who can say we’d take with us the wisdom acquired by making past choices and learning the lessons that can only be learned within constantly changing circumstances.

If you haven’t yet watched the movie “The Butterfly Effect” you may want to come up to speed with this idea of If I had it all to do over again. It is a story about a young man who could do it all over again and every time he made a different choice the result made things worse. The movie was based on chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. The theory was first put forth by American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. 

The documentary about this is available on Prime Video and the movie, based on the theory, is available on Netflix. I suppose you could label this by another name called “The domino theory” which was the political justification for many wars fought to ensure the dominos fell in a chosen direction. Of course, they never did, since eventually one decision led to an unpredictable set of other conditions such as those illustrated at the designated link—The War to end all wars. It’s the same principle with a different label. Furthermore, we have a rather dismal historical record of forecasting the most significant waves of change, as pointed out by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book “The Black Swan.” Our crystal ball of significant future events is without doubt, cloudy.

Many years ago, when I first stepped onto the path of Zen, I read a book about this constantly changing landscape. It was called The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. At the time it seemed a shocking idea, simply because I too had not been noticing the tick, tick, tick. And after reading his book, it wasn’t so shocking. I then began to notice, and the path of Zen became deeper and deeper until it ultimately led me to the state of immanent Self-discovery. 

All that time I thought I knew who I was. The world was telling me. I was making error upon error (or so I thought at the time) and getting the expected feedback. The dominos kept falling and eventually the world summed up their evaluations and I bought their feedback hook, line, and sinker. I had been trapped, without knowing, in a state of clinging to all of those judgments which led me to a point of crisis and that in turn led me an implosion of my sense of self (ego), which in turn led me to the discovery of the indefinable state of my true Self-nature—the source or capacity of perception we know as pure, undefiled consciousness, completely lacking description, but is the same in every sentient being. From that moment on, I knew precisely what (who?) I was, and I also then knew what I was not—the ego formation we all fabricate out of whatever we perceive and bounded within the framework of what can be perceived, and never the one who perceives.

Like everyone else I could not return to my past (nor can I now) and reconstruct anything, but what I could do was construct a future (only for me) based on two fundamental matters: Choices that arose from that core awareness (e.g., who I was and who I was not) plus accepting the constant flow of change. I can assure you that the same is within reach of every living being. It sounds easy in words but is incredibly difficult in the doing. Learning how to not think—How Bodhidharma defined Zen—is most difficult but is the pathway leading from intuition: The state beyond rational thought—the motherload of all wisdom.

Beyond 911—Over the cliff

It has been 15 years since 911, and it’s time to dust off a previous post that was painful to write and perhaps painful to read. I wrote about the side of a veteran’s life that nobody wanted to hear. We much prefer to bathe in the glory of war and avoid the aftermath. But as one who fought and has an aftermath, I thought it was important to paint the whole portrait.

Similarly, some time ago I wrote a book (The Non-Identity Crisis) that has the following on the dedication page:

“This book is dedicated, not to a person, but rather to an idea: the eradication of war and the end of suffering. In particular what I have to say in this book is dedicated to all who have experienced anguish resulting from the tragedy of 911. I write as a fallen warrior with my own wounds inflicted during a previous conflict—The Vietnam War. True for all warriors of any and ever war, the scars never go away, even the ones that lay buried deep in your mind. We learn mostly from our own suffering and if we wish to not keep repeating it, the only ones who can chart a new course are us.”

In this book I write a lot about what war is really like when we scratch away the veneer of glory. We are living in the aftermath of 911, Osama Bin Laden is now dead, and our actions years later reflect this trauma. Bin Laden is now gone but his legacy is not. There is a message in this book that addresses both our responsive actions and moving beyond the trap. I’d like to share with you a perspective from the book that may not been immediately evident:

“When you kill another, sooner or later their surviving loved ones will come after you. War is the ultimate failure of the human family and if we ever hope to live in peace we are the only ones who can create the conditions for that to happen. What we are doing right now around the world is continuing the legacy of war and thereby guaranteeing future conflicts. What I have to say throughout this book is how to end it. Holding onto the desire for vengeance and justification for killing that emanated from 911 virtually insures our collective downfall. The mantra of ‘Never Forget’ is a banner for that downfall and only appropriate for those who never fought. For those of us who have fought, we must forget and forgive or go insane. What Bin Laden started but couldn’t finish on 911—to bring down our culture—we may do to ourselves due to our attachment to revenge at all cost. Did he anticipate our predictable response? It’s impossible to say, but a fundamental rule of warfare is to know your enemy and goad him into a trap of his own making.”

If we are sincere in wishing to honor the sacrifices of our young men and women who so valiantly offer themselves to defend our way of life, the best way of doing that is to stop the insane path we are presently following, bring our warriors home and pay for their healing and restoring their lives.

To see ourselves truly.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns coined the phrase, “Ahh, to see ourselves as others see us...” and this way of seeing is indeed valuable. However, there is a more valuable way: To see ourselves as we truly are beyond the ordinary lens of perception. What is this strange way?

The Lankavatara was allegedly the sutra most revered by Bodhidharma: the father of Zen. Among the myriad sutras, the Lankavatara lays out the essential challenge inherent in the human dilemma. Here we see how the matter of perception leads us into error. The problem is that the world (including our thoughts) is perceived by-way-of discriminate forms, and we remain oblivious to the one doing the perceiving (ourselves). 

We see shapes and forms configured in different ways before us. We hear sounds tinkling or loud. We smell different aromas, and through this manner of distinguishing differences, we form judgments of like and dislike, clinging to the first and resisting the latter.

This process is essential and can’t be avoided, but unless we become aware—deeply aware—of the indiscriminate perceiver (who is beyond all color and form), we become mesmerized and enslaved by the dance of differentiation, all the while creating havoc for ourselves and others. The sutra says the result of this ignorance are minds which “burn with the fires of greed, anger and folly, finding delight in a world of multitudinous forms, their thoughts obsessed with ideas of birth, growth, and destruction, not well understanding what is meant by existence and non-existence, and being impressed by erroneous discriminations and speculations since beginningless time, fall into the habit of grasping this and that and thereby becoming attached to them.”

This unavoidable process leads to clinging to an evanescent world of objects. And as we cling, we oppose the truth of our unknowing and therefore are trapped in karma born of greed, anger and folly. The accumulation of karma then goes on and we become imprisoned in a cocoon of discrimination and are unable to free ourselves from the rounds of birth and death.

The Buddha said that it is like seeing one’s own image in a mirror and taking the image as real, or seeing the moon reflected on the surface of water and taking it to be the actual moon. To see in this way is dualistic whereas to see truly is a matter of Oneness revealed within innermost consciousness. 

The unavoidable conclusion of seeing beyond the biased lens of perception is all of us are the same at the deepest level, none better or worse. It is all too easy to become trapped by the constant flow of tidal forces and forget that each of us is the master of our very own sea.

Complete Release— Number 2

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday this identity issue appeared to be unresolved with us trapped in a logical box. So now let’s shift gears and come at this from a different tack by turning, of all places, to the Bible and look at an insightful passage:

“For our light and momentary troubles (causes and effects at the conditional level) are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” —2 Corinthians 4:17-18

“How does the Bodhisattva-mahasattva meditate on the Void-Void? This Void-Void is where the sravakas (see ending note) and the pratyekabuddhas (see ending note) get lost. O good man! This is ‘is’ and this is ‘not-is’. This is the Void-Void.” Chapter 22—Mahaparinirvana Sutra.

When we are finally done with hope in temporal life; when we see completely that there is nothing to hold on to that doesn’t result in suffering; when we finally get it that attachment is a dead-end, rooted in a deluded sense of separate and independent identity, then we can emancipate ourselves by releasing from attachment to attachment. 

Is relinquishing opinions.

Believers in emptiness

Are incurable.”—Nagarjuna

And this from Buddhist scripture:

An is, in this context, means form as when we refer to something: We say it is a ladder. The is has defined characteristics. The not-is has no defining characteristic, which makes it emptiness or in other words the Void. 

The Void is the Wall—Essence: the unconditional nature of us all. One side of reality against which the ladder, (e.g., the other side) rests. Emptiness and form are the divine partnership, which frames reality. The Void is, as the apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians, unseen. So what does that make the Void-Void? The answer to this question is what makes Zen, Zen and to answer the question we turn to the 14th Patriarch of Buddhism—Nagarjuna.

He really knit this together as well as anyone ever has. His expositions on emptiness are sublime. What he leads us all to see is that if emptiness has any validity then it must measure up to emptiness itself. Empty-Emptiness; the Void-Void. Let’s examine this carefully and see where it goes. First, appreciate Nagarjuna’s interest and focus. He was not interested in meaningless philosophy and speculation. He wanted to rip apart speculation and arrive at the residue of truth. He wasn’t trying to create a new dimension of faith. He was working with the raw material spoken by the Buddha, and his focus was the dimensions of reality, which sat on a three-legged stool. The legs were:

1. Emptiness/essence/The Void (sometimes referred to as  Śūnyatā)—our unconditional Self

2. Form/matter/temporal life (in Sanskrit “Rupa”)—Our apparent self

3. Dependent origination

These three integrated measures of reality define what is known in Buddhism as the Middle Way. Here’s how these three fit together. Form must emerge from somewhere. That somewhere is the ‘is’ of ‘is.’ ‘Is’ equals otherness with defined characteristics, which makes it limited in time, space, and causality. ‘Is’ therefore is not the somewhere, otherwise, it would define itself, like a car with no driver. 

The somewhere must not be limited. It must have no properties yet all properties at the same time, therefore the somewhere is the indefinable, transcendent essence, which, as Paul states, is unseen—the Tathagatagarbha (Buddha-womb). These two—form and emptiness—come into existence simultaneously. One can’t precede the other for the same reason that a thinker can’t precede thinking. 

Creation by definition implies a creator just like a thinker implies thinking. This simultaneous arising is what is known as dependent origination. But that dependent origination as stated earlier seems to occur in the imaginary box, which looks like an unsolvable problem.

So let’s take the next step and see how we can resolve it. What is the pinnacle of surrendering? Surrendering from surrendering. What does that mean? It means the logical ground of faith. Surrendering is an action; a motion and form is the instrument of motion, but not the prime mover of the motion. Something must propel the motion of surrendering. It doesn’t occur by itself just as a car requires a driver. Mind essence is the indefinable, unseen Void-Void which propels motion. 

But this mind essence is not mind as we normally think of, as a product of our limited and independent brain. This is the primal mover of all motion. This mind moves flags, the wind, and us. It is the is of “is”.  When Nagarjuna postulates empty-emptiness, the Void is transformed back into form in a never-ending feedback loop, which can’t be separated.

This inseparable feedback loop of form/emptiness is this very special mind essence (our true nature) not emptiness or form but both. If it were one or the other we would still be non-integrated and dual, regardless of logic. 

The Buddha created a completely new paradigm, which brought speculation about self/SELF (anatman/atman) to an end, thus resolving the identity issue. If only emptiness/essence (atman) this would be like a ghost. If only form/flesh (self) this would be the non-walking dead—“Just like a plant or stone”. 

The combined union of emptiness-form provides all that is needed for the existence of life. It has the driver (essence) and the car (form) and the combination—not one or the other—makes the motion of surrendering possible. Neither alone would suffice. The two become one, but the One is two interdependent aspects of the same thing—the Ladder with a Wall. That being the case, dependent origination remains intact but no longer in a box constrained by mundane logic. This union has a name called mind essence. The technical term is the sambhogakaya—one of three aspects of a Buddha.

Attaching to anything, including attachment, creates misery. It is quite possible to become dogmatically undogmatic and cling to a fixed position of being uniquely undogmatic, but that would still leave us attached, resulting in the sort of dilemma we see today with people getting locked into unswerving ideologies and unable to compromise. 

Letting go of everything creates emancipation thus enabling us to conform to actions demanded by evolving circumstances.  When we see that, then we no longer fix our eyes on what is seen but rather fix our eyes what is unseen. What Paul asked of Christian believers to do as an act of blind faith, The Buddha and Nagarjuna reasoned as a logically discerned premise. 

There is a logical foundation for faith, which arose 500 years before Jesus walked the earth, and it came from Gautama Buddha, later to be refined by Nagarjuna sometime during the 2nd century CE, about a hundred years after the apostle Paul died during the 1st century CE. 

The problem is fairly simple to solve once we let go of the fixed limitations of conceptual, mundane logic, by escaping from this box of rational logic and accessing intuitive, supra-mundane logic. When the Heart Sutra says that emptiness is form and form is emptiness we need to look carefully at these words as an equation: as mirror images. The union can’t be broken.

Complete release means surrendering from faith in this material existence and placing our faith completely in the unseen union of mind essence: the Void-Void. From that point on, wisdom shifts from the mundane to spiritual origins and becomes Prajnaparamita—Perfect Wisdom—we enter the realm of Nirvana: “The ‘Dharmata’ (True Essence) of all Buddhas” and then see reality, as it is without discrimination. That is the ultimate wisdom. Complete release means the total absence of delusions, which thus allows the shining jewel of prajna to burst forth.

“Buddhas say emptiness

The problem with the conventional understanding of Paul’s statement is that it keeps God at bay; as a separate reality—in the bye-and-bye, not accessible in the here and now. What the Buddha brought to this discussion is integration. God/Buddha-Nature is both in the bye-and-bye and in the here and now. 

Buddha-Nature can’t be divided and neither can we since we are fundamentally Buddhas. The curious thing about Paul’s statement is not what he said but how it is usually understood. The conventional wisdom of his day—that God lived in heaven in the sky (where the Pie resides)—was used to interpret what he said. If you read his statement carefully you will not find a separate God.

And contrary to the Christian notion that we are separated from God, The Buddha saw this separation as impossible! We could quibble about the difference between God and mind essence and miss the point, which is that every moment within every sphere of existence, our beingness is the inseparable union of the seen (which dies) and the unseen (which lives forever). The true you and the true me is indiscriminate and exactly the same. It has no definable properties yet infuses all properties. Unless this is true then we are all like immovable stones.

This post concludes this series on surrender but more needs to be said about this matter of essence—the true you and me. Without a solid grasp of essence this entire matter floats about in the air with very little practical understanding and nothing is more practical than grasping our true nature.

Note: A sravakas is a disciple and a pratyekabuddhas is a lone Buddha; said to achieve enlightenment on their own, without the use of teachers or guides, by contemplating the principle of dependent arising.