Study the Way/Self

Mine; Not yours.

“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.”

Dogen’s famous commentary on the self deserves careful consideration. “The Way,” of course, means the way of a Bodhisattva. Dogen says this way concerns the study of the self. Buddhism is essentially the way of taking a hard and thorough look at the most fundamental aspect of reality—the nature of identity, resolving the matter, putting it completely aside, and moving on. He did not say to just move on with the presumption that everything will be okay. Of course, that is a prescription for continued suffering, which is a function of the self. It is the self/ego that suffers and creates suffering.

After more than 40 years of extensive study following my own awakening, I have come to realize the evident truth about enlightenment; the truth as recorded throughout nearly all sutras—It is ever-present, nothing special (after-the-fact, but never before), always-on, and reduces down to a simple understanding of Tathāgata. Fundamentally it means “reality as-it-is,” alternatively understood as suchness. It is easy to write, difficult to experience, yet always possible by being continuously and fully present. Contrast this to being never present—lost in thinking about just about anything—that obstructs being present.

Dogen rightly arranged the order: First, study the self. Second, resolve the matter. Third, forget about it. And forth, be enlightened by all things by not continuing to dwell on this central issue once resolved. This order reflects the order taught by The Buddha. To be attached to anything is to ensure suffering, including being attached to the self or even The Buddha.

It is critically important to firmly establish our real identity as one and the same as The Buddha. We are not a fake and imaginary non-self. We are the Self (e.g., awakened), which is The Buddha. If we don’t resolve this matter, we will forever be guided and dominated by our ego-self and remain self-absorbed, producing ignorance, greed, and anger. It is only when we have finally resolved the phantom nature of the non-self and accepted the unborn/never-die identity of Buddha-Nature that we can genuinely do away with ignorance, greed, and anger. This must be the preliminary phase because otherwise, we continue to see ourselves as separate from and in competition with the rest of life. When we clearly see that we are interdependent and in harmony with life, then we can rest and begin to reflect the ever-present, virtuous qualities inherent of Buddha-Nature.

In that state of unity with all, we can be enlightened by all things because all things are a part of us. It is impossible to be intimate with anything from which we are separated. We can imagine unity in some abstract way, but that abstraction is still separate. Dogen knew, so he said, “cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others.” Body and mind are just formed elements—outward trappings, which keep us locked into the delusion of separateness and cause us to say things like “my” body, “my” mind. From the perspective of Buddha-Nature (our real nature), there is no “my.” There is only “us.”

The ending of Dogen’s commentary is especially instructive. He says, “life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.” What could that possibly mean? There is only one aspect of life with no tracks and lasts forever: Buddha-Nature, which is wholly enlightenment, and where there is wholly enlightenment, there is no enlightenment. Everything-Nothing is the same thing. We can’t see it because of self-created delusions, but it’s there. Our duty is to simply learn to cease not being present. Then only there is no duality. Then only there are no tracks because a track is an otherness. Buddha-Nature is whole. No tracks.

Readiness.

The road MOST traveled.

“The teacher appears when the student is ready.” Everyone has heard that metaphor, but what does it mean? It probably means different things to different people, but perhaps the central meaning concerns alternatives and choices.

It’s human nature to select the choice that entails the least effort and delivers the most bang for the buck. Why pay $100 for something if we can find something that works just as well for $1? But if we pay $100, we expect to get that much worth in return. But what if we don’t get the value we hoped for but instead get far less? And what if we keep spending the same $100 and keep getting shortchanged? After a certain point, we might want to try another tack. Then we’re ready.

The time is ready when we reach the ultimate end of a wrong road to a worse place, that keeps on delivering the ultimate lack of value. It can happen individually or culturally, and these two are not different since cultures are nothing more than grouped individuals. We are collectively and individually approaching a readiness of time. We have tried to attain ultimate value, and it isn’t working. The more we spend, the worse it gets and, it’s time to find out why it’s not working. What is preventing us from, what we all say, is so desperately sought? And what might that goal be? It’s love, happiness, fulfillment, joy, harmony, and peace.

These are the goals we have been seeking (acknowledged or not), and we’ve been traveling the wrong road to get there. The teacher is our natural, divine intelligence; our “true” mind—that doesn’t exist conceptually, yet nevertheless leads to a deeper source of wisdom and compassion that contains all that we’ve been seeking but not finding. The ego is a gatekeeper that denies access to what lies beyond and, consequently, the unknown remains unknown. 

The soul knows because the soul is closer to our central, spiritual core than the ego (which serves as the gatekeeper for “acceptable” dogma). However, without an awareness of a difference between experiencing and fantasizing—The context of our lives, out of which grows everything—we remain like a garden growing only weeds with no flowers. The realm of the soul is the storehouse where we experience what we say we are seeking (e.g., love, happiness, fulfillment, joy, harmony, and peace). It is also the source of adaptive wisdom, so needed in the world today, where we find the answers that help us survive. 

The goal is not “out there” on a path to nowhere. It is “in here” on the path to ourselves. And once we find our source, we realize that the idea we held of “ourselves” was wrong and far too limited in scope and character. When we get beyond that gatekeep, it is like coming home to the place we’ve never left, but previous to that very instant never knew existed.

Making sense of it all.

Which side are we on?

I spent most of my career as a professional communicator in the advertising business and thus employed certain principles to guide advertising practices. 

Central to that business is to know your current and potential customers. And the more precisely you understand that the more successful you are. It is impossible to conduct this awareness without wrestling with the issue of how people understand their identities. For that reason, advertisers spend a lot of time and resources carving up their market in various ways. One of those ways concerns demographics. Another is psychographics.

Demography defines people by surface structures such as age, race, education, income, occupations, geographic clusters, and so forth to zero in on where, when, and through which media to reach their audience. Psychographics goes a step further and says, okay within that demographic framework, what can be determined about lifestyle issues—how people actually conduct their lives. After all of this carving up, it then becomes a matter of designing messages that best appeal to the demographic and psychographic nature of people, and all of that has one thing in mind: Try to persuade you that you need something.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the issue of “group-think,” and I did so within a political context, saying that sadly we seem to gravitate toward this tendency to jump on board bandwagons characterized by what is at heart, herd-mentality. It has more than likely been something we’ve been doing for eons, perhaps all the way back to the cave days when it became clear that two of us together could do what a single person couldn’t by themselves.

Nevertheless, this tendency is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it is true that when birds flock together, there is strength in numbers. On the other hand, no two birds are exactly the same, so inevitably conflict arises within flocks, not to mention beyond the flock boundaries with other communities. As we advance as a human culture, it is becoming clear that something new is occurring that hasn’t been prominent before.  And perhaps this new thing is due to the Internet. 

Before now, it wasn’t possible to know that significant dissenters even existed, and the old assumptions are starting to crumble. I’ll give you an example: Every day of every week, I, and I imagine millions of others, receive solicitations for contributing to one worthy cause or another. If I were independently wealthy, I still couldn’t contribute to them all. Consequently, I have to be selective, as I’m sure it is right for everyone. The ones I send quickest to the circular file make guesses about my views and conduct. I don’t like any label because no label perfectly defines me and I resent being pigeonholed. 

This past week I received a solicitation to make a contribution to several democratic candidates, and the organizing theme of these candidates was that they all professed to align themselves around the pro-choice issue. That one sailed into the trash quickly because I don’t endorse giving people the license to kill their own progeny. Yes, I know this is a hot button and far from clear. I happen to think that whatever law we create, exceptions need to be allowed. For that reason, I neither endorse nor repudiate abortion, knowing full well that we don’t make sensible laws. Instead, once created, the rules become iron-clad, and I think it is a bad policy to lump everyone together under a single inflexible roof.

You might think that I’m drifting here and wonder where this is going. The answer is identity and little allegiance to group dogma. In a certain sense, it doesn’t matter whether abortion, immigration, the economy, or any other conceivable issue is at stake. The point is how we identify ourselves and the assumed limitations of any and all defining characteristics. 

In my book The Non-Identity Crisis, I suggest that our problems today are made significantly more challenging to address and solve because of these “me-against-the-world” boundaries and the assumptions that arise because of them. This is squarely a matter of how we understand ourselves, either as naturally alienated individuals of antagonized differences or as a united human family. The vast majority seem inclined to choose the former, which inevitably leads to violence against non-flock members. Few indeed select the latter.

Most of my writing occurs under the rubric of spiritual matters, and this is further defined as Buddhist or Gnostic Christian, but it isn’t essential to me how you identify me. What is critical, however, is whether or not what I have to say makes sense and how (if at all) it contributes to fostering peace, harmony, and a better world. If I can accomplish that, it’s been a good day. 

Intimacy and Objectification

When we objectify anything, we remove ourselves from it. Often we may say, “I’m just objective” without realizing what we are saying. Subjectivity is more honest. It recognizes the lens of our own being to perceive. We are not objective and will never be. We experience life through our own biases and experiences. When we miss-identify ourselves and adopt the cloak of ego, our bias is self-serving, and the natural result is objectification and alienation.

Objectification is a form of abstraction, such as when an artist represents something through paint, stone, or words. Unless the artist is completely lost, they will be clear about the difference between what they represent and the medium they employ. That difference—always, entails duality. An artist, creating works of art, is an objectification. The work comes from their subjective nature but is expressed as an objective, perceptible form. The thinker is dually creating thoughts. The thinker is an abstraction, and abstractions are not real. Both thoughts and thinkers are objectified condensations about reality, which are cut off from life.

When there is objective separation, true intimacy is not possible. An imaginary self is an impediment to integration. It is an illusionary, one-sided dimension that blocks wholeness and denies intimacy with our real self and, therefore, others. An imaginary self understands itself as independent and can’t see the interdependent connection to others. It is a psychic island cut off from life.

The ego adopts a stance of “what’s in it for me” with expectations of return on investment in an objectified role. Compassion and equanimity are not possible, objectively. There may be the appearance of virtue, but ego-centricity is waiting for that return, and if not provided, disappointment will result. Genuine compassion is intimate and non-discriminatory with repose as its defining characteristic. The only way such a thing can occur is through subjective identification in a non-dual way. When the subjective nature of Self identifies another Self, there is the recognition of unity.

Isolation or Unity

In the past few days, a man murdered three women, injured 10 more, and then turned his gun on himself. He left behind many tracks declaring his intention, one of which was his blog. Amongst his many comments, he said that he felt isolated and rejected. 

Sadly this is not an unusual reflection in today’s world. Rather it is very understandable given how we ordinarily consider ourselves and others. Phenomenally we are all very different and separate. If that is all that we are, everyone can only experience themselves within that tight definition—isolated and estranged. 

That is a fairly accurate understanding of what phenomenal life means: As things appear. When we consider ourselves and others as purely phenomenal, the only possible conclusion is that we and they are mere objects, lacking intimacy and life. In that case, shooting someone is not much different from a video game. In our contemporary world, too often, this one-sided view has become the standard—pure objectivity and nothing else. Buddhism holds a very different view. 

Not only are we (and all life) objects, but we are also subjects and whatever is subjective contains an eternal spirit that is unborn and never dies. The unity of these two sides (phenomena and noumena, or subject and object) is accepted as a fundamental aspect of existence. Given that unity, all of life is sacred and without discrimination. The lowest of life-form contains the same Buddha-Nature as the most enlightened person. This understanding can radically transform anyone’s experience from isolation to unity and from a lack of caring to compassion.