Seeing clearly.

Today is Sunday, the day in the week when Christians around the world go to church, hoping to hear a sermon of inspiration and goodwill. Therefore, I am offering this post as a sermon that will accomplish those two things: Inspiration and goodwill.

To begin, I would like to address sight and vision. Macular degeneration is a condition that results in a loss of sight in the center of your eye due to damage to the retina. Some sight remains peripherally but is mostly lost looking straight on. There is no known cure for macular degeneration, but there is for degenerative vision.

There are parallels to this physical condition that we know of as such things as bias, preconceived notions, fixed opinions, denial, and unfounded belief systems, all of which emerge from a self-understanding centered on the ego. All of these conditions serve the function of filters blinding us to unfettered clarity; true vision—seeing things as they are, without distortion. These impediments lock us into inflexible ideologies, opposed to, and at odds with, other similarly embedded ideologies. The impediments are clouded windows through which we see and understand the world and ourselves. It’s like being in a cave with two openings: One looking outward and the other looking inward, both of which are clouded and contaminated, obscuring clear vision. One gives us ideas concerning ourselves and the other, ideas concerning the world, and both are shrouded.

The undeniable correction is to remove the impediments and see without filters of distortion (call it spiritual surgery). Within Christian mysticism, the term that captures the principle of this unfettered clarity is “thusness,” which means things as they are. This “thus” means an unveiling of what is present, and thereby also an elementary confirmation, an original principle of truth prior to conceptual differentiation.  

Meister Eckhart, (the 13th-century German Theologian and mystic), used this expression to signify unattached oneness or unity. Such a view of unification, when intuitively experienced, removes the impediments and allows clear seeing.

One of the most misunderstood passages in the Bible is John 15:13, which looks like this in Koine Greek (the ancient form of Greek used to write The New Testament): “μείζονα ταύτης ἀγάπην οὐδεὶς ἔχει, ἵνα τις τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ θῇ ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων αὐτοῦ,” and is ordinarily translated into English as, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” I’m not employing Greek here to impress you but rather to prove a point. The two highlighted words provide insight into the true meaning of this passage. 

The first highlighted word (ἀγάπην) means universal, unconditional love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. There is only one kind of love that is unconditional (e.g., no strings attached), and that kind of love can come only from God. All other forms of love are conditional and contingent upon changing circumstances.

The second highlighted word (ψυχὴν) is the life of a particular form: Life of the psyche, in other words, ideas, thoughts, ideologies, biases—any and all manifestations of the mind. In Koine Greek, there were three different forms of life that depicted the Greek’s different views of life. This form of life (“ψυχὴν”) is the form used here and is the root word of our present understanding of “psychology” or “psychiatry.” The second form of life was “ζοε” (pronounced Zoe—long A sound at the end—and meant the unified, ultimate source of everything. The third life form was “βιος,” the root word underscoring biology—our physical being.  To grasp the significance (as it relates to seeing clearly) it’s necessary to understand John 15:13 in the original language, not the English translation.

Thus, to come up with the correct translation of John 15:13, it is necessary to understand the words first in Koine Greek. Rendered in that way, the passage should be: “Greater love (e.g., unconditional) has no one than this, that one lay down his ‘mind manifestations’ for his friends.” And why might understanding be the highest act of love? Simple: It’s impacted ideologies (dug-in biases) that separate us all from one another and drives us into camps of close-minded hostility: The same quality, that at present, lies at the core of polar oppositions, dividing people everywhere and leading to the political gridlock that paralyzes our current government (and those around the world) where compromise becomes an impossibility. 

Often times, spirituality and contemporary living appear to be at odds. Nothing could be more incorrect. Seeing clearly is essential to human progress, and at the present time, we seem to be stuck in ruts of ideologies of irreconcilable opposition, believing all the while in the flawed principle of “I’m right, and you’re wrong.”

To Have or To Be?

Is having the same as being?

It has now been sixty-three years since I sat in my high school algebra class. I remember very little of that room, except for one thing that has stayed with me and been a guiding light throughout my life. That one thing was a banner; my teacher hung above the blackboard that read, “He who perseveres attains the expansion.” 

I imagine she meant it as an encouragement to stay the course and learn algebra. I understood it in a much broader sense: as a way of living—to stay the course through adversity and never give up, particularly during times of extreme suffering. At the time, I knew nothing about psychology, religion, or spirituality but those words of encouragement took me into the realm of all three.

My childhood was a mixed bag of both suffering and fun. The fun part was an escape from the suffering, but I never really escaped until decades later, when, due to a crisis of major proportions, I entered the realm of self-understanding. And that led me to psychology, religion, and spirituality. I suffered, and I got to the point of readiness when I was desperate to fathom why.

I first became aware of Zen because rumor had it that the practice was all about understanding suffering and finding release. It did both. But I was unclear how and why, and that took me to psychology—Erich Fromm and Carl Jung, and ultimately The Buddha. 

Fromm’s ideas were very similar to those of The Buddha, and I came to realize something essential: people have a tendency to regard spirituality and psychology as two different matters, and I found that was not true. Both spirituality and psychology are concerned with a single matter: the human mind. 

Both Fromm and The Buddha recognized a dichotomy between “having” and “being,” but it was The Buddha who found the link that joined the two together, explained how and why they were linked, and found a solution that put being as the dominating force. I found myself agreeing with both that having (to excess) became a poisoning of the spirit, and there was a watershed moment in my life when what I thought was my spirit became broken, thus my quest to solve the dilemma.

To The Buddha, both “having” and “being” coexisted, but it was the illusion of a misunderstood sense of being (the ego) that overrode and blocked genuine “beingness.” Before dealing with the ego, there seemed to be no genuine “beingness” since this latter remained hidden beneath a perceptible ego, with its multiple dimensions of insatiable greed, simply because our awareness told us that “having” was “being,”—the more we had, the more real our sense of beingness. For me, the problem was, the more I had, the more corrupted I became, and the connection eventually imploded, leaving me with nothing but being, which was impossible to articulate since beingness was naked and without identification.

My life has been regulated by that basic principle of perseverance. I never understood the compelling force until I began my study of the mystics and enlightened psychologists. It is that force of self-determination that struggles to be free of bondage to things so dominating today. It is perseverance through thick and thin, good times and bad, never wavering from the desire to be free (as it did for me) that compels us all who don’t settle for things but demands for themselves self-actualization.

There’s a Youtube video of an interview with Erich Fromm. I encourage you to take the time and watch it, and as you do appreciate, this interview happened more than sixty years ago, yet the social and cultural conditions he described then are as real now than in 1958 (even more so).

Many people are off-put with mystical matters, thinking, “oh, that’s too unorthodox and not for me,” but everyone wants to understand themselves. Note that Fromm’s comments concerning people’s ideas concerning means becoming ends—A haunting premonition of today’s attitudes today. We have created a vacuous society that relies more and more on things and less and less on what matters—genuine beingness.

“As always, Erich Fromm speaks with wisdom, compassion, learning, and insight into the problems of individuals trapped in a social world that is needlessly cruel and hostile.”—Noam Chomsky.

The power of “me,” and the power of “we.”

Flattening the curve.

A dear friend, from my time as a Mad Man on Madison Avenue, sent me the image to the right. I responded by saying, “The power of me must first decrease before the power of we can increase,” and suggested the curve is upside down to allow “me” to bottom-out.

The point of those posts is the same as nearly every post I’ve written: Within us all lives the ineffable, indefinable true nature that unites us—The We. If we don’t discover it on our own, the virus will do it on its’ own by removing the “Me’s.” (not a word, nor in truth, a reality).

Nature is having a field-day with COVID-19 since the virus is indiscriminate, affecting everyone without preference for political affiliation, ideology, measures of intellectual acumen (or not), intuitive capacity, or any other criteria that define and keep us opposed from one another. It doesn’t read. It doesn’t calculate, speculate, or articulate. It does one thing only, supremely well—finds and infects a willing host. It is a traveling guest seeking an immovable host and reminds me of several posts I’ve written previously: “Guests and Hosts,” “Perpetual host; Holy ghost,” and  “Perpetual Motion.”

Irrational exuberance and the tradition of silence.

“Dogma” is the thorn in our collective side. It is always heated,

exuberant, and close-minded. The message of dogma is one of self-righteousness and is based on obdurate and unyielding ideologies. My way or the highway is becoming a really big problem, around the world today. The “unmasked” champions are convinced that the COVID-19 virus will somehow know they are the good guys and steer clear to attack just their opposers—the bad guys. 

Opposing sides are so dug in it seems impossible to win hearts and minds, even among those who cling to hair-brain ideologies (e.g., think QAnon, for example). Rationality matters little to dogmatic holders. All dogma is based on conceptual thinking—impacted points of view arising from a perceived beautiful, rational perspective (at least in the eye of the ideologist). A contrary ideologist sees this perceived beauty as sheer ugliness. So long as dogma reigns, no reconciliation is possible and both opposing forces become irrationally exuberant.

In sharing the dharma, some have said, “You’re closed-minded to my perspectives but are asking me to join you in your close-mindedness.” There is a difference between Zen and other perspectives. The tradition of Zen is a silent tradition and is fundamentally rooted in a transcendent position, which reaches “across time and space,” not favoring one position or the other. From that platform, you might say that Zen is being closed-minded to being close-minded.

The most revered figure following the Buddha was Nagarjuna who is best known for his doctrine of two truths. The essence of his teaching is that we have no choice except to employ conventional means, which are admittedly delusional, to ultimately destroy delusion. By using words (conventional abstractions: conditioned phenomena) the goal is to go beyond words to find ultimate truth. 

The famous Diamond Sutra, held in high regard by Zen advocates, teaches this point, saying:

“All conditioned phenomena
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, or shadows;
Like drops of dew or flashes of lightning;
Thusly should they be contemplated.”

The identity we value (self-image, the imagined “I”) lives within the illusion of what we ordinarily regard as mind―the manifestations, which emerge from our true mind. According to Chán Master Sheng Yen, (Complete Enlightenment—Zen Comments on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment)

“… 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.”

Rationality came out of the European Age of Enlightenment as a solution to religious dogma, but it has become a different form of dogma. I am not suggesting that we return to religious dogma. Dogma of any kind is what happens when we close our minds to suchness—to things as they are. Rather than swing from one dogma to another, or one set of illusions to another, what we need to do is dump all dogma and illusions and rid ourselves of bias, and delusion. That is the thrust of Zen. It is about seeing clearly; seeing things as they are rather than how we imagine they ought to be. Zen is about balance, integration, and harmony, and is opposed to imbalance, disintegration, and chaos. 

Zen Master Huang Po spoke eloquently about the difference between conceptual ideologies and ultimate truth. He said, “If he (an ordinary man) should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestations, he would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditional being. This then is the fundamental principle.” (The Zen Teachings of Huang Po—On The transmission of Mind). 

Yes, Zen is dogmatic, but the target of dogma is dogma.

Dreams and delusions.

Chuang Tzu's Dream of reality.

The expression, “You are living in a dream world” is understood to mean you are out of touch with reality. I know, as a result of conversations with my friends, that during this pandemic, dreams are becoming more frequent and seemingly real. I, too, have experienced the same thing. This could be the result of being forced into isolation and the resulting anxiety we are all experiencing. What dwells in our subconscious is coming out of the closet, perhaps as the result of limited input.

The great Taoist master Chuang Tzu once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering here and there. In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person. He was only a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke and found himself laying there, a person once again. But then he thought to himself, “Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?”

Many people don’t know what the term “Buddha” means. It means “awake,” and within the context of  The Buddha, it meant “awakened one, or enlightened one,” which is not limited to The Buddha, Buddhists, or any other restrictively defined persons. The path The Buddha traveled toward awakening was intimately linked to the practice of Zen—the pathway that encompasses long periods of draining the swamp of the delusions living in our subconscious. Hardly anyone is aware of such delusions for a simple reason: They reside in consciousness at the unconscious level which naturally comes out at night, sometimes in very strange ways that seem very real, like being a butterfly. Only when we come out of a sleep state are we able to realize what we experienced were dreams. And sometimes even then we are not quite sure if they were real or not.

Modern-day psychologist and psychiatrists, for the most part, agree that whatever is rooted in our subconsciousness can, and often does, disrupt our waking lives since we have been programmed by prior experiences and learning (some of which produce biases, preconceived beliefs, and dogma) which then become dominating forces that filter our sense of “what’s real.” All of us are affected by what we can perceive and nobody (ordinarily) can perceive the source of perception that bypasses these powerful, embedded delusions that shape our lives.

Zen provides that avenue, the means, to plunge into the depths of consciousness, through and down to that source. And when you arrive at the source you “wake up” to suchness—things as they are without the delusions that control our lives, most importantly who we are and who we are not (an ego). Only then do we experience, and realize, that pure consciousness is identical in every sentient being. That is the place of ultimate union with everything—a place of unconditional connectivity, liberated from the controlling force of delusions. It doesn’t mean you have necessarily completely drained the swamp. Some obstacles are too deeply rooted and can come out to “play” in destructive ways.

The father of Zen (Bodhidharma) said: “The mind is the root from which all things grow. If you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like a tree. All of its fruit and flowers, its branches and leaves, depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies. Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort. Those who don’t understand the mind practice in vain. Everything good and bad comes from your own mind. To find something beyond the mind is impossible.”

Understanding that prescription is one thing, experiencing it is another. The prior is an intellectual fabrication—a road map, while the latter is real, no speculation required. The experience of waking up is the ultimate form of clarity, serenity, and hope. Without that, we are all in a prison of the mind and have no clue.

Reality and perfection.

I am a subscriber to an email newsletter from Windmill, the header of which says: “You do not need to be ashamed of being imperfect. We were all made that way. You do not have to be ashamed that it’s so hard to work with your imperfections: the very tools you have for doing this are imperfect. We are all truly doing a difficult thing in being human.” 

I enjoy Windmill and think it is helpful in many ways. However, I want to address an essential point in this post within their header: “You do not need to be ashamed of being imperfect.” Due to some fortunate education, which others may not have been afforded, I learned to read Koine Greek—the language used to write the New Testament of the Bible and discovered much of value, not the least of which is how perfection was understood and defined way back then and has continued to find it’s way into modern culture.

The word “perfection,” properly defined in Koine Greek is not some abstract notion of being without flaw. The word (and it’s definition) is enlightening. The word for perfection is teleos and means complete or finished. Aristotle apparently said, “‘Nature does nothing in vain.’ So far, there’s no teleology to explain why you haven’t left the couch for several hours.”

Unfortunately, we still cling to the incorrect idea of being without flaw. I do agree it is impossible to be flawless living as a mortal. However, that is a side issue to what I want to convey in this post, which is reality. Until we get that issue right it doesn’t matter how we understanding anything, perfection included. 

So what is real? Those locked into the physics only, perspective, define reality as tangible, measurable phenomena (in other words objects known through the senses rather than through thought or intuition) or alternatively, a temporal or spatiotemporal (e.g., belonging to space-time) object of sensory experience as distinguished from noumenon. 

From this understanding, we can glean two essential points: There are measurable phenomena and noumenon (a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes). Noumenon goes by various names, among them Suchness and/or Thusness. Both terms arise from mystics, such as The Buddha or Meister Eckhart, as well as anyone who has plumbed the depths of consciousness to their ineffable core to find the true nature of reality—the basis, or foundation of all things (phenomena).

To repeat myself, what’s real? The realm of phenomena is physics based, and the realm of noumena is metaphysics based. Therefore there is a world, subject to perception (which we naturally assume as all there is). Does that make one right and the other wrong? Not at all. We humans are a mixed bag of both a physical, tangible, perceptible body (our house) and a metaphysical, intangible, unseen noumenal soul.  

Reality is thus like a coin with two sides (heads and tails) and perfection (completion/perfection) entails moving on a pathway leading to an awakening of that which is undetectable, yet the basis of all things. And when, at last, we awaken, it changes everything and we see with new eyes the two-fold nature of ourselves and others, one part of which is complete and the other part is a work in process— birth, change, growth and ultimately death of the “house” with the soul (which never dies) released to move on along the ultimate pathway to indwell another house.

“When you do things from the soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” and, “My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”—Rumi