Our upside down world.

If you can, grasp that everything we perceive and process—whether internal or external-results from elusive images projected in our brain. You can then begin to appreciate the incredible miracle represented by the Buddha’s enlightenment. His understanding occurred 2,500 years before tools were developed, which allow us to validate his teachings from a neurological perspective. While the language used that long ago may seem arcane to us today, by transcending these barriers of time and culture, we can understand the true nature of ourselves and the world in which we have always existed.

Buddhism, by any measure, from the normal western perspective, seems strange only because we have been conditioned to see life in a particular way, which, as it turns out, is upside down. What we regard as “real” is not, and what we regard as not even perceptibly present turns out to be real. And because of this error, our understanding causes us to identify with illusions, which are simple mental projections. Not realizing this, we end up clinging to vapor and then suffering as it slides away. What is the solution?

First, as the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment says, we must become aware of what is happening. Without this first step, there is no hope of ever being set free from a never ending dream—a nightmare of suffering that keeps repeating endlessly. When the illusions of our lives begin to break down (which they inevitably do), we are faced with tragedy. We suffer, so we search for relief, which unfortunately may come in further addictions that bring temporary relief but never last. It is like suffering from thirst and drinking salt water, which just makes us thirstier.

If we are fortunate, we discover the Dharma (the truth as revealed by the Buddha) and begin to fathom the source of our dilemma. It may start by taking a class or reading a book. Slowly our eyes become open to what is genuinely real, and our hunger grows. What begins as an intellectual snack holds the potential of becoming a full-blown meal. What fills the belly of one who has savored true awakening won’t do someone else any good. Ideas don’t fill the emptiness in our guts. Only awakening to our true nature can satisfy that craving for substance.

This sutra hits the nail on the head. Of course, the prime motivator is anyone’s own state of mind. As Master Sheng-yen pointed out, “Generally, unless a sleeping person is having a nightmare, he or she will not want to wake up. The dreamer prefers to remain in the dream. In the same way, if your daily life is relatively pleasant, you probably won’t care to practice to realize that your life is illusory. No one likes to be awakened from nice dreams.”

This is a bit like the story of a salesman who came across a man sitting on his front porch smoking a pipe. The salesman noticed a large hole in his house's roof and asked the man why he didn’t fix it. The man responded, “If it ain’t raining, there’s no need, and when it is raining, it’s too late.” The time to awaken is before the rains of suffering arrive.

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.”

The opening hand of faith.

Many years ago, my teacher said that the process of awakening was like a hand that begins with a fist of fear and over time, through persistence and cleansing, opens like a morning blossom emitting fragrance and love…and then it becomes a fist again. This opening and closing continues time and again until one day, your hand remains open, fear no longer reigns, and you stay open, exposed, and vulnerable yet a blessing to the world. Then you are a suffering servant (e.g., Bodhisattva).

Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chödrön puts it this way: “We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together, and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen—room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” 

Our hand opens when we feel safe and closes again when we sense fear approaching. Having neither optimistic nor pessimistic expectations are accepting the reality of life. There is room for it all. 

And one final observation: The cycle of opening and closing happens on a mortal level, yet when we truly awaken, the immortal part of us neither opens nor closes. Ordinarily, while awake during the day, we can open or close our eyes, but the eye of awakening to immortality is always on. Like a mirror, consciousness just is, reflecting whatever comes. It is fear and ignorance that clouds clarity and distorts true understanding.

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.

Transcendence and the Middle Way

Choosing the middle doorway.

“The Middle Way” is a hallmark of Buddhist thought yet the term is often short-changed or converted into a sort of formula for advancing toward enlightenment—A pathway. Over the vast expanse of time since Buddhism became established, this pathway was been adorned with many different embellishments, not all of which are helpful.

Initially, The Middle Way meant “not this, not that; not not this, not not that”—both a negation and an affirmation at the same time: a position (or non-position) between all opposites, but especially between permanence and impermanence. Expressed in equivalent terms: Between immortality and mortality. Rather than an either/or, it was the position of both/and. During the epoch of The Buddha, Indian philosophy was wrestling with these two opposites. One school argued in favor of an absolute, the other school argued in favor of complete nihilism. Upon his enlightenment, The Buddha realized that neither school was right, nor were they wrong—thus The Middle Way.

And while this enlightened conclusion may have philosophically resolved the matter, the real power is to transcend the entire issue, in fact, to transcend all opposition or sameness. In Western thought, something is momentarily one thing or another at any given point in time and space. A “white” object is only a discrete white object and nothing else. A “good” thing is discretely a good thing. One set of beliefs are right and others are wrong. If a person is considered to be alive mortally they can’t be alive immortally; if a Buddhist, not a Christian. We enshrine such exclusive labels. Given the passage of time, space, and circumstances one thing may (or may not) transform from one discrete thing into another. The problem with this way of thinking is that it moves back into the same argument that was resolved by The Buddha more than 2,500 years ago—“not this, not that; not not this, not not that.” Sometimes it seems that we are doomed to keep repeating the same error endlessly.

For The Middle Way to have any usefulness (beyond philosophy) transcendence is required: to simply move beyond all opposites and do away with such views, in fact, to transcend all ideas of who we all think we are. Our greatest of all fears is mortal death. And this fear is based on the idea that mortality and immortality are mutually exclusive. We misunderstand that true life does not die. While we are mortal beings, within our mortal house (which surely dies) resides immortality.
 

To adopt view “A” (while excluding all “non-A” views) gets us stuck, or to use a Buddhist term “attached” which The Buddha taught is the nexus of suffering. Practically speaking, hardly a moment passes when we don’t find ourselves taking up a firm stance on something. We almost regard this way as virtuous. My country right or wrong; love it or leave it. My ideology is right. Yours is wrong. And we demand that our leaders embrace this hardened, bunker mentality. This way of taking up inflexible stances is wreaking our world. How can we be open-minded without being considered wishy-washy or a fence straddler? In the West, it is very difficult. 

To answer that question it is necessary to seriously consider this matter of “transcendence.” The truth is that everything has two-interdependent states vs. discrete, independent states. A “white” object can only be that way because it contains all other colors. Scientists proved that long ago through diffraction. Okay, then you would argue that the opposite of white is black and for sure is not in the light spectrum—it is the absence of light. And “white” means nothing, without the existence of the opposite color.  This “view” would be correct and not correct—not this, not that, not not this, not not that. Why? Because light and not light arise together just as a mother can only be a mother by virtue of having a child, or a child can only be a child by virtue of having a mother: the chicken and egg thing. 

This interdependent acknowledgment has a name in Buddhism. It’s called dependent origination which has been central to evolving Dharma (e.g., truth) teachings. 

There have been many enlightened Zen masters but one of my favorites is Huang Po. Here is what he had to say about this issue. “Once you stop arousing concepts and thinking in terms of existence and non-existence, long and short, other and self, active and passive, and suchlike, you will find that your Mind is intrinsically the Buddha, that the Buddha is intrinsically Mind, and that Mind resembles a void.”—From the Wan Ling Record. Huang Po is very succinct and cuts to the heart of the matter. He is talking here about transcending, just canning all conceptual matters and allowing your mind to rest with the understanding that there are no valid, exclusive positions and when we adopt a position (any) we are trapped like a monkey who reaches into a jar to get a goodie and won’t let go, thus imprisoning himself. We do it all of the time and pay a heavy price when we do.

At the core of each and every one of us, there is a place of peace—a void, without this vs. that. Call it what you will: Buddha, One Mind, Dharmakāya, The Absolute, Immortality, whatever. The label doesn’t matter. When we move away from that middle place we run the risk of creating karma (either good or bad). At the core, there is no karma because this is the unconditional realm (e.g., without conditions). Yet this core space can’t exist without a conditional jar and if we try to grasp it we’ll get just as stuck as the monkey. But maybe Huang Po would say just forget about jars and what’s inside. Just let it all go.

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.

Uncertainty and instability.

The winds of change.

At the current time, conditional uncertainty and instability are running rampant throughout the world, and this is causing big problems for business maintenance and expansion. Few companies know which end is up—where to locate their facilities; to close a factory (or not) to quarantine workers due to rampantly spreading viruses (never seen before); how many employees to hire (at what price) or fire; when, if ever, trade wars will end and bring stability back to a manageable level; to invest (or not) in productivity measures—which reduces their short-term P/E ratio if they do invest, and thus reduces demand by investors to purchase their public offerings. 

All of that has no geographic restrictions since the entire world is going through the same turbulent conditions at the same time, increasing the odds of a global recession (or worse yet, a sustained depression). Not only is “no man an island,” but “no company is an island.”  While we may wish to Make America Great Again, we might as well wish for Santa Claus, so long as we believe such a thing is possible, at the expense of other nations. The notion of making a nation great (at the expense of other nations) has about as much chance of success as making yourself great at the expense of your partner. Being self-centered, whether with a partner or other nations, is doomed from the outset.

There has never been a time like this in history where trade is more interconnected than now. And this interconnection has become common-coin with people around the world, due to the Internet. Conditional interdependence is now perfectly obvious (to those who care to see the handwriting on the wall—some don’t—which is amazingly puzzling). We are creatures of habit, holding onto “the way things used to be” and paying mightily for our ignorance. Now we are fighting for survival against a coronavirus, never encountered before, and discovering the conditional differences between those who have chosen to throw caution to the wind and those who are willing to do the necessary (but undoubtedly not the convenient) to minimize the damage. For reasons not universally obvious, there are those who choose to attempt to bulwark the ever-changing tides of life and prefer to see life through the lens of “never change” instead of “ever change.”

Many years ago, when I first began my Zen practice and inquiry, my entree primer was a book written by Alan Watts—The Wisdom of Insecurity (catchy title) that did indeed captured my attention, and I thought, how is insecurity “wise?”. After having read that book I began to see how wise insecurity actually is since Watts spelled out what was, and is, perfectly obvious (every conditional thing is changing all of the time, whether we notice it or not). The wisdom is to not hold onto stuff that changes because it creates suffering, in two different ways: Either because we hold onto what we like and love (assuming it will remain static, but it doesn’t) or we resist what we don’t like and love, but it comes upon our shores anyway. Now we have invented a slogan that captures the essential idea: “What goes around, comes around.” And some people refer to this pattern as karma—an essential aspect of understanding the dharma of the Buddha.

However, as said previously: We are creatures of habit and learn slowly, most vividly through suffering. Nobody enjoys suffering yet nobody can avoid it. The very first truth of the Four Noble Truths is “life is dukkha”—translated into English as suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness, etc.. When first I read this truth, I had not yet understood (or even been exposed to) the difference between conditional life and unconditional life. Consequently, I digested this first truth as an inescapable death sentence, which of course it is so long as we see life as purely conditional—everything is changing and dukkha is unavoidable. What a bitter pill to swallow! As the saying whimsically goes, “Nobody gets out of here alive.” 

But then an amazing and unexpected thing occurred: I experienced the unconditional realm, didn’t grasp the profound significance and subsequently spent the next 30+ years attempting to understand the ineffable mystery. I could not pretend the experience never happened, try as I may, but instead was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery (Note: There is no bottom; no top; no East nor West; no anything in the realm of unconditionality). Yet how does anyone pretend an experience, that never ends, did not happen? I suppose Galileo found himself in the same dilemma when he observed that the earth was not the center of the universe, at a time when The Church maintained it was. It is impossible, and when it happens, you have a simple yet profoundly tricky decision to make: To either find the truth and share it (thus ensuring slings and arrows) or keep quiet and stay in comfort.

The truth I discovered to explain the experience is the other truth, beyond the first, that Nagarjuna expressed roughly 400-500 years following the death of The Buddha. What Nagarjuna said filled in the blank of my understanding. He said:

“The teaching by the Buddhas of the dharma has recourse to two truths: The world-ensconced truth and the truth which is the highest sense. Those who do not know the distribution of the two kinds of truth, do not know the profound ‘point’ in the teaching of the Buddha. The highest sense of the truth is not taught apart from practical behavior, and without having understood the highest sense one cannot understand nirvana.”

This came to be known as The Two Truth Doctrine and can be simply stated like this: The pathway to the highest (unconditional) truth must go forward along the path of conditional truth, the latter of which is provisional (e.g., temporary and changes). And these two are interdependent, neither of which can exist without the other. This relationship is known in Buddhist vernacular as “dependent origination,” and when properly understood informs three important matters that help us all to understand every dimension of the world in which we live. The three matters are (1) absolutely nothing has independent existence (e.g, self-contained, separate or existing as an island), (2) everything is inexorably linked together, and (3) The poles of these two truths are utterly opposite in nature—One side is conditional, always changing, and full to overflowing with suffering, leads to saṃsāra and the other pole is unconditional, never changes and is Nirvana itself (śūnyatā—emptiness/utter bliss).

Uncertainty and instability are the never-ending dimensions of the contingent world in which we live, perhaps best illustrated by the consequences of the world’s largest bridge collapsing (e.g., The Three Gorges Dam), leaving in the deluge the devastation of 400 million lives. Such unplanned, collateral damage will continue to disrupt planning for the future, be that from an industrial perspective or any other conditional perspective. 

We have codified this dilemma with sayings such as, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” On one level, we all know this is true. But on a higher level, the opposite is true, and that latter truth remains unknown. Too bad, because this other truth is where solace from the winds of change resides. There is no solace within a conditional and crumbling world. It is there that suffering prevails. And the only way out of misery is to awaken to both truths.

The bird in your hand is the true doctor.

The true doctor.

It is our nature to esteem credentials, accolades, and titles. More times than not you’ll rely on the opinion of a doctor over that of an uneducated man, because the assumption is that a man of letters has earned his stripes and is better educated (e.g., he knows more). 

Mark Twain once said: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”  There’s a lot of subtle wisdom inherent in that statement. Once I had a friend who was studying for her Ph.D., and she asked me, “What do you call a person in the doctorate program who graduates last in the class?” I thought about what that might be and then she told me the answer: Doctor.

Unfortunately, our system of education is lacking. The emphasis is on rational analysis and communications (e.g., reading, writing, number-crunching, critical thinking, and rationality). All of that is fine, but it doesn’t train our trans-rational capacities: the wellspring of all thought and non-thought. Consequently, we have become a very rational, stressed out, fear oriented violent species. We can, and do, justify the most egregious behavior possible and then feel righteous about our words and actions, never realizing we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Has that disparity ever crossed your mind? It is a puzzle, but shouldn’t be. The problem is simple (yet profound). The problem is, as expressed in the contemporary vernacular: We are not cooking on all cylinders. Translation⎯We’re out of balance and living in a dream world. We are rational, but lacking wisdom. Being educated does not necessarily make us wise, and without wisdom, rational thought, only, leads us all astray and into the conflict between the opposite quagmires of right vs. wrong.

One of the foremost examples of a wise yet uneducated man was the sixth patriarch of Chan (Chinese Zen). Huineng was born into the Lu family in 638 C.E. in Xinzhou (present-day Xinxing County) in Guangdong province, and since his father died when he was young, his family was poor. As a consequence, Huineng had no opportunity to learn to read or write and is said to have remained illiterate his entire life. Nevertheless, Huineng is recognized as one of the wisest Rinzai Zen masters of all time.

That’s the first point. The second is misleading labels. If The Buddha were born into today’s world, he would undoubtedly be called “doctor” (appropriately so). He was, and remains, the most profound doctor of the mind of any time or place. The sort of doctor he would most closely approximate today would be “psychiatrist.” However, modern psychiatrists function within a presumed sphere of science, meaning measurable matter, despite the truth that the true mind can’t be found, much less be measured.

Some years ago, I read a book by neuropsychologist/philosopher Paul Broks. The book was titled, Into the Silent Land. In probing the layers of human physiology and psychology, Broks leads us through a haunting journey. It is hard not to be stunned by reading his dissecting view of what it means to be human. We take so many things for granted. That, which is inanimate “meat,” animates with consciousness, cognition, imagination, feelings, and every other aspect of our condition, and seems to float by as a given. This fundamental mystery is so ingrained into our being that it goes unnoticed, but not by Broks.

He asks alarming and provocative questions such as “Am I out there, or in here?” when he portrays an imaginary man with a transparent skull, watching in a mirror his own brain functioning. He notices, for us all, that the world exists inside the tissue residing between our ears. And when the tissue is carefully examined, no world, no mind, no ego, no self, no soul, no perceptual capacities, nor consciousness—nothing but inanimate meat is found. Unable to locate, what we all take for granted, he suggests that we are neither “in here” nor “out there;” maybe somewhere in the space between the in and the out, and maybe nowhere at all.

Indeed, as so many mystics and seers have noted: The true mind can’t be found, and none of us can study what is beyond measuring and defining. Nevertheless, it is the true mind (which can’t be found) that is the foundation upon which everything is based⎯the source of wisdom, harmony, and the lack of stress. Speaking from intimate personal experience, I can state without equivocation that once you experience your true Self-nature your world will turn over.  And why would that be? Because stress is the result of craving what you have already. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to obtain what lies ever within your hand. So long as we believe we don’t have what we need, we will forever remain anxious, frustrated, disappointed, ill, and full of stress. And that makes us all sick, not to mention very, very tired.

Transitions

Which way to go?

“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”—Alexander Graham Bell.

In a lifetime we go thru many transitions, beginning with dependency as a child, progressing into independency, and then returning to dependency again in old age. We thus move from need thru want and back to need again. Moving through these transitions can feel disorienting and filled with crises. I am now in the autumn of my mortal life, and like all mortal beings was born and will die one day. However, during my life-span I’ve picked up some bits of wisdom that allow me to not fear death and to welcome crisis.

The first bit concerns the Chinese language which is composed of two parts. One part deals with surface stuff and the other part is concerned with meaning. A word in English, such as crisis, means something simple like “danger” but in Chinese it means both danger and opportunity, at the same time: One door closing and another opening.

It’s human nature, as we transition from one relationship foundation to another, to experience crisis, interpret it as danger and react in ways that destroys what was, in order to enter into a new foundation, sort of like needing to clean out a closet before hanging up new clothing. It is neither good nor bad but we can see it as only loss unless we are careful and understand what is happening.

Another bit of wisdom I collected during my Zen days, concerns the process of moving through these doors. It feels threatening to leave one known-thing behind (even if it doesn’t serve us) and leap into the unknown. And then we go through a cycle, that begins with understanding our deepest human nature and grasping a principle not well known in the Western world. That principle is called “Dependent Origination.”

It is a foundational principle of everything and says simply that nothing exists independently. Independence Day is a delusion: Something our leaders desperately need to keep in mind as they make international trade deals. Responsive feedbacks can be a killer! When one thing comes into existence, the opposite comes into existence at the same time and place. There are two sides to everything. Nothing lacks perceptible qualities and thus can’t be seen. Why? Because anything that is unconditional, like nothingness (e.g., lacking conditions) has no discriminate properties. Only conditional things have discriminate properties. Our outer, mortal nature is perceptible, but our inner immortal nature is not. 

Immortally we are whole, complete, and perfect already, and is the unseen part of you and me. Immortality is our spiritual core and it is the everything/nothing part of you and me. And furthermore, mortality and immortality are irrevocably joined together. The union can’t be broken just like an up/down union can’t be broken. If we tried to do away with one side, the other side would cease to exist, at least conditionally.

The father of Zen, Bodhidharma, cast this relationship between the seen and the unseen in his Wake Up Sermon as follows:

“What mortals see are delusions. True vision is detached from seeing. The mind and the world are opposites, and vision arises where they meet. When your mind doesn’t stir inside, the world doesn’t arise outside. When the world and the mind are both transparent, this is true vision. And such understanding is true understanding.”

The conditional part of anything is divided between polar opposites and subject to cause and effect (e.g., karma). The unconditional part is unified and not subject to anything. Conditions change. Immortality (e.g., no conditions) doesn’t change.

Why do we suffer, and find it hard to know what is true? The Buddha and ancient yogis boiled it down to what was known as “kleshas”⎯Sanskrit, meaning causes of affliction. And there were five inter-related kleshas, the first of which was ignorance of our true reality, believing that the eternal is temporary, the pure is impure, and pleasure is sure to be painful. This false representation of reality was understood as the root klesha that produced the other four. When our true reality is experienced, we are set free from mental bondage we don’t even know exists. And when our understanding is distorted, the other four kleshas follow, and they are:

“I-am-ness”⎯The identification of ourselves with our ego. We create a self-image of ourselves that we believe is us, but it is not us. And this misidentification results in three mental poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance.
“Attachment”⎯The attraction for things that brings satisfaction to our false sense of ego-self. Our desire for pleasurable experiences creates mindless actions and blind-sighted vision. To a narcissist, this seems perfectly normal. When we can’t obtain what we desire, we suffer. When we do obtain what we desire, our feelings of pleasure soon fade and we begin our search for pleasure again.
“Repulsion”⎯The opposite of attachment; aversion towards things that produce unpleasant experiences. If we can’t avoid the things we dislike, we suffer. Even thinking about unpleasant experiences produces suffering, which lies at the root of PTSD. I recently went through this on the 4th of July when all of the painful memories of my war experiences came rushing back, full force.
“Will to live”⎯The deepest and most universal klesha, remaining with us until our natural, mortal deaths. We know that one day we will indeed die, yet our fear of death is deeply buried in our unconsciousness.

There is no remedy to this cycle of suffering without first dealing with the number one klesha—that of understanding our true, unified reality. When, and if we do, then the other four become unraveled and fall apart.

What I’m trying to say is this: The real part of you is the same real part of me; there is no difference, and it is that part that goes through all transitions, even the one of mortal death. It is our spiritual being, living within our mortal shell. Reality can’t be anything less than whole, complete and perfect—which by the way does not mean without mortal flaw, at least not in the original language. Perfection means “arrived, or the end result” and when anyone arrives at this understanding of our true, unchanging nature, we discover we have never left and there is nowhere to go without being there already.

Closing one door, in transitioning, is not to be feared. It is to be welcomed because without closing that door, we won’t go through the one that is always open to us. I know it is hard to let go of what was (the past) and getting old (which really sucks, mortally) requires that we adapt and change away from want and accept, without complaint, need. I am now fully in my mortal autumn and am very clear about mortal needing.

I keep a poem by Rumi pinned to my refrigerator door to remind me of how to go through the mortal crisis. It is called The Guest house.

“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”

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.

The critical nature of genuine self awakening.

When contemplating the myriad problems of today’s world you might come up with a list such as the following:

• The COVID-19 pandemic

• The Middle East debacle

• Unchecked global climate change (warming)

• A growing gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else

• Spreading violence

• Hatred and intolerance

• Political gridlock

• Toxic pollution of the environment

• Loss of genuine liberties

• (add your own)

While all of these are problems of enormous concern, there is a core root that underlies and drives them all: a misidentification of who we are individually and collectively. So long as our answer to identity boils down to a vacillating self-image (ego) the natural result is fear, greed, possessiveness, selfishness, isolation, irresponsibility, despair, and a victim mentality that leaves us all heading for a cave of seeming security.

Recently Avram Noam Chomsky observed that “As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism, or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.” While a grim statement that shocks us into states of denial and disbelief, his observations are true.

The question is, what must we all do in order to escape from this inevitable outcome? The answer is not the ostrich method of avoidance, denial, and ignorance. On the contrary what we must all do is transform our self-understanding, from an isolated individual to a connected member of the human race, which was (and remains) the solution to suffering offered by The Buddha more than 2,500 years ago. The solution does not change because the nature of being human does not change. 

At the central core of all of us is an indefinable state of unconditional consciousness that is the same for everyone. The problem is that while this state is the source of all aspects of awareness, itself is not detectable and we are all prone to consider real only things with conditions that can be detected. This is a case of the eye not being aware of the eye. However, in this case, it is the inner eye (URNA) instead of the detectable eye, and as the father of Zen wrote, it is in this state of mind that all discrimination ceases to exist. Out of this indiscriminate state arises sentient discrimination that leads us to the mistaken notion that each of is a dependent ego at odds with every other human, vacillating and contingent on an uncertain world and that “ego idea” then produces the undesirable qualities listed above.

In the recent past, a form of meditation (MBSR) has become prominent in helping many to cease attachment to waves of thinking, many of which are destructive to self and others. While very helpful, it only one of two dimensions outlined by The Buddha in his Eight Fold Path. MBSR rests upon one of these two: right mindfulness (Sanskrit: samyak-smṛti/sammā-sati) and is the essential path to a genuine awakening of our true, indiscriminate nature (who we truly are). The other dimension of mind (right concentration (Sanskrit: samyak-samādhi/sammā-samādhi) is not widely known, but by any other name is Zen/Dhyāna, with a history going back into an unrecorded time, long before The Buddha. 

The two disciplines were intended to be practiced as a combined pair but in today’s world, they have been split apart. MBSR has become quite useful in stilling the mind and helping practitioners to stay present instead of lost in speculation. However, the issue of identity remains an esoteric matter leaving those who practice MBSR only, still holding fast to a perceptible and insecure self-understanding. Importantly it is Zen that produces the desired result of a sense of SELF that is unconditional, whole, perfect, and unshaken. This quality alone delivers the awareness that we are all unified, none better; none diminished in any way. 

As awful as the laundry list of contemporary problems may be, those and unknown others will flourish unless we can experience this state of indiscriminate, undiscovered unity, inherent in us all.