You

Thinkers think thoughts.

Thoughts produce thinkers.

Thoughts are about things.

Things are not thoughts.

Thoughts are not things.

Both thoughts and thinkers are unreal.

Things are not unreal.

Abstractions are thoughts about what’s real.

You are not an abstraction.

You are a real thing.

Thoughts about you are not real.

What is real is not a thought.

You are real and not a thought.

When you think, abstractions appear.

When you stop thinking, you appear.

Think about this and you’ll be lost in thought.

Don’t think about this and you’re ready, 

for the next thought.

One size fits all.

Fat issue into skinny package

High profile people have a way of finding their opinions published in the news media, and this morning is a good example. Brad Pitt’s mom apparently felt inclined to express her perspective on the presidential competition with the following:  

“Any Christian should spend much time in prayer before refusing to vote for a family man with high morals, business experience, who is against abortion, and shares Christian convictions concerning homosexuality just because he is a Mormon.”

So let me grasp this combo: Christian=family man=high morals=business experience=anti abortion=homophobia. According to Mama Pitt (Brad’s mom), that pretty much sums it up, thus “Vote for Mr. Romney.” I don’t know how Brad feels about his mom’s perspective, but if she were my mom, I think I’d want to hide her under the bed.

First of all, the implication here is that anyone labeling themselves Christian should be held in high esteem. There are ample reasons to question that premise. By way of example, consider the following, from another Christian:

“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” And “Each one of us today may regret the fact that the advent of Christianity was the first occasion on which spiritual terror was introduced into the much freer ancient world.” 

Lest we forget, that was a quote from Mein Kampf by author Adolph Hitler. And granted his xenophobia in this quote concerned those ‘evil’ Jews, but he wasn’t fond of homosexuals either, never mind that scholars today think he probably was one. 

Between 1933–1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and somewhere between 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in extermination camps due to the orchestration of this fine Christian. So much for high Christian morals and homosexuals. But how about this other: “anti-abortion” wedded to Christians? Is the implication here that these two equate? Can a Christian, or any person of conscience, be against abortion (as an unswerving standard)? The problem with the law either for or against abortion is the expectation of justice. There are occasions when it is just to allow abortion and occurrences when it is just to not allow it. The law rarely acknowledges such wise discernment, and we end up fostering “anti-justice” in our desire to create a one-size-fits-all world.

I am not a high profile person, so my opinions don’t find their way into the published news media. But Dharma Space is my forum, and I can say what I want to my small audience, which might be a wee bit more intelligent than the average bear. What I wish is that all of us would stop such insane lumping together of complex issues and use the brains God gave us all. But perhaps that is expecting too much. 

The Matrix—Illusory Mind

Image via Wikipedia

In his commentary on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, Ch’an Master Sheng-yen said what might seem like a startling thing. He said, “The self (imagined self/ego) creates vexation, and the vexation, in turn, reinforces the sense of self...When there is no vexation, and therefore no self, the mind of discrimination is replaced by the mind of wisdom.”

What’s going on here is a psychic feedback loop. It’s the chicken/egg thing. Vexations and self arise together. Not one and then the next. Both arise together, instantly. Thinkers think thoughts. In this case, the “thinker” is the imagined self who is thinking the thought of a self, which then thinks more thoughts. Feedback loop—one illusion creating another illusion, which creates the next, like one mirror reflecting another. There is no substantial and real “self” inside this holographic illusion. It is a mirage or as stated in the Diamond Sutra: 

“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world: like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”

All of those notions about our identity obscure any sense of our substantial real self; the union and the integrated aspect of our existence. The Ladder-Wall is the Union. It is not a Ladder or a Wall. It’s a Ladder-Wall: one inseparable thing. Form and Emptiness. Essence and non-essence. 

For thousands of years, people have been attempting and failing to rid themselves of the flesh believing that the flesh was opposed to spirit. Even today certain religious sects engage in practices of flagellation. And within certain schools of Zen, there are advocates, who press to rid themselves of all thoughts, which is a psychic version of flagellation. I’ll be saying more about this thrust in a later blog but for now, I’ll just make a quick comment: nonsense! Essence is indivisible from both flesh and our minds.

As long as we are imprisoned within this holographic feedback loop we are unaware of what is real. We are like Keanu Reeves in the classic 1999 science fiction movie “The Matrix.” The film describes a future in which the world we know is actually the Matrix, a simulated reality created by sentient machines. Only our Matrix is self-created and it has been here forever. We are the sentient machines creating our own simulated reality. When we say to “Think outside the box,” the “box” is illusory mind: the Matrix; the realm of the self creating the self.

Like Keanu Reeves, we need to be de-programmed in order to break the grip of simulation. In Zen that is done by pursuing The Middle Way. Much of the harm done by not following this path is unintentional, but real nevertheless. How could we know inside the feedback loop? 

Unlike Keanu Reeves, we follow this way both with a support group (known as a sangha) and by our self. We don’t have to go to a confessional with a priest. We know (deep down in our moments of quiet honesty, when we can get beyond denial and blame) what we’ve done and whom we’ve infected. We know what judgments we’ve made, both of others and ourselves. It isn’t necessary for us to stand before others and announce, “I’m an alcoholic and I’m always going to be one.” 

This is a prison from which we can escape with commitment, patience, diligence, and perseverance. If we wish to escape we can. It just depends on whether or not we enjoy being “In the Matrix.” Some people don’t seem to care one way or another. The entire process is sort of like taking an inventory of the mess in our houses, collecting the trash, dumping it out, and doing the best we can to not continue creating a mess. Rather than garbage in/garbage out it becomes a virtue in/virtue out: VIVO, which in Latin curiously means living that takes place inside an organism.

That is an extremely foreshortened overview of the process. In point of fact it is a process that never ends. Because we live in a conditioned world, dust accumulates. We wash our clothes and clean our houses because cleanliness is more desirable than filth. The same thing applies to our inner house. Dust accumulates (emotional and psychic dust) and we need to keep it clean. If we bring in trash, due to bad karma, we suffer. If we become attached to fleeting stuff we suffer. If we live in the illusions of life we suffer. And all of that suffering makes us cranky and then we just make more bad karma. It is an inverted way of living, which must be turned upside down and shaken about.

And the truth is, none of this deep honesty is possible so long as we remain trapped in ego la-la land—The Matrix. Mr. or Mrs. or Ms ego is extraordinarily greedy and self-centered. From the perspective of our egos, everyone else is right to be blamed for our misery. Ego is very self-righteous. None of it is our fault. It has nothing to do with our own self-generated karma. Inside this hologram of blame and self-delusion, we experience life in competition and defensiveness. The world is either/or. It is either right or it’s wrong (and always my right and your wrong). This world runs according to hard and fast rules and inflexible boundaries and to deviate from the rigor entails fear, perceived threat, and loss. 

There is never enough insulation in this realm, and to share with others is to diminish our share and thus increase our risk exposure. We build fences of all kinds to keep the bad guys out without realizing that the fences also keep us in. The threat is everywhere and there is a good reason for the concern: Everything is changing. The storms will come and we better make sure our life raft is watertight.

Sound familiar? Who can question the exposures to risk and an unknown future? No one. Risk is a part of life but there is a huge difference between living hunkered down and walking tall. The ego, because it is an illusion, is rightly concerned with risk. It should know better than anyone. The ego is fragile and so too is our fleeting world. The alternative is to accept our wholeness—our integrated beingness, and to practice it moment by moment—a sacred act, not as a concept but as a reality. 

How is that done? This is a realm without multitasking. When we eat, we eat. When we talk, we talk. Whatever we do, we do wholly, in each and every moment, whether we like it or not. We just do it and let the illusions subside. It is a practice of being present with all of the grief, anguish, pain, sorrow and joy. We cry when we cry and laugh when we laugh and we do it with gusto. No illusions or expectations or wishes or overlays. We accept life as an un-gilded lily, without embellishment nor judgments nor any other forms of distortion or fabrication. Life just is. The Buddha called this “thusness”—things as they truly are.

This might all sound like accepting everything as unavoidable, but it is not. When we accept our ego-less interdependence—beyond the Matrix, truly, we must see that we are united with all of life. There is no way to disconnect from the ubiquitous dimension of essence. We are glued to our collective world, like it or not, so unless we like living in a mess then we must do what we can to clean it up and join the living. We are not isolated and independent beings, severed from life. We are life and there is no way to have a life without death. They arise as an undivided partnership. When the world suffers we pay the price because we are members of a common family. When the world rejoices, we rejoice with it. We are not just our brother’s keeper. We are our brothers and our sisters. There is no way to sever the link of essence.

This is not an airy-fairy thing. This is reality, inseparable, indivisible, and integrated and the only way to divide it is in the illusions of our imagination. That is where the danger lies. No, this is not resignation, cynicism, defeatism, or victimization. This is the polar opposite. This is a stance of engagement and responsibility, of doing what can be done but remaining hopeful without attachment to results.

The over-riding message contained in the Diamond Sutra regards the nature of enlightenment and compassion. The Buddha was teaching Subhuti (one of his disciples) that the distinguishing mark of a true Bodhisattva is deep compassion that can only come about without any sense of ego or gain. There is no calculation or contrivance since a true Bodhisattva realizes that there is no difference between himself and others. Jesus said something very similar: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” When we accept our ground-of-being relationship with life, the unavoidable conclusion is that we share common ground. We are in this together.

Bipolar

Manic depression; Bipolar affective disorder is a certifiable mental illness that can mimic something akin to phases of awakening. 

The principle of dependent origination says that everything in life is a reflection of this fundamental principle, and this is illustrated with the broadly known relationship between suffering and enlightenment. 

Bodhidharma said that without afflictions, there could be no enlightenment. The two are linked by the principle of dependent origination. A famous Zen saying is, “No suffering. No enlightenment. Little suffering. Little enlightenment. Great suffering. Great enlightenment.”

In his commentary on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, Chan Master Sheng Yen said that nobody having good dreams wants to wake up. Only when they have nightmares are they eager to do so. The point is that there is a correspondence between the magnitude of both suffering and awakening. The entirety of Buddhism concerns the alleviation of suffering. There is no other purpose for this quest than that. So some reading this may think to themselves, “I don’t suffer so Zen isn’t right for me.”

I have two rejoinders to this observation: (1) not yet, (2) and denial. The “not yet” part realizes that it is impossible to live and not suffer because the fundamental nature of conditional life is suffering. The “denial” part concerns resistance (a form of attachment which creates more suffering). And I am not throwing stones of blame. I too remained in denial too long and paid the price. I wrote about this in another post: The Four Horses of Zen.

Nobody wants to suffer and unfortunately this motivates many to stay in states of denial. The pain is too sharp to bear so we stuff it down and try to go on with life and this can eventually be a large problem because it isn’t possible to keep suffering locked away forever. Sooner or later it seeps out and corrodes our sense of wellbeing.

When you learn to mediate (and practice it) all of that suppressed mental poison gets released, you clean out the pipes and move on toward wholeness. It isn’t fun to lance that boil but it beats living with the compacted aftermath of suppressed suffering. Along the way toward restored mental health there can be wide swings from one depth to the opposite, but this is the necessary result of mental house cleaning. Zen is not a practice for the faint of heart. It’s only for the most desperate and those who exhibit the necessary courage to go through the anguish required to have a life worth living.

Spirit and me.

The notion that our spiritual lives are separate from our biological lives is a bit strange. Even if you don’t believe there is a spiritual world, I’ve never met anyone who argued that they didn’t have a spirit. The means of experiencing anything, spiritual or otherwise, is based in biology. 

On the other hand, you may accept that there is a spiritual reality but think that we are separated somehow from that spiritual dimension. For the spirit to be experienced, our biology is the avenue of communication since that is our means of experience. 

I personally know there is no such separation. Instead, I am persuaded of what the Dharma (and Christianity) teaches that our wholeness is the undividable conjunction of spirit and matter: that I can only exist as that partnership. If this is not so, then what part of me is compelling movement? An object can’t move. A stone just sits there and doesn’t move. We however do move and without a spiritual consciousness, we would be no better than a stone.

The point of contact, regardless of how the spirit is understood, is biological. However, and whatever we have, any experience is through a biological pathway impacting our bodies (a fantastic organism involving a multitude of biochemicals, hormones, neurotransmitters, and electricity). When we experience fear, our biochemical makeup is altered in one direction. When we experience joy, it’s changed in another order. Anger, another, and so on. The altering of our biochemical makeup affects even enlightenment, and all of these biochemical changes affect our thinking and responses to life.

The ingestion of drugs likewise alters our biochemistry and our sense of reality. What seems real given one biochemical arrangement is wholly altered when drugs are introduced. What seems familiar in a non-drug induced state is completely changed when drugs are used. And this is also true when enlightenment is experienced. What looks divided and alienated in our usual every-day way, before enlightenment, is seen as unified and compassionate after enlightenment. Our world and our self-understanding are subsequently turned upside down.

I don’t advise doing drugs because they can be addictive and ruin your life. On the other hand, there are situations where drugs are beneficial. But I do recommend the worldview and the self-understanding that arises with both certain drugs and enlightenment. One can destroy your life. The other can save your life. Besides, the latter is free of charge, and the former can bankrupt you. One can set you free, and the other can send you to jail. People die all of the time from a drug overdose, and nobody has ever died due to enlightenment.

Tracking a koan.

A story is told in the Platform Sutra of a conversation held between Daman Hongren (fifth Chinese Chan patriarch) and Dajian Huineng (sixth Chinese Chan patriarch). Huineng was an illiterate, unschooled commoner who, upon hearing the Diamond Cutter Sutra, realized enlightenment and subsequently sought out Hongren. When Huineng met the patriarch, he was assigned the lowly job of rice-pounder, where he remained for many months before proving his worth to Hongren.

The conversation between the two was thus: Hongren—“A seeker of the Path risks his life for the dharma. Should he not do so?” Then he asked, “Is the rice ready?”  Huineng—“Ready long ago, only waiting for the sieve.” 

Two questions, and a single short answer which reveals the nature of enlightenment—both sudden and gradual. Sudden, since awakening happened quickly, but fullness required the sifting of life’s sieve—The rice was ready, but the lingering, residual chaff had to be blown away by the winds of life.

The insight flowing from this conversation is enhanced through the lens of an ancient Greek word for perfection. The word is “Teleios,” which means having reached the finale—the logical culmination of maturation. Like birth, first, we come into this world, and then it takes many years of living to reach maturation.

More than forty years ago, I came to a realization of my true nature, but I also needed further shifting to fully grasp the magnitude of what had occurred. It is one thing to experience profound transformation, and it is another to allow it to flower and revolutionize your life. Besides, the initial experience was so contrary to the ordinary, that when it happens, I barely know which end was up. It took time to absorb the experience, allow it to infuse me, and to settle in.

One of the critical ingredients for me of this settling in concerned the Japanese words “mu” and “shin.” Mu is, of course, the Japanese word for “no,” and you find Mu in the koan about Jōshū’s dog: “A monk asked, ‘Does a dog have a Buddha-nature or not?’ The master said, ‘Mu (No)!’”

When I lived in a Zen monastery, this was my koan and for a long time it made no sense. In Zen, you are taught that Buddha-nature inhabits all sentient beings, one of which is a dog. So how could it be that Buddha-nature infuses everything but not a dog? But as life sifted me, it began to become a part of who I was, and ever so slowly, I understood. 

What I came to understand concerned variations on Mu. One of these is the obvious negation no. An alternative is nothing meaning the absence of something. And another is no-thing, (which is similar to nothing but more precise, meaning not a thing). These latter two can be combined, which rounds out the correct Buddhist understand of emptiness, which the Buddha said is form. Seen in this combined manner, emptiness becomes more than just the absence of form. It then becomes the wellspring of form (and everything else). Mu is not a phenomenal thing. Instead, it is the soil out of whch grows all things. If it was a thing, then it could not be all things.

The Heart Sutra says form is emptiness. That is a profound equation, but it rattles your brain. In a way this is the premier koan. We all think we know what form is. It’s the measurable stuff that surrounds us. We can sense it in every way. But emptiness is an entirely different kettle of fish. How can you perceive that? The truth is you can’t perceive emptiness. You can only experience it, and the reason is actually quite simple (but only when you understand—before that, it makes no sense). 

Emptiness is who we truly are. It has no discernible properties, but all form emanates from there and all form is infused with the indelible dimension of the ubiquitous power of creation. If emptiness had detectable properties, it would be limited. Buddha-Nature (your true nature) is not limited. Buddha-Nature is emptiness and it is you.

I was helped to fathom this when I learned a few things about the Chinese and the Japanese language. Every culture sees things differently, and these two languages see life in ways that are radically different from the English perspective. 

From a Western point of view, we have a heart, and we have a mind. We see these as two separate and different matters. Not so with the Chinese and the Japanese. The heart and the mind are one integrated whole, so they call it XIN (Chinese) or SHIN (Japanese), and both of these terms mean heart/mind—the integration of thinking and emotions. That was one piece of the puzzle.

The next piece concerned the seeming dichotomy between illusion and reality, and here again the cultural framing played an essential role. What we ordinarily consider real is what we can perceive, whether internally or externally. We see the objective world of form and the fabrication of thoughts and consider both real. But there is a problem here: Both our thoughts and the outside world of form are constantly changing, and both lure us into identity attachment and thus suffering. 

That part is the illusive dimension of XIN/SHIN, otherwise known as form. But The Buddha had said that form is emptiness, so in essence, he was saying that we could only perceive the manifestations but not the source of mind. In fact, this is what he had said in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra:

“Seeing the actions of body and mouth, we say that we see the mind. The mind is not seen, but this is not false. This is seeing by outer signs.” Elsewhere he spoke of finding the fire of mind only by seeing smoke.

When we look for the mind, we find nothing—the mind can’t see itself, and this is where Zen shines because what we aim for in zazen is a cessation of form, long enough to experience the lack. Bodhidharma had said: “That which exists, exists in relationship to that which doesn’t exist.” And Rinzai’s teacher Huang Po, was particularly lucid in his teaching about the relationship between abandoning form and finding yourself. In the Chun Chou Record, he said: 

“To say that the real Dharmakāya of the Buddha resembles the Void is another way of saying that the Dharmakāya is the Void and that the Void is the Dharmakāya ...they are one and the same thing.... When all forms are abandoned, there is the Buddha ... the Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma. This spiritually enlightening nature is without beginning...this great Nirvānic nature is Mind; Mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the Dharma.”

One of the fascinating aspects of Zen study is to begin patching together apparently disparate pieces into a seamless tapestry of meaning. When we arrange all of these pieces, a picture emerges centered on this notion of Mu and Shin and what it reveals is this equation: “Mu shin=Shin” where the first part “Mu shin” (the absence of thoughts and emotions) is joined to our true nature (Shin) which is formless/the void/true mind/the Buddha/yourself. 

Formlessness is lacking form. It is emptiness itself: “…the void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma. This spiritually enlightening nature is without beginning...this great Nirvānic nature is Mind; Mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the Dharma.” 

And that is who we are. Now the curious thing about my own awakening is what was taking place within me while immersing myself in Mu practice. Yes, I had been given the Jōshū’s dog koan, and yes, I was following the prescribed method, but there was a much deeper internal koan occurring that had been haunting me for many, many years, and there didn’t seem to be any way to either get rid of it or make rational sense of it. That koan was the mind-bender: who am I? So while I was immersing myself in dogs, this deeper koan was down there underneath. It didn’t seem to be even slightly related to dogs or Mu but what happened was that the answer to my who am I? question, emerged as the solution to the Mu koan because the answer to one is the answer to the other.

I had been struggling for years, believing all the time that I was a worthless excuse for humanity, and in my moment of awakening, I realized that I was already Teleios (complete). I knew, at the most fundamental level of me, I was perfect, had always been perfect, and would never stop being perfect, and ever so slowly, the winds of life began to blow away the chaff of the terrible part of me.

Preparing the soil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conquering dislike.

When we spend time with someone we care about, it can be challenging when we rarely see eye to eye on matters of significance.  And you may, as I do, wish for more compatible fellowship. 

It’s enjoyable to feel like who you are is valued by the people in your life.
But there is another side that is hard to embrace: Being with someone who doesn’t value you. That tests our resolve and demands that we examine why they don’t like us. What are we doing, beyond just existing, that encourages their behavior? 

It is all too easy to blame them. After all, can’t they see how wonderful we are? In such moments we can see the inward dragon rising with his ugly head. Mr. (or Mrs.) Ego is coming into view, and that one wants applause, not disparagement. I don’t like that side of myself, but if I look closely, I can see the benefits of this awkward situation. Unless we want to spend my time around sycophants and birds just like us, it’s in everyone’s best interest to come to terms with the only thing we have control over—Ourselves.

We are the ones who cause either acceptance or rejection of ourselves. Nobody creates that but us. And that takes clear-headed resolve, courage, and willingness to take the heat of our own dispassionate self-assessment to create a better world. Getting rid of our ego is a nasty business that entails a path of suffering that leads inevitably to freedom. The Buddha’s words:

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. What we think, we become.”

Simple complexity.

I’ve been a student of Zen for more than 40 years. During that time I must have read hundreds of Buddhist and Zen books. To be honest nearly all of them were profound yet abstruse. 

Transcendent truths can be perplexing for a number of reasons. Since language is limited and reading is language-centered, this constrains understanding of changing time and cultures. It’s an oil and water conundrum. Additionally, what is considered truth is a variable depending on a host of changing conditions. Mining profound treasures involve a lot of digging and dirt tossing. And after the mining, you still have a problem: How to transmit the gold to others.

Long ago Lao Tzu addressed this problem when he said, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” That is indeed a perplexing communication challenge. As I’ve worked through this challenge I have struggled to distill and shift out the dirt so that I could speak simply of matters that are anything but simple and obvious.

I’ve studied the writing of the great sages and seers to understand their wisdom. Jesus chose to speak in parables. The New Testament is full of his parables. The Buddha chose similar methods. Both were so erudite their own disciples rarely grasped their insight. And while these methods worked with some, the vast majority still didn’t understand. Life’s greatest truths are not so evident. I’m no sage but I use their communications methods since I am persuaded that if I can find ways to share the wealth of my own mining then a lot of people can begin to find their own treasure. 

One of the most valuable communication tools used by The Buddha is known as “Upaya” — expedient means. The principle is simple: Teach people at their level rather than your own. This method is extraordinarily wise. Imagine what would happen in a Kindergarten class if the Ph.D. teacher tried to teach nuclear physics by employing high-level jargon. It doesn’t mean that young people one day won’t be capable of becoming nuclear physicists. But there is a huge difference between knowing something and being an effective teacher. All of us have experienced both and all of us prefer good teachers.

What I have chosen to do is adapt. I use, as much as possible, simple language with graphics and other devices that aid in the learning process so that matters of great profundity can be grasped by people not yet schooled. They know precisely the nature of their own dilemma but they don’t know the nature of the solutions. Transcendent truths provide the solutions they seek. It is my job to speak simply of these truths. All I do is haul water to thirsty horses. The horses decide if they want to drink.

Dreaming the impossible dream.

Many years ago, my teacher told me that life was full of koans; all we have to do is pay attention to what comes our way. Since then, I have found the truth of his advice. 

Recently, what has been coming my way concerns hopes and dreams. A friend has recently been writing a lot about hoping and dreaming, and I find myself both agreeing and saying, “yes, but.” Another friend is wrestling with hope and losing the battle. Dreaming and hoping can be both a blessing and a curse. Both reflect reaching for something which doesn’t yet exist that can either motivate us onward, trying to attain a goal, or fill us with unrealistic expectations. At the heart of both dreaming and hoping lays the issue of fulfillment. The presumption of any quest is that we are not fulfilled. The height of lunacy is to seek something we have already.

The popular song To Dream The Impossible Dream was composed for the 1965 musical Man of La Mancha, which portrays the story of Don Quixote, who chases windmills and stands vigil over his paramour. People glean either aspiration or futility from this story.

Dreaming and hope have special significance within a Buddhist framework. In fact, it is a central issue. To be a Buddha means to wake up from a dream that is destroying lives. The flip side of that is to live in delusion and not even know it. The question that divides this matter is reality. What is it? And the corollary, what does it mean to be unrealistic? It’s a critical issue that brings into focus the legitimacy of a quest.

From a Buddhist perspective, we are already fundamentally full; nothing meaningful—nothing of significance is missing that could contribute any value to our lives. That is a very different matter from contributing to life out of lack. “You can’t pour water out of an empty bucket” is a common bit of wisdom. 

The issue is not the presence of fullness but awareness of that state of mind. It does nobody any good to have a treasure in hand, of which they are not aware, and without being aware, there is nothing to pour out to the world. Nothing is more unrealistic than looking far and wide for what is already in our bank account. 

That is indeed an impossible dream. The challenge is thus to become aware of the infinite wealth that is already within our possession. Once that occurs, our relationships with others and the world are transformed, and we can share a life of fulfillment. Until then, seeking from another what only we can realize within, is an exercise in futility. Countless Zen masters have pointed to the inward treasure in our possession and guided the process of moving beyond the delusions that obstruct genuine self-awareness.

In 1913, Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize for literature. One of Tagor’s resonate themes is opening doors. Here is one facet from his poetic jewel Journey Home.

“The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”

The message of Tagore is that fulfillment is an already present reality that lies within each of us. This message seems to be one of the most challenging of all to absorb and put into gear. The result is we go on quests trying, and forever failing, to gain what can never achieve. Dreams and hopes are wonderful once we’ve found our own never-lost treasure. Only then can we share the wealth.

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. 

Mixing it up.

We’re a curious species. Being human puts us at the top of the food chain. It also puts us at the top of other chains, such as the chain of creativity. No other life form (at least none that we know of) can imagine and solve problems as we do. 

Unfortunately, this seems to be a two-edged sword. One way cuts in the way of creation, and the other way cuts in the form of destruction. We are masters of both.

Awhile back, I wrote an article called a “Bird in hand” and spoke about compounds that result from mixing different things together. The point of that article was that once mixed, an entirely new compound results. The separate ingredients can then no longer be detected, but something new has been created.

I’m an old man now and have been kicking around spiritual conclaves for quite some time, and I’ve noticed a meaningful thing about compounds. People show up in a wide variety of such places for various reasons, but the alleged reason is they go there seeking God. After a time, many remain for other reasons, and they forget about why they came in the first place. A rare few figure out an essential truth: God doesn’t live in churches, synagogues, or temples. God lives in people.

Many people pay lip service to what their own scriptures tell them. For example, Christian scripture says that “You are the body of Christ.” If you happen to be a Buddhist you’re taught that everyone contains the enlivening essence of The Buddha. But too few seem able to accept the resulting compound and just go ahead and act like God is absent from the true temple of themselves.

Have you ever wondered what our world would be like if everyone conducted themselves by embracing this fundamental principle? If we really want to make the world a better place, begin to see yourself and others as a compound container of divinity. I am aware that most of us exhibit some less than ideal nastiness, but it’s also mixed together with genuine love and compassion. Adversity seems to bring out the goodness that is always there. And even if you don’t accept the idea that we are the resulting compound mixture of spirit and matter, it never hurts to pretend that we are.

What's Zen?

We live in a time awash in technology and assume that it is based on electronics. But the principle of technology is much broader. Fundamentally technology means an application of knowledge, especially in a particular area that provides a means of accomplishing a task. Anything from a simple hammer to charting the cosmos properly belongs to the realm of technology.

The common coin understanding of Zen is wrong. Ordinarily, Zen is considered a branch on the tree of Buddhism but few people realize that Zen came first, a long time before there was such a thing as Buddhism's religion. The Buddha used the mental technology of Zen to experience his enlightenment. While Zen isn’t electronic, it is similar since our brain works by exchanging electrical transmissions, and Zen is the most thoroughgoing technology for fathoming the human mind ever conceived.

The human brain is the most sophisticated computer ever and can calculate at speeds a billion times faster than any computer yet built. Furthermore, it is “dual-core,” computing in parallel mode with completely different methods. One side works like a serial processor (our left hemisphere), and the other works as a parallel processor (or right hemisphere). The left creates code, and the right reads the code. The left is very good at analyzing, dissecting, and abstracting (but doesn’t understand) while the right interprets (but doesn’t read) and says what it all means.

Lao Tzu expressed this division of function like this: He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Zen is the mental technology of using this equipment to understand itself. The true mind watches the movement and arising of the code to grasp how the “machine” works. Everything perceived and processed is watched. There is a conditional and object-oriented aspect, and there is an unconditional objectless aspect. Both sides of our brain have no exclusive and independent status. Only when they function together are they of much use. 

Our subjective nature is unseen and without form. Our objective nature has form and is seen. Our brain could be considered hardware and our mind software. Software instructs the hardware on how to operate. Together these two are mirror opposites and rely upon the other side. In Buddhist terminology, this relationship is called “dependent origination,” which means they only exist together. The same is true for anything. Up and down are mirror opposites, and neither can exist separately. Nothing can. Everything can only exist in that way.

The two sides of our brain are mirror partners. Our whole brain is the mirror partner of our mind. Our mind is the mirror partner of no-mind. Every nuance becomes progressively more concentrated and potent. The entire universe in infinite configuration and form is essentially empty. If you delve into quantum physics, you arrive at nothing. If you go to the farthest reaches of space, you arrive at nothing. Before the Big-Bang, there was nothing. Now there is everything. Everything is the same thing as nothing. And this amazing awareness comes about by simply watching the coming and going of the manifestations of our mind. That’s Zen.

Ideas and what ideas are about

Ideas about ideas

We think in image forms. Thoughts are not real. They are abstractions, coded messages that represent something but are not what’s being represented. In our minds-eye, we see a constant flow of images and ordinarily, imagine these images are real and, in such a state of mind, go unaware that there is a watcher of this flow. That’s what being conscious of our thoughts means. There is a watcher, and there is what’s being watched. Neither of these (the watcher or the watched) can exist by itself. It takes both for thinking to occur.

On the left side of our brain is the image factory, creating thought images, and on the right side of our brain is the watcher of the images. It’s a marvelous system, and both sides must function together. But since we have two sides, responsible for different functions, each side does things differently. The left side thinks in language (coded images). The right side “thinks” in pictures (interpreting the images). The left side talks but doesn’t understand, and the right side understands but doesn’t talk. Together the two sides make a great team, but individually they make for bad company.

The problem with our world today is that we are predominately left brain analyzers and have not been trained to make sense of what’s being analyzed. Education (in a normal sense) trains our language and analytics capacities but ignores our capacities that enhance compassion, creativity, and insight. Consequently, we are out of balance aggressors, dominated by our egos, and unaware that we are creating an abstract and unreal world that is progressively more violent and hostile.

The problem with identity is that we assume that an objective and independent watcher is doing the watching. We label that watcher as “me”—a self-image (otherwise called an ego). But here is where this must lead. So long as we see an image of ourselves, that image (ego) can’t possibly be the watcher because the watcher can’t see itself. So long as we see any images (self-image included), there is a difference between what is being watched and the watcher.

Some time ago, I read Paul Brok’s book “Into the Silent Land,” and wrote about what he had to say. Broks is an English neuropsychologist and science writer. The astonishing thing about our mind was laid out in these terms:

“That, which is basically inanimate ‘meat,’ can and routinely does animate with consciousness, cognition, imagination, feelings and every other aspect of our mental condition seems to float by as a given.” Due to FMRI imaging, it is possible to see certain parts of our brain light up when various thoughts and emotions are being processed. He observes that nothing remotely resembling any of these functions is found when a brain of a cadaver is dissected. It is indeed a mystery, yet we know neural activity occurs as abstractions of reality, but nobody can actually “touch” what is real.

The true person has no image dimension because all images are objective, whereas the true person is subjective. Subject/Object—Two halves joined together into a single real thing. One part can be seen (an image), and the other part can’t be seen (the watcher of the image). An image isn’t real. It just looks that way. The part that is real is the part that can’t be seen.

A Bird in hand.

Here or There?

Permeate. Interpenetrate. Assimilation: all mean essentially the same thing—To infuse one thing completely into another thing, so the distinction between the two no longer exists. 

Mix the color red with the color blue and purple results. Now there is no more red or blue. Combine liquid water with extreme cold and ice results. Now there is the result of interpenetration. Mix spirit with matter, and what do you get? A sentient being with no more boundary lines between matter and spirit. Now mix two or more sentient beings, and what do you get? Chaos. 

Red is different from blue, and they don’t fight. Water and cold are different, and they don’t fight. Spirit and matter are different, and they do fight. Isn’t that odd? How can it be explained?  The problem is consciousness and perception. Red, blue, water, and cold are not conscious, but suddenly, there is fighting over differences when you add consciousness. And the reason is simple: Consciousness produces the capacity to perceive, and what a sentient being perceives are differences. 

Nobody can perceive a spirit, just what a spirit produces—sentient matter. There are both benefits and consequences of being human. We are a mixture of matter and spirit. We are sentient beings. We perceive only differences. We don’t perceive our true spiritual nature because it can’t be perceived through our ordinary senses. We would rather have what we imagine is a couple of birds in the bush instead of the one in our hands. The one in our hands is no longer either spirit or matter. Now it is simply One whole sentient being: the infusion of Spirit and non-spirit. We are the Middle Way.