The Material World

 

The material world, depending on how we define it, is simply existence. But in colloquial parlance "The Material World" refers to a world where surface is all: rather like encountering a painted elephant and thereafter considering the painted surface to be all there is to an elephant. Living in the decorative surface of being blinds humanity to the living pulse of the prime mover. Intoxicated with appearances, they live and they die. In the best of times this is harmless, and this is certainly blameless in any simple animal.

But these are not the best of times. And it puts me in mind of a phrase I sometimes toss around having to do with what kind of catastrophe it will take before "the obvious becomes apparent to the hopelessly occluded."

The meaning saturated gestalt is a sea of potential. It is omni-present and it has no surface. Events are catalyzed into existence by behaviors, and these "behaviors" are the vestiges of previous catalyzations in the flux of inevitability. The emission of a beta particle from an unstable atom is an event. Its course on the path to collision is behavior leading to events, etc. . It is endless beginning in a cascade of inevitability where guided trajectories chart the course of humanity. Witchcraft and politics are examples of primitive efforts to nudge manifestation by manipulative behavior (of course the same could be said of getting a spoon to ones mouth).

So what we see before us is a riot of half-wit-to-lunatic-would-be-wizards running around stirring the cauldron of inevitability to achieve some superficial purpose. 

Baring the advent of some degree of Enlightenment. . . .

 this can not end well.  

Intuition and Inspiration

 

Intuition leads us. Intuition is visceral: a scent on the wind. Intuition is the direct product of Awareness. 

Inspiration finds us where we are. Inspiration is a synaptic event of mind. Inspiration is the product of consciousness.

If, in the press of modern life, we have smothered intuition, our inspirations will be correspondingly undernourished.

Intuition is viceral. Inspiration is cerebral.

Technologies of Being

The potential of any human being to fully explore the opportunities presented by existence is limited by access and exposure to technologies of being. Public schools and universities are examples of societies attempt to cultivate a citizen that is productive and reliably civil, but these institutions of domestication stop very short of accessing the more esoteric venues of human potential.

Religions as generally found are emergent technologies of being: prescribing how to be in order to determine what will be. And then there are the myriad, often exotic, mystery schools with varying claims on personal evolution. Again, all of these are technologies of being.

I am now in my eightieth year. From earliest childhood I had wondered "What is the Who", and had searched the lore of self discovery seeking a means: to discover a true ray of light and to follow that ray to its source. That was my purpose.

Everyone was selling something.

The Zen of the patriarchs is not selling anything. The Zen of the patriarchs is a technology of being which enables the relaxation of any second order edifice of identity. The Zen of the patriarchs is a technology of being which makes possible the awakening of Pristine Awareness: the Who of all living creatures.

In meditation simply let consciousness contemplate Awareness.

The obvious will become apparent.

The Purpose of Zen

 

There is a vast and rich treasure by way of understanding humanity to be found in literature. If we read Thucydides' 2,500 year old account of the Peloponnesian War and we change the names of people and places, we could be reading the news of the day. War-ish tribalism is in us like dye in water. The swaggering pronouncements of politicians and public figures are unchanged from 2,500 years ago. And the subsequent descent into chaos and death and social upheaval is likewise unchanged.

But one of the shadows on the wall of human opacity that we also find in every "where" and in all times is an intuited sense of humanity as an expression of something larger than life its self and from which life emerges.

And it is entering into the light by which this shadow is cast that is the purpose of Zen.