It is not at all hard to see that desire shapes the world of the animal. All animals. Desire is the crucible with which time has cast its exquisite forms, and desire is the retort in which evolution has distilled the vapors of instinct.
Will and Repose are the coins of this realm. The Yin and the Yan. The Alpha and the Omega.
It is through the cultivation of emptiness that we discover our selves as Awareness. Everything which exists, exists as presence. The presence of Pristine Awareness is the presence of living emptiness. This receptive emptiness is in every creature the repository of the tools and inclinations which make its continued existence possible, and Pristine Awareness becomes invisible by inflating these sterile tools and inclinations with purpose.
It is not for the inconceivably various forms of creature hood to undergo the transformation of profound awakening. They do not have the capacity. The same could be said of the great masses of humanity. They are, and will remain, held in the colorful iron folds of animistic individuation.
Is it Fate, or is it Destiny, that compels any certain flower on the tree of life to the liberation of self discovery?
Do we see awareness through the lens of our humanity
or
Do we see our humanity through the lens of Awareness
Consciousness is individual and Awareness is Universal. The Awareness of any organism comes on board with what might be called genetic memory. Built into the fabric of the physical form is a time tested preprogram about which (in the case of human beings) the personality coalesces. In the same way as each unique snowflake spontaneously forms around its impersonal core, the consciousness individuates upon a core of predetermined impersonal inclinations. Should that Awareness which is the substance of consciousness awaken, it becomes obvious that the behavior patterns which are the stuff of the personality are ephemera caught upon a framework of instinctual inclination: impersonal and not discardable. We do not choose these inclinations anymore than water choses to run down hill. In all creatures the I AM says "I" to the impersonal sway of instinct.
If the mind of a lion should awaken it would still be a lion.
An ancient master remarked that "Stubbing your toe in the dark, and stubbing your toe when you can see around, are miles apart."
The general admonitions concerning kindness and consideration extend to the Self.
One of the great visionaries of the 20th century postulated what he called the Omega Point. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (d.1955) saw the inevitable product of evolution as the Universe awakening to its Self with mankind as the vehicle realization. He called this awakening the "Omega Point" The Omega Point is a line drawn in the sands of time. On one side of the line we find sleeping humanity as an intelligent animal, and on the other side of the Omega Point we find humanity as Awake. The child of the Earth has become the child of the Universe.
The Omega Point is attained individually. And with this in mind we can see that for thousands of years an individual here or there has crossed over. Pierre Teilhard saw that the cumulative press of knowledge, and in particular the sophistication of language, would inexorably lead life on earth to realization. Zen is an emergent laborer in this work of Awakening.
This is happening all around us as we speak, and the work is increasingly critical, for it must be admitted that by-and-large the spectrum of humanity which thinks it runs the world is populated by unenlightened monkeys (not that there's anything wrong with that).
The womb of Zen was an established Chinese monastic culture that had been in existence for hundreds of years before the unique conjugation of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism gave rise to the advent of Zen. The adepts and acolytes of these monastic communities lived a cloistered existence intended to insulate the mind from the myriad demands of secular existence. Freed from the demands of family and commercial society the mind was available for excursions into, and exploration of, an esoteric terra incognita. To enter into the Enlightenment decried by the historical Buddha: this was the goal of our Zen progenitors
The complexities of the modern world demand the constant exercise of consciousness to this-or that-or some other thing, so how in the world is one to participate in the discovery of Pristine Awareness while attending to all that is asked of the mind by the tasks of ordinary day to day existence?
The birth of Zen was an institutional recognition of the potential for, and insistence upon, awakening Pristine Awareness. The exercises and mysteries developed in monastic sanctuaries kept Zen alive and well, incubated as it were, giving time for humanity to ripen culturally that the truths of Zen might become accessible to the world at large. Perhaps, perhaps, the richness of modern language and the breadth of contemporary scientific understanding can bridge the chasm between Self-understanding and the gymnastics of consciousness required by everyday existence, so that Zen might take its rightful place in the maturation of human existence and the betterment of all life on Earth.
When we encounter language, spoken or written, it is not received as a chain of definitions. Language is received as a flow of meaning. Words are representations of categories of experience, and naming is a form of shorthand for easy reference. We find here the inestimable value of education. Our library of experience determines the richness of our understanding.
Metaphor and analogy are tools of meaning with great explanatory power, but that which is beyond the various categories of our experience is beyond the reach of metaphor, and with regard to our humanity there are possibilities of being that amount to the emergence of an entirely new kind of creature on the twining tendrils of the tree of life.
An ancient master once remarked "Why does the enlightened man not step forward and declare himself?"
What Zen is not? Zen is not some antique asian hocus-pocus mysticism.
In precocious individuals Awareness has been emerging from the hypnosis of consciousness for thousands of years. Many of those individuals reached out to their fellow beings in an attempt to make possible this metanoia. Some of them became great religious leaders. Some of them became philosophers and sages of great renown. Some of them lived lives of obscurity, and some were executed as heretics. Zen had the good fortune to emerge in a culture where a monastic tradition made possible the cultivation of its emergent technologies of transformation.
And this is what Zen is. Zen is a technology constellated to awaken Awareness from the hypnotic trance of consciousness, and bring about a new creature emerging from the cocoon of biological make-work.
Our minds are us, but we are not our minds. The mind is a creation; a construct built of representations; a feed-back loop in the resonance of Awareness.
One remarkable benefit of meditation is that meditation creates a circumstance in which Awareness discovers that mind is a subordinate apparatus, and not a proper seat of identity.
Yogic practices of meditation had been around for thousands of years. But it was the unique encounter of these yogic practices with Chinese esoteric pragmatism that engendered Zen. And Zen is a radically effective technology of enlightenment. And this "enlightenment" is nothing less than Awareness awakening to the tyranny of mind which is the normal state of creature-hood.
The biological realm, in all its wrinkles and writhes, is the armature for the emergence of Awareness. Every creature from the paramecium to the anthropoid ape is a thread in the scintillating fabric of Awareness aglow on the surface of the Earth. In its lust for life Awareness presses into every possible avenue of existence, and each life form contributes its vibrational exuberance to the chord of Being struck here on Earth. There is nothing mystical about this. This is simply the way it is.
There is a real world about which we can speculate but which exists independent of all speculation, and in this unassailable realm of seething existence we have our moment. Curiosity and longing and the human capacity for imagining, inevitably create a haze of surreal projections and practical solutions to the ever-present presentment of the real. So how is this creature with such inexhaustible talents of invention to come into co-incidence with the factual in such a manner as to create a rewarding, peaceful, and productive existence.
To find ones way into this unexplored region of the existential real one must have a compass.
Zen is such a compass.
One can observe something, and one can have an idea about something, but clear, clean, observations are not ideas.
Zen is about clarity of observation, and all of Zen's procedural habits are about cleansing the doors of perception.
Behavior of any animal is a product of natural inclination interfacing environment, and it is only the accrual of learned experience that introduces agency. Just as a ball rolling down an inclined plane or water running down hill, life generally unfolds in the service of instinct. That Awareness which is the I AM of the living organism is exercised in the service of blind nature. The course of evolution must start from scratch.
The existence of Zen or its equivalent is the inevitable result of Awareness evolving to the state of Self recognition and emerging as agent. Zen is the cultivation of a new existential paradigm in the unfolding of living beings, and Zen is the opening of the eyes of nature.
1. The I AM of all life forms is Pristine Awareness.
2. Pristine Awareness is hypnotized by the sway of nature.
3. The Zen of the patriarchs is a technology contrived to awaken Pristine Awareness.
As any traveler will attest, in ones peregrinations some baggage is essential. In our passage through this vail of tears (tears of joy, tears of sorrow) we come on board with a massive load of antique baggage.
One of the many benefits of Awareness emerging as the seat of identity is the ability to recognize and discard those bits of instinctual bric-a-brac which clutter up our personal lives and make all but impossible the enjoyment of inner peace.
Think about it.
Becoming a well trained monkey is not a substitute for Enlightenment.
But it's a start
There must be an appreciation of self governance.
Zen is not intentionally elitist. What makes it seem so is that Zen makes no bargains with our humanity. Zen insists upon a transformation of being that indulges no intermediate dallying. I have described it as the emergence of a butterfly from its chrysalis. In a time when both animals were beasts of burden Yung-ming (d-975) put it as "from the womb of a cow an elephant is born"
Simply let consciousness contemplate Awareness.
This morning I was reading an article concerning cognition and the formation of cognitive bias. The article was subject to the normal disregard of Awareness as the precursor of consciousness, and in the process of describing how consciousness is subject to error the phrase "intuitive belief" was used.
"Intuitive belief" The phrase is the very essence of oxymoron. Intuition is the direct product of Awareness: fluid, active, ever in flux, and that is its value. Belief is the spawn of consciousness: formal, confined, ridged. And though belief has a proper place in civil affairs, intuition and belief are as different as liquid water is from ice, and I think what they are attempting to describe could be better termed as "passive belief".
It seems to me that all the difficulty in this consciousness probing goes back to a materialistic explanation of existence: does matter precede Awareness, or does Awareness precede matter.
Of course your garden variety materialist will scoff at the mere suggestion that matter might be an epiphenomenon of Awareness. But the reason solid things appear solid is because of the interaction of unexplained fields in the fabric of unexplained nothingness. If we look for light as a wave (field) we find it as a wave. If we look for it as matter we discover it as a point object. The electron exists as a field, and it is atomic nuclei attracting complimentary electronic balance which leads to the formation of molecules. And it is the sophistication of molecules that leads to the emergence of an awareness capable of consciousness. And when they boil it all down looking for prime movers is seems to be wiggles of nothingness.
Consciousness is a magic wand for good or for ill, and beliefs are the bricks with which cultural edifices are constructed. Zen is a technology of being based on the fact that consciousness is a configured state of Awareness. Zen is a technology designed awaken this little droplet of Awareness to the marvelous fact of its existence. The success of Zen is when a living creature discovers its true identity.
"I have investigated the old Woman". (Chao-chou. died 834)
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 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.
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.
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.
That Greek of great renown, Plato, lived about 2,500 years ago in the same historical period as Lao Tzu and the historical Buddha. He gave us the records we have of Socrates' demolishing of the rhetorical constructs of his fellow Athenians, but his most famous essay is that of "Plato's Cave"
Plato postulated a society of cave dwellers chained to their seats. Their only referents were shadows on the wall cast by a flickering flame behind them, and his cave dwellers would discourse at great length concerning the significance, the meaning, and the import of these shadows. He then has one of his cave dwellers somehow slip from his chains and make his way to the mouth of the cave where he sees for the first time the "real" world, and who then rushes back to inform his fellows that there is a visceral world of reality of which they have no knowledge: a visceral world that is "real" as opposed to the shadows with which they are familiar.
Our now "enlightened" chap is of course considered (and dealt with) as a dangerous lunatic.
I have often thought of the view that comes with Enlightenment as seeing in the infrared. And that all attempts to describe the ensuing image of reality is an attempt to explain color to someone who sees only black and white, or to explain vision to a cave fish. This, while all the while swimming in a miraculous sparkling sea of crystalline formations of Pristine Awareness.
For me it remains an open question whether or not the ability of Pristine Awareness to awaken and live frolicking in the sun is a genetic mutation available only to an emergent specie of humanity. But one thing of which I am quite certain is that in the present circumstances the practice of meditation is an absolute necessity.
Perception is an excitation in the field of Awareness. As we discover in our meditation, the field of Awareness exists in a state of active passivity. Awareness resists nothing and requires nothing. Perception provides an itch and behavior provides the scratching.
Every creature comes into being with a library of instinctual potentials ingrained in the physical patterns expressed in their existence. These potentials exist to excite the field of Awareness and spur behavior. The exegeses of existence further enrich this library, and the capacity of this library is what is known as "intelligence".
What we see here is that behind all this experiential busyness is the primacy of Pristine Awareness. And that all the activities of all living organisms are constellated to ensure the wellbeing of the residence of said nodal of Awareness. We find here that Pristine Awareness is what we are and that all else is window dressing.
Consciousness emerges with the advent of nervous systems. Nerve systems enable the creation of rich libraries of experienced exegeses, and with the enrichment of this library comes into being the librarian: the Ego. And this Ego, blind to its origins, believes itself to be the author of its tale when it is actually the stepchild of Cosmic Necessity.
Zen is the slap designed to awaken Pristine Awareness to the true state of things.
Zen is not about the monkey waking up to Awareness. Zen is about Awareness waking up to the monkey.
In the time-scale of the Universe the ascent of Awareness has progressed smoothly and quickly. Our single-cell ancestors, in a Darwinian progression, gave rise to Homo Erectus. Homo Erectus paved the way for the emergence of Homo Sapiens, and Homo Sapiens is but a wide-spot in the road for the flowering of Homo Sophians.
The soup of creature-hood is the agar plate for the emergence of Self-Recognition in the fabric of the Universe, and the emergence of what has become known as "Enlightenment" is the denouement of the Universe's aspiration for this "Self-Recognition."
All living creatures are the expression of Pristine Awareness, and Pristine Awareness over millions of years has, like a tree root in rocky ground, leveraged its way through the darkness of material existence in the process of refinement of said Pristine Awareness (which is the substrate of the Universe) that it might awaken to its Self.
The intuitive recognition of the oneness of existence in precocious individuals made religious mysteries inevitable, and filling in the blanks of knowledge in a pre-science world necessitates well constellated mythologies. And in all of this we find the thread of the Universe's appetite for Self-Recognition.
Just as there are mathematical geniuses, amongst the geniuses of all stripes we find religious geniuses. Religious geniuses do not invent anything: they see. And in the historical survey of religious genius we detect the budding fruition of self-recognition in Pristine Awareness. And just as one Einstein tills the field for ensuing mathematicians, a parrot can pronounce great truths.
On the Dogwood tree, every bud that will flower in the Spring is present when its leaves are dropped in the Fall. Those buds winter over and when the time is right they burst into flower in a matter of days.
Homo Sapiens is the rootstock for the emergence of Homo Sophians.
This blog of personal musings is certainly not about events in the world of the unenlightened, but it is so glaringly obvious that the animal faction of humanity is impervious to the majesty of the inevitable that they seem rather like an ant contemplating the toe of an elephant with aspirations and self importance.
I take it as a personal failing that I find this not only astounding, but a touch horrifying.
While the jungle is morally neutral, the foundational nature of Awareness in all creatures leads to emotional judgements that, while conflicting, are axiomatic: it is wrong to be hurt, it is wrong to be eaten, it is right to wield power, it is right to eat. Several thousand years ago a famous Greek wrote down that "The powerful do as they will. The weak endure what they must."
All animal behavior is an exploitation of its environment in pursuit of satisfaction of an organic need, and in the more complex creatures this includes complex needs that are psychologically driven. There is no behavior without motive whether it is scratching your nose or some act of tribal rapine.
As we survey the infusion of intelligence into animal existence through the vehicle of evolution we find the emergence of a remarkable property. We find the emergence of an intelligence capable of awakening to the Pristine Awareness which is the substrate of its existence, not to mention the essence of all life. One might say that the spirit of life-itself has awakened.
As long as the mind of humanity at-large enjoys the state of animal innocence, our societies will reflect the laws of the jungle.
