If you do not possess your Mind
it is you who are possessed
In Samadhi we find that Mind is a subordinate faculty of Pristine Awareness, and that Mind is the seat of animal identity. If Mind is not occupied by Awareness then it will most certainly come under the possession of squatters.
No-one has to tell an amoeba how to pursue, capture, and consume its prey. No-one has to teach a bird how to fly. No-one has to prompt a caterpillar to become a butterfly. And no lessons are needed to school humanity in the subtle arts of petty irritations, of vanity, and of tribal violence. What Carl Jung (d. 1965) referred to as the Unconscious Mind is no less than a minefield of instinct: stimulus-response patterns that determine the moment to moment behavioral repertoire in every living organism.
Consciousness has created a situation wherein the creature subject to these impulses says "I" do this. "I" feel this way. "I" want that. The "I" of these pronouncements is a chimera devoid of any individuality other than proximal.
There is a Self that is real, that is fundamental and common to every living thing, and which can awaken to become the arbiter of a given life. Pristine Awareness is the stuff of life and Pristine Awareness is the primordial substrate of consciousness. And in some examples of humanity Pristine Awareness is capable of awakening (just the right word) and charting a path through the minefield of animal existence. The mind has become the wish fulfilling gem, and the body the magic carpet.
This awakening is as natural as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, and is a natural flowering of the tree of life.
If in meditation we simply let consciousness contemplate Awareness we encounter Pristine Awareness as receptive emptiness. This "receptive emptiness" is the storehouse of all potential and is in fact the Self itself.
Meditation is the brick with which we knock at the door.
The cake icings of yesteryear were made of sugar and lard and were applied to make the cake more attractive visually and culinarily. And in just such a manner the technologies of being developed by millennia of intuitive individuals come to us larded with mythologies and sweetened with tales of transcendence.
This is what Lin Chi (d 866) was getting at with his:"If in your travels you meet the Buddha, SLAY HIM!"
In meditation simply let consciousness contemplate Awareness.
The Self is a droplet of Awareness with an inside and an outside.
Our humanity is a garment woven by aeons of Self "improvement"
.
No aspect of the living world is indifferent.
and
Awareness does not require or imply mind.
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 possible its continued existence, 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.
Should the mind of a lion awaken it will 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 of 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 an awakened moment it the fabric of existence. 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 and 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 awakening of Pristine Awareness while attending to all that is demanded 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.
