What Do People Want

What ever they want it is it is certainly not Enlightenment. There is too much to lose and Nothing to gain. The normal mind has absolutely no awareness of it's investment in cultural trivia and biological make work. And that's OK. Most human beings are unprotesting, hardworking, innocent examples of animal nature. They expect and wish for no more. Sharing the instinctual attitude of all mammals is absolutely without blame. It is what we are and it would be grossly fascistic to expect otherwise.

Hmmm.

Imagine That

The view that emerges with Enlightenment is beyond the reach of imagination, for imagination is left with shuffling the cards of the known. The world encountered with the dropping of the veils of creature hood and culture-ization is devoid of imagination. When Rinzai made his famous pronouncement "If in your travels you meet the Buddha, slay him." this is what he was referencing. You have an imagination about Buddha and about Enlightenment. This is an intractable impediment to freedom. And of course the popular imagining is of Enlightenment as something gained, rather than a catastrophic collapse of the psychology of adornment.

Its OK to be a human being. Humanity is the soil the Universe has gone to such lengths to cultivate that it might discover it's Self. When the ancients said "Even the rocks and trees will become enlightened" they meant it.


Many are called, few are chosen, and that's OK. Imagination is the perfect armor against the Real, and is the core of civilization as we know it: the wish fulfilling gem is in the hands of naive children and dangerous adolescents.


"Meditation is the brick with which we knock at the door."

Meditation as Field, Zen as Flower

It is not uncommon that an individual experience a spontaneous breakthrough to Awareness only to lose that opportunity for a shift in being, in a drift back to normalcy. They had an "experience". For what ever reason they slipped into the experience of a higher reality. This "experience" is remembered like a dream, and they go on about their lives unchanged.

Meditation is a preparation just like the tilling of a field. Without the cultivation of emptiness the natural press of creature hood will subsume the seeds of Enlightenment when they spontaneously emerge.

An ancient master once remarked "Meditation is the brick with which we knock at the door".

History

There are several threads that run concomitantly in stitching the fabric of history. It is no accident that mankind is the most successfully violent creature on earth. And it is also inevitable that the intelligence fueling that violence evolve to the state of self contemplation.

It is thought by some that the reason we hear no voice when we listen for a call of life from distant stars is that those creatures aggressive enough come to dominate their home planet destroy themselves as soon as they have the necessary technology. Be that as it may, it can be seen that as that intelligence which fuels violence sprung from the darkness of the earth swells to it's crescendo, a counter punctual light of self realization, spontaneously struck by that same intelligence, begins to glow.

That glow is the universe awakening to its self. We call it Enlightenment.


Meditate.

Existence

All existence is material existence: a  stone, an electromagnetic wave, an idea: material existence. The material existence which is the fabric of the universe exists in sublime simultaneity. The field of play of this sublime simultaneity is nothingness. All things are enfolded in nothingness, and therefore in communion.

Meditate.

Time of the Seasons

All creatures have a time of seasons within a season. In our season as human creatures we will experience the seasons due our humanity and within that ebb and flow, mature according to the sway of fate and destiny.

We find in some creatures a culture passed down through generations that cannot be recreated whole cloth anew. When mountain goats were reintroduced to precipitous environments from which they had been extirpated the results were disappointing. They fell to their deaths. It was discovered that mountain goats "learned" the mountain from their forbearers, and that without such learning the mountain was as treacherous for them as for any other newcomer.

With the advent of written language and the technical advances of publishing, the wisdom accrued through all of the seasons of humanity is available to almost anyone. It is to fate and destiny which narration of path will strike a chord in the season of a given individual.

The path leading to the awakening of Awareness is seldom trod, and for those with talent and potential there are many diverting byways in which to pass the sunny days of one's season.


And after all, Time is the first and foremost illusion.

The Problem With Enlightenment

The problem with enlightenment is that it means what ever the user of the word wants it to mean. When we speak of the Supreme Enlightenment which is the awakening of Buddha Nature, the problem with enlightenment is that aspirants imagine themselves becoming spiritually accelerated people. The fact is that their imaginings are like unto a driver imagining him or her self as a fancier car.

The problem with Enlightenment is that what has become known as Buddha Nature transcends not only our humanity, but our existence as animals.  So how is an animal that imagines Enlightenment as an adornment to it's humanity ever to cross to the other shore?

An ancient Master once remarked that it is like a mosquito trying to pierce an iron bull. He then went on to describe how simple it is.

Default Settings

Emotions provide the default settings for animal interactions. Less intelligence is required of their state, thus their limited intellect is usually sufficient to flow into a resolution of what ever situation has aroused a spontaneous emotional response. Most humans exist at this same primitive level of problem solving.

Emotions are a powerful smokescreen when it comes to the magic of intuition.


The coldest measure of this observation that I have found in the literature is this comment by an ancient master.


"The mind should be like a withered stick."

The Narrative of Enlightenment

All animals are born into the web of their genetic imperatives. They feed, they breed, they die. And with any luck at all they experience the simple joys which are their portion. Humans, in addition to the ancient tides of nature, are born into a narrative. A colorful brocade cloaks every aspect of our naked being. Politics, religion, wars and the peace which wars bring, are examples of the narratives of social anthropology. We subscribe to the narrative because it presses it's self upon us in an avalanche of ways, and because it is the only world we know.



Enlightenment must endure a narrative just as an iron skillet must have a handle.

Thought Forms and the Memes of Consciousness

The normative state of the human creature is one wholly identified with it's process, which is to say that thought forms created and harbored are not recognized as artificial constructs. The life of all humans, such as it is, is the reflection of thought forms created spontaneously in the flux of the mind's passage through the vicissitudes of existence. The mind generally does not recognize that what shows up as "idea" is an actual self created field form in the tissue of the brain, so Awareness becomes shrouded in what were termed by the ancient masters of Zen as "creepers". These "creepers" vine on Awareness as the Strangler Fig vines upon a tree to the point that the tree is lost to life.

Thought forms manifest powerful efficacies for good or for ill, and there is no form of any kind without it's requisite inevitabilities.

When Awareness is awakened as the host of mental processes, thought forms are recognized as guests. Some guests bring gifts, and some bring sorrows. Some guests are to be welcomed and some are to be banished. But none are to be permitted to subsume the authority of the host.

This is precisely the difficulty when one succumbs to the memes of "consciousness". Consciousness is a state of excitation in the field of Awareness, and if our primary identity is that of consciousness the riches of Awareness are correspondingly inaccessible.

Do the Math

Unless we start counting from zero all of our subsequent calculations will be some degree of invalid.

Meditation's greatest fruit is the discovery of the Self beneath and above the worldly animal. Awareness, un-configured and receptive, is the true substrate of all life. Consciousness is Awareness configured through the vehicle it occupies, and is generally fournd wholly identified with it's creature. Meditation properly silences the noise of the animal, making possible the awakening of the Universe in it's progeny as the self discovers Awareness.

Unless we start counting from zero all of our subsequent calculation will be some degree of invalid.

Purity

We find the antique tribalism of human nature vulnerable to an appreciation of what could be called "PURITY". This "purity" expresses it's self as prowess in it's rainbow of manifestation. Prowess in action and prowess in inaction. The purity of religious zealots and the purity of athletic geniuses excite the same kind of fervor in vulnerable individuals. And this is because these achievements require the kind of purposeful self abnegation and purposeful self exploitation that admiring individuals find lacking in themselves.

This is all fine and dandy except that it leads to posturing and self inflation and a well deserved sense of failure.

Enlightenment is not about achievement

Enlightenment is simply recognizing what is.


Purity is a tortured path to oblivion paved with imagination.

The pursuit of excellence is, however, an all together different matter.

Playing the Game

We must play the game or most surely the game will play us. The world into which we are born has been made inevitable by accidents of nature. The rhymes and the reasons of our culture are mechanical as an old fashioned alarm clock, but born into the tick-tock tick-tock we play our part in this shadow world saying "I" to the springs and the gears, and to the time.

It is not surprising that some minds rebel against the stacked deck that is life its self, but rebellion is a tragic waste of precious existence. The path to Enlightenment is unobstructed but by the normal faculties of mind. And should that Awareness, which is everywhere the true substance of life, awaken to become the master of the consciousness it has created, everything is just as it was, is now, and ever shall be.

The Waves are the Water

It is not enough to quiet the mind. The essence of ones being is met when Awareness forbears the creation of mind. Mind is a necessary tool to the processes of life, and basking in the instinctual satisfactions that the mind provides is just fine. But mind is not the true self. Mind is the basket weaver of illusions. The narratives that dominate human existence (for better or worse) are phantasms made flesh. When Awareness wakens to its Self it is as if we had always known.

The waves are the water.

The Importance of Being Ernest

All culture is imagined into being. We are born into the world made inevitable by the imaginations of our forebears, and the starkly arbitrary nature of the forms of daily existence exist as norms to us. The long shadow threatening to extinguish life as we know it, is the direct spawn of the human imagination acting in the sway of unacknowledged, and therefore unperceived, primitive archetypes to which humanity en-mass has said "I".

Enlightenment is no longer a luxury good in the shop of human choices.  Enlightenment is our only hope.

The Finger Pointing at the Moon

A certain kind of Zen has broken away from it's religionist roots, and with all due respect to traditional Buddhism, has established a frontier in universal Enlightenment.

Simply stated most people aren't really interested in the moon. What they want is a confidence inspiring finger pointing at the moon. I was initiated into the Nichiren Sect in 1966, but it was encountering Zen as delineated by D T Suzuki that some ten years later I came to understand the true seismic significance of the historical Buddha. Suzuki has been pilloried as a heretic by some Buddhist religionist. The second patriarch of Zen Buddhism was allegedly executed as a heretic at the insistence of Buddhist dogmatist when in his 90s about 1,400 years ago.

At the time of the extinguishment of the dinosaurs the largest mammals were about the size of rats. To consider the emergence of an awakened life-form from the chemical inevitabilities that lead to life is to consider the fact of one's own awareness. The Awareness which is the substrate of our own consciousness was present in our progenitors, and exists in us through a unbroken chain of sexual transmission. The seed of life sends forth the vine and the flower of that vine is the Universe awakening to its self.

This is what Zen is.

Square One

With out doubt one of the stumbling blocks set before anybody genuinely interested in encountering the core of their own being is that in the literature and in the halls they will face a phalanx of antique terminology. Terms that may at one time had simple referential meanings have become romanticized: have ceased to have colloquial value and now carry a load of romantic baggage.

The facts are quite simple. Awareness is everywhere simply aware. It seems to be a field phenomenon and has no other properties. Mind is a state of excitation of this field and is peculiar to the form producing the field. Consciousness occurs when mind possesses some degree of state recognition.

There are degrees of consciousness. There are as many different minds as there are creature to produce them. Awareness is always and everywhere simply aware.

Awareness is.

Zen and Culture

Culture is in every case a drape over the simple imperatives of the animal that we are. The drape of culture creates a sense of place in the unformed jungle of genetic imperatives and is the inevitable press of knowing. Culture is not inherently good or bad, but the emergence of culture is inherently inevitable as the mind brings order to the perceived world.

The ultimate nature of Zen transcends culture. Where we find what might be called a culture of Zen we see the superficial accoutrements necessary to access, in the manner of signage that directs one to the nearest bathroom. This, and the fact that the immediate experience common to enlightened beings is one where the obvious is simply apparent, gives the appearance of culture where there is simply a direct accord with the obvious.

Those who drape themselves in a culture of Zen have configured Zen into a trap and a stumbling block. They are proudly stuck in costume at the door.


Of course there is another way of looking at this. Enlightenment transcends culture and Zen is a culture conducive to Enlightenment.

Let's Have an Idea: the Zen View

It is ridiculous to assume that Darwinian speciation ever does any thing but what it does. And what it does is select for inherent traits........why do you find them attractive? whom do you love?...some-one "beneath" you?.....some-one above you?  .....not to mention the simple fraud that all opinions tend to be.

It cannot be over stressed that all idea are imaginary. Second to that is the fact that the vast majority of ideas stem from some genetically driven proclivity to which the Awareness innocently subscribes.

Zen is the cosmic limit to which all "versions" are seen as the ideological frauds that they are.

The Urge and the Expression

There is no expression devoid of urge. That mind informed by Awareness, sitting at the wellspring of being, is not moved by the mechanical normalcy of inclination, but finds it's Self informed.

The Ghost in the Machine

Those souls which have awakened, have from the dawn of time sought ways to clear the path for those yet gestating in the womb of biological necessity. Our creaturely needs are a running scale of binomial satisfaction presided over by "The Ghost in the Machine".

What we find in religion is at its best a soup of metaphor and legend charged with clues to the irreducible mystery of being. "I am that which I am", "All sins forgiven but to sin against the Holy Ghost", "The Buddha's Pure Land": on and on these simple truths posses a facticity that belies their place in the folk narratives of religion. All of these cultural relics can be thought of as koans, and to solve one is to enter into the garden from which they all spontaneously spring forth.

One of my personal favorites is "The Ten Bulls". "The Ten Bulls" is an inspired allegory that when unwrapped reveals the "I am", the "Holy Ghost",  "The Buddha's Pure Land", and onward 'till dawn. Another personal favorite is "The Chocolate Buddha Box". There is no shortage of koan-like artifacts of religious lore. The path to Enlightenment is strewn with them. This is the breadcrumb path of "Handsel and Gretel" strewn with diamonds to guide one through the darkness of the forest: homeward.

Enlightenment is the inevitable denouement of the yearning of the first life that is everywhere all life: where all births are virgin births.

The Spiritual and the Secular

There is no "spiritual realm". There is no "secular". Providing words and definitions does not alter the fact that there exists one seamless reality. The materialist identification with surface makes these mental bifurcations inevitable, but they remain intellectual artifacts of a superficial nature. The degradation of our island planet is made to seem reasonable and inevitable only by the confused "secular" excuses of materialists.

When the blind will lead the blind, is not disaster to be expected?

What Zen Is and what Zen Is Not

Meditation and study are necessary requisites, but the great difficulty in conversing about Zen is that Zen is not a mere reconfiguration of the way we think. Zen is not an acquired set of behavioral patterns. Zen is not a mind set or an accumulation of knowledge. Zen is not an emotional or intellectual posture. Zen is not a discipline and can not be learned.

The great difficulty in conversing about Zen is that the realization of Zen is a transformation of being that leaves one a different kind of creature than one which was born of woman.

It is like a line explaining its self to a point. It is like the sublimation of ice into vapor. It is the spiritual equivalent of the metamorphosis we see in the lives of insects and amphibians.

It is like one without arms reaching out.




The truth of Zen is invisible because it is everywhere, and the Enlightenment of Zen is simply the obvious becoming apparent.

Politics

Some form of political activity is made inevitable by our existence as communal animals.

At its best politics is: serious minded individuals coming together in a collegial manner to address the guidance of communal wellbeing.

At its worst politics devolves to: intelligent sociopaths manipulating a naive polity for fun and profit.



Chuang Tzu remarked that in troubled times the enlightened being retires to private virtue.

"The Ten Bulls" Revisited: the Suchness of Awareness is Emptiness

Just as creatures living in the deepest ocean trenches have no sense of pressure because that pressure is ubiquitous, the mind has no recognition of Awareness. In the same manner as coffee or tea or lemonade are flavored water the mind is flavored Awareness. If the mind is some funny shaped balloon creation Awareness is the air inside, and the balloon's rubber skin the voice of animal nature. On the other hand, if Awareness was an empty box, mind would be its contents. If Awareness were clay, mind would be form. The waves are the water.

When Awareness awakens to its Self and becomes the seat of individual identity it is called Enlightenment. The word "enlightenment" suggests itself: for the creature involved, the experience is exactly the same as a light coming on in a previously dark room. The obvious becomes apparent: for this particular creature the chrysalis of creature-hood has split open to reveal a child of the Universe.


This is the transformation described in "The Ten Bulls" of Zen Buddhist lore.

The Suchness of Awareness is Emptiness.

The Mind Box

We exist in a sea of light

The mind makes boxes



Inside the box it is dark

Meaning and Zen

Life is the crucible in which material events achieve meaning.

Devoid of life, the Universe (while seething with events and eventualities) is devoid of meaning.

The central purpose of the exercises which comprise the mind set known as Buddhism is to uncover and to cultivate that prehuman core of immediate experience which is the foundation of life anywhere in the universe.

And then to live from that place fully aware.


This is the meaning of Zen.

Mindfulness and Enlightenment and Zen

An ancient master once remarked "Meditation is the brick with which we knock at the door"


It is encouraging to find "mindfulness" catching on, and the practice of "mindfulness" will have immediate benefits in the life of anyone who takes it up. That said it must be remarked that in Zen, meditation is the exercise that prepares the mind for the transformation of being that is known as Enlightenment.



The signature characteristic of the unenlightened is that their primary identity is still as Human.

The Wonder of Being

It is universally unrecognized that our existence has no explanation. All of the philosophies of tangled humanity try to explain the unexplainable: we exist.

The miracle of our moment is lost in the normalcy of our consciousness and the normalcy of existence subsumes Awareness of its incongruity in a material world.

Like children at the carnival we are hypnotized by the bright lights and festivities of creature-hood.


Zen (or its equivalent) would occur anywhere the Universe evolves to Self Awareness.

Buddhism and Zen

Buddhism and Zen are an accident to the Universe waking up to its Self in its progeny.

And should be seen as such.