Under the Streetlight

Perhaps you are familiar with the joke concerning the fellow who searched for his keys under a streetlight after losing them in the dark "because there is more light here". Well that is the perfect analogy for those who seek Enlightenment in the domains of the personality.

The Field of Enlightenment

The field form which is the substance of our individual awareness exists between "things". The thing we are born into has a library of forms that is ancient and sufficient to its natural needs. In the process of maturation this library of forms is enriched through the vehicle of experience, and experience exists as field shape in the tissue of the brain. Memory is an assuming by the field of awareness, previously known shapes using the architecture of the brain as a frame to stretch upon. Intuition is the action of forms suggesting themselves by association and by force of subtle external emanations.

The Enlightenment sought in Buddhism is no less than this field awakening and becoming the seat of Identity. The field of Awareness is not a material thing and exists in the space between things.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The highest fruits of Zen Buddhism transcend the human surface of our existence, and if you wish to preserve  your "humanity" don't mess with it.

Self Improvement

Self improvement. Just what are we improving? The self that excites the imagination of the sleeping creature that is the normal human being has limited claim to self at all.

What is the Who?



Self discovery will absolve the truth of our being from the burden of improvement.

Internal Affairs

Our inner state is not monolithic. There exist two distinct psychic entities the marriage of which results in what we call consciousness. One aspect of our inner life is ancient and one aspect is relatively young. The ancient aspect of what we imagine ourselves to be is Awareness free of all dispositions. The new aspect of our inner life is our humanity. Our humanity is a haze of dispositions.

That moment of existence which is experience, which says "I", is in fact simple Awareness. Awareness is usually found wholly identified with it's host: in this case, with it's humanity.

When Awareness begins to realize that it is being played, it spontaneously begins the arduous but enormously rewarding task of Self discovery.

The Ten Bulls and C. G. Jung

For those serious about Self discovery a survey of the work of Carl Jung is indispensable. His explications of the nature of the Collective Unconscious is a Grey's Anatomy of the process described in "The Ten Bulls" of Zen.

If we had a psychotropic transparency of the transformation described in "The Ten Bulls" and overlaid this with the awakening of Awareness accompanying realization of the Collective Unconscious as detailed by Jung, we would find total congruence. The bull is no less than the archaic structure upon which the personality is draped. The normal state of Awareness in any creature is total identification with the animal. The Awareness which is the essence of all life is totally hypnotized by instinct and says "I" to the impersonal antique prods of the form it inhabits. Physically. Emotionally. Intellectually. Awareness is possessed by the archaic tropisms of the animal.

All this would be just fine were we not so dangerously effective in all that we do.

Enlightenment is the second birth.


Enlightenment is that creature born of earth becoming a child of the Universe.

Signal to Noise

 


The vast majority of what passes through the human mind is instinct driven noise. The unaware individual innocently says "I" to the noise in their head leading to the world as we find it.


Oh well.



Having surrendered autonomy to instinct, Awareness is seduced by consciousness.




We find almost no other configuration.

The Animal and Zen

The animal is the ride, and it's a good ride, if you are born in the right place at the right time. But the animal is a provisional truth. How is one to call to those born into this barnyard to realize themselves at more fundamental level of existence.

Hans Christian Anderson in his simple parable "The Ugly Duckling" relates the evolution of those for whom realization is inevitable in wonderfully succinct terms, but I don't know of a nuts-and-bolts how-to guide for the mystified beginner.

Those who "see" are freaks from earliest childhood and will suffer the abysmal self doubt made inevitable because they are surrounded by the bizarrely self-confident blind.

Zen (the Zen of the patriarchs, not the Zen of religionists) is the only system I have found that leads to the wellspring of being.


Meditate

Enchantment and "The Ten Bulls"

The chrysalis of creature hood is spun in forms of enchantment. Enchantment is necessary to the perpetuation of form. Form is the womb of all becoming.


When that Awareness which is the essence of all life matures to the state of self recognition it is called Enlightenment.

The Tyranny of Ideas

There is no way to express the tyranny of ideas, for we are left with ideas as a mode of expression. Even Buddhism becomes a matrix of ideas. So we prostrate ourselves before wrenches and screwdrivers.


Hence the exotic ways of the ancient masters.

Creations of the Mind

When at last the obvious becomes apparent it will not be a creation of the mind.

Samadhi's Revelation

We return from that Samadhi where in our humanity has been successfully sublimated. Having been naked before the Universe we understand our humanity and our existence by having been to the wellspring of being.

If there were words to describe colors to the blind this could be aptly described.

Consciousness on the part of creatures large and small is inevitable, natural, and dis-associative. The very nature of creature-hood requires of Awareness a focus making inevitable the sense of individuation. The emergence of "I" from the field of Awareness is necessary to the survival of any living organism. And it is wholly to be expected that this dis-associative natural fabrication should dominate the sense of being.

Those who wish to live from the un-carved block of their being have only to slip the leash of consciousness in awakened full Awareness.


Meditate.

What is the Sexual Who

One of the difficulties elucidated in "The Ten Bulls" is the arduously achieved recognition of the collective-unconscious by that Awareness which is the true Self and the essence of all life, individual and collective. This Awareness made inevitable by our existence has no gender, has no opinions, has no habits. The creature-hood made inevitable by the structure of our antique brain is the domicile of the ancient scarecrow in whose psychological cloaks Awareness will drape its Self. We do not choose these things. The collective-unconscious is the template about which Awareness explains and arranges its experience. This is wholly impersonal, and when we innocently subscribe to the sway of the collective-unconscious, Awareness is hostage to the blind forces of nature: once again individually and collectively.

The un-enlightened, say "I" to these impersonal forces. "I" feel this. "I" am that. The "I" which is subject to these forces is the product of these forces in a self-reinforcing spiral of hypnotic fascination.

The great Awakening does not dispel the animal. The animal is the ride. Riding while asleep is almost certain to achieve less than optimal denouements.

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.