Church of the Churchless

Enlightenment: there's an iPhone app for that

Since I love my iPhone, and it can reliably guide me to earthly destinations, I figured that spiritual enlightenment also would be available via one of the many downloadable applications for this marvelous device.

And yes, it was. In the form of Guided Insight Meditation.

Buddha must have been looking out for me, because I came across this app on the very last day, October 17, that it was still free. (As of now, you'll have to fork out $2.99 for enlightenment. Plus the cost of an iPhone, if you've got bad karma and don't have one yet.)

I liked how most of the meditation lessons fit on a single iPhone screen. The introduction was a bit wordier, requiring some scrolling, but ended with an appealing offer.

Meditation is about developing your mind. It requires a significant amount of energy, determination, discipline and patience. The goal is awareness and concentration. The reward is real and unconditioned happiness, peace and a true understanding of what, why and how things are.

Cool. At least the reward part was.

I wasn't so wild about the significant amount part. Hey, this is an iPhone app! I assumed that Guided Insight Meditation should go as quickly and smoothly as everything else Apple'ish does.

So I was ready for instant enlightenment yesterday morning. I took my iPhone with me onto my meditation cushion, as I always do.

(Making my way past another level of Ragdoll Blaster each day is a big part of my spiritual path, for reasons that won't be understandable to anyone who hasn't experienced the mystic bliss of shooting ragdolls out of a cannon while figuring how to hit a target in a manner guided by immutable laws of physics.)

After dutifully spending five minutes or so reading about meditation misconceptions -- for example, I wouldn't be running away from reality, or, sadly, getting high -- and the correct attitude (accept yourself; experience everything; let go; and so on), I was ready for my guided meditation.

I pressed the "start session" button. A male voice led me through ten minutes of instruction.

I sent out loving feelings of kindness toward everyone and everything in existence (I wanted to make an exception for Fox News, but stifled the urge). I took three deep cleansing breaths. I followed my inhalations and exhalations. I was especially conscious of certain sensors in my nostrils (upper right corner of my right nostril seemed acutely breath aware).

Wanting to assure my rapid spiritual progress, I kept on meditating for ten minutes after the instruction stopped. Twenty minutes total. The timer on my iPhone chimed.

Yay! I was enlightened. Had to be! iPhone apps almost always work as promised.

It's difficult for me to convey what enlightenment is like. Just as Zen masters say, my life doesn't seem to have changed, in line with the adage "first there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is."

Yet obviously I now have a true understanding of what, why and how things are. This is what the Guided Insight Meditation app promised, and so this is what I must have achieved.

I'll do my best to remain humble, though this is difficult for me now that I know so much more about the cosmos than almost everyone else. If you don't believe me, consider this:

I am so enlightened, I don't even feel any difference from my previous unenlightened state. This shows that I've been enlightened from birth, a Bodhisattva. All the iPhone app did was make me aware of my pristine awareness.

I'm not sure what to do next. Traditionally, I gather I'm supposed to help all sentient beings attain Buddha-hood.

I was in an Apple store today and got to play briefly with an iPhone 3Gs, the most powerful iPhone ever. Seemingly my enlightenment would be even more enlightened if it was transmitted over a 3Gs rather than a mere 3G.

Unfortunately for all sentient beings, I'm not eligible to upgrade at a reasonable price for nearly another year.

"Sickest Buddhist" video spotlights spiritual hypocrisy

Oh, yeah, in my true believing days I knew people who were so damn proud of how humble they were. And who acted like jerks while preaching high-minded morality to others.

So I could relate to Arj Barker's slickly produced and smile inducing video where he raps out his claim to being the Sickest Buddhist. (embedded at end of this post)

You can read the lyrics if you can't understand all of them, thanks to YogaDork. Sample:

I’m the illest Buddhist you’ve seen
all the ladies wanna meditate with me
I look so serene when I bust a lotus
but i don’t have an ego so I wouldn’t even notice

I think of you before I think of myself
that’s probably why people think I’m so chill
But still I’m hell of intense
my clothes have little bells and they smell like incense

This stuff is funny. And also it isn't. Because it's so true.

I'm much more familiar with Eastern varieties of spiritual hypocrisy, because I was involved with organized yoga and meditation practice for about thirty-five years.

Now, I can understand the defense this Buddhist blogger offers up to the Sickest Buddhist video.

I want to say "Hey guys, did you read the paper today, the part where Goldman Sachs and Exxon screwed the entire planet 100 million times as badly as any confused Buddhist or yogi ever has? Did you hear the lyrics of the latest corporate rap song that reduces humanity to its most superficially glittering impulses for millions of young people to consume without a thought? Did you see how Republicans stonewalled on healthcare reform again? Then please stop talking about Buddhists and Yogis."

But the followers of any spiritual path or religion who can't laugh at its weirdnesses and excesses don't have a right to say, "please stop pointing those out to us." They should be the first to admit how bizarre dogmas, rituals, and such can be.

One of my prouder moments during my humble stage was helping a talented artist come up with Sant Mat cartoons that made gentle (or not-so-gentle, depending on one's sense of humor) fun of Radha Soami Satsang Beas devotees.

Buddhists should be thanking Arj Barker for bringing smiles to so many faces. Enjoy:

Sickest Buddhist from GenerateLA on Vimeo.

Where Buddhism & science coincide -- and divide

As noted before, I used to be a lot more attracted to Buddhism than I am now.

My churchless scientific leanings cause me to shy away from faith-based religiosity, and I've learned that while Buddhism talks a pretty good "spiritual science" game, the actual playing is lacking.

Owen Flanagan, a philosopher, explains why in his "The Really Hard Problem," a book I'm enjoying.

The really hard problem is how meaning is possible in the material world. To me it's obvious how this is done: each of us makes our own meaning, right here and right now. No metaphysics required.

However, religions want us to believe that the meaning of life is something to be discovered, not made. And that it exists in some unseen divine realm, not the physical universe.

Science relies on evidence, not faith.

Since there is no demonstrable evidence of a metaphysical reality, science doesn't accept that such exists. In like fashion, it doesn't make sense to found one's meaning of life on a non-existent base, which is what religion offers.

Now, Buddhism appeals to many who shun traditional religions because there's no belief in God or an eternal unchangeable soul. By and large, Buddhism is naturalistic.

This allows Flanagan, who has participated in efforts of the Dalai Lama to meld science and Buddhism, to say that Buddhist teachings about karma mostly are entirely in line with the theory of evolution.

What I have been calling the tame interpretation of karmic causation involves the conjunction of three uncontroversial ideas: (i) that sentient beings exist; (ii) that these beings engage in mentally initiated purposeful action, and (iii) that all the actions of sentient beings (intentional and unintentional) have abundant effects.

Absolutely.

As a sentient being I think, "Today I'll write another blog post about Flanagan's book." Then, I do it. And when other people read what I wrote, they will have mental reactions that cause them to engage in actions of their own, such as posting a comment, or flying off to another part of cyberspace with the thought, "Jeez, I can't believe how boring that was."

So far, so good on the Buddhism is compatible with science front. However, what Flanagan calls the "untame" Buddhist interpretation of karma divides them.

Because this wilder side of Buddhist philosophy posits that consciousness is non-material and survives the death of the physical body. So Flanagan says that a karmic reward and punishment system "juices" the psyches of future beings prior to their reincarnation.

What is meant by the idea of "the law of karma, by which an intentional act will reap certain fruits" is this: my consciousness does not die when my body does, it goes on and reaps in the next and possibly many (many) future lives what it sows in each antecedent life.

This, one might say, is simply what all eschatologies say in one form or another. So in order to make clear what makes karmic causation ^untamed especially distinctive, one might add: immaterial properties of sentient beings produce causal effects in the natural world, upstream, down the road, in the future.

Obviously it's unclear how this happens.

How does something immaterial affect materiality? For karma to make a difference in the physical world, seemingly DNA has to be modified, brain patterns affected, behaviors controlled.

Yet neuroscientists operate under the assumption that there is a neural correlate for every mental state, or subjective experience. This entirely reasonable perspective, given the evidence for it, is known as NCC -- neural correlates of consciousness.

Flanagan says that throughout a recent book by the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist leader "seems content with the idea that there are neural correlates for every mental state." However, this contentment isn't complete, as evidenced by this quote from the Dalai Lama:

Now I'd like to say more about the fundamental nature of the mind. There is no reason to believe that the innate mind, the very essential luminous nature of awareness, has neural correlates, because it is not physical, not contingent upon the brain. So while I agree with neuroscience that gross mental events correlate with brain activity, I also feel that on a more subtle level of consciousness, brain and mind are two separate entities.

Well, there's nothing wrong with having feelings.

But demonstrable evidence of the "luminous nature of awareness" doesn't exist. In fact, there is no way such proof could exist. So when Buddhist dogma separates brain and mind, a separation also occurs between Buddhism and science.

Here's the reason, as laid out by Flanagan. If essential consciousness has no physical effects, this makes it an epiphenomenon.

Meaning, it is meaningless to us, since consciousness is just there -- a fundamental property of reality like time or space that doesn't ever make any difference to anything, since it isn't a thing that can affect other things.

Flanagan writes:

According to the laws of physics (e.g., conservation laws), consciousness, if it is immaterial, can have no effects. None. If a Buddhist insists on operating with the assumption that the mind is immaterial and causally efficacious, his position is scientifically and philosophically unstable.

The neurophysicalist will claim that the thesis that mind is not embodied undermines the very idea that "mind-training," conceived non-naturalistically, could yield any of the promised changes in the life of an embodied Earthly being.

...The view that immaterial stuff or properties can cause anything to happen is an idea, which despite numerous noble efforts no one one has ever been able to make sense of. The idea that it is possible is inconsistent with all known scientific law.

Yes, indeed. Such wisdom reminds me of me (not surprisingly, given my non-realization of egoless Buddha nature).

I said that God is good for nothing. Consciousness also, it seems. God and/or essential immaterial consciousness may exist, but there is no evidence that either makes any difference in the physical world.

Great news for my Wu Project. If nothing is real, it really is nothing.

On giving up Buddhism and Zen

My churchlessness must be heading into even deeper irreligious territory, because lately I've been enjoying criticisms of some minimally churchy spiritual systems -- such as Buddhism -- that I used to identify with.

The problem I'm having with Buddhism is that it really doesn't deliver on the promise I often have heard from Buddhists: "You don't need to believe anything; just study your own mind and observe what is experienced in meditation."

Well, that sounds good. But actually there's a pretty extensive list of preconceptions in this supposedly conceptionless faith.

Reincarnation or rebirth. Karma. Non-existence of the self. The four noble truths (including "life is suffering").

Buddhists aren't genuinely open-minded about what they'll find when they look within their minds. Expectations about what will be learned through meditation are quite narrowly bounded, not expansive.

For example, it's unlikely that one's satori will be recognized as valid if the big realization is:

"I discovered that the more I think about the past and future, rather than being in the present, the more content I am. So now I just let my thoughts roam wherever they want to. To hell with this be here now crap. There-and-then is the place to be."

Today I came across a piece by John Horgan about why he gave up Buddhism. I could resonate with much of what Horgan said. Such as...

But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation. Buddha's first step toward enlightenment was his abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism) still exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual. From this perspective, the very concept of enlightenment begins to look anti-spiritual: It suggests that life is a problem that can be solved, a cul-de-sac that can be, and should be, escaped.

Horgan has written widely about mysticism and religion from a properly skeptical scientific perspective. Check out his web site. There are links to some interesting articles on the right side.

One is "Why I Gave Up Zen." It describes how he became disillusioned with Buddhism in a different fashion from his other essay. I could identify with this bit of rebellion against self-discipline:

Then I rebelled against this drill sergeant in my head. This exercise in self-discipline is absurd. Every time I order myself to be here now I’m not being here now. I’m thinking about being here now. It’s self-defeating from the start, like trying to remember to forget. In heeding the command, I violate it.

More and more, it seems to me that no organized spiritual practice is going to lead anywhere other than where we already want to go.

Meaning, we search out a religion, meditation approach, mystical system, or metaphysical philosophy that matches up with what we believe to be true. So long as our beliefs remain in sync with the teachings we've embraced, all is well and good.

But when our experience doesn't dovetail with dogma, we refashion the teachings to relieve the discrepancy. If the gap gets too large, then we say "Adios" to the organization and seek a faith that does a better job of validating us.

But why join a group in the first place, if all we're looking for is validation of what we already believe?

Horgan discusses this nicely in "Keeping the Faith in My Doubt." He ends with:

Instead of banding together, maybe we unbelievers should set an example by going in the opposite direction. We should renounce all isms that claim to speak for our most profound personal beliefs. Or rather, since we seem to be headed in this direction anyway, each unbeliever could create his or her personal ism with its own name. Since Universism is taken, I’ll call mine “Horganism.” You can revile it, admire it, or ignore it, but you can’t join it.

"Mind in the Balance" unfairly slams science

Bummer. I thought I was going to enjoy B. Alan Wallace's "Mind in the Balance," since the subtitle points to an intriguing subject: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity.

But the book turned out to be a disappointment, largely because Wallace is disturbingly anti-science and pro-religion, which shows that Buddhists can believe with blind faith in weird stuff just as other religious fundamentalists do.

Right away I saw inklings of this. A sentence on page 1 had me nodding agreeably with Wallace:

What's been hidden is meditation's role as a precision tool for exploring consciousness and the universe scientifically -- that is, using empirical methods similar to those intrinsic to the scientific method.

But on page 2, the author starts to show his religious spots.

We generally think of religion as simply an attitude based on faith in authority ("Jesus or Mohammed or Moses said 'X,' so I believe 'X.'"), and carelessly lump together those who believe without question the revelations of religious authorities and "religious groups" that question and explore in hopes of confirming and directly experiencing religious phenomena. There is a huge difference between the two.

Well, theoretically perhaps.

But in practice, I've found that groups claiming to practice an experimental "spiritual science" or "science of the soul" don't really follow the scientific method.

Meaning, the questioning and exploring referred to in the quote above never results in any disconfirming of a cherished belief, or a marked change in a group's teachings, whereas science is continually revising and refining theories based on experimental evidence.

Buddhists often talk a good game -- I like how the Dalai Lama says that if science disproved some tenet of Buddhism, it would have to be given up -- but "Mind in the Balance" presents Buddhism as a faith-based religion, which turned me off.

Example: I can sort of understand what "brightly shining mind" might be like (this supposedly is primordial consciousness, the mind of the Buddha). Maybe it is possible to experience this through the Buddhist meditation practices described in the book.

But many Buddhists also believe in a bodily transformation that is a whole lot less believable.

The culmination of the path of the Great Perfection is the realization of the "rainbow body," in which one's body allegedly dissolves into shimmering, multicolored light at death. If the theory of reincarnation stretches the scientific imagination, the Buddhist assertion of the rainbow body transcends all bounds of credulity for many people in the modern world.

That's for sure. Count me as one of those whose credulity has been stretched to the breaking point.

Given Wallace's assertion that Buddhism is a religion committed to confirming religious phenomena, I figured that he'd offer up some evidence of "one's body vanishes at death like a rainbow disappearing into the sky" and "the material body of the contemplative decreases in size until it finally vanishes without leaving any trace of the body or mind behind."

Nope.

All he does is repeat claims that this has been seen by Tibetan Buddhists, and says that Jesus' resurrection could be an instance of a physical body turning into a rainbow body.

Then Wallace says:

We may never know whether the Christian resurrection can be understood in Buddhist terms, but it is possible to put the Buddhist assertion regarding the rainbow body to the test of experience.

Great. Let's put video cameras and neutral scientific observers next to the death beds of advanced Buddhist practitioners and document what happens. Does the physical body disappear?

But this isn't the sort of test Wallace is talking about. It's pretty clear that by experience he means something else -- seemingly a subjective personal "step-by-step path of purification."

So there is no evidence confirming a Buddhist dogma, the dissolving of the physical body at death into a "rainbow body," that could easily be tested by scientific methods. Yet Wallace speaks of this being "an extraordinary challenge to many religious and scientific assumptions that limit the human imagination today."

Wrong.

Obviously the human imagination is alive and kicking in religious minds, which account for the vast majority of human minds on Earth. True believers such as Wallace accept all kinds of strange ideas, such as the rainbow body and Jesus' resurrection, without demonstrable evidence.

All science does is put imaginings to reasonable tests, if they are held out as reflecting objective reality rather than a subjective thought, emotion, or perception.

Wallace's version of Buddhism is annoyingly unscientific. He uncritically accepts religious beliefs, such as the rainbow body and reincarnation, on faith, and also makes unfounded claims that Buddhism knows more about physical reality than science does.

For example:

Thus at conception there is a confluence of the genetic information received by way of the egg and sperm of one's parents and the past-life information received by way of the life force. The interface between the two represents the interface between the scientific theory of evolution and the Buddhist theory of karma.

Well, that's interesting.

Wallace is on his way to a Nobel prize if he could back up that assertion. But of course, he can't. Wallace merely presents a Buddhist dogma as if it was fact, going on to talk about how karma supposedly manifests in the lives of humans and animals. 

Here's another faith-based assertion:

So, from a contemplative perspective, this extraordinary claim about the physical nature of consciousness appears to be utterly unsupported by all the scientific and personal evidence available.

Again, absolutely wrong. I have no idea what the guy is talking about.

Hasn't Wallace heard about anesthesia, persistent vegetative states, neurological injuries, MRI scanners, and other evidence that the physical brain and consciousness are exceedingly intimately connected? If not identical.

Sure, subjective states can't be measured objectively. That's obvious, both philosophically and scientifically. That's a far cry, though, from asserting that Buddhists know human consciousness survives bodily death.

And they have discovered that ordinary states of consciousness actually emerge not from the brain but from such subtle, nonphysical continuua of consciousness that do not cease at death.

No, they haven't.

Every Buddhist contemplative who supposedly has made this discovery has been alive at the time. How the heck can someone know that his or her consciousness doesn't cease at death when they're not dead?

I found a little to like in "Mind in the Balance," but not much.

The meditation exercises were familiar to me. I kept penning question marks with my highlighter in the margins, because Wallace so often made dogmatic religious statements without a shred of evidence to back them up.

The main thing I learned from this book is that Buddhism really is a religion. I've tried to view it as a philosophy based on direct experience of one's own mind/consciousness, not on theological precepts accepted on faith.

But it's clear that Wallace, who is a long-time Buddhist monk ordained by the Dalai Lama, sees meditation merely as a means of confirming the teachings of Buddhism. If a meditator doesn't experience what Wallace believes is true, he or she is doing something wrong.

This isn't spiritual science. It is dogmatic religion disguised with a flimsy covering of a pseudo-scientific method.

If you're interested in non-religious Buddhism, there are plenty of alternatives to "Mind in the Balance." A couple of my favorites are "Buddhism Without Beliefs" and "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness."

Buddhism and Taoism deconstruct religion

Even when I was young, a pre-teen, I was attracted to Taoist and Buddhist imagery. During my first visit to San Francisco's Chinatown at about the age of twelve, I bought a bunch of scrolls and artwork showing sages wandering on misty mountain paths.

Where the heck did that immediate attraction for a philosophy I knew nothing about come from? I have no idea. But it was a premonition of things to come.

Because now my churchlessness has evolved to the point where Taoist and Buddhist writings are just about the only kind of spiritual literature that my psyche can stomach. And even with these genres, occasionally I get turned off by excessive dogmatism.

On the whole, though, philosophical Buddhism and Taoism are pleasantly compatible with a churchless frame of mind.

The book I've been blogging about recently (see here and here) helps explain why.

Jim Powell's "Deconstruction for Beginners" contains a nice description of how Taoism and Buddhism undermined the traditional religiosity of Hinduism and other logocentric faiths.

I like Powell's way of saying things so well, I'll let quotes from his book speak for his point of view and not try to paraphrase him. Here he talks about the first Hindu skeptics who appeared in what is now India.

They began to question everything Hindu. In fact, sometimes they would eat the flesh of dead men or would meditate atop a corpse. And instead of chanting Om, and instead of seeking for Brahman -- the essence of everything -- they began to question if anything has an essence -- if Brahman even exists. They questioned everything -- using riddles.

And from among this group of skeptics emerged a young prince, Siddartha Gotama, who was to become known as the Buddha. The Hindus had believed that the soul or Atma was identical with Brahman or God, and that it was eternal. But Buddha taught that all things are impermanent, and that there is no soul.

...Buddha paved the way for Asia's greatest Indian philosopher, who was to be called "The Second Buddha." His name was Nagarjuna, and many modern scholars have found that his philosophy has much in common with Derrida's "deconstruction."

Powell then discusses this familiar optical illusion. Is it a white cup? Or two black faces?

The important point is that we cannot see both the cup and the faces simultaneously. Each image appears to possess svabhava or self-essence. Each image appears to be a self-sufficent, self-existent, discrete image. But they don't possess self-essence!

There is an intimate, subtle relationship between the faces and the cup. One cannot exist without the other. They depend on each other. According to Nagarjuna, we tend to think in terms of such dichotomies (or binary opposites).

For instance, the Hindus thought the Universe is made of up of this pair: (1) An eternal spiritual Self (Atman or Brahman) and (2) a Non-Self, made up of Matter. This fundamental dichotomy lies at the basis of all Hindu experience. But the Buddhist will say that neither the Self nor the Non-Self is substantial.

A fundamentalist Christian or Muslim will also think in terms of such dichotomies. He will claim that only his religion is true, and that every other religion is myth or of the devil. As Derrida and Nagarjuna have shown, we tend to form these dichotomies (binary opposites) and to favor one member of the pair. Either Christian or Muslim.

But the cup and the faces are not separate. Each image is in a subtle and intimate relationship with its hidden partner. Though they cannot be seen at the same time, neither of them exists alone. Neither of them possesses svabhava or self-existence.

In fact you could say that they are Empty of Self-existence. This does not mean that they don't exist, or that they don't appear. Emptiness just means that the illusion of their separateness is a mirage.

...Ordinary people are like the magician's audience. They assume that everything has self-existence. They become emotionally and intellectually attached to the "things" they perceive. Thus, most people see only the ordinary level of truth (samvritisatya).

Those who see the Emptiness of things are like the magician -- he sees the same things, but from a different point of view. He knows that things are empty of a fixed, self-existent nature. He simply perceives things accurately. Thus he sees the Ultimate level of truth (para-marthasatya).

And even the concept of these two levels of truth is empty of self-existence! For if you cling to the concept of an Ultimate Truth, then IT becomes the lower, Conventional Truth!

Then Powell talks about someone -- Coyote, say -- gazing into a pool of water and seeing his own image, but thinking that it is the real unreflected Coyote.

But then you suddenly realize that the reflection is not what it appears to be. This does not mean the reflection does not exist. The reflection now seems to be an illusion only because you had believed it was the real you.

But now you know that the reflection in the pool does not have self-existence. After all, the reflection depends upon the pool, the eyes, mind and presence of the real Coyote. But this doesn't mean that you abandon the reflection. It is still useful to you for admiring yourself, etc.

The reflection is like the Lower Conventional Truth. And realizing it is only a reflection, devoid of self-existence, is like the Higher Truth. According to Nagarjuna, everything in the world is like the reflection of the mirror.

Taoism gets less attention than Buddhism in Powell's book. The deconstructive power of Taoist teachings is just as great, however, because Taoist sages similarly clear away dualistic oppositions that clog up human minds.

There isn't any room for conventional religious dichotomies -- body/soul, God/man, heaven/earth, virtue/sin -- in Chuang Tzu.

Nothing exists which is not "that," nothing exists which is not "this." I cannot look at something through someone else's eyes. I can only truly know something which I know. Therefore "that" comes out of "this" and "this" arises from "that." That is why we say that "that" and "this" are born from each other, most definitely.

Compare birth with death, compare death with life; compare what is possible with what is not possible and compare what is not possible with what is possible; because there is, there is not, and because there is not, there is.

...When "this" and "that" do not stand against each other, this is called the pivot of the Tao. This pivot provides the center of the circle, which is without end, for it can react equally to that which is and to that which is not.

...To use a finger to show that a finger is not a finger, is not really as good as using something that is not a finger to show that a finger is not a finger; to use a horse to show a horse is not a horse is not as good as using something other than a horse to show that a horse is not a horse.

Heaven and Earth are as one as finger is, and all of creation is as one as a horse is.

Zen minus Buddhism equals Taoism

Becoming “churchless” doesn’t mean that someone has given up the search for meaning in life. Quite the opposite.

Speaking personally -- as if I had a choice -- I don’t feel that the intensity of my quest for ultimate answers concerning the nature of the cosmos has lessened a bit since I turned away from organized religion and spirituality. 

All that has changed is the style of my search. I’m more open now to wandering in the open fields of mysticism and philosophy, being less concerned about staying on a well-defined path.

Still, I enjoy learning about how other pathless (or semi-pathless) wanderers look upon reality from their vantage point. I don’t want to follow in someone else’s footsteps, but it’s nice to meet up with like-minded travelers for a friendly get-together around a literary campfire.

These days, when I walk into a bookstore or browse through my own library I usually head for the Taoism and Buddhism sections. This is where my churchless soul finds the most Yes, Yes, Yes resonance.

So Ray Grigg’s “The Tao of Zen” is right up my reading alley, since it features a discussion of both philosophical systems.

I’ve read the book several times. Each re-reading offers up new insights, with some thoughts popping out of a page with much greater vigor than before.

Browsing through “The Tao of Zen” the past few days, I’ve been struck by the distinction Griggs makes between (1) Zen, and (2) Zen Buddhism. I’ve tended to see these terms as being virtually synonymous. But there’s good reason to argue that genuine Zen has little if anything to do with Buddhism.

And a lot to do with Taoism.

Makes sense to me. I’m a big fan of philosophical, as opposed to religious, Taoism. I also enjoy Zen literature, unless it is heavily tainted with the religious side of Buddhism.

Grigg’s notion is that Zen minus Buddhism equals Taoism. Or at least is virtually identical.

Ch’an [Zen] then, when understood without the overlay of Buddhism -- when its Indian element is removed -- is almost indistinguishable from Taoism. In personality, philosophy, and intellectual character,  Ch’an without Buddhism is almost identical to Taoism.

As much as I’m attracted to Buddhism, the most churchless world religion, it’s other-worldly aspect often leaves me with a Huh?

I mean, Buddhist meditation practice emphasizes mindfulness in the here and now. Yet much of Buddhist philosophy stresses the goal of detaching from this illusory world of maya, getting off the wheel of rebirth, and experiencing some sort of transcendent reality.

This reading time around, some previously non-highlighted passages in “The Tao of Zen” got a heavy dose of yellow.

For Taoists such release from ego is a means of reconnecting to wisdom and body of Earth, to the Great Mother; for Buddhists it is a way of disconnecting from the burden of samsara, the “Wheel of Life.”

...For Buddhism, however, enlightenment creates a metaphysical disconnectedness; for Taoists it creates an earthy reconnectedness. At a superficial level the two forms of awakening seem similar. Both cultivate an attitude of separation, of detachment, but at a deeper level they are quite different.

For Buddhism the separation is an objective; for Taoism it is a means. Buddhism separates from the world to transcend it; Taoism dissolves back into the world to become one with it. Later, in Japanese Zen Buddhism, this difference is clearly expressed in the distinction between Buddhist and Zen attitudes.

I’ve always liked the Buddhist adage, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” So nicely non-fundamentalist. You won’t find many Christians advising, “If you meet Jesus, kill him.” They’re eager to have Jesus return, not to get rid of him.

Griggs, though, writes:

Killing the Buddha comes from the Zen in Buddhism, not from the Buddhism in Zen Buddhism. The aphorism illustrates the polarity of difference between Zen and Mahayana Buddhism.

Why is it important for Buddhists to kill the Buddha? Or for Christians to kill Jesus, for Muslims to kill Muhammad, for Jews to kill Moses, for Taoists to kill Lao Tzu, for Sikhs to kill Guru Nanak, or for adherents of any other religion to kill the founder or current  leader? (metaphorically, of course -- this is a killing of outwardly directed devotion and intellectuality, not of a body)

Because natural reality doesn’t have well-defined boundaries, whereas human belief systems do. So if we want to know what’s real, we have to kill the artificial concepts and forms that obscure our universal vision.

Both Taoism and Buddhism experience from within systems of understanding that must finally negate and abandon themselves; both practices can only happen when they are free of the constraints of themselves.

Much of Taoist literature is an admonishment against becoming caught in any system, whether moral, political, philosophical, linguistic, or religious. With such freedom, belief is replaced by experience. A traditional Buddhist dialogue reflects the same principle:

The Buddha was asked, “Are you God?”
“No,” he said.
“Well, then, what are you?”
“Awake,” said the Buddha.

To become a pure Buddhist, a Buddhist must ultimately renounce Buddhism just as the Buddha renounced self and all attachment. This principle pervades Taoism as well. Taoists cannot live Taoism if they hold to the system called Taoism.

Individuals who practice either Taoism or Buddhism are inevitably inclined toward inconspicuousness and, finally, invisibility as the system that contains them dissolves itself.

Nice.

Churchlessness isn’t viewed as a movement away from “divinity” in Zen and Taoism. Rather, it is a necessary step toward it. Which in the end is realized as being exactly where each of us is now.

But wandering can teach us a lot. Mainly, I’ve found, that no matter how many different places I go to, I always find the same person there.

Search for happiness (and self) called off

A few years ago I laughed my way through an Onion piece, "Search for Self Called Off After 38 Years." Then I wrote a blog post about the notion, saying that some friends and I had just been talking along the same lines.

I told them that when I peruse my extensive personal library, searching for some spiritual inspiration, usually the only books I can stand to read have Buddhist, Zen, or Taoist themes. All the rest seem too damn dogmatic now.

Buddhists and Taoists don’t waste much energy searching for a true self because they don’t believe that it exists. At least, they’re not sure whether it does. If it pops up and says “Hi!” one day, they’ll welcome the company. But they don’t agonize over finding a self that is different from the self that would be doing any finding.

This relates to the question we've been talking about here of whether there are universal mystical principles. I argued, "No," because there's a big divide between teachings that posit a soul or self and those like Taoism and Buddhism that don't.

If we have a real self that has been covered up by gobs of illusory ego-crap, then our goal should be to restore that divine cosmic gem to its original shining glory.

However, what if our problem is believing there's a problem with our self? This kicks our spiritual pursuit up into another philosophical or epistemological level, as Barry Magid talks about in his marvelous book, "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness."

Magid is a Zen teacher, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. I'm only a few chapters into his book, but already have found a whole lot to wrap my churchless non-self around. Here he relates the idea of "self" to that of "time."

I owe this example to the early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who cited Augustine's puzzlement about time as highlighting a very basic problem in philosophy, a problem that also emerges when we imagine that there is something somehow hidden from us about the "true nature" of anything.

...Adding to Wittgenstein's list of misleading substantives [like "the secret of consciousness" or "the essence of truth"], it seems to me that the Buddha was telling us that the most important and misleading of all is the word "self."

...Which is the "true" self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray. Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there's another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for.

Maybe there is.

But if there isn't, then our "spiritual" practice (Magid, like me, doesn't find this word very useful) should consist of dissolving the framework where the question -- Which is our true self? -- has been posed.

From my reading of Magid's book so far, this also is the key to solving the happiness conundrum. We believe that something, someday, somehow, is going to get us to the end of life's vexing problems.

Religions call this nebulous but oh-so-enticing condition by various names: salvation, heaven, enlightenment, satori, nirvana, god-realization, and such. Non-religious people see it more as self-awareness, inner understanding, or a psychological breakthrough.

In both cases, these are what Magid terms "curative fantasies."

A curative fantasy is a personal myth that we use to explain what we think is wrong with us and our lives and what we imagine is going to make it all better.

This is common, he says, even in Buddhism.

If we practice Buddhism, we are tempted to blame our desires or our self-centeredness for our suffering -- that's what Buddha said we are doing wrong, isn't it?

We imagine: "If only I could get rid of those bad parts of my self, everything would be OK." Or maybe I have to get rid of my "self" entirely! Then "I" get entangled in the paradox of wanting to get rid of "me."

"I"? "Me"? "My "self"? How many of us are in there, and which side am I on? How did I end up in so many pieces?

I don't know whether the Zen response to these questions is correct. But it sure generates a resounding Oh yeah! in me.

In a way, we allow our life to become much more superficial. We are no longer so preoccupied with our important thoughts and deep feelings that we don't see what is right in front of us. Practice allows us to actually pay attention to all these nice trivial things that are happening around us.

We don't have to make our preoccupations go away either, they become just one of many things happening -- no longer the only things that count. They are just things hanging around in the corners of our minds; they don't stand in the center of our universe any more.

After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized, spiritual minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative. We're not here to fix or improve ourselves -- I like to say practice actually puts an end to self-improvement.

But it's very hard to stay with that sense of not needing to do anything, not to turn the zendo into a spiritual gymnasium where we get ourselves mentally in shape. It's hard to really do nothing at all. Over and over, we watch our mind trying to avoid or fix, fix or avoid; to either not look at it or change it.

Leaving that mind just as it is is the hardest thing to do.

The Monk and the Philosopher debate Buddhism

It's interesting how my attitude toward Buddhism has changed during the course of my descent (or ascent) into churchlessness. I used to find Buddhism wonderfully non-dogmatic. Now, I see it as permeated with an uncomfortable amount of religiosity.

A couple of fellow Tai Chi students recommended "The Monk and the Philosopher" to me. With the subtitle, a father and son discuss the meaning of life, how could I resist making a visit to Amazon?

Last month I wrote about how when the Monk (Matthieu Ricard) and his Philosopher father (Jean-Francois Revel) discuss karma, I disagreed with the Buddhist notion that Tibetans brought upon themselves the Chinese invasion of their country.

Having finished the book, I have more quibbles with the Monk's belief system. I agree with the Philosopher's conclusion:

What lessons have I drawn from these conversations with Matthieu? What has their result been for me? I have become more and more appreciative of Buddhism as a system of wisdom, and more and more skeptical about it as a system of metaphysics. ... To state it plainly, the theoretical background of Buddhist wisdom seems to me unproved and unprovable.

That's pretty much how I see it.

Buddhism's basic advice for us is pretty darn simple: lessen your desires; accept life as it is; embrace change; don't ruminate about what can't be thought.

As the Philosopher points out repeatedly, this wisdom isn't unique to Buddhism. The Greek Stoics, such as Marcus Aurelius, said almost exactly the same thing (see my Marcus posts here and here).

The Monk liked to argue that if following Buddhist precepts leads someone to serenity, this shows that Buddhism has a correct view of reality -- which includes quite a few metaphysical concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and such.

Surely the attainment of serenity is one of the experimental proofs of contemplative science, just as the falling of bodies is experimental proof of the law of gravity.

Well, there are serene people who don't do a lick of meditation, or accept any Buddhist beliefs. And there are devout Buddhists who haven't achieved peace of mind after years or decades of practice.

Many Christians feel great by believing in Jesus. If a certain psychological state is proof of a metaphysical position, then every religion is right and every religion is wrong.

Studies of identical twins find that genetics explains about half of the differences in happiness between individuals. Some people are born with more of a potential to be happy than others.

Meditation and other techniques that change mental patterns can affect someone's happiness, but there seems to be a limit to our changeability. I suspect that certain sorts of people are drawn to Buddhism (or some other faith) because it meshes with their view of life -- which is different from the faith changing that view.

Another quibble: I agreed with the Philosopher when he said...

But in Buddhism there's no transcendent God, so what is monastic life or retreat from the world, directed toward? In a word, since Buddhism isn't a religion, why does it look so much like one?

I didn't find the Monk's defense of Buddhist rituals very convincing.

Such customs are useful outer supports allowing believers to communicate with an inner truth. I know from experience that when ordinary Tibetans offer thousands of butter lamps (the equivalent of candles) they're well aware that the light they're offering symbolizes wisdom dispelling darkness.

The prayer they'd be making as they offered lamps would go something like, "May the light of wisdom arise in myself and in all living beings, both in this life and in lives to come." Even very simple people are aware of the symbolism. The same goes when they're reciting mantras.

Not likely. The Monk ignores the great popularity of Pure Land Buddhism, which is religious through and through.

Like every faith, if you peel off the dogmatic, fundamentalist, religious aspects of Buddhism, from my churchless perspective you're left with something much more appealing.

The question is: isn't that "something" simply everyday life, lived honestly?

Is karma a bunch of crap?

While there's much in the realms of religion, spirituality, mysticism, and metaphysics that is out-and-out ridiculous, I've considered the notion of "karma" to be pleasingly quasi-scientific.

Heck, I even wrote a book about karma: Life is Fair.  This was back in my true believing days. Now I'm not nearly as confident that much of what I said in the book is true.

However, when karma is viewed as synonymous with "cause and effect," it's reality is evident.

This is how the world works: causes resulting in effects that produce causes resulting in effects ... and so on ... and so on ... and so on ... ad infinitum.

Eastern religions such as Buddhism see karma in an expanded sense, though.

Through reincarnation chains of cause and effect are considered to persevere between lifetimes. Causes in one incarnation can bear fruitful effects in another life.

This leads to some disturbing conclusions, which I used to find acceptable but now turn me off.

Here's an example from "The Monk and the Philosopher," where devoted Buddhist Matthieu Ricard is explaining karma to his rather skeptical father, Jean-Francois Revel.

In terms of the kinds of suffering for which we're apparently not responsible ourselves, those that are imposed on us by others and natural disasters or diseases, we've already talked about how they can be understood.

Such wrongs are due neither to divine will, nor to fixed destiny, nor to chance, but to the long-term consequences of our own actions. They're arrows we've shot ourselves, coming back to us.

I understand that the whole notion of karma can be quite disconcerting. Whatever happens to us, it teaches, is never just by chance. We've created the causes of our present sufferings ourselves.

...From within a different metaphysical framework, of course, it would be difficult to see how our present happiness and suffering could be the result of our distant past. But in the context of a religion like Buddhism that accepts the idea of numerous rebirths, it all makes sense.

Well, not really.

I'll go so far as to accept, for the sake of argument, that reincarnation could be true.

This still leaves the Buddhist conception of karma far out on an unreasonable limb. And Buddhism itself supplies the saw that seemingly dumps karma into a Crap Container.

Which is, the central Buddhist (and believable) idea of emptiness. Ricard says:

But if you look at things from the point of view of absolute logic, the laws of cause and effect couldn't operate with entities that had any permanent and solid existence. So nowhere in the whole phenomenal world is there a single fixed, independent, intrinsicially existing entity.

Such as a person. Who reincarnates. And who supposedly carries along karma from life to life that is an arrow shot from his own hand, returning to him.

Hmmmm.

That karma-carrying consciousness sure sounds like a fixed, independent, intrinsically existing entity. It sows causal seeds and it reaps a crop of effects, all by itself.

This doesn't make sense in a world of complex interrelating causes and effects.

Ricard's father, Revel, points out that Tibetans couldn't be karmically solely responsible for China's invasion of Tibet because "the hatred comes from the Chinese; the Tibetans didn't have it."

Yet this comment elicits the arrow-returning analogy quoted above. Ricard, the Buddhist, clearly believes that Tibetans brought upon themselves all the suffering wrought by the Chinese takeover of their country.

That's crazy, both metaphysically and logically.

Even if one accepts the reality of reincarnation, how could the Chinese be empty vessels into which the Tibetan karma is poured?

Meaning, karmic law issues an edict: "Tibetans hated in past lives, so now you Chinese must have a similarly hateful urge to invade Tibet and wreak havoc upon the country."

Yet Ricard has said that every person creates his or her own karma, so how could Tibetan karma cause an urge to take over Tibet to pop up in the minds of Chinese? Such is akin to the notion that when I married my wife, it was her karma that made me love her.

Hey! What about my karma? Don't I get to have karma also?

You can see that with a little clear thinking, any sort of reasonable foundation for the Buddhist notion of karma starts to disintegrate.

It's tough to posit an interrelated cosmos with no independently existing entities, as Buddhism does, and also claim that individuals are solely responsible for what happens to them in life.

Cause and effect: yes.
Karma: no, if the word is taken to mean that whatever befalls us is the result of an arrow shot from our own hand.

There's effectual arrows flying all over the place, released from countless causal bows. A lot more like this than the simplistic Buddhist idea.

Soul of the Samurai: so simple

For about fifteen years I've been practicing martial arts. "Practice" is the operative word.

I've always felt like a beginner, because whenever I've learned something a fresh realization follows almost immediately: there's so much more to learn.

What I enjoy the most about martial arts -- I started with traditional Shotokan karate, moved to a mixed style, and now am focused on Tai Chi -- is what they teach you about yourself.

There's a deep connection between Zen/Taoism and Japanese/Chinese martial arts. I've understood this better after taking up Tai Chi, which basically is Taoism reflected in movement.

This isn't rocket spiritual science, of course. Many, if not all, of the same lessons can be learned in other activities, such as sports and dance.

For example, when my wife and I start learning a new dance style (most recently, basic swing), I go through predictable phases. The first lesson is the most fun, because I've only got a couple of possible moves to choose from as the leader.

As we learn additional steps, my mind has more to think about. Then the flow-with-it rhythmic movements I enjoyed in the first lesson start to get choppy. I hesitate, change my mind in mid-lead, fall off the basic rhythm as I try to get onto fancier steps.

The samurai philosophers understood this stuff. They needed to, because faltering in sword play has different consequences than a stumble in dance.

Here's some quotations from Thomas Cleary's Soul of the Samurai: Modern Translations of Three Classic Works of Zen & Bushido. As I see it, the theme is not complicating doing, or being.

This caution reminds me of my serious true believing phase, when I was dead-set on doing everything just right in meditation and other aspects of spiritual practice.

Whatever you do as your Way, if you keep it in your heart as the only thing of importance, then it is not the Way. When you have nothing in your heart, then you are on the Way. Whatever you do, if you do it with nothing in your heart, it works out easily.

...The heart of those on the Way is like a mirror, empty and clear, mindless yet not failing to accomplish anything. This is the normal mind. One who does everything with the normal mind is called an adept.

It's so true: trying to do your best prevents you from doing your best. I can't tell you how many times I've lost my balance in Tai Chi class after saying to myself, "This is a tricky move, got to be careful about losing my balance"

Whatever you do, if you keep the idea of doing it before you, and do it with single-minded concentration, then you will be inconsistent. You'll do it well once, but then when you think that is fine, you'll do it badly...This is because of acting with the thought of doing it well.

Independence and freedom, spiritual or otherwise, come from letting go of leashes. Problem is, the leashes are part of us. At least, we believe they are.

To embody the free-minded mind means that you are not free or independent as long as you use the mind that releases the mind to rope the mind and keep dragging it back. The mind that does not stop and linger anywhere even when set free is called the free-minded mind.

When you embody this free-minded mind, then independence is possible in actual practice. You are not independent as long as you are holding onto a halter. Even dogs and cats should be raised unleashed.

Here's more cautions about seriousness. The main rule is, screw rules.

People who read Confucian books dwell on the word seriousness as if it were the ultimate, spending their whole lives in seriousness, thus making their minds like leashed cats.

...Seriousness corresponds to a quality of the basic mind, yet it is a state of mind that lasts only so long as it is practiced. When we relax our reverential gesture and stop chanting buddha-names, the image of Buddha in our minds also disappears. What then remains is the former distracted mind. This is not a thoroughly pacified mind.

People who have successfully managed to pacify their minds once do not purify their thoughts, words, and deeds -- they are unstained even as they mingle with the dust of the world. Even if they are active all day, they are unmoved, just as the moon reflected in the water does not move even though millions of waves roll one after another.

Don't get stuck. No fixations. Keep flowing. Good advice for both a samurai and us.

The general meaning of sickness is the lingering or tarrying of the mind. In Buddhism this is called fixation, and it is severely rejected. If the mind is fixated on one spot and lingers there, you will miss what you should see and suffer unexpected defeat.

"Just do it." Nike wasn't at all original with that notion. Life, including the martial arts, is pretty damn simple when we don't make it complex.

With your mind on whatever you are thinking about, it inclines in one direction; when it inclines in one direction, you don't hear things even though you listen, and you don't see even when you look. This is because there is something on your mind.

...The idea of getting rid of whatever is on your mind also becomes something on your mind. If you don't think about it, it disappears of itself, and you naturally become unminding.

Persist in this, and before you realize it you will spontaneously become that way; if you try to accomplish it in a hurry, you won't get there. An ancient verse says, "Intending not to think is still thinking of something; do you intend not to think you won't think?"

Want to stop being sick? Good luck. That wanting leashes you to sickness. Let it go, sickness and health both.

At the advanced level, to have no thought of getting rid of sickness at all is getting rid of sickness. To think of riddance is itself sickness. Letting sickness be while living in the midst of sickness is to be rid of sickness.

Thinking of eliminating sickness occurs because sickness is still in the mind. Therefore sickness doesn't depart and whatever you do and think is done with fixation, so there can be no higher value in it.

Once, when a bunch of students were occupied with wanting to advance in martial arts rank, our sensei (instructor) showed us a kata (specified series of moves). It looked great. He then turned to us and said, "I haven't done that kata in years. Do you know why I could do it so well? Because I don't care any more."

If you're fixated on becoming a black belt in something, you won't be able to act like the person you want to be. True accomplishment comes from not caring about what's accomplished.

...Masters of the arts cannot be called adepts as long as they have not left behind fixation on their various skills.

...Asked what the Way is, the ancient worthy replied that the normal mind is the Way. this is indeed supreme. This is the state where the sicknesses of the mind are all gone and one has become normal in mind, free from sickness even in the midst of sickness.

To apply this to worldly matters, suppose you are shooting with a bow and you think you are shooting while you are shooting; then the aim of your bow will be inconsistent and unsteady.

If you are conscious of wielding your sword when wielding your sword, your offense will be unstable. If you are conscious of writing while writing, your pen will be unsteady. Even when you play the harp, the tune will be off if you're conscious of playing.

Mind: a mirror or nothing?

I've been thinking about this awareness watching awareness thing, the subject of a previous post. Of course, I've been thinking with my mind. And mind is at the root of the whole thing.

So I'm pondering what pondering is about, in much the same fashion as Michael Langford says that awareness needs to watch awareness in order to become aware of what awareness is.

Pretty damn confusing. But seemingly important.

Because the debate over whether consciousness (and hence reality, since a reality with no one aware of it is non-existent for us) is one'ish or two'ish is central to religion, spirituality, philosophy -- any attempt to discern the meaning Of It All.

Tucson and The Elephant have been having an interesting conversation in the recent comments on this post.

I don't claim to understand it's intricacies (heck, they may not either, for all I know). Yet much of the debate appears to be reflected in a classic Zen interchange. I've seen various descriptions and translations of it.

This is the version in Albert Low's "Hakuin on Kensho."

Zen masters frequently use the metaphor of the mirror. A famous example is the interchange involving Hui-neng (Jap.:Eno). The fifth patriarch wanted to pass on the patriarchate. In order to determine who should be chosen, he asked his monks to write a short poem to indicate their level of attainment. The head monk wrote:

The body is a Bodhi tree,
The mind a mirror bright.
Wipe it carefully day by day
And let no dust alight.

Hui-neng realized that the head monk had not seen into his true nature, and he wrote instead:

In Bodhi there is no tree,
Nor a mirror bright,
From the beginning not a thing is,
Where can the dust alight?

...In Zen, the metaphor of a mirror is used to point out that, just as reflections do not have any being in themselves and are dependent upon the mirror for their being, our experiences have no being in themselves and are dependent upon knowing for their being.

This is like saying that form is emptiness. Zen insists upon no substratum, no underlying or Supreme Being. The doctrine of prajna, an aroused mind that abides nowhere, affirms this, as does Buddha's doctrine of anicca, the doctrine of no-thingness.

For Zen, the mirror is knowing, which, although it is not constant, nevertheless constantly and at each instant recreates itself. Knowing is its own being; being is itself knowing. For the Taoist, the mirror is the substratum that makes reflections possible, hence the need for a clean and tranquil mirror. Hui-neng put his fist through this substratum.

Well, I don't understand this discussion all that well either. I get the basic debate here -- is mind/awareness a mirror or nothing? The distinction between Taoism and Zen seems sort of extraneous, a dig at a competing philosophy that doesn't mesh with how I understand Taoism.

In a post earlier this year ("Big waves, small waves: no difference?") I quoted another version of the Hui-neng story. It concluded that the no mirror stance also was the foundation of Taoism. That is:

"The world is always held without effort. The moment there is effort, the world is beyond holding."

So I come back to the notion that awareness watching awareness or mind cleansing the mirror of mind makes reality overly complex.

All this effort to achieve a state that supposedly we already are. I'm decidedly lazy. Thus I'm attracted to "just let go and be" philosophies.

Yet these also seem most likely to be in touch with the nature of being. Be...being. Got to be some sort of connection here.

Best reason for why you don’t exist

Got to be fair. Can't play favorites. A few days ago I talked about the best reason why God doesn't exist. Now, here's the flip side: why you, and I, don't exist.

This is a central Buddhist notion, anatta, no-self. But my big fat ego has resisted the notion, despite the many times I've read about it. Somehow I just seem so…I don't know…me.

Last night, though, I heard myself talking as if I believed that there's no enduring central core to me. Laurel and I went out to dinner with some visiting relatives and two of their old college friends, who drove up from Eugene.

The conversation turned philosophical near the end of the evening. There wasn't a religious soul in the bunch, so we were all on the same churchless wavelength.

I shared my "don't know" rap, which segued into mentions of Douglas Hofstadter's notion that humans are a strange loop. We're simultaneously aware, and aware of our awareness. [See "You're a strange loop (and that's OK)" and "If I'm not an 'I', what am I?"]

I talked about how Hofstadter considers that his wife lives on in his memories, and other traces that she has left behind. But not otherwise.

And that, if all of our memories and other experiences could be transferred into a sophisticated computer, wouldn't that device be indistinguishable from who we feel ourselves to be now, in a non-bodily sense?

So where am "I" in all this? Well, in the past I've enjoyed believing that it could be possible to enter a state of pure consciousness where you're just a blissful bubble of being, or something equally (and indescribably) ethereal.

After all, if I could simply exist, not as anything outside of myself but as existence plain and simple, then seemingly this would be a really real me – separate from everything else.

I've never been able to do this, though.

And the more I've pondered the possibility, the less likely it seems. How would I know that I existed if there wasn't anything to be aware of except my own awareness? What's the difference between being dead and not knowing that you're alive?

This morning I picked up a constant companion in my meditation enclave, Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity." Thumbing though a few pages, these thoughts hit me with a fresh anatta'ish force.

In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experience, thinker, or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think that any such thing exists?

Watts then talks about how memory enables us to recollect what we've experienced previously. This allows us to fashion a self out of the bits and pieces of prior experiences – not the whole shebang, obviously, because our memories are so incomplete and selective.

He says:

But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself form this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.

There is simply experience. There is not someone or something experiencing experience! You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling.

…No one ever found an "I" apart from some present experience, or some experience apart from an "I" – which is only to say that the two are the same thing.

Pretty persuasive. I still feel like me, but the foundation on which I'm standing is beginning to seem more like quicksand rather than concrete.

I could slip away at any moment. Which, for Watts, is the wisest thing to do.

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the "I" out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two.

Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate "I" or mind can be found.

Life is just what it is

How's this for a sign of how close I'm coming to Buddha-hood?

This afternoon Laurel and I, plus another couple, visited the Wizard Falls Fish Hatchery in central Oregon. Feeling boundless compassion for all the small trout stuck in boring concrete tanks, I took out two quarters and bought some fish food.

Tossing it into the tanks, I enjoyed watching all the thrashing about – the fish obviously much desiring the pellets, not recognizing that desire is the root of suffering (along with biting into a sharp hook).

Then we walked past some decorative ponds that I hadn't noticed before. They held fish also, fish that my boundless compassionate Buddha nature saw were being ignored by the hatchery fish feeding visitors, as they weren't in recognizable tanks.

I went back to the fish food dispenser. Dug deep for my last quarter. Put it into the dispensing machine. Walked to the ponds with my handful of pellets.

Throwing them into the water, watching the fish joyfully eat the food, I felt my oneness with all sentient creatures.

Naturally, my next thought was to tell my wife and friends about my exalted state. "My Buddha nature is almost complete!" I said. "Except for the ego loss thing."

Details, details.

Then, a guy I didn't recognize comes up to me. He says, "Are you a Buddhist? I noticed your t-shirt."

I looked down. On my chest was the Church of the Churchless symbol (upper left corner of this blog). I told the guy: "Well, this is the eighth of the Ten Oxherding Pictures. It's the stage where you don't know anything, so it describes me pretty well."

Laurel breaks into the conversation. "Aren't you the Salem Unitarian Church minister?" "Yes," he says, "I am." Ah, now I knew where I'd seen him. We went to the Unitarian church quite a few years ago on Christmas Eve, feeling the need for some churchless churchliness around the holidays.

Rick, the minister, and I chatted for a while.

The church has a Wednesday night Buddhist sitting group, a blend of Buddhist and Unitarian philosophies. I told him that I'd be more inclined to come to his church if his Sunday service wasn't so early, because I'm not a morning person.

Rick asked what time would be convenient. I told him, "Noon." He said that probably wouldn't work out for other Unitarians, but he'd see what he could do.

I like Unitarians. They're so non-judgmental. Most ministers would consider that if I wanted to save my soul, I could damn well get up earlier on Sunday. But Unitarians don't believe in soul-saving, thankfully.

I got in a mention of how I'd recently taken the Belief O'Matic quiz and turned out to be 100% Unitarian. (I'm just not Unitarian enough to actually go to a meeting, though.)

Returning to our car, I pondered how differently I looked on episodes like this in my current churchless state of mind. Before, when I was a true believer, I would have attached a lot of significance to the fact that shortly after I proclaim my Buddha nature, a Unitarian minister walks up to me and starts talking about Buddhism.

Cosmic! Far out! A sign from God! (or somebody Up There)

But now…just something that happened. No big deal, notwithstanding the fact that I've spent quite a bit of time blogging about this no big deal.

Earlier in the day we'd hiked up along the beautiful Metolius River on the always enjoyable Wizard Falls hike. We'd stopped at the confluence of Canyon Creek and the Metolius, where I'm always fascinated by how the two streams of water come together.

The patterns, eddies, mini-whirlpools, currents…ever changing. There will be a large section of calm water for a while. Then, it'll change into a swirling liquid dance.

It's all caused, naturally (fluid dynamics), but there's no conscious purpose behind all the movement. That's how my fish hatchery visit seemed to me – a happening without intention.

I've talked about this before. Interestingly, the last time I did – a few months ago – who did I mention in my post but…Rick Davis, the very Unitarian minister guy I met this afternoon.

[cue Twilight Zone music]

Maybe there's more to life than is apparent. But what's apparent is good enough for me.

My ego loss isn't complete. That's evident from my desire to proclaim my Buddha nature. However, to me it's much better to be honest about your egocentricity than to believe you're humble at the same time you're considering that the world revolves around your religious system.

Quoting David Ignatow again:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

True believers are always seeing omens, portents, karma, and signs from God in every passing coincidence. Or, you can just look at all that for what it is.

Meditation is useless

I like it when a practitioner says, "There's no point to what I'm doing." Especially when he's talking about a supposedly spiritual practice.

For me, this is the dividing line between fake religiosity and genuine whatever. (I tried to think of a better word than whatever, but couldn't).

You just do it to do it. Meditation. Prayer. Worship. Study. Whatever.

Zen and Taoism appeal to me because they extol uselessness. In "The Tao of Paris Hilton" I said:

And let us also learn to appreciate Paris more by studying this passage from "The Book of Chuang Tzu," where a long-lived, greatly-venerated tree appears to Master Shih in a dream and explains why it has never been cut down like other trees:

Because they are useful, they suffer, and they are unable to live out the years Heaven has given them. They have only their usefulness to blame for this destruction wrought by the people. It is the same with all things. I have spent a long time studying to be useless, though on a couple of occasions I was nearly destroyed. However, now I have perfected the art of uselessness, and this is very useful, to me! If I had been of use, could I have grown so vast?

On the Zen front, Zoketsu Norman Fischer speaks about the uselessness of zazen (Zen meditation) in "A Coin Lost in the River is Found in the River."

Nice essay. This is the sort of non-religious religion the world needs more of.

Zazen is fundamentally a useless and pointless activity. A person is devoted to zazen not because it helps anything or is peaceful or interesting or because Buddha tells him to do it — though we may imagine that it helps or is peaceful or interesting — but simply because one is devoted to it. You can't argue for it or justify it or make it into something good. You just do it because you do it. It's not even a question of wanting to or not wanting to. Zazen for zazen's sake. Birds sing, fish swim, and people who are devoted to zazen do zazen with devotion all the time although there is no need for it.

I've meditated daily for almost forty years. I've read Zen literature for even longer. I've never actually practiced Zen. But maybe I have. Heck, I surely have.

We all have. We're alive. And once in a while, either by accident or on purpose, or with purposeless purpose, we see what life seemingly is all about. A glimpse at least.

It's cold here in Oregon right now. Freezing cold at night, which is fairly rare in the temperate Willamette Valley. This morning I got up and looked at our indoor thermometer, which also shows the outdoor temperature.

"27.2 degrees," I said to myself. At that moment I had a flash of it's so absolutely right. That was the temperature! Absolutely marvelous! In a little while it'd be different. And that too, absolutely right.

It might snow later in the week. Which could make it tough to drive around. Still, absolutely right. There's always only one thing going on: what's going on.

Any attempt to convince oneself of that – completely useless. Yet this is what religion is all about. As is Zen and Taoism.

The only difference, and it's a big one, is that religions take themselves seriously. Zen and Taoism don't. From what I've read, the ultimate Zen experience is throwing a pie in the face of your most revered Master.

Whereupon he laughs uproariously. So do you. What a joke!

In a dharma talk, "Three Ways to See Zazen," Fischer speaks more about how there's nothing to do. But that nothing needs to be done anyway. He says that zazen isn't like waiting for something that we expect is coming.

Zazen is certainly not waiting in this sense. It is waiting in the profound sense of waiting for nothing. Simply waiting. No expectations, nothing that is supposed to happen. No desired result. Just this moment of sheer presence.

Waiting – for what? If "nothing" seems too uninspiring and foreboding perhaps we can say we are waiting for God. This is the title of one of Simone Weil's books, Waiting for God.

That's how God appears- not by summoning God, or by performing sacrifice, prayer, or something like that, so as to manipulate God, causing God to appear on demand, like a vending machine- put in the quarters and you'll hear that satisfying clatter and bump.

No, God comes when we wait. Just sitting, just being present, with a powerful and alert anticipation, a pregnant, focused, poised-at-the-edge-of-the-abyss awakeness. Hoping for, waiting for- exactly nothing. Plunging into the moment of being alive. Just that, and nothing extra.

Wu.

From Sant Mat to Buddhism

I'm not a Buddhist. I don't know what I am, belief-wise. So I suppose that could make me a Buddhist. Buddhism isn't big on beliefs.

Hakuin, an 18^th century Zen master, extolled doubting in a fashion that is worlds apart from faith-based religions like Christianity.

If you keep on doubting continuously, with a bold spirit and a feeling of shame urging you on, your effort will naturally become unified and solid, turning into a single mass of doubt throughout heaven and earth. The spirit will feel suffocated, the mind distressed, like a bird in a cage, like a rat that has gone into a bamboo tube and cannot escape.

Granted, that isn't uplifting. But Buddhists are much more into being real. And reality, as we all know, is filled with suffering. Plus, doubt.

Hans, a long-time friend, and I had one of our never-ending Sunday coffee shop conversations today. We're always on the edge of figuring it all out.

Problem is, our figuring proceeds apace philosophically without knowing what "It" is. So that keeps us on this side of the edge. But we had a good latte-fueled time talking about the view from where we are.

For both of us, that's looking more Buddhist'ish, whether or not we use that term.

Hans still has a fondness for Sant Mat and the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, though he's never been initiated into the RSSB fold. And I was a true believer from 1970 until whenever my doubts started to bubble up out of the mud of blind faith that I'd plastered over them.

Today we talked about the importance of saying it like it is. Not the big capital "I" It. Everyday "it" – our relationships, thoughts, emotions, activities, hopes, fears. In short, life as each of us is living it now.

There may be a there and then after death. Hans and I don't know. Nobody on earth knows, since every person living is still alive.

Hakuin and other Buddhists aren't much concerned with there-and-then's. They're into what's going on here and now, coming to grips what who the heck is trying to figure it all out, which is a whole different thing from tying down "It."

In "Hakuin on Kensho" editor Albert Low comments on Hakuin's Zen teaching.

The boundless light is not a light that we can see, but the light by which we see. In the unawakened state we ignore this light…We overlook the fact that we know this world. We ignore the truth that the world is as it is because we know it to be so.

…Hakuin is saying that deep, deep questioning must pervade our lives. "What is it?" Everything must point to this question: "What is this?"

We use words and expressions such as knowing, intelligence, supreme wisdom, mirror wisdom, bodhisattvas, or Buddha-nature.

We wonder what the words mean and so use other words as definitions, and then wonder in turn what those words mean. What use are all the jangling words? And what is asking the question?

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Oregon (where I live) was part of the Canadian Radha Soami Satsang Beas organizational structure. I was the local RSSB organizer, the secretary. I reported to Jiti Khanna, the RSSB representative, who lived in Vancouver, Canada.

I liked Dr. Khanna a lot. He was wonderfully unassuming. Our Salem group (sangat) frequently would invite him down to give a talk (satsang).

One year I picked him up at the motel where he was staying with his family. I drove them over to the community hall that we'd rented for a Sunday satsang and potluck.

Quite a few people had come for this special occasion, a chance to hear the guru's representative talk about the RSSB teachings.

I went up to the podium and welcomed everybody. Then I introduced Dr. Khanna, who was sitting in the front row, and sat next to him.

After a few seconds I saw that Dr. Khanna was still in his chair. He was calmly looking at the podium. I waited a bit longer. Then I understood what was going on.

Dr. Khanna didn't expect that he was the star attraction. He apparently was totally comfortable with driving all the way from Vancouver, spending the night in a motel, and then being just another attendee at our Salem RSSB get-together.

I thought I'd made it clear that we wanted him to speak, but he was in the moment. Sitting still. Watching the podium. Waiting for the talk to begin.

I nudged him. "Dr. Khanna," I said. "You're the speaker."

He turned to me. "Oh, very good." He stood up and proceeded to give a wonderful extemporaneous satsang for 45 minutes or so. Warm, humble, inspiring.

I can't remember anything about what Dr. Khanna said. Just how he said it.

It didn't surprise me when, in the early 1990s, we heard that he'd resigned as RSSB representative and taken up Buddhist practice.

Since, I haven't heard much about Jiti Khanna. There have been some posts about him on a Radha Soami discussion site, including this mention of a TIME magazine letter mentioning Sant Mat that apparently was written by him.

I hope Dr. Khanna is doing well. I'd like to know how his spiritual trajectory from Sant Mat to Buddhism to whatever has proceeded.

Most likely: quite nicely.

Finding my original face in packing for a weekend trip

My mystical-spiritual aspirations used to be really grandiose.

I was going to grasp the secrets of the universe; soar through higher metaphysical regions of reality; get drenched in divine light and sound; merge with the Ultimate until there was nothing of me left but One.

Yesterday I managed to pack for a weekend trip and keep my calm. That's what counts as spiritual progress for me now. Call it what you will, it's undeniably real. I could feel the difference between the usual flappable-while-packing Brian and who I was twenty-fours ago.

Thank you, Kosho Uchiyama. I've been trying to absorb your message in "Opening the Hand of Thought," the subject of my last post. Today I read:

There is a koan that asks, "What is your original face before your parents were born?" One might naturally assume that there is some special thing called "original face," but that is not the right approach. When we open the hand of thought, letting go, the original self is already there.

It's not some special mystical state. Don't seek it somewhere else. When we open the hand of thought, what is there, in that moment, is our original face.

When we refrain from grasping our thoughts, we realize that the force that animates our lives and the force that moves the wind are the very same force. Our lives and the force that moves the wind are the same. Our breath and the wind blowing are one.

When my wife and I (plus the family dog) go to our cabin on the Metolius River in central Oregon, we pack heavy for what is usually just an extended weekend trip. We've got the routine down, but it's still a mini-ordeal.

Bike rack. Bikes. Food boxes (health-minded vegetarians that we are, we can't survive by foraging on local fare). Dog supplies. Heaps of unread magazines. Clothes for cool, warm, sunny, and wet weather (Oregon is changeable in the spring).

We usually try to leave by late afternoon. Yesterday, our schedule was side-tracked by a hectic day. No opportunity to pack until I rushed home about 6 pm, figuring that since I'd been gone most of the afternoon and Laurel hadn't, she'd have made a good start on the packing.

But all I saw was that two empty food containers had been taken from the garage and put by the front door. "I'm just beginning to pack," Laurel said as I walked in, frazzled and tired.

Usually I'd feel This isn't right. Yesterday I caught myself before that thought had a chance to get rolling down Mount Irritation. "Okay," I told her. "I'll put the bikes on the car. We'll leave whenever we can."

I'm no Kosho Uchiyama. But maybe I am, just a little bit. He says:

The important point here in terms of the truth of universal self is not to run away from the worse way (hell, unhappiness, or bad circumstances) and turn toward some better way (heaven, happiness, or good circumstances) by discriminating between better and worse using our heads.

Rather, what is crucial is magnanimous mind, with which we take the attitude of living straight through whatever reality of life we are presently faced with. In other words, if I fall into hell, then hell itself is my life at that time, so I have to live right through it, and if I find myself in heaven, then heaven is my life and I have to live right through that.

We pulled out of the driveway about 8:00 pm. Laurel got ready to go as quickly as possible. Me too. It was just the right time. Every time is, really.

We had a late take-out Thai food dinner at the cabin. We were hungry by 10:30. Dog was too. It was just the right time. Every time is, really.

Per usual, we stopped about halfway at Detroit Lake for coffee, a bathroom break, and snacks. Most everything but the little market closes down in Detroit after 9:00 pm. The woman ahead of us in the checkout line asked if any gas stations were open.

"No," she was told. "Oh, no," she said. "We're on empty and we've got to get to Bend."

A local guy heard her. "I know the people who own the gas station," he said. "I'll give them a call. I bet they'll be willing to come out and open it up for you."

Small town friendliness. And an advantageous meet-up at the cash register for the woman who was just about out of gas. It was just the right time. Every time is, really.

Religion is part of life for many people. But for all of us, atheist, agnostic, or true believer, it should be recognized for what it is: just a part, not life itself. Uchiyama:

Instead of looking at the fresh and vivid reality of life with their own eyes, people end up stifling that reality in the name of justice, or peace, or some fixed dogma.

All these memories and myths are produced by human life, so we cannot say they are meaningless. However, all these ideas and beliefs have only a conceptual existence that is fixed within our thoughts, they are not raw life-experience that is alive right now.

We tend to plunge our heads too far into memories and fantasies, into religious dogma and rigid doctrines. When we admire them and believe in them blindly, becoming frenzied and fanatical, we become imprisoned by this fixed and conceptual existence.

We would be much better off if our past experience and wisdom were made to live within the raw life-experience of the self here and now.

…The only true enlightenment is awareness of the vivid reality of life, moment by moment. So we practice enlightenment right now, right here, in every moment.

Rocks in the thought-stream are natural too

As so how often happens on this here Church of the Churchless blog, a comment to one of my posts diverts my stream of consciousness in a fresh direction. In this case, one that I'd already been meandering toward.

Edward's response to my "Flowing with waves while sitting on the beach" made me think Oh, yeah, so true. His comment had a delightful Edwardian neo-Zen flavor to it that led me sit up even while I was lying down (on the sand).

Lately, I have been having difficulty seeing some thoughts as unworthy, ("get out of my way,") and others as worthy. I read a NYT interview with Russell Simmons, and he said something to the effect that living in permanent satori was the ideal. Dismissing parts of my internal life is somewhat akin to growing a beard and declaring that my chin has been subdued by spiritual discipline.

Which is a wave and which a rock? I don't want to push the metaphor too far, (water feeling like concrete, etc.); I don't think that there is an imperative to have an opinion on each interior stimulus.

The feelings come unbidden, thoughtlessly, and the thoughts come numbly. I perceive some connections, but they are like the coincidences that happen in a dream.

I have the experiences, and just as importantly, the immediate creation of now wants me to have experiences. The five colors, the five tones, the five tastes can all be taken in. The stomach is not separate from the eye. "Therefore the sage discards this for that," is an expression of arrogance, a Laoism that is part of a dualist canon.

Can you discard the parts that are not your original face? Say it now!!

Yes, which is a wave and which a rock? Which is a worthy thought and which an unworthy thought? What should be discarded from the thought-stream and what embraced?

This morning I was in my usual shade-spot under a palm tree on Napili Beach, trying not to try to want larger waves to enter the bay, frustrated that I was feeling frustrated that my boogie board had been gathering dust sand the past few days.

Two couples walked by. I heard a loud "Shit!" It had come from an overweight man wearing tennis shoes with socks. He'd been trudging along the waterline and was shocked, absolutely shocked, that a wave rolled over his feet.

"Duh," I thought, "what do you expect when you walk on the beach? Dry pavement?"

Apparently, because his New Jersey accent (which sounded remarkably like what I hear on "The Sopranos"—plus the guy looked a lot like Mafia, which is why I was careful to just think what I thought rather than blurt it out aloud) continued to echo over the beach.

"I've got mud in my shoes. I'll meet you at the caaar!" he boomed in a pissed-off voice to his companions, who had left him behind. "Come on, get over it" they yelled back. I had the feeling that they were used to putting up with his nonsense.

So what was I supposed to do? Not be affected by this astounding display of beachy ignorance? When someone wearing socks and tennis shoes is offended by the ocean doing what it does naturally, make waves, "Duh, what do you expect?" is a fitting response.

But a momentary one. For this was just a moment among many moments on the beach today. To linger on it after the moment had passed would have distracted me from what came next. And after that. With more to come.

From Thomas Cleary's Soul of the Samurai.

The basic mind is the mind that does not stay in a particular place but pervades the whole body and whole being. The errant mind is the mind that congeals in one place brooding about something; so when the basic mind congeals, focused on one point, it becomes the so-called errant mind.

…To make an analogy, the basic mind is like water that does not stagnate anywhere, while the errant mind is like ice that cannot be used for washing your hands or your head. When you melt ice into water so that it flows freely, then you can use it to wash your hands or feet or anything else.

…The idea of getting rid of whatever is on your mind also becomes something on your mind. If you don't think about it, it disappears of itself, and you naturally become unminding.

I'm bringing home a print of this marvelous "Wave Sculptures" photograph by Victoria McCormick. It's amazing. And not retouched. It's what a North Shore wave actually looks like, if we could see with the eye of McCormick's camera.

Complex. Edgy. With many surfaces. Not only smooth and flowing. Also sharp.

Rocks and waves do blend.

Dalai Lama is on Maui too. Is compassion contagious?

At the moment the Dalai Lama and I are on opposite sides of Maui. He's on a two day speaking tour in Paia and Wailuku, and we're condo'ing it on Napili Bay.

We're opposites in more ways than that, obviously. Yesterday the Dalai Lama spoke about compassion, saying "Compassion is the universal message of all traditions."

I often come up short in the compassion department. Tuesday morning, a few hours before the Dalai Lama's free talk at Maui's War Memorial Stadium, my wife took me to task for being self-centered and (one of her favorite ex-psychotherapist terms) "having a sense of entitlement."

Which most men are over-stocked with, in Laurel's entirely accurate opinion.

The Napili Kai Beach Club walkway to the beach is a narrow rocky path. There's room for two people to walk abreast, but just barely. Carrying my boogie board in one hand and a beach mat in the other, I saw some people coming the other way.

I moved over to the right against the railing as far as I could go. It was obvious to me that there was room for the other group to pass. And there was.

But I was criticized as soon as they were out of earshot. "You should have gotten completely off the path when you saw them coming. That's what I did. You need to be more considerate."

The last statement of Laurel's was indisputable, in general. However, I defended myself in this particular instance. "They got by just fine. I knew that they could. There wasn't any reason for me to do anything more."

I was right. Yet also wrong. For I readily admit that my viewpoint of the situation was almost entirely from my own perspective.

It was our first full day on Maui. I was eager to get to the beach. I didn't want to delay my arrival by even a few seconds. I calculated that I could keep on walking, with a rightward sidestep, and not interfere with the other people.

Me, me, me. A Honolulu resident, Caroline Odo, came over to Maui to hear the Dalai Lama. She's quoted in the Maui News.

I have my own faith, and he's still affirming the things that I believe in. It's all about having respect for one another and showing love to one another—you don't have to bring religion into it.

Indeed, the newspaper story says:

He told his listeners not to consider negative emotions to be a natural "part of our mind," but to embrace emotions "that are good for (your) mental health." "These are not religious examples, but scientific explanations," he said.

One of the reasons I like Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" so much, the subject of my two previous posts, is that Hofstadter likewise considers the human condition from a scientific/philosophic rather than spiritual/religious perspective.

Like the Dalai Lama, he challenges the notion that each of us is an isolated "I," separate and distinct from everyone and everything else. Hofstadter's conception of soul is markedly different from most religio-mystical teachings (though not so much from Buddhism).

To him, souls aren't encapsulated in a single body—the "caged bird" metaphor. Each of us is the result of innumerable influences acquired over a lifetime of interactions with countless animate and inanimate entities.

Our "I" is shape-shifting continuously; there's no firm boundary between either us and other people, or between the person we are right now and the "I" we have been in the past and will be in the next moment. Hofstadter says:

What makes all of this so counterintuitive — verging on the incomprehensible, at times — is that your brain (like mine, like everyone's) had told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called "I", and one of the most crucial aspects of this "I", an aspect that is truly a sine qua non for "I"-ness, is that it fluently flits into other brains, at least partially.

Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons), your brain's "I" continually makes darting little forays into other brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them…[Indeed] your "I" isn't housed anywhere.

Today, leaving the beach after an enjoyable couple of hours boogie-boarding (me), snorkeling (Laurel), and people-watching (both of us), we decided to exchange our wet and sandy towels.

The towel hut wasn't far away on the Napili Kai grounds. But it took us quite a while to get there. We found ourselves behind an older couple, he getting along with a cane, she arm in arm with him—not looking so spry herself.

The wide curving sidewalk allowed plenty of room to pass. We could also have stepped onto the lawn and moved around them easily. Today, though, I didn't feel any inclination to do anything but stay well behind them.

I paused to read signboards. I stopped to look out to sea. I did my best to not let the couple know that some speedier people were behind them.

I put myself in their place: enjoying their vacation, knowing that there won't be many more times they'll be able to visit Maui, happy that they can still hold onto each other and move, albeit slowly, along a walkway beside beautiful Napili Bay. They didn't need a "young" 58 year old breezing past them, a reminder of healthier years gone by that won't come again.

A small – very small – act of compassion. Maybe a tiny bit of the Dalai Lama had entered my soul, from what I'd read in the Maui News this morning and perhaps even vibes that had soared over the West Maui mountains and landed on Napili Bay.

Regardless, I felt better than I had the day before, when I'd kept on walking rather than stepping aside.

After exchanging our towels, Laurel and I found ourselves behind another slow-moving bunch on the oceanside path. Different people, same reaction. I was happy to stroll at their pace, bringing up the rear, hungry for lunch though I was.

When they turned off toward their building, Laurel said, "Wow. You were so patient. I'm impressed." "Actually," I told her, "this time you were the one guilty of tail-gating—or rather, butt-gating. I think you should have stayed further behind them so they didn't feel pressured."

Now, saying those words really felt good. Hah, beat you this time at the compassion game, lovely wife of mine. Which indicates that I've got a ways to go before egolessness is complete.

But, hey, I'm a man. Give me some slack. Like most of my gender, I've got more of an ego to lose.

Humility is being in touch with reality

I don’t trust displays of humility. This folding of the hands with a bowed head, this uttering of “God (or guru) is everything; I am nothing,” this confession of sins, failings, and weaknesses—it’s all too contrived, too artificial, too calculated.

This morning I re-read the chapter “On Humility” in Hubert Benoit’s The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought As noted in my “The Supreme Doctrine, thirty-six years overdue” post, this is the only library book that I’ve kept permanently. When I first read it back in college, I couldn’t bear to let it out of my hands.

Where it still often is found. Benoit is a marvelously astute observer of the human condition. As noted on a Supreme Doctrine-centered web site, Benoit was severely wounded during World War II and spent years in a hospital bed. Then he went into psychiatry.

So when Benoit talks about reality being the best teacher of humility, he has the credentials to make that statement. He ends his chapter with:

Let us recall that the ‘nature of things’ is for us the best, the most affectionate, and the most humiliating of masters; it surrounds us with its vigilant assistance. The only task incumbent upon us is to understand reality and to let ourselves be transformed by it.

Benoit says that our efforts to rise up spiritually are doomed to failure. As are our efforts to sink down. Any effort at all is counter-productive, though we have no choice but to attempt such futility until the light of satori dawns.

What we should seek is equality, not higher or lower. But that’s too damn scary for an ego that depends upon separateness in order to keep feeling that “I” am something distinct. “I am humble; I am nothing” and “I am proud; I am everything” are both preferable to the equitable obliteration of “I am, along with everything else.”

I believe that I am separated from my own ‘being’ and I am looking for it in order to reunite myself with it. Only knowing myself as a distinct individual, I seek for the Absolute in an individual manner, I wish to affirm myself absolutely as a distinct being. This effort creates and maintains in me my divine fiction, my fundamental pretension that I am all-powerful as an individual, on the plane of phenomena.

…I train myself never to recognise the equality between the outside world and myself; I affirm myself to be different from the outside world, on a different level, above whenever I can, below when I cannot….I see myself as conditioning the outer world, or I see myself as not succeeding in conditioning it, but never can I recognise myself as conditioned by it on a footing of equality.

We’ve got a small pond with a pump that gets clogged with debris from time to time. The pump sits in a plastic enclosure with a gate that lets the pond water flow in when it’s open. To clean the pump, I shut the gate and let the pump run until the enclosure is almost empty of water and I hear the pump sucking air.

That’s the enclosure’s state of humility. I reach down and scoop out the remaining water, making it even humbler. Then I sponge up snail shells, pine needles, and other debris before cleaning the pump itself.

Throughout this process a trickle of water is flowing into the enclosure. The gate, though shut, isn’t completely water tight. Emptiness, like enforced humility, is difficult to maintain.

No matter. When both the pump and enclosure are free of debris, it’s time to open the gate and let the pond water flow back in. I do this gingerly. If the water rushes in too fast it brings with it more pond crud—like the algae that grows despite our best efforts to keep it under control.

Whoosh! The water flows into the enclosure, that plastic representation of our separate egos. Higher and higher rises the water until—I always get a little thrill when this happens—the level inside the enclosure equals the level in the pond.

I’ve been holding onto the gate to keep the water from gurgling in too strongly. Then, the gate relaxes against my hand. Inner and outer are equalized, at peace, on the same level. Nothing needs to be done now. There’s no pressure for the lower to be filled by the higher, nor for the lower to empty itself.

Similarly, Hubert Benoit speaks of what brings about genuine humility:

In our desire to escape from distress at last, we search for doctrines of salvation, we search for ‘gurus.’ But the true guru is not far away, he is before our eyes and unceasingly offers us his teaching; he is reality as it is, he is our daily life.

The evidence of salvation is beneath our eyes, evidence of our non-omnipotence, that our pretension is radically absurd, impossible, and so illusory, inexistent; evidence that there is nothing to fear for hopes that have no reality; that I am and always have been on the ground, so that no kind of fall is possible, so that no vertigo has any reason to exist.

…I feel myself nearer to the ground, to the ‘beneath,’ to real humility (humility which is not acceptance of inferiority, but abandonment of the vertical conception in which I saw myself always above or below).

…From the moment I succeed in no longer moving in my humiliated state, I discover with surprise that there is the ‘asylum of rest,’ the unique harbor of safety, the only place in the world in which I can find perfect security.

Reality. As it is. Not as religions would have us imagine it to be.

Pumps get clogged. So do arteries. And kitchen drains. Minds too. That’s real.

To pretend that something is what it is not—crazy. To see ourselves as higher or lower—unwarranted.

Where is the benchmark against which our humility is considered to rise or fall? How do I gauge the progress of my spiritual ascent or descent when the mountain I’m supposedly climbing isn’t apparent?

Benoit should have the last word. Not because I’m humble; he’s just got better words.

The impossibility in which I find myself today of being in possession of my own nature, of my Buddha-nature, as universal man and not as distinct individual, obliges me unceasingly to invent a representation of my situation in the Universe that is radically untrue.

Instead of seeing myself as equal with the outside world, I see myself either as above it or below, either on high, or beneath. In this perspective, in which the ‘on high’ is Being and the ‘beneath’ is Nullity, I am obliged to urge myself always towards Being. All my efforts necessarily tend, in a direct or a roundabout manner, to raise me up, whether materially, subtly, or, as one says, ‘spiritually.’

…To cure distress is to be freed from all possibility of humiliation. Whence comes my humiliation? From seeing myself powerless. No, that it is not enough. It comes from the fact that I try in vain not to see my real powerlessness.

It is not powerlessness itself that causes humiliation, but the shock experienced by my pretension to omnipotence when it comes up against the reality of things.

…The veritable cause of my distress is never in the outside world, it is only in the claim that I throw out and which is broken against the wall of reality. I deceive myself when I claim that the wall has hurled itself against me and has wounded me; it is I that have injured myself against it, my own action which has caused my suffering.

When I no longer pretend, nothing will injure me ever again.

Open presence meditation

The story in “On Buddhist meditation practice” about meditators not being startled by a tree trunk crashing or heavy hail falling reminded me of a chapter in Matthieu Ricard’s “Happiness.”

Ricard is a long-time Buddhist. He’s participated in scientific studies concerning the neurological correlates of meditation. I suspect that the subject he’s talking about is himself.

He says that the startle response is one of the body’s most primitive reflexes. It responds to activity in the brain stem and is usually not subject to voluntary control. “The stronger a person’s flinch, the more he is inclined to experience negative emotions.”

The researchers hooked up the Buddhist meditator to equipment that would measure his reactions. Ricard says, “The experimenters opted for the maximal threshold of human tolerance—a very powerful detonation, equivalent to a gunshot going off beside the ear.”

The subject was told that within five minutes he’d hear a loud explosion. He was asked to try to neutralize it. Hundreds of other people had taken this test. Nobody had ever been able to stop the startle response. Not even police sharpshooters.

But the meditator could. He’d been practicing two types of meditation: single-pointed concentration and open presence. The best effect, he found, came with open presence meditation. He said:

In that state I was not actively trying to control the startle, but the detonation seemed weaker, as if I were hearing it at a distance. In the distracted state, the explosion suddenly brings you back to the present moment and causes you to jump out of surprise. But while in open presence you are resting in the present moment and the bang simply occurs and causes only a little disturbance, like a bird crossing the sky.

It seems, Ricard concludes, that the meditator’s body registered all the effects of the detonation, but it had no emotional impact on his mind.

The meditator’s performance suggests remarkable emotional equanimity—precisely the same kind of equanimity that the ancient texts describe as one of the fruits of meditative practice.

Well, this is my mind of spirituality. Measurable. Discernable. Practical. Instead of pie-in-the-sky you’ll-be-rewarded-when-you-die religiosity, the best forms of meditative practice deliver results here and now.

Which is where and when, the concluding page of my well-thumbed “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” tells me, we should be looking for whatever the hell it is we’re all searching for.

What is Zen? Try if you wish. But Zen comes of itself. True Zen shows in everyday living, consciousness in action. More than any limited awareness, it opens every inner door to our infinite nature.

Instantly mind frees. How it frees! False Zen wracks brains as a fiction concocted by priests and salesmen to peddle their own wares.

Look at it this way, inside out and outside in: consciousness everywhere, inclusive, through you. Then you can’t help living humbly, in wonder.

“What is Zen?”

One answer: Inayat Khan tells a Hindu story of a fish who went to a queen fish and asked, “I have always heard about the sea, but what is this sea? Where is it?”

The queen fish explained: “You live, move, and have your being in the sea. The sea is within you and without you, and you are made of sea, and you will end in sea. The sea surrounds you as your own being.”

Another answer:

Suppose I should leave the empty space as that. Or, rather, as That. But there’s always another answer, after another answer.

Today I came across a “Lost” poem by a fellow Salem, Oregon blogger. Burton says that he’s a cynical, sarcastic Presbyterian. Also, a non-traditional know-it-all who questions authority.

I’d say he has some Zen in him too. Nice poem, Burton.

For those who want to diminish the startle in their lives, here’s Ricard’s description of open presence meditation.

Open presence is a clear, open, vast, and alert state of mind, free from mental constructs. It is not actively focused on anything, yet it is not distracted. The mind simply remains at ease, perfectly present in a state of pure awareness. When thoughts intrude, the meditator does not attempt to interfere with them, but allows the thoughts to vanish naturally.

On Buddhist meditation practice

Today I got another email from my “Balancing Sant Mat faith and doubt” correspondent. I enjoyed learning more about how Buddhist meditation practice looks upon supposedly mystical phenomena like inner light and sound. This person’s description of how a group of Buddhist meditators reacted to dramatic outer sound also is interesting.

Read on…

Taoism's Secret of the Golden Flower

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if what we were looking for in life is what we are? After we strip away what we are not, that is. This is the central message of “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” a delightfully simple book that could take a lifetime to grasp.

Thomas Cleary translated this classic Taoist guide to meditation. In his introduction he says:

The golden flower symbolizes the quintessence of the paths of Buddhism and Taoism. Gold stands for light, the light of the mind itself; the flower represents the blossoming, or opening up, of the light of the mind.

…This manual contains a number of helpful meditation techniques, but its central method is deeper than a form of meditation. Using neither idea nor image, it is a process of getting right to the root source of awareness itself. The aim of this exercise is to free the mind from arbitrary and unnecessary limitations imposed upon it by habitual fixation on its own contents.

…The essential practice of the golden flower requires no apparatus, no philosophical or religious dogma, no special paraphernalia or ritual. It is practiced in the course of daily life. It is near at hand, being in the mind itself, yet it involves no imagery or thought. It is remote only in the sense that it is a use of attention generally unfamiliar to the mind habituated by imagination and thinking.

Every religion is based on conjectures about the nature of God, soul, morality, salvation, heaven, and such. Yet the nature of the mind that is conjecturing about all this stuff rarely is given much thought.

Not that it is possible to understand that nature by thinking about thoughts. But at least this leads to the humble realization that we don’t really know where the contents of the mind come from, nor how much faith should be placed in them—especially when it comes to abstractions that have no evident connection to material reality.

The Secret of the Golden Flower suggests that before we start making bold pronouncements about God, we should give some attention to the mind that is prone to making bold pronouncements about things it doesn’t have a clue about.

Here are some passages from the book:

Naturalness is called the Way. The Way has no name or form; it is just the essence, just the primal spirit.

Turning the light around is not turning around the light of one body, but turning around the very energy of Creation.

If you can look back again and again into the source of mind, whatever you are doing, not sticking to any image of person or self at all, then this is “turning the light around wherever you are.” This is the finest practice.

Deliberate meditation is the light of consciousness; let go, and it is then the light of essence. A hairsbreadth’s difference is as that of a thousand miles, so discernment is necessary.

The Way is present before our eyes, yet what is before our eyes is hard to understand. People like the unusual and enjoy the new; they miss what is right in front of their eyes and do not know where the Way is. The Way is the immediate presence.

If you read “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” be sure not to skip Cleary’s extensive notes on virtually every passage. His deep knowledge of Zen and Taoism clarifies what would be murky to an average reader like me.

Cleary also offers an Afterword where he speaks about how he has applied golden flower principles in his own spiritual practice and further explicates the meaning of this profound churchless text.

This teaching calls itself a “special transmission outside of doctrine,” free from attachment to dogma and form, based on direct perception of the essence of mind and recovery of its inherent potential.

…For practical purposes, a distinction is made in the golden flower teaching between the “original spirit” and the “conscious spirit.” The original spirit is the formless essence of awareness; it is unconditioned and transcends culture and history. The conscious spirit is the mind-set of feelings, thoughts, and attitudes, conditioned by personal and cultural history, bound by habit to specific forms.

…Intuition belongs to the original spirit; intellect belongs to the conscious spirit. The essence of Taoism is to refine the conscious spirit to reunite it with the original spirit.

In doing so, you’ll be saying goodbye to religion, which can’t exist without dogma, theology, concepts, emotions, commandments, and other artificial creations of the human mind.

Trust your intuition. When the original spirit calls, put down your holy book and attend to its wordless message. You’ll never be able to tell anyone else what you heard. But the smile on your face will speak volumes.

To find God, get off the mind road

Churches are big on mind roads. That’s what they want you to travel on. In the church’s theological car, of course. Propelled by faith that you’re eventually going to get to God. Driven by the savior, mediator, master, guru, or prophet who supposedly knows the territory.

Problem is, nothing travel-worthy is apparent apart from the belief that there is. That’s why it is a mind road, not a real road. The pavement is cobbled together from passages found in holy books, words heard from the mouths of holy teachers, images seen by eyes that have gazed upon holy places and icons.

Which are all in the mind of the believer. When the belief is gone, so is the mind road. Real roads aren’t so ephemeral. When I’m driving on I-5 from Salem to Portland, if I take my eyes off the road or allow my mind to daydream about a more pleasant activity, the road is still there.

Not so with a mind road. So the advice of the sincerest spiritual sages throughout the ages is to get off it, if you’re on one. As most people are. If you belong to an organized religion, you’re on a mind road. If you consider that you’re on a defined spiritual path, you’re on a mind road.

And it could be said that if you’re occupied with thinking about how to get off the dead end of an imaginary way to God, you too are on a mind road. “You” likely includes me as I write this, and you as you read this.

But there’s a big difference between some short ruts that lead straight into the wilderness of divine Mystery, and a four-lane freeway of theological speculation that goes on, and on, and on, leading nowhere but to Blind Faith.

Zen Buddhism is small on mind roads. Zen says that they don’t lead past the Gateless Barrier. I don’t know what this barrier is. If I did, I suppose I’d be beyond it. So I’ll stop traveling on my mind road and let Wu-men, a thirteenth century master of the Rinzai school, speak about another way.

“Mu” is Japanese. “Wu” is Chinese. The words roughly mean “without” or “have not.” Roughly is the operative adjective, as Wu-men explains.
-----------------------------

(From “The Gateless Barrier: the Wu-men Kuan,” translated and with a commentary by Robert Aiken)

A monk asked Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?”
Chao-chou said, “Mu.”

Wu-men’s Comment:

For the practice of Zen it is imperative that you pass through the barrier set up by the Ancestral Teachers. For subtle realization it is of the utmost importance that you cut off the mind road. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, if you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to bushes and grasses.

What is the barrier of the Ancestral Teachers? It is just this one word “Mu”—the one barrier of our faith. We call it the Gateless Barrier of the Zen tradition. When you pass through this barrier, you will not only interview Chao-chou intimately.

You will walk hand in hand with all the Ancestral Teachers in the successive generations of our lineage—the hair of your eyebrows entangled with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears. Won’t that be fulfilling? Is there anyone who would not want to pass this barrier?

So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu.” Day and night, keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” and “has not.” It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t.

Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past. Inside and outside become one. You’re like a mute person who has had a dream—you know it for yourself alone.

Suddenly Mu breaks open. The heavens are astonished, the earth is shaken. It is as though you have snatched the great sword of General Kuan. When you meet the Buddha, you kill the Buddha. When you meet Bodhidharma, you kill Bodhidharma. At the very cliff edge of birth and death, you find the Great Freedom. In the Six Worlds and the Four Modes of Birth, you enjoy a samadhi of frolic and play.

How, then, should you work at it? Exhaust all your life energy on this one word “Mu.” If you do not falter, then it’s done! A single spark lights your Dharma candle.

Wu-men’s Verse:

Dog, Buddha nature—
the full presentation of the whole;
with a bit of “has” or “has not”
body is lost, life is lost.

Buddha enlightens Jesus about the self

A meeting between Jesus, the Christ and Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha. I’d love to be able to sit in a corner and listen in. Maybe even throw in a question or two.

Obviously so would Carrin Dunne, who wrote “Buddha & Jesus: Conversations.” Carrin said that she is a Christian with a growing interest in Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism.

I enjoyed this short (112 page) book, which was loaned to me by Warren, my Taoist marital arts teacher. He said that he felt Gotama gets the better of the arguments. I agree.

Dunne’s book was published in 1975. I note that a 2004 book about the I Ching was co-authored by one Carrin Dunne. I like to think that this is the same person, and that after writing about Jesus and Gotama Dunne continued to migrate toward the East.

For me the most interesting dialogue revolved around the subject of the self. To put it bluntly, I’d say that Gotama kicked Jesus’ ass. Spiritually speaking. Christianity just seems way too personal to be an accurate reflection of ultimate truth.

I can’t believe that the Word which supposedly created the cosmos became flesh and walked among us. Give me a break. The power behind the big bang that over 15 billion years has brought into being 100 billion galaxies, how could this force be encapsulated in a finite human being?

Who, according to Gotama, doesn’t even exist as a separate self. Gotama considers the self to be “the absolute source of illusion, the heart of ignorance and bondage.” Jesus, on the other hand, says that the self “is not only valuable but of infinite, irreplaceable value. Far from being the source of illusion, I see it as the source of truth.”

Gotama tries to set Jesus straight:

Infinite value? The source of truth? Indeed our differences are great if you mean what you say. I hope we can understand one another. I was deeply heartened when I heard you say that men must leave self behind to follow along the way, but I was disturbed when you added that to follow the way was to follow you.

Your way of putting it confuses the issue—which is a question of leaving all self behind, myself, yourself, all selves, the whole notion of self. You would do better to distinguish clearly between your person and your teaching.

Great advice, which applies equally to religions and spiritual paths of both the West and East. For it isn’t only Christianity which brings divinity down to a highly personal level and has a human proclaim that “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.”

This also is the teaching of many Eastern guru-based faiths. The guru is considered to be God in human form, just as Jesus is viewed by Christian believers. Thus Indian mystical philosophies such as Sant Mat (“path of the saints”) bear much resemblance to Christianity in their emphasis upon love and devotion directed toward an earthly person.

Jesus feebly tries to claim that when he asks men to follow him, this “is the most radical form of self-renunciation.” Gotama replies:

Forgive me if I still cannot grasp your language. When I speak of leaving self behind, I mean not only this particular self, but all notion of self, whether particular or universal, human or divine. You seem to be asking men to renounce themselves in order to cleave to another self, your own, which becomes a new world, an all-encompassing self for them—your desires in the place of their desires, your thoughts in place of their thoughts.

Jesus admits that “When you put it that way I can see why they say that I am possessed and raving. It sounds like the ambition of a self-obsessed madman.”

Gotama: “I am sorry to say it, but it does.”

It takes two to Tango, though. There is no guru without a disciple. I’ve seen tens of thousands of disciples staring spellbound at a guru, hanging on his every word, drinking in every manifestation of his personality.

Even when I was highly devoted to Sant Mat, in the guise of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch, I couldn’t understand this emphasis upon the person rather than the teaching. Some Western disciples loved to go to talks by the guru where he would speak entirely in an Indian language they couldn’t understand, just to be in his presence.

I found it boring.

I’ve also seen Westerners give their own talks about Sant Mat where they would mimic the gestures and speaking style of the guru. Just as Dunne says, they strove to submerge their own personality in the personality of another. I’d sit there thinking, “This is weird.”

For the person they wanted to become was someone else. They wanted to skip Socrates’ step of “Know thyself.” Buddha advises that this is the first, and likely also the last, step toward enlightenment. Why take on another persona when you are clueless about your own?

So I’m with Gotama in this regard. And most other regards. It makes sense to me to look within for spiritual truth, not without. I can admire another person, but I can never become him or her. My devotion should be to my own higher self, not to someone else’s.

Or, lack of self. Whichever, I’m confident that the self or non-self I discover at the end of my quest won’t belong to some other person.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

How many people are there in Boston? Two hundred thousand. Then there are so many sects. I go for Churches of one…The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

…The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it….Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

I get a glimpse of Tango Zen

Monday night at my Tango class the instructor taught us a pretty complicated move. Muy Tangoish, so it was cool. But difficult for our four-month-old Tango brains to grasp. My wife and I gave it a try, though.

From the man’s perspective: Step, step, trap her foot, turn her to left, stop her, cross step, side step, move her around with waist turn, trap her foot, step forward into centering position, step, step, step.

Well, it looks better on the dance floor than on a computer screen. However, at first I struggled to get the moves down. Then we started practicing.

And did OK. Heck, maybe better than OK. Within a few minutes Laurel and I were Tangoing along nicely. Until I started thinking, “Wow, we’re Tangoing along nicely.” That was the kiss of death for the new move.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Laurel complained. “You were doing fine before. Now you’re not.” “I know,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to make X, Y, and Z flow better.”

“Well, go back to how you started,” my non-shrinking-violet wife told me. Which I tried to do by just doing it, not by thinking about how to do it. Eventually I got back to where I had been. And then better than that, after we practiced the move for another half an hour with very little analyzing.

It was a revealing Tango Zen experience. I began by knowing that I didn’t know. Did fine. I progressed to knowing that I knew. Fell apart. I ended up not-knowing that I knew. Best of all.

In his book, Tango Zen, Chan Park talks about this sort of thing in refreshingly brief chapters.

Whatever feelings and thoughts arise while dancing Tango—just let them pass by with no attachment to anything. Zen teaches us to open our minds and see things as they are. Be ready to let feelings and thoughts come and go without engaging them. Resist the impulse of analyzing or judging them. However, don’t push away or avoid them either. Just listen to the music and dance.

…For Tango to be Tango, we need to make each and every movement with confidence. No hesitation. In Zen we strive to celebrate our own nature, our unique gifts and abilities. We are who we are and, likewise, we dance Tango the way we are. For self-confidence, we need to block our self-consciousness by stopping the self-critical monologue, e.g. the mental chatter while dancing Tango. Be easy on yourself, as you are the best you can be Here and Now!

It struck me that the attitude I had during my awkward period at the dance class was akin to feelings I had when I was overtly religious. At one time I thought that I knew a lot about the faith I was committed to, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). I knew what was right and what was wrong. I was constantly afraid that I’d make the wrong move.

Eat some meat, fish, or an egg by mistake. Imbibe some alcohol. Fail to meditate for the required period of time each day. Act against the wishes of the guru. I was stumbling all over myself trying to make precisely right moves on the spiritual path. I was self-consciously attempting to be humble and lose my ego.

Didn’t work. Couldn’t work. Would never work.

Here are some quotations from the Tango Zen book.

There is only the one Way—straight, open, and utterly empty of obstructions. –Yuan-Wu

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. –Zen Proverb

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. –Zhuagnzi

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things. –Dogen

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural. –Anna Pavlova

There is Buddha for those who don’t know what he is, really. There is no Buddha for those who know what he is, really. –Zen saying

I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance. I just put my feet in the air and move them around. –Fred Astaire

Going with the flow

My wife and I are in Maui right now. I’m sitting on the balcony of our condo, watching the waves roll into Napili Bay. Seems like a good time to think about going with the flow.

Of course, thinking and flowing are like oil and water. They don’t mix very well. Still, there’s a certain flow to thought when you just let it happen. It’s conscious controlling that messes the flowingness of anything up. That’s the bugaboo of religious concepts—the subject of my previous post.

They’re like rocks in the ocean. As an avid boogie boarder, I know all about those. I’m aware of the location of just about every large rock in Napili Bay. They’re where you don’t want to go when you catch a wave. Big waves aren’t dangerous. They’ll just toss you around. It’s hitting a rock or a reef that will wreck your day.

Rigidity sucks. Stay clear of it.

In “Lectures on Zen Buddhism” (one of the essays in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis), D.T. Suzuki talks about flowing. Don’t let the book’s title put you off: this is a great essay.

Suzuki urges us to become artists of life. However we earn our living, this should be our real profession. He says that “in point of fact we are all born artists of life and, not knowing it, most of us fail to be so and the result is that we make a mess our lives, asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Are we not facing blank nothingness?’”

The problem is that we’re facing in the wrong direction, where meaning won’t be found: outwardly. Suzuki assures us that “an artist of life has no need of going out of himself. All the material, all the implements, all the technical skill that are ordinarily required are with him from the time of his birth, perhaps even before his parents gave him birth.”

Cool. You don’t need to be saved. You don’t need to get religion. You don’t need a guru. You don’t need to heed the word of God. All you need to do is learn how to unlearn all the crap that you’ve been taught about what you are not.

Don’t copy. Be an original. Art isn’t imitation. Listen to Suzuki.

To such a person his life reflects every image he creates out of his inexhaustible source of the unconscious. To such, his every deed expresses originality, creativity, his living personality. There is in it no conventionality, no conformity, no inhibitory motivation.

He moves just as he pleases. His behavior is like the wind which bloweth as it listeth. He has no self encased in his fragmentary, restrained, egocentric existence. He is gone out of this prison.

One of the great Zen masters of the T’ang says: “With a man who is master of himself wherever he may be found he behaves truly to himself.” This man I call the true artist of life.

Yesterday afternoon I felt an urge to do some Tai Chi forms and a few martial arts kata that I’ve taichized. A sandy outcropping on the edge of Napili Beach beckoned to me. Weddings often are performed there. It’s a beautiful spot, facing Molokai.

When I mentioned my intention to Laurel she said, “Just don’t do it by me. You’re going to look funny. It will seem strange.” I didn’t blame her for having that reaction. I understood how she felt. But I didn’t care what other people on the beach would think. I always do these forms several times a week, and it was time to do them again.

I’m glad I did. How often am I going to be able to do Tai Chi in the soft sand, with waves crashing over rocks and dashing me with foam? I didn’t care if people were watching me. Nor did I care if people weren’t watching me. For the moment (and just for the moment, sadly) I was in a Zen-ish state of mind. Suzuki again:

But let a man once look within in all sincerity, and he will then realize that he is not lonely, forlorn, and deserted; there is within him a certain feeling of a royally magnificent aloneness, standing all by itself and yet not separated from the rest of existence.

…What makes him feel that way comes from his personally experiencing creativity or originality which is his when he transcends the realm of intellection and abstraction. Creativity differs from mere dynamism. It is the hallmark of the self-determining agent called the Self.

[By contrast] Individuality…is liable to become associated with self-asserting power. It is always conscious of others and to that extent controlled by them. Where individualism is emphasized, the mutually restricting feeling of tension prevails. There is no freedom here, no spontaneity, but a deep, heavy atmosphere or inhibition, suppression, and oppression overpowers one and the result is psychological disturbance in all its varieties.

I know a bit about sword techniques. I’ve studied the Japanese katana and have two “live” blades plus several wooden practice bokken. I’m slowly learning a Tai Chi sword form. However, I’ve done very little freeform sword fighting.

Still, from my other marital arts experience I can relate to Suzuki’s Zen wisdom here—which applies equally to all of us fighting the battle of life. He is relating the advice of Takuan to his swordsman disciple Yagyu Tajima-no-kami.

Takuan’s advice is chiefly concerned with keeping the mind always in the state of “flowing,” for he says when it stops anywhere that means the flow is interrupted and it is this interruption that is injurious to the well-being of the mind. In the case of a swordsman, it means death.

…When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, nor of himself, nor of his enemy’s sword-movements. He just stands there with his sword which, forgetful of all technique, is really only to follow the dictates of the unconscious.

The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hands of the unconscious that strikes. There are stories in which the man himself has not been aware of the fact that he has struck down the opponent—all unconsciously.

Now, that’s flow. Real artistry. Conscious concepts get in the way. “I need to hold the sword this way.” “If an attack comes from this direction, I will parry in this fashion.” Thoughts like these interrupt the genuine knowledge, prajna, that springs naturally from within.

Religious thoughts are similarly obstructive. “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.” “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” “Without a living guru, god-realization is impossible.”

Ideas like these cut us off from the reality toward which they supposedly point. They interpose dogma between us and direct experience. Does anyone really know any of those statements to be true? No. But the faith of billions rests on theological hypotheses like these.

They’re considered to be rocks on which to stand. Actually, they’ll bust your head. Trust yourself. Flow with the waves of life and stay away from reefs of rigidity. When given a choice between one religious way or the highway, head for the open road.

The joy of uncertainty

Admittedly, uncertainty is in a different league than sex. Yet it is as valid to praise the joy of uncertainty as the joy of sex. They both promise prodigious pleasure to those willing to take some risks and leave the familiar boundaries of the known.

When I speak of uncertainty I’m mainly referring to the spiritual variety: the embrace of mystery and not-knowing, opening yourself to higher truths in any sort of form they may present themselves, casting aside rigid programmed beliefs in favor of surprise me!

But you can’t confine uncertainty. It’s everywhere. It’s part and parcel of life itself. It’s what adds the spice to what otherwise would be bland routinized existence.

Which connects uncertainty with sex. The thrill of the unknown. Someone new. Green pastures. A hint of danger. Losing control. A generous dose of uncertainty is part of the formula for satisfying sex.

The same goes for satisfying spirituality. A few days ago I ran into an old meditation buddy who I hadn’t seen for at least ten years. He asked how I was doing, spiritually speaking.

“I’ve become a heretic,” I said. “I don’t know anymore. I’m not sure of anything. I’ve lost faith in everything except my own experience. It feels good. I’m a lot more relaxed now. The pressure’s off.”

Uncertainty is something you can count on. Indeed, you can be certain of it. Plus, uncertainty is real, honest, natural, humble, energizing, and scientific. I love it. I’d give it a big hug if I could pin it down. But it always pops up when you least expect it, and then dashes off again unexpectedly.

That’s the nature of uncertainty. Can’t change it. Wouldn’t want to. It’s a wild, unpredictable spiritual catalyst that brings passion into a person’s relationship with the cosmos.

Absent uncertainty, life is boringly mechanical and dryly logical. With uncertainty, life crooks its alluring finger and whispers “Step around the corner, honey, and see what surprise I’ve got for you.”

Uncertainty is the death of religion. It’s the lifeblood of mysticism and genuine spirituality. That’s how you can tell when you’re in the presence of deadening fundamentalism: you won’t hear “I don’t know,” “It’s a mystery,” or “Who can say?”

You have to dig deep to reach the uncertain mystical core of most religions. It’s there, but buried under dogma, scripture, theology, organized principles of metaphysics. Only a few spiritual traditions elevate uncertainty to the pinnacle that it deserves. Taoism. Buddhism.

Here’s an excerpt from Ray Grigg’s great book, “The Tao of Zen.” As you can tell from the title, he links authentic Taoism and Buddhism, revealing the common essence of both.

The wisdom, the peace, the grace of Taoism and Zen come from a special uncertainty. The result is a condition of perpetual preparedness, an easy readiness that takes an appropriate shape for every particular circumstance. Every answer becomes “as the situation arises.” Each individual person becomes the balanced and shapeless center of the universe, dancing alone with the unpredictable order that swirls everywhere.

…In a world full of people who are strewn between total confusion and absolute certainty, the Taoist and Zen challenge is the nearly impossible simplicity of reaching a deep insight that is wholly inclusive yet devoid of answers.

And here’s a link to an interesting piece, “Surprised by Joy: Experiments with Uncertainty,” from a fellow uncertainty embracer, Mel Crossley.

I have to add: this post turned out quite different from what I envisioned when I began writing. As it should have, given my subject. Now, it’s time to open the refrigerator and see what there is to eat for dinner. I'm ready to be surprised.

Mantra meditation: what’s in a word?

If I had a penny for every time I’ve repeated a mantra during the thirty-six years I’ve been meditating, I’d have something to show for all the words I’ve spoken in my head. But I don’t.

So, what’s in a word? What’s the point of saying a mantra over and over, whether it be during a designated meditation period or at other times during the day?

Christians use mantras. “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” was endlessly repeated by the Russian whose tale is told in “The Way of a Pilgrim.” Buddhists use mantras. “Namu amida butsu” (I take refuge in Amida Buddha) is chanted by the Pure Land school of Buddhism. “Om,” “Ah,” “Hu,” these one-syllable mantras are but a few of the countless other words that are repeated by millions of devotees in every corner of the world.

So what? All of us speak words all of the time, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently. Why is a mantra any better than the stream of verbal consciousness that normally courses through the mind?

Such as, for me right now: “Got to get going finish post later need to exercise hungry take banana remember put dog out maybe no chew stick diarrhea this morning yuck hope this ends up making sense think while driving wait supposed to be about mantra should practice what preach.”

D.T. Suzuki, a noted Zen adept, says that there are two ways of conceiving the purpose of a mantra.

In the first case the name itself is regarded as having a wonderful power, especially over human affairs; it is a magic formula…In the second case, the name is pronounced not necessarily as indicative of things that are therein suggested, but in order to work out a certain psychological process thus set up.

He is speaking here of “namu amida butsu,” but the principle applies to every variety of mantra. When we repeat certain words over and over, is it with an outward or an inward intention? Are we trying to influence someone or something out there that is separate from us, or is it we ourselves in here who is affected by the repetition of the mantra?

In every religion there are outward-directed and inward-directed followers. For example, in Buddhism the Pure Land believers consider that repeating “namu amida butsu” brings all kinds of benefits from various deities:

When we say "Namu-amida-butsu," the countless Buddhas throughout the ten quarters, surrounding us a hundredfold, a thousandfold, rejoice in and protect us.

OK. Maybe. I doubt it, but everyone is entitled to their own beliefs.

I find that the Zen approach to mantra meditation makes a lot more sense, for it is psychological rather than theological. D.T. Suzuki says that when “namu amida butsu” is repeated without regard to the meaning of the words, or envisioning that countless Buddhas are hearing the invocation, a profound alteration in consciousness may occur.

Psychologically considered, the aim of the vocal Nembutsu is to do away with the fundamental dualism which is a condition of our empirical consciousness. By achieving this the devotee rides over the theoretical difficulties and contradictions that have troubled him before. With all intensity of thought and will he has thrown himself into the deeps of his own being.

And what is found in those depths, ultimately, is Buddha nature. So the Pure Land devotee and the Zen practitioner seemingly arrive at the same destination via different avenues. Zen, however, takes a more direct path, since the journey doesn’t involve any appeal to beings or entities separate from the devotee’s own consciousness.

I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that Jesus, Buddha, God/Allah, Angels, Soul Guides, Gurus, or whoever, are listening to people doing mantra meditation and doling out grace when the right words are heard. That just seems like rank superstition to me.

When mantra meditation is viewed in that light—as a petition to some higher being—it is no different from traditional religious prayer. Masquerading as a mystical practice, meditation then simply is endlessly repeated prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” “I take refuge in Amida Buddha.”

Words directed outwardly, whether spoken aloud or silently within the mind, have meaning only if someone else is listening. Otherwise we’re just talking to our own self. And since I already know what I’ve said to myself, or I wouldn’t be able to say it, such is an empty circular exercise.

I understand why people like to feel that the Buddha, Jesus, a guru, or some other being is aware of their mantra meditation or prayer. It’s nice to have a companion on the spiritual journey. But I want a real companion, not an imaginary friend. Suzuki directs our attention to what really lies at the root of the words that are repeated in the mind.

Mere naming does not prove to be so efficient, is not so effect-producing, as when there is back of it a corresponding reality. Mere uttering the name “water” does not quench the thirst; when it is visualized and there is a mental picture of a spring it produces a more physiologically realistic effect; but it is only when there is real fresh water before us which is quaffed that the thirst actually ceases.

Words are just words unless they point to a directly experienced reality. When I call “Serena!” our dog comes running (usually). That’s because we have a dog who knows her name. When I’m hungry and feel too lazy to cook anything, I often call “Maria!” That’s the name of our imaginary maid. She never responds because she isn’t real.

I’m all for repeating a mantra. Purposeful mental activity is a lot better than letting the mind ramble around aimlessly. I feel more centered when I don’t allow words to run crazily around the racetrack of my brain like blind greyhounds chasing rabbits on meth.

However, I don’t consider that a mantra is magic. It simply is a pointer toward mystery, the mystery of me, the mystery of what lies at the root of the being uttering the mantra. As Suzuki puts it:

The Nembutsu ceased to mean “meditating on the Buddha” and came to be identified with the name, or rather with “uttering the name.” Meditation, or “coming into the presence of the Buddha,” thus gave way to the constant repetition of the phrase as not always or necessarily referring to any definite objective reality, but merely as a name somehow beyond comprehension, or rather as a symbol standing for something indescribable, unpredictable, altogether transcending the intellect, and therefore suggesting a meaning beyond meaning.

Which means to me, no more words tonight. Time to make a salad. And get wordlessly real.

Western religions holding back stem cell research

Watching “Nightline” a few days ago, I was pleased to find an expert supporting my contention that religion is at the root of the reason why the United States is falling behind other nations in crucial health care research.

In my “God must be a Buddhist” post I argued that the Western monotheistic religions have more of a problem with absorbing scientific facts into their worldviews than do Eastern faiths such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism.

Thus recent breakthroughs in embryonic therapeutic cloning occurred in South Korea, not the United States, because irrational tenets of fundamentalist Christianity have resulted in limits being placed on federal funding of stem cell research.

On the May 24 Nightline program, Ted Koppel interviewed Lee Silver, described as a “genetics professor at Princeton University” (Silver’s official status is Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Affairs). Silver said that the way to make sure U.S. stem cell research has ethical limits is to have research funded by the federal government, with accompanying federal regulations.

He went on to say that the two most important advances in therapeutic cloning have come out of South Korea, though the United States spends far more on research. One reason is that the U.S. has put restrictions on this research, which is leading to private funding and stem cell researchers going to other countries.

Silver said, “Then the research will be conducted basically in Asia, where people don’t have as many problems with this research as Westerners tend to have.”

Koppel interjected: “You were just about to say, and I could see you catching yourself, whether they don’t have the same ethical considerations. You weren’t really going to say that, were you?”

“No, no,” Silver responded. “I don’t think that is correct. I think that we’re seeing different senses of spirituality or ethics in the United States and in Asia because we have very different religious traditions. And I think the research in Asia will be done ethically, but they don’t see human embryos in the same light as we do in America or Europe.”

Fundamentalist Christians in this country are disturbingly ignorant of alternative faiths such as Buddhism. Americans, who are overwhelmingly Christian, tend to think that they have a corner on the market of moral values. So Bush can stand at his presidential podium and spout nonsense about vetoing proposed legislation that would loosen federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research because he is “pro-life.”

No, he isn’t. The Buddhist stem cell researcher in South Korea, Hwang Woo-suk, is pro-life, because he is working to cure diseases that shorten life and reduce the quality of life. Bush is pro-cells in a Petri dish, not pro-life.

Koppel said to Silver that his mind jumps from the term “embryo” to “tiny little creature, soon to become a baby.” Silver set him straight: “We have to understand that when you have an embryo in a Petri dish it cannot possibly become a fetus or a baby. That can only happen if the embryo is placed in a woman’s womb.” And if we don’t want this to occur, he added, we need transparent research funded by the federal government.

In a Korea Times article, “Stem Cell and Buddhism,” I learned that Hwang used to be an atheist until he became a Buddhist about twenty years ago. Hwang says, “I am not versed in the creeds of Buddhism. But when I carry out research, I always check whether they square with the sublime spirit of the Buddha. If I am not sure, I will be unable to continue my work.”

In Buddhism, an early-stage embryo isn’t classified as “life” until it is implanted on the uterine wall. Supposedly this is part of the Buddha’s teachings, which I have suspicions about. Regardless, it makes sense. Much more sense than Bush’s notion that a few cells lying in a Petri dish have more of a claim to life than real live people suffering from diseases that potentially could be cured with therapeutic cloning.

Koppel told Silver that some say umbilical and adult stem cells are as good as embryonic stem cells. “I disagree with that,” Silver said. “An embryonic stem cell has the ability to become every tissue or organ in the body if you can figure out what factors to give it.” Other stem cells don’t have that potential.

Hwang has figured out how to create an embryo’s cells from a patient’s own cells. So when the stem cells are put back into the patient, the patient’s body sees those cells as part of itself and won’t reject them.

That’s beautiful. It’s spiritual. It’s godly. You just need a compassionate sensibility and open mind to recognize that therapeutic cloning is a scientific advance to be embraced, not a sin to be rejected. Fundamentalist Western religions create a divide between humanity and nature that is well, unnatural. Also unreal and unbelievable. These religions posit ethical problems where none exist, and ignore evident affronts to life—such as the diseases that could be cured through advances in embryonic stem cell research.

Silver has written a soon-to-be-published book, “Biotechnology in a Spiritual World.” In a lecture based on the book he notes that Western religions embrace a tight one-to-one linkage between body and soul. This can lead to the view that research on a embryo in a Petri dish is murder. However, “In Eastern cultures, biotechnology is not viewed as a challenge to a master God because no such master is thought to be in charge. Furthermore, Eastern spirits are much more loosely attached to bodies and beyond the reach of any scientist.”

I’m not certain which worldview is correct, but my leanings are strongly in the Eastern direction. It is more scientific and sensible. Western religions make conceptual divisions where none exist in reality. For example, Silver notes that Christianity doesn’t believe plants and animals have souls, though they evidently are alive.

Why is an alive human considered to be completely different spiritually from an alive animal? Why is it all right to genetically modify and clone plants, but not people? Questions like these twist Christian theology into irrational knots, while Buddhism presents more compelling answers.

In the afore-linked Korea Times article, Hwang is quoted as saying: “Cloning is a different way of thinking about the cycle of life and re-birth. It is a Buddhist way of thinking.” The article’s author comments, “He was referring to the developmental plasticity of cells, and their genomic and genetic possibilities can be understood in the context of reincarnation, a central concept in Buddhism.”

Whether or not reincarnation after death is true, there is no doubt that life is continually transforming itself in our bodies at every moment. Therapeutic cloning simply builds on natural processes of renewal and rebirth.

This is easy for a Buddhist to see. I only wish that President Bush and the other Christian fundamentalists had such a clear spiritual vision.

Centering in on “The Supreme Doctrine”

Today I finished re-reading Hubert Benoit’s classic book about Zen psychology, “The Supreme Doctrine.” I’ve been quoting from “The Supreme Doctrine” in earlier posts, here and here.

Now I want to take a stab at writing about this book entirely in my own words. I’d like to share what has stuck in my mind after making my way through this wonderfully insightful treatment of man’s spiritual psyche. Benoit probably wouldn’t like the word “spiritual” used to describe his book, but now I get to describe it the way I want to.

That’s just the approach Benoit took toward Zen. In a concluding chapter he says that he isn’t sure how the great Zen masters would look upon his work. But he believes that they would approve of his effort to maintain his own personal thoughts in the face of all that has been written about Zen by others.

Breaking the rule I just made for myself (firmly in the Zen spirit), I’ll quote Benoit: “One remembers that Zen master who, seeing one of his pupils pouring over a Sutra [Buddhist scripture], said to him: ‘Do not let yourself be upset by the Sutra, upset the Sutra yourself instead.’ For only thus can there be established between the pupil and the Sutra a real understanding.”

So here’s my take on four themes that stick in my mind after reading “The Supreme Doctrine.” They’ve stuck because Benoit’s analysis of the human condition and the spiritual pursuit rings so true to my own experience. The minds of Homo sapiens' work much the same, no matter in what bodies they function. Frequently I’d read a passage where Benoit describes an introspective experience and think, “Why, he's just like me!”

Self and not-self. At the root of every thought and action, says Benoit, is the primal distinction between self and not-self. This rings absolutely true for me. I’m constantly evaluating how the world is affecting me and how I’m affecting the world. There’s a constant give and take between what seems to be “out there” and what seems to be “in here.”

When the world affirms me, my spirit soars. When the world denies me, my spirit sinks. My self is constantly at risk of being annihilated by the not-self, which is ever so much bigger and more powerful than I am. I’m just a teeny-tiny speck compared to the vastness of even just planet Earth, not to mention the inconceivable expanse of the entire universe.

Now, if I was nothing and the world was everything, then obviously there would be no problem. My self couldn’t get anxious about the prospect of being obliterated if I didn’t exist. However, this isn’t an appealing solution to my chronic anxiety about how the relationship between my self and the not-self is going, because what I’m anxious about is not existing. If the prescribed treatment is becoming nothing, then the cure is worse than the disease.

So how about if I become everything? That sounds a lot more appealing. I get to preserve my individuality. Even better, I get to expand my self so it encompasses the entire world. My Brian ego finds it easy to smile at that prospect. The only problem is how to accomplish this ballooning out of me. Obviously it can’t be attained physically—it isn’t possible to devour the Earth—so the solution has to be psychic.

Compensations. Which gets us to a word with psychoanalytic connotations that Benoit uses a lot (no surprise, since he was a practicing psychoanalyst), and I don’t claim to fully understand: “compensation.” My understanding of this term is that the self has to somehow compensate for the tremendously greater power of the not-self.

I couldn’t function if my ego recognized how insignificant I am compared to the cosmos. I’d be overwhelmed, crushed, psychically smashed to smithereens. Thus I conjure up some defenses. My mind, like all human minds, finds ways to make itself the center of the universe around which all else revolves.

Since everyone else is doing the same thing, we end up with a crazy quilt of overlapping compensations that produces the ever-entertaining dynamics of interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal psychology. My main compensative mechanism is identifying myself with what is not me. I assuage my anxiety about what the not-self might do to me by psychically bonding with as much of not-me as I can. And so do we all.

Attachment to my marriage partner. Patriotic commitment to my country. Devotion to my religion. Adherence to my ethical values. Belief in my core philosophical concepts. Engagement with my community. Appreciation of my natural surroundings. Interaction with my friends, pets, acquaintances, strangers on the street. Scientific understanding of my world and universe.

All of these attempts to build bridges between little me and the infinitely larger not-me (the above-mentioned obviously are just a sampling) have the effect of maintaining the integrity of my existence in the face of what otherwise seemingly would be a cold, cruel world. When they function as they should, my compensations nicely compensate for the fact that, crudely but accurately put, the universe could wipe me off its butt and flush me down the cosmic toilet without losing a speck of anything valuable.

This indeed is what will happen when I die. And seemingly it would happen before I die if my compensations fail me. If I let down the barriers between my self and my not-self, why, it would be like opening up the hatch of a submerged submarine. I’d sink like a stone to the bottom of an existential abyss. Or so I believe.

Imaginative film. My compensations are beliefs. My anxieties are beliefs. My hopes and fears for the future are beliefs. My understandings of myself are beliefs. My dreams are beliefs. My conceptions of God, heaven, and hell are beliefs. Virtually everything that I do and am is a belief embedded on the film of my imagination. It is through this film that I perceive the world. Not as it is, but as I imagine it to be.

“Imagine” may seem like an excessively strong word to describe all my thinking and emoting. Indeed, thoughts and feelings appear to be closely connected with what I consider to be objective reality. I see a beautiful sunset and think, “Ah, what a beautiful sunset.” Our dog wags her tail when I enter her room in the morning and I feel a burst of affection for this beloved canine companion.

And yet. The sunset doesn’t have any genuine connection with my thoughts about it. Nor do my feelings about our dog truly reflect the nature of her. The contents of my imaginative film are vitally important to me, the Brian “in here,” but to the world “out there,” they make not a whit of difference. If I vanished, the sunset and our dog would still exist. Less dramatically, if my imaginations vanished, the same would hold true.

Indeed, Zen teaches that things outside in the world would be more real for me if my internal world wasn’t filled with so much that is purely of my own making. If I could simply sense what is actually there, without adding on to that “is” all the thoughts and feelings that I customarily plaster over reality via my mental imaginative film, then I’d be much closer to the truth. Satori. Enlightenment. Salvation. Wisdom. Whatever you want to call it, I’d be nearer to it.

Thus, Benoit says, it turns out that all my efforts to defend my self against the inroads of the not-self actually end up making me less safe. For what I should be fearing isn’t the world of not-me, but rather the continuance of an illusory ego that maintains the fiction of a distinct difference between the self and the not-self.

A difference there is, but it is more like an ever-shifting boundary line between two similar entities—such as a small inlet and a vast ocean. At high tide the distinctions are erased; at low tide each is separate. Waves and water are fluid, though. You can’t draw a firm line between a inlet and the ocean to which it is connected.

Well, you can. Yet it would be an imaginary line, existing only as a concept, not part of real reality. Similarly, if we want to know the cosmos as it is, in contrast to how we imagine it to be, the contents of the imaginative film that normally obscures our perceptions have to be set aside. Somehow we need to perceive our self in relation to the world as that relationship is naturally, before we added on all of the extraneous thoughts and feelings that, though undeniably a part of being human, prevent us from realizing our divinity.

Buddha nature. Original self. Soul. More words to describe the wordless. Those words, those descriptions, they don’t help us see clearly. Rather, they are part of the imaginative film that has to be scrubbed clean of concepts before consciousness can look through an open window onto what is really there—not what is imagined to be there.

Humility. People who aspire to being spiritual usually consider, correctly, that humility is central to their pursuit. However, Benoit cautions against any sort of forced effort to be anything other than what we truly are. Reality, he says, will produce in us the perfect proportion of humility, for when we understand truly how self relates to not-self, there isn’t much of us left to be excessively proud about.

Further, it is self-evident that the self is virtually powerless against the not-self. Even without the just-mentioned understanding, life lived as it is at every moment screams at us a message that cannot fail to be heard: “The individual is nothing compared to the all that is everything.” Whatever I do, whatever I think, whatever I feel—the world proceeds on its own way, heedless of my actions, thoughts, and emotions.

I will drive myself crazy if I continue to believe that I am separate and distinct, that I exist as a firmly defined bubble of Brian, bobbing on my own in the otherwise fluidly connected ocean of the cosmos. The walls within which I have enclosed myself are of my ego’s own making. When they fall, my existence won’t be obliterated, but my imagined life that has Me at the center of the universe will.

I can’t will that will, however, for such an effort would simply sustain my erroneous belief in a self that acts independently of the rest of the world. Benoit says that genuine self-realization or satori isn’t caused by all of my efforts to bring it about. Rather, it follows those efforts. Not casually, but sequentially.

The cause isn’t under my control. All I can do is prepare myself for the cause—what Benoit calls my Principle—to work its way within me. That’s a humbling thought.

And when the thought of the humbling goes, that’s when the real humility has a chance to appear.

"The Supreme Doctrine," thirty-six years overdue

“The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought” is one of my favorite books. When I checked it out from the San Jose Public Library while I was a San Jose State University student, I couldn’t bear to return it.

It’s now thirty-six years overdue. I’m pretty sure I paid the library the $1.65 replacement cost. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than 5 cents a day, times 365 days, times 36 years, which is what I would have owed by now.

This is the only library book I’ve ever kept permanently. I brought it on our Maui vacation (where my wife and I are now) because I haven’t re-read it for a long time, and I was curious to see if what attracted me so strongly to “The Supreme Doctrine” when I was twenty-one still was a spiritual magnet for me at the age of fifty-six.

It is.

Hubert Benoit, the author, was a psychiatrist and practicing psychoanalyst. I saw “was,” because “The Supreme Doctrine” was first published in 1951 and I assume Dr. Benoit is dead by now. I was a psychology major when I came across the book. I also was reading a lot of Zen literature at the time. So Benoit’s ability to translate Zen insights into a psychological framework fascinated me back then.

It still does.

Zen, along with Taoism, are wonderfully non-religious spiritual pursuits. So they continue to be mainstays of my Church of the Churchless faithless faith. Benoit’s discussion of Zen involves a bit of abstract metaphysics, but mostly he speaks directly about the immediately obvious human condition—just as Taoists do.

Religion, by and large, leaves me cold. It is too detached from my conscious reality, the world inside my head where I live my daily life. So far I’ve only re-read the first four chapters of “The Supreme Doctrine,” yet already I’ve been reminded why this book speaks so truly to me. It is as if Benoit knows my mind. Of course, I would expect nothing less from a psychoanalyst.

He says that Zen teaches that all of the false efforts to deal with the evident reality of human misery don’t reach the root cause of our problems:

At the back of all that there is the following simple-minded reasoning: “Things are going badly with me in such and such a way; very well, from now on I am going to do exactly the opposite.” This way of regarding the problem, starting from a form that is judged to be bad, encloses the searcher within the limits of a domain that is formal, and as a result, deprives him of all possibility of re-establishing his consciousness beyond all form.

Maybe that passage sounds rather intellectual to you. It doesn’t to me. I know just what Benoit is talking about. For most of my life I’ve believed that in order to be spiritually free, it’s necessary for me to confine myself within the bounds of a spiritual system. That doesn’t make sense to me now. Confinement isn’t freedom. Confinement may be followed by freedom, but the two states can’t be present at the same time. Either you are confined or you are free.

Benoit says that we always are free. We just don’t realize it. We are dreaming a dream of confinement. Virtually everything we do to escape this illusion just keeps us more tightly encased within it.

All my apparent ‘trouble’ derives from the sleep of my faith in the perfect Reality; I have, awakened in me, nothing but ‘beliefs’ in what is communicated to me by my senses and my mind working on the dualistic plane (beliefs in the non-existence of a Perfect Reality that is One); and these beliefs are illusory formations, without reality, consequences of the sleep of my faith.

In short, everything appears to be wrong in me because the fundamental idea that everything is perfectly, eternally and totally positive, is asleep in the centre of my being, because it is not awakened, living and active therein.

So let’s say that we agree with Benoit that something within us—call it “soul,” perhaps—needs to be awakened, enlightened, saved. What then? He says that we aren’t out of the frying pan; we’ve just jumped into another hot spot of illusion in our desire for salvation.

All the determining, enslaving reality which man attributed to this or that ‘temporal’ enterprise becomes the most determining, the most enslaving that can be imagined. Since realization signified liberation one arrives at the absurd paradox that man is subjected to the coercive duty to be free. Man’s distress is concentrated then on this question of his salvation; he trembles at the thought that he may die before having attained his deliverance.

Most spiritual seekers submit themselves to an external authority in hopes that they can become liberated from pain, suffering, sin, illusion, maya—whatever you want to call the fallen state that most of us believe we are trapped in. Yet Zen says that this very belief in the reality of being trapped is the true trap.

Benoit says that my desire to be someone unique, one of a kind, a “me” unlike any other, is the root of all of my problems, both spiritual and worldly. Yet here I am, seeking personal salvation, when the egotistical belief that I am a special person who needs to be saved is what I need to be saved from.

I’m afraid of existing, Benoit argues. I believe that existence is a mere foundation for the really important thing: living. He writes, “ A man declares: ‘My life is insipid and monotonous; I do not call that living; at most it is existing….According to my fiction of personal divinity, to found my sense of life on my vegetative phenomena and the actions which serve them is absurd, while to found this sense on actions which tend to affirm me as separate is sensible. This view is profoundly rooted in the mind of man. It is evident to anyone who thinks about it impartially that it is this opinion which is absurd.”

Why? Because my emphasis on the importance of actions that only I can do places me at the center of the universe, whereas Benoit correctly says that only the First Cause (or what I’d call Ultimate Reality) can be that center. So according to Zen I would be much closer to the truth if I could tune into my pure and simple existence, my being, rather than all my doing.

I’ll probably share more from “The Supreme Doctrine” after I’ve re-read additional chapters. Apropos my current near-vegetative Maui beach life, here’s a nice Zen story from Benoit’s book that should make you feel better when you don’t feel like doing anything.

"Once upon a time there was a man standing on a high hill. Three travelers, passing in the distance, noticed him and began to argue about him. One said, ‘He has probably lost his favorite animal.’ Another said: ‘No, he is probably looking for his friend.’ The third said: “He is there only in order to enjoy the fresh air.’

The three travelers could not agree and continued to argue right up to the moment when they arrived at the top of the hill. One of them asked: ‘O friend, standing on this hill, have you not lost your favorite animal?’ ‘No, Sir, I have not lost him.’ The other asked: ‘Have you not lost your friend?’ ‘No, Sir, I have not lost my friend either.’ The third traveler asked: ‘Are you not here in order to enjoy the fresh air?’ ‘No, Sir.’

‘What then are you doing here, since you answer ‘No’ to all our questions.’ The man on the hill replied, ‘I am just standing.’”

Flee from the fear of God

Yesterday John, a commenter on my “Reality is the best religion” post, gave me some advice: “If you desire to become more wise than [sic] consider that wisdom begins with the fear of god.”

I must be a real dumb-ass, because I’ve never been able to muster up much of a fear of God. I’m afraid of a lot of things—death, disease, Bush appointing a Supreme Court justice, missing the final episode of “Survivor”—because I have either directly observed these fears or can reasonably imagine their occurrence.

But I’ve never seen God. And I bet John hasn’t either. So how does he know that it’s wise to fear God? Maybe God doesn’t even exist, in which case fearing God would make as much sense as fearing the boogeyman. I can understand why an impressionable child would believe that something unseen lives under his or her bed and threatens to get them. I can’t understand why a mature adult would believe in an unseen God who is similarly deserving of fear.

Strangely, John also said, “In this world there is nothing so real like the love of Jesus Christ.” Since Jesus is purported to be the son of God, this implies that God also is real. How could a son be more real than his father? I suppose a son’s love could be more real than his father’s love. Yet it seems to me that if God exists, it is much more likely that God’s love would surpass Jesus’ love rather than fall short of it.

Trying to understand why I should fear the loving Christian God, I perused scripture on a “Why Fear God?” web page. It didn’t make much sense. First I read that "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16 NIV). Ah, eternal life: that sounds good. Sign me up.

A bit further down the page, though, I came to "The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread.” (Isaiah 8:13 NIV), and also, “But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12:5). Oh, hell: that isn’t appealing. Cancel my application.

The Christian God described in the Old and New Testaments isn’t somebody I want to spend any time with. Certainly not eternity. He’s a father who only loves children who fear him: As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. (Psalms 103:13)

I also read, “To find balance between love and fear look to your childhood. As children, we all loved our earthly fathers, but we feared the times of discipline (which was for our own good). ‘The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous.’ (Psalms 19:9 NIV)"

Well, I grew up without a father. And my mother believed in maternal love, not fearful discipline. So I guess I didn’t experience the child abuse that apparently is needed to appreciate why I now need the fear of the Lord.

My wife is a psychotherapist. Frequently she counsels people who are being, or have been, harmed by a “good Christian” man who thinks that his woman and children should fear him just as God teaches that He should be feared.

If you find yourself in such a situation, flee it. Do something about it. Fight it. Don’t put up with it. Life is too short and too precious to be lived in fear. Don’t be afraid of a human father, and don’t be afraid of a heavenly father. All too often people put up with fear because they are more afraid of losing the security that an authoritarian father-figure provides.

Mussolini made the trains run on time and Saddam Hussein kept the electricity on. Well, I’d rather wait for a train and eat in the dark than live under a dictator. In the same fashion, I’d rather deal with the consequences of having an open mind than live confined in the dogmatism of a fundamentalist theology.

This page, “Reality versus God and the human illusion of fear” from Escape from Watchtower.com nicely encapsulates the choice between being (in the author’s words) a Mr./Ms. Fundamental, Theist, Formula, Religion person or a Mr./Ms. Mystic, Poet-Thinker, Existentialist, Agnostic, Nontheist person. The author added “science” in the first category, but I question whether it belongs there. For a religion based on fear, such as fundamentalist Christianity, is rooted in a primitive pre-scientific misunderstanding of how the world works.

Science knows that the cosmos is lawful, not arbitrary. The universe shows no evidence of a Zeus-like God who capriciously throws sinners into hell and elevates the faithful into heaven. Yet the religious faithful believe in old texts from a bygone age which were written by people who viewed the world in an unscientific fashion. Those people didn’t know any better; we do. So it is time—actually, long-past time—to embrace spiritual beliefs that are in tune with how reality is, rather than how it isn’t.

Buddhism isn’t immune from rituals and religiosity, but the core of this spiritual philosophy reflects a modern mindset. My Christian correspondent told me that wisdom begins with the fear of God. This excerpt from the second page of an essay called “Why Buddhism?” makes a lot more sense to me:

From the Buddhist point of view, wisdom is based on right understanding and right thought, the realisation of universal law and the development of insight. Insight means not only to see the truth, but to perceive the way of complete liberation from the state of unsatisfactoriness in life.

Therefore, real wisdom cannot be found in academic institutions or in the laboratories of scientific research, nor even in a place of religious worship where people go and pray or perform rites and rituals. Wisdom is within the mind itself. When experience, understanding, realisation and purification are complete, this wisdom, comprising of the highest perfection, will arise and be seen. The aim of life is the attainment of this wisdom. Instead of searching into outer space, man should make the effort to explore the space within. Then he could reach his final goal.

Buddhism advocates right action, or morality, but not out of a fear of God. Rather, “Evil is to be avoided for the welfare of all living beings, not for fear of god or his punishment.” I’ve been a vegetarian for over thirty-five years. The main reason I don’t kill animals for food is because it would seriously bother me to know that I’ve made them suffer. I also consider that karma and reincarnation are part of the fabric of reality, so I also don’t want to incur the consequences of unnecessary killing (which is immediately evident in the form of diseases related to meat-eating).

Believing in universal laws of natural consequences, causes and effects, is much different from believing in a whimsical personal authoritarian God who punishes sinners and rewards the faithful.

This choice of beliefs can be simply encapsulated in a T-shirt slogan.

Which is most appealing to you: this or this?

I’ll take “No Fear,” please.