Satori and the Unconscious

Suzuki's longest (and for me the hardest) section is on Zen and the Unconscious.

He spends a great deal of time on theological debates amongst late first millenium Chinese Buddhists fraught with technical terms and attempts to relate them to the psychological/spiritual experience of Satori.  He finds the unconscious mind of the late 20th century West (fraught with Jungian understandings) a useful tool for trying to describe what is admitedly undescribable. 

While not presented as a religious experience, Alexander Bennett describes a moment of Zen like concentration in a Kendo meet that may have parallels with what Suzuki is trying to explain -



"My opponent was a formidable fencer, but I was resolved to give it my all and let the result take care of itself.  Not far into the bout, I managed to score a strike to the head - a decisive hit.  I felt no particular elation, no desire or excitement after taking the lead.  I was in the zone.  Then before I knew it, I had scored a second point to his head."

Alexander Bennett
Bushido and the Art of Living


"in the zone"
"let the result take care of itself"
"no particular elation, no desire or excitement"

These terms of non-attachment Bennett calls mushin 'no-mind' - term very important to Suzuki's decription as well.

Why is what we choose to believe so important?

An interesting perspective from a dissident imprisoned in the days of communist rule in Czechoslovakia -

"In recent years I've met several intelligent and decent people who were very clearly and to my mind, very tragically, marked by their fate: they became bitter, misanthropic world haters who lost faith in everything.  Quite separately, they managed to persuade themselves that people are selfish, evil and untrustworthy, that it makes no sense to help anyone, to try to achieve anything or to rectify anything, that all moral principles, higher aims and suprapersonal ideals are naively utopian and that one must accept the world 'as it is' - which is to say unalterably bad - and behave accordingly.  And that means looking out for no one but oneself and living the rest of one's life as quietly and inconspicuously as possible.

"....Resignation, like faith, can be deliberate or unpremeditated.  If it is deliberate, then the tinge of bad conscience that customarily clings to it requires it to be justified and defended extensively (before whom? why?) by referring to the evil of the world and the incorrigibility of that evil.  The important thing to note here, of course, is that it was not the evil of the world that ultimately led the person to give up, but rather his own resignation that led him to the theory about the evil of the world.  However 'unbelievers' may deny it, the existential choice always comes first, and only then is followed by the dead-end, pessimistic picture of the world that is meant to justify that choice.... To put it even less charitably: 'unbelievers' insist on the incorrigible evil of the world so obstinately chiefly to justify committing some of those evils themselves.  (Notice that whenever someone starts carrying on about how corrupt everything around him is, it is usually a clear signal that he is preparing to do something rather nasty himself.)"

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Touched by Strange Fire

A life long interest in the spiritual experiences of the race - not just those bound within the borders of my creed and communion, but the race entire! - has been a little difficult at times to explain, even to myself.



I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes -
In a Cathedral Aisle,
And understood no word it said -
Yet held my breath, the while -

And risen up - and gone away,
A more Bernardine Girl -
Yet - knew not what was done to me
In that old Chapel Aisle.

Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickenson, (Franklin), 211

Summerholics Anonymous

I taste a liquor never brewed -
From Tankards scooped in Pearl -
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air - am I -
And Debauchee of Dew -
Reeling - thro' endless summer days -
From inns of molten Blue -

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door -
When Butterflies - renounce their "drams" -
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their Snowy Hats -
And Saints - to windows run -
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the - Sun!


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 207

Crepuscular Transitions

I'll tell you how the Sun rose -
A Ribbon at a time -
The Steeples swam in Amethyst -
The news, like Squirrels, ran -
The Hills untied their Bonnets -
The Bobolinks - began -
Then I said softly to myself -
"That must have been the sun!"
But how he set - I know not -
There seemed a purple stile
That Yellow boys and girls
were climbing all the while -
Till when they reached the other side -
A Dominie in in Gray -
Put gently up the evening Bars -
And led the flock away -


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin),
204

Havel - Truth and Information

"...The meaning of life is not, as some people often think, just an item of unfamiliar information that can be communicated by someone who knows it to someone who doesn't, somewhat the way an astronomer would tell us how many planets the solar system has, or a statistician how many of us are alcoholics.  The mystery of Being and the meaning of life are not 'data' and people cannot be separated into two groups, those who know the data and those who don't....Safarik correctly distinguishes between truth and information: information is portable and transmissible, whereas it is by no means as simple with truth."

"....Anything meaningful that has ever been said in this matter (including every religious gospel), is...remarkable for its dramatic openness, its incompleteness.  It is not a confirmation so much as a challenge or an appeal; something that is, in the highest sense, 'taking place,' living, something that overwhelms us or speaks to us, obliges or excites us, something that is in concord with our innermost experience and which may even change our entire life from the ground up but which never, of course, attempts to answer, unambiguously, the unanswerable question of meaning (answer in the sense of 'settling the matter' or 'sweeping it off the table").  It always tends rather to suggest a certain way of living with the question."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga


An interesting perspective on meaning/truth and information/data.  A little overstated perhaps, but still  a useful counterbalance to our tendency as Mormons to OVER value the INFORMATION that God has given (as well as to overestimate our understanding of that information) and to UNDER value our encounter with the truth and meaning given by our personal connection to God and the Savior.  For example, I find attempts to reconstruct the history of the earth from the data given in Genesis far less useful than the truth and meanings that the passage conveys - that God is a careful creator, that his creations are marvels that deserve reverence, that they have a purpose, that we are created in his image and likeness. 

Blooming Where You Are Planted

"Each time you visit, you tell me about more friends who have left the country.  I understand them, particularly the young people who want to know the world, study, see something, and who don't feel bound to this place by a sense of responsibility to work already begun or by a feeling that there are some things a man does not walk away from.  And yet when I think about it, it seems to me that a decision to leave is always appropriate when...someone conceives of study chiefly as the gathering of information.  If one is after truth, however, on had better look for it in oneself and the world fate has thrown one into.  If you don't make the effort here, you'll scarcely find it elsewhere.  Aren't some of these departures an escape from truth instead of a journey in search of it?"

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga



It's not that I don't believe that the spirit can move one, like Abraham, to "lekh l'kha," - "get thee out...and go to a land that I will shew thee" (Genesis 12:1).  But one should also be open to the fact that at times the spirit calls one, as it did to Havel, to sit tight, to stay put, even in a difficult place.

Questioning God

Hildegard of Bingen has some interesting things to say about questions of faith -

"In these struggles, the question arises: Is there a God or not.  The answer of this question comes to people from the Holy Spirit, namely that there is a God who created you and who also redeemed you.  As long as the question and the answer is in the person, the virtue of God will not be out of the person because repentance clings to this question and answer.  However when the question is not in a person, then neither is the answer of the Holy Spirit because such a person drives the gift of God out from himself or herself."

My experience is similar.  It's not the questions of faith that are caustic.  The only damage that is done to the soul is in the leap of faith one makes to conclude there is no God.  For thus one loses also, as Hildegard observes, the "question of repentance" as well, and puts oneself on a spiritual path that leads downward.

Little Things

"One must pay attention to the little theories that govern our daily life waking and sleeping, the minor beliefs."

Yukio Mishima
The Way of the Samurai

Holmes the Believer

"Your life is not your own," he said. "Keep your hands off it."
"What use is it to anyone?"
"How can you tell? The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world."

Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger"
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

Poem

As if some little Arctic flower
Opon the polar hem -
Went wandering down the Latitudes
Until it puzzled came
To continents of summer -
To firmaments of sun -
To strange, bright crowds of flowers -
And birds of foreign tongue!

Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickenson (Franklin, ed.)
177



It's only a part of the full poem, but the words and images stir me strangely.

Another Samurai Insight on Leadership

"...the proverb says, 'fish do not live in clean water,'  It is the seaweed that provides fish with a hiding place in which to grow safely to maturity.  It is because one sometimes overlooks details and does not lend an ear to minor complaints that those in one's service are able to live in peace.  An understanding of this point is essential when considering the character and deportment of others."

Jocho Yamamoto
Hagakure

quoted by
Yukio Mishima
The Way of the Samurai

“I charged the Saints not to follow the example of the adversary in accusing the brethren, and said, “If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse you.... If you will not accuse me, I will not accuse you. If you will throw a cloak of charity over my sins, I will over yours—for charity covereth a multitude of sins.”

                                                       Joseph Smith

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit - Life!


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickenson (Franklin, ed.)
156

A deep little poem applicable to a million human situations.  Right now, for me, I think of it in terms of my oh so well-intentioned attempts to help/fix others.

One way of looking at mortality

If pain for peace prepares
Lo, what "Augustan" years
Our feet await!

If springs from winter rise,
Can the Anemones
Be reckoned up?

If night stands first - then noon
To gird us for the sun
What gaze!

When from a thousand skies
On our developed eyes
Noons blaze!


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickenson (Franklin, ed.)
155

A Zen perspective on Dhyana

Dhyana is usually translated as meditation.  Prajna as insight.  The terms are much wider in meaning, more fraught with implication, and accompanied by a nimbus of religious experience in Buddhism's various branches than we non-Buddhists are aware of.  D. T. Suzuki's chapter Zen and the Unconscious is partly about how Chan Buddhism in 1st millennium China understood these terms as opposed to how they were used in other strands of Chinese Buddhism.

Again, I am struck with a contrast to what I find unappealing in Nisargadatta -

"Dhyana is not quietism, nor is it tranquilization; it is rather acting, moving, performing deeds, seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering; Dhyana is attained where there is, so to speek, no Dhyana practiced;  Dhyana is Prajna, and Prajna is Dhyana, for they are one."

Havel muses on the structure of the experience of meaning - II

"Most people's lives, it seems to me, are fragmented into individual pleasures (both mundane and exalted, wretched and admirable, but most often a rich mixture of everything imaginable), and it is precisely these individual pleasure that give people the elementary and essentially spontaneous feeling that life has meaning.  To put it another way, such pleasures ensure that the question of what life actually means never comes up....this all-important question, only arises, I believe, when one first suffers or experiences, existentially, the 'gap,' the abyss that separates the pleasures in life from one another.  That, at least, is how I feel it....all kinds of things, from serving good dinners to working for a 'suprapersonal' cause....I have always experienced them as mere 'islands of meaningfulness' floating in an ocean of nothingness....It may well be that this warning thought comes through most clearly at the climax of a particular joy, not only tainting it, but intensifying it as well.  Even if one is standing firmly on solid ground, then, one can never forget that the ground is just an island, or lose sight, of the 'sea horizon,' surrounding it.

"....One usually begins to pose the question of the meaning of life and reflect on it in a fundamental way when one is suddenly ambushed and overpowered by a painful question: 'and what next?  A question essentially the same as the question, 'so what?' ....In other words, what is the meaning of that which gives our lives meaning, or, what is the 'meta-meaning' of the meaningful?  It is only when all those thousands of things that impart meaning (spontaneously) to our lives - that seem to make life worth living, or for which we have simply lived - are thus challenged, that the stage is set for us to pose, in all seriousness, the question about what our lives mean.

"Posing it then means, among other things, asking whether those 'islands' are really so isolated, so randomly adrift on the ocean as they appear in moments of despair, or are they in fact merely the visible peaks of some coherent undersea mountain range."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Self Awareness

"well-meaning women both, knowing very little of their own motives."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

Self awareness in some senses of the word is a spiritual gift.  Lack of it buffers the soul to some degree from being fully condemned for one's actions, but it also blocks any real spiritual growth.

"If men come unto me I show unto them their weakness...

"Because thou hast seen thy weakness, thou shalt be made strong..."

Ether 12

Havel muses on the structure of the experience of meaning - I

"I'm sitting on a bench...doing what I like best, that is thinking about what I will do once I am free again....When I think about it, all such daydreams have one thing in common: sooner or later, a disturbing question always arises: what then? what next?  For the time must come, after all, when - figuratively speaking - I will have swum enough, preened myself enough, eaten enough, slept enough; when I will no longer want to indulge in those delights any more, yet my life will clearly be far from over, and it will be high time - especially after all that - to breathe some meaning and substance into it....

"....When I mentioned a sauna and a good dinner, I deliberately chose the most trivial example...a truly ephemeral pleasure...(though to be truthful, such pleasure is all there is to the meaning of life for many).  But the same applies to all the other more substantial joys in life.  For example, if I imagine that rare and wonderful moment when I get an idea for a play, and idea so fine and gratifying that it practically knocks me off my chair, and if, in a kind of joyful trance, I imagine actually turning the idea into a play I'm happy with, then having it neatly typed out, reading it to some friends who like, and even finding theaters that express an interest in putting it on - imagining all that, I must also necessarily imagine the moment when it's all over and the awful question comes up again: "Well?"  "Is that all?"  "What next?"  I would even venture to say that the more "serious" and time-consuming the activity that lends meaning to life, the more terrifying the emptiness that follows it."

A Samurai commentary on D&C 121

"Reprimanding people and correcting their faults is important; it is actually an act of charity - the first requirement of samurai service.  One must take pains to do it in the proper way.  It is an easy matter to find strong points and shortcomings in another man's conduct; it is equally easy to criticize them.  Most people believe it a kindness to tell people things they do not want to hear, and if their criticism are not taken to heart, well, then nothing more can be done.  Such an approach is totally without merit.  It produced results no better than if one had set out willfully to insult and embarrass the man.  It is simply a way to get things off one's chest.  Criticism must begin after one has discerned whether or not the person will accept it, after one has become his friend, shared his interests, and behaved in such a way as to earn his complete trust so that he will put faith in whatever one says.  And then there is the matter of tact: One must devise the proper way to say it, and the proper moment - perhaps in a letter, perhaps on the way home fro a pleasant gathering.  One might start by describing one's own failures, and make him see what one is getting at without a word more than is necessary.  First one praises his strength, taking pains to encourage him and put him in the right mood, make his as receptive to one's words as a thirsty man is to water.  Then correct his faults.  To criticize well is extremely difficult"

Jocho Yamamoto
Hagakure

quoted by
Yukio Mishima
The Way of the Samurai

Zen - "Static Meditation"

A passage from D. T. Suzuki that resonates with my reaction to Nisargadatta -

"The dominant idea prevailing up to the time of Hui-neng was that the Buddha-nature with which all beings are endowed is thoroughly pure and undefiled as to its self-being.  The business of the Yogin is therefore to bring out this self-nature, which is the Buddha-nature, in its original purity.  But, as I said before, in practice this is apt to lead the Yogin to the conception of something separate which retains its purity behind all the confusing darkness enveloping his individual mind.  His meditation may end up in clearing up the mirror of consciousness in which he expects to see the image of his original pure self-being reflected.  This may be called static meditation.  But serenely reflecting on the purity of the Mind has a suicidal effect on life."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism

Holmes on meaning

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."

Arthur Conan Doyle
His Last Bow
"The Adventure of the Cardboard Box"

East vs. West? A Meditation on Nisargadatta

We Westerners have long loved to depict the East as fundamentally 'other.'  We have done it at times to give ourselves airs of superiority, and at times to find a hidden wisdom that gives us a stick to beat our least favorite things about  Western civilization with.  I've certainly been guilty of both at certain times in my life.  These days I don't think I really buy the whole 'Eastern' Label.  We select what we want to see and label it Eastern, failing to give due attention to the multitude of Asian counter examples. 

In 1977, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox,  drew attention to America's ongoing spiritual turn eastward.  As we combed through the vast amount of information available to us about Asian religion and philosophy, we selected what we felt was the core of Eastern-ness, and in some ways we selected those strands that fit most naturally with the spirit of out time and place - and transcendental meditation, martial arts and Zen Buddhism sent their tentacles through our consciousness.  The things we selected were indeed capable of being compared to European thought patterns in ways that pointed up significant differences.  But Asia isn't meditation, Satori and Bushido.  Asia is billions of people, living and dead, and thousands of individual cultures, religions and sects.

In my twenties, reading through the largely alien thought of Hinduism, I ran onto the split between Ramanuja and Shankara.  In Ramanuja's Dvaita Vedanta I found a place in Hinduism that so resonated with my own spirituality that it almost felt like coming home.  His dualistic approach to religion contained all that I had been taught to see as "Western" - the primacy of God's personal face over his immanent presence, the importance of relationship with the divine over mere identification with an impersonal "divineness."  It was my first wake up call to the fact that life doesn't have two basic flavors, East and West.  Human is human.  Culture shapes us yes, but the same capacities and potentialities exist in us all, for better and for worse.

As I read through Nisargadatta I find his monism (advaita) to be, to be completely honest, boring.  His guru taught him "you alone are" and he came to believe it.  he sees the world as an illusion, God as an illusion, birth and death as illusions, even salvation is an illusion: "Saved from what?"

"I really do not see myself related to anybody or anything.  Not even to a self, whatever that self may be.  I remain forever--undefined.  I am within and beyond--intimate and unapproachable."

Far more interesting is the faith of his Hindu challengers

"The world is; I am.  These are facts...."

"You say the world is no use to us--only a tribulation.  I feel it cannot be so.  God is not such a fool.  The world seems to me to be a big enterprise for bringing the potential into actual, matter into life, the unconscious into consciousness.  To realize the supreme we need the experience of the opposites.  Just as for building a temple we need stone and mortar, wood and iron, glass and tiles, so for making a man into a divine sage, a master of life and death, one needs the material of every experience.  As a woman goes to the market, buys provisions of every sort, comes home, cooks, bakes and feeds her lord, we bake ourselves nicely in the fire of life and feed our God....A child goes to school and learns many things which will be of no use to him later.  But in the course of learning he grows.  So do we pass through experiences without number and forget them all, but in the meantime we grow all the time.  And what is a jnani but a man with a genius for reality!  This world of mine cannot be an accident.  It makes sense.  There must be a plan behind it.  My God has a plan."