The Impenetrable Wall

The unanswerables due to ineffability:

1. Whether god exists or not
2. Whether god is one or many
3. Whether god is permanent, impermanent or intermittent
4. Whether god is universal or local
5. Whether god is male or female, or neither, or both
6. Whether god is concious or unconscious, sentient or insentient, cognisant or uncognisant
7. Whether god is anthropomorphic or alien
8. Whether god has any intentions or what those intentions are
9. What god may or may not think or believe, want or wish
10. Whether you can or cannot communicate with god
11. Whether your beliefs about god are true or untrue

Ineffability implies incomprehensibility: that is the impenetrable wall.

There are experiences that we can have when confronting that wall, and, yes, I feel it is important to confront that wall.Those experiences can sometimes be given names like “god”, like “the peace that passes all understanding”, like “touching the divine”, like “being in the presence”, like “being touched by god”, like “seeing the light” …; these experiences are very real and can be important to our spiritual growth, but they can lead to many delusions.

Interestingly, people tend to interpret such experiences in terms of their culture, Christians in a Christian way, Muslims in an Islamic way, Hindu in a Hindu way, Buddhists in a Buddhist way, and so on. Such experiences are taken as a confirmation of the ontology of their respective weltanschauung. Thus in monotheistic cultures they are often taken as confirmation of the existence of a deity.

"Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God." 

The Cloud of Unknowing

And I would suggest that even the word “god” can be one such stumbling block, one such attempt to explain experiences in terms of a familiar culture. 

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability

If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.

So you have dealt with the illusion of the everyday self and have created the "ghost in the machine", your escape pod, discovered the Buddha within, found your real nature. Now you need to destroy that illusion, that Buddha Nature, and wake up.

The Twin Illusions

Some speak of “absolute or divine consciousness” as opposed to “everyday consciousness”, or some such terms, suggesting that our routine states of mind are not fully real, that the state of consciousness we experience in meditation is somehow more so, that our everyday is no more than an illusion. This thinking is so much a part of the ways of seeing our human predicament intrinsic of in the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, amongst others faiths, and now absorbed into the New Age and other “think” of our Western mind.

However, I wonder, in the light of our modern scientific insights into the brain, whether it is these traditionally described states of mind that are not the real illusion, the real misconception, the real misunderstanding. The distinction between the “illusionary” nature of everyday life and the deeper “reality” of the meditative mind being no more than that between “background consciousness” and “foreground consciousness”; the trick of meditation being no more than learning to avoid higher level excitation of the brain whilst allowing, or even boosting, lower level excitation, thus experiencing the “background” state without its being masked by the foreground “noise” of higher level activity. A state that may we be very pleasurable and may lead to increased levels in the brain of those chemicals that lead to feeling of well-being, happiness, confidence, euphoria or even ecstasy, and which may therefore be taken as being more “real” in some sense.

In such brain states one may well believe that one is experiencing “oneness with everything”, or “unity with the divine”, or “being in the presence of God” or … ; well, that will depend on which discourse tradition you subscribe to as to how you will describe it. But, I am sorry to report, the meditative state may be no more “real” than the everyday state, just as much an “illusion”, but a grand illusion as opposed to a collection of petty illusions of the everyday.

Being carried away by the power of the experience of the meditative state can lead being deceived into believing in that grand-illusion every bit as much as you were originally deceived into believing in the petty-illusions. I suspect that part of understanding the “middle-way” is to learn that both polls, clinging to the petty-illusions of the the everyday state or clinging to the grand-illusion of the the meditative state are mistaken. In the end you are reduced to the ground of just being, no more, no less

Perhaps that is why so many Zen masters have resorted to hitting their pupils in order to force them to recognise their ground-state, to liberate them from the twin illusions.

An Ultimately Heraclitan Buddha

Although ultimately a Heraclitan answer, no-self points to the impermanence and transience of all that may be experienced; even the qualia of your sense experience can vary depending on your state of health, or as an effect of taking psycho-active substances; or, for that matter, the impermanence of conciousness itself, which can be turned on or off by accident, as in coma, or by the use of anaesthesia; or can be fractured into the unintelligible kaleidoscope and meaninglessness of dementia.

But it may also get you to dig deeper, to see the whole “you” package as no more than a temporary phase that is to be passed through, perhaps to be replaced by another “you” at some other time or place. It is in part a mind-trick to lend plausibility to the doctrine of re-incarnation; but then, re-incarnation is a doctrine that lends plausibility to the belief in a "self".

Strip away everything until your "Buddha-nature" stands naked – but then know that Buddha-nature is also an illusion and strip that way too. 

No-mind is in itself just as phantasmal as mind: the ultimate deconstruction. 

Self, no-self, no no-self, no "self" at all, no "no-self" at all, just words being stretched over the moment like a very inadequate pair of underpants. Do us all a favour and take them off, or, on second thoughts, keep them on. 

Now, having totally undressed yourself and discovered that you are not your cloths, get dressed again in your being, in your meanings, in your culture.

Random notes on sitting practice

How can we be compassionate if we have never known suffering?
How can we help others if we have not known joy?

If we do not radiate joy others are not warmed by us: we are the light in their darkness as they are the light in ours.

Your time sitting is not an end in itself, nor is it there just to enrich you.

The tranquillity of detachment is only meaningful in the context of passionate engagement. Passionate engagement is only meaningful against the background of the tranquillity of detachment. Each feeds the other in a virtuous spiral.

Realms of rebirth? Reincarnations? Who's fantasies are these?

"if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?"

... 及吾無身 ，吾有何患？
(Tao Te Ching - 13)

It is an odd trick of language and of logic to separate the "mind" from the "body". It is the body that is alive, that feels, that experiences; the nervous system and the central nervous system are simply parts of the means by which it does so - and the "mind" is an "illusion" created by the functioning of those systems. Our intelligence and our meaning gymnastics should recognise their visceral roots - the body is indeed precious for that is what we are, a conscious, feeling, sentient body.

No body => no being. 

So, yes, "if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?" - or joy or anything, come to that!

Let life flow through you moment by moment, breath by breath, heart beat by heart beat.

“The ghost in the Machine”

A body and a mind? Two entireties? Or equally, a body and a spirit? No amount of dissection will reveal the beating of a heart separated from that organ, nor the flight of a bird separated from its wings, nor the song separated from the thrush. The one is an object, the other its performance. You can have the dancer without the dance, but not the dance without a dancer, or a singer without the song, but not the song without a singer. Minds, spirits, souls, consciousness, et al – these are all but performances. The confusion of entireties with performances, whilst understandable, is an ontological error - a case of cloudy and somewhat wistful thinking.
 

And the mind? It is a performance, or more exactly, an orchestra of performances, an entire suite of symphonies, an immense repertoire.

When the dancer dies we may say "their spirit has left", but in truth there was nothing that left, only a performance that ended.