Zen in the art of feeling

Emotions are strong, powerful beings; they are bigger than us; they extend out beyond us and fold us into the world; they are the ropes that hold us in place, the glues that bond us together, the thermostats and gauges by which we experience our well-being, or lack of it. Without them we would only be half alive soliptical zombies, or even automatons. What point would there be in life if you never wished to dance with joy? Never knew excitement, anticipation, longing, love, grief, loss or any and all of the other pantheon of emotions? They very much are just such a stuff as life is made out of.

The point is to know them for what they are. To let them be an honest part of your life. To let them flow through you like the natural streams that they are, not to dam them up, divert them, trap them or let them become foetid and stagnant. It is the psycho-dramas that we play that diverts them and which can make them so destructive. (At this point think of R D Lang or of CBT, and such like.)

Imagine your emotions as a wild horse upon which you must ride. You can just cling on, suffer and be carried where they will take you, or master the horse, tame it, make a friend of it, harness its energies and develop a harmonious relationship with it. You care for and nurture your emotions much as you would any other animal which you have. It is a life long companion that will carry you well, even through the heat of battle or on long and perilous journeys. Your emotions are your allies - let them not be your masters.

The point of much meditation is to observe yourself as a rider. This you can only do when you learn to quieten the incessant head chatter, the fleeting psychodramas, the pseudo images of self. Then you can let go of all of that and simply be. Only when you can sit, purposeless and quiet, that can you begin to learn. It is like developing a good seat in ridding so that you sit naturally and balanced and in a harmonious way with your horse. In this case the horse happens to be yourself.

A good rider is a good companion to ride with. A poor rider is a liability, or even a danger, to themselves and to others. They are not fun to ride with. They would be disastrous to undertake a journey with.

Zazen, or Zen style meditation, sometime call whole-hearted sitting, is a counterbalance to action. It is where one learns to sit well on one's own being, so that when faced with action you do not become unseated. It is the schooling ring where you master the seat that will enable you to ride through anything.

Traditionally many Samurai warriors would practice Zen because it gave them the supper clear mind with which they could face whatever their bonds of duty demanded of them. Likewise the taiko drummers practice zazen to give them the clarity of mind needed to perform. Good zazen lead to clear minded, and therefore more effective, living. It is no accident that great art, music, drama, sporting achievement or intellectual attainment all require a clear mind.

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.