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the idea with nihilism. Others equate nirvana with some kind of everlasting spiritual bliss. Nirvana isn’t about bliss.
Enlightenment is reality itself.
Reality is this moment.
Dogen said it best by saying that zazen itself is enlightenment.
Zazen isn’t about blissing out or going into an alpha brainwave trance. It’s about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren’t bliss, I’ll tell you that right now. You’re a mess. We all are.
But here’s the thing: that mess is itself enlightenment. You’ll eventually see that the “you” that’s a mess isn’t really “you” at all. But whether you notice your own enlightenment or not is utterly inconsequential; whether you think you’re enlightened or not has nothing to do with the real state of affairs.
We all have a self-image and we call that self-image “me.” I do. You do. Dogen did and so did Gautama Buddha. T...
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the fact that they had a self-image. Nor did they stop referring to that image as “me” when trying to communicate to someone else. Obviously you can’t talk about anything at all without socially accepted and understood words to use to refer to it. The problem with our self-image is that we don’t see it for what it really is: a useful fiction. The idea that our self-image is somethin...
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And yet in another sense, no matter how wealthy celebrities are or how much power they seem to have, we are all absolutely equal. The only difference is that some people understand this and others do not. The entire universe is created by us and we rule over it unopposed—but for the opposition of our own minds.
Zazen embraces everything.
All of our religious and social codes came down to us from human beings who made connections between certain actions and their results. Sometimes their deductions were correct and sometimes they were dead wrong. But correct or not, they were passed down from generation to generation, each time gathering more psychological and social weight.
Far from being the dangerous loosening of morals so many warn us about, this kind of thing is actually human society’s awakening to a new sense of real morality, a morality that is much more powerful than any which could be maintained through the fear of a God whose existence most of us question.
The demons represented in ancient paintings or spoken of in legends are nothing more than stuff just like this. Those beautiful drawings in Tibetan Buddhist art are representations of all the things that distract a person from finding the truth.
Your thoughts aren’t the real you either. They’re just electrical energy bouncing around in your brain. If you do lots of zazen you often end up going for longer and longer periods where very few thoughts occur. The brain goes quiet and Descartes’ old axiom “I think therefore I am” makes no sense anymore because you’re not thinking, yet existence still is.
IF YOUR ZAZEN PRACTICE IS REASONABLE, if you’re not doing too much or striving too hard to reach some goal, your demons are unlikely to appear in the form of hallucinations or massive attacks of fear and panic. But mark my words: your demons will appear. To experience such phenomena is a sign that your practice is maturing. The key is to not get sucked into it and to not push it away. Don’t get frightened by the scary
experiences and don’t get seduced by the seductive ones. Keep your head. Finding a real teacher will help.
Being “mindful,” to most people, means bringing “me” into the situation. “I” am mindfully reading this book. This is a mistake. To paraphrase a line in Dogen’s Shobogenzo, real mindfulness includes you being mindful of the book, the book being mindful of you, you being mindful of you, and the book being mindful of the book. In real mindfulness, book and reader disappear completely, mind and body disappear completely. There is nothing to be aware of and no one to do it. Awareness pervades everything, awareness itself is people and books, and the smell of burning tar, the songs of birds, and all
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According to that non-Buddhist view, there is one spiritual intelligence existing within our body. When this body dies, however, the spirit casts off the skin and is reborn. If we learn this view as the Buddha’s Dharma we are even more foolish than the person who grasps a tile or pebble thinking it to be a golden treasure.
A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, “Is there life after death? The Zen Master says, “How should I know?” The guys replies indignantly, “Because you’re a Zen master!” “Yes,” says the Zen master, “but not a dead one.
When Gautama Buddha was asked about life after death, eternal existence, the origin of the universe, whether space is finite or infinite, and other such imponderables, he said, “The question does not fit the case.” Being less formal, I might phrase the same thing this way: “That’s the wrong question, doofus!
But it’s what you see for yourself—what you realize for yourself—that really counts. What I say here is just another thing written in another book.
The present moment is eternal. It’s always there. It is unborn and it cannot die. And it does not reincarnate.
Nor does it hold any beliefs or opinions, for or against anything at all.
If we sit behind the old railway station in Kent, Ohio, and watch the Cuyahoga River flow, ignoring the noise from the frat boys harassing the art students on Water Street, we’ll see lots of bubbles on the river’s surface. They float along on the river for a while then burst. The bubbles are just air and water. The water returns to the river. The air returns to the atmosphere. But that one bubble we watched will never appear again. If we buy a candle at Spencer Gifts shaped like something naughty, light it, then use the flame to light a second even naughtier-shaped candle while simultaneously
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Moments of you whip by so fast you can’t possibly notice them, just like movies create the illusion of movement by showing you a series of still photos in rapid succession. The illusion of time is created by moments of you whizzing by so fast they make the standard film speed of twenty-four frames per second look glacial.
A Buddhist learns that his thoughts are just thoughts, nothing requiring any response. But most of us feed into them: a little spark of a complaint appears and instead of letting it die out, we stoke it up. If we work really hard at it, we can make a tiny spark can turn into a raging blaze in no time at all. Then we get upset because it’s getting too
hot. Once the blaze has gotten that big, though, it’s hard work to put it out. What’s worse is that we have no idea how to put it out. Our efforts just end up making the flames bigger and bigger until it’s completely out of control consuming every moment of our lives.
The reason to avoid ideas
about life after death isn’t because they couldn’t possibly be true. Maybe they could. How would I know? It’s because ideas like that promote a kind of dreamy fantasy state that distracts us from seeing what our life is right now. “The question doesn’t fit the case.” Look at your life as it is right now and live it, right now.
The word karma just means “action.” But since we cannot take any action without some kind of consequences following, the word karma has commonly been misunderstood as referring only to the consequences of our actions and not the actions themselves. Actions and their consequences always appear simultaneously, though our brains are stuffed so full of cotton-candy we presume they take place sequentially.
Enlightenment is for sissies. Living ethically and morally is what really matters.
When you decide that helping feed homeless transgender crack addicts to the baby whales—or whatever—is somehow more worthy than helping your mom clean the dead squirrel out of the gutters, that’s when you get in trouble. It’s not that the “worthy” causes aren’t worth pursuing—of course they are. It’s that all too often our image of “worthy” causes completely obscures the stuff right under our noses—and that’s the stuff that needs our attention, right here and right now.
Actually, though, the tiniest bit of good you do makes the world a better place for everyone. Cleaning those weird orange stains of unknown origin off the toilet isn’t solely going to bring about lasting peace in the Middle East, but it helps. It really does. It’s part of a chain of cause and effect that affects you and affects the universe. And life for everyone gets a little better. A little of that goes a long way. And it’s really impossible to know exactly how or how much.
Doing what’s right in this moment is the only good there is, doing what is not right at this moment is the only evil. A war stops when people stop firing guns at each other. Treaties and ceremonies are just window-dressing. World peace happens when no one fires guns at anyone anymore.
You bring about world peace when you bring about peace within your own body and mind.
If you understand the natural law of cause and effect in your bones you naturally refrain from doing stupid things—because it all happens to you. You create the cause and you experience the effect.
The major problems we have in the world are nothing more than big ugly heaps of much smaller, much more mundane problems. But ultimately, taking care of the small takes care of the large. Of course, we do have to work out some of those really big issues before they kill us all. But even here we have to do what needs doing step by step with the flexibility to change tactics when things don’t go as planned.
Gautama Buddha was able to see through the façade of religious organizations and must certainly have realized that his simple method of meditation ran a serious risk of being turned into something cheap and shoddy by association with such nonsense. In fact he predicted his own order’s eventual demise. Yet he went ahead and established an order of monks, and one of nuns, anyhow. He knew it was the best way to transmit what he had found to future generations. It worked, too—for all the cheap gaudiness that surrounds much of what passes for “Buddhism” today, Buddhism works. Real Buddhism still
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Buddhist muck, like a flower blooming out of a cow-pie.
Any good Zen Buddhist teacher will tell you right up front that the whole Zen Buddhist shebang, from robes to enlightenment to Dharma Transmission, is really a sham, ultimately not important in the least. And that’s what makes Zen Buddhism different from every other religion.
Ultimately it’s always better to make people see how they can heal themselves. That’s what real Buddhism does. Real Buddhist teachers don’t tell you about reality, they teach you to see reality for yourself, right now.
The very idea of higher states of consciousness is absurd. Comparing one state of consciousness to another and saying one is “higher” and the other is “mundane” is like eating a banana and complaining it’s not a very good apple. The state of consciousness you have right now is 100 percent purely what it is. It is neither higher nor lower, better or worse,
more or less significant, than the state of consciousness once achieved by some spaced-out swami who came back down and then wrote a book about his memories of it.
Chasing after fantasies is always a bad idea. Stick with reality. Reality’s all you’ve got. But here’s the real secret, the real
miracle: It’s enough.
You’ve been deceiving yourself for millions of years; it’s what your brain evolved to do. But once you catch sight of balance and learn where the center is, you can use your brain differently and always find that center, that balance, and that
true reality again in any moment.
The fact is, the universe has chosen you as the vehicle through which to experience the uncanny thrill of cutting up cabbage for dinner, the wonder that is inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, the fabulous spectacle of watching your clothes dry at a coin-op Laundromat™ where the radio is stuck on an EZ-listening station and an old lady keeps staring at you for no discernible
reason. The universe has demanded that you be you. Ain’t no avoidin’ it.
This kind of thing is a common problem among zazen practitioners. They have these really cool experiences, or really cutting insights, and then they latch onto them forever, like a pitbull onto a postman’s ass—effectively missing out on the rest of their lives. It’s a game the ego plays: if it can’t keep you believing in it through all the usual methods, it tosses something that feels just like what you
