I am glad to learn how ardently you are practicing zazen. What you have reported to me is a little like a Zen experience, but it is essentially what you have understood with your intellect.
The Great Question cannot be resolved by the discursive mind. Even what becomes clear through realization is delusion of a kind. In a previous letter, I wrote you that only when you have come back from the dead, so to speak, will that which hears manifest itself. Your persistent inquiry "What is it that hears?" will eventually lead you to awareness of nothing but the questioning itself. You must not, however, be misled into thinking this is the subject which hears. You say that in working on this koan you feel as though you have taken hold of a sword and cut away every idea in your mind, including the impression of emptiness, and that questioning alone remains. But what is doing all this?
Delve to your inmost being and you will discover it is precisely that which hears.
Even though you experience your Self-nature again and again, and understand Buddhism well enough to discourse upon it, your delusive thoughts will survive, inevitably precipitating you into the Three Evil Paths in your next life, unless their root is severed through perfect enlightenment. If, on the other hand, still unsatisfied, you persevere in your self-inquiry even to your deathbed, you will unquestionably come to full enlightenment in your next existence.
Don't allow yourself to become discouraged and don't fritter away your time, just concentrate with all your heart on your koan. Now, your physical being doesn't hear, nor does the void. Then what does?
Strive to find out. Put aside your rational intellect, give up all techniques [to induce enlightenment], abandon the desire for Self-realization, and renounce every other motivation. Your mind will then come to a standstill, and you won't know what to do. No longer possessing the desire to attain enlightenment or to use your powers of reason, you will feel like a tree or a stone. But go further yet and question yourself exhaustively for days on end, and you will surely attain deep enlightenment, cutting away the undermost roots of birth and death and coming to the realm of the non¬ self-conscious Mind.
The undermost roots of birth and death are the delusive thoughts and feelings arising from the self-conscious mind, the mind of ego. A Zen master [Rinzai] once said: "There is nothing in particular to realize. Only get rid of [the idea of a] Buddha and sentient beings." The essential thing for enlightenment is to empty the mind of the notion of self.
To write in such detail is unwise, but as you have written me so often I feel obliged to reply in tins way.
It has to be exactly as it is, yet it can be any which way. Nothing has to be done in any particular way, yet it has to be done in the highest and best way.
Sen no Rikyลซ once hired a carpenter to drive a nail into a pillar. After considering it thoroughly, he decided on the exact point. The carpenter made a little mark and then took a break. When he finally got around to actually hammering the nail in, he couldn’t find his mark anymore. Sen no Rikyลซ reconsidered the matter and eventually called out, “Here, here’s a good place!” When they looked at it closely, it was clear that it was exactly the same spot where the carpenter had made his mark before.
In the middle of pure formlessness, there is an ultimate direction. In the same way, there is an ultimate facial expression among a person’s facial expressions.
Since pure awareness of nowness is the real buddha, in openness and contentment I found the Lama in my heart.
When we realize this unending natural mind is the very nature of the Lama, then there is no need for attached, grasping, or weeping prayers or artificial complaints.
By simply relaxing in this uncontrived, open, and natural state, we obtain the blessing of aimless self-liberation of whatever arises.
No words can describe it
No example can point to it
Samsara does not make it worse
Nirvana does not make it better
It has never been born
It has never ceased
It has never been liberated
It has never been deluded
It has never existed
It has never been nonexistent
It has no limits at all
It does not fall into any kind of category.
Friday, March 31, 2023
Thomas Merton from "No Man is an Island".
"When I am not present to myself, then I am only aware of that half of me, that mode of my being which turns outward to created things.
And then it is
possible for me to lose myself among them. Then I no longer feel
the deep secret pull of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self toward
God.
My will and my intelligence
lose their command of the other faculties. My senses, my
imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face
of the earth.
Recollection brings
them home. It brings the outward
self into line with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God."
We get born. Someone official on the scene takes a look at what you got twixt, and makes the call. It's a BOY! It's a GIRL!
Nowadays that's called your "assigned" gender. "Assigned" makes it sound like it's a convention of convenience. Something arbitrary. Or, somebody with some say so said so says so. If you want to go all reductio ad absurdum with it you might as well give up since it's just a coupla words. I'm fantasizing a alternative scene where the presiding decider exclaims, "It's another asshole!".
Which sort of gets me to share that this one's take is that all this fuss about gender is for ... assholes. Really!
Someone said that you are a little girl, and you obediently agree. Same with little boys. I once asked my little Daughter Katherine who she was. "I'm Kate!"
I get it that we put on our identities. No problem. Just lets not identify as who we are from them. As a young man, my car was my identity. To a point. Even such a dumbass like me then knew I wasn't my car. Consider your body on that point. Or, that mind you got; you know, that little voice in your heard that you listen to as if it's you. Sorry to burst any bubbles. But, in my universe, when a bubble is burst I might be the prick, but the Lord's hand is in all things. Repent! That is, turn away from labels. To what, you ask. Just, not that. Labels, as such.
So, now that we have even just a few years under our belt, we announce to Momma and Pappa that we are not what was assigned; but the opposite. Or, neither. Neither? Lucky you, with such woke parents. That's enough to send you off into some techno-medical black box where we will pop out some years down the road as what we say we are. All of it proudly announced on social media. Maybe even a YouTube video to chronical the evolution. Devolution? All for what? Some little boy likes at one point in his young career to wear a dress? Or, a little girl likes to play ball and hang with the boys? Are you so blind as to not see that a gender reassignment is the right thing to do?
Let's not get into the fickle factor. I like feeling my feminine side. But, I'd rather be on the side of someone feminine. I'm straight, But, for Mango! OMG!
Choice. Yes, let's all have our choice. But let's not pretend there's some written in the stars kind of thing behind it. Also, be careful what you wish for. Sometimes getting what you want is a trap. And having to get what you want as a way of life, I'll leave that to the fantasy show we call celebrity, fame, and fortune. That said, I would enjoy a 500+ meter custom yacht. And, all the babes that will float.
In Wronski-world boys have dicks and balls. Girls have pussies and tits. And, with all the ancillary plumbing that God built into those two interlocking units. It's that simple. BTW, if you want to tell a male chromosome from a female chromosome, what do you do? You pull down their genes!
So how does a guy with a swingin' dick show up feeling like a girl. That's one thing, but when the junk is gonna get lopped off ... I clench just thinking about it. [Does that make me a sexist?] Or, a little cutie with her shy little pretty pink smooth pussy decide "he" needs to have a dick, and a coupla balls? Hey, little girl, you want a dick? I got your dick!
Seriously, I could have solved a lot of young blood angst wondering what girls looked like down there. So horny changing out of swim trunks at the beach in the open air changing space with a high brick wall separating the males from the females. So close, yet so far. Now all you have to do is announce you are female and it's open sesame, and a front row seat to the greatest show on earth. Of course, back in the day, a guy simply announcing that you're a female trying to waltz into the Ladies Room ... fuggedaboutit.
Personally I'm into being all with at the level of working on my new pronouns. Current contenders are "Yessir", "HeyYou", "Flibitygibit", "Wa-Rosk".
The angel on my one side ... wants me to strip you of all your dark and heavy conceptual garments into the nakedness of being. Nothing more.
The devil ... wants me to go to town with you in an endless night of the unlicensed carnal ecstasy of unleashed intimate abandon. All of it. Everything left "on the field".
There is a piece I saw today about the prediction that by year 2017 everyone in the US of A will have a microchip implant. Certainly sounds like it would solve the illegal immigrant concerns.
With the demonstrated willingness of large swaths of the electorate to fall into lockstep behind some pretty huge demagoguery, can the Brave New World be that far off? Imagine all the other wonderful — and terrible — possibilities Depending on where you stand you will either see this as a boon for mankind, or fraught with dangerous possibilities. Some of both, we can be sure of that. We humans, even with the best of intentions, have a predictable way of screwing things up. Do I need to give examples? I was born and raised in the City of Detroit. Enough said. Okay. How about all the plastic in the oceans? Sony recently has filed for a patent for a camera device embedded in a contact lens. A brain chip shouldn't be all that hard to engineer. Heck, it would allow us to scan the WWW and do all the things we do on our "devices" with the screen projected out right in front of your actual field of view. And, in HD quality. It's not that someone somewhere isn't trying to jigger that sort of thing, it's more about public acceptance. Like in the auto industry. The technology is always way ahead of the public's ability/willingness to accept and adopt. But, you can be sure, it's not all that big a step from a Smartphone in front of your face or some wearable on your ear or wrist to awakening to the convenience of having something that'll do all that and more shoved up yourself somewhere. Here's a brand name suggestion ... Apple/Up Yours! So, it's a matter of time.
Enter ... Gatekeeper. First offered as an app. Like on the Apple Watch. But, Up Yours! Which, by the way, you could have something like Gatekeeper right now on your wrist or Smartphone. But, instead, Gatekeeper of the Brave New World will be linked to an implant placed somewhere up your ... whatever. Here's how it would work. The most obvious will be in personal location identification. That little bugger would offer GPS. For you, and anyone else who felt it necessary to keep track of you. No child ever lost again. Who wouldn't go for that? Or, say you don't want your kids to go into night clubs when they're under age. (Underage. What a quaint concept. When the official state religion becomes full-on Relativistic Non-Judgementalism who should say what those little idiots of yours should or should not do. Hey. "You know you got it [you know it's right] if it makes you feel good." Pearl said it!)
A coordinated device at the door of said den of iniquity would sound an alarm when anyone with a device programmed "do not enter" approached. The head spins at all the wonderful possibilities. No more drunk drivers. Your car — any car — would not work past a specified blood alcohol level. What about some drunk walking out into the roadway, a danger to himself and others. No prob. Shoes that would squeeze your feet into submission. What if they take off their shoes? The belt around the waist could cinch up to incapacitate. Enough with the permutations! That's for some bright kid just out of graduate school who's too green to have enough of a world view to know what the implications of what he or she is doing to figure out. We're all tools when we enter the work force. Only get wise — if we do — later when it's too late and we're strapped in with kids, a mortgage, car payments, and that little something we keep on the side in town for when we're "working late". Gatekeeper would certainly settle those public restroom concerns. Now just to find the Wonder Kind algorithm genius to figure out who should in fact go where. Like the other day, a friend of mine was deeply and truly feeling in touch with his inner feminine. He went into the Ladies room at the bar to, as they say, "drain the main vein". He has no idea what all the ensuing fuss was about. He did assure everyone that since his penis was attracted to women it was lesbian. That should've handled it. No pun intended. But, I think he went a little astray when he whipped the thing out to prove it. There should probably be a book or movie. But, the reality will be here soon enough.
Mr. Elon Musk has announced "Neurolink". This is gittin' real, folks ... [But, hey, it's not gonna be mandatory. Yet.]
