Zen . . . No-Zen . . . Zen

"Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system," writes Thomas Merton, "a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness. It is therefore in a sense "void." But it can shine through this or that system, religious or irreligious, just as light can shine through glass that is blue, or green, or red, or yellow. If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass.""

[Thomas Merton, "Thoughts On The East," p. 34.]

Only Breath

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,

Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East

or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not

composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,

did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace

of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two

worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that

breath breathing human being.

-- Jallaludin Rumi --

[Coleman Banks, "The Essential Rumi," p. 32]

"Zen insight," Merton points out, "is at once a liberation from the limitations of the individual's ego, and a discovery of one's "original nature" and "true face" in "mind" which is no longer restricted to the empirical self but is in all and above all."

"Zen insight" he notes, "is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us."

[Thomas Merton, "Thoughts On The East," p. 32.]

Interdependence: An Eastern Perspective

"For a table to exist," writes renowned Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, "we need wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes in order to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast fresh air, and so on. And each of these things, in turn, has to be brought about by other conditions. If we continue to look in this way, we will see that nothing has been left out; everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table."

In explaining the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, Thich Nhat Hanh points out that there is no separation in reality, despite what our egos would tell us, and that in fact everything is in a state of perpetual interbeing.

"Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree and the clouds, we can see the table," he points out. "The one can be seen in the all, and the all can be seen in the one."

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu writes:

As soon as one begins to divide things up,
      there are names;
Once there are names,
      one should also know when to stop;
Knowing when to stop,
      one thereby avoids peril.

In metaphorical terms,
      The relationship of all under heaven
         to the Way
            is like that of valley streams
               to the river and the sea.

"One cause is never enough to bring about an effect," Thich Nhat Hanh observes. "A cause must, at the same time, be an effect, and every effect must also be the cause of something else."

"Cause and effect interare," he notes. "They give rise to each other."

"Our difficulties," he points out, "arise when we forget this teaching and become attached to ideas and things, believing that they are independent and permanent. When we embrace the interdependent nature of all things, forsaking all extremes, we will be on the path of a more peaceful and joy-filled existence."

On the Threshold of a Great Transformation

"(C)onsciousness is not a late emergent product of a material evolution, but the exact opposite: the source of all material evolution," observes biologist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris. "Spirituality and science were separated only for historic reasons. It is time now to reunite them in a single worldview that can encompass the best of our spiritual traditions and the best of our scientific traditions."

"When you do that," she points out, "you come to a view of a living universe, rather than this strange concept amongst human cultures that Western science came to, that we are in a non-living universe . . . that is running down by entropy, and in which by some miracle life emerged from non-life, consciousness from non-consciousness, intelligence from non-intelligence. Those have been the stickiest problems for Western science."

"The really exciting thing about being alive today," Dr. Sahtouris notes, " is that we are all here for a great transformation. It is clear that we are unsustainable, we have to change things, and we are figuring out how. In a sense the old system is getting more entrenched, more violent, more powerful. It's trying to deep itself alive. While we know that we need a new system."

Utilizing the metaphor of a caterpillar dissolving into a chrysallis within its cocoon before it metamorphizes as a butterfly, Dr. Sahtouris points out that we can not save today's societal paradigms as they are unsustainable, but that rather we must evolve new ways of living. This, she notes, is of course no mean feat, and its inevitability is by no means assured.

"If we put our energy into building all the alternative ways of doing things, we can learn from nature how to go about this process of evolution that is called for today. We can build alternatives to the old models of education, of law, of health care. All this we are doing. And we know we can function as a global family because we have communication systems that are global."

"Above all," Dr. Sahtoris points out, we need a very powerful vision. (We need) to know where we want to go, because the old system is very clear about what it wants. And we really do create our realities out of our beliefs. If we don't believe in a positive world in which all humans are liberated to express their creativity, we cannot build it. We must hold the vision very clearly and then go about doing whatever each of us loves doing most, knowing that others will do the other parts. None of us has to do the whole thing, (and) together we can make it happen."

A Need for Spiritual Awakening

Rather than calling it the Self, the Atman, or any other descriptive noun, physicist-turned-philosopher Peter Russell talks of "the aware-ing" that allows one to observe the process of the ego from the perspective of an omnipresent higher state of consciousness and being that is always available, although it is most often obscured by the thoughts of the smaller self.

Steeped in Transcendental Meditation, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhist meditation and various other wisdom teachings (including "A Course in Miracles"), Russell is the author of a number of books that explore the interrelationship of science and spirituality, an interface he (like many others) sees as increasingly important given the collective crises humanity faces and the widespread spiritual awakening that seems to be arising in response to such crises.

"I see this as a huge, unprecedented moment in human history," Russell observes. "We have scientific developments like never before, but we also live in a state of real vulnerability on the planet. Environmentally, we could really screw things up. And, at the same time, there is this search for spirituality. "

"It is becoming widespread across the planet," he notes, "that the old way, the material way that is actually leading to so many problems, leading to environmental issues, isn't actually working. It doesn't work for the planet - we are destroying the planet - but it is (also) not working for us as individuals."

"We just keep on going on down the same road and never ever getting anywhere much," he points out. "So," he notes, "I see that there is a widespread search for spiritual awakening that is happening across society."

"This is the time in history where we need that spiritual awakening," Russell notes. "Because it is the fact that we haven't got it - that we are coming out of this materialist, self-centered consciousness - that is leading us to destruction."

Liberation from the Self

The average person, though he or she likely does not know or believe it, is driven by the small "self" of the human ego. The sense of a separate "I" which is nothing more than an undisciplined but continuous stream of thought is, in effect, his or her identity, and he or she acts based upon such thoughts. Yet on all continents and in all ages non-dualistic wisdom traditions have pointed out the fallacy of this belief. We are much, much more than we think; albeit, what we think, we are.

"What man," asked Jesus, "ever added one cubit to his stature by taking thought?" "Know thyself," Socrates urged. "Nothing is either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so," observed Shakespeare.

"There is no ego apart from the thoughts," explains Eckhart Tolle in the attached video. "The thoughts, (and) the identification with thoughts, is ego. But the thoughts that go through your mind, of course, are linked to the collective mind of the culture you live in (and) humanity as a whole. So they are not your thoughts as such, but you pick them up from the collective - most of them. And, so, you identify with thinking, and the identification with thinking becomes ego. Which means, simply, that you believe in every thought that arises, and you derive your sense of who you are from what your mind is telling you who you are."

Yet the wisdom of all the worlds great religious and/or spiritual traditions (along with that of transpersonal and many other Western psychoanalytic schools) tells us that there is a far greater depth to our being than the merely egoic self.

The great twentieth century Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich put it this way:

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth. It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth. . . .

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "The Shaking of the Foundations," Scribners, 1948, pp. 56-57.]

To mistake the small "self" or ego with who we are, thereby obscuring the depths of our being (and thereby the Ground of Being, itself) is, however all too common. Albert Einstein, called it "an optical delusion of consciousness," observing: "A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness."

"The true value of a human being," the great scientist noted, "is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive," he warned.

The first step in obtaining "liberation from the self," is thus, (as Tolle notes) becoming aware of our own egoic thinking in order to disidentify with it, to become the observer of the thought rather than the enactor of the ego's thinking.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Science, Religion and the Perennial Philosophy

"We need religion, yes assuredly, but we need it free from superstition."

-- Paul Brunton --

("The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," Vol. 1, p. 209.)

While the target of all science is the discernment of truth, observes integral philosopher, Ken Wilber, the goal of all religions is meaning. In a post-modern world, Wilber notes, what is needed is a synthesis of religion and science so that we can ascribe meaning to the vast truths that science has uncovered. Yet, he notes, now, perhaps more than ever, religion is seen to be the antithesis of science, and vice versa.

"The reconciliation of science and religion is not merely a passing academic curiosity," Wilber points out. "These two enormous forces - truth and meaning - are at war in today's world. Modern science and pre-modern religion aggressively inhabit the same globe, each vying, in its own way, for world domination. And something, sooner or later, has to give."

"Science," Wilber notes, "tells us what a thing is, not whether it is good or bad, or what is should be or could be or ought to be. Thus this enormous global scientific infrastructure is, in itself, a valueless skeleton, however functionally efficient it might be." "Within the scientific skeleton of truth," he observes, "religious meaning attempts to flourish often by denying the scientific framework itself - rather like sawing off the branch on which you cheerily perch." "The disgust is mutual," he points out, "because modern science gleefully denies virtually all the basic tenets of religion in general."

[Ken Wilber, "The Marriage of Sense and Soul," pp. 3-4)

In the early 1940's, Einstein famously made the observation that "(s)cience without religion is lame, (while) religion without science is blind." What then is necessary for a reconciliation of these two eternal strains of humanity's intellectual and spiritual quest? Wilber suggests that the key to the problem lies in the contradictory claims of the world's great religious traditions. "(I)f we cannot find a common core of the world's great religions, then we will never find an integration of science and religion."

Fortunately, however, there have been innumerable attempts - some more successful than others - to reconcile the core teachings of all the great wisdom teachings, the most successful of which may be the following four-part description of the "perennial philosophy" put forward by the philosopher, Aldous Huxley:

"First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground." 

[Prabhavananda and Isherwood, "The Song of God," Intro., p. 13.]

Taking consciousness itself as being the key to religious experience, a position vigorously advocated by William James over a hundred years ago, and examining those contemplatives and mystics who have achieved  higher states of consciousness  through "direct intuition" could, many advocate, be the key to a reconciliation of science and religion. A failure to do so, it is well argued, will result in a continuing "retinal blindspot" in the Western scientific vision, and will thus preclude any true synthesis of science's truths with religion's meaning.

Einstein to Alan Watts and Beyond: Who Are We?

"You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiments and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences (however) may not be behavior along the lines of conventional morality."

-- Alan Watts --
("The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are")

The illusory way of seeing the world from the perspective of the individual "self" of the human ego is a problem recognized by deep-thinking scientists and philosophers alike. Whether Einstein's view on the illusory nature of the ego informed or was informed by his paradigm-rattling theory of relativity, one cannot but help think that it may have helped him in framing his famous thought-experiment of "the twins paradox." (In this paradox, one identical twin remains on earth while another travels the stars in a space ship that is going at nearly the speed of light. When the second twin arrives back on Earth, to their amazement the Earth-bound twin will have aged appreciably more than the space-faring twin due to the effects of relativity.)

Irrespective of what came first, his "twins paradox" or his views on the illusory nature of the human ego, it is clear that the latter informed both Einstein's work as a humanitarian and as a pacifist. In one of his many quasi-scientific/quasi-philosophic observations, he famously remarked:

"A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness."

"This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

The polymath philosopher, Alan Watts, a dozen-or-so years after Einstein's comments (which were made in 1954, at the height of the Cold War), came to much the same conclusion. After presciently warning against the arms race, overpopulation and environmental degradation - issues that have only become more acute in the intervening decades - Watts observed:

". . . (T)he problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking."

"Yet," he observed, "the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body - a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature.""

"This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe," he notes, "is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world, we come out of it, like leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely if ever experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" in bags of skin."

This stark delusionary "reality," Watts points out, results in two distinct, but interrelated problems; problems that have only grown more acute as man's technology and his increasing sense of isolation from the whole have spiked in recent years. Together, these factors lead (a) to an ever increasing exploitation of our environment and (b) to the inability of individuals, let alone nations, to act with a common sense of purpose, even in the face of the glaring existential threats that we have created.

"The first result of this illusion," Watts notes, is that our attitude to the world "outside" us is largely hostile. We are forever "conquering" nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. . . . The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events - that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies - and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends."

"The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien and mostly stupid universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology." 

[Watts, "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," pp. 12 - 13.]

"We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive," Einstein warned. Such a new way of thinking must, as Watts points out, originate from a much deeper place in our consciousness (both personal and collective), from a state of consciousness and being where we do not conceive of ourselves and others as merely separate "egos" encased in "bags of skin."