Raison d’etre

Zen has nothing particularly to offer as its own; for its raison d’etre consists in its being a spiritual experience and not in its being a special system of philosophy or of certain dogmas conceptually synthesized. We have Zen only when the Mahayana Buddhist speculation is reduced to actual things of life and becomes the direct expression of one’s inner life.

D.T. Suzuki in his 1927 essay, History of Zen explains a little about Zen as well as the differences between the Chinese beliefs about Buddhism and the Indian concept of the religion. As Suzuki points out Zen is not a religion or for that matter a thing; it is the expression of nothing as we untangle our thoughts about spiritual experiences and physical reality.

The expression of nothing or what the ancient monks call ‘no-thing’ is a burst of awareness that grabs the focused self and deposits it into a vat of emptiness where all things exist. That emptiness is not empty; it is filled with energy that changes the psyche so it vibrates with the silence that connects the music of being. The psyche we recognize as significant is scattered through the emptiness of Zen and when we allow a fragment of it to bleed through we automatically sense our multiplicity.

When we get to a point where we simply begin to allow this bleed through to occur amazing changes develop in this reality. Men of Letters who cared less about carpentry suddenly begin to do their own home repairs. Doctors become farmers, and politicians discover their spiritual presence. The creativity of the psyche allows us to connect worlds that we say are not real, and we sense the Zenness that swallows the ego.

The direct expression of one’s inner life is a menagerie of expressions that manifest as we awaken to the Zen in all of us. On the tip of every eyelash sits a cell waiting to express itself in order to experience the excitement of being physical. That is the true raison d’etre.

Inside Dimensions of Consciousness

The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; everything impossible until we see success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, that nothing is of us or our works, that all is God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writings come by the grace of god, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral, keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honestly in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied by the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach me much that the days never know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, Experience is explaining the nature of this focused reality. Awareness comes in with lightning speed, but is absorbed in slow motion. The years are the result of days, which rely on hours, and hours are entangled in moments, which is where the spirit meets the flesh. The inside dimensions of consciousness can not be identified, but are obvious with each blink of an eyelash.

Each individual carries unlimited creativity, but that energy is compacted and contained in boxes of beliefs that are riddled with distortions and contrite senselessness. We play our beliefs over and over again using one melody and expect to hear different music. Different music is playing within the psyche that fires the vitality within us, but we choose to believe someone or something is responsible for our own responsibility.

We look for change when we create political tomfoolery and governmental hypocrisy. We dip ourselves in self appointed waters of redemption while the change and the confirmation we so actively seek is firmly embedded in the our will to be.

To some extent we can access the incalculable results of life if we focus on the families of consciousness that exist within us. Each latent portion of the self contains the essence of the whole so the vital force of the Eternal is the composition of the pauses and the silences that exist within the self. The whole self teaches what the focused self already knows, but we believe everything is impossible until we see our innate designs manifest physically.

A Jigsaw Puzzle Of Awareness

Locke and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of spiritual substance. I will only mention Locke’s treatment of our personal identity. He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says so much ‘consciousness,’ namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of soul-substance.

But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should we be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, should we,, as we realize ourselves, be any the worst for that fact? In Locke’s day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished.

William James in his 1907 essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered brings the mental juices to a simmer with Locke’s 17th century thoughts about consciousness and God. He believed that one was distinctly separate from the other and he also believed that the soul was a religious football that could be thrown between the goals of lightness and darkness. Those ideas are beginning to boil and unity is beginning to come to the surface.

Consciousness and God are in the same stream with the soul. That stream is filled with other aspects of consciousness that express life physically as well as non-physically. The soul is not confined to one physical individual; each personality carries traces of other consciousness so there is a world of consciousness, which is a jigsaw puzzle of awareness in which each identity no matter how large or small has a part.

The soul is not a unit that is definable. It is an undefined quality which cannot be broken down or built up or destroyed, but it can change affiliations and organizations as well as characteristics and still remain itself. Those remembered moments of life are the expression of counterparts that bleed through the psyche and manifest as reincarnational lives. The soul exists in all of those counterparts as a whole as well as part of a greater being.

Contrary to what Locke believed we are not instruments being played by some God sitting in judgment and then rewarding or punishing souls; we are the composer, the symphony, and the audience. We are classical musicians as well as rockers and rappers’ moving through the vibrations of consciousness, and our performance does not contradict the performance of any other form of consciousness.

Our symphony is not only based on physical expressions; it's based on the silence between the notes, which highlights as well as frames the notes. The soul and the psyche exist in more that one place at once just like an apple which can be found on a tree, on the ground or on a table. We are capable of endless notes and each note is capable of endless creative variations.

Distorted Image of Selfhood

In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer craves a particular commodity; anything less than all good is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance. The fact that we are surrounded by miracles is not the result of luck or the worship of some exalted human that has been put on a pedestal of faith by humans who want to control and deceive. Prayer is sensing the stream of consciousness that exists in all life and realizing we all make our own reality.

Michelangelo and Da Vinci roamed the centuries and used the prayer of consciousness to connect to the genius within them. Their genius shows us what we are, yet we feel separated and tainted by religious convictions that are tainted with brush stokes of half truths. We live cut in half by the belief in one reality, yet we function in several simultaneously. We rub senses with the God we fear, and we crucify ourselves with the concept of sin. The potential within the prayer lies in our own creativity and if there are nightmares connected to that process we will waken from them as the awareness of the self expands.

We learn from the fear that exists within the prayer, and we begin to push into the self and find dimensions of being that exist, but we believe they are reserved for the God of challenges. From the fear we discover our own divinity, which gives our humanity meaning, and through our own innate compassion we learn to expand in awareness. We begin to understand that prayer gives humanity its meaning. Our soul within the cells continuously forms realities that are rooted in the divinity of our multiplicity.

Prayers exist as patterns in a stream of consciousness that mixes and merges and then separate in order for us to discover that we are a manifestation of our own souls. Just like a group of cells that form an organ in the body, the soul forms a group of selves that experience the miracle of one reality and the pleasure of functioning in other realities, which we choose not to focus on in this particular and distorted image of selfhood.

Slowness of Nature

Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the slowness of nature which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for total worth of man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Friendship talks about being a friend by trusting in the self and by playing with the spirit, but our vision of the spirit has been distorted by our desire to blend in and conform to a ridged world of biased rules, regulations, and methods of discipline.

We keep searching for ascended masters and gurus to keep us in line and point the way to spirit, but in that process we lose sight of our own creativity. We become so dead serious we can’t even play mentally. We view spiritual development as a goal that must be attained through hard work, but the spirit does not need that hard work to know itself. Plants don’t work at developing their potential. They aren’t beautiful because they believe it is their responsibility to please humans.

We would not be alive in our limited terms, if we didn’t imagine ourselves alive in a given moment in time. Play is one of the most practical methods of survival for individuals as well as for species. Play provides needed rest from our distorted concepts about selfhood. Discovery comes from imagination and play; not stressful work and conforming disciplines.

Seriousness and unrelenting hard work distorts the nature of our spirit because we don’t drop our guard long enough to sense what spirit is. That wall of resistance prevents one aspect of consciousness from freely intermingling with another so we miss the Zenness of being. We become so intent on maintaining one reality we lose it by denying the creativity in playfulness.

We search for soul mates with pompous seriousness without understanding what the soul means. The soul is firmly rooted in the spirit within all that is so we’re not one part or a half of a soul searching for another part.

Emerson concept of friendship begins with the self and the psyche. The psyche is like a plant sending out seeds of itself in all directions. Each seed grows into a new plant in new conditions, and these new plants send out seeds to create new variations.

Plants use their innate creative ability to find soul mates that play in their own reality while appreciating the reality of others. That is the nature of spirit. Our Spirit and consciousness realizes the slowness of nature even when the ego is unaware of that friendship.

Teflon Type Thoughts

Expertness in philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come.

Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows They don’t just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial or what not. At any rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of ‘whack’ and have no business to speak up in the universe’s name.

William James in his 1906 essay, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy explains the nature of human expression. Our cells retain the knowledge of all their affiliations and our consciousness is capable of the same thing. No knowledge exists outside of consciousness. Consciousness passes on information through living vehicles whether they are physically materialized or not.

Consciousness is always individualized, but not necessarily in our accepted terms. Ancestral experience is coded information that is used within a particular reality to express the validity of our identity, but that identity is a small part of the total that is expressed in the character of the universe. Concepts of selfhood would disappear if we allowed any subjective experience to intrude in our objective sense of self.

Our absent self is the portion of our existence that we do not perceive or accept objectively, but we continue to search for it through the philosophy of others, but that philosophy exists within the cells as well. The cells and the mind maintain current information about this absent self and philosophy develops that opens the door of doubt. From the doubt an outcrop of luxurious awareness creeps into the jealous and prejudice folds of the ego.

The absent self is not absent to anyone or anything; it is saturated in a reality that coats the ego with the teflon type thoughts that eventually begin to stick to our fragmented physical self.

Unrecognized Compartments

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the wildest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrasting effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.

Williams James in his 1906 essay, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy writes about the clash of human temperaments. Temperament is not recognized reason; it is personal reasoning that creates conclusions. Philosophers usually live on the ledge of one reality and step through other realties in order to express a wholesome approach to identifying the psyche as well as the self. The temperament of a philosopher includes reason that has not been verified or accepted. There is a certain radical idiosyncrasy to it that touches the soul when we realize that the soul is the life within all that is.

We grant soulhood to our own species as if souls had sizes and graduations. We believe they are an exclusive part of humanity, but that is the separatist approach that has got us in this tub of ignorance, which has partial compartments of beliefs based on our limited view about the nature of life itself. We put cells in one of those compartments and never really pay much attention to them until they are damaged or destroyed.

When we think for a moment we realize that each cell in the body has a soul, and the course of each cell in the body is not predetermined. Cells are cooperative, especially when they form the structure of a body; that is the structure they chose to experience. Cells aid our existence, but that aid is in the framework they have chosen. They have the ability to reject certain elements in their existence, change their course, and even form new alliances. They have a great amount of freedom within the framework we call our reality.

Our cells are conscious, but conscious in a different way. Each one possesses a consciousness and a consciousness of the self. There are different kinds of selfhood and an infinite number of ways to experience self-awareness. Each kind of life has its own qualities that can’t be compared with other types of life, but they are all valid and recognize the self and its own consciousness.

The soul is not a unit that is definable. It cannot be broken down or built up, destroyed or expanded, but it can change organizations and affiliations as well as characteristics while it always remains the same. The cells show us those traits through their soul, even though we can’t put their soul in one of those compartments. The soul's history is in the future not in the past.