ZEN

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

[size=150]GOOD MORNING TOMATO[/size]

In their Ages-long journey out of Africa
gradually gaining collective knowledge
as they evolved through different Ages of social cooperation
to arrive at nationhood
the people of Japan
gained their own exclusive grasp
of the metaphysical forces that focus the human spirit

They learned how to apply pain
as a goad towards spiritual advancement
and called it Zen

Some two hundred thousand years later
after pilgrimages into
Animism
Shamanism
Hinduism
And Christianity
I took a jet plane
and followed that same ancient ancestral migratory route
out of Africa

I crossed the Red Sea
stopped briefly in Israel
and sampled Judaism
then across to Asia Minor
for a taste of Islam

A pause in Greece
To solute
Socrates
Plato
and Aristotle

Then a sojourn in Hong Kong
to pay respects
to Loa Tse and Confucius
in Taoist temples
before I arrived in Japan
to experience a painful initiation
in Zen Buddhism

Rising at 4am each morning and sitting in lotus
amidst a group of gowned and shaven monks
in a draughty seven hundred year old Buddhist zendo
doing sesshin from morn to night
is another kind of journey altogether.

The pain in the legs
sitting in lotus for long periods
can get intense.
It begins some twenty minutes into each forty five minute sitting
and grows from there.

There is no sterner disciplinarian than a Zen roshi
Any movement to ease the pain
brings the lacquered wood of the kiashak paddle
slapping down across the shoulders.
In that dead silence
in that temple setting
no sound can explode with more shame.
A slight formal bow of acknowledgement
relieves the embarrassment slightly.

Sitting in lotus cuts off the circulation
This results in oxygen starvation
to the all the muscles and sinews below the hips.
That is when the burn begins.

Time slows down to a crawl when you are drowning in pain.
After thirty minutes
the torture is like a slowly turning vise.
Even in mid-winter the heat
generated by collective pain
can be tangible

At forty minutes
a trance-like coma overtakes the psyche.
One is literally sitting in a sea of pain.
It comes at you in endless waves.
There is no escape
It grips the mind
Driving off thought

The last five minutes gain complete attention
the mind is still
only pain exists
Bliss lies beyond
so it is said

Sesshin goes on for seven days.
Each day the pain gets worse
The torture is self-inflicted
Anyone can get up from his seat and walk away from it

The goal of zazen
Idealistically
is Satori
Full Enlightenment
A knowing of one’s ultimate place and purpose in the Cosmos
An escape from the endless wheel of karma
Becoming one with Nirvana
Finding blissful union with universal consciousness
This is the Holy Grail of the East
Precious few ever attain it

The goal of zazen
Realistically
Is an unshakable knowing and command of the self
An acceptance of the individual circumstances of life
And a determination to make the best of it
Any and all can attain such a state of self-realization
Via steadfast submission to pain

Pain forces the self out of its comfort zone
When prolonged
It makes one question the self
Examine one’s past behavior
And suffer burning shame over past abuses
That harmed another
It brings perspective to the present
And demands to know
What meaningful action one is accomplishing in life

The depth of questioning depends
On the degree and duration of pain

For most
we suffer pain by accident or illness
Even in its extremes the answer tends to escapes us
Because we deal with the torture with the attitude of an innocent victim
We assume that for no reason
Some unknown perpetrator has attacked us
And we suffer through it as though martyred
Thus we end up no wiser when it is over
The Grail is never in vision
And we are doomed to struggle on in ignorance

The secret of Zen
Is that the pain is self-inflicted
You are the perpetrator
And the reason for victimizing one’s self
Is to remove the confusions of life
Thus when the pain comes
you do not look outward
The answer
if any
has to lie within

On the mid-morning of the third day of my second sesshin
I took a walk in the vegetable garden
to ease the cramps in the legs

The tomato vines in the garden were loaded with fruit
As a walked
I became hyper-conscious
of being in the midst of a larger consciousness
For one brief instant
I was conscious of the fact
that all the tomatoes in the garden
where conscious of me
a light switch went on inside
I attained a brief glimpse of the Grail
And then it was gone

The hard-earned pain generated in zazen
Releases endomorphines inside the brain
Blocked channels between neurons are opened
communication flows freely
Between both hemispheres of the cortex
Dry Analysis is infused with creative intuitive insight
And one rides the pure high
Of alternate realities
Not plagued by mundane doubts

Tens of thousands of hippies around the world
Tripping on LSD
Have become conscious of Nature’s consciousness
And said good morning
to flowers
to trees
to stones
and come down from the high
feeling not certain that the meeting was real
because they had leaned on the drug

I was on a pure high that morning in the Japanese garden
There was no inner confusion
I was not locked into a purely analytical view of life
Both sides of my psyche were activated
I was not a separate observing entity
Analyzing data input
The observer and the observed
Had merged for a moment into One
My glimpse was real
One no different in essence
from an LSD trip

So take heart my hippie friends
As you take pause today
In your yuppie lives
Wondering how real your high was
In years gone by
You touched the Grail
And the vision was real

2

I never read that pain is so crucial to the practice of Zen before. Were you taught that or was it simply your experience?

3

You have obviously never spoken to or read the comments of any zenist who has undergone the ordeal of a sesshin.

4

Sensory-deprevation-gnosis and pain-gnosis, are two of the many forms of magick consciousness which one may want to try.

Most of the potentialities of the mind go unrealized for eternity.

Diving into various forms of gnosis helps one realize new potentialities, new states of mind, new perspectives, new ways of dealing with things. At best, it is yet another mode of self-expansion. Harcore chemical perspectivism.

Pain gnosis, I would not prefer, compared to motion deprevation. For as long as thee can, and then, for even longer, lay still, do not move at all. For me, this helped mundane addictions to fade. Almost every habbit and tradition in humanity is a neuropathic, linear, dogmatic, atrophising, wasteful, autocratic addiction. Stopping such waste leaves thee with far more consciousness to use. Melting down the old and rusty cars that aren’t even going anywhere other than in circles, a pool of mental energy can be liberated, in order to potentially empower other things.
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Even farther beyond this step, is the liquification of limit. Imagine, for a moment, the river stops running, and its waters stops eroding the canion. Most people are unaware of the inner destruction that human “thought” can have. Deduction is not only a construction, but also, is a destructive deconstruction. A reformation. An interference with raw sensation. An excessive refinement. And also, a form of prefered loss.

5

There are centers in Europe that offer complete sense deprevation.

There used to be an ancient practice in Tibet, which walled a neophyte inside a cave for three years and three months. He lived in total darkeness and practiced chakra visulaization techniques under guidance from a lama adept outside the wall. The objective was the ability to exit the body at will.

Before attaining the privilege of such time and effort expended on his further development, the neophye had to accomplish a series of spiritual disciplines. The first was 100,000 full-length prostrations. This exercise in focused self-determination could take up to three years to complete. It had then to be followed by five other spiritual disciplines, each of 100,000 repetitions.

6

That’s some hardcore training! :laughing:

Tibetan mages qwn the USA. :-3

7

I guess not. I received the most help in meditating from reading Thich Nhat Hanh.

8

There is far too much mystrery attached to the mental and spiritual states of our greatest mystics. The Enlightements of Christ, Buddha, Loa tse etc. etc. have no relevance to them, to us or to our collective cosmic destiny, unless they relate directly to the human condition. The purpose of their ministery is to give us deeper insights into the endless challenges and difficulties of every-day life - and find comfort in their assurance of profound meaning and purpose to our lives

The only reaon one must practice spiritual disciplines is in order to find a way past the one-sided analystical view of life that the struggle to survive forces upon us - and see the potential of a utopian existence that lies ahead if we all keep our spirits up.

9

I always suspected Timothy Leary was an insecure Zen Master. :laughing:

10

Him and Ram Das were instrumental in administering soma juice to thousands of sleeping young souls and kick-starting them into a greater sense of self awareness.

During the sixties before LSD was outlawed, two other Harvard reseachers; Masters and Houston (if my memory serves me right) conducted LSD experiments on a couple of hundred university students. When they published Varieties of Psychedelic Experience they listed four different states of consciousness - predominantly analytical. Significantly, ten of the students reported experiencing God-Consciousness.

11

For starters, This was very good. I would love to experience this. But funds and lak of passport kills it. It’s harder to get here in the west but it can happen. Also talking about acid, they took it off the market and brought bak in extasy. Within that I was listening to a guy talk about trippin himself off drugs. I understand having taken it myself. You can do thiengs mentally with acid that is hard for me to do without. How did this end for you? I notice you stop on the third day. Whayt else did you do if your allowed to say.

12

All things considered the LSD evangelists probably did more harm than good by advocating unsupervised experimentation with that and other psychedelic drugs. There were many casualties which could have been avoided by responsible use. In the US the abuse resulted in the passage of laws to prevent ANYONE from using LSD and similar even for research for more than 30 years. A little moderation could have prevented much harm and negative societal reaction.

13

I have to disagree with you. A case can be made that much of our modern consciosnsess - regarding the global environment; anti-war; relious and racial tolerance - could well have originated in the “lets make love and not war” drug culture of the 1960’s.

Governments who outlaw mind altering drugs, citing abuse, when alchohol abuse is infinitely more detrimental to social behaviior, is pure hypocracy.

14

Our modern consciousness is ambiguous at best. I approve of the social movements you speak of, but I think they are hardly attibutable to the drug culture. Drug abuse and alcohol abuse are both problems. Substance abuse has contributed to the break down of families and crime. The hypocrisy is endemic in government but doesn’t prove recreation drug use is a good thing.

15

I produced documentary programs for TV featuring over a dozen modern religious groups for twenty five years. From my rough calculations more than a hundred million westerners have taken formal initiation into Far Easterm metaphsyical practices. Many millions more practice hatha yoga, mainly for the phsyical benefits Such a huge number of spiritual activists ( as apposed to passive agnostics) has significantly affected the mass consciousness of western culture in a possitive direction during the past forty years. There is nothing ambiguous about any of them.

There has never been anything wrong with drugs. Everything we injest is a chemical drug of some kind. And everything we eat or drink becomes poisonous if we abuse the intake via over-indulgence.

Any shaman can tell you that for many intiiates, a mind-altering experience, induced by a powerful narcotic can be very effective in awakening and focusing the spiritual impulse. I can vouche for that myself.

16

I agree there is nothing wrong with drugs in themselves. And of course they can be beneficial even spiritually illuminating. But they can also induce psychosis. Some folks who use them never recover. Others become addicted to them. In short, they have harmful side effects. Therefore, they must be used with caution. That’s why mommie kept the medicine cabinet locked up. People use drugs to commit suicide very effectively thus proving that they can be lethal. It’s not an either/or black/white topic. There are many shades of gray. Just ask your doctor.

17

It’s a little know fact, because of it’s being illegal in some countries, that most modern Dharma centers worldwide use LSD as expedient means. This is especially true of the Zen, Tibetan and Theravadin traditions.

18

Do they screen initiates first before they administer the drug? Do they provide spiritual supervision and a safe tranquil setting for the initate while he or she is tripping?

19

They directly ask if the initiate is a police enforcement officer, because if they are they have to say yes!

Yes. They even provide what is called a “salvaku,” a person who’s responsible for whipping the drool from the trippers chin. :angry:

20

Do they give LSD to manic-depressives and schizophrenics?