Zenarchy

[via technoccult]

“Zen anarchy? What could that be ? Some new variations on the koans, those classic proto-Dadaist Zen “riddles”? What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist? If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves? Does the flag move? Does the wind move? Does the revolutionary movement move? What is your original nature—before May ‘68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?

Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183-1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685-1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.

I. Smashing States of Consciousness

This is what all the great teachers show: Zen is the practice of anarchy (an-archy) in the strictest and most super-orthodox sense. It rejects all “archys” or principles—supposedly transcendent sources of truth and reality, which are really no more than fixed ideas, mental habits and prejudices that help create the illusion of dominating reality. These “principles” are not mere innocuous ideas. They are Imperialistic Principalities that intrude their sovereign power into our very minds and spirits. As anti-statist as we may try to be, our efforts will come to little if our state of mind is a mind of state. Zen helps us dispose of the clutter of authoritarian ideological garbage that automatically collects in our normal, well-adjusted mind, so that we become free to experience and appreciate the world, nature, and the “Ten Thousand Things,” the myriad beings around us, rather than just using them as fuel for our ill-fated egoistic cravings.”

Part 2 and Part 3

On koans and rotting dogs

Erik Davis of Techgnosis on Jodorowsky's Spiritual Memoir:

"A friend recently asked me if I though Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain was a “good” movie, and I had to answer that, in the case of this surreal mythopoetic masterwork, the usual good/bad categorization does not apply. The film is truly beyond category; or rather, it is “terribly good.” While the first half of the movie—which was definitively released on DVD within the last year—is perhaps the greatest sustained expression of visionary psychedelic filmmaking ever, I can understand why people also find the exploding frogs repulsive and the mystagoguery redolent with all the erratic indulgence and hierophantic pretension that mark the more wayward domains of Seventies spiritual counterculture. But even that’s as much a plus as a minus, especially if, like me, you believe that the peculiar genius of this era provided mystical and hedonic conundrums that are still worthy of study and exploration.



"So it was with great excitement that I read the recent translation of Jodorowsky’s spiritual autobiography, entitled—hold onto your hats—The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like his films, it is a puzzling, wonderous, grotesque, and sometimes tedious book, but it does confirm the sense I get from his films that he is not fucking around with the mysteries. In the Sixties and Seventies, Jodorowsky was a serious practitioner of Zen, studying and meditating with a Japanese priest in Mexico City named Ejo Takata. Their koan combat is the most steady thread of this book, a male-buddy-cognitive conversation that forms a counterpoint with the other figures in the book, all of whom are women who offer Jodo various modes of initiation—artistic, sexual, magical, energetic. These women include the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who sounds as wacky brilliant as Dali, and a goat-killing silicone-implanted Mexican actress known as La Tigress."

Contemplating Circles

In my Religion in Asia class today we watched a film called "The Land of the Disappearing Buddha," in which the narrator, who looks like an older businessman, wanders around Japan to different temples asking almost childlike, yet extremely pertinent questions of the religions he encounters. gazing at the lavish gardens of a Zen monastery, he asks that for being a form of Buddhism, where is the Buddha in Zen, and how does meditation, as a form of personal enlightenment, fit in with the Buddhist concept of saving all beings. After laughing, the Zen monk says that in Zen, everything is the Buddha, by doing zazen you recognize that there is no distinction between you and all the other things in reality. Consequently one can go about your day helping others with this enlightened perspective.

(As an aside, the psychological benefits of meditation are now being charted by science: "Over time, brains develop what is known as a ‘set point’. If a person's set point is tilted to the left then the tendency is for lots of activity in the left frontal cortex, making for a happy person. If it is tilted to the right the opposite occurs. But the set point can change: volunteers who undertook a short course of Buddhist-style meditation moved their set point to the left." [Times Online via Digg])



This identification with the whole is best illustrated by the Zen calligraphic practice of drawing a circle. You may think you are an individual point, but really you are part of a continuum that contains everything, and furthermore that circle of everything is really just an illusion, containing nothing. I recalled that my most intense and true spiritual experiences have centered around that recognition of being part of everything, and that the reality of which I am a part is often little but a flimsy mask, like a soap bubble. I left the class and wandered through the rain, feeling joyous, at ease, smiling at everyone with that secret that there is no distinction between us, and it was all a pleasant, fleeting, dream.

infornography

Reading more PK Dick before work i came on several passages of relevance to the dream novel. it seems Dick was also familiar and concerned with mythological themes and their application to his life (as i imagine every writer must be to some degree). but as the inexplicableness of his transcendent experience took hold of him this was the only place he could turn to make heads or tails out of whatever had actually happened, which could otherwise be considered madness; much the way i am doing with my dream visions. indeed there are many parallels, of most note that when he had looked deep into the void he was shown he found in the heart of it and himself a beautiful and all knowing woman, his anima; whom he associated with the goddess Sophia, who in xtian mythology Christ promised would come to those who embraced the light through the dark night of their souls (i will have to find this reference, probably in the Gnostic texts), as the Glory figure came to me when i was struggling with the end of my internal world and disintegration of the self.

Dick also said he found that void to be God, the awareness in all things behind their apparent, separated, realities, who was both more real and ineffable. the way that in my San Pedro trip I found what i could only call God in the hollow behind all things, yet could only describe it as a comfortable absence that was aware of the entirety of existence. Dick remarked that no one else (in his knowledge) had had this experience in the past 200 years, and i wonder that i should also come to a similar place, even down to the anamnesia of the Record, and if this kind of awakening is becoming more common. especially as the ages of consciousness expanding drugs and information make connectivity and the concept of omniscience more obvious and essential to modern life. one could probably make an argument for the exteriorization of the sub- or unconscious, where it was latent or hidden before. as the pantheon of gods (cross-cultural) could be seen as a finer-grained pattern of ourselves, our hopes and fears, desires and other subtle energies (which it has been postulated they were created to represent in the first place, for lack of better terminology or understanding of our inner workings), so too could the gods be seen as a rough-hewn emanation from some deeper, lighter source or pattern that runs beneath and shapes all things. the matrix metaphor points to this condition, but as this matrix is but matter or mother (Ma’at), it is more related to the veil of maya, the ground of appearances, Dick’s black iron prison; and not to whatever energy or awareness lies formless behind the forms.

in talking with sophie about her process of coming out of her darkness (the shamanistic rebirth or psychological individuation process), she mentioned having to find a “positive energy” to rely on, though she was understandably hesitant to call it God, as AA usually tells its participants to turn to. i suggested there was nothing in the energy itself which is positive, that it is our perception and use of it which casts it in either that dark or light. one could argue it is that same energy (or our refusal of it) that drives people to drink or madness, and the acceptance of something larger than themselves to trust in which leads them back to a sense of peace or heightened presence in themselves and the world. i suppose it is many things for many people, that some find it necessary to couch this energy in terms of myth or religion in order to match their own peculiar symbolism of the world, but that ultimately it doesn’t matter what you call it, as it is inexpressible outside of metaphor and imagination. of course, that the energy is chargeless (for lack of a better word to describe its dual positivity/ negativity), means that many choose consciously to embrace its dark face, the madness of the world of forms, the secret longings and highs and powers of sex and violence which currently seem to be driving our world. but these are just as much a “path to god” as the more ascetic, pure paths, as evidenced by the tradition of tantra, in which instead of drawing the senses away from the world in order to find what is beneath them, one purposely overloads the senses until they reach a breaking point, and find the still emptiness that resides in the chaos. our culture is currently in such a process of overloading itself with information and images (infornography).

i suppose the distinction is that like breeds like, and that increasing the amount of sensory stimuli or violence in the world only creates more of a maze to extricate ourselves from later. certainly in the early days of disentangling my dreams i found myself relying heavily on metaphors and symbolism to explain my experiences, only to find that they were creating that much more of a labyrinth between me and reality. this continued until i asked the zen master Chong Hae what this dream was i could not wake up from, and he said it was all the theories and images we put on top of reality in order to avoid just having it be reality itself. as Dick tells it in an amusing argument with God, each time he came up with some other theory besides having met God, he fell into an infinite regress of thesis/ antithesis, at which God would butt in saying, “i am this infinity, and i will play this game until you die or accept it” at which Dick would say “but maybe…” and fall into another infinite regress, ad nauseum.