Lucifershammer: The seeker must still have as clear an idea as possible of what he is seeking.
Bosse de Nage: If you see Buddha on the road, chop him into little pieces.
This seems to me to be a crucial matter, and one I have long pondered. The “danger” is that one will find things in such a way that they fit the “clear idea” that one has been holding to begin with. The mind, it seems, has a tendency, when confronted with anything sufficiently different as to be disorienting to its ordinary way of perceiving/thinking/categorizing, to immediately—and subconsciously—begin to “translate” things into images/thoughts/ideas it can understand. Ergo, if one who was seeking the Christ (ho Christos)—or if the seeker simply happens to be steeped in that tradition, or was studying it recently—has an experience of the “divine ground of being” (just using that as a catch-all term; could be Brahman, God, Tao, etc.), the mind is likely to translate that overwhelming experience into Christian images and terms. For a Hindu, it might be Krishna, etc. The same divine ground of being could be pre-consciously translated by different people into different terms, none of them more than a “translation.” Then, of course, they might all begin arguing about which one is right!
This “translation” process may be a safety mechanism. One thinks of the near-hallucinogenic description of Krishna in the Gita—which terrifies Arjuna.
This also may be how the mind operates in dreams: “What was George doing in my dream? Why would I be dreaming about George?” Whereas, in reality, in image of “George” (doing whatever “George” was doing in the dream) is simply the way some thought/idea from the unconscious got “translated.”
The Zen response is generally to dismiss all such images as illusory, not be held onto. Hence BdN’s quote (although that also applies to looking for a Buddha separate from oneself). But even Zen has its grounding in Buddhism and Taoism, and its “vast emptiness” (Bodhidharma) concept—even if that is meant to transcend concepts.
I think it is important to realize that all such “fingers pointing at the moon” originate in “mystical” (for terrible want of a better term) experience, though they may become concepts for theological and philosophical speculation by others.
Lucifershammer: But no tradition simply says, "Do this and see what happens".
Zen masters sometimes come close to this. I think maybe the most the traditions can (should) do is to provide a framework that allows the journey to be undertaken safely (“Here’s the map; here’s your seatbelt; you can throw them both away later” ).
Nevertheless, I think in the end all one can really do (if one chooses to embark on this journey at all; noting that sometimes it just happens, whether one has chosen or not) is really to “do this and see what happens.” And then to treat any images, visions, revelations, etc. as at least as provisional or open-ended as dream images, subject to multiple interpretations (or none); and taking any meaning that one finds as meaning that one is at least partly responsible for creating, and then testing it to see if it is personally helpful or not. Or (closer to where I’m at) just allowing the experience of ____________ (just tathata? just the thusness/suchness of it all, in full bloom, so to speak?) to inform how I go about the rest of my life.
At least I have found no other solution. I even do not speculate on the “source”—God, Brahman, Tao, the divine ground, my own unconscious, some combination thereof. I see no way out of the same existential dilemmas that are inescapable in our “ordinary” daily lives, the “inescapable freedom” to choose and to create as we go along.
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BTW, LH—it sounds as if your understanding of “soul” is getting close to something like “the suchness that I call myself, as it is manifest in (and from) the suchness of the ‘all of all of it,’ with whatever inseparable elements that make up that suchness.” Now, BdN may be right that such a “definition” is necessarily incoherent—but it does seem to get at something that I can have a “sense” of, that “sense of suchness” that I have of myself. And that “sense of suchness” is inextricably “entangled with” the suchness of “all of all of it.”
That phrase entangled-with is just my attempt to capture the idea that, to see just the ground (e.g., Brahman) and not the figures/forms that stand out (ex-ist) from the ground, is as much illusion (maya) as to think that the figures/forms are somehow separate from the ground, and not connected with each other through the ground. It is perhaps an attampt at a dialectical “synthesis” between the one-versus-many question.
What is a "soul"?
08 Sep '05 09:00
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