How To Be Liberated On The Spot

An Eternal Now SG

From 'Buddhism Is Not What You Think', Steve Hagen

How To Be Liberated On The Spot

Chinese Zen teacher Baizhang once said that if you could realize that there is no connection between your senses and the outside world, you would be liberated on the spot.

This seems strange to most of us. We think that there’s a world out there, a world we take in through the gates of our senses. For each of us, it appears as though “I myself am in here, getting readings on a world that is out there. I can see it. I can hear it. I can smell it, taste it, and touch it.” We feel this sense of separateness quite strongly. But where does this feeling come from?

This feeling is consciousness itself. Simply put, consciousness is an awareness of an object (in this case, what we call the outside world) as well as an awareness of a subject (in this case, what we call me, in here). But both the object and the subject—as separate, discrete entities—are mental constructions. In actual experience, there is no boundary between a “here” and a “there,” between what I call me and what I designate as the external world. Both subject and object are illusions created by Mind.

There ’s a Zen aphorism that says, “Whatever comes in through the gates is foreign.” The gates are the senses, and whatever we believe comes in through them seems separate from us, foreign to us. But that’s only because we’ve created a conceptual split between what we call our senses and what we call the outside world.

Baizhang correctly points out that there’s no connection between our senses and an external world. To see a connection implies that we have a twoness—me in here, and the world out there—that in some way can be connected. But Baizhang tells us that this twoness isn’t what is really happening.

Reality is always right here, right now. It’s just this—vibrant, immediate experience. This doesn’t come in through any gates. How can it if it isn’t outside in the ﬁrst place? It’s intimate. It’s already Mind itself. We may call this experience “airplane” or “bird” or “love” or “fear,” but in Reality, it’s just this arising in Mind.

Most of the time, however, we superimpose something onto what is immediate and Real. We project onto what we directly experience, and we extend that projection through time and space. Thus we create subject and objects. And then, in relation to these objects, longings and loathings arise in our mind.

Thus we mistake the world that we’ve created in our minds and projected “out there” with Reality. The upshot is that we don’t engage the world as it actually is. Instead, we react to the world as we assume it to be—or, worse, as we think or wish it ought to be. We live out our lives in our imaginations, reacting to our concepts of the world rather than attending to actual, directly perceived Reality. In spite of this, the fact is that you do see the world exactly as the awakened see it, all the time. There isn’t any difference between what the enlightened see and what we all see. Perception is the same for all of us. But the awakened stay with perception rather than reject it in favor of their mental constructions and ideas about reality.

Though it manifests in countless forms, Reality is only one way—it could not be otherwise. And all who see, see the same thing. It’s not that the world of multiplicity we see all around us isn’t real. It’s not that the plane overhead is a phantom, or that the page you’re reading doesn’t exist. It’s all real enough. But if we think this realm of objects and subject is the full explanation of Reality, then we quickly become lost in a world of confusion, of wanting, of craving, and of fearing. It’s a difﬁcult life, though we might not fully realize it. What we have to see is that this very same reality can be viewed in a completely different way, a way based on perception alone.

The awakened see Reality as it is. They see that enlightenment is nothing more than not being deceived by the conceptual world each of us creates. Consciousness splits the world into this and that and the next thing. The most basic split, of course, is “here I am” and “out there is everything else.” But when we understand what consciousness is and how it functions, we realize that our sense of self and other, of subject and object, is an illusion created by consciousness itself. The enlightened person isn’t taken in by such conceptual dualities. Still, it isn’t that the illusion goes away. The illusion still appears, but it’s seen for what it is—an illusion. And this seeing is utterly liberating. As the Buddha put it, “Just as a man steps upon a serpent and shudders in fear but then looks down and notices that it’s only a rope, so it was that one day I realized that what I was calling ‘I’ cannot be found, and all fear and anxiety vanished with my mistake.” But what, exactly, has changed? In a sense, nothing. “The rope” is still “there”; “the foot” is still “there.” But everything is seen as empty of self. Thus with seeing, the sense of “I” drops away. We no longer have to get in there and manipulate or control. Enlightened people don’t suddenly disappear. Neither do they suddenly forget how to eat a meal or drive a car or take care of their children. But they understand that they cannot hurt others without doing injury to themselves. In the end, what is understood is that this is all of one fabric.

One of the great moral questions in the Bible is when Cain murders his brother, Abel. God comes to Cain and asks, “Where is your brother?” And Cain replies, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” How can we answer a question like this? If we remain caught by our conceptualizing minds, it’s impossible because it demands an answer that cannot be mentally formulated. For how can we be our brother’s keeper without controlling him? And if we are not his keeper, why do we feel for him when his house burns to the ground or he’s starving or he’s unjustly held against his will?

But what if you realized—in your bones and in your guts— that there was ultimately no way of distinguishing between yourself and your brother? What if you saw that “I’m here and he ’s there” isn’t a full explanation of Reality? What if you saw that injury to your brother is injury to yourself? With this direct awareness of Reality, the dilemma dissolves.

Your experience is always this, right here, right now. There’s no separate outside world, no separate senses, and therefore no connection between them. How can there be a connection between something and itself?

An Eternal Now SG

Something related by U.G. Krishnamurti:

Q: So there is no way of seeing what I think I see.

UG: You never see anything. The physical eye does not say anything. There is no way you can separate yourself from what you are looking at. We have only the sensory perceptions. They do not tell anything about that thing - for example, that it is a camera. The moment you recognize that it is a camera, and a Sony camera at that, you have separated yourself from it. So what you are actually doing is translating the sensory perceptions within the framework of the knowledge you have of it. We never look at anything. It is too dangerous to look because that `looking' destroys the continuity of thinking.

We project the knowledge we have of whatever we are looking at. Even if you say that it is an object without giving a name, like, for example, camera, knowledge has already come in. It is good for a philosophy student to talk about this everlastingly, separating the object from the word, or separating the word from the thing. But actually, if you say that it is an object, you have already separated yourself from it. Even if you don't give a name to it, or recognize it as something, or call it a camera, a video camera, you have already separated yourself from it.

All that is already there in the computer. We are not conscious of the fact that we have all that information locked up there in the computer. Suddenly it comes out. We think it is something original. You think that you are looking at it for the first time in your life. You are not. Supposing somebody tells you that this is something new, you are trying to relate what he calls new to the framework of the old knowledge that you have.

Q: So if it is not in the computer, you cannot see it.

UG: You cannot see. If the information is not already there, there is no way you can see. [Otherwise] there is only a reflection of the object on the retina. And even this statement has been given to us by the scientists who have done a lot of observation and research. There is no way of experiencing the fact of that for yourself, because the stimulus and response are one unitary movement. The moment you separate yourself, you have created a problem. You may talk of the unity of life or the oneness of life, and all that kind of stuff and nonsense. But there is no way you can create that unitary movement through any effort of yours. The only way for anyone who is interested in finding out what this is all about is to watch how this separation is occurring, how you are separating yourself from the things that are happening around you and inside of you. Actually there is no difference between the outside and the inside. It is thought that creates the frontiers and tells us that this is the inside and something else is the outside. If you tell yourself that you are happy, miserable, or bored, you have already separated yourself from that particular sensation that is there inside of you.

Q: So by naming our sensations, our physical processes....

UG: We maintain the separation and keep up a non-existing identity. That is the reason why you have to constantly use your memory, which is nothing but the neurons, to maintain your identity.

An Eternal Now SG

This Will Never Come Again

After a brisk walk on a cold winter day, I settled before the ﬁre and opened my volume of Emily Dickinson. The ﬁrst line my gaze fell upon was this: “That it will never come again.” I was ready for it, and so I began to read:

That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet.

Believing what we don’t believe

Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best

An ablative estate— This instigates an appetite

Precisely opposite.

Emily Dickinson’s poem touches the deep longing in the human heart to live forever. We don’t want to die. We don’t want to pass out of existence. At ﬁrst glance, the line That it will never come again would seem to sum up our culture’s general understanding of our life. But surely Buddhists think differently. We don’t just go around once: we’re born again and again and again—and this just goes on and on. Isn’t this how we’re supposed to understand life as Buddhists? No. This is basically the same as thinking that we’ll live forever. This is not what the Buddha taught at all. It’s just another form of eternalism. Dogen Zenji, the great Japanese Zen teacher, said that just as ﬁrewood does not return to ﬁrewood once it is burned, so a person does not return to life after death. So what about this matter of being born again and again? What does it mean to be reborn? And what, exactly, is Emily Dickinson writing about? She ’s writing about just this. This wonderful, clear, bright, blue winter day. It won’t come again. There will be other, very similar days, no doubt. But this day will not return. And you sitting here reading this, you will not sit again in this same way, with these same thoughts and feelings. None of this will ever be the same again. Even as you set down this book and leave the room, you’ll not be the person who walked in. This will never come again. This is always the case. That this will never come again is what it actually means to be born again and again. We, and indeed the whole world, are born repeatedly, over and over, in each new moment.

But there’s a caveat. This change, this ﬂux, is complete and thorough. So thorough, in fact, that there’s nothing solid—no “we”—here at all. There’s nothing solid that returns or endures. There’s no “I” in this picture. And no“world outside me,”either. When we think in terms of reincarnation, we’re thinking in terms of a self. We’re seeing everything in terms of “me” persisting through time. “And when I die,” we say, “I’ll come back. I’ll be born again as someone else.” But this is absurd. We can’t possibly be “someone else.” How can you be someone other than who you are in this moment? How can anything be other than what it is now? Such thoughts are nothing more (or less) than the profound longing in the human heart for persistence—when in fact, nothing in the world persists. Nevertheless, this wonderful, precious, brilliant moment appears now, now, now, and again now, reborn again and again, moment after moment. It’s forever just this, yet with no one moment ever to come again. This, says Emily Dickinson, “Is what makes life so sweet.” What makes human life—which is inseparable from this moment—so precious is its ﬂeeting nature. And not merely that it doesn’t last but that it never returns. This is the actual vibrant life we experience and know directly. Yet it is enough.

In this poem Dickinson has a very curious set of lines: Believing what we don’t believe / Does not exhilarate. What is it that we believe but don’t believe?

We believe in permanence. At least, we’d like to. We long for permanence in our hearts precisely because, underneath our superﬁcial thoughts and convictions, we can’t really believe in it. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we see nothing but this boundless transitoriness. Life shows us nothing but ﬂux and ﬂow and change and movement. Every cell and atom of our bodies, every thought and feeling of our minds, is ﬂux. Nothing holds still or endures, even for a moment. We cannot ﬁnd permanence in anything. Yet we carry on—in fact, we construct our lives—as though this were not so. Yet beneath it all, we know we don’t believe. We envision a permanent oasis, a heavenly abode—our Pure Land, our Elysian Field—and despair because we never ﬁnd it. It’s never here, and here is all we’ve ever known. But if we fully digest our innermost understanding—that the world reveals nothing to us but thoroughgoing change— we will see that here is precisely where we belong and where we need to be. And then we can appreciate that this world of Emptiness is vibrant and alive precisely because nothing endures. What we would freeze and hold close, as if to quiet the ache of the heart, is transitoriness itself. It doesn’t occur to us that, beyond the impossibility of ever succeeding in making solidity out of Emptiness, we don’t need to hold on to the world. We don’t need to make anything extra out of the aching in our hearts. So instead of longing and reaching for what never was and never will be, we can awaken to the thoroughgoing impermanence of this moment.

To live our lives as though there were some end point is to live in fear of that end point. The thought of arriving at some ﬁnal destination where everything is ﬁne—or where everything somehow stops or repeats itself—is to deny this world where nothing stays put. It’s to deny life and consciousness itself. In believing what we don’t believe, we live life with the brakes on—without exhilaration. Yet vitality springs from letting go of any concern for what sustains us. This vitality is found only in living life in accord with actual experience, unhindered by our wishes, speculations, and beliefs. If we would just dig a little deeper into actual experience and step aside from our constructed realities and from the longedfor objects of our thoughts and imaginations, we’d ﬁnd life as it’s actually lived. But as it’s actually lived, as Emily Dickinson says, it’s at best an ablative estate. That is, it’s continuously receding from us. We can’t grasp it. And so, Dickinson tells us, This instigates an appetite / Precisely opposite. It’s this very way of imagining the world— coming out of a deep desire to hold to a self that we hope can endure in some pleasant abode—that instigates in us an appetite that’s precisely the opposite of life. We want the good, the wonderful, the pleasant—but we want it embalmed forever. Whatever we take hold of, if we pursue it long enough, only points to meaninglessness. And so we fear there might be only meaninglessness. But the feeling of meaninglessness would never arise if we would not reach for what is not there. What we truly need—and already have—cannot be dreamed of or even wished for. It’s called the Wishless. The Signless. And it looks and feels exactly like this.

An Eternal Now SG

The Elixir of Immortality

When the Buddha was asked to sum up his teaching in a single word, he said, “Awareness.” This Awareness the Buddha spoke of is not an awareness of particular things, thoughts, or feelings. It’s Awareness itself— before things, thoughts, and feelings appear. This is also the Awareness the Buddha spoke of when he said, “Awareness is the path to the deathless. Ignorance is the path of death. Those who are aware do not die; those who are ignorant are as if dead already.” Human beings suffer from confusion, from fear, from longing, from loathing. The main problem we suffer from is that we know we ’re going to die. This registers deeply within the human psyche. It’s very painful to contemplate because it’s something we don’t want to face.

When we awaken to the fact that we have this problem called death, it leaves us wondering: What meaning is there in life? What satisfaction is there if in the end it all comes to naught? There’s nothing we can make or create that doesn’t pass away. Thus we become bafﬂed and frightened. When the Buddha spoke of Awareness as “the path to the deathless,” he wasn’t just using a ﬁgure of speech. He was pointing to what’s actually going on. He was directing our attention to something we can’t believe, grasp, take hold of, or conceptualize in any way. Still, we can learn to see what he was getting at.

“The Song of the Jewel Mirror Awareness,” a poem by the great Chinese Zen teacher Tung-shan, speaks of the very same Awareness that the Buddha pointed to. This image of a jewel mirror was used as a way to express the source from which all things issue. All the myriad things, thoughts, and feelings we experience appear like images in a mirror: vivid yet insubstantial. The ungraspable mirror is what’s Real, while the seemingly isolated things that appear in it are not. Consider, for example, the simple act of smelling a rose. We see the rose, feel the rose, bring it close, breathe in through our nose. We “smell the rose,” as we say, though this refers more to how we conceptualize our experience than it does to what is actually experienced. To say we smell a fragrance would be closer to the actual experience.

But where does the act of smelling a fragrance take place? If we attend carefully, we can see that all of our usual accounts of the experience start to break down. Is the fragrance in the rose? If it was, how could you smell it? You’re here while the rose is “out there” somewhere. On the other hand, if the rose were removed, you surely wouldn’t smell the fragrance. But if you were removed—or if the air in between you and the rose were removed—you also wouldn’t smell it. So is the fragrance in the rose? Is it in your nose? Is it in the air in between? Is it in the air if no one is around to smell it? If so, how could we tell? Is the fragrance in your brain, then? And if it’s in your brain, then why is the rose necessary at all? Ultimately, the simple act of “smelling a rose”—or any other act involving a subject and object—becomes impossible to pin down and utterly insubstantial.

Gradually, however, we can begin to appreciate what the experience of smelling a rose actually entails. It’s of the nature of the mirror itself—that is, that the source of all experience is Mind. As such, the act of smelling—or seeing or hearing or touching or thinking—literally has no location. This nonlocality is the very essence of Mind. We naively think Mind conveys actual objects to us, as though the objects themselves were Real. Although they may appear this way, no separate objects are ever created and conveyed to us. In fact, such an arrangement is quite literally impossible. We know from physics, for example, that the book you’re holding and the hand that holds it are reconstructed (that is, reborn) moment after moment as a blur of rapidly moving molecules and atoms, each exchanging electrons and energy with other molecules and atoms at enormous speed. As a result, in no two instants is there the same book or hand. The whole picture reduces to energy and movement. Early Buddhist teachers, who did not have the beneﬁt of modern physics, nevertheless recognized this as total, thoroughgoing impermanence. Nothing whatsoever abides for a moment. In each instant we ﬁnd a different picture, a changed universe. And why is the physical world this way? Because this is the only way it can be experienced. It’s a mental experience. Mind is the Source. But I’m not talking about our common idea of mind, like “your mind” or “my mind.” Your mind and my mind are just more examples of the mentally fabricated and labeled stuff, such as “this book,” “the rose,” “the fragrance,” and all the rest. These all exhibit a reality we cannot deny; yet if we think they are all there is to Reality, we’ve got it all backward. The multitude of labeled things is not Reality but merely our interpretation—our concepts—of Reality.

All of philosophy sprouted from the conviction that there must surely be a way to live, a way to understand human life, a way to conduct our affairs, that doesn’t lead to suffering. This is the basic problem for us human beings, and we have looked for a solution for millennia. We’ve devised philosophies of all kinds—not to mention religions, political theories, and so forth—all in this great endeavor to resolve the problem of human suffering. And yet suffering and ignorance just go on and on. What’s the problem? When we search for the pure land, the place of peace, the right philosophy, the ultimate abode, or whatever, believing there ’s really something “out there” waiting to be found, we set ourselves up for disappointment. There isn’t any such thing. But as long as we keep thinking in such terms, we’re headed for either of two destinations. Either we remain naive and callow or we become grim, crusty, and cynical. We overlook that this all comes about because of our thought. As long as we hold to anything at all, doubt and despair will fester deeply in our minds. But this despair only comes about because we’ve locked on to the notion that there has to be some wonderful, perfect, healing object or concept or philosophy or answer in the ﬁrst place. And since there isn’t, we react as though human life has no meaning. As long as we’re stuck in this place, there appears no way to resolve this profound human problem. Either we’re ultimately doomed to realize that we live in a meaningless universe or we ’re doomed to abandon our intellect and live in a fool’s paradise. Both of these are forms of hell. Is there any other option outside of these two terrible extremes?

Consider what another ancient Chinese Zen teacher, Baizhang, spoke of as the “elixir of immortality.” An elixir is a medicine that cures all ills. The elixir that Baizhang refers to is pure, naked, objectless Awareness. To Baizhang, we suffer because we buy in to the notion of substance. That is, we think that the things we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think are real, solid, and enduring. But naked, objectless Awareness reveals to us a very different Reality. In speaking of the elixir of immortality, Baizhang is speaking not just ﬁguratively or poetically; he’s speaking of the Awareness that nothing really dies—and that nothing is ever born. To the extent that this is seen, our experience of the world is utterly transformed. And virtually all that we suffer from— confusion, pain, longing and loathing, loss and sorrow, fear of death—comes to an end. Indeed, it doesn’t even arise anymore because we’re no longer looking “out there” for anything that will satisfy. We can see that there is no “out there”—and no “in here.”

There are different ways of looking at this elixir of immortality—this realization that nothing dies—but I’ll give just two examples. First, we could look to Nagarjuna’s observation that nothing is impermanent. When we ﬁrst hear this, it probably strikes us as very strange, perhaps even contrary to Buddhist teachings. After all, impermanence is a basic tenet of the Buddhadharma. And it makes so much sense. It seems glaringly obvious, once it’s pointed out, that nothing lasts. Yet Nagarjuna says that a complete and thorough understanding of impermanence is that nothing is impermanent. What Nagarjuna is pointing to is that believing things are impermanent involves a contradiction. First we posit separate, persisting things (in effect, absolute objects); then we refer to them as impermanent (that is, relative). What we fail to see is that we are still holding to a view of substance. We don’t really appreciate the thoroughgoing nature of change, the thoroughgoing nature of selﬂessness. Nagarjuna makes it abundantly clear that impermanence (the relative) is total, complete, thoroughgoing, Absolute. It’s not that the universe is made up of innumerable objects in ﬂux. There ’s only ﬂux. Nothing is (or can be) riding along in the ﬂux, like a cork in a stream; nothing actually arises or passes away. There ’s only stream. Another way of looking at this realization that nothing dies comes from Bodhidharma, the ﬁrst Zen ancestor in China. Commenting on the Buddhist precept of not taking life, he said, “Not nursing a view of extinction is called the precept of not killing.” In other words, to hold a view that something actually dies or passes away is to believe that there are actual, abiding entities that come into and go out of existence. That forms appear to come and go cannot be denied. But to assume the existence of imaginary persisting entities and attach them to these apparent comings and goings is delusion. When the Buddha said that those who are ignorant live as though dead already, he was saying that when we imagine permanence within the forms that appear to come and go, we necessarily live with fear, confusion, and the sense that human life is ultimately meaningless. It’s a huge burden to bear—and it all comes from our marvelous ability to abstract our experience into things and thoughts. It’s a grand illusion that easily takes us in—and we are left trembling in our boots at the thought that we will die, that everything else will also pass out of existence (at least for us), and, worst of all, that we really don’t understand anything. Thus we miss the ﬁeld and fabric of just this—dynamic Reality itself. We are, in the Buddha’s words, “as if dead already.”

One other image in Buddhist texts is used to express this objectless Awareness that nothing dies. It’s called the Golden Fish. It’s not a typical image of something we can grasp. In fact, the term is used for something we can’t even imagine. We don’t know what it is because it’s nothing in particular. It’s not an object at all. In fact, it’s not even anything we can name, let alone possess or form a relationship with. Yet it’s what will truly satisfy. But, since it has no location, there’s nothing we can do to ﬁnd it. All we need to do is lower the net.