Zen: A Radical Change of Perspective

In his foreword to A Profound Mind: Cultivating Wisdom in Everyday Life by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Nicholas Vreeland wrote,

"Perhaps the chief difference between Buddhism and the world's other major faith traditions lies in its presentation of our core identity. The existence of the soul or self, which is affirmed in different ways by Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is not only firmly denied in Buddhism; belief in it is identified as the chief source of all our misery. The Buddhist path is fundamentally a process of learning to recognize this essential nonexistence of the self, while seeking to help other sentient beings to recognize it as well."

In other words, this is what Buddhism is. Everything else the Buddha taught can be tied back to the cultivation of wisdom.

In my previous post  I struggled to define what Zen is and isn't. For the reader who wants to review some of my sources, they are listed there. I'll go back and revise that one as I learn more. In this post, I'd like to allow myself a bit more freedom to explain the radical impact of Zen on a more or less conventional mind (mine).

Like many "spiritual" disciplines, Zen attempts to connect it's practices and theory to Scientific knowledge and method. This is usually a sham, as in "Scientology" and "Christian Science". In the case of Zen, however, the claim seems to be serious and well founded. The Dali Lama has famously said that if there is a conflict between Buddhism and Science, then Buddhism will need to change. As Zen wades ashore in the Western World, it does, in fact, submit itself to penetrating questions. Known as "Mindfulness",  makes serious effort to assist in the relatively new Scientific attempts at investigating what we mean by "self" and "consciousness". Western Science has made little effort to investigate the subjective world - in fact, until very recently, investigation into such matters was the kiss of death for a career oriented Ph. D.

This has all changed in the last few decades. We should not be surprised to find that the initial results are not at all what we would expect. After all, we now know we are mostly empty space and that the Universe began 13 billion years ago in a stupendous explosion. We are beginning to accept the fact that most of the matter in the universe is (so far) of unknown nature. Is it any surprise that, when looked at closely, the "self" turns out to be mostly empty space as well?

Zen encourages us to completely experience the present moment. The past is a story we tell ourselves. The future is a fiction. We are the swirl of desire, fear, regrets and worries that wrestle for our attention all day long and in our dreams. There is no "observer", no "us" to whom all these thoughts occur.

Our minds have evolved to focus most of our attention on internally generated phantom reality. We don't experience the world as it is, only what we are afraid it is, or want it to be, or hope it will be or vaguely remember it to be. Zen . To us, the Universe is a giant story featuring us in a starring role. Meditation practice allows us to remember -- to constantly come back to -- the actual experience of the present moment. This is still not direct contact with "reality" of course - we can never really escape the meat computer that we use to process information that comes to us from "out there". However, the mere attempt to get closer to reality produces profound results. The most unexpected of these results is a greatly changed experience of the self: who "I" am, what "I" mean by "me" and what is "my" relationship to "my" stuff. We see how our minds are full of fictions such as theories about how others see "us" and how important that is. As I untangle all the lies and half-truths I tell myself, I discover that what remains is not really "me" at all.

Of course, most of us have been raised with the belief in a "soul" - some essential "me" that survives even death. Even for those who reject this idea, no alternative is readily apparent. Our daily experience is that there is "somebody" looking out our eyes, picking up and continuing our story day by day. Zen tells us that this "person" is fictional. More than that, it's a fiction that results in tremendous self-inflicted suffering. This fiction inflicts suffering on those around us and we suffer from association with others who are blind to what is really happening around them. This is not a pathological condition (not, for example, a consequence of "modern life"). It's the way our minds naturally work -- it cannot be overcome without working against the grain - training our brains to work in ways they have not evolved to work.

It takes awhile for all this to sink in, but when it does, everything changes.

From the outside, Zen looks like a way to relax, relieve stress, maybe live with pain or deal with anxiety. Yoga for the brain. In discussions between practitioners, we see a sweeping re-evaluation not only of what it is to be human, but what "is" in general.

Let me remind the reader: Zen is not what you believe, it's what you do. None of this will make much sense until you take the plunge and spend some of your precious time discovering who you are.