July
5, 2001.
The father & son had walked
their morning coffee down to the big creek, and were sitting quietly with
feet in the water, in a spot not yet touched by the sun, when a rabbit
bounced by on the opposite bank,
and the elder finally began
to speak:
“Have you noticed how less frequently
your cousins come to
talk with me about that certain
matter which is the essence of
our lineage's special tradition?
They still profess their interest
therein,
and all remain involved in some
titularly related activity,
and for most of their lives
they enthusiastically sought my comments regarding their current passion,
(Zen, Sufism, the Gita, whatever),
and considered me the supreme
authority
in translating such into useful
forms,
and while they continue to hold
me in high regard,
since I have started talking
about that special family matter
in the terms I have of late,
note -- their visits have severely declined.
I bring this up because the reason
for their change of attitude
is at the very axis of what
I have been recently talking to you about,
and trying to turn your attention
to;
more of a head-on, blood-&-bone
view of what we do,
than the traditional poetic
& metaphorical one.
As soon as I brought the brain
into it --
their interest began to wane;
the more I confined everything
about the matter to a man’s brain,
the less did they think I was
still speaking of that special subject.
My life long interest & involvement
in this affair has gone
far beyond the struggle to,
‘Wake up the mind,’
and is now, let us say, (for
the sake of verbal expediency),
more like a struggle to directly
comprehend the essence of the mind.
I know from experience what it
means to,
Wake up
-- to, Be enlightened,
and such events do, in no uncertain
terms,
validate everything you ever
imagined This Thing to be about,
(if indeed you ever needed such),
but my increasingly incendiary
interest now is in
understanding at the most basic
level possible,
what my mind, and this thing-I-want-to-do-about-my-mind
are literally all about.
I want to know what, ‘being
awake' IS
--
I know what the experience
is. but I want to know what it
is.
I want to see for myself
-- right inside my own brain --
precisely what IS
this thing we call the mind,
and what happens to it
when it experiences that extraordinary condition we call, ‘waking-up-from-a-sleep’.”
The father stopped to sip from
his cup, looked around them for a
few seconds, then continued
his comments:
”The heart of my entire life
has been devoted to trying to, Wake up,
(ever since I first read about
the idea as a teenager -- same as you);
I have never regretted a moment
of it,
and it has given me joy &
pleasure of a type, nowhere else available;
I simply cannot imagine my life
without it -- but:
I tell you that since I have
shifted my focus to trying to figure out
what, trying-to-wake-up
itself is all about,
I am enjoying it more than ever;
my understanding is deeper &
wider than ever before, and yet, note;
if I talk about it in this way
--
even those who want to wake
up -- start to doze off.
Why?
For folks like us, there is great
initial excitement when you first
run across the idea that your
mind is not operating at its
optimal potential, but can be
made to do so;
you instantly feel that a mysterious
illness that has surrounded your
life since childhood has finally
been correctly diagnosed,
and you soon align yourself
with some school you discover that professes to teach methods that will
produce the cure for your malady,
so you undertake to become an,
‘Enlightened Zennist,’
or an, ‘Awakened Sufi,’ or something
of the like,
(it doesn't make any difference
what teaching you initially follow,
just as long as you get started),
but few even of the few born
with the instinctive taste for this affair
ever get beyond this point,
which simply shows that they
are satisfied to go no further;
they are pleased to think of
themselves as being a member of,
this-or-that group of unusually
insightful people following the
precepts of some extraordinary,
(better if dead), Teacher.
Like everyone else, their brain
has various thoughts that appear in it, and are available to it, and one
of theirs is the thought:
‘I
want to, Wake up: I want to be like Buddha; I want to be a Buddhist,’
or, ‘I want to be Enlightened: I want to be like Rumi: I want to be a Sufi’
which, I remind you again is,
in some form or the other,
necessary for a man to ever
take the first step in this mighty journey,
but due to the inescapable nature
of how thought operates,
every individual thought a man
experiences is --
outside of his normal awareness
-- compared to other of his thoughts;
thus every time the thought
appears in a man that says & represents the idea that the man is:
struggling-to-awaken-his-mind-from-its-dreams,
that thought -- totally
beyond the man’s notice -- is always comparing
itself to some other thought
he has picked up & added to his stock
that defines what, ‘being
asleep, and, being awake’ are.
Ergo always is the particular
thought a man is experiencing
in an endless process of comparing
itself to some other thought(s);
how else can a person judge
whether they are making progress in the efforts to awaken their mind from
its state of sleep?! –
and since I have ceased speaking
to your cousins within this context,
that thought in them that says
it, ( and them), ‘wants to wake up’ –
has lost interest in what I
have to say about it -- and, why? -- consider:
at some point in our past the
first man’s brain had that experience we
now call, ‘Waking up, Enlightenment,
The Liberation,’
but when new, there was no name
for it,
so as always, the brain invented
one, and called the condition:
‘Waking up; Being Enlightened;
Being Liberated,’
terms which it obviously found
agreeable --
since it was the one who had
HAD
the experience,
and knew whether the metaphorical
descriptions were apt or not --
and further proof that it finds
them so
is by the fact that we are still
using them thousands of years later;
and the brain had to have clearly
realized at the time it created these terms that what they represented
was a condition it had experienced wherein its routine consciousness had
abated to such a degree that
about all that remained was
the brain’s consciousness of itself,
and that such a thing was –
quite literally -- unspeakable
--
in that while in that unnatural
condition, the brain -- for all intents --
stopped speaking,
and once back to its usual state
of operation,
vis a vis consciousness &
the mind -- a world dependent on words --
it was left to put into words
an experience devoid of all words,
and indeed made extraordinary
BY
that fact.
The brain also had to have almost
instantly realized that there was no way for it to describe to others,
or itself, directly, that is, literally
what it had experienced,
nor could it find exact expression
to instruct someone -- or itself –
how to bring about such a condition,
(again, in its case),
for what had occurred was that
the operations of the brain that it named, ‘The
mind’, (and issued to us), were turned
so near to, Off,
that the brain was more or less
left there alone in the skull
with nobody but itself, and
with nobody any longer talking,
so what can it possibly say
to describe how to bring on such a state –
which approaches being a --
state of, non stateness.
Thus I say to you that the brain
was FORCED to invent the various
Yogi, Zen, Cabalistic systems-to-awaken
so that subsequent men
whose brains had the potential
for the unusual experience would have something OUTSIDE OF their
own brains to apparently -- Study;
things to look at, (books, teachers,
shrines, icons) -- anything but itself,
for the brain can look directly
AT
a page in a book,
but it cannot look directly
at itself,
so it reads words outside of
itself -- about itself --- in the effort to --
study itself.
The brain: ‘I
want to know about my feet,
therefore I will do the obvious:
I will read about feet.'
This is as far as a man can go
in the pursuit of altering his mind –
unless he suddenly turns the
pursuit completely around,
and makes it start pursuing
itself.
The manner in which I now pursue
This
Thing
has moved me from, attempting-the-improbable
to:
being committed-to-the-impossible:
if ’Waking
up’ is iffy;
then directly comprehending
what, ‘being asleep’
is -- is impossible,
but by my relentless pursuit
thereof anyway,
my radical -- and I do
mean radical understanding of everything
has expanded more in the last
several years
than I did the previous several
decades.
Even the brain of a person sincerely
interested in this affair
finds hearing itself talked
about this way -- almost intolerable --
and I fully understand why;
it creates an initial, almost
overwhelming feeling of frustration
that far surpasses that of merely,
trying-to-wake-up
--
and I am not surprised at your
cousins’ loss in interest
in hearing me talk about it
in this fashion,
but my boy,
based on a lifetime of experience
& devotion to this delightful sport,
there is nothing I can recommend
to you more highly than
switching over to its bare knuckles
version:
your own brain trying to comprehend
itself without the intermediary of any comparing thoughts.
No words, no instructions --
you just do it.”
He drained his cup and arose.
J
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