Consider the living moment, the significance of the value inherent within it, how conditions can and do affect its quality, and the meaning of where the attention is focused. Many old eastern and relatively new western ideas and intuitions offer us insights that might illuminate our understanding of how the quality of our ‘now’ is an effect of our own doing. An earnest searcher after truth will invariably discover that there are genuine understandings in many ancient and living cultures that shed light on the misunderstandings of some others, including many of our own modern views. And in particular, if we can reconcile seemingly competing views, then we might come to see that there is a complementary relationship between such seemingly competing views as mysticism and philosophy, eastern and western philosophy.
At the outset it is worth considering whether there is a pre-linguistic experience of meanings, which represents not only experience of the highest order that should rightly be available to all, but is instead lost in miscommunication and buried beneath layers of misconception about what is indeed valuable, real, and true. We might then consider our western norms and habits that have developed around these misconceptions about the nature of value, truth, and reality.
It stands to reason that this pre-linguistic, precognitive, intuitive experience of meaning provides an understanding distinct from that which words and logical argument can elicit. We can have no doubt that the experience of meanings exists prior to the formulation of symbols to represent those meanings. Proof of this lies in the fact that, while there is a meaning for every word, there is not a word for every meaning. Words are only handles attached to meanings so that we can share them with others. Some meanings, however, are not shared, and others cannot be. Those meanings which are not deemed significant enough to find their way into a cultures discourse do not warrant a name. similarly, those meanings which are unique to particular individuals, as if everyone had his or her absolutely private thing-in-a-box, have, as Wittgenstein observed, no place in the language-game at all since there is no common ground for understanding, therefore no hope for successful communication about them. Yet these meanings do exist, in that each person has a perspective unique to him or herself which is not completely communicable. Hence, Polanyi’s observation that “we can know more than we can tell.”[1]
Plato, in his autobiographical Seventh Epistle, wrote that he had composed no work in regard to his doctrine, now would he ever, for it could not be put into words, but must be generated in the soul. While Plato’s absolute knowledge is denied us by the limitations of language, our own purely personal experience of meaning can prove even more enlightening than second-hand experience of even Plato’s meanings. To ‘know’ as in to experience, to sense, to feel, is a very certain knowledge, and one that exists prior to and independent of any correlative nomenclature. To experience the personal significance of events, to approach the world in such a way that we experience each new happening fresh, to interpret new information in terms of its significance to all other information, to piece together experiences which together make a larger understanding, to actively participate in one’s existence. Such a mode of existence is a project of enlightenment, and no doubt it is this project which magnifies the meanings such that some have rich subjective experience, while others have little or none, to hear them tell it; of course we all have subjective experience, we just don’t all appreciate it. This undervaluation of the internal is central to the problem that I would ultimately like to discuss, but for now I wish only to make the point that subjective experience of meanings exist, whether we pay attention to them or not, prior to and independent of the words which we might employ in order to share them. We are always free, of course, to stretch the capacity of our language, to adopt or invent words to describe previously undiscussed meanings. But we must remember that these are inventions, and they are an afterthought to the meaning experiences which they define.
To illustrate this, consider both of the pre-linguistic experiences of every life’s infancy and the infancy of humankind in the pre-civilized experience. Can it be said in either case that there is no experience of, say, heat, because there is as of yet no symbol for it? I think not; the experience of the meaning of heat is between a person and herself, and is altogether prior to community agreement on what that meaning should be labeled for purposes of discourse. Furthermore, I think that the experience of meanings and the experience of words are frequently completely independent of one another; meanings more frequently than not are experienced without cognitive or communicative activity, and unfortunately, it seems that words are more frequently than not used without the correlative experience of meaning. The meaning of the word ‘hot’ is more commonly understood than many more individualized meanings, but it is not in principle different than the experience of any meaning. The fullest experience of meaning is in recognizing significances of meanings to all other meanings, thus, they become more complicated as interrelationships are recognized in the labyrinth of understanding, and as they take on greater significance they become more idiosyncratic, less communicable. Meanings which are less common, that is highly idiosyncratic, such as beauty, goodness, truth, and love, are extremely difficult to talk about because there meanings are so individualized, as well as constantly changing. The words are only useful in directing the receiver to his own pure experience of a similar meaning, and are never enough to communicate meaning where there is not this understanding by pure experience. To understand ‘hot’ one must feel it. I think that it is in the domain of these feelings, sensations, images and intuitions that we must experience phenomena in order to truly understand them, and not in the domain of words, logic and argument alone. Knowing the words and knowing the meaning of the words are widely disparate experiences, and constitute different kinds of knowledge. Either we have discovered knowledge ourselves, or we have literally taken someone else’s word for it. As noted Zen writer D.T. Suzuki put it, “Unless it grows out of yourself, no knowledge is really yours, it is only a borrowed plumage.”(p.92)[2] Understanding then refers to the pure experience of meanings, prior to and independent of language – what is called in another tradition gnosis.
I do not mean to imply that language is not a good and important tool, of course. Words, used well, are magic, and humans are able to enhance their existence by intelligent use of words to promote mutual understanding of meanings. By reciprocal teaching and learning toward understanding what words truly mean, we validate one another, such that the sum of humankind together is more than the totality of the parts. So words and language are valuable tools. But words alone do not constitute understanding, and where they are mistaken to be more than they are, something precious is lost. Whereas language may be a necessary condition of ‘being with’ others, it is not a necessary condition of ‘being’ itself. Language serves communal integrity well, but personal integrity is an experience that is prior to communicating about it.
‘Being’, in the sense that eastern philosophers understood, is having mind in direct participation with body. It has been called “participating consciousness” by anthropologist Morris Berman. Others, such as William James and D.T. Suzuki, have called it “pure consciousness.” It is the experience of “becoming immersed in events; the state of consciousness in which the subject/object dichotomy breaks down and the person feels identified with what he or she is perceiving.”(p.355)[3] As Native Americans say of our Original Instructions, “all artists know, when we are ‘in the groove’ or ‘in the flow’…we are present in the moment as an integral part of creating.”(Nelson, 292)
The ancient Greeks called it mimesis, and that Plato is said to have considered mimesis pathological ought to make us look deeper, for that opinion, later reinforced by Descartes and others, seems to be at the heart of the split that we seek to unify, to bring the intellectual mind of language together with the sensual, emotional and intuitive mind of direct experience.
In contemporary western culture the air is loud with cries of search for life’s lost meaning. I think that meaning is not lost, but has simply become conflated and confused with the language that was originally meant only to serve it. We have come to define scientific knowledge as the most valuable knowledge, discounting the value of personal perceptions. We attribute worth to that knowledge for which we can produce logical or empirical proof, and in doing so have undermined every person’s trust in intuition, thus thwarting their project of enlightenment. This is a healthy cost since, as followers of Zen know, the clear undistracted perceptions of meaning is experience of the highest order, experience which is, in and of itself, reason for living. Thus the meaning of life is not lost, but waiting to be rediscovered under our attitude which underestimates the value of personal subjective knowledge.
As Polanyi pointed out, language is only “a kind of verbal pointing,”(p.208)[4] and as the followers of Zen say, “A finger is needed to point at the moon, but what a calamity it would be if one took the finger for the moon.”(p.74)[5] It seems that this is precisely what has happened in the west, that too frequently static scientific knowledge of facts has taken the place of dynamic intuitive knowledge of significances, and what has been lost is understanding. This “nonparticipating consciousness”, or dualistic thinking, that is that state of mind in which one knows phenomena by thinking, that is that state of mind in which one knows phenomena by distancing oneself from them, is the essence of alienation, or what one writer argues is the “schizoid duality at the heart of the Cartesian paradigm.”(p.37)[6] The split between subject and object, private and public, inner and outer world, disallowed the value of the inner, and by asserting the value of the external, set into motion a process by which maximization of interests amounts to competition for domination of the external world.
Thus, with the acceptance of the Newtonian-Cartesian world view, Berman argues, “Europe went collectively out of its mind.”(p.112)[7] The exploitation-mentality which is ushered in is today threatening to consume the world in its greed. There is little doubt that we are at a critical point in human evolution. Without a revolution of values, it is quite likely that we will not have the opportunity to evolve any further at all. Thus the moment at hand is crucial, and in more ways than one. This is both the reason to learn the lesson, and the lesson to be learned. The moment at hand is wherein meaning must be grasped, to catch life as it flows; to pay attention to passing phenomena in such a way as to pierce the intellect, to see through it to those feelings, sensations, images and intuition which, while of little utility in mediating the differentiation of interests within and among groups, are of infinite value in mediating the differentiation between individuals and their environments. These engage the mind with body, reintegrate persons with their internal idiosyncratic experience of life. In western culture we have normalized both hiding our feelings and hiding from or feelings, indicating that for us they are frequently painful thus to be avoided. But we must recognize that feelings can be enormously gratifying as well, and as such a means by which persons can ameliorate the atmosphere of their lives.
But in order to perceive subtle feelings and meanings the mind must be resting, it seems. It must suspend the socially preparatory activity of cognition, and return to its native activity of experiencing by tactic knowledge. The internal conversations involved in cognition have to do with the meaning of ‘being with,’ more than the meaning of ‘being.’ Being precedes cognition. In the integrated mind, one parts knowledge is another parts knowledge. There is no need to communicate within oneself until and unless one is divided into subject and object, at which time the mind can practice interactivity. But this practice is not being and often alienates us from being. Personal understanding does not need, and is often inhibited by the internal use of words. Precognitive being does not make distinctions where in fact there are none. It knows meanings to be fluid processes rather than static entities, so it does not violate them by locking them into place. Intellectualization, like language, is an extremely valuable tool, but we must beware of seeing trees and missing forests. Intuition provides the holistic picture that language distorts by particular emphasis on parts. And intuition begins, it seems, only when intellection rests.
Thus we may contrast the western scientific view of knowledge with that of the east, where personal experience is everything. The east “does not care so much for the elaboration of particulars as for a comprehensive grasp of the whole, and this intuitively.”(p.35)[8] The western way of knowing is folly, qen would say, because “life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow; to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it, leaving its cold corpse to be embraced.”(p.132)[9] By contrast, in the eastern way, just “once touch the heart of it and the whole universe will rise from its grave where we have buried it with our logic and analysis.”(p.113)[10]
It seems that the contrast between the eastern and western means to truth runs parallel to the contrast between the experience of meanings and the experience of words alone, the two kinds of knowledge we discussed earlier in this paper. How interesting that what for one is considered to be the untimate life experience is thought to be madness by the other. Whether the Newtonian-Cartesian world view is schizoid, or participatory consciousness is, as Plato thought, pathological, will not concern us here. The matter is settled only by agreement on definition in either case, and perhaps we have already done more of that than is in our best interest. It makes more sense, in terms of human survival on an individual as well as global scale, to stop taking sides in such matters as what we will call the behavioristic attributes of other people’s states of mind, and in a very real sense learn to mind our own business. If we are mad in the west, it is because we are competently adjusted to our environment. It is a self-preservative madness, necessitated in part by the constant watch of ‘big brothers’ such as the scientific mentality has made of all of us, and the normalizing judgments of the scientific community which would have us all compartmentalized, thus under control. I question the moral implications of such a mode of inquiry, given the emerging evidence of what is lost by it. Regardless of what it is called, R.D. Laing writes, “our sanity is not true sanity…their madness is not true madness.”(p.244)[11] They are simply different modes of mind, different ways of looking at the same world, whose ultimate interest is in integration. I think Jesus Christ’s last prayer, “that they may all be one…they may all be one body and one spirit, and may combine to form one perfect man,”(*) carries the message that overrides both the eastern and the western way of knowing. And to be fair, it must be noted that the eastern way has never been to exclude the western way entirely, only to put it in its place. Whereas the scientific mentality, at its most defensive, denies the very existence of inner experience. While most clear headed thinkers in the western tradition would not take this position, it is nonetheless considered something akin to heresy to assert the paramount importance of the senses over the intellect. Yet as one western master pt it, “How much of mob and middle class there is this hatred… We want to hold fast to or senses, and to pt or faith in them,” wrote Nietzsche, “and think their consequences through to the end! The nonsensuality of philosophy hitherto is the greatest nonsensicality of men.”(p.125)[12] In this, Nietzsche gives us a call for thinkers to ‘come to their senses’ as it were. Polanyi wrote that “by elucidating the way our bodily processes participate in or perceptions we will throw light on the bodily roots of all thought, including man’s highest creative powers.”(p.13)[13]
Sensuality as a mode of existence might find nutrition and expression in sexuality. There is a peculiarly sexual aspect to the approach/avoidance of systems interaction. From this perspective, all of one’s interactions might be viewed as sexual, all knowledge is carnal knowledge. But sensuality need not involve dramatic interactions of wants and repulsions. In fact, a pursuit of sensual delights need not involve desires and their satisfactions at all. As lover of sensual pleasures and perhaps the most misunderstood philosopher of antiquity, Epicurus observed that the ultimate pleasure is peace; “Those have the sweetest pleasure in luxury who least need it, and that all that is natural is easy to be obtained, but that which is superfluous is hard. And so plain savours bring us a pleasure equal to a luxurious diet, when all the pain due to want is removed; and bread and water produce the highest pleasure, when one who needs them puts them to his lips…we maintain that pleasure is the end, but pleasure as in freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind.”(p.193)[14] Freedom from artificial want altogether is the greatest sensual satisfaction, perhaps the highest form of freedom, and a right which we might defend more heartily than we now do. Ultimately, sensuality aims at optimizing the quality of this moment at hand. Only eliminating dissatisfaction about what is not, can free us to appreciate what is.
Peace in the here and now is also the ideal of Zen. However, before taking up discussion of Buddhism, it must be stated again that no discussion of any meaning can ever be adequate, and this is especially true with regard to meaning as enormours as that of Zen. The Zen experience of meaning defies all concept making and slips through all words. Trying to talk about it is like trying to tie up smoke. “it is an experience which no amount of explanation or argument can make communicable to others unless the latter themselves had it previously.”(p.92)[15] It is first-hand knowledge and there is no substitute for it. A meaning will always be reduced by the word which denotes it, but again, this is true of more than Zen.
The ultimate Zen experience is called satori. Suzuki defines it as “intuitive looking-into, in contradistinction to intellectual and logical understanding. Whatever the definition,” he says, “satori means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistic mind.”(p.98)[16] It is acquiring a new viewpoint, a collapse of the old structure and a rebuilding of one’s knowledge is such a way that the new structure allows view of that which was earlier obstructed from sight. To see that which is there to be seen, to hear, smell, taste, and feel the meaning of life. Zen attempts to take hold of the pure sensual and intellectual experience of here and now. To know this moment as fully and as wholly as possible, to bear full witness to happenings in time, to appreciate as much as can be with hermeneutical consciousness; this is the way in which we create our reality. Perspective determines what is real for us, and our perspective depends upon our selective attention to the world around. Selective attention is partly a matter of choice, and part habit. Since that upon which attention rests is ultimately all that we get, I think attention is a more precious commodity than we realize, and our capacity to control its focus is nothing less than the power of free will, a power I think we badly underestimate. In Zen this power to hold one’s mind collected and concentrated on a single subject is called dhyana comes easier where there is the satori viewpoint, that is, where the knowledge is structured in such a way that life shows through.
Attention consists of more than just focus. It seems as if attention is a matter of the degree of participation, divided among levels varying from conscious to subconscious. Where we focus we seem to be exercising our control consciously and directly, while in peripheral vision our perceptions seem more to do with habit and assumed value. We might consider this distinction again in regard to time perception. For now I wish to focus on the value of that part of attention that is concentrated.
It becomes easier to understand why the Zen state of mind is so elusive when we think of it in terms of concentration on the experience of life. It’s difficult to talk about because any moment spent in explanation is not spent in concentration on life. In order to talk about it one must leave it, so finds herself with nothing left to talk about. If one goes back to concentrating on the task at hand, Zen may return, bt the instant one looks up to see what Zen is, it is not.
Hence, G. E. Moore’s observation that “the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish. It seems as if we have before us a mere emptiness.”(p.450)[17] The problem that Moore is having seems to come from trying to see ‘distinctly’ what is not distinct at all. Consciousness is not a thing, but a way. It is the scientific mind at work that asks what Zen is, distinct from other things, as if we must observe ourselves in the act before we can ‘know’ what we are doing. However, because we cannot concentrate on life and on ourselves at the same time does not preclude us from ‘knowing’ what Zen is. We know by the experience of Zen what it is – it is full participation of attention on the experience of hers and now - complete involvement in what one is doing, whatever that is. Not the scientific way of knowledge, it’s true, it is most the personally satisfying way.
Regarding this distinction between subjective and objective modes of knowledge (which, by the way, does not actually exist) it is important to see how one knows ‘self’ in both modes, and how this difference in perspective (i.e. outside-looking-in or inside-looking-out) relates to how persons know their world, by first or second hand experience. The outside-looking-in point of view on oneself seems to cripple the inside-looking-out view, such that the observation of self in the act of here and now precludes the experience of here and now. So the two forms of knowledge, at least in terms of self-experience, seem to be mutually exclusive.
This distinction comes into focus in the work of George Herbert Mead, whose work in the area of social conditioning opened doors into many still unlit corridors. Mead conceived of personality as being composed of two clearly distinct, that is, mutually exclusive modes of being; the ‘I’, which is “the living act,”[18] and the ‘me’, which is the self-reflective experience, whereby the individual takes the observers perspective on his or her self. Social control is exercised by the expression of the ‘me’ against the expression of the ‘I’, Mead explained. Without elaborating all of the parallels, note that Mead’s ‘I’ bears interesting resemblance to the Zen experience. The ‘I’ belongs to “that which is actually going on, taking place, and it is in some sense the most fascinating part of our experience,” Mead wrote. “It is there that novelty arises, and it is there that our most important values are located. It is the realization in some sense of this self that we are continually seeking.”[19] And on that note Mead went merrily on his western way, toward a more perfect behaviorist science of human ‘being.” Yet he did so without the presuppositions, made by Watson and Skinner, that to know observable human behavior is to fully understand human being. He never pretended that the inner did not exist, only that the external is all we can know scientifically. And for Mead, it was also the more interesting. In fact, fretting as he did the inability of getting the ‘I’ into the experience of the ‘me’, one could infer that he thought the experience of the ‘me’ out of the experience of the ‘I’. That notwithstanding, Mead’s approach went a long way toward conceptualizing how it is that the ‘me’ controls the ‘I’, thus toward a grasp of the breakdown of subject and object which is the heart of alienation. Mead as I read him has a good deal to say about the means by which life loses its meaning. His ideas are also particularly valuable for his emphasis on the importance of language and its part in the conditioning of thought and behavior, for his recognition that meaning can be experienced and exchanged without the use of articulate speech, for his emphasis on the role played by fundamental needs in shaping behavior, as well as for his emphasis on the importance of processes and perspectives, and the implications of these for the nature of reality. He also had concerns regarding temporality (which we will discuss later in this paper). These are very eastern notions coming from a very western philosopher. The particular idea which brings Mead into this discussion is his belief that reality is generated by the individual’s perspective, which is a function of the individual’s attention and the attitudes (values) which guide it. Mead’s conception of ‘mind’ is as a dynamic system in interaction with other systems, not as the static entity that some second-hand-knowledge-seekers would make it. I think a contemporary rereading of Mead might help us understand how it is that Zen is lost in our culture, or for that matter, in contemporary eastern culture, which is quickly giving way to western ways. But before discussing how it is lost, we must become as clear as possible on what it is, as well as how and why it is valuable.
What is so precious about the moment? What so important about free attention? What so valuable about peace of mind? These questions can only be discussed in terms of quality. The Zen state of mind is a particular quality of ‘being’ and of ‘being with.” The quality of the moment is dependent upon which particular meanings are being perceived, that is, where the attention is at. When we say ‘where’ we mean where in relative terms, in terms of space and time. Since it might seem that fixing one’s attention in the here-and-now would preclude concerns for their-and-then, it seems important to discuss how attention can be spread over time and space while focused in the here-and-now. This again involves us in the notion of attention’s peripheral vision. By it, it seems that perceptions of the past and future can be incorporated into the here-and-now by the way they affect our mood and expectations. The Zen conception of time, as I see it, is not a conception at all, but an experience – the experience of all time in the quality of the moment at hand. How this is accomplished is not, I think, as obscure as it at first seems. It is easy enough to see how the perceptions we experience contain within them the mood created by the past, and our expectations about the future. Thus the quality of this moment then is in part dependent upon how much energy we have put toward the future in the past, as well as how much energy we intend to put toward the future. But note the distinctions between putting energy vs. attention into the future. To anticipate the future by conscious attention is to rob oneself of the awareness of now, and to pejoratively affect both now and the moment we are anticipating, as we will be busy then comparing the actual moment with the image we have concocted. The future, like it or not, will be the wonderfully spontaneously result of all those moments which lead up to it, and because of this cannot ever be captured in foresight anyway. Active anticipation is incompatible with the presence of mind needed to appreciate here-and-now.
Likewise, active remembering can similarly affect the quality of this moment. Since ‘now’ inevitably contains stressful and strenuous details which have long been put aside in memories of past events, now will always suffer by comparison. Of course, both active anticipation and remembering have their appropriate time and place in the here-and-now, since it is important that we remember the past and look to the future in order to guide the choices of now. Thus, in terms of life quality, to review past events and to imagine future ones is not in itself a bad thing. But to dwell on the past in order to avoid change, and to set strategy for the future in order to control it do not enhance past, present, or future. We enhance these, hence our private reality, by freeing our attention from other times and places to participate fully in this one. The mood that we carry with us gives in effect a color tour perceptions which serves to compliment some aspects and filter others. Our expectations for the future create an atmosphere in which we carry out the work of creating future realities. How much we cared about the future in the past and how much we care now about our present future both come home to create our present reality. But what does it mean to ‘care’? I think that this is where values are manifest, for what we care about determines how our energies are dispersed and focused, and how we divide up and apply our energies determines what we make real. Thus the quality of our life depends upon how much we care about it.
I think that the western conception of time is distorted by this cultures materialistic values, and the notion of rationality which follow from them. The idea that persons always act toward ends which maximize their materialistic interests changes the function of the present. ‘Now’ becomes an instrument of accumulation. Not an end in itself, but a means of maximization, the confusion is around the issue of what is the ‘good’ which it is the function of now to maximize.
This brings me to the question of life-plan, and the distinction between strategy and policy. Again, all action stems from what the actor believes is important, thus worth working toward. When we value things, we set strategy by which we hope to eventually accumulate ever-increasing quantities of them. Zen, on the other hand, rejects the value of ‘having’ and strategies of ‘becoming.’ In Zen the approach is not one of strategy, but of policy; the policy of ‘being’. Not to maximize our external good, but to optimize our internal good. The difference in these values and the approach which results from them is what accounts for the difference in eastern and western perspectives on time. I feel that it is more personally satisfying, therefore more valuable, to live in such a way that we ‘feel’ the presence of then-and-there in the mood and expectations of here-and-now, i.e. to have a sense of the past and future in the peripheral vision of our immediate present, and not to look directly at them. To look directly at our peripheral vision is to make it our focus, hence to move our peripheral vision to the side. Just as the peripheral vision of the human eye has functions that the focus cannot imitate, so the mood and expectations of our perceptions cannot be captured by our focused attention; atmosphere, like the faint light of star, can be sensed, but try to focus on it and it disappears. Thus, we should pay attention to what we are doing – whatever we are doing – and let the Zen mood bring color and the Zen expectations bring hope to the activities of our lives. The object is to care about the quality of the moment at hand, to give one’s all to it, to look for and appreciate what it has to offer, or as one sixties movement coined it to smell the flowers alone the way.
It is in a sense using one’s ‘big mind’, a mind we all have at times, some more frequently than others but only because they remember to us it. There are times during which it becomes obvious what is truly valuable, and what is delusional. To remember what the mind recognizes at these times and to apply it in our approach to life is the object. Of interest here is Mead’s conception of the ‘specious present,’ i.e. the present as integral to a process of making real a whole system of memories and expectations. Mead’s conception of mind is as a dynamic whole which spans and connects time; the meaning perceived in the future changes the meaning perceived in the past, and both hinge on the meaning of the perceptions of the present. Thus all pasts and futures are only possibilities, subject to revision by the chosen perspective of the moment. A command of perspectives – this is what ‘big mind’ is. The ability, available to all who so choose, to transcend space and time restrictions on awareness. To see from a point in space where a grain of sand or a world are practically indistinguishable in their size, from a moment in time from which an eon seems only a slightly longer than an instant, which is itself an eternity. To view whatever comes into one’s sensory and intellectual experience from everywhere and all times at once, from as many perspectives as one can experience and command. To have perceptions as free of self-interest as possible. This may sound like a lofty prescription, but it is not an esoteric as it at first seems. To take a universal perspective is not as much to expand one’s being to infinite proportions, as it is to condense the knowledge of the universe and to bring it into one’s being in the moment. To understand as many different perspectives as possible, and to use them to make sense of one’s life, this is all that we mean when we c all for a universal perspective, to acquire knowledge and to use it. Reality is nothing but perspective, and there are many. To ‘know’ them and use them, this is ‘big mind.’ Unselfish perspective is easily forgotten in the course of daily struggle, but ‘big mind’ remembers that perspective are real, and the matter of daily struggle is an illusory as it is distracting. And to become free of struggle is the goal.
In Zen one avoids the struggle by non-participation in it. As noted earlier, Zen does not set strategy, but policy. Not a plan of action dependent upon the actions of others, but a way of responding such that, whatever the actions of others, one has done the best one can do so can trust that things will turn out the best they can be, since one has done one’s best, no more could have been done. To take life as it comes, to stay as balanced and centered and relaxed as possible. Just as a swimmer will float gently if he or she paces the breadth and relaxes his or her muscles, but begins to sink at the first struggle. To take the waves as they come, to stay calm and balanced…not to set direction and take to it because there is nowhere to get to. We are floaters in a shoreless ocean, and by swimming we only insure our eventual exhaustion.
The Taoists call this approach to life wu wei. It amounts to the simple recognition that we already are where we will always be, always where we should be. We are in our life, and our life is on the move, and that’s all there is to it. Grasp the moment or let it slip, beyond these there is no alternative. The future will be as it should be. The best thing we can do for it is to leave it where it is, and wait until we get there to appreciate it. Not to thwart it by plans and calculations, but to earn it by our deeds in the moments which are leading to it. To let life become what it will spontaneously be. To those who would argue that we must pay attention to the future in order to keep from making a mess of it, I say, we have already made a mess of it by that strategy. We would do better to recognize the mess that we have to be what we deserve for trying to take control of the uncontrollable. It’s the scientific materialistic mentality which seeks to colonize the future as it seeks to control, predict, and exploit every corner of the world and the mind. It would leave nothing free to be itself in its own environment, but brings it’s perlocutionary ways to bear on all that it can profit from, and ironically does so under the banner of ‘freedom’, i.e. freedom of the strong to exploit the weak. A system which sets strategy against its people necessitates that they set strategy against one another, making wu wei existence extremely difficult. It makes for turbulent seas. It is one thing to assert that the best way for one to see to the future is to earn and expect it, but it must be recognized that survival in a competitive system requires a defensive strategy. This is the heart, I think, of the process by which the Zen mind is lost in the west, and it is a point to which we will return. For now I simply wish to make the point that, in cases where individuals are not threatened by a calculating and exploitive environment, the best way to see to one’s future is to earn it, wu wei. To live here-and-now in a way that is best for there-and-then. To take responsibility for the quality of the future by giving our all to every moment which leads to it. To give a hundred percent even in difficult moments when eighty would be easier, is to give oneself a realistic expectation that we will live up to the challenges of the future, whatever it takes, thus an atmosphere of hope. Then we are a person who holds destiny in hand, and anxiety at bay.
Having rounded up the attention from other times and places, and brought it home to appreciate the time and place we are in, now we can begin to appreciate what is here in this moment to be known.
So perhaps our nostalgia for childhood is rooted in the peaceful perceptions, the wonder, the appreciation of life’s meaning which we were more free to feel then? It is indeed childlike wonder with which “Zen finds an inexpressibly deep thought even in holding up a finger.”(p.34)[20]
Satori is available when the mind is cleared of clutter and distraction, including words and logic. What can be perceived directly becomes fascinating, and diverse phenomena come together in their complex simplicity. Subtleties take on new significance, secondary features become primary. There erupts a sense of enthusiasm for exploration. Suddenly there is the sense that there is more time than world, and more going on than one had time for previously. It seems realistic to expect to be able to explore it all, eventually. The world ‘feels in tune, one feels integral to it, challenged by it.
When the world feels small and in control, problems seem manageable too, at least in relation to our power to handle them has grown. Far away friends seem close, and even distant and deep phenomena come into focus.
With such a worldview, it becomes increasingly easy to live wu wei if we let now is as it should be, just as we have earned it to be, our responsibility seems clear. The future will likewise be as it should be, so nothing seems urgent, all in its own good time, all the better for taking tis time. One finds it easier to wait contentedly for life to unfold when and because there is this wonderfully interesting world to explore, experience, enjoy and appreciate in the meantime.
I would not deny that friendship is a great thing, but it is in our solitude that we come to know the intrinsic pleasures of life, such as art, music, literature, work, sport, and an endless array of possible personal appreciations of life’s offerings. We are ultimately alone, it is true, but we need only despair at that if we ourselves are poor company. Solitude can as easily be like being with a best friend if we are appreciative, accepting, if we do not impose false or unrealistic and anxiety provoking standards upon ourselves, especially those that originate outside of us, so have every likelihood of serving someone else’s interests, perhaps even contrary to our own. We should thus allow ourselves quiet perception from our own eyes out, and not distract by ogling ourselves from outside in. Living up to other’s extrinsic standards for us may not always be what’s actually best. Perhaps we do best by ourselves when we leave ourselves alone, let ourselves follow our better instincts, distinguish them from our lesser ones. What we are is the result of what has been, and if we want change, then we can choose what will be better. And in the meantime, expect those who care about us to respect our self-determination.
The quality of ‘being’ then is very much like the quality of ‘being with’, the same mutual respects apply. To be a friend of quality, to oneself or to others, is to allow individuality. To let others be who they will themselves to be, free of our judgments and evaluations, is needed if we wish others to do the same for us. Arguably, to know Zen is to know what other need from us, hence to know better how to love, and that includes when to back off...to trust the other to know what is best for them. To leave others their peace, to care enough to take care not to disturb, interfere when uninvited, this is how a Zen mind loves. This respect for privacy pervades a Zen existence. To let ourselves and others meet the situations they face fresh and respond to it with their best intuitions, free from the weight of others judgments or expectations. To be is just to be, and to be well is to be left to just be. To do what one is doing for the sake of what one is doing. To understand what can be understood, and to make oneself understood by those who can understand us. To find and explore those critical details which bear appreciation. This is to live Zen.
If we sometimes wonder why so-called ‘real-life’ doesn’t resemble the drama or profound themes of great literature, perhaps it is because our life’s author does not attend to the same crucial details which the writer of drama recognizes as significant. Consider lovemaking in literature as it compares to lovemaking in life. That sex which lives in the pages of literature is bursting with sensuous, lustful, detail. They draw our attention to fingers on contours, lips on skin, breadth on sweat, eyes meeting eyes; all the stimulating details that are critical to the full pleasure of human sexuality. Here there is no ego, no defenses, no thought at all perhaps, no words; just pure pleasurable experience. Contrast this with what frequently occupies our attention in ‘real-life’ sex… What happens to pleasure when the mind is busy wondering how the performance is going, if the body is adequate, if he’s/she’s satisfied, or fantasizing about someone else, if I’ll/she’ll get pregnant, if he’ll/she’ll marry me, or worse, if I’m going to be late for something, if I passed that exam, what the boss has in store…etc. etc. In ‘real-life’ there is frequently so much going on that the truly valuable details of life go unnoticed. Great writers, like great lovers, don’t miss the details. When one is fully aware, awake, then even peaceful life is dramatic.
And if the quality of lovemaking is sometimes less than we might hope for, so too is the quality of our love relationships. Relationships such as we are habituated to in our part of the world too often begin by calculated acts of persuasion and are held together by rules and promises. Such relationships require continual maintenance and constant supression of freedoms. Whereas if we are in the Zen mode of loving, then we know that if we are the best we can be, then we will spontaneously attract that which is best for us, so needn’t calculate, which only thwarts what would otherwise spontaneously have been. One increases one’s power to magnetize, we might say, by increasing the quality of our own being. When we have what comes by spontaneous attraction, rather than by calculated acts of interference and persuasion, then we need not fear loss of it, become insecure about the other’s love, or become solicitous of the others attention. We can rest assured that what we have attracted by our personal gravity, we may keep by continuing on our original path, and need only fear loss of love then if we are not being the best we can be. This is quality ‘being-with’ then.
Can we trust spontaneous attraction to bring us what we want? That depends on if what we want is actually what’s good for us. If we live wu wei, we can trust the universe to bring us what is good for us, at least in as much as we can make the best of whatever comes our way. In this sense, we can trust spontaneous attraction to bring to us, wu wei, those who should be in our life, who appreciate us for our unique qualities, for our depth and complication, and not in spite of it. When we allow our individuality to magnetize other like individuals, together we amplify each others strengths, and mute each others inadequacies. Where there is respect for individuality, there is also respect for difference, and freedom to experience them. Freedom does not threaten relationships built on the unique qualities of each. We are not so easily replaced when we are loved for more than those attributes we have in common and share with many. There are many pretty faces, but deep beauty is too rare, and this is what leaves a lasting impression.
Freedom is the essence of Zen love. If the choice to be with or without is not ever new, then neither is the satisfaction. To want to be together is the only good reason to be. A Zen mind does not seek to capture love, but only to feel it. There is no having or holding, just understanding and appreciation. To know in the Biblical sense is to have pure sensual and intellectual experience of another human being, to make that person real in your own feelings, to understand their perspective; this is how Zen loves. If it hopes to secure love, it trusts that real love is as captivating to its object as it is to its subject. Rather than try to merely capture our love objects attentions, we might rather try to earn only respect. The object is not to distract or become distracted by another from our life’s work, but to be left to do it or perhaps helped along the way. Attention is not love. We feel loved when we have others respect and interest, not their attention on us, but with ours. Whether we follow or lead, it is always spontaneous in Zen. There is no love-plan that can lead to disappointments, but appreciation of what comes naturally. As is always the way, it doesn’t anticipate what might be, but appreciates what is.
Love is perhaps the most dynamic of all meanings, and can’t be held still by words or rules. Where there is real love it is ‘felt’ and words are unnecessary. And the same holds true of promises. One cannot lock a living meaning into a static frame; the very attempt to hold love still will often set it to struggling for it’s freedom. Although we wei relationships may hold implicit promise, they need not and do not make them explicitly. The only vow one takes is to his or her own fullest potential; we pledge allegiance to the relationship for only as long as the relationship holds allegiance to our personal and over all well-being and self-realization. Zen trusts that each will and must follow his or here own path of self-realization, and that it is up to the other to place him or herself on that path. When ‘being-with’ takes on these freedoms and satisfactions, then there is a quality about moments together which calls out, “This is the moment; pay attention!” Real love speaks for itself. By the rituals we employ to demonstrate love, we risk confusing the pretense with the real thing. We should remember the danger of solidifying what should remain fluid, for it is only ourselves we cheat. By trying to lock ourselves into love, we often lock ourselves out. We may very well succeed in insuring the continued existence of ‘the relationship’ as an entity, but often at the expense of the spirits residing within it. Since relationships exist for the sake of those spirits who compose it, their good must take precedence. But most norms that guide love in our civilized world are inadequate to this higher purpose. The Zen approach to love, like the Zen approach to life, is to live each moment as it comes to it’s fullest.
If the Zen state of mind is so valuable and if we wish to preserve and promote it, then we must begin to look at the conditions of the world in terms of how they affect the mind and its relationships. Suzuki offers an account of a Zen that can help us see how dependent perception is on what actually exists to be perceived, and all that might get in the way.
“There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my windows; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods; in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No wordy discussion is necessary, nor any explanation. I do not know why – and there is no need of explaining, but when the sun rises the whole world dances with joy and everybody’s heart is filled with bliss. If Zen is at all conceivable it must be taken hold of here.”(p.75)[21]
Most people probably wouldn’t have much difficulty mustering an appreciative attitude toward this tranquil scene, but what of persons whose lives are not made of books, clouds and playing children, but instead exhausting, menial, and unpleasant work? Or relentless poverty, discomfort and hunger? One whose time is filled with worries has difficulty relating to one who hasn’t a care in the world. So how does Zen find its way into a mind that is preoccupied with unsatisfied needs? I have asserted that freedom of attention, freedom from coercion, is a fundamental need, but this is a higher level need than most that remain unsatisfied in the west, and according to Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs,’ attention adheres to the lowest level unsatisfied needs until they are met. Only then is attention free to move up to the next highest level, and not until all needs are satisfied is attention truly free. The need to understand is simply not going to be given priority until the more basic needs are met. And this, all by itself, is good reason to reconsider the tenets of our extrinsic goods economy.
The Zen state of mind is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in a physically or psychologically threatening environment. And this is, arguably, the primary violation against individual persons by the principles of a competitive economy. We are not free, despite so much rhetoric to the contrary, if and when we are locked into a perpetual game in which others are seen as impediments to our survival and well being, as are we to them. There is no rest and no time to question the rules, for he who hesitates is lost. As Mead notes in his analysis of play and game behavior, in game-thought one employs the “generalized other, i.e. the me, toward himself, hence he is not in the “I” – he is not primarily self-controlled, but socially-controlled. I think we have, in the Capitalist economy, mis-defined freedom by viewing it as the right to pursue externals at the expense of others, rather than the right to pursue internals up and to the point where it begins to interfere with others. This artificial freedom mistakes the right to control oneself with the right to control others. By this mis-definition of freedom, I think we have thwarted the real thing. Life is play, not a game, and the play cannot begin until we have found a system which provides the basic needs of it’s people, including their need to think free.
One could go on indefinitely expounding the ways our western world impedes personal freedom. There is no doubt that we need to take an active hand in institutional evolution, as Jurgen Habermas has argued, and therapeutically weed out those conditions which impose upon the human spirit. Yet there is another, perhaps even more powerful impediment to our freedom among western conditions, and that is the condition of the western mind. It is so cluttered with false assumptions and mistaken beliefs that we can’t find our way to the door. Freedom is something we should find for ourselves. It’s true that institutions will need to recognize their new responsibility to individuals, but this is not likely to happen until individuals stop participating in institutions which perpetuate their alienation. Only when people come to truly understand their inner needs will they begin to resent the deceits of our economy, the rude imposition of the judgmental eye of the Social Sciences, and the control exercised by all, particularly organized religion and education. Before we will have enough incentive to see to it that our institutions change, we must unlearn a great deal.
I have discussed some of the misconceptions that confuse the western mind, but there are others that deserve closer examination. Besides misunderstood freedom, there are fundamental problems of misplaced value, misunderstood truth, and misplaced authority which all stem from an undervaluation of the internal. In fact, the question of misplaced value underlies most or all of these misconceptions in some way, since it is the overvaluation of the external that distracts us from internal satisfactions. Our emphasis on having has made it so that being just doesn’t seem enough. And this will probably not change until such a time when the ruling paradigm gives way to a new world view based on an understanding of the deep satisfactions intrinsic to simple being alive. A new paradigm will have to follow the recognitions of how shallow external satisfactions really are. It will have to help us rethink what is good for human beings. Tow this end, we arguably need a new psychology, and if one looks to the popular consciousness they will see that a phenomenological perspective is replacing older trait and behavioristic models. The field of psychology has in the past been in large part a lot of shallow business. But phenomenological psychology has understanding, not control, as its end. A person cannot straighten up their life, and a culture cannot straighten up its institution without doing it psychologically. A new paradigm will have to be founded on the new values generated by this new understanding of the greater human responsibility. Only when we recognize the quiet place is each of us to be desirable will we recognize the moral implications of the method employed by the social sciences, that miss out on a full half of the story. Here we come to the issue of mistaken truth, for the attempt to utilize the method of the physical sciences to develop a science of human behavior has amounted to a denial of human choice, thus an invalidation of the human spirit. In the miscommunication between social theorists and social science practitioners human potential has been stunted. In their attempt to make humans predictable, thus controllable, social scientists have misunderstood the prescriptions of theorists, and tried their best to develop laws of human behavior, irrespective of time and place. Hypothetico deductive theory would stop the flow of change in order to frame a clear picture of the future. And in the process it has created a popular psychology which has stifled human growth and alienated us from our potential. Indeed, we are locked into our lives by our very belief that we are locked in. As one reluctant messiah put it, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” Yet social theorists, at least the most clear headed among them know that human behavior is never independent of time and place. As economic, cultural, and political values change, so does the meaning of the acts for the actors, therefore changing the actions themselves making human behavior unpredictable. The only discernable cause of human behavior is human choice, and failure to recognize this has alienated us from our responsibility, and our potential. We have no laws to blame for the human condition, no determination to attribute our inadequacies to, no God to pass our responsibility on to. We are, and have always been our own and our only authority. Whatever we have become, we have made ourselves to be, and we can make ourselves different, if we would only so choose.
Alienation from potential is not the only hazard that has been imposed on individuals by the omnipresent social science influence. Just as human behavior is not irrespective of time and place, neither is it irrespective of the observer (this is our lesson from quantum mechanics). Labels and norms and judgments and prescriptions by so called experts have made us self-conscious. So much so that when we are told that there is no such thing as inner experience, we believe it. Our locus of control has long since shifted into the extrinsic subsystem thanks, in large part, to the controlling stare of the social sciences. So that when the investigator describes what he sees, his report is of almost totally socially controlled subjects, but how much of this is a result of his watching in the first place? Eventually, the social scientist will have to realize that to watch how persons behave is to know nothing of them at all. It’s not the external vestiges of a person that is reality, but how his experience feels to him. It is his perspective which matters. To understand people, we must look into them, not at them. To pretend to be able to understand humans by ogling their external attributes is to be ignorant of the beautiful complexity of human existence, and we may not unreasonably assume that those who imagine humans to be predictable, are themselves devoid of the rich subjectivity that others enjoy.
I’d also like to comment that the view that holds philosophers to be lost in their words is not altogether fair. One thing that eastern mystics and western philosophers do not have in common is the social and psychological environment in which they have developed, and which they must overcome. Philosophers since antiquity have struggled to find a system that will provide for that ‘good’, but the existing system has a mind of its own – a western, scientific mind – and we have a long way to go to overcome it. The task is more difficult than eastern thinkers might suppose. Western philosophers are not lost, but from where they are coming, it is a very long way home.
With that, I would like to close with a passage, an allegory actually, by James A. Ogilvy, which I think makes my point well:
“Imagine a city. It is a city of words. Outside the city lie peaceful pastures and forests of silence. As one approaches the suburbs he finds a few houses, modest edifices of words, mere opinions compared to the larger structure that knowledge has built within the city proper. Now each of us who is a user of language, a knower of truths, or a holder of opinions resides somewhere within the confines of this city as its suburbs. The quest for knowledge leads us deeper into the heart of the city where even newer buildings are being built. The quest for wisdom – philosophy - takes us in the opposite direction, toward the city limits, beyond which lies the silence of mysticism. The silence is neither absolute quiet nor a refusal to speak. Similarly, mysticism is not the opposite of philosophy, nor wisdom the opposite of knowledge. The silence of mysticism is like natures silence: nondidactic sounds that are heard only when you listen, a ‘speech’ in rhythms about the fullness of time.”[22]
[1] (Polanyi 1973)
[2] (Suzuki 1964)
[3] (Berman 1981)
[4] (Polanyi 1973)
[5] (Suzuki 1964)
[6] (Berman 1981)
[7] (Berman 1981)
[8] (Suzuki 1964)
[9] (Suzuki 1964)
[10] (Suzuki 1964)
[11] (Laing 1973)
[12] (Nietzsche 1973)
[13] (Polanyi 1973)
[14] (Epicurus 1973)
[15] (Suzuki 1964)
[16] (Suzuki 1964)
[17] (Moore 1903)
[18] (Mead 1956, 236)
[19] (Mead 1956, 237)
[20] (D. T. Suzuki 1964)
[21] (D. T. Suzuki 1964)
[22] (Ogilvy 1973)
At the outset it is worth considering whether there is a pre-linguistic experience of meanings, which represents not only experience of the highest order that should rightly be available to all, but is instead lost in miscommunication and buried beneath layers of misconception about what is indeed valuable, real, and true. We might then consider our western norms and habits that have developed around these misconceptions about the nature of value, truth, and reality.
It stands to reason that this pre-linguistic, precognitive, intuitive experience of meaning provides an understanding distinct from that which words and logical argument can elicit. We can have no doubt that the experience of meanings exists prior to the formulation of symbols to represent those meanings. Proof of this lies in the fact that, while there is a meaning for every word, there is not a word for every meaning. Words are only handles attached to meanings so that we can share them with others. Some meanings, however, are not shared, and others cannot be. Those meanings which are not deemed significant enough to find their way into a cultures discourse do not warrant a name. similarly, those meanings which are unique to particular individuals, as if everyone had his or her absolutely private thing-in-a-box, have, as Wittgenstein observed, no place in the language-game at all since there is no common ground for understanding, therefore no hope for successful communication about them. Yet these meanings do exist, in that each person has a perspective unique to him or herself which is not completely communicable. Hence, Polanyi’s observation that “we can know more than we can tell.”[1]
Plato, in his autobiographical Seventh Epistle, wrote that he had composed no work in regard to his doctrine, now would he ever, for it could not be put into words, but must be generated in the soul. While Plato’s absolute knowledge is denied us by the limitations of language, our own purely personal experience of meaning can prove even more enlightening than second-hand experience of even Plato’s meanings. To ‘know’ as in to experience, to sense, to feel, is a very certain knowledge, and one that exists prior to and independent of any correlative nomenclature. To experience the personal significance of events, to approach the world in such a way that we experience each new happening fresh, to interpret new information in terms of its significance to all other information, to piece together experiences which together make a larger understanding, to actively participate in one’s existence. Such a mode of existence is a project of enlightenment, and no doubt it is this project which magnifies the meanings such that some have rich subjective experience, while others have little or none, to hear them tell it; of course we all have subjective experience, we just don’t all appreciate it. This undervaluation of the internal is central to the problem that I would ultimately like to discuss, but for now I wish only to make the point that subjective experience of meanings exist, whether we pay attention to them or not, prior to and independent of the words which we might employ in order to share them. We are always free, of course, to stretch the capacity of our language, to adopt or invent words to describe previously undiscussed meanings. But we must remember that these are inventions, and they are an afterthought to the meaning experiences which they define.
To illustrate this, consider both of the pre-linguistic experiences of every life’s infancy and the infancy of humankind in the pre-civilized experience. Can it be said in either case that there is no experience of, say, heat, because there is as of yet no symbol for it? I think not; the experience of the meaning of heat is between a person and herself, and is altogether prior to community agreement on what that meaning should be labeled for purposes of discourse. Furthermore, I think that the experience of meanings and the experience of words are frequently completely independent of one another; meanings more frequently than not are experienced without cognitive or communicative activity, and unfortunately, it seems that words are more frequently than not used without the correlative experience of meaning. The meaning of the word ‘hot’ is more commonly understood than many more individualized meanings, but it is not in principle different than the experience of any meaning. The fullest experience of meaning is in recognizing significances of meanings to all other meanings, thus, they become more complicated as interrelationships are recognized in the labyrinth of understanding, and as they take on greater significance they become more idiosyncratic, less communicable. Meanings which are less common, that is highly idiosyncratic, such as beauty, goodness, truth, and love, are extremely difficult to talk about because there meanings are so individualized, as well as constantly changing. The words are only useful in directing the receiver to his own pure experience of a similar meaning, and are never enough to communicate meaning where there is not this understanding by pure experience. To understand ‘hot’ one must feel it. I think that it is in the domain of these feelings, sensations, images and intuitions that we must experience phenomena in order to truly understand them, and not in the domain of words, logic and argument alone. Knowing the words and knowing the meaning of the words are widely disparate experiences, and constitute different kinds of knowledge. Either we have discovered knowledge ourselves, or we have literally taken someone else’s word for it. As noted Zen writer D.T. Suzuki put it, “Unless it grows out of yourself, no knowledge is really yours, it is only a borrowed plumage.”(p.92)[2] Understanding then refers to the pure experience of meanings, prior to and independent of language – what is called in another tradition gnosis.
I do not mean to imply that language is not a good and important tool, of course. Words, used well, are magic, and humans are able to enhance their existence by intelligent use of words to promote mutual understanding of meanings. By reciprocal teaching and learning toward understanding what words truly mean, we validate one another, such that the sum of humankind together is more than the totality of the parts. So words and language are valuable tools. But words alone do not constitute understanding, and where they are mistaken to be more than they are, something precious is lost. Whereas language may be a necessary condition of ‘being with’ others, it is not a necessary condition of ‘being’ itself. Language serves communal integrity well, but personal integrity is an experience that is prior to communicating about it.
‘Being’, in the sense that eastern philosophers understood, is having mind in direct participation with body. It has been called “participating consciousness” by anthropologist Morris Berman. Others, such as William James and D.T. Suzuki, have called it “pure consciousness.” It is the experience of “becoming immersed in events; the state of consciousness in which the subject/object dichotomy breaks down and the person feels identified with what he or she is perceiving.”(p.355)[3] As Native Americans say of our Original Instructions, “all artists know, when we are ‘in the groove’ or ‘in the flow’…we are present in the moment as an integral part of creating.”(Nelson, 292)
The ancient Greeks called it mimesis, and that Plato is said to have considered mimesis pathological ought to make us look deeper, for that opinion, later reinforced by Descartes and others, seems to be at the heart of the split that we seek to unify, to bring the intellectual mind of language together with the sensual, emotional and intuitive mind of direct experience.
In contemporary western culture the air is loud with cries of search for life’s lost meaning. I think that meaning is not lost, but has simply become conflated and confused with the language that was originally meant only to serve it. We have come to define scientific knowledge as the most valuable knowledge, discounting the value of personal perceptions. We attribute worth to that knowledge for which we can produce logical or empirical proof, and in doing so have undermined every person’s trust in intuition, thus thwarting their project of enlightenment. This is a healthy cost since, as followers of Zen know, the clear undistracted perceptions of meaning is experience of the highest order, experience which is, in and of itself, reason for living. Thus the meaning of life is not lost, but waiting to be rediscovered under our attitude which underestimates the value of personal subjective knowledge.
As Polanyi pointed out, language is only “a kind of verbal pointing,”(p.208)[4] and as the followers of Zen say, “A finger is needed to point at the moon, but what a calamity it would be if one took the finger for the moon.”(p.74)[5] It seems that this is precisely what has happened in the west, that too frequently static scientific knowledge of facts has taken the place of dynamic intuitive knowledge of significances, and what has been lost is understanding. This “nonparticipating consciousness”, or dualistic thinking, that is that state of mind in which one knows phenomena by thinking, that is that state of mind in which one knows phenomena by distancing oneself from them, is the essence of alienation, or what one writer argues is the “schizoid duality at the heart of the Cartesian paradigm.”(p.37)[6] The split between subject and object, private and public, inner and outer world, disallowed the value of the inner, and by asserting the value of the external, set into motion a process by which maximization of interests amounts to competition for domination of the external world.
Thus, with the acceptance of the Newtonian-Cartesian world view, Berman argues, “Europe went collectively out of its mind.”(p.112)[7] The exploitation-mentality which is ushered in is today threatening to consume the world in its greed. There is little doubt that we are at a critical point in human evolution. Without a revolution of values, it is quite likely that we will not have the opportunity to evolve any further at all. Thus the moment at hand is crucial, and in more ways than one. This is both the reason to learn the lesson, and the lesson to be learned. The moment at hand is wherein meaning must be grasped, to catch life as it flows; to pay attention to passing phenomena in such a way as to pierce the intellect, to see through it to those feelings, sensations, images and intuition which, while of little utility in mediating the differentiation of interests within and among groups, are of infinite value in mediating the differentiation between individuals and their environments. These engage the mind with body, reintegrate persons with their internal idiosyncratic experience of life. In western culture we have normalized both hiding our feelings and hiding from or feelings, indicating that for us they are frequently painful thus to be avoided. But we must recognize that feelings can be enormously gratifying as well, and as such a means by which persons can ameliorate the atmosphere of their lives.
But in order to perceive subtle feelings and meanings the mind must be resting, it seems. It must suspend the socially preparatory activity of cognition, and return to its native activity of experiencing by tactic knowledge. The internal conversations involved in cognition have to do with the meaning of ‘being with,’ more than the meaning of ‘being.’ Being precedes cognition. In the integrated mind, one parts knowledge is another parts knowledge. There is no need to communicate within oneself until and unless one is divided into subject and object, at which time the mind can practice interactivity. But this practice is not being and often alienates us from being. Personal understanding does not need, and is often inhibited by the internal use of words. Precognitive being does not make distinctions where in fact there are none. It knows meanings to be fluid processes rather than static entities, so it does not violate them by locking them into place. Intellectualization, like language, is an extremely valuable tool, but we must beware of seeing trees and missing forests. Intuition provides the holistic picture that language distorts by particular emphasis on parts. And intuition begins, it seems, only when intellection rests.
Thus we may contrast the western scientific view of knowledge with that of the east, where personal experience is everything. The east “does not care so much for the elaboration of particulars as for a comprehensive grasp of the whole, and this intuitively.”(p.35)[8] The western way of knowing is folly, qen would say, because “life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow; to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it, leaving its cold corpse to be embraced.”(p.132)[9] By contrast, in the eastern way, just “once touch the heart of it and the whole universe will rise from its grave where we have buried it with our logic and analysis.”(p.113)[10]
It seems that the contrast between the eastern and western means to truth runs parallel to the contrast between the experience of meanings and the experience of words alone, the two kinds of knowledge we discussed earlier in this paper. How interesting that what for one is considered to be the untimate life experience is thought to be madness by the other. Whether the Newtonian-Cartesian world view is schizoid, or participatory consciousness is, as Plato thought, pathological, will not concern us here. The matter is settled only by agreement on definition in either case, and perhaps we have already done more of that than is in our best interest. It makes more sense, in terms of human survival on an individual as well as global scale, to stop taking sides in such matters as what we will call the behavioristic attributes of other people’s states of mind, and in a very real sense learn to mind our own business. If we are mad in the west, it is because we are competently adjusted to our environment. It is a self-preservative madness, necessitated in part by the constant watch of ‘big brothers’ such as the scientific mentality has made of all of us, and the normalizing judgments of the scientific community which would have us all compartmentalized, thus under control. I question the moral implications of such a mode of inquiry, given the emerging evidence of what is lost by it. Regardless of what it is called, R.D. Laing writes, “our sanity is not true sanity…their madness is not true madness.”(p.244)[11] They are simply different modes of mind, different ways of looking at the same world, whose ultimate interest is in integration. I think Jesus Christ’s last prayer, “that they may all be one…they may all be one body and one spirit, and may combine to form one perfect man,”(*) carries the message that overrides both the eastern and the western way of knowing. And to be fair, it must be noted that the eastern way has never been to exclude the western way entirely, only to put it in its place. Whereas the scientific mentality, at its most defensive, denies the very existence of inner experience. While most clear headed thinkers in the western tradition would not take this position, it is nonetheless considered something akin to heresy to assert the paramount importance of the senses over the intellect. Yet as one western master pt it, “How much of mob and middle class there is this hatred… We want to hold fast to or senses, and to pt or faith in them,” wrote Nietzsche, “and think their consequences through to the end! The nonsensuality of philosophy hitherto is the greatest nonsensicality of men.”(p.125)[12] In this, Nietzsche gives us a call for thinkers to ‘come to their senses’ as it were. Polanyi wrote that “by elucidating the way our bodily processes participate in or perceptions we will throw light on the bodily roots of all thought, including man’s highest creative powers.”(p.13)[13]
Sensuality as a mode of existence might find nutrition and expression in sexuality. There is a peculiarly sexual aspect to the approach/avoidance of systems interaction. From this perspective, all of one’s interactions might be viewed as sexual, all knowledge is carnal knowledge. But sensuality need not involve dramatic interactions of wants and repulsions. In fact, a pursuit of sensual delights need not involve desires and their satisfactions at all. As lover of sensual pleasures and perhaps the most misunderstood philosopher of antiquity, Epicurus observed that the ultimate pleasure is peace; “Those have the sweetest pleasure in luxury who least need it, and that all that is natural is easy to be obtained, but that which is superfluous is hard. And so plain savours bring us a pleasure equal to a luxurious diet, when all the pain due to want is removed; and bread and water produce the highest pleasure, when one who needs them puts them to his lips…we maintain that pleasure is the end, but pleasure as in freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind.”(p.193)[14] Freedom from artificial want altogether is the greatest sensual satisfaction, perhaps the highest form of freedom, and a right which we might defend more heartily than we now do. Ultimately, sensuality aims at optimizing the quality of this moment at hand. Only eliminating dissatisfaction about what is not, can free us to appreciate what is.
Peace in the here and now is also the ideal of Zen. However, before taking up discussion of Buddhism, it must be stated again that no discussion of any meaning can ever be adequate, and this is especially true with regard to meaning as enormours as that of Zen. The Zen experience of meaning defies all concept making and slips through all words. Trying to talk about it is like trying to tie up smoke. “it is an experience which no amount of explanation or argument can make communicable to others unless the latter themselves had it previously.”(p.92)[15] It is first-hand knowledge and there is no substitute for it. A meaning will always be reduced by the word which denotes it, but again, this is true of more than Zen.
The ultimate Zen experience is called satori. Suzuki defines it as “intuitive looking-into, in contradistinction to intellectual and logical understanding. Whatever the definition,” he says, “satori means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistic mind.”(p.98)[16] It is acquiring a new viewpoint, a collapse of the old structure and a rebuilding of one’s knowledge is such a way that the new structure allows view of that which was earlier obstructed from sight. To see that which is there to be seen, to hear, smell, taste, and feel the meaning of life. Zen attempts to take hold of the pure sensual and intellectual experience of here and now. To know this moment as fully and as wholly as possible, to bear full witness to happenings in time, to appreciate as much as can be with hermeneutical consciousness; this is the way in which we create our reality. Perspective determines what is real for us, and our perspective depends upon our selective attention to the world around. Selective attention is partly a matter of choice, and part habit. Since that upon which attention rests is ultimately all that we get, I think attention is a more precious commodity than we realize, and our capacity to control its focus is nothing less than the power of free will, a power I think we badly underestimate. In Zen this power to hold one’s mind collected and concentrated on a single subject is called dhyana comes easier where there is the satori viewpoint, that is, where the knowledge is structured in such a way that life shows through.
Attention consists of more than just focus. It seems as if attention is a matter of the degree of participation, divided among levels varying from conscious to subconscious. Where we focus we seem to be exercising our control consciously and directly, while in peripheral vision our perceptions seem more to do with habit and assumed value. We might consider this distinction again in regard to time perception. For now I wish to focus on the value of that part of attention that is concentrated.
It becomes easier to understand why the Zen state of mind is so elusive when we think of it in terms of concentration on the experience of life. It’s difficult to talk about because any moment spent in explanation is not spent in concentration on life. In order to talk about it one must leave it, so finds herself with nothing left to talk about. If one goes back to concentrating on the task at hand, Zen may return, bt the instant one looks up to see what Zen is, it is not.
Hence, G. E. Moore’s observation that “the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish. It seems as if we have before us a mere emptiness.”(p.450)[17] The problem that Moore is having seems to come from trying to see ‘distinctly’ what is not distinct at all. Consciousness is not a thing, but a way. It is the scientific mind at work that asks what Zen is, distinct from other things, as if we must observe ourselves in the act before we can ‘know’ what we are doing. However, because we cannot concentrate on life and on ourselves at the same time does not preclude us from ‘knowing’ what Zen is. We know by the experience of Zen what it is – it is full participation of attention on the experience of hers and now - complete involvement in what one is doing, whatever that is. Not the scientific way of knowledge, it’s true, it is most the personally satisfying way.
Regarding this distinction between subjective and objective modes of knowledge (which, by the way, does not actually exist) it is important to see how one knows ‘self’ in both modes, and how this difference in perspective (i.e. outside-looking-in or inside-looking-out) relates to how persons know their world, by first or second hand experience. The outside-looking-in point of view on oneself seems to cripple the inside-looking-out view, such that the observation of self in the act of here and now precludes the experience of here and now. So the two forms of knowledge, at least in terms of self-experience, seem to be mutually exclusive.
This distinction comes into focus in the work of George Herbert Mead, whose work in the area of social conditioning opened doors into many still unlit corridors. Mead conceived of personality as being composed of two clearly distinct, that is, mutually exclusive modes of being; the ‘I’, which is “the living act,”[18] and the ‘me’, which is the self-reflective experience, whereby the individual takes the observers perspective on his or her self. Social control is exercised by the expression of the ‘me’ against the expression of the ‘I’, Mead explained. Without elaborating all of the parallels, note that Mead’s ‘I’ bears interesting resemblance to the Zen experience. The ‘I’ belongs to “that which is actually going on, taking place, and it is in some sense the most fascinating part of our experience,” Mead wrote. “It is there that novelty arises, and it is there that our most important values are located. It is the realization in some sense of this self that we are continually seeking.”[19] And on that note Mead went merrily on his western way, toward a more perfect behaviorist science of human ‘being.” Yet he did so without the presuppositions, made by Watson and Skinner, that to know observable human behavior is to fully understand human being. He never pretended that the inner did not exist, only that the external is all we can know scientifically. And for Mead, it was also the more interesting. In fact, fretting as he did the inability of getting the ‘I’ into the experience of the ‘me’, one could infer that he thought the experience of the ‘me’ out of the experience of the ‘I’. That notwithstanding, Mead’s approach went a long way toward conceptualizing how it is that the ‘me’ controls the ‘I’, thus toward a grasp of the breakdown of subject and object which is the heart of alienation. Mead as I read him has a good deal to say about the means by which life loses its meaning. His ideas are also particularly valuable for his emphasis on the importance of language and its part in the conditioning of thought and behavior, for his recognition that meaning can be experienced and exchanged without the use of articulate speech, for his emphasis on the role played by fundamental needs in shaping behavior, as well as for his emphasis on the importance of processes and perspectives, and the implications of these for the nature of reality. He also had concerns regarding temporality (which we will discuss later in this paper). These are very eastern notions coming from a very western philosopher. The particular idea which brings Mead into this discussion is his belief that reality is generated by the individual’s perspective, which is a function of the individual’s attention and the attitudes (values) which guide it. Mead’s conception of ‘mind’ is as a dynamic system in interaction with other systems, not as the static entity that some second-hand-knowledge-seekers would make it. I think a contemporary rereading of Mead might help us understand how it is that Zen is lost in our culture, or for that matter, in contemporary eastern culture, which is quickly giving way to western ways. But before discussing how it is lost, we must become as clear as possible on what it is, as well as how and why it is valuable.
What is so precious about the moment? What so important about free attention? What so valuable about peace of mind? These questions can only be discussed in terms of quality. The Zen state of mind is a particular quality of ‘being’ and of ‘being with.” The quality of the moment is dependent upon which particular meanings are being perceived, that is, where the attention is at. When we say ‘where’ we mean where in relative terms, in terms of space and time. Since it might seem that fixing one’s attention in the here-and-now would preclude concerns for their-and-then, it seems important to discuss how attention can be spread over time and space while focused in the here-and-now. This again involves us in the notion of attention’s peripheral vision. By it, it seems that perceptions of the past and future can be incorporated into the here-and-now by the way they affect our mood and expectations. The Zen conception of time, as I see it, is not a conception at all, but an experience – the experience of all time in the quality of the moment at hand. How this is accomplished is not, I think, as obscure as it at first seems. It is easy enough to see how the perceptions we experience contain within them the mood created by the past, and our expectations about the future. Thus the quality of this moment then is in part dependent upon how much energy we have put toward the future in the past, as well as how much energy we intend to put toward the future. But note the distinctions between putting energy vs. attention into the future. To anticipate the future by conscious attention is to rob oneself of the awareness of now, and to pejoratively affect both now and the moment we are anticipating, as we will be busy then comparing the actual moment with the image we have concocted. The future, like it or not, will be the wonderfully spontaneously result of all those moments which lead up to it, and because of this cannot ever be captured in foresight anyway. Active anticipation is incompatible with the presence of mind needed to appreciate here-and-now.
Likewise, active remembering can similarly affect the quality of this moment. Since ‘now’ inevitably contains stressful and strenuous details which have long been put aside in memories of past events, now will always suffer by comparison. Of course, both active anticipation and remembering have their appropriate time and place in the here-and-now, since it is important that we remember the past and look to the future in order to guide the choices of now. Thus, in terms of life quality, to review past events and to imagine future ones is not in itself a bad thing. But to dwell on the past in order to avoid change, and to set strategy for the future in order to control it do not enhance past, present, or future. We enhance these, hence our private reality, by freeing our attention from other times and places to participate fully in this one. The mood that we carry with us gives in effect a color tour perceptions which serves to compliment some aspects and filter others. Our expectations for the future create an atmosphere in which we carry out the work of creating future realities. How much we cared about the future in the past and how much we care now about our present future both come home to create our present reality. But what does it mean to ‘care’? I think that this is where values are manifest, for what we care about determines how our energies are dispersed and focused, and how we divide up and apply our energies determines what we make real. Thus the quality of our life depends upon how much we care about it.
I think that the western conception of time is distorted by this cultures materialistic values, and the notion of rationality which follow from them. The idea that persons always act toward ends which maximize their materialistic interests changes the function of the present. ‘Now’ becomes an instrument of accumulation. Not an end in itself, but a means of maximization, the confusion is around the issue of what is the ‘good’ which it is the function of now to maximize.
This brings me to the question of life-plan, and the distinction between strategy and policy. Again, all action stems from what the actor believes is important, thus worth working toward. When we value things, we set strategy by which we hope to eventually accumulate ever-increasing quantities of them. Zen, on the other hand, rejects the value of ‘having’ and strategies of ‘becoming.’ In Zen the approach is not one of strategy, but of policy; the policy of ‘being’. Not to maximize our external good, but to optimize our internal good. The difference in these values and the approach which results from them is what accounts for the difference in eastern and western perspectives on time. I feel that it is more personally satisfying, therefore more valuable, to live in such a way that we ‘feel’ the presence of then-and-there in the mood and expectations of here-and-now, i.e. to have a sense of the past and future in the peripheral vision of our immediate present, and not to look directly at them. To look directly at our peripheral vision is to make it our focus, hence to move our peripheral vision to the side. Just as the peripheral vision of the human eye has functions that the focus cannot imitate, so the mood and expectations of our perceptions cannot be captured by our focused attention; atmosphere, like the faint light of star, can be sensed, but try to focus on it and it disappears. Thus, we should pay attention to what we are doing – whatever we are doing – and let the Zen mood bring color and the Zen expectations bring hope to the activities of our lives. The object is to care about the quality of the moment at hand, to give one’s all to it, to look for and appreciate what it has to offer, or as one sixties movement coined it to smell the flowers alone the way.
It is in a sense using one’s ‘big mind’, a mind we all have at times, some more frequently than others but only because they remember to us it. There are times during which it becomes obvious what is truly valuable, and what is delusional. To remember what the mind recognizes at these times and to apply it in our approach to life is the object. Of interest here is Mead’s conception of the ‘specious present,’ i.e. the present as integral to a process of making real a whole system of memories and expectations. Mead’s conception of mind is as a dynamic whole which spans and connects time; the meaning perceived in the future changes the meaning perceived in the past, and both hinge on the meaning of the perceptions of the present. Thus all pasts and futures are only possibilities, subject to revision by the chosen perspective of the moment. A command of perspectives – this is what ‘big mind’ is. The ability, available to all who so choose, to transcend space and time restrictions on awareness. To see from a point in space where a grain of sand or a world are practically indistinguishable in their size, from a moment in time from which an eon seems only a slightly longer than an instant, which is itself an eternity. To view whatever comes into one’s sensory and intellectual experience from everywhere and all times at once, from as many perspectives as one can experience and command. To have perceptions as free of self-interest as possible. This may sound like a lofty prescription, but it is not an esoteric as it at first seems. To take a universal perspective is not as much to expand one’s being to infinite proportions, as it is to condense the knowledge of the universe and to bring it into one’s being in the moment. To understand as many different perspectives as possible, and to use them to make sense of one’s life, this is all that we mean when we c all for a universal perspective, to acquire knowledge and to use it. Reality is nothing but perspective, and there are many. To ‘know’ them and use them, this is ‘big mind.’ Unselfish perspective is easily forgotten in the course of daily struggle, but ‘big mind’ remembers that perspective are real, and the matter of daily struggle is an illusory as it is distracting. And to become free of struggle is the goal.
In Zen one avoids the struggle by non-participation in it. As noted earlier, Zen does not set strategy, but policy. Not a plan of action dependent upon the actions of others, but a way of responding such that, whatever the actions of others, one has done the best one can do so can trust that things will turn out the best they can be, since one has done one’s best, no more could have been done. To take life as it comes, to stay as balanced and centered and relaxed as possible. Just as a swimmer will float gently if he or she paces the breadth and relaxes his or her muscles, but begins to sink at the first struggle. To take the waves as they come, to stay calm and balanced…not to set direction and take to it because there is nowhere to get to. We are floaters in a shoreless ocean, and by swimming we only insure our eventual exhaustion.
The Taoists call this approach to life wu wei. It amounts to the simple recognition that we already are where we will always be, always where we should be. We are in our life, and our life is on the move, and that’s all there is to it. Grasp the moment or let it slip, beyond these there is no alternative. The future will be as it should be. The best thing we can do for it is to leave it where it is, and wait until we get there to appreciate it. Not to thwart it by plans and calculations, but to earn it by our deeds in the moments which are leading to it. To let life become what it will spontaneously be. To those who would argue that we must pay attention to the future in order to keep from making a mess of it, I say, we have already made a mess of it by that strategy. We would do better to recognize the mess that we have to be what we deserve for trying to take control of the uncontrollable. It’s the scientific materialistic mentality which seeks to colonize the future as it seeks to control, predict, and exploit every corner of the world and the mind. It would leave nothing free to be itself in its own environment, but brings it’s perlocutionary ways to bear on all that it can profit from, and ironically does so under the banner of ‘freedom’, i.e. freedom of the strong to exploit the weak. A system which sets strategy against its people necessitates that they set strategy against one another, making wu wei existence extremely difficult. It makes for turbulent seas. It is one thing to assert that the best way for one to see to the future is to earn and expect it, but it must be recognized that survival in a competitive system requires a defensive strategy. This is the heart, I think, of the process by which the Zen mind is lost in the west, and it is a point to which we will return. For now I simply wish to make the point that, in cases where individuals are not threatened by a calculating and exploitive environment, the best way to see to one’s future is to earn it, wu wei. To live here-and-now in a way that is best for there-and-then. To take responsibility for the quality of the future by giving our all to every moment which leads to it. To give a hundred percent even in difficult moments when eighty would be easier, is to give oneself a realistic expectation that we will live up to the challenges of the future, whatever it takes, thus an atmosphere of hope. Then we are a person who holds destiny in hand, and anxiety at bay.
Having rounded up the attention from other times and places, and brought it home to appreciate the time and place we are in, now we can begin to appreciate what is here in this moment to be known.
So perhaps our nostalgia for childhood is rooted in the peaceful perceptions, the wonder, the appreciation of life’s meaning which we were more free to feel then? It is indeed childlike wonder with which “Zen finds an inexpressibly deep thought even in holding up a finger.”(p.34)[20]
Satori is available when the mind is cleared of clutter and distraction, including words and logic. What can be perceived directly becomes fascinating, and diverse phenomena come together in their complex simplicity. Subtleties take on new significance, secondary features become primary. There erupts a sense of enthusiasm for exploration. Suddenly there is the sense that there is more time than world, and more going on than one had time for previously. It seems realistic to expect to be able to explore it all, eventually. The world ‘feels in tune, one feels integral to it, challenged by it.
When the world feels small and in control, problems seem manageable too, at least in relation to our power to handle them has grown. Far away friends seem close, and even distant and deep phenomena come into focus.
With such a worldview, it becomes increasingly easy to live wu wei if we let now is as it should be, just as we have earned it to be, our responsibility seems clear. The future will likewise be as it should be, so nothing seems urgent, all in its own good time, all the better for taking tis time. One finds it easier to wait contentedly for life to unfold when and because there is this wonderfully interesting world to explore, experience, enjoy and appreciate in the meantime.
I would not deny that friendship is a great thing, but it is in our solitude that we come to know the intrinsic pleasures of life, such as art, music, literature, work, sport, and an endless array of possible personal appreciations of life’s offerings. We are ultimately alone, it is true, but we need only despair at that if we ourselves are poor company. Solitude can as easily be like being with a best friend if we are appreciative, accepting, if we do not impose false or unrealistic and anxiety provoking standards upon ourselves, especially those that originate outside of us, so have every likelihood of serving someone else’s interests, perhaps even contrary to our own. We should thus allow ourselves quiet perception from our own eyes out, and not distract by ogling ourselves from outside in. Living up to other’s extrinsic standards for us may not always be what’s actually best. Perhaps we do best by ourselves when we leave ourselves alone, let ourselves follow our better instincts, distinguish them from our lesser ones. What we are is the result of what has been, and if we want change, then we can choose what will be better. And in the meantime, expect those who care about us to respect our self-determination.
The quality of ‘being’ then is very much like the quality of ‘being with’, the same mutual respects apply. To be a friend of quality, to oneself or to others, is to allow individuality. To let others be who they will themselves to be, free of our judgments and evaluations, is needed if we wish others to do the same for us. Arguably, to know Zen is to know what other need from us, hence to know better how to love, and that includes when to back off...to trust the other to know what is best for them. To leave others their peace, to care enough to take care not to disturb, interfere when uninvited, this is how a Zen mind loves. This respect for privacy pervades a Zen existence. To let ourselves and others meet the situations they face fresh and respond to it with their best intuitions, free from the weight of others judgments or expectations. To be is just to be, and to be well is to be left to just be. To do what one is doing for the sake of what one is doing. To understand what can be understood, and to make oneself understood by those who can understand us. To find and explore those critical details which bear appreciation. This is to live Zen.
If we sometimes wonder why so-called ‘real-life’ doesn’t resemble the drama or profound themes of great literature, perhaps it is because our life’s author does not attend to the same crucial details which the writer of drama recognizes as significant. Consider lovemaking in literature as it compares to lovemaking in life. That sex which lives in the pages of literature is bursting with sensuous, lustful, detail. They draw our attention to fingers on contours, lips on skin, breadth on sweat, eyes meeting eyes; all the stimulating details that are critical to the full pleasure of human sexuality. Here there is no ego, no defenses, no thought at all perhaps, no words; just pure pleasurable experience. Contrast this with what frequently occupies our attention in ‘real-life’ sex… What happens to pleasure when the mind is busy wondering how the performance is going, if the body is adequate, if he’s/she’s satisfied, or fantasizing about someone else, if I’ll/she’ll get pregnant, if he’ll/she’ll marry me, or worse, if I’m going to be late for something, if I passed that exam, what the boss has in store…etc. etc. In ‘real-life’ there is frequently so much going on that the truly valuable details of life go unnoticed. Great writers, like great lovers, don’t miss the details. When one is fully aware, awake, then even peaceful life is dramatic.
And if the quality of lovemaking is sometimes less than we might hope for, so too is the quality of our love relationships. Relationships such as we are habituated to in our part of the world too often begin by calculated acts of persuasion and are held together by rules and promises. Such relationships require continual maintenance and constant supression of freedoms. Whereas if we are in the Zen mode of loving, then we know that if we are the best we can be, then we will spontaneously attract that which is best for us, so needn’t calculate, which only thwarts what would otherwise spontaneously have been. One increases one’s power to magnetize, we might say, by increasing the quality of our own being. When we have what comes by spontaneous attraction, rather than by calculated acts of interference and persuasion, then we need not fear loss of it, become insecure about the other’s love, or become solicitous of the others attention. We can rest assured that what we have attracted by our personal gravity, we may keep by continuing on our original path, and need only fear loss of love then if we are not being the best we can be. This is quality ‘being-with’ then.
Can we trust spontaneous attraction to bring us what we want? That depends on if what we want is actually what’s good for us. If we live wu wei, we can trust the universe to bring us what is good for us, at least in as much as we can make the best of whatever comes our way. In this sense, we can trust spontaneous attraction to bring to us, wu wei, those who should be in our life, who appreciate us for our unique qualities, for our depth and complication, and not in spite of it. When we allow our individuality to magnetize other like individuals, together we amplify each others strengths, and mute each others inadequacies. Where there is respect for individuality, there is also respect for difference, and freedom to experience them. Freedom does not threaten relationships built on the unique qualities of each. We are not so easily replaced when we are loved for more than those attributes we have in common and share with many. There are many pretty faces, but deep beauty is too rare, and this is what leaves a lasting impression.
Freedom is the essence of Zen love. If the choice to be with or without is not ever new, then neither is the satisfaction. To want to be together is the only good reason to be. A Zen mind does not seek to capture love, but only to feel it. There is no having or holding, just understanding and appreciation. To know in the Biblical sense is to have pure sensual and intellectual experience of another human being, to make that person real in your own feelings, to understand their perspective; this is how Zen loves. If it hopes to secure love, it trusts that real love is as captivating to its object as it is to its subject. Rather than try to merely capture our love objects attentions, we might rather try to earn only respect. The object is not to distract or become distracted by another from our life’s work, but to be left to do it or perhaps helped along the way. Attention is not love. We feel loved when we have others respect and interest, not their attention on us, but with ours. Whether we follow or lead, it is always spontaneous in Zen. There is no love-plan that can lead to disappointments, but appreciation of what comes naturally. As is always the way, it doesn’t anticipate what might be, but appreciates what is.
Love is perhaps the most dynamic of all meanings, and can’t be held still by words or rules. Where there is real love it is ‘felt’ and words are unnecessary. And the same holds true of promises. One cannot lock a living meaning into a static frame; the very attempt to hold love still will often set it to struggling for it’s freedom. Although we wei relationships may hold implicit promise, they need not and do not make them explicitly. The only vow one takes is to his or her own fullest potential; we pledge allegiance to the relationship for only as long as the relationship holds allegiance to our personal and over all well-being and self-realization. Zen trusts that each will and must follow his or here own path of self-realization, and that it is up to the other to place him or herself on that path. When ‘being-with’ takes on these freedoms and satisfactions, then there is a quality about moments together which calls out, “This is the moment; pay attention!” Real love speaks for itself. By the rituals we employ to demonstrate love, we risk confusing the pretense with the real thing. We should remember the danger of solidifying what should remain fluid, for it is only ourselves we cheat. By trying to lock ourselves into love, we often lock ourselves out. We may very well succeed in insuring the continued existence of ‘the relationship’ as an entity, but often at the expense of the spirits residing within it. Since relationships exist for the sake of those spirits who compose it, their good must take precedence. But most norms that guide love in our civilized world are inadequate to this higher purpose. The Zen approach to love, like the Zen approach to life, is to live each moment as it comes to it’s fullest.
If the Zen state of mind is so valuable and if we wish to preserve and promote it, then we must begin to look at the conditions of the world in terms of how they affect the mind and its relationships. Suzuki offers an account of a Zen that can help us see how dependent perception is on what actually exists to be perceived, and all that might get in the way.
“There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my windows; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods; in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No wordy discussion is necessary, nor any explanation. I do not know why – and there is no need of explaining, but when the sun rises the whole world dances with joy and everybody’s heart is filled with bliss. If Zen is at all conceivable it must be taken hold of here.”(p.75)[21]
Most people probably wouldn’t have much difficulty mustering an appreciative attitude toward this tranquil scene, but what of persons whose lives are not made of books, clouds and playing children, but instead exhausting, menial, and unpleasant work? Or relentless poverty, discomfort and hunger? One whose time is filled with worries has difficulty relating to one who hasn’t a care in the world. So how does Zen find its way into a mind that is preoccupied with unsatisfied needs? I have asserted that freedom of attention, freedom from coercion, is a fundamental need, but this is a higher level need than most that remain unsatisfied in the west, and according to Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs,’ attention adheres to the lowest level unsatisfied needs until they are met. Only then is attention free to move up to the next highest level, and not until all needs are satisfied is attention truly free. The need to understand is simply not going to be given priority until the more basic needs are met. And this, all by itself, is good reason to reconsider the tenets of our extrinsic goods economy.
The Zen state of mind is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in a physically or psychologically threatening environment. And this is, arguably, the primary violation against individual persons by the principles of a competitive economy. We are not free, despite so much rhetoric to the contrary, if and when we are locked into a perpetual game in which others are seen as impediments to our survival and well being, as are we to them. There is no rest and no time to question the rules, for he who hesitates is lost. As Mead notes in his analysis of play and game behavior, in game-thought one employs the “generalized other, i.e. the me, toward himself, hence he is not in the “I” – he is not primarily self-controlled, but socially-controlled. I think we have, in the Capitalist economy, mis-defined freedom by viewing it as the right to pursue externals at the expense of others, rather than the right to pursue internals up and to the point where it begins to interfere with others. This artificial freedom mistakes the right to control oneself with the right to control others. By this mis-definition of freedom, I think we have thwarted the real thing. Life is play, not a game, and the play cannot begin until we have found a system which provides the basic needs of it’s people, including their need to think free.
One could go on indefinitely expounding the ways our western world impedes personal freedom. There is no doubt that we need to take an active hand in institutional evolution, as Jurgen Habermas has argued, and therapeutically weed out those conditions which impose upon the human spirit. Yet there is another, perhaps even more powerful impediment to our freedom among western conditions, and that is the condition of the western mind. It is so cluttered with false assumptions and mistaken beliefs that we can’t find our way to the door. Freedom is something we should find for ourselves. It’s true that institutions will need to recognize their new responsibility to individuals, but this is not likely to happen until individuals stop participating in institutions which perpetuate their alienation. Only when people come to truly understand their inner needs will they begin to resent the deceits of our economy, the rude imposition of the judgmental eye of the Social Sciences, and the control exercised by all, particularly organized religion and education. Before we will have enough incentive to see to it that our institutions change, we must unlearn a great deal.
I have discussed some of the misconceptions that confuse the western mind, but there are others that deserve closer examination. Besides misunderstood freedom, there are fundamental problems of misplaced value, misunderstood truth, and misplaced authority which all stem from an undervaluation of the internal. In fact, the question of misplaced value underlies most or all of these misconceptions in some way, since it is the overvaluation of the external that distracts us from internal satisfactions. Our emphasis on having has made it so that being just doesn’t seem enough. And this will probably not change until such a time when the ruling paradigm gives way to a new world view based on an understanding of the deep satisfactions intrinsic to simple being alive. A new paradigm will have to follow the recognitions of how shallow external satisfactions really are. It will have to help us rethink what is good for human beings. Tow this end, we arguably need a new psychology, and if one looks to the popular consciousness they will see that a phenomenological perspective is replacing older trait and behavioristic models. The field of psychology has in the past been in large part a lot of shallow business. But phenomenological psychology has understanding, not control, as its end. A person cannot straighten up their life, and a culture cannot straighten up its institution without doing it psychologically. A new paradigm will have to be founded on the new values generated by this new understanding of the greater human responsibility. Only when we recognize the quiet place is each of us to be desirable will we recognize the moral implications of the method employed by the social sciences, that miss out on a full half of the story. Here we come to the issue of mistaken truth, for the attempt to utilize the method of the physical sciences to develop a science of human behavior has amounted to a denial of human choice, thus an invalidation of the human spirit. In the miscommunication between social theorists and social science practitioners human potential has been stunted. In their attempt to make humans predictable, thus controllable, social scientists have misunderstood the prescriptions of theorists, and tried their best to develop laws of human behavior, irrespective of time and place. Hypothetico deductive theory would stop the flow of change in order to frame a clear picture of the future. And in the process it has created a popular psychology which has stifled human growth and alienated us from our potential. Indeed, we are locked into our lives by our very belief that we are locked in. As one reluctant messiah put it, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” Yet social theorists, at least the most clear headed among them know that human behavior is never independent of time and place. As economic, cultural, and political values change, so does the meaning of the acts for the actors, therefore changing the actions themselves making human behavior unpredictable. The only discernable cause of human behavior is human choice, and failure to recognize this has alienated us from our responsibility, and our potential. We have no laws to blame for the human condition, no determination to attribute our inadequacies to, no God to pass our responsibility on to. We are, and have always been our own and our only authority. Whatever we have become, we have made ourselves to be, and we can make ourselves different, if we would only so choose.
Alienation from potential is not the only hazard that has been imposed on individuals by the omnipresent social science influence. Just as human behavior is not irrespective of time and place, neither is it irrespective of the observer (this is our lesson from quantum mechanics). Labels and norms and judgments and prescriptions by so called experts have made us self-conscious. So much so that when we are told that there is no such thing as inner experience, we believe it. Our locus of control has long since shifted into the extrinsic subsystem thanks, in large part, to the controlling stare of the social sciences. So that when the investigator describes what he sees, his report is of almost totally socially controlled subjects, but how much of this is a result of his watching in the first place? Eventually, the social scientist will have to realize that to watch how persons behave is to know nothing of them at all. It’s not the external vestiges of a person that is reality, but how his experience feels to him. It is his perspective which matters. To understand people, we must look into them, not at them. To pretend to be able to understand humans by ogling their external attributes is to be ignorant of the beautiful complexity of human existence, and we may not unreasonably assume that those who imagine humans to be predictable, are themselves devoid of the rich subjectivity that others enjoy.
I’d also like to comment that the view that holds philosophers to be lost in their words is not altogether fair. One thing that eastern mystics and western philosophers do not have in common is the social and psychological environment in which they have developed, and which they must overcome. Philosophers since antiquity have struggled to find a system that will provide for that ‘good’, but the existing system has a mind of its own – a western, scientific mind – and we have a long way to go to overcome it. The task is more difficult than eastern thinkers might suppose. Western philosophers are not lost, but from where they are coming, it is a very long way home.
With that, I would like to close with a passage, an allegory actually, by James A. Ogilvy, which I think makes my point well:
“Imagine a city. It is a city of words. Outside the city lie peaceful pastures and forests of silence. As one approaches the suburbs he finds a few houses, modest edifices of words, mere opinions compared to the larger structure that knowledge has built within the city proper. Now each of us who is a user of language, a knower of truths, or a holder of opinions resides somewhere within the confines of this city as its suburbs. The quest for knowledge leads us deeper into the heart of the city where even newer buildings are being built. The quest for wisdom – philosophy - takes us in the opposite direction, toward the city limits, beyond which lies the silence of mysticism. The silence is neither absolute quiet nor a refusal to speak. Similarly, mysticism is not the opposite of philosophy, nor wisdom the opposite of knowledge. The silence of mysticism is like natures silence: nondidactic sounds that are heard only when you listen, a ‘speech’ in rhythms about the fullness of time.”[22]
[1] (Polanyi 1973)
[2] (Suzuki 1964)
[3] (Berman 1981)
[4] (Polanyi 1973)
[5] (Suzuki 1964)
[6] (Berman 1981)
[7] (Berman 1981)
[8] (Suzuki 1964)
[9] (Suzuki 1964)
[10] (Suzuki 1964)
[11] (Laing 1973)
[12] (Nietzsche 1973)
[13] (Polanyi 1973)
[14] (Epicurus 1973)
[15] (Suzuki 1964)
[16] (Suzuki 1964)
[17] (Moore 1903)
[18] (Mead 1956, 236)
[19] (Mead 1956, 237)
[20] (D. T. Suzuki 1964)
[21] (D. T. Suzuki 1964)
[22] (Ogilvy 1973)