Tag: Delusion and Enlightenment

Delusion isn’t being mistaken about something; the earth being flat, or there being penguins at the North Pole: it is taking experience and using it in creating and maintaining a sense of Self.

Often we experience this as a kind of incessant inner conversation. Whilst we might want it to stop, this too is Self-ing.

We change when we experience it as energetic noise, feeling it in the body. When we experience noise, we can experience silence. When we experience silence, we can experience vast space.

What does satori mean? When the Japanese coined the term, they rolled up into that one word three distinct ideas in Chinese Buddhism about enlightenment.

The first was delusion and enlightenment; that is, through practice, we gain insight into our habitual being pulled this way and that by our desires, our habits, our karma, and when we realise this, we can stop.

The second is awakening. We realise that what we take to be real, our whole conceptual apparatus of self and world, is created by us. It’s like a dream. But we don’t wake up into another reality; we wake up within the dream.

The third and most important is practice realisation. That is, we accept the Buddha’s teachings. We then sincerely practice, and through practice we realise that those teachings are true.

And in this context, what we realise is true, is our ceaseless tendency to fabricate the self, to fabricate a world, to fabricate our lives.

In seeing that, even for just moments we can stop that karmic activity. The problem with satori is we think it’s something else that we can acquire. But the whole point is that it’s not about getting. It’s about not-getting, losing, stopping, desisting.

Delusion isn’t quite located where we think it is.

We imagine that it’s the apparently ceaseless thoughts and emotions which come up during sitting, but it isn’t. It’s our response. Uchiyama likened it to an ignorant person watching a play, mistaking it for reality, seeing a villain on stage, jumping up on the stage to remonstrate with the villain.

This is the practice. We keep finding ourselves up on the stage, realising what we’re doing, and leaving the stage, to sit with all beings.

That’s why an emphasis on consciousness is harmful, because we’re focused on the wrong thing. Whether we turn the mind from lead to gold, it’s still a headstone, weighing down on the body of the world.

Senika appears in the Nirvana sutra as a kind of fall guy. He’s a Brahmin who believes that the body is the temporary home of the soul, which lives on after the death of the body.

Certainly, his soul has lived on, buried deep in our language. We make statements like ‘I am doing zazen’ or ‘I am living my life’ or ‘I need to be kinder to myself,’ and imagine we are saying something true.

Lying within the buried soul of Senika is the belief that the world is constituted of things, with attributes, acting.

This is the ground of delusion. Unless we can escape from it, buddhist teaching is entirely nonsensical.

In our practice, we are continually drifting in and out of delusion.

The delusion isn’t the intermittent noise; rather, it’s when our attention focuses on a kernel of thought/emotion, and our breathing becomes shallow. It’s a kind of trance state. In response, we throw the breath and attention wide open, unentrancing ourselves.

This learning to fall out of self enchantment is giving life to all things.

Our aim isn’t to eradicate delusion, but to actualise space.

Within vast space, each thing can have its own life.

Although it is natural to wish that our demons were gone, only demons can kill demons.

We should distinguish between obstacles and delusion.

Obstacles are straightforward: a persistent tune, an idea that keeps returning, a scenario that keeps regurgitating itself. These seem a serious obstruction to our practice, but they’re not.

Delusion is our taking a position towards them. One aspect of delusion.

A principal way in which we maintain ourselves in delusion is imagining that our life and practice should be something other than it is. We locate delusion in the wrong place. We imagine that our transient thoughts and emotions are obstacles, and if somehow we got rid of them, we wouldn’t be deluded any more.

But this is precisely the idea that is the engine of delusion. When Dogen says that delusion is carrying the self forward to experience the myriad things, and realisation is the myriad things expressing and experiencing themselves. By ‘myriad things,’ he doesn’t just mean trees walls and sky. He means everything, including our thoughts.

If we obsess on our thoughts, it is as if we take all the light and concentrate it on that, so that everything else – the body, the senses, the breath – is in darkness. Throwing the light over all experience makes the dualism of thought and world impossible to sustain. We see the tremor and evanescence of our thoughts as one aspect of our aliveness, which is to say, the aliveness of everything.

The dream state and the waking dream state.

In dreams we imagine–at least later–that what we see is unreal, although really it is just our fractured heart taking on one form after another. We feel fully. We exert ourselves fully. We are always implicitly asking, “What is this?” How can we dismiss it so easily?

In the waking dream state, we cannot say that what we see is unreal, but why? We concede easily that what we see is what our culture and our language can see, and concede–less easily–that our emotions are flung randomly onto this thing or that, like paint falling from high windows. And the same question: “What is this? What is this?” And thus, a false world created. How different? How different?

In our dreams what we feel cannot be doubted. In our waking dream state what arises cannot be doubted. And the whole waking world conceals itself in the heart. Should the heart open, a world will spring out. The only true one.

Demons are the creators of false worlds. Equanimity is walking on the heads of these demons, partly in tenderness, partly in scorn.

The desire for enlightenment is the root of delusion. It is a project of the heroic ego, and the ego is part of that frozen mass of thought and feeling we call delusion. Zazen is a melting of that mass.

It is no use calling on our demons to leave us. Even if they wanted to, they can’t. But we can leave them.