“As you are aware of your thoughts and emotions, you must ask yourself, who is it that is aware?”

This Zen teaching, this koan, opens the Universe. Who is it that is aware?

The psychologist, Richard Alpert, turned guru, Ram Dass, talks about the difference between the western psychological tradition and the Hindu/Buddhist model of mind more or less in the following way: We experience our lives as if confined to a prison cell made up of the concepts that are conditioned into us by society, culture, family and personal experience. There does not appear to be any way out. Some of us have orderly,comfortable cells, and some of us have filthy, cluttered cells of personal torture. We call these states of relative order, being mentally well or ill. Western psychology acts like a kind of maid that comes in and tidies up the place,giving it better order and cleanliness. We remain, however, locked inside the cell, which tends to re-clutter itself. This is the psychology of the ego, what Buddhism calls the little mind. Hindu/Buddhist psychology, through the vehicles of meditation and the dharmic teachings, is the door out of the cell,into the world of expansive potentiality, into what Buddhism calls big mind.

Two dimensions of mind. Little mind and big mind. Not the conscious and unconscious dimensions of Western psychology, but the dimension of the ego and, to borrow the term Eckhart Tolle applies, the dimension of Being. Other terms used are the relative and the ultimate, the secular and the sacred. To use the language of Gestalt Psychology, they are the dimensions of figure and ground.They are the experience of form and the vast energetic potentiality out of which form emerges.

From this perspective, to be what Western culture calls conscious is really to be unconscious. It is to be unaware of the limitless potentiality of life.It is to be limited to living in the world of forms created by the conditions and conditioning of the egoic mind. We are physiologically awake, but psychologically and spiritually asleep.

Where does this world, this universe we experience, come from? What is God? What is the purpose of the idea, “God”, that is so critical and universal to the human experience? What is the place of the human species in this universe? Why is the Universe marked by harmony but the human experience marked by such disharmony? Why do humans go insane? What is sane? What is the nature of the human mind? Remarkably, we, in the scientifically advanced West, have no satisfactory answers to these questions. How then, can there be a valid psychology, study of the soul/mind, from such a society? No. We must look to other cultures.

Native American culture explains the unique awareness that human beings possess this way: Spirit manifested, and this Spirit manifesting is the world. But Spirit was unable to experience Creation,that is to say, to stand outside of Creation, thereby having the perspective that allows for subjective/objective experience. So Spirit manifested into an animal unique in its ability to stand outside of Nature, an animal uniquelybifurcatedin its consciousness. Human beings.

These creatures were Spirit manifested just as all the rest of Creation, but they experienced life from the perspective of separated individuality. Is that so different than the Adam and Eve parable in Genesis that leaves the descendants of the original human manifestation, “cursed above all cattle, and above all wild animals”? Human beings. Human. Self aware and separate, what Western psychology calls ego. Cursed. But also beings.Spirit manifested, what Buddhist psychology calls “original mind” or big mind,capable of awareness emerging from its origin in harmonious Nature/God.Consciousness peering into manifestation.

Western psychology seeks to bring order to the inherent cursed disorder of the ego. Buddhism seeks to return humans to contact with their original Beingness. Big mind is the awareness of God peering into the world of manifestation. Little mind is the confused identification with separateness and form that parades around as a person causing mischief and suffering.

How to find our way back to the Garden? How to live in both the relative and the ultimate, the secular and the sacred without contradiction? This is the journey of destiny for each and all human beings. This is the discovery of who it is that is aware.

“The Zen “genius”sleeps in every one of us and demands an awakening.” -D. T. Suzuki

Awaken! Awaken! Awaken! This is the message of Buddhism.Simple as can be, yet there is no greater challenge. Awakening is the karmic challenge of every human being. Awakening is the karmic challenge of all humanity.This moment is the gateway, the “gateless gate”. Can you walk through it?

The greatest secret, the conundrum that plagues the seeker of spirituality,sanity and wisdom, is the ancient instruction that tells us that we already know everything we need to know. We were born possessing the key that unlocks the lock. But then we lost it. More accurately, we were born knowing there is no lock, and that searching for a key is a fool’s journey. But the programming of socialization, of egoization, occurs, and demands the delusional belief that there must be a lock and there must be a key. So there is a lock,and there is a key, and we have lost it. We have lost the no-key to the no-lock.

So, we search. We search in the world of power. We search in the world of possessions. We search in the world of pleasure, and even the world of pain. We search in the world of diversion. We search in the world of knowledge.We search in the world of politics. We search in the world of religion. We look for the teacher/leader/messiah who will give us the answer.

There is a deep knowing that this world is mired in distress, and this collective distress is reflected in the confusion, emptiness and destructiveness people experience in their individual and collective lives. We are lost. We pretend, in the pursuit of our myriad addictions and affiliations,that we are not, yet we know intuitively that there must be a deeper meaning and order to life than we experience. Out of this yearning, philosophy,politics, religion, the pursuits of pleasure, wealth and power, the pursuit of meaningful relationships are born. We look for authorities outside ourselves to answer the questions, to give meaning and order, yet the authorities and the answers only seem to compound the problem.

Zen asks us, who is it that knows the world is in distress? Who is the genius that can see through all the constructions of culture and society to know there must be a better way? Where does this insight come from? Zen answers, the genius is you, the one who feels the distress, the one who experiences the disharmony deep in your gut.

Buried beneath the programming and conditioning of culture and society,encased within the constructed personalities that we believe to be who we are,is the genius who knows the answer. Zen calls this genius your original or true self.All of Zen teaching and practice is designed to penetrate our false conditioned identity that stumbles confused through the world, to reveal to us the wise,spontaneous, free being that is our true self, the genius within who tells us that something is wrong and knows how to make it right.

Zen teaches us that beneath the commotion and confusion, beneath the construct of thoughts and words, beneath the hypnotic hold of society and culture, beyond the illusion of separateness, is the gateless gate, the doorway of stillness,the no-key to the no-lock. The sleeping genius waits, longing to awaken into consciousness, into its destiny, to live in harmony. Look not outside yourself,but very deeply within yourself. Look into the stillness. The whispering genius is there.

“Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet – because that is the purpose of humanity.” – Eckhart Tolle

“As far as Buddha Nature is concerned, there is no difference between a sinner and a sage… One enlightened thought and one is a Buddha, one foolish thought and one is again an ordinary person.”
– Hui-neng (6th Zen Patriarch – 7th Century)

A most puzzling aspect of Buddhist philosophy is that there is nothing to achieve, for the idea of achievement implies adding something that was not there before. The heart of Buddhist philosophy is that our original nature is completely sane and at one with all of life, but that through the psychological conditioning of society and family, we lose touch with that nature. Siddhartha Gotama, 2500 years ago,awakened out of this conditioning and realized his true and original nature, that is, he realized enlightenment. Thenceforth, he was known as the Buddha, “the awakened one”.

“Birds chirp, dogs run, mountains are high, valleys low. It’s all perfect wisdom! The seasons change, the stars shine in the heavens;it’s perfect wisdom. Regardless of whether we realize it or not, we are always in the midst of The Way. Or, more strictly speaking, we are nothing but The Way itself.” – (Taizan Maezumi -20th Century Zen Master)

As we are nothing but The Way (the Tao, the uncorrupted nature of nature) itself, we are only separated from the Buddha within us, from awakening, by being unconscious. We are asleep to our true and original nature. We believe the false conditioning to be true. We believe it is who we are, and we live from within it, clinging to this false identity, rather than from our inherent Buddha Nature. Thus, we live in an “illusion” of life, full of strife and struggling. Buddhism teaches that all there is to do is to find our way back to The Way. There is nothing to add that achieves our enlightenment. There is only letting go of illusion. There is only waking up. All the struggles we experience in life are over our compulsion to enhance and defend a very personal sense we have of who we are. This is the ego. We create an identity of a very shaky somebody out of this precarious ego. This is a very big mistake. An insecure somebody lives in a world filled with problems. These problems tell a story. We start living as if we are that story, and keep authoring it over and over, with the same problems. Buddhism teaches the philosophy of being “nobody”. “Nobody”is not defined by the story of the ego. There is a dimension of mind that is before the thoughts that construct our experience of life.There is the dimension of awareness itself. Buddhism teaches that this awareness is who you are. It is impersonal, or more accurately,transpersonal. It is nobody. Buddhism teaches that Ego is a tool, much like a computer, not an identity. It is how the amazing human mind conceptualizes and works with the world. It is a useful tool, even a miracle when operated by an awakened person. It is a disaster as an identity. Ego identity is conditioned by society and family. It is always crazy. It is always fearful. It is always seeking to enhance and defend itself. This is normal, in the sense that nearly everyone does it, and, it’s completely crazy, because it causes all of our distress and problems for others and ourselves. “You must unlearn what you have learned,” says Master Yoda of a galaxy far, far away. You are nature and nurture. We have lost touch with our nature by getting lost in our nurture. Western psychology does not understand the mind. It only attends to the conditioning, the nurture, of the mind, not the nature of it. The conditioning is crazy. The nature is Buddha. One thought from our Buddha and we are enlightened. Immediately, the next thought is from our foolish ego. Sage and sinner all wrapped into one.Awakening is in learning to use the ego and not be it. Unlearn the limitations you were taught about yourself, others and the nature of existence. Find your original mind. Find Buddha.

“The contours of your neurosis are the same
as the contours of your awareness” – Gestalt Therapy maxim

In the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, a charismatic and dynamic form of psychotherapy called Gestalt Therapy was central to what was known as the human potential movement. “Gestalt” is a German word that does not translate easily into English, but means roughly, the configuration or meaningful whole of an entity. A more precise way of explaining the concept of Gestalt as relates to a person, is contained in the concept of the “figure-ground relationship”. This is the relationship of the perceptions and actions of a person to their full potential. The“ground” is a person’s full potential, while the “figure” emerges from the ground of full potential to be a person’s experience of themselves and the world, which for most of us is only a small fraction of our full potential. Gestalt therapy was conceived to explore and activate the potential that is repressed or dormant, to expand the contours of awareness, thus dissolving neurosis. The figurehead genius behind this therapy was German psychologist, Fritz Perls, who immigrated first to South Africa in1933, escaping Nazism, then to America in1951. In his own words: “from an obscure lower middle-class Jewish boy to mediocre psychoanalyst to the possible creator of a ‘new’ method of treatment and the exponent of a viable philosophy which could do something for mankind.” Perls dissented with Freud, disagreeing that healing the human mind was accomplished through analyzing the historic personality (ego) formation. Rather, he believed that healing occurred when a person was able to witness the limited and limiting contours of their personality in the present moment, exposing the distortions and lapses between their potential (ground) and their conditioned personality (figure). In the distortions and lapses was the unfulfilled Gestalt of the person. Bringing these distortions and lapses into awareness for full experience completed the Gestalt, and realized the “meaningful whole” of a person.

Perls realized that what wasat issue in determining a person’s sanity was the degree of consciousness that a person could bring into their experience of life. What Perls brought to psychotherapy was a method of actualizing the expansion of consciousness into a more complete personal Gestalt. His method was, reminiscent of Eastern meditation and mindfulness, a process that cultivated the capacity of a person to step outside of being trapped within the limited figure of their conditioned personality, into the ground of their witnessing self. Perls brought to western therapy a multidimensional model of mind much like that which Buddhist psychology is based in. Translating into the language of Buddhism, “figure” is the conditioned egoic “little mind”, and“ground” is the full potential of the “original mind”, “Buddha mind” or“big mind”. Another way of expressing this,is that figure is the ideas we carry around about who we are, others are, and the world is, while ground is the reality of full potentiality. The difference between this idea and reality is our “neurosis”.

Perls developed very powerful and dramatic methods and techniques for expanding the contours of awareness so that a person could make better contact with the full potential of life. Perls was, however,very Western, and a very powerful and dramatic ego, and true to his analytic training, his therapy focused on unshackling the ego from its neurotic constraints, creating an uninhibited, creative and assertive dynamism. While his insight was instinctively trans-egoic, his methods, following the contours of his own personality and training, led principally to the expansion of the contours of the ego,and thus, it might be said, failed to accomplish the full Gestalt of his insight,an integrated psyche of ego and the ground of original mind. A large ego, inevitably results in conflict with other egos. Just ask anyone whoever encountered Fritz Perls, or many of his ultra-assertive disciples. The contours of awareness of a fully healthy and realized being contains and also transcends an ego not noted for its size,but its minimalist balance, fearlessness and compassion. Buddha realized this over 2500 years ago. We in the West, are just beginning to catch on, and if we do, it just might really “do something for mankind”.

Have you ever considered that the two fundamental principles of the Universe are expansion and contraction? Physics has proved to us that everything is energy, and that the basic variable distinguishing the various manifestations of energy is density of form. The most basic difference between solids,liquids, gases and pure energy is density of form. The very radical principle of Buddhist psychology is that the same principle applies to mind.

Buddhism refers to the thoughts that occupy your mind as mental forms. They are the energy of the mind contracted into form-objects. These objects conform to the dimensions and parameters that society, culture, family and personal experience have programmed into us. It is not unlike a sculptor who only has the materials of their region and the images that their culture deems acceptable for sculpting. We only have the patterns for representing the possibilities of life that have been pre-programmed into us.

Now, just as the sculptor has wood, stone or metal to form a sculpture with,these forms in the mind have different properties. Different types of mind-forms have different densities that you can begin to distinguish, even affect, when you train through meditation then on-verbal perceiving dimension of mind. The amazing thing about humans is that we have the capacity to transform the dimensionality of the energy with which we sculpt our mental forms,the contents of the mind. Without the training of meditation, we are mostly unaware of this capacity other than as a faint intuition.

I am a believer that there are only two primary human emotions, and they are love and fear. These are the principles of union and separateness, with the commensurate properties of expansion and contraction. Love is the experience of oneness with another person, with nature, even with God, Spirit or the universe. In this experience, the energy of the mind expands so that a person’s identity likewise expands to encompass that which is being loved. Conversely,the experience of fear is a contraction of a person’s identity into ever more isolated aloneness, and so, the energy of the mind contracts into a smaller and smaller, lonelier and more vulnerable sense of self. All other emotions are variations of love and fear with corresponding variations of the dimensionality of the energy of the mind.

Affection, happiness, appreciation, kindliness, generosity are all variations of love, not quite as expansive and inclusive, but clearly sharing that expansive,inclusive quality. Anger, aversion, hatred,repulsion, greed are all emotions that are derivatives of the experience of fear, of separateness, difference, rejection. The sense of self that is the ego contracts behind a barrier of separateness to defend itself against perceived threats. The mind sculpts tight, dense, contracted forms of thought concerning the threatening “other” and the embattled“self”. Some emotions, like sadness, are ambivalent combinations of love and fear, vacillating between inclusion and separateness,identification and loss.

How do we know that this is true? Try it for yourself. Think of a person or situation that is very pleasant and personally supportive of you. Experience how the thought feels. Emotion is the body’s feeling response to thought. Then think of a person or situation that is threatening to you. Experience how that thought feels. See? To have a pleasant thought-form in mind causes your sense of self to expand to include the object of the thought resulting in an expansive experience of mind and body. To have a threatening thought-form in mind is to experience your mental energy contracting into the dense form of the fear/anger-thought and so too the body contracts into corresponding tension-emotions.

Buddhism teaches enlightenment. En- lighten -ment. The miracle of mindfulness is the alchemy of transformation of the forms of the mind from separateness-fear-based thoughts that leave you and your experience of life very heavy and dense to union-love-based thoughts (and no-thought) that bring to you a very light and expansive experience of life. You become the sculptor of your life-experience capable of transforming thoughts with the threatening dense hardness of steel into the lightness and healing capacity of,well, – light, the pure energy from which we come. The expansive unity of the Universe becomes the field in which we play. How light, how expansive your mind can be is the liberating and healing practice of a lifetime.

The column title is a Zen koan. A koan is a riddle that takes us to our deepest nature. Some koans can be understood at a rational level, others cannot. This koan is one that is rational, but takes us deeper. It takes us as deep as we are willing to go. Because it is rational, some will take it nowhere, and believe that they have understood it. They will not have. These words must be penetrated with your intuitive mind. Only intuition can take us beneath the surface constructions of the rational mind, and it is beneath these facades and constructions that we must journey to enter into Zen,to enter into our deepest nature.

Who are you? This is the question I have always believed to be at the heart of any true psychotherapy, but as always, the issue is how deep is the psychotherapist capable of, and how deep is the client willing to go? The question to those reading is,how deep are you willing to go?

No thought can take you there. Only meditation can. True meditation is the exploration of knowing who you are at the deepest level. In fact, if that question isn’t the silent mantra of your meditation, then you are just resting, relieving stress, sitting cross legged, watching your breathing,trying to catch your mind as it wanders. Yes,this is valuable. But this is not the yoga of meditation.

I have always been inspired by the late psychologist, Sydney Jourard, who believed that psychotherapy was an exploration in what it is to be authentic as a person. Note, that he wasn’t exploring what it meant to be in -authentic. Most psychotherapy is an exploration of the in-authenticity of a person, all the ways that a person is neurotic. It expends great energy pointing out the places where the inauthentic,neurotic personality creates distress and difficulty. And that’s all well and good. That information is helpful. What it doesn’t get to, however, is what it is to be truly authentic, what it is to be whole and healthy, the mind that is called enlightened.

Buddhism teaches that what is called the rational mind is the source of all that is in authentic and unhealthy in humans. The rational mind is the realm of the ego, the place of ideas, and ideas can be anything. Christianity, Islam, Judaism,Capitalism,Communism, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong are just ideas. They are tools for conceptualizing possibilities. People mistake them for truths. While some do point to eternal truths, most do not. They are mental constructs that create a matrix of experience that we call reality and that we believe tells us who we are and what life is. We live inside this matrix mistaking it for reality. Voila! A personality is born living inside a culture. For better, for worse, in sickness and in health. This is you. This is your world. Or is it? These are the questions that Zen asks. “Who are you?” “What is the world?”

It could be said that the difference between Western therapy and Eastern meditational healing is that Western therapy agrees that the matrix image, the story you tell, is you. To an Eastern teacher of meditation this story is “illusion” or, in psychological terms, “delusion.” Ram Dass (a.k.a., Richard Albert, Ph.D.psychologist, of Stanford and Harvard Universities) has said that the difference between Western therapy and meditation is that we live inside a cell constructed by the ideas of our egoic minds and therapy helps rearrange and tidy up the cell, but we remain trapped inside the cell of these mental constructions. He goes on to say,the wisdom found through deep meditation is the door out of the cell.

Do you know who you are? What an achievement if you do! Are you living and being what you know? This is the greatest challenge. This is Zen. This is the door out of the cell. Do you have the skills and will to find and use the key? For this, a skillful and true teacher is invaluable.

“If you want to know the realm of enlightenment, you should make your mind as clear as space; detach from subjective imaginings and from all grasping, making your mind unimpeded wherever it turns…Buddhahood is the realm of the sacred knowledge found in oneself… You do not need paraphernalia, practice, or realizations to attain it…do not see Buddha in one phenomenon, one event, one body, one land, one being – see Buddha everywhere.” –Chinese Zen Master Dahui – (app. 10th Century)

Zen is the simplest of spiritual practices. Chinese Master Ying-an said, “Zen living is a most direct shortcut, not requiring the exertion of the slightest bit.” So simple. So difficult.

But the human mind does not want simplicity. The human mind does not want to be “clear as space” or detached from grasping. The human mind wants complexity. It wants constant stimulation and speculation. It wants to grasp. It wants to be special. It wants to be grand. It wants sacred knowledge to be secret and hidden so that it can be sought in secret texts and initiations and owned exclusively by the specially initiated. The human mind does not want enlightenment. The human mind wants religion. The human mind wants to make Zen another religion. So much paraphernalia, so many practices, so much seeking of special realizations.

“Buddhahood is the realm of the sacred knowledge found in oneself.” You already have it. There is nowhere else to seek. So we are dumbfounded. If there is nowhere else to seek, what do we do? How can we already have it, when we are so confused and crazy?

Having “the sacred knowledge” in oneself and living from it are two very different things. To find the “sacred knowledge” we must awaken from the hypnotic hold of what we confuse to be our minds and discover our essential Beingness. What we call mind is just ego, the culturally conditioned aggregate of thoughts that the mind contains that create the illusion of the separate “me”, and makes the world a panoply of separate objects. We have an egoic mind, useful as a tool to manipulate worldly objects, but we are not our egoic mind, disastrous as an identity and guide to our own and the world’s true nature.

The realm of sacred knowledge is not found in the egoic mind. It is found in the Beingness of our original nature before the conditioned contents of the ego covers it over. This is the awakened Buddhamind. It is not found “in one phenomenon, one body, one land, one being”, but in all phenomenon, bodies, lands and beings. It is the natural world just as it is, just as you are. And are not. This paradox of Being and ego is the human condition, and unraveling this paradox is the realm of Zen.

Are you in harmony with the natural world just as it is? Do you experience the wholeness and balance of the world, or do you struggle and connive and grasp in futile attempts to make the world the way you want it to be? And does this struggling and conniving work? No. It makes us angry and anxious, depressed and stressed, and it is killing the natural world. Would you call anger, anxiety, depression, stress and planetcide sane? Of course not. But it is “normal” if normal is a statistical point of gathering. So “normal” is quite insane, and Humanity continues being angry, anxious, depressed, stressed and killing the natural world (and each other), saying it is normal “human nature”.

Zen teaches us this is not so. Just “make your mind clear as space.” Then you’ll see.

In his transformative book, The power of Now , Eckhart Tolle points out that we make the mistake of being so caught up in our “life situation,” our ambitions and frustrations over what we believe will lead to a happy life, that we miss being meaningfully present for life. We mistake our narcissistic drama,the story of me, for Life, and of course, it isn’t.

Our life situation draws from our past experiences, creating the story of me. We erroneously mistake it as the only resource we have for our identity. We then project this identity into the future, where our story will play out its fulfillment or failure. Our mental landscape is mostly taken up with this drama, out of place in time. We compulsively review past events assessing the quality of this story and our significance in relationship to others. We likewise compulsively attempt to anticipate future events and how they will affect our status. When we relate to the present moment, it is mostly in the form of judgments, seeking to ascertain whether the circumstances of the moment favor or disfavor “me”. Our mental landscape is nearly completely preoccupied with the status of “me,” and with “my life situation.”

Tolle describes this insecure existential time traveling as normal, but quite crazy. As a result, we seldom are grounded in the present, rarely available for the beauty, depth, mystery and meaning of Life just as it is. We are largely unable to experience Life directly, where we are not the protagonist in our own drama without all of Life being measured against our self-absorbed desires. We are seldom able to experience the ineffable beauty, connectedness and peacefulness that is available when we experience that we are actually but a thread in the great tapestry that is Life.

Life is……. I ought to stop right there, but that would be just too enigmatic. Life is….everything, all possibility, and much more than we can imagine as possible. Life is Creation unfolding. It is mystery, wonder, balance and intricacy. Life is infinity. Life is manifestation in all of its subtle, complex, majestic and sometimes,terrible forms. And it is happening right here,right now, nowhere else. It is certainly not what we have going on in our heads.

And so, where are we? As our culture and society train us to do, we are caught in our personal drama, making up this life situation that we call our lives; past, future and, only very shallowly, present. Our obsession with our life situation makes it impossible for us to be truly present for Life, its mystery, wonder and power, where our lives truly unfold, in the eternal present moment. We use our own personal agenda and significance as our reference point for the center of the Universe. Consequently, we miss so much of what is truly meaningful and important. We live unfulfilled and unskillful lives when measured against the full potential of what Life actually offers us.

We miss Life not only by being caught mentally in the story of our personal life situation, but in the gossip that makes up most social conversation, comparing stories of drama,finding status in diminishing the status of others, or identifying with the achievement of those we admire. We are a culture where people live their lives projecting their imaginary life situation onto everything we come in contact with, projecting, projecting,projecting. We even believe spirituality is in praying, that is talking to God, speaking of what our life situation wants and needs, neglecting the very important necessity of meditating to listen for god’s answer, for God’s words have always been to set aside vanity,materialism, conflict, ego and self-absorption.

Then there are the virtual-reality life situations of media and culture that we are so addicted to. Mostly, the only times we allow ourselves to be in a receiving mode, we are absorbed in the virtual-life situations that media projects at us, reinforcing the image that all there can be is an egoic contest for life drama. We compete with each other in our conversations to establish whose life has the most drama, and we talk titillatingly about the latest in entertainment, seeking to turn the volume up louder and louder, hoping that what we lack in the direct living of Life, we can make up with ever more dramatic and sensational life situations, to the point where we even become bored with our fictions and seek still higher levels of stimulation in“reality” entertainment, the most unreal of all.

As for how to describe Life,even the words that can be used to describe it, are only pale forms of mind. Life is not in concepts, words, or in all the inspiring phrases of poetry and spiritual teaching. Life is Life. It requires we open our minds to it. Literally. This is the mystic event. Open and expand consciousness beyond situational thinking, lost in its time travel. Open into the fullness of this moment. This is the direct experience that all of Zen is a preparation for. Not lost in mental forms, but present with mind expanded and open to experiencing …….Life. Look beyond looking and see. Listen beyond listening and hear. Feel beyond feeling and touch. Open the mind and dissolve into Life.

Does this mean that we ought to quit our jobs, our families, friends and activities, our life situation? Certainly not. Not unless, these circumstances are truly frustrating not only our contact with Life, but are not even a satisfying life situation. Zen teaches us that we live in both our life situation and Life simultaneously, in our egoic separateness and our universal oneness. To live fulfillingly requires that we be deeply connected to Life while in our life situation. One way to understand Zen is that it is about skillfully balancing our life situation with Life. It is the recognition that we exist in these two dimensions simultaneously, and our humanity and life quality is accomplished in how we balance them.