“To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.” – Dogen (1200-1253 – Founder of Japanese Soto Zen)

In our culture, trying to figure out who we are, what we are, and are we enough, is a lifelong preoccupation which never really finds its answers. This quandary is the preoccupation of our ego, the matrix of thoughts all strung together trying to establish a workable and satisfactory story of a person in a whole chain of relationships and identifiers.  Am I enough, am I okay, who am I in relationship to others? These questions, silently gnawing at us, disguised within our situational experiences, keep our mind spinning night and day.

In the language of Zen, these are the issues of “body and mind.” When we have our sense of self embedded within how our body looks, feels, and its capacities; in how others are thinking about and responding to us; in our ranking within social hierarchies; and in our security in the world, we are lost in hopelessly unreliable and ever-shifting criteria for our basic well-being. We are lost in our thoughts and emotions. Anxiety is ubiquitous, depression is epidemic, character disorder and addictions are common-place, mental illness (clinical and sub-clinical) is rampant. This is the circumstance of our society, and it is reflected in the chaos of our politics, the dysfunction of all our institutions, and our hurtful, unstable, and sometimes destructive, relationships everywhere from within our families and communities, through our politics, and on to the natural world.

The great scientist, Albert Einstein, was a deeply wise human, a sort of non-Buddhist bodhisattva. He once said, “problems cannot be solved with the same consciousness that created the problem” and this wisdom seems quite applicable to why our society is floundering. The consciousness that has and is creating all our problems – from within our own minds through all the above-named relationships – can be called consciousness centered upon our insecure egos.  We are deeply insecure at all levels of organization and so our policies have a kind of paranoia to them, an “us” verses “them” underpinning.  From an anthropological perspective it could be said that human society is in the ego-centric phase of its evolution.  We are obsessed with the ego’s capacity for abstraction and so we abstract philosophies of politics, religion, and social organization meant to make more of ourselves.  Our technology and science are mostly devoted to this quest for more – domination of the environment, personal security, comfort, and status, and strength in the struggle of us versus them. 

Levels of consciousness exist within feedback relationships so that a single person within a group contributes to and is affected by the consciousness level of the group so that individuals both feed into and are influenced in return by the level of consciousness of others in the group. In its most primitive stage, it can be called “mob mentality,” where people’s fears and prejudices amplify each other into a frenzy of hatred directed at those who are the objects of their primitive and violent impulses. In its subtler expression, we see “group think” where the same principle as the mob is working to shape how individuals and their affiliation groups are stuck in loops of limited perception and response in their understanding and approach to life’s opportunities and problems.  This is the state of egocentric consciousness that dominates human society today and has for several thousand years. It was a once generally stable mindset that the vastness of the planet was able to contain and had been in its own process of evolution from monarchies and aristocracies into democracies with increasing emphasis on human rights and technological development. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, because humanity’s technology and population now threaten all life, have seen the emergence of a new psychological existential crisis that may be the spur to evolve a higher level consciousness that can spread from awakening individuals to the general populace.   

Social and physical scientists, as well as philosophers, psychologists, and theologians have been warning that the technologies of power which humanity has devised, technologies which once served to lengthen lifespan and improve quality of life, now threaten life and social stability. An anthropologist would say we are in an evolutionary crisis where the very continuation of the species is, for the first time, threatened by the same technology and mindsets that had been agents of progress. It is increasingly clear that a new level of consciousness is needed.  Humanity must make an evolutionary leap into a new level of consciousness. Fortunately, the basis for this new consciousness does not need to be invented.  It has been with us all along, simply pushed to the fringe of our cultures, shelved into the category of religion – but not mainstream religion – rather esoteric or mystical religions, which teach non-dual consciousness. The growing interest and application of this higher consciousness is a response to this existential anxiety and is pointing the way. Interestingly, Einstein saw within Buddhism the consciousness he felt necessary to carry humanity safely and successfully into the future.

As humans began creating civilizations between four and six thousand years ago, humanity began evolving from living in direct non-dual identification with Nature and the laws of Nature in the first phase of human social evolution into what can be described as artificial realities generated by the imaginative power of the human mind. The Creative Force behind all Creation began to be identified within human rather than Natural reference, taking on the dualistic characteristics of the hierarchical political structures of the empires violently created by the early civilizations. Humanity’s “fall” and “original sin” is this loss of connection and identification with our true Source in Nature. “God” was no longer found within the harmony of Nature, but in temples and cathedrals with a priestly hierarchy imposing their will as God’s will. Thus began the second, the egoic, phase of human social evolution which we are still in and its preoccupation with body is not for the body of Nature but rather vain styles of body and technology that amplify our status and physical power – all to strengthen and flatter our ego. We are immersed in dualistic thinking.

Einstein, so instrumental in ushering in the nuclear age, in advancing our understanding of the true nature of the cosmos, realized the genie was out of the bottle, and that because we were in an age so fixated on power and so alienated from Nature, humanity was mired in the dualistic consciousness that could be its undoing.  He also recognized that this undoing was not only about our physical existence, but that the physical existential crisis was precipitated by and connected with existential psychological and spiritual crises which required a complete shift in the level of consciousness we applied to our spirituality, our psychology, and our science.

Zen was, as were all the original great spiritual teachings, warnings about humanity losing its touch with, as Zen puts it, “original nature,” and offered the means to remain in touch, or “awake” to our nature within Nature, to the original non-dual unity of Life. And so, all of Buddhism is built around The Dharma – “The Way” to stay awake to the true nature of Reality, to the Universe with its absolute rules of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all phenomena.  Dharma warns that to break these rules, as has humanity with its inventiveness designed to master nature rather than harmonize with it, brings karmic consequences, beginning with driving us quite insane (out of touch with Reality) individually and collectively, and possibly culminating with our demise as a species and possibly of all life on this planet.

Of course, 800 years ago in Dogen’s feudal Japan, an individual’s concern for “body and mind” was even more precarious than in our modern lives. Individuals had no certainty of any safety at all. Scheming to find one’s position within the absolute hierarchy of society which could provide security obsessively took up one’s mind, much like today, only with life and death stakes. Having little power to create physical safety, Dogen’s instruction was addressed to the mind, teaching that true peace and emotional security comes from within. His teaching was meditation; in learning that we are NOT our body or mind – or station in life – rather, we are the peaceful gaze of awareness that can study the ego-self, and in studying it, realize we CAN allow the concerns of body and mind to “drop away.” This then, in 1226 and 2026, is the “no trace” which offers peace and sanity in any age. Unstable, even dangerous, historical and personal times come and go, as do unstable, even dangerous, states of mind. Zen asks us to be aware of and to cultivate what does not come and go. We must honestly study this false ego self and see its error, and in the seeing, let it “drop away” from its centrality for individuals and our society. In doing this, we can reawaken to our balanced place within the miracle of Nature and with all of Life. Thus, we can be actualized into the next phase of human evolution, harmonizing our first and second phases as the technological species that no longer looks to dominate Nature, but to nurture and protect it, realizing this nurtures and protects our individual and collective humanity. We must learn and then practice, that only by cultivating inner peace can we assure a world of peace.  If we can do this, egocentricity will fall away and we can begin to live harmoniously within ourselves, with each other, and with all Creation. This is humanity maturing into enlightenment – the balance of duality within non-duality in all levels of human experience – and this enlightenment can endure and continue endlessly. So said Dogen, 800 years ago, and the followers of the “buddha way” have been keeping this wisdom alive and living it all these years. It seems that now would be a good time for us to, at last, pay attention and apply this wisdom in reshaping our lives and human society, not necessarily as Buddhists, but as enlightened human beings creating enlightened society.