Zen Videos

Comcast is soon discontinuing its "Personal Web Page" service. I've got a bunch of stuff I put up there over the years, which will disappear when the service ends. I'm transferring some of it from there to this blog, for the benefit of future generations... 

Video below contains excerpts of interviews and teaching talks from Zen Master Seung Sahn (Dae Soen Sa Nim), founder of Kwan Um School of Zen. See also Wake Up! (a short pdf illustrating ZM Seung Sahn's basic teaching) and Only Don't Know (a much more extensive collection of his letters to students).



Next is clip from Dharma talk by Zen Master Bon Seong. Many more are available on Empty Gate Zen Center YouTube channel.



Finally, a talk I myself gave at Empty Gate years ago (2 parts).

My Dharma Talks

Comcast is soon discontinuing its "Personal Web Page" service. I've got a bunch of stuff I put up there over the years, which will disappear when the service ends. I'm transferring some of it from there to this blog, for the benefit of future generations... 

Following are transcriptions of some short talks I've given at Empty Gate Zen Center:

HOT TUB ZEN

There was once a "Parliament of the World's Religions" in Chicago, and many religious leaders were invited - Catholics, pagans, Black Muslims, Hindus, witches, and on and on. One of the things they did was try to draft a statement of principles; they wanted to tell the world, "These are the fundamental truths that spiritual people accept." They had a terribly hard time, of course. It's difficult for human beings, spiritual or otherwise, to agree on anything.

Our teacher, Dae Soen Sa Nim, was there. Even though he's been a Zen Master for over 40 years, he didn't contribute a word to the statement of principles. He just encouraged everyone to sit together silently (he didn't use the word "meditation"), which they eventually agreed to do for 10 minutes.

This is Zen practice, putting aside our different ideas and opinions, and just acting in this moment. If more people could learn to just do something together, even something as simple as sitting silently, then we wouldn't create so many problems for the world.

Formal Zen practice includes sitting, chanting, bowing, and other things that may look like a religion. But it's not at all necessary to consider these actions special, spiritual, or holy. They're opportunities to let go of my ideas, my opinions, mymy situation, I, my, me ... and just do it. At a Zen center, there's a schedule telling us what it's time to do (7pm: sitting; 7:30pm: chanting, etc.). In ordinary life, we often don't have a schedule, but we can keep the same mind - clearly perceiving each moment, and doing whatever that situation calls for.

Years ago, Dae Soen Sa Nim wrote a letter to the Pope, suggesting that he call a meeting of the world's spiritual leaders. When they arrived in Rome, there'd be a hot tub that they could all sit in together. Next, they'd share a meal. And after that, everybody would go home - all without saying a single word.

When religious people come together, they're wearing different costumes. Monks in Korea wear grey, Indian swamis wear orange, the Pope has his white robes, and so on. But to take a hot tub, you take off your clothes, so that would be one step towards putting aside different ideas. And when we eat, our likes and dislikes appear very strongly. So eating the same meal with other people is another way to practice letting go of our opinions.

People who want to make a formal commitment to practicing Zen go through what's called a precepts ceremony, and after the ceremony they get a certificate that includes this poem:

 Good and evil have no self-nature
 Holy and unholy are empty names
 In front of the door is the land of stillness and light
 Spring comes, the grass grows by itself.

The first two lines mean: let go of whatever ideas and opinions you're holding. In the third line, "the door" is the senses, so this line means that whatever you perceive at this moment is Truth. Finally, the last line means: whatever it's time to do, just do it.

SQUARE ONE

For over 10 years, I’ve lived in an apartment just a couple blocks away from the Hayward fault. There’s been one serious quake during that time. It was a few years back, around 3 in the morning. Waking up to an earthquake intensifies that special experience you always have at the moment of waking. There’s always that moment when you have no idea, when there’s nothing in your mind but “What?!”

The phrase that comes to my mind is “back to square one.” As the room rolled back and forth, it was as if I felt, “I can’t even count on the walls and floor staying still any more; so I give up, I don’t know anything.” I had that clear, alert, immediate experience of the rocking room for just seconds. Then thinking appeared, I understood what was going on, and the square one mind was replaced by various wants, including the most pressing want of staying alive and not getting buried in rubble.

The Zen teaching tradition exists to point at this square one mind, the mind we have before thinking. In simple terms, Buddha said that suffering is caused by desire; if you want something, then you have a problem. Before thinking there’s no wanting, no suffering. So it’s a mind worth looking at. You’ll see various stories of Zen masters responding to a question by hitting someone with a stick, or shouting. These actions are like the earthquake, something to give one the before-thinking experience, at least for a moment.

People may talk about square one in a negative sense, as in, “I’ve been trying to get ahead in life for years, but now I’m back to square one.” But in Zen, returning to square one is the practice. Day after day we accumulate ideas and opinions, things we think we know, and it’s possible to practice putting all of that down and returning to square one.

In sitting Zen and in life, I’ve been noticing how these two minds alternate. Sometimes there’s square one, nothing but open alertness. And at other times, there’s thinking about what I want.

Some traditions suggest the path of replacing bad wants with good wants. Some spiritual teachers will say that since bad wants (materialism, sense desire, etc) cause suffering, the solution is to replace them with good wants: “I want enlightenment,” “I desire God,” etc. And there’s some point to this: during those years when I had a strong desire for enlightenment and God, it’s true that all other desires naturally receded into background. But Zen teaching is different. This teaching says that good wants and bad wants are both wants, and as long as you want something, you’ve got a problem.

You’ll hear that style of teaching often in the Zen tradition. “Why do you make good and bad?” This is the same as pointing to before-thinking mind, because thinking makes wanting, and wanting makes good and bad. If I want something, then when the world gives me what I want, I call it “good”; when the world gives me what I don’t want, I call it “bad.” It’s an interesting practice; whenever I see good or bad, I know I can trace it back to something I want.

Likewise with “God.” Most of the world attaches great importance to the idea of God, and conceives of “God” as the embodiment of absolute Good. But good and bad are made by wanting, so wherever “God” appears, we know someone wants something.

I went to a fringe religious ceremony that had a Christian form. A line from one of the hymns has stuck with me. Addressing God, we sang, “You’re the one we wish to serve; you give to us what we deserve.” And I thought, “Sweet Jesus! If I’m taking the trouble to sing hymns to God, He sure as hell better be a God that gives me MORE than I deserve!”

People call Buddhism atheistic, since belief in God isn’t necessary. But it’s not that Buddhism says you must believe there’s no God. Rather, it points to the possibility of accepting what one deserves, of taking whatever comes through natural process. If that’s the case, we don’t need to make ideas of God, because we don’t want anything from him.

There’s a particular practice in Zen called “kong-an” in Korean, or koan in Japanese. In this practice, the teacher asks a question which the student is challenged to answer from a clear mind, from a square one mind. The questions are designed to tempt desires to appear, but once you want something, it creates a fog that makes a clear answer impossible.

There are many hundreds of kong-ans, and they can get awfully convoluted. But when I first met Zen master Seung Sahn, his kong-an to me was simple and direct. I sat down for a formal teaching interview with him, and he asked, “What do you want?”

How to find a clear answer? Any time I stop and think about it, I can find dozens of things I want. “I want a million dollars. I want world peace. I want everyone to like me. I want to feel good all the time.” But all these answers are made by thinking. They’re “wanting” answers; what would a clear mind, square one answer be?

I could say, “I don’t want anything.” Not only is that likely dishonest, it’s what we call “attachment to emptiness.” It’s like saying, “I want to not want anything”; it’s still not clear. But when the teacher asks, “What do you want?”, there’s a particular, elegant, clear answer. What is it?

I was recently reading an essay written by a woman in therapy. She said that after months of appointments, she said to her therapist, “Now I understand something. I see that I had a certain relationship with my mother, and as an adult I often re-create this relationship with others, and this makes problems. What I don’t see is, how does this understanding change anything?”

The therapist replied, “You think it’s supposed to change something?”

VEGAS ZEN

I spent 1990 living in Las Vegas, making a living by dealing blackjack and roulette in the casinos. Most people know what it's like in a casino - nearly everybody loses money, nearly everybody knows that nearly everybody loses money, and nearly everybody is convinced that if he could just find the right secret, he'd beat the system and get rich.

At the roulette wheel, some gamblers figure out that if red comes up three times in a row, it means you should bet on red. Others, with just as much confidence, determine that it means you should bet on black. Some players have strong ideas about which is the lucky table, lucky dealer, lucky chair, or lucky deck of cards. At the blackjack table, many people said to me, "The secret is to make your big bets when you really feel lucky." I'd always tell them, "Whether you'll get good cards or bad cards has nothing to do with how you feel," but they'd never believe me.

There are endless tricks, and every trick works ... sometimes. I'd see people on hot streaks, winning constantly for an hour or more, and their expressions seemed to say, "I've finally got it all figured out! I'll never have to work again!" I knew that before long this type of thinking would get them into deep, deep trouble, so it was sad to watch.

People who start a religious or spiritual practice tend to have minds like these gamblers. We think, "There must be a way to avoid the suffering that everyone seems to experience; how can I beat the system?"

Also, the world is filled with spiritual teachers anxious to tell you their ways to beat the system. They say, "If you follow me and my way, you'll get all sorts of good feelings inside and good situations outside; if not now, then in the future. My way will grant you benefits infinitely greater than the effort you put into it."

In other words, they teach the possibility of getting good stuff that you don't earn, and don't deserve. This is a beautiful idea, and it's given beautiful names, such as "God's grace," etc. I've noticed that the largest crowds seem to form around those teachers who say that small efforts can bring big rewards.

In our school, the teaching different. Dae Soen Sa Nim says, "Big effort, big attainment. Small effort, small attainment. No effort, no attainment." How can someone considered a great teacher get away with promising so little? He also says, "Understanding cannot help you." This means that life offers no tricks or shortcuts; and if you really understand that there are no shortcuts, even that's not a shortcut.

Maybe it sounds awful to give up such beautiful hopes. But when you completely give up hope, you're left with something extraordinary: a clear view of the present moment. What do you see? What do you hear? What are you doing right now? That's much better than hope.

There's a story about this in a Carlos Castaneda book. Carlos is walking with don Juan and stops for a moment to tie his shoe. Just then, a boulder falls from the cliffs above and crashes to the ground a few feet ahead. "My God!" Carlos says. "If I hadn't had to tie my shoe, that would have killed us!"

"That's true," replies don Juan. "And maybe someday you'll stop to tie your shoe, and because you stop a boulder will kill you. You don't know when the boulder will fall, so the most important thing for you to do is to tie your shoe impeccably."

CIRCLE TALK

We recently reached the end of the year, and what do you know, we’re right back at the beginning. Of course the calendar is man-made, but it’s the same in the natural world. There’s a cycle of seasons; you reach the end, and you’re at the beginning.

It may seem obvious, how it goes round and round like this. But consider: if you’d just been born, even with a fully developed intellect, would you automatically know that the world operates in these circular cycles? Maybe it’s something we learn through experience.

Zen isn’t different from life, so we also find many circles in Zen teaching and art. Zen Master Seung Sahn illustrated his teaching with the Zen Circle. Points around the circle have particular meanings… but the big meaning is the metaphor of the circle itself. You start at zero degrees, and you progress to 360 degrees, which is the same point. It illustrates that the truth, the goal, the pure and clear thing, is not something separate in space or time. It’s already appeared in this moment.

Our teaching style doesn’t say, “You must struggle for decades or lifetimes, and then attain holy ‘egolessness’” or whatever. But rather: “Just now, before the thought of ‘I/my/me’ even arises, everything is already perfect and complete.”

The circle metaphor stands in contrast to the more common image of spiritual life as a path to a mountaintop. This path image puts me in mind of people who climb Everest. Climbers speak of a problem they call summit fever. It’s not just the craziness caused by oxygen deprivation, but a psychological affliction. Climbers can become so focused on reaching the summit that they lose all reason. They don’t consider that after they summit, they’ll still have to climb back down! They make stupid decisions in striving for the peak at all costs; it turns out that most climbers who die do so on the descent.

Metaphorically, that’s what it’s like to follow a path. When you strive to reach something, you don’t clearly perceive and respond to the reality of the moment.

On the other hand, if we see that we’re going around and around in circles, there’s nothing special to look forward to, or to look back on. Then it’s possible to connect with just now. In walking meditation, as we go around and around the room, we can return to a meticulous awareness of the moment, the breath going in or out, the pressure of the floor against the soles of the feet.

Sitting meditation is similar. Trains of thought appear and disappear, over and over again in circular rotation. When I recognize that the thinking cycle is going nowhere, it points back to the clarity of What am I doing right now?

Ken Wilber is a writer and modern philosopher, popular in spiritual and New Age circles. In constructing his view of human development, Wilber has used the metaphor of a ladder. You start with body-consciousness, then move up to the next rung of emotional consciousness, then intellect, then witnessing and other spiritual rungs, higher and higher. He provides an interesting map of this process, but it lacks any sense of circularity.

One of his critics argues that Wilber and his group are missing half of reality. Wilber focuses entirely on development, but existence is more than growth and development, it’s also decay and death. To avoid facing this other half of the circle is like having summit fever, with a mind clouded by refusal to see the whole picture.

If we look at the full circle, it becomes clear. A hundred years ago, I didn’t exist. Then I got born, so now I do exist. A hundred years from now, I’ll be dead, I’ll have returned to that same point of not-existing that I started at! In Buddhism, we say that emptiness becomes form, then form becomes emptiness. First zero, then one, then zero, around and around and around.

Sometimes, I get distracted for half a second, then my attention returns. Sometimes, I get an idea, and keep thinking about it for months before letting it go. These circles, large and small, are encompassed by the circle of life — appearing out of emptiness, and eventually disappearing back into emptiness. It all points back to one thing. We’re not going anywhere, so we’ve got precisely one thing: What is this moment?

The Most Important Thing About Zen

Zen Master Dae Kwang on The Meaning of Life

Economics Lesson

A college Intro to Economics book began, "Man's desires are infinite. But the means necessary for satisfying these desires are limited. This is what gives rise to value." The first sentence was enough to inspire me to leave school and look into the big questions of desire and suffering.


Today I found further evidence of the Buddhist wisdom within Economics, in the form of this quote from John Maynard Keynes:


The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

Caution

"A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve."

-- Confucious

Self Improvement

We often say Zen is not really about self improvement. What is the self that you want to improve? Who are you really? That's the fundamental point. And until we really deal with that question, we are not really getting to the base of practice. Because our desires, our beliefs, and our opinions drag us around. Until we doubt them, investigate them, and use the moment as an investigatory tool, we're just playing around.  


-- Zen Master Bon Soeng

Zen Master Bon Yeon on How to Meditate

Karma

Zen Master Dae Kwang on Compassion

Finding Primary Point

From a talk by Zen Master Seung Sahn, 1977:

I often talk about primary point. What is primary point? When you have a
scale and there is nothing being weighed, the indicator points to zero. You put
something on it, and the pointer swings to "one pound." You take it off, the
pointer goes back to zero. This is primary point. After you find your primary
point, then good feelings come, bad feelings come, so your pointer swings in
one direction or the other. But this doesn't matter. Don't check it. When the
feeling is over with, the pointer swings back to zero.

But if you haven't found your primary point, then it is like taking a heavy
object off of the scale and having the pointer stay at "ten pounds." Or the
pointer moves back only part-way, it doesn't go completely back to zero. Then
you have a problem. Your scale does not weigh correctly. Maybe if you put a
heavy object on it, it will break completely.

So first you must find your primary point. Then you must keep it very
strongly.

A taxi has weak shock absorbers, so it hits a small bump and bounces up and
down. A train has strong shock absorbers, so it is very steady. If you keep your
primary point, your mind-spring will become stronger and stronger. You will
meet big problems and your mind will move less and less. A big problem
comes, your mind moves, but soon returns to primary point. Finally your
mind will be very strong; it will be able to carry any load. Then saving all
people is possible.

What is This?

Currently in midst of Zen retreat...

I found this on the net a couple days ago. Erik (visiting from Hawaii, and sitting 2 days of this retreat) reminded me of it; we had both seen the comic decades ago. He remembered it accurately, but I recalled the text as "What do you mean, 'What happens next'?" I prefer my false memory to the actual caption.

The Best Zen Talks Never Mention "Zen"

"Of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jobs said: 'I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.'"

Ya Don't Gotta Believe!

The recent CNN.com article Religious belief is human nature huge new study claims begins, "Religion comes naturally, even instinctively, to human beings, a massive new study of cultures all around the world suggests."

This is no surprise if we consider our distant ancestors. Cavemen who failed to see tigers in the bushes often died too early to pass on their genes. Those who saw tigers even when they weren't there may have been stressed-out, but they survived and procreated just fine.

Evolution must therefore favor those who perceive patterns, whether they really exist or not. (If you have any doubts of this, look up at the clouds and see the duckies.) Perceiving patterns leads to perceiving meaning and purpose, where they exist and where they don't. Hence, the natural and instinctive "religion" that CNN reports.

Buddhists -- not to mention Existentialists -- would say that originally there's no meaning or purpose. If we want them, then we make them ourselves. This view can be learned and practiced, but it doesn't come instinctively to us from the get-go.

There's evidence all around that religious belief is inherent. Consider the May 21 doomsday scare. Ordinary-appearing people devoted their lives to a belief in end-times prophesy, based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Or watch Sister Wives on the TLC cable channel. Perfectly functional people, risking arrest by following a polygamous belief-system. God bless 'em, it's horrific that the government harasses them... but how can these otherwise intelligent people follow a religion that defies simple arithmetic? (If men have multiple wives, but no women have multiple husbands, it simply doesn't add up.)

The majority of us follow religions that are obviously silly; this is solid evidence that we're hard-wired to believe. Yet it's possible to live and learn. As I go through life, I find less and less interest in holding beliefs, and more and more in questioning, watching, wondering.

Often I've encountered people proclaiming beliefs unsupported by logic or evidence. Many seem to embrace a belief purely because it's old, or popular, or written in a dusty book, or asserted by charismatic people in fancy costumes. I ask the faithful why they choose to hold their beliefs, and have repeatedly heard responses like, "You've got to believe in something. You can't live without belief."

A while back, in the ayahuasca-soaked web zine Reality Sandwich, Charles Eisenstein wrote:

Last time I wrote about this, a commentator suggested that we not “believe” anything. I find this position disingenuous, akin to certain misunderstood Eastern teachings about non-attachment. We are born into the world of flesh and dust, and are not meant to be aloof from it. We are meant to experience the joys and sorrows of attachment. If you want to build a bridge, or a relationship, you have to believe something and act accordingly. You believe the steel will hold. You believe someone will do as she has said. Life in the world is built of beliefs. The world is built of stories. We enact them and live in the world that they create.

I suspect that the commentator he's referring to is me. Whatever. To the above assertion, I replied thusly:

The point isn't believing vs not-believing. It's whether or not you recognize belief for what it is. When you embrace a belief, do you recognize it as your own creation? As a choice that you can examine and question? Or do you assume that your chosen beliefs represent substantial truth (as "religious" people do)?

The use of the passive-voice "meant to be" belies our own power to examine and question beliefs. Who or what is it that "means" for us to do this or that? Are we assuming there's some God or Force that decides that we're "meant to" feel this or that? Or do we take responsibility for how we choose and create our own meaning?

You could say, e.g., "I choose to see myself as living in a world of flesh and dust, and I want to be attached to the joys and sorrows of this world." Wouldn't that be clearer than speculating about what's "meant to be"?

To question your chosen beliefs is hardly being "aloof" from the world. Indeed, taking refuge in a belief-system is a common strategy to avoid engaging with the living experience of each moment. When these joys and sorrows appear... how much are you present for the experience itself? How much are these experiences filtered through a belief-system?

Dzogchen

Following is some teaching on Dzogchen, a Tibetan tradition with some similarities to Zen. Thanks to Josh Baran, who provided this quoted material and pointed me to it. In posting it to the OBC (Order of Buddhist Contemplatives) forum, Josh wrote, "... when you see the word 'dzogchen' you could substitute zazen or meditation or just sitting."

EVERY DAY MEDITATION

The everyday practice of dzogchen is simply to develop a complete carefree acceptance, an openness to all situations without limit.

We should realize openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality, manipulation or strategy.

We should experience everything totally, never withdrawing into ourselves as a marmot hides in its hole. This practice releases tremendous energy which is usually constricted by the process of maintaining fixed reference points. Referentiality is the process by which we retreat from the direct experience of everyday life.

Being present in the moment may initially trigger fear. But by welcoming the sensation of fear with complete openness, we cut through the barriers created by habitual emotional patterns.

When we engage in the practice of discovering space, we should develop the feeling of opening ourselves out completely to the entire universe. We should open ourselves with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind. This is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection.

We shouldn't make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn't become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realize that the purpose of meditation is not to go "deeply into ourselves" or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration.

Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the beginning and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordeal state has no bias toward enlightenment or non-enlightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, as the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity.

All aspects of phenomena are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed - everything is mutually interpenetrating. Seeing all things as naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize. The nature of phenomena appears naturally and is naturally present in time-transcending awareness. Everything is naturally perfect just as it is. All phenomena appear in their uniqueness as part of the continually changing pattern. These patterns are vibrant with meaning and significance at every moment; yet there is no significance to attach to such meanings beyond the moment in which they present themselves.

This is the dance of the five elememts in which matter is a symbol of energy and energy a symbol of emptiness. We are a symbol of our own enlightenment. With no effort or practice whatsoever, liberation or enlightenment is already here.

The everyday practice of dzogchen is just everyday life itself. Since the undeveloped state does not exist, there is no need to behave in any special way or attempt to attain anything above and beyond what you actually are. There should be no feeling of striving to reach some "amazing goal" or "advanced state."

To strive for such a state is a neurosis which only conditions us and serves to obstruct the free flow of Mind. We should also avoid thinking of ourselves as worthless persons - we are naturally free and unconditioned. We are intrinsically enlightened and lack nothing.

When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating. It should not become a specialized or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity. We should realize that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation. Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything. Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad.

Therefore we should simply sit. Simply stay in your own place, in your own condition just as it is. Forgetting self-conscious feelings, we do not have to think "I am meditating." Our practice should be without effort, without strain, without attempts to control or force and without trying to become "peaceful."

If we find that we are disturbing ourselves in any of these ways, we stop meditating and simply rest or relax for a while. Then we resume our meditation. If we have "interesting experiences" either during or after meditation, we should avoid making anything special of them. To spend time thinking about experiences is simply a distraction and an attempt to become unnatural. These experiences are simply signs of practice and should be regarded as transient events. We should not attempt to reexperience them because to do so only serves to distort the natural spontaneity of mind.

All phenomena are completely new and fresh, absolutely unique and entirely free from all concepts of past, present and future. They are experienced in timelessness.

The continual stream of new discovery, revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of our clarity. We should learn to see everyday life as mandala - the luminous fringes of experience which radiate spontaneously from the empty nature of our being. The aspects of our mandala are the day-to-day objects of our life experience moving in the dance or play of the universe. By this symbolism the inner teacher reveals the profound and ultimate significance of being. Therefore we should be natural and spontaneous, accepting and learning from everything. This enables us to see the ironic and amusing side of events that usually irritate us.

In meditation we can see through the illusion of past, present and future - our experience becomes the continuity of nowness. The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?

We should free ourselves from our past memories and preconceptions of meditation. Each moment of meditation is completely unique and full of potentiality. In such moments, we will be incapable of judging our meditation in terms of past experience, dry theory or hollow rhetoric.

Simply plunging directly into meditation in the moment now, with our whole being, free from hesitation, boredom or excitement, _is_ enlightenment.

Plenty of Nothin'

In last month's blog posting, I quoted Stephen Hawking, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist." In the comments, Doug wrote, "Particle/anti-particle pairs can appear spontaneously out of empty space... it's almost beyond comprehension to wrap one's brain around the 'why?' something can appear seemingly from nothing."

What exactly does it mean when we say that something appears seemingly from nothing?

Say you're a primitive human. Each morning, you see the sun appear on the eastern horizon. You know nothing, zero, about what exists beyond that horizon. So from your perspective, you could say that the sun appears spontaneously, seemingly from nothing. What you'd really be saying is that you don't know anything about where the sun originates.

Isn't it the same when Hawking says the universe creates itself spontaneously from nothing? We don't know how or why the universe initially appears; we don't know where it comes from. To name the source of the universe as "spontaneous" or "from nothing" is simply a way of saying "don't know."

Hawking may also be implying that when it comes to the universe's origin, there are uncertainty principles that prove we can't know the answer. It's like trying to see your own eyes: impossible. It's like trying to understand your true self: anything we understand is by definition separated from the subject. When we know that we can't know, OK, that's something. But we still don't know.

Buddhist teachers have said that everything arises from "Emptiness." This is just a name given to the mystery. It may be worthwhile to clearly perceive that it's a mystery, to make peace with that fact. My Zen teacher would say, "Your body's name may be John or Joe or Mary. But your true-self's name is 'don't know.'"

Our monkey-brains love to know things; the desire to understand is integral to survival and development of the human species. We easily fool ourselves into believing that when we name something, we've learned something about it. But names are just names. We may call the source of the universe "Emptiness" or "God" or whatever, but that doesn't mean we know it in the slightest. To say it all arises spontaneously from nothing... is just giving another name to "don't know."

Socrates would always teach everyone, "You must know thyself!" But when he was asked, "Socrates, do you know yourself?", he said, "I don't know what I am either... but I understand that I don't know."

Stephen Hawking vs God

Of course I'm a fan of Stephen Hawking. How could you not love a man who not only solved the great mysteries of the universe, but was a guest voice on the Simpsons?

Hawking has gone through two marriages. By the time he hooked up with his nurse in the mid 90s, neuro-muscular dystrophy had left him able to move only his cheek and one finger. Amazing how he pulled off that seduction. Genius indeed.

And the divorces. When he gave each wife the "Honey... it's... over... between... us..." speech, it must have been particularly bizarre, delivered over several minutes by that computer-generated voice.

Hawking's latest book was published yesterday. An excerpt from The Grand Design appears in the Wall Street Journal article Why God Did Not Create the Universe:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

"Create itself from nothing" sounds a lot like Buddhist teaching. All things appear out of emptiness; exist for a limited time; then return to emptiness. Zero becomes One, then One becomes Zero, over and over. That's all.

Emptiness and zero are names, just words. In Buddhist teaching, what do these words mean? They point to the source of all phenomena as being before words, ideas, and thinking. "Everything arises from emptiness" means that we don't know where it all came from, or why.

Imagine meeting someone on the street, and asking him, "Where were you before you came to town?" He answers "Don't know." You ask him where he'll go afterwards, why he came, and who he is. Each time, he says, "Don't know." That'd be odd... yet it's precisely the situation we find ourselves in, when we get born into this world.

Our very survival depends on knowing stuff, so we've evolved this tendency to seek solid explanations. Yet when it comes to the really big questions, we don't have a clue. The heart of Zen practice is to sit unflinchingly with the simple experience of not knowing.

Religious people may say, "God made everything," but what's "God"? If it's a name for the mystery, another way of saying "I don't know who or what made everything," then OK. But to claim anything about what this "God" is... is to pretend to know what we really don't.

Is it so different to say it all comes from nothing? That's an OK name -- no worse than Emptiness or God -- but is it just another way of saying we don't know?

What is this nothing anyway? Whatever we think when we hear the word "nothing," it's an idea, which is something. Hawking's "nothing" can't be anything like the common sense of the word. If I have a wallet filled with nothing, it never spontaneously creates cash. Let alone Existence.

And Stephen, Mr Genius, can "spontaneous creation" really be called a reason? Does that phrase explain anything?

Example: someone asks why high-tech companies have thrived in San Francisco. You say, "Because the educational and cultural institutions in the area attract the type of workers who make the companies succeed." That's at least a coherent reason. It may have practical meaning; you could test if the explanation holds true in other cities. But if your answer was, "it happened spontaneously," have you communicated anything beyond "I don't know why"?

Is it possible that scientific ideas, like religious ideas, can be used to avoid the discomfort of not knowing? Could we discard these ideas and face the concrete reality, the great don't know, right in front of us, just now?

Real-Time Dharma Talk Online, Sept 1

Resident monk Kwan Sahn Su Nim has been bringing Empty Gate Zen Center into the new millennium, with a website, Facebook page, Twitter account, and YouTube channel. A week from Wednesday, 9/1/2010, we go a step further, with our first live webcast. The Dharma talk by Zen Master Bon Soeng will be broadcast from this link. It should start around 8 p.m.

Su Nim is also webcasting morning practice each Sunday (sitting and chanting starting 7:30 am, Pacific time) from this link.

Are Antidepressants Better Than Nothing?

Thanks to Doug, Rambling Taoist, and yomamma for posting to the comment's section of May's blog entry, which touched on the topic of depression. I've since read a couple of articles on the question of whether antidepressants are any more effective than placebos (a placebo being any medicine which has no active ingredients, but which the patient believes will help). This issue has been in the news since a 2009 study showed that drugs like Prozac and Paxil, when used to treat mild-to-moderate depression, are hardly more effective than dummy pills.

Study author Robert DeRubeis says, "The message for patients with mild to moderate depression is, 'Look, medications are always an option, but there's little evidence that they add to other efforts to shake the depression...'" Studies have been suggesting this conclusion since at least 2002, when Shankar Vedantam wrote in the Washington Post, "After thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions and tens of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression: Antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft work. And so do sugar pills."

The Newsweek article that clued me in to this debate (The Depressing News About Antidepressants) speaks of it as a moral dilemma. It hardly seems right for a doctors to put millions of patients through the expense and side-effects of drugs that have no medical potency. Yet if the patients knew the truth, it might destroy the very real benefits they get from their belief in the drugs.

In the same article was a pro-antidepressant (heh) sidebar, in which a doctor claimed that based on observing the effects of the medications on his patients and himself, he's convinced that "antidepressants work." It's striking in how completely the doctor misses the point. There's no question that Prozac et al work. But there's a very real question of whether they work better than anything else you believe in. For non-severe depression, there's little evidence that the pills are more helpful than talking to a therapist. And little evidence that talking to a therapist is more helpful than chatting with a trusted friend.

The Avatamsaka Sutra (Buddhist scripture) says, "If you want to understand all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future, then you should view the whole universe as being created by mind alone." It seems that we have a tendency to underestimate the power of thinking (beliefs, assumptions, desires, expectations) to alter our experience of the world. "Thinking appears, all things appear; thinking disappears, everything disappears."

I've had many conversations re the mystical energy of holy temples, objects, or gurus. When spiritual people rhapsodize about such energies, I myself (being a trouble-maker) will often tell them, "You know, what you've experienced is entirely dependent on your beliefs and expectations etc." People sometimes get furious at such an assertion, even offended at the suggestion that their powerful experiences are "just in the mind."

I'd imagine that antidepressant users might similarly object to that suggestion that the power of pills is mostly in the mind. But it's often impossible -- without rigorous scientific method -- to know the actual cause of physical or mental changes. We can be entirely wrong when we speculate about ailments. And just because you happen to be the one who's experiencing the stomach-ache or panic-attack, doesn't give you any special insight into what causes or cures it.

It's a distinction between experience and belief. When we have depression (or a spiritual epiphany, or other mind-states), we can can speak with authority on the what of the experience. But as soon as we speak of the why (where the experience comes from, what causes it to come and go, what it means), we're in the realm of speculation and belief.

Funny how people resist so strongly the idea that their peak experiences or mood elevations are "just in the mind." The evidence is clear: it's hard to beat the power of mind. Even the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry apparently has a tough time finding anything more powerful.