Alan Watts: Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen

Everyone is born a mystic and a lover who experiences the unity of things and all are called to keep this mystic or lover of life alive. – #7 of Matthew Fox’s 95 Theses

In my research I’ve been noticing the Beat poets and writers were definitely mystics “digging” life in their own foray into the forest for the Holy Grail. Kerouac reasserted over and over that “the Beat Generation was basically a religious generation.”

Reading Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whalen, and Synder myself I sense an authentic urge but couldn’t help feeling that sometimes the Zen and the Buddhism was warped a bit, especially from the most notorious Beats. (There weren’t much in way of teachers in the US then, just moldy books in libraries.)

Then I came upon an essay by Alan Watts, born in England he died in the Bay Area – the North Bay of Mill Valley to be precise. His “Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen” essay just gets to the heart of it all. Very enlightening read.

Square Zen is “a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approval and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall.

Whereas…

For beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. [He describe its self-defensive underside.] But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master.

Watts goes on to masterfully explain why satori “can lie along both roads.”

Ultimately, the ancient Chinese Zen masters practiced everyday Zen, an ordinary “no-fuss” Zen. Fuss comes in when we’re “mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and “fuss” when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture for five hours a day.”

Alan starts and ends with the Tao which is close in essence to the Chinese Zen, or Ch’an. To begin, “Tao is that which one cannot depart. That which one can depart is not the Tao.” And he ends with this Taoist poem.

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;
The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short.

A “Spiritual Radicals” course is being offered by UC Berkeley this spring and fall in San Francisco. From the course Description:

This course introduces students to seven highly original thinkers–J. Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Ram Dass, Chogyam Trungpa, and Matthew Fox–whose lives and work brought about a renaissance in American spirituality. Authors, scholars, and religious figures, they each journeyed beyond accepted norms and reinvigorated religious practice through the retrieval of ancient wisdom.

They all brought a Beat sensitivity of personal experience as the final authority. And it’s no coincidence that Aldous Huxley opened the doors of perception in 1954 ushering in “Howl” and the sixties’ psychedelic movement. When Allen Ginsberg tired of drugs in his attempt to recapture a natural 1948 peak experience (named it Harlem Vision even) he turned to Chogyam Trungpa as his guru. In separate journeys, Ram Dass (last home Tiberon) and Steve Jobs went in search of the same guru in India. Dass found him, but Steve wandered in India and promptly on his return started tinkering with Apple. Oh, I could go on and on. (These guys ‘cept Matthew Fox are all dead, but there are living breathing radicals right here in our midst today! And no, they’re mostly not celebrities.)

p.s. Looks like Matthew Fox even had a blog for a brief while. Fox is also the founder of the University of Creation Spirituality (now Wisdom University), which was in Oakland and looks to be headquartered in San Francisco now.

The One-Way Ticket: Stream Entry

I spoke of stream entry yesterday. Basically it’s the first seeming hurdle (seeming as I, as many do, get stuck in terms of thinking of cause-and-effect linear stepwise) on the seeming path to Enlightenment. In other words, there is no path to what you already are.

Buddha: “What do you think, Subhuti? Does a Stream-Enterer think, ‘I have attained the fruit of stream-entry.’?”

Subhuti replied, “No, World-Honored One. Why? Stream-Enterer means to enter the stream, but in fact there is no stream to enter. One does not enter a stream that is form, nor a stream that is sound, smell, taste, touch, or object of mind. That is what we mean when we say entering a stream.” – The Diamond Sutra

Yep, and now there’s no turning back either…

According to Buddhism, a stream-enterer “gains its name from the fact that a person who has attained this level has entered the “stream” flowing inevitably to nibbana. He/she is guaranteed to achieve full awakening within seven lifetimes at most, and in the interim will not be reborn in any of the lower realms.”

David Hawkins’ new book also mentions that a level of consciousness of “unconditional love”, or 540 on (the, again, seemingly linear) scale 1 to 1000 as achievable by anyone and everyone that commits to it. He’s a bit more skeptical of full enlightenment in one lifetime…but what if you’ve lost track of how many lifetimes you’ve been at this?

In accounts of the life of the Buddha, there are many examples of people immediately understanding his teaching and breaking the first three ‘fetters’ that hinder people from seeing Reality. These fetters are: having a fixed view of oneself; doubt; and being attached to rites and rituals as ends in themselves. Such people become ‘stream entrants’ — because they have entered the stream that draws them irresistibly towards Enlightenment.

Over the centuries there has been a tendency to emphasise the difficulty of making such a breakthrough [this blog will emphasize the ease!], and some Buddhist schools teach that it may take many lifetimes, or even that it’s no longer possible. Sangharakshita has a different understanding. He suggests that all sincere, committed and effective Dharma practitioners, who have supportive conditions and enough time, could reasonably expect to make substantial progress and even gain Stream Entry in this lifetime. – Friends of the Western Buddhist Order

I don’t have first-hand experience, but, fyi, here’s the local FWBO sangha (community):

San Francisco Buddhist Center
37 Bartlett Street
San Francisco CA 94110
USA
+1 415 282 2018

Jack Kerouac: The Fog is Paradise

I just got my copy of Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (no, it’s not a must-have for the Big E library; I’m doing research on the Beats, the 1906 earthquake, creativity, and salons.)

I’m floored that Kerouac was inspired by Thoreau’s Walden Pond (inspiring; in nature we are in silence; so there, we might glimpse that our nature is silence). He “was so inspired by its discussion on Indian philosophy, especially the Bhagavad Gita [it rocks], that he was prompted to read other Hindu scriptures.”

Funny though, when he got to the San Jose Library (gulp, literally a stone’s throw to me) Kerouac picked up instead a translation of Ashvaghosa’s The Life of the Buddha.

The empty blue sky of space says ‘All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I dont care, it still belongs to me’ — The blue sky adds ‘Dont call me eternity, call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise; the leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise.’ – Jack Kerouac, quoted in Big Sky Mind

The fog is paradise.

If you’ve spent any time in San Francisco, you know he’s writing from witnessed experience. The thick grey shroud is an icon of SF.

The fog is paradise can take yet another level of meaning: This mental fog is paradise. I’ve been in THE fog today and this passage whacked me.

The conditioned reaction is to struggle with the fog. 

And I can get caught up in the details: the rent is overdue, why won’t the car start when it’s a torrential downpour like yesterday and day before, my Technorati rank is plummeting, my friend hasn’t called back, why do I even write this blathering blog, I want that sweeping bliss back, what’s the point it’s all samsara, and the beat goes on. Droning on and on and on. Over and over.

Haven’t I been here before? FOG ‘R US. 

Lifetimes before?

There is no reincarnation, says Bryon Katie, just reincarnated thoughts. (As good a definition of karma as I’ve ever seen or heard.)

In the many reincarnations of the fog, I’ve attempted to get rid of it, deny it, and a past winner - succumb to its entreaty to wallow and bury myself in its fogginess.

Zen Really is Boring, Enlightenment Is

“Some people come to Zen expecting that Enlightenment will be the Ultimate Peak Experience.” – Zen is Boring

I’m one of them except I read that linear time was an illusion so I figured it’d be some kind of eternal, you know, permanent Peak Experience of Flow. In Disappearance of the Universe the author is goaded on by with the comparison of endless orgasms offered as enticement.

Shortly after I was silly enough to believe I’d ”lost” ”my” awakening (merely stream-entry*, not nibbana, or Enlightenment), I heard Gangaji speak.

She said that anything that comes and goes, isn’t It.

What you are precedes all that. Hint: Unchanging. You cannot lose that.

“Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment.” – Zen is Boring

No experience is enlightenment. No person becomes Enlightened. Enlightenment appears to happen when Self becomes Self-aware. When you ARE precisely what you are rather than KNOWING about your Self. In that split second before your mind engages to interpret Self.

You are the primordial all-encompassing awareness where tangerine, tangerine-eater, and tangerine-eating arise from. That One realizes that the tangerine-y images arising and departing never mar the clear mirror of Awareness itself. 

I agree with the value of the living Presence of a teacher. Luckily my teacher was after the Truth more than after Zen. Fifteen years of rigid zazen under his belt and he awakened in a slouched position. Go figure. The first time in his presence, my thoughts were irrelevant background noise like a kitten walking in and out of a cat door within a vast mansion. While all attention lay within this mansion of indescribable silence for nearly ten days.

Dry? Far from it. Deeply awakened people are a breath of fresh air, humorous and rarely take things or themselves seriously. (Except when they think they stand for Awakeness and become defensive like where this post is headed!)

I see my teacher every few weeks, so he’s not by my side 24/7. However by using the tool of inquiry you can use each and every situation, every person as a mirror to cut through your interpretations (peeking through the layers of ideas about Reality) and pierce through to Reality itself.

Up till now this post may not seem to make rational sense, but this part is straigtforward: Go buy Loving What Is, by Bryon Katie (website).

The Beatest Time of My Life: San Francisco Bay Area

In his 1957 classic “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac wrote that he “stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time” of his life. – “San Francisco museum celebrates renegade literary movement“, SF Chronicle, January 14, 2006

Few people know how tempted I was to just chuck it and stay in Asia (I was in Sri Lanka and Thailand for nine weeks this winter). But the San Francisco Bay Area beckoned.

I can’t totally articulate it, but there is an energy here. Not the surface caffeinated frenetic energy I can pick up in the technology industry, but the layer beneath: sublime and fundamental and magnetic.

There are more seekers here per capita I reckon than anywhere in the world. Yeah, even India. The bonus is enough have stopped seeking.

“I see the Beat Generation as an enlightening movement,” said founder Jerry Cimino, 51, who kept his collection of beat artifacts in the backyard of his Monterey, Calif. home while working in the computer industry. – SF Chronicle

It’s no secret that many of the Beat poets were enthralled by Zen. Their yearning spilled to the page. Yet it’s taken decades for Zen to ripen in maturity in the United States.

Among all my patients in the second half of life – that is to say over thirty-five – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. – Carl Jung

Like Jung I view religion in terms of this definition:

re-li-gion (ri lij’ en) L. religio, religare, to bind back { re-, back + ligare, to bind, { bind together, to connect the lesser to the greater, the part to the whole

I viscerally feel this religious urge ripenening here in the Bay Area the most whether it’s at satsang or the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church. That’s the reason I come back here no matter how far I wander.

Christians and Enlightenment

“Even as a tree has a single trunk but many branches and leaves, so there is one true and perfect religion but it becomes many, as it passes through the human medium.” – Mahatma K. Gandhi

I was realizing the other day that this blog may seem as if it’s just for Buddhists. After all, “enlightenment” and “nirvana” are Buddhist constructs, right?

I think as you get to the trunk and start digging towards the roots, these distinctions blur. The holiest (as in whole) people in all religious paths I meet are so alike.

An evangelical Christian said yesterday: “I run into a lot of people that have a relationship with theology – not God.”

If you are Christian (and I must admit my own path is very inspired by Jesus, much more so than the Buddha) what does Enlightenment mean? It’s to know God, not about God and to live each moment whispering “Thy will be done” entirely without an ounce of doubt or resistance or remnants of self-interest. To be at complete rest in God.

I saw yesterday that my path has had three steps. I’m aiming to live #3 right now and that’s why I started this blog to explore my own ‘bleeding edge’ which I felt might benefit others as well.

1. There must be a better way!
2. Be still and know.
3. Thy will be done.

The Sublime Aspect to Art

There are two SF Bay Area arts events that may be of interest. One is a free symposium on Arts and Consciousness, Berkeley, this Sunday, March 19th.

The second is a panel in SF, March 27th, that explores the theme of creativity, calamity and catastrophe in commemoration of the 1906 SF earthquake centennial.

What does art have to do with enlightenment? (Note: Not all art is sublime.)

From a post on art and world-view disrupting lives I wrote last year, here are two hints:

Aquinas defines beauty as that which pleases; that’s a very nice definition. There is another aspect, however, to art which is the sublime. And the sublime is that which simply shatters your whole ego system.  – Joseph Campbell, from his lecture “The Way of Art“

I’m in the bookstore doing a bit of sleuthing on the Parsifal and the Holy Grail myth. I spot one of those oversized coffee-table astrology books. My curiosity peaked, I just had to open it to my birthday. It spoke of the path of the artist for me. This stands out: “Great art is energy channeled in from spirit and translated into words, images, or sounds to which people can relate. Art is powerful, not just because of the intense emotions it can stir, but because it helps people feel the inspiration felt by the artist at the time of creation.”

Could there be another way?

After a strenuous six year path including a stint at extreme ascetism, the Buddha asks a crucial question. Could there be another way?

At this stage he asked himself: Could there be another way to Enlightenment? It struck him then that as a child, while his father was engaged in the ploughing festival, seated in the cool shade of the purple berry tree, aloof from sense desires, aloof from evil states of mind, he attained the First Meditation [jhana, or] (pathamajjhana) which is with initial and sustained application of thought, joy, and ease born of detachment. On considering further: Could this be the way to Enlightenment? he came to the conclusion: This indeed was the way to Enlightenment. – from Path Fruit and Nibbana, by Kheminda Thera (printed by Karunaratne and Sons Ltd, Colombo, Sri Lanka, ISBN 955-9098-09-8)

Unadorned

The word unadorned came to me as I thought of this blog’s design (just picked one of the free ones available with this free software) and that word seems to fit. All the way around really. Who would we be if we were unadorned? essence?

And I thought of this passage about the Beat poets of San Francisco.

“Three centuries later, Kerouac provided an American definition of the [haiku] form: “POP-American (non-Japanese) Haiku, short three-line poems, or ‘pomes’, rhyming or nonrhyming, delineating ‘little Samadhis’ if possible, usually of a Buddhist connotation, aiming toward enlightenment”…

“This actual moment! That bedraggled crow! This moonlit evening, that cold rain on your skull! There you stand, inhabiting your body with animal clarity, wide-open senses, and no preconception or abstract idea can touch the experience itself. Buddhists call this tattva, thusness. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams famously wrote, setting ten thousand poems free from abstraction. He could have been reading Basho: “To know the pine, go to the pine. To know the bamboo, go to the bamboo.”

…Haiku’s simplicity of spirit is what so quickly allies it to Zen Buddhism. I like to think the current popularity of Zen in America is due in part to a tenacious belief that we remain a no-nonsense people, a people who talk straight and try to keep life simple – this and a mounting restlessness with our overabundance of things… This Thoreau-like hunger for unadorned living, and the belief that the richest insights can only be acquired through close-to-the-bone experience, carries on in the spirit of modern poets. It is nowhere more evident than in the embrace of the haiku ethic.”

- from “Rucksack Poetry: How Haiku Found a Home in America”, Winter 2004, Tricycle, (in The Best Buddhist Writing 2005 anthology)

Rilke’s Poems Sprung From Stillness

“These intensely inward conversations with God distilled the seeking of the past years for an unmediated and intimate encounter with the heart of the universe. In November he wrote in his journal – the journal in which he never mentioned The Book of Hours – “I have begun my life.” – preface by Joanna Macy to 100th Anniversary Edition Rilke’s Book of Hours

Never mind the theology, these love poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke are exquisite and transport you to that place of stillness for yourself because that is where they sprang from. It’s exactly what mystic Jean Klein meant by stating that words spoken from silence are perfumed with the source which they came from.

If this is arrogant God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea. [1, 12]

Don’t get just any translation, get this one.

I would describe myself

like a landscape I’ve studied

at length, in detail;

like a word I’m coming to understand;

like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;

like my mother’s face;

like a ship that carried me

when the waters raged. [I, 13]