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.

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.

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.”

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)

The Middle Way, Woodacre, CA, April 23

“The Buddha’s insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere.”  – Adyashanti

I rarely reveal my teacher as I feel everyone has their own that will compel them to perceive their pure nature, and one needn’t be influenced by my own choice. This is my teacher. He’ll be speaking at Spirit Rock Meditation Center on April 23 on The Middle Way. Adya, as he’s affectionately known, speaks frequently in the Bay Area, where he makes his home.

“The Himalayas in India and Tibet have no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting your body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his guru will appear near-by.” – Autobiography of a Yogi, p 138