I.

            The disease of the culture is false self-denial. Both the pseudo-philosophy that passes for ‘scientific’ in this culture and most of the ‘new age’ elixirs are in fact detours to evade the necessity of the self.
            Yes. On the one hand, the question is: What is the self? On the other, the question is: What is not the self?

            What is the self?
            When we go looking for it, it dissolves in front of us. If we pursue the issue with any honesty, we eventually strip away everything except awareness. I am this witness, this point of view.
            But that consciousness lacks content. In other words, awareness becomes a shell game. I can be this and not-this simultaneously, and I can do it intellectually, so it becomes this game: ‘catch me if you can’. We’ve gotten into some of that here.  But it says nothing and does nothing for my perception of existence. It might as well be a board game I keep on my shelf.
            My presumption here is that we are all looking for something. If not, we should either become gurus or go earn millions and buy penthouses in New York and SF and condos in the mountains and Florida, etc.

            What is not the self?
            This is all my self. The dark side of the moon is only my experience of the dark side of the moon. My ignorance is only my experience of my ignorance. We are trapped in our solipsism. Even our experience of ‘objectivity’, the core experience of validity, is still an EXPERIENCE. I have not escaped the I.

            It is only when we actually experience the figure / ground shift when we access the central moment of reflective awareness that we resolve the paradox. I am the value at the center of this moment of experience, and this value is simultaneously pure subjectivity and pure objectivity.
            This is the experience at the center of science. We study science and study science, and then one day we have this peculiar experience which causes us to know that what we experience is ‘true’, that is, that it is a validity which – through experience – convinces us that we have experienced something beyond the pure subjectivity of experience.
            This is the same moment we experience in true creativity. But the truth is now in the aesthetic moment or the product of the aesthetic moment. The dancer can only know by dancing. But the plastic artist has the memento that certifies the transcendence.

            But both of these are the ‘little death’. We have found something seductive enough so that in the moment of transcendence we forget or fail to notice that what we have experienced is the death of the self. Or we recognize the death of the self, but now assume that the self is actually dead. We see artists clinging to the memory of an experience of true creativity as if their intellectualization were actually producing a legitimate replication of that initial, singular experience of creativity. We see scientists assuming that a single experience of objectivity now pervades their lives and understanding, and they can abuse their children profoundly with the absoluteness and perfection of the objectivity of their judgments and create a pseudo-philosophy of scientism that insists that there is no difference between a scientific fact and the experience of objectivity.
            This is the cultural disease. But at the core of the cultural disease is the human disease, the human addiction to self, the human fear of death, a fear that can only arise because we are self-aware, because we have left that primitive garden of the unreflective where we walked with God in the cool of the morning.

            The reason we can engage in these ‘little death’ moments is, on the one side, because the perceived value has some personal dimension and, on the other, because these moments are focused in this intimate value and only indirectly entrain the loss of self. But in order to grasp the core of the reflective process we have to confront the self-producing moment in its native element. And this requires an ultimate loss of self or Great Death.
            Every legitimate religion, whether it follows the path of self or the path of no-self, necessarily points to this final moment of self-confrontation and loss. The anatma or no-self religions point directly to the issue of value and its process. This is why Dogen can say, ‘To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.’ Then he speaks about the nature of the actualization at the core of this experience. To assume that this ‘non-self’ moves forward to experience the ‘ten thousand things’ – the panorama of the field’ – is delusion. To understand that the ten thousand things come forward to actualize themselves is realization. But once we have attained this experience of ‘dropping away of body and mind’ (shinjin datsuraku), we must still eliminate the ‘stink of Zen’, all of the remaining elements of arbitrary self-hood that still cling to our self-perception. The end result is the immediate experiential moment of unobstructed actualization of value, what we would define here in our terms as the actualization of the vocational self. This actualization of value is both intimate and impersonal.

            II.
 
            Almost all of my spiritual life, I have been confronting the dogmas of the no-self self: There is no self. Drop the thinking mind. Etc., etc. My teacher taught the no-self self – which is why it took me twenty years, encroaching old age and a fulfilling synthesis of understanding before I could acknowledge him.
            From where I sit now, my teacher had total absorption, but not necessarily full realization. In the dimensions in which I can enter absorption, I feel that I can touch full realization. The paradox, of course, is that full absorption produces the moment-by-moment appearance of realization. But realization passes beyond the moment of absorption, however profound, because both history and value are real. The doctrines of no-self self ultimately foreshorten or deny the realities inherent in history and value, the peculiar spiritual and religious gifts indigenous in the process that, historically, produces ‘objectivity’.
            So, in any case, my process has always been vocational. At the point at which I learned to stop the inner monologue, I had clear signs that the monologue itself is also part of the process. The voice that emerges from the silence is the same voice. And, for a writer, following that voice is not just the inner journal, the inner log of sadhana, of spiritual work, but an essential part of the spiritual work itself.

            But vocational practice is no more immediately connected to the Great Death than the practices of the no-self self. No spiritual practice leads directly to the Great Death. Dogen sat zazen and dropped away mind and body. He advocated zazen as the solitary practice that leads to full enlightenment. But that was because his vocation was zazen. Matsu attained realization when his teacher pointed out that he could not ‘become a Buddha’ by sitting zazen.
            If we have a vocation and follow it, however, presumably it will lead to an opportunity for the Great Death. Since I am only one practitioner, I can’t say for certain. But my understanding points to it, as well as the texts that resonate for me.

            Thus far, the purest description I have found for the vocational process is the Gospel of Thomas, referenced in an earlier post. Thomas offers an alternative to the traditions of the church, an alternative with no reference to the death of Jesus and no assertion whatsoever of his divinity. It consists of 114 Sayings. I will quote and explain a few of them here.

            Saying 2. Jesus said: Let the seeker not cease searching until he finds; and when he finds he will suffer; but having suffered, he will exult, and he will command the all.

            Commanding the all is absorption, the equivalent of dropping away body and mind. Buddhism speaks of shunyata, ‘the emptiness’. Gnosticism speaks of pleroma, ‘the fulness’. Mastering the all is the experience of absorption as an ongoing state.

            Saying 3. Jesus said: If those who guide you say, ‘The kingdom is in heaven’, then the birds of heaven will arrive before you. And if they say to you, ‘It is in the deeps’, then the fish will precede you. But the kingdom is within you and within your sight. If you will know yourselves, you will be known, and you will realize that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, you are in want and you are want.

            ‘Being known’ is one core expression for the Great Death. So this text seems to promise that if you follow your vocation, you will necessarily be led to the Great Death. The birds represent thoughts and ideas. The fishes are the emotions.

            Saying 7.  Jesus said: The lion is blessed which the man eats, and the lion becomes man. And the man is cursed whom the lion eats, and the lion becomes man.

            The lion is the traditional image for personal destiny. Each of us has a unique destiny. The question, however, is not uniqueness, but ‘actualization’. If we fail to actualize it, we ‘lose our lives’ in the largest sense.

            What follows immediately are recitations of the wise fisherman parable and the parable of the sower. The wise fisherman throws all the little fish back into the sea and accepts the large, edible fish. This is the key to vocation. Ideas are immediate consequences of the reflective process, and therefore tend to reinforce reflection, rather than break through it. But feelings naturally lead us to our vocation. But we must choose the big fish, the feeling that returns again and again, outside the parameters of needs and lusts. The parable of the sower talks about the kinds of illuminations, and how to distinguish between them. In other words, the path of vocation is defined by a relatively inexplicable feeling leading us toward a particular goal and a process of illumination, which, if we learn to assess the nature of ‘lights’, lifts us, by qualitative shifts, toward the realization of the goal.

            At this point, I hope to have seen the last of these topics as any kind of central concern for this blog. My hope is to proceed toward a more specific assessment of the work of Antonio and William and some discussion of our shared histories in terms of the arts.