360-Degree Transmission / Zen Realization & Imagination, April 2, 2010

David: Even though Consciousness in enlightenment is immediately apprehended, there is still a journey that one goes on toward that apprehension. So, we could say that the journey of enlightenment, the voyage of self-realization is also immediate as well as gradual. It’s both gradual and sudden.

It’s actually neither of those, but to speak about it in human terms using logic you have to bring time in. And the two polarities of temporal progression are our notions of immediate or sudden, and gradual, a slow build-up, a slow momentum, which accumulates and then has fruition.

And really everything in nature has both of those qualities. At any given moment an apple tree, which is always apple-ing, which is always producing fruit is at certain stages not producing fruit and is exactly where it is supposed to be. It’s in its present fullness. It has still suddenly realized itself even without any fruition of fruit.

In the same way, the human being who is on the journey to self-realization and has not had that full blossoming is also exactly where he or she is supposed to be. And that’s very important to recognize, that amidst this talk of gradualness and suddenness, the underlining reality is you are where you are supposed to be.

And until you become comfortable in this understanding that where you are is where you should be, and where you are is where you only can be, and where you are is where you actually are, then there’s no spiritual path. There’s no real spiritual path unless you grasp that because that’s the foundation, just remaining neutral where you are like a car. You put it in neutral. It’s just where it is. It doesn’t go backward. It doesn’t go forward. It just stays there in neutral. It’s out of gear.

If you recognize this quality in yourself in comfort and ease then you’ve already made the supreme gesture. Then you can undergo real education, real self-education. Then you can begin to realize where you are, not just be where you are. You actually begin to have a realization about where you are, where Consciousness is, where existence is.

But you need to expand out from simple Being into the mind so that the mind has the recollection, either in the form of its imaginative aspect or through its thinking aspect or through its feeling aspect, through its loving aspect. So, there are many doors with which to enter back into who you are.

There’s the who you are of simple Being, but then you are this very complex body-mind. Some aspect of that body-mind needs to become stimulated so that you can grasp in realization the place where you actually exist. In other words, you have to live a life. Your life has to begin to speak back to you.

Many people think enlightenment is just being where you are. It’s like going backward. You just get to the place where you start from. No, otherwise you will be viewing enlightenment as regression when in fact it’s a form of progression. It has progressive movement and momentum in it, which is why your mind, your imagination, all of that has to come into it to realize God if you want to use that word.

It’s a theological word, but we can use it. Loaded with misunderstanding, but we’re not using it in those ways of literal speaking. We’re using it as a metaphor for the inexpressible. So, if enlightenment is a progressive movement then it ultimately becomes both where you are and where you are not. It’s not just seeing who you are. It’s also seeing what you are not, it involves negation.

This would be a simple matter if I just came in and gave a talk and left it to you to grasp what I say mentally, and then learn something, and then take it home with you. It would all be very easy if that was the case. But something else is going on here, the transmission factor, which makes this something much more than a presentation.

It would be much simpler if it was just a presentation. If I could just present material to you, and then have you relate to the material, and then through that relationship with that content come to some new awareness, that would be very simple. It would be like giving you a tool and having you work the tool and getting the result.

But something else is going on here. Something unruly has come into play, something that plays by no rules and that is initiatory in nature. This is where things are not so easy to understand. If I understand my own teaching correctly, what it is is the transmission of impulses within Consciousness that are evolutionary or progressive in nature and that are evolving or driving this Cosmos to manifestation, not just manifestation but maintenance and destruction.

In other words, the whole machinery of the Cosmos is energized by impulses, by an Impulse, both impulses and an Impulse. The latter is capitalized to denote the impersonal. The former are various factors within that Universal Consciousness that have some kind of specificity in functioning, like energy, light, feeling, imagination, various components that function as activating properties in your own consciousness to bring it to the highest state, the highest state of which it can possibly imagine.

These impulses are transmission-based. By transmission-based I don’t mean it goes from a literal me to a literal you, but it has its root, these aspects of transmission have their root in something which is non-dual. So, instead of going from here to there, they simply come up in another location. That does not rule out that it can appear to come from me to you, but it’s not limited to that. That’s just a particular interpretation based on a certain time-space mentality that would view it from person to person. Instead, it may actually come out of the ground of Being and arise like waves in the sea.

One wave does not follow the next in the sea. You have hundreds of billions of trillions of waves all activating at the same time. Some waves are going north. Some waves are going south. Go to the beach sometime, and you’ll see that the waves sometimes collide. You have to look out far. Near the shore, they just come and go like this [David motions with his arms moving forward and back]. They just roll in and roll out.

So, if this transmission power is three-hundred sixty degrees and it’s coming up in all directions fueling those impulses that promote the evolutionary process, feeding the metaphors that are in your mind, the images that deal specifically with Divine realization, they need to be fed, and you can’t just get rid of your images of the Divine. They need to be fed and expanded. The sheath within the imagination needs to balloon out, expand way past what the logical mind can understand.

In Zen Buddhism, in a monastery, you’ll see many Buddhas even though Zen is anti-image. It’s anti-representational yet you’ll see a Zen garden, a garden of rocks carefully raked, carefully placed, giving a viewpoint into emptiness, into the most abstract state of Consciousness. You’ll see Zen flower arrangements. You’ll see a Zen tea ceremony.

Now, what’s the use within the context of philosophical Zen for these art forms? Why employ them? If Zen says specifically it’s beyond your thinking and that’s the core tenant of their philosophy, their meditation practice, their metaphysics, then why all of these imaginative indulgences along the way?

That Zen garden is there so that you see it, not so that you don’t look at it. The tea ceremony is not there so that you don’t drink the tea. It’s there to ingest the tea in the midst of an aesthetic relationship with what you’re doing and a careful placement of objects and practices within the context of an emotional, psychological, imaginative performance all geared toward the revelation of emptiness.

Therefore, even in Zen, it’s recognized that the imaginative sheath must be fed and nurtured, the most anti-imaginative, anti-literal, anti-thinking, anti-linear thinking teaching on the planet. So, all of this emphasis on aesthetics in relationship to the expansion of Consciousness simply admits to the inextricable relationship between the imagination and the full expansion of Consciousness.

Any questions, comments?

Participant 1: I didn’t really get what you were saying initially about knowing where you are and then where you’re not. But, then what seemed to come forward was that it was a way for realization itself to get a bearing.

David: Right.

P1: And the same thing in the Zen, it’s like a way for you to get a bearing in your own realization.

David: A bearing, right, a context.

P1: Yes.

David: A viewpoint,

P1: Mm-hmm.

David: even though the realization is one that is explicitly beyond viewpoint.

P1: I’m hesitant to say perception, but it’s more of a bearing.

David: I understand.

P1: Or a coordinate.

David: Right, it’s even a viewpoint. There’s no doubt it’s a viewpoint. To say that it’s no viewpoint is to contradict yourself. If Zen were to say it’s no viewpoint what do you do with all the Zen teachings? And there are lots of them. Even the lives of the Masters as they are recounted is an imaginative exercise.

When you read about the ancient Zen Masters, Bankei and those others, Dogan, whatever their names are, when you read about them today and they died four hundred years ago or six hundred years ago, Huang, all those people, what are you doing? You’re engaging in an imaginative voyage. So, these stories are meant to feed your imagination and help your imagination remain in the teaching.

The only danger arises when the imagination does not go all the way to the fully abstract level of total expansion. In other words, it fails to transcend itself in what Zen points to, mushin, no mind, and it falls back on the literal mind, and the literal mind says, “Oh, I have the truth now because I was able to get that glimpse in the imagination, and let me tell you what it is.” So, you now think you know what the truth is and you come out trying to tell everybody, “This is the truth. Just listen to what I say. Just accept what I say.”

P1: So, if that sheath is one facet of say different aspects, do all the aspects have to transcend or can one do it?

David: As you get closer to the transcendent point all of them will be there.

P1: Gotcha.

David: But, to answer your question on a grosser level, yes. You can use primarily the imagination, or you can primarily use as Hinduism tells us one of the four yogas like karma yoga. Just action can be your path. Or, just meditation and silencing yourself can be your path.
Love can be your path, feeling, in other words, bringing great feeling into your painting if you’re a painter. Bringing great feeling into your technical expertise if you work with technical things.

And even there in the technological there’s still room for the emotions and the aesthetics to come in. It’s not like technology is just about pure machines or approaching things strictly through analysis. Great scientists use images. They wonder.

I mean, how did we come to a heliocentric view of the universe? Everything was accepted as earth-based, right? Human-centric and earth-centric. And then someone started to wonder. “Oh, wait a minute. I want to picture this differently.”

So, they went into their imaginative sheath and started thinking bigger, imagining bigger. And then on the basis of those hypotheses, they then did tests and realized, “Oh my God! This universe is completely different than what was suggested earlier.” The earth was flat and all that stuff. For some people the earth still is flat, but those are the people who fail to take the imaginative journey to the end.