The Goal
Maturity
"Today, as always, the old is putting its sluggish weight against the new."
What matters today is changing human beings in a way that frees them from the prison of static, world-bound thinking into a dynamic process in which they mature, overcome outside obstacles, grow beyond inner barriers, and enter on the way to true self-fulfillment, self-fulfillment that links them with otherworldly Life.
What matters is people who unite with their true nature and find higher freedom as persons.
Just as the truth of Life knows nothing of the division between matter and spirit, and vanishes whenever either claims to be whole, so working in the world and inner maturing belong indissolubly together.
Our worldly skills and the value of what we do in the world increase as we mature, and the only way of maturing genuinely is to take the world head-on and face up to its demands.
People who say that attending to the soul reduces our worldly efficiency, or that the world prevents us from traveling the road that leads inwards, are again making false distinctions.
"Personal maturity" is not simply a matter of knowing and being able to do certain things. It means being remade by the Absolute.
The kind of maturity we mean leaves them free, not simply to make their own decisions on worldly matters, but also to witness to their own true nature, and to the transcendent order woven into it.
They are divided into those who accept the demands of practice and those who do not, and what finally counts is whether they try to realize themselves in humanity that relies on immanent transcendence to lift humanness to a higher level, and so fulfill their true human destiny.
As we swing between the ego's claims and the world's demands, we are constantly in danger of becoming alienated from our true nature, of losing ourselves to the world and being devoured by it.
It is only by taking the detour through alienation from the ground that sustains us that we can one day find ourselves in what we really are, that is, in Being that embraces and resolves all the contradictions of being-in-the-world.
This True Nature cannot be objectively grasped, but we basically exist from it, are destined to manifest it, and depend on its indwelling presence for the whole maturing process.
That Freedom comes of maturity that allows us to yield the third impulse from the Absolute, the impulse from the all-embracing, all-transcending Unity of Being. It is only in overcoming the antithesis of life and death, absolute and contingent, spirit and nature, timeless values and temporal destiny, worldly existence and otherworldly Being and fusing them in a superordinate whole, that makes us free in a personal sense.
"Nearness of death... terror engulfs us... inner resistance collapses... self-shielding ego cannot understand... suddenly calm... fears instantly forgotten... certainty... something in us that death and destruction cannot touch."
"Anything that pulverizes our imagined independence can bring us the experience of Being (if we only accept it)... sense of deeper meaning, make us feel part of an incomprehensible order... great clarity illuminates us."
Human life is fulfilled in the tension between a worldly reality centered in the determining ego and an otherworldly reality centered in our true nature and in the true nature of everything else. But we must also see that we cannot resolve this tension by choosing one reality and rejecting the other but only by integrating the two. The answer is not either or choice but wholeness on a higher level.
The ego's vision suppresses the absolute center and conceals it from us, and the anguish of being pushed toward the "periphery" intensifies our longing for liberating contact with that center.
Something very special happens when we really make contact with Being, and its meaning is not "experience" but transformation.
Meister Eckhart's mighty dictum "God's being is our becoming" fulfills itself in obedience to the everlasting law of dying and becoming.
To stop identifying with the timorous, afflicted, and despairing ego, and to melt down that ego in that contact with the all-resolving ground of Being. As they do this, a deep, redeeming strength repeatedly fills and renews them while they themselves increasingly bear the imprint of true nature, and are increasingly imbued with a commanding love and transformed in their weakness - are given the strength to endure this life and grow ever more transparent to a greater Life beyond it.
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Transparency
When it matures in the right way, human life becomes transparent - transparency being the quality that allows otherworldly Life, present in individual and in the world, to be seen and sensed through both.
Shine effectively through superficialities of ego-world consciousness. This kind of transparency also gives us a feeling for something that transcends both the ego and its consciousness - but contributes, deep down, to fulfillment of the ego's real purpose.
Transparency is not simply a state in which we perceive Life, having once been cut off from it, but also a state in which Life perceives itself in us. It is the Whole's revelation of itself to itself.
In this process, we become ourselves - not simply as the expression of true nature, but as the integration of true nature and world-ego.
The otherworldly irradiates the world, dispelling its objective limitations and allowing it to open up, release its creative potential, and touch us on the deepest level, where we are linked to it.
There is primal prepersonal transparency, in which Life still shines out unchecked. This is the child's transparency and something of it survives through all later stages. It is expressed in a "yes" to life that underlies and unconsciously accompanies all our experiences. "Yes" as sustaining power and promise, as the basic tone of the overall harmony. But when our autonomy hardens to a point where this tone falls silent, the Absolute's deep-down "animating" force disengages. In effect, we lose our soul. When "yes" becomes "no" without our being aware of it, the ground starts to crumble beneath our feet, we find ourselves fighting for air.
This real Body is not something that we "have" and must be able to command for certain purposes. It is, rather, we ourselves in our own way of "being there" in the here and now. Body as mirror and medium of the person progressing towards transparency.
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Form
Every human being individually shares in otherworldly Being and Being strives to manifest itself in him or her - or better "as him or her" in the world. From this innate true nature, people feel an unremitting urge, a vital sense of moral obligation, and permanent longing to realize themselves in a specific form, in which their Being can reveal itself clearly in existence.
The Absolute never takes on worldly form in any final sense but assumes form only to shed it again in a never-ending process. This is why we must never think of inner form as something fixed but as the "formula" that governs true nature's effort to manifest itself in a worldly process of becoming.
To the extent that neurosis results from clinging to existential forms, we are all neurotic. Our actually becoming ill depends on how far true nature's shaping energy is blocked.
Voice becomes more resonant, the complexion slightly darker, the expression of the eyes fuller and deeper, the movements rounder, whole rhythm more relaxed and crisper, more balanced, and whole posture acquires a new center of gravity.
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The Way
Over The Threshold
When Being comes home to us and is neither recontoured and reified, nor amorphously dissolved, in objective consciousness, but remains transparently, wakefully present in subjective consciousness, we attain new freedom.
Of course, the old ego is still here, and still sees the old reality - although we ourselves now "see through" that reality and know that ego conditions and limits it.
Absolute duty in ourselves. Serve a new master. Turns obedience to belief into obedience to experience.
The Latin word initiare means "to open the way to the mystery." Initiation is the process and the initiate is someone who not only possesses secret knowledge but has been transformed by experience, exercise, and trial and has entered a superhuman dimension of Being.
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East And West: True Nature & Personhood
All alienation, and thus all typically human anguish derives from identifying with an ego that pins experience down in fixed images, concepts, and values, and is always intent, in theory and practice, on finding a "secure position."
If all suffering is ultimately due to alienation from Being by this ego, then relief ultimately depends on escaping from its power and categories, fusing with the true nature it conceals from us, and thereby attaining a new subjectivity. Being cured in this sense means breaking through objective consciousness, which is anchored in the defining ego, and waking to a new consciousness. This breakthrough - a process in which the old ego is absorbed into the real self and a new one emerges - gives human life a wholly new direction, and is the focal point of all Zen's spiritual guidance.
In the East, the starting point of all religious thought, feeling, and action is the concept of the "All-One", which we ourselves basically are. The starting point in the West is belief in God, the all-powerful Creator, on whom we depend and from whom we are utterly, permanently separated.
The goal in the East is union with the All-One (beyond life and death, being and non-being); in the West, it is communion with God, with whom we never merge, but who comes home to us in faith as the mighty "You", from whom we are always distinct.
In considering differences, we must always remember that each of the "standpoints" has both higher forms and lower ones - and be careful not to assume that our own form is always the highest, and the other side's the lowest.
The Eastern Way leads the believer through a lengthy process of change away from individuation and the here and now to the experience of union with Being that cannot, ultimately, be experienced personally; the Western (Christian) Way, on the other hand, leads him or her through a process of individuation to a state of independent personhood, in which he or she assumes full responsibility for his or her own self.
The East aims, in the encounter with the Absolute, at progressive dissolution of its "otherness" (with which it is familiar, but which it traces back to the divisive ego).
Spiritual development in the West, on the other hand, aims at a progressive revelation of this "otherness" - a process in which both the ego and the true nature's individuality are fully brought out, affirmed, and acknowledged, and that culminates in a free confrontation of the human and divine persons, the ego in its higher form and the divine "you". Progressive depersonalization of both the seeker and the Absolute in the East contrasts with a progressive personalization of both in Christian quest.
Ultimately, the East is focused on nonpersonal Being, the West on a personal God.
Ultimately, the only thing accepted as "real" by Eastern "knowledge" is the all-unity of Being, which resolves all distinctions and which rational consciousness conceals by seeing division everywhere and disregarding the fundamental oneness of things.
Human understanding is not something that generates an illusory multiplicity and conceals true nature's undivided unity, but something that shows us a genuine, God-created multiplicity, and allows us to perceive the divine in various forms and on various levels. At the same time, the child-father image that is used to convey the nature of the Christian's relationship with God is not really that of a relationship in which ego and transcendent deity are entirely separated.
Surely the East affirms the world's multiplicity as well? And is the notion of an illusion-spinning consciousness really something inherently Eastern - and not perhaps an insight of universal significance, to which the East has simply paid more attention?
If we compare the conceptions of reality and the religious instincts of East and West in this way, the positions are clearly incompatible. Similarly, two opposite movements cannot coincide in space and time - any more than breathing out and breathing in?
But what if the relationship between East and West were really the same as that between breathing out and breathing in? Breathing out and breathing in are dialectical poles in the breather's life-rhythm. In this sense, everything that lives is something that breathes.
Perhaps, indeed, the earth should be thought of spiritually as a mighty breathing process. Surely it might be seen, entire and in all its constituents, as breathing, living itself out, developing and driving toward an ever higher, ever subtler wholeness in the polar movement of two life impulses, a polar movement that is reflected in the relationship of Eastern to Western spirit, just as the relationship of male and female is reflected in every human being. This image, I believe, is a fruitful one - and indeed not simply an image.
Yin And Yang
What do we mean by Yin And Yang? We mean the convergence and coexistence of two primal principles, in which the whole of life embodies, disembodies, and rembodies itself in its own vital forms as they enter and pass out of being. Every form that exists is generated and impelled to distinct and complete realization of itself by Life.
Every movement toward form is balanced, however, by a countermovement back to the All-One, which contradicts all individuation and fixation of forms and draws them home into itself. And so every advance into the particular is matched by a retreat into the unity that dissolves it. In human beings, this movement appears in the interplay of male and female, paternal and maternal, heaven and earth, begetting and conceiving, creative activity and redemptive inactivity, willing and accepting, bright ego-world consciousness and dark unconsciousness, world-ego, and God-infused true nature. But human life is always both at once.
At this point, the true self is nothing but the All-One and thus identical for all human beings - indeed all true natures.
We can also say, however, that the All-One manifests itself as it really is in the individual, unique true nature of every one of us. Life commands us, not to dissolve individuality in the All-One but to realize Individuality in the "person."
Charged with energy and radiance that point to presence from the Absolute he or she comes to master in full awareness of having been freed from the puny ego's clutches - daring at last, as it were, to be fully himself or herself.
Absolute absorption of the Absolute into the here-and-now body. Here-and-now body affirmed as something that reveals and mediates the divine self and not as something that contradicts it.
Whenever we realize a new form of personal being in the yang's upswing, we must have the courage at once to throw everything we are, have, and believe into the yin's downswing.
Again and again, we must dare to surrender all the hardened products of imagistic consciousness to those impenetrable depths in which images and forms fade and disappear. We can rely on being repeatedly lifted from those depths and carried into a new form of personhood - a higher human stage that is free and responsible because it is ever more a part of otherworldly Life.
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Exercise
Not something we "do" but something we allow to happen. It means listening, hearing, obeying, surrendering to a process and admitting a new reality that touches us in ourselves and in everything around us, calling on us to change in a very special way, and impelling us to do so.
Must be aligned on the numinous and must preserve a special alertness that ensures that our "feeling" for the Absolute is constant. Develop the special extrasensory sensitivity to perceive the absolute quality in relative phenomena and to see this quality as expressing their real essence.
Without understanding what is happening, Being touches us. Suddenly, without warning, we feel strange. We are wholly present, totally here - and yet not focused on anything definite. In a peculiar way, we feel "round," "closed," and yet open as a mighty inner fullness reveals itself. We seem to be floating and yet move surely and steadily on earth. We seem to be absent and yet are totally present and filled with life. We rest wholly in ourselves and yet are related to everything on the deepest level. We are raised above everything and at the same time within everything, connected to everything and tied to nothing. We feel that we are being mysteriously led and at the same time free.
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Experiencing The Numinous
Transparency as openness to the numinous, in which the Absolute reveals itself in special moods, qualities, and impulses, particularly means openness to those motive, mandatory, and transforming energies that enter us from the other dimension, make us over, and enable us to operate in a new way. When we have the right permeability, the Absolute determines and enters us with dynamic force.
Sometimes it touches us as a gentle summons, imperceptibly drawing or pushing us on; sometimes it hits like a thunderbolt, hurling us out of and beyond ourselves, or pitching us into the unknown depths.
In the archer's gallery, the judoka's hall, and the rooms where ritual swordsmanship is practiced or the tea ceremony performed, there is always a danger in the air - the danger of perishing with the old ego; but for that very reason, the air is also charged with the promise of new being.
As long as we identify with the worldly ego, we are constantly sacrificing Being's nearness and our own transparency by defining the things that preoccupy us at any given moment.
Opens our inner eye and ear to the depths of the world's true nature and shifts our attention from merely objective phenomena to "valencies" which the Absolute softly irradiates.
The mature vision, which sees through the carapace of worldly forms, comes from a faraway dimension. In the same way, serenity rooted in the Absolute communicates itself to other people too, and makes them permeable to the Absolute by allowing true nature to emerge and the world-fearing ego to fade out.
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Triunity of Being
Being touches in three ways: as absolute plenitude, as order, and as unity - of which the human correlatives are gladdening strength, feeling for form, and love.
Our purpose is to serve the otherworldly in the world and accept that mission. Just as reason's ultimate purpose is to clear the way for something that transcends, so human beings are fully, successfully human only when they mediate the superhuman in everything they experience and do.
Everything we are is reflected in everything we experience. Noise, music, pain, scents affect us in total sense, touch the chords of our wholeness and set them vibrating.
It gives us a sudden sense of freedom, and in this freedom there are three elements - gift, promise, and summons. The gift is the fullness of Being, as it forces its way into us; the promise is the promise of a higher Life; and the summons is the summons to prepare ourselves for it.
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The Numinous And The Senses
Cultivating the senses in a way that increasingly opens to Being's presence by sharpening and refining our ability to detect the deeper dimensions in all-sense qualities.
Our task today is to take these insights over, eliminate their elitist character and make them generally available to the growing number of people who have heard the call and whose innate developmental or individual destiny and maturity have brought them close to the point where the world-ego can and must surrender its hegemony, and they themselves begin to serve the Absolute consciously.
It is joy in living that first reveals absolute fullness to us. "I delight in living," Meister Eckhart said, particularly when we experience it directly as bubbling root-energy, as maturing effective penetrating power, and as liberating warmth.
Bathed in the glory of its radiant colors and sounds, constantly, surprisingly remade in the interplay of its forms small and great, full of tension and danger, but also and always full of promise. This radiant fullness of being, is experienced as burgeoning life, as an urge to be up and doing, as motive energy and dynamic force, as vitalizing breath, as coruscating, resounding, scenting, tasting, driving, impelling, warming, alluring, and liberating infinity - all of this comes through our senses.
In this consciousness, primal life images and principles may be revealed to us - and yet are mysteriously, brightly, illuminating clear to us in their all-determining significance. When this happens, we ourselves are the order we experience, and the experience itself is radiant and powerful precisely because it is not something we have, but something we are.
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Meditation
Meditation also leads to relinquishment of all the well-worn paths and rigid structures that stand in the way of maturity, renewal, and primal action. Surrender of the created wakes the uncreated in ourselves.
No longer held in check by the self-seeking, angst-ridden ego, it reveals itself joyously in consummate achievement and performance, which are no longer "done" but flower unaided from the depths, and are thus genuinely creative.
Develop an overall attitude and consciousness in which the forms we are given to realize are repeatedly stripped of the veils of habit and conceptual significance, and are enabled to touch us directly.
The "fullness of Being" is always experienced as a sustaining, vitalizing, and renewing energy that seems to defy all the limitations and perils of here-and-now existence. Light that dispels the darkness of contingency, revealing the essential and eliminating the irrelevant.
We, too, are radiant in this sense only when we avoid conformity, compromise, stereotyping, and routine, and succeed in being repeatedly, newly present in the here and now from our individuality's creative center. "Right" form always gives us the freedom to this, whereas "good" form which is merely copied and assumed robs us of that freedom.
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Maturity And Old Age
The fruit of human maturity is a beneficial light that a person radiates without "doing" anything (or better, that lies beyond activity and inactivity).
In which we become windows of creative energy, ordering brightness, and redeeming warmth of the divine light that is our life's true center.
I shall never forget an experience of this kind that I once had myself. A friend was dying after a serious operation. When I entered his room, one look told me that he was dying. He started talking about a lecture that he was due to give a fortnight later. Behind everything he said, I had a clear sense that he actually knew that none of this was true. I took my courage in both hands and said, "My dear old friend, instead of thinking about your lecture, I think you should put it all behind you and start thinking about the point that lies beyond life and death. Yes," I repeated, "the point that lies beyond life and death."
The effect was electrifying. He closed his eyes. New life came into his face. Its ashen color was replaced by a rosy glow. A kind of light seemed to shine from it. Then he opened his eyes and, with an expression of infinite peace on his face, gave me his hand and said simply: "Thank you." Then he closed his eyes again, and I left.
Here was a man who was not afraid of dying, and had the maturity to prepare for it consciously and calmly - and his dying was being spoiled for him. Nurses came crowding round his bed with equipment and instruments to prolong his merely physical life for a few extra hours.
Why, when their time has come, are people not allowed to die in peace?
