08/18/97 2:25 PM when i woke up this morning wu were on my mind worries appeared I saw them as ripples on the surface

of a vast ocean after the usual preparations sitting in the deck chair sipping sweetened milened coffee smoking a camel light in the warm sunlight worries and ripples a phone call came earlier picked up the ZEN doctrine of no-mind opened it at the bookmark where I finished reading yesterday nad found this (O good friends,) what is there for wu (of wu-nien, unconsciousness) to negate? And what is there for nien to be conscious of? Wu is to negate the notion of dualism and to get rid of a mind which worries over things, while nien means to become conscious of the primary nature of Suchness (tathata); for Suchness is the Body of Consciousness, and Consciousness is the Use of Suchness. It is the self-nature of Suchness to become conscious of itself; it is not the eye, ear, nose and tongue that is conscious; as Suchness has self-nature, consciousness rises in it; if there were no Suchness, then eye and ear, together with forms and sounds, would be destroyed. In the self-nature of Suchness there arises consciousness; while in the six senses there is seeing, hearing, remembering and recognizing; the self-nature is not tainted by objective conditions of all kinds; the true nature moves with perfect freedom, discriminating all forms in the objective world and inwardly unmoved in the first principle. So much for worries

But here we are again with the typical amorphous and ambiguous terms that abound in Buddhist and Zen Buddhist literature. What the fuck is Suchness what the fuck is wu-nien I had an idea about this while laying in my bed at night. It comes in the form of a symmetrical harmony between the stories of the evolution of science, the evolution of art, music, technology, architecture, biological life, human culture and the story of evolution in spiritual awakening. We can expect to find that in the field of the unameable (but lets give it a try and use the words spituality, consciousness, perception, awareness, philosophy, psychology, religion - with a word of caution that none of these really accurately represents what we are trying to identify here but the harmony between all of the terms does - in other words it is that is common to all of them) that there is an evolutionary stry just as there is science and all areas of culture and in biological life. Human consciousness evolves. Growth is apparent - yet of course it is a growth that sort of disappears when we envision things via the idea of simultaneity - of past present and future as a whole process. This suggests that the ambiguous terms of Buddhism which tend to leave us confused because we dont know what they mean and cannot grasp the meaning of the terms and statements in the Buddhist literature; are in fact there precisely for this reason; to defy the reaoning, dialectical, intellectual, logical type of state of consciousness and to germinate a vision of the Self Nature directly rather than by logical reasoning. There are frequent references to terms like mirrors and original mind and self nature and enlightenment, to emptiness, suchness, awakening. The logical mind receives these words and tries to determine what they mean while the envisioning capability of the mind sseks to assemble a vision that isnt constrained by the rules of logic just as dream visions are not so constrained. So contact with terms

like these tends to set up a vision of the unborn, the face before birth, the sound of one hand clapping, a perfect mirror that reflects all, emptiness, no-mind, no thoughts, unconsciousness, the original nature, the pure and undefiled. What I am getting at is that perhaps as consciousness evolves (in time), as human culture evolves we find new ways to express our experience and that this Buddhist way was originally developed a long time ago but new ways to awaken consciousness to its nature continue to develop and one thing we know is that our consciousness comes up with radically new ways of seeing things even if the Buddhist want to focus on unchangeability. For me I find great illumination in the ideas of simultaneity and germination of consciousness from the confined seed of sensory perfection; from the view of the finite ststae of consciousness as a thin slice of the whole and of the awakened consciousness as that which is integrated from the whole. There is not any negation in this view and that creates a paradoz when I try to harmonize my own experiences with those of Buddhism which seem to insist on emptiness and no thoughts. The most important thing in all of this is the awakening of the consciousness of the wholeness of the true self nature. If this is experienced by Buddhist via a course of meditation and the emptying of the mind by imagining the emptying then great. If it is experienced by others without then great too. I suspect that what we might have here in the Zen Buddhism of Hui-Neng is like a new growth or a new way of envisioning or awakening the transformed consciousness - rather than by endless meditation and a slow process of awakening of consciousness, an abrupt and sudden method. In this view, both the techniques of sudden and gradual probably work but perhaps along comes Hui-Neng, the illiterate and as an illiterate he rejects what is written and everything intellectual and proceeds on a revolutionary course and comes up with a new way. By teaching about sudden enlightnement, when a disciple can stop reasoning about it and allow the envisioning capability to actually begin to envision

abrupt awakening the vision of abrupt awakening begins to form just as when a mould is build and molten metal is pured into it........................ In this metaphor it is the energy of awareness that is the molten metal and the teachings that are the mould so we might say that that the molten metal of awareness is pured into the empty space within the mould of te teachings and in this sense the teachings are designed to fit around the outside of the energy of awareness and to shape awareness. This tells us something about the depth and accuracy of the knowledge of Buddhist teachers about human perception. The Buddhist tradition appears to me to be concerned with knowing the nature of perception The Tao tells us that it is formless and thoroughly mysterious. It is quite uncertain but that doesnt mean that we cannot know anything about it even though everything we may know about it is subject to uncertainties - such as what works in one region of time and space maynot work everywhere just as in science the Newtonian conception of the Universe worked in a confined region of time and space but not everywhere. Variability.