There’s something to being on the highway for this old mystic that is a gateway for insight. It’s been that way a long time. Visual stimulation is probably the biggest trigger for human response and the movement while driving and seeing others around you, going and coming, passing and being passed is certainly fascinating and expanding. It’s Saturday morning and this mystic is on his way to volunteer at the local Buddhist festival, driving down the freeway. I wonder about my fellow travelers on the road and what they will do for the day, and perhaps most importantly, their experiences for the day. This includes myself. Saturday, especially for those that work weekdays, often is a day of errands or a day with special purpose. The light entering my retina is translated into pictures and this evokes a response. In Buddhist philosophy, the mind is considered the sixth sense, with thoughts and mental phenomena considered its objects. Just as the five physical senses perceive external objects, the mind perceives internal mental objects like thoughts, memories, and emotions. So, imagine all those people in all those cars, using their senses, including thought. Now, as it turns out, on this particular Saturday, one of the Zen teachers is also leading a day of Mindfulness, with check in online. While this mystic is not participating directly, this was in the back of his mind.
I see “people” on the highway mostly just as cars. It is thought and past conditioning that opens up an internal dialogue. How odd, these carbon-based life forms, essentially life-support vehicles (of what, consciousness?), moving in car vehicles, with both being composed of earth elements and ultimately powered by the fossil energy of the sun. It can get strange in a hurry. Now, imagine each individual, or individuals, in those cars involved with their own sensory processes, some just grooving on music, others deep in thought about “problems” or maybe just planning lunch. Some harbor anger, maybe at the big black truck tailgating them, or perhaps someone is having an argument. There are a myriad possibilities. Shift scales and move to the small, down to the quantum scale. The momentary highway scene loses meaning – poof it is gone. Same if we expand out, until earth is light years away. Again, a whole different world. But one thing remains at all three scales and every intermediate one, namely the very sense of Being. It is very subtle and in Buddhist philosophy is called suchness. As it is beyond thought, it is hard to describe. Mindfulness is the process of being the observer of all six senses and opening up to this suchness. It is a way to “see” more than the ordinary and very limited world. Anther technique, Zen meditation or Shikantaza, just sitting, contains an exercise of letting go of thoughts, or non-thinking. Anything we can think up, at least in terms of philosophy is not direct insight or Kensho, rather a dualistic mode capable of perpetuating a small separate self, even if the thought is a most excellent one!
Within this suchness many things will occur over the 24 hours of the day, both seen and unseen. Not all of them will be pleasant. For example, due to natural laws one may have a car accident, or perhaps a heart attack – and your car will kill things. There is the ever-present dance within the world of phenomenon. But for most of us there will be a series of basic experiences triggered by either the sense objects or thoughts that will have the flavor of either neutral, positive or negative. While we do live in a mysterious world and universe, so much of our “reality” is wrapped up in our mental processes, namely reacting to the sense objects and thought objects and essentially being jerked around by them feeling very small and separate. This mystic has talked previously about how we fabricate our world and create a mental model of it. With mindfulness, seeing around the edges and through the cracks opens our perspective. Just directly seeing the actual thing…. And all the people I see today, including this old mystic, contain and are influenced by a world of conditioning, namely inherited karma and karma we produce every time we react to a sense or thought object. While I can never know “you” your actions will influence me! It’s a giant pool table of interacting billiard balls! So, please be kind and considerate! 😊 Suchness can be kind and loving.
My volunteer assignment at the Buddhist festival was directing various Buddhist groups where to drop off and set up their booths. Now, these are people who have trained in mindfulness. Over the course of an hour and a half I interacted with everyone from twinkly-eyed masters, to happy hippy Buddhists, to older attentive and kind lay Buddhist practitioners. Not everyone seemed mindful, however. A few just drove right by. Maybe they were so mindful they already knew where to drop off their stuff. Others came late or exhibited some level of anxiety. I loved the relaxed ladies who were followed by their non-Buddhist husbands in vans or trucks. Good karma! The point here is that all of us are shaped by conditioning developed through living in this realm and this in turn shapes our interactions with others. It’s a work in progress. Oh, and suchness includes thought, but don’t label it as suchness. Who are we, anyway?
Little Known Mystic 