Love Itself - in Form and the Formless

     “A number of years ago, at a retreat in Ithaca, New York, Leonard told me that he was going to retire from music. Then a few years later, he came out of retirement, and he came out with a CD that he called Ten New Songs … The whole album is dedicated to, 'Our Teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi.'
     The works of Leonard Cohen, are known all over the world, of course. But what isn't known is that they are peppered with inside allusions to the teachings of Sasaki Roshi. The fifth cut on the Ten New Songs is called "Love Itself" and it's Leonard's version of the teisho, or Zen talk, of Sasaki Roshi. Unless somebody pointed it out, you wouldn't realize that.
     Sasaki Roshi has only one talk: There is zero. But zero is inherently unstable because it consists of all of the positive and negative in the universe. Therefore, inevitably it breaks apart into expansion and contraction. Expansion only knows how to expand. Contraction only knows how to contract. In between, they create a vibration called space, and that vibration is further nurtured and matured in the cleft between them, and then it evolves into a feeling thinking self that either knows it just came from zero, in which case we call it an enlightened self, or it doesn't. If it knows where it just came from, it knows to give the positive that it received from father back to father, and the negative that it received from mother back to the mother. Therefore, it disappears. There's nothing in between father and mother anymore. And they come back together to create a new state of zero. Oh, you don't understand? Okay, well, I'll try to say a little more. Then he says exactly the same thing again. And then, I see you still don't understand. Well, let me see if I can say some more. But you see, each time he says it, he lives it. He could say it forever. He lives that cycle and if you sense that he's living that cycle, you could listen, you could hear him say it forever.
     You're going to see in this song, there's a refrain. It imitates the style of Sasaki Roshi, but there's more to it. Sasaki Roshi talks about this little room of space where father and mother vibrate, and that's — They come into contrast, you reunite, come into contrast, reunite. He always describes it as like a private little room where there's only the two sides of the Source.
     Many of you have experienced that there are different flavors of Flow, different flavors of impermanence. I look upon the expansion and contraction as the fundamental flavors. When a wave comes up on the shore, the top of the wave is expanding, the bottom of the wave is contracting, and in the cleft as they're sheared apart is born all this foam. There's wavy Flow, there's vibratory Flow, which is analogous to the foam, but underlying it all is this expansion and contraction.
     Often, the most prominent experience of Flow, or change, or impermanence, is a kind of scintillating misty bubbly kind of Flow and it's very blissful, often. And your whole body and mind and the external world can dissolve into it, and it's like trillions of little motes of dust sort of just shimmering. Some of you have had that experience. Because it's blissful, there is the danger of being attached to it. But if you don't become attached to that, then it all sort of flatlines into zero. All the little vibrations go back to the Source. Father and mother come together, and there is shalom bimromav, the peace of heaven.
     If having that champagne bubbly experience of Flow is like being made love to, in a sense, what's beyond that is the Gone. And what's beyond the Gone? Well, after Gone, there's no place to go but to come back, to self and world, but to see it in a different way, for having had that experience. And to do this over and over and over again until there is no fundamental separation between the experience of the Source and ordinary experience. They're on a continuum. There's not a duality between the deepest transcendent empty timeless spaceless cessation, there's not a duality between that and any ordinary experience. They're on a continuum. That's living nirvana. There's nothing in between one's humanity and that which is beyond the human. And that would pretty much describe the world of a master.
     There is the formless, there is the form, and then there is them not being fundamentally separate. In the end, if you want to experience what Sasaki Roshi calls true love, hontō no ai, use that expression. It says everybody wants true love, but they don't realize that true love is zero. True love is what happens if you're willing to let go of the most celestial form of love other than true love, so you'd have to even let go of the massage of the spirit.
     Understanding this, you are in a position to completely understand Leonard's song called 'Love Itself.'"
     Shinzen Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSv5ELuujjs&list=PLngmRO3nU7wLESfjzlpE3STD4YqFvq5pE&index=32&t=4s

 

Leonard Cohen - 'Love Itself'

 

 

Power Phenomena in Meditation & Shamanism

     A pointer towards deepening meditation practice & liberation:

     “In Zen, if you buy into the content of 'makyo' experiences (power phenomena), it’s going to shunt you away from the direct path to liberation. 
     However, my take on it is informed by that, but also it’s a little broader. These power phenomena are basically the wish list for new age spirituality: encountering entities, gods, ghosts, ancestors, angels, remembering former lives. And they map onto a lot of shamanic experience culturally around the world. But the good news is that if those phenomena are happening, then that’s an indication that you’ve dropped into a deep level of consciousness, so that’s a good thing. It’s actually a kind of feedback to tell you that you’re going deep. 
     So in Native cultures, this would be called the Spirit World, and of course it’s very real to those cultures – so there are the Spirits let’s say. And then there’s what we might refer to as the Great Spirit or the Source, which in Buddhism would be called the Dharmakaya. And I would take that as that primordial perfection, that formless doing that molds ordinary and extraordinary experience, moment by moment. 
     So if you’re encountering spirits, it means that you’re getting close to the Great Spirit. That’s good. But the Great Spirit is formless, so by paying attention to the energy flow that envelops the manifestation of those unusual phenomena, you’re keeping yourself pointed towards the formless Source that is the Great Spirit. And so in terms of traditional Buddhist vocabulary, by observing the impermanence of the power realm experiences, that’s pointing you to the force that molds them. We can draw a metaphor from physics: force is proportional to acceleration. So as you’re watching how these things sort of vibrate and undulate, you can get a sense that there is a formless activity of consciousness that is molding these spirits. That’s the same thing that molds the ordinary so-called physical world. And by doing that, you ride the spirit world directly down to the Great Spirit. 
     But if you get either frightened or enchanted by the contents of the spirit realm, then you could go off in a horizontal direction and not realize it, and so you stop going deep – you just go out into the power realms. 
     Our remote ancestors practiced shamanism. And the spectrum of classical shamanism around the world is a spectrum of angles. One angle is you go out into the power realms and you don’t go any deeper into purification or get closer to the formless. Those people become one kind of shaman that’s sometimes called a Witch or a Sourceror or a Power person. Then at the other extreme are the people that just deconstruct, deconstruct, deconstruct, until they find the no-self, true self, formless Source of it all. And that extreme is sometimes traditionally called a Holy Person. And then there are an infinity of oblique angles, where your growth has a component of interest in the content of power realms, but also a component of movement towards the formless. 
     And so that spectrum is the real old time religion of this planet. It’s what most people did for their spirituality for most of human history. So it’s something to be honored from that point of view, but it’s also something to be understood.”
       Shinzen Young Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview #2: https://batgap.com/shinzen-young-2/

From Egocentricity towards a Wise Heart

       Do we really want instructions on how to fear our hearts?
     "Over the last twenty years, the political systems of the western world have become increasingly divided—not between right and left, but between crazy and non-crazy. What’s more, the crazies seem to be gaining the upper hand. Rational thought cannot prevail in the current social and media environment, where elections are won by appealing to voters’ hearts rather than their minds. ..." from the product description of the book with the (misleading) title: "Enlightenment 2.0" by Joseph Heath.

     "But interest can easily be corrupted by the mind into intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity is the mind's attempt to understand through language and reasoning what life is about - as opposed to the primary curiosity that is attempting to silently merge life into itself. The mind's (intellectual) curiosity builds a body of knowledge that can become a source of self-esteem and personal power that is strongly tied to the image of us, the knower. Meanwhile, the primary curiosity of discernment moves toward absolute contentment and stillness."

       Rodney Smith. Awakening. A Paradigm Shift of the Heart. Shambhala, Boston, 2014.

The Next Step from the Top of a 200 Foot-High Pole

     "Lost within the dependency on any structure is the sacred formless, infinitely available once form has been released.

     There is no bridge between form and the formless, and all form can ever do is establish a readiness to surrender to the formless.

     Is our present spiritual form ever going to let go of us? Will it ever say, 'Job well done, you are finished and ready for the formless,' or is that readiness going to have to come from us - with the understanding that the 'feeling of readiness' may not be part of what it means to be ready?"

       Rodney Smith. Awakening. A Paradigm Shift of the Heart. Shambhala, Boston, 2014.

 

Tangled Garden   www.tangledgardenherbs.ca