Our western viewpoint is that of standing on a river bank watching the river of time flow by..watching the world over there change…and we try to get in sync with this moving treadmill, but we cannot as long as one foot stays on the riverbank so we can have an experience of being in sync with the river…You see the problem?

We must know when we are in sync, otherwise, what’s the point of arriving if you cannot experience it, get the reward of the effort…so we keep one foot on the riverbank that watches the river of experience so we can experience ourselves being in the river…

If we let go or remove our foot from the stable river bank, and fall into the river…we will knot have an experience of it…in fact, the feeling of a separate self won’t be there…so from the point of view of the separate self…I must jump totally into the river of realtiiy, but I cannot jump into the river of reality…

So we are stuck in the waffle house that tries to do both at the same time, by doing everything with half a mind…With one foot outside of what we are doing…

The irony is that Sinatra is a great man/a bad man…Both at the same time…The good and the bad are One in the joke, so Sinatra cannot say Rickles is calling him good or bad, because they are the same…so in order to get out of the double-bind where he cannot either praise or blame Rickles…he laughs…The laughter is the only way to break through the double-bind where he is good/bad/bad good…Catch 22

The spiritual irony of Zen instead of pushing you to break out in laughter pushes you to break out in Kensho, or Awakening…the mind that does not rest on good or bad…

When good and bad are the same, the choosing mind, the separate self that is the chooser if trapped and cannot move…but it must…so it chooses the death of laughter or Kensho…

When the Zen master says, holding up a stick: if you say this is a stick, I’ll hit you with it; if you say it is not a stick, I’ll hit you with it. Now…which is it? Speak or I’ll hit you with it.

You see the dilemma here…Instead of leaping or breaking through, we say, oh, how cruel Zen is…All Zen koans are break-through spiritual jokes…

The ego or SOS, sense of self, is a viewpoint created for the scientist at the end of the Middle Ages when the European man broke out of the thousand-year Holy Roman Catholic Church and its hermetically sealed mythology that has suppressed Greek ideas.

Suddenly it’s a brave new world ripe for exploration from a viewpoint that is outside of nature, outside of its own nature, and outside of reality itself…Instead of being aware as the world as given by the Bible, one could be aware OF the world as known through reason and logical thinking…Reason replaced faith, and the viewpoint shifted, and a new consciousness was born that integrated all this incoming data that was suddenly released..

Instead of being imprisoned in a Church mythology, man as a self was not portable and could explore the world from his viewpoint that was outside of the world, like a surgeon is outside of his patient…Man could now operate on nature with his new tools of accumulating scientific knowledge and the scientific method that worked everywhere..
.

But, alas, this useful viewpoint became crystalized as the Ego, a sense of self that was believed to be real, a free individual…but a false free individual who is forever dissatisfied with his feeling of being alienated from his own nature…So this man, this ego mind must keep seeking and searching, expanding forever in order to find his lost soul….

Zen story….When Emporer Wu asked Bodhidharma who he was, the sage said: I don’t know and walked off…

Did that mean that he would know who he was given more time to meditate? Or is he saying I am unknowable? Western science is built on the belief that given enough time and computer power everything is knowable, everything can be made conscious, which means knowable…This was Freud’s belief also…What’s in the unconscious must be made conscious if you are going to be healed and normal..

But in Buddhism, this is not the case; while the external world is certainly fair game for knowing, for transmuting everything into knowledge, when it comes to who I am…when I know who I am, I am then fixed and stop growing, and Life is change, life is growing, so when I stop learning who I am, I am walking dead…But can I arrive where I know who I am? We call this awakening…so is there an end or finality in awakening where time stops?

Awaking has no beginning and practice has no end; practice has no beginning and awakening has no end, (Zen)

So the Zen trick of awakening is that awakening is life and life is impermanence or change —things don’t change, things are change—therefore, we don’t awaken, we Are awakening, and that means there is no way to know who I am….I am a mystery to myself…the undefined…the unborn…always a discovery…free…

It’s ironic that we are always already free, yet we must keep searching for freedom…but..wait…maybe what we must do is not find freedom but activate the freedom we always already have…

When we get a new credit card with all this power, we have to call in to activate the card, or else it’s no good…so we have to activate our freedom through the practice of freedom…It is the doing of freedom that creates freedom…not looking for it or remembering it…This freedom is Faith Mind…the activated faith that I am always already free…and this mind is what we can say is a creative mind that is always seeing the situation fresh and for the first time…

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time. (TS Eliot)