I mentioned before that I am reading (very slowly) Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the way of being time. I’ve read the first section and it is super easy to read, with a wonderful gentle voice and presentation style and it is shaping up to be the most difficult book I have ever tried to understand. In fact I am so frustrated with myself that I need a moment to vent ———

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

———

OK. That done let me tell you the main problem. I cannot help but slip into thinking of being as a thing. For me, being, no matter how much I like Katagiri’s approach, remains a noun.

The problems I am having are the same problems anyone has that attempts any deep change, and seeing this way is most definitely a big change. Most people, I suspect, have no idea how intransigent their conceptual frameworks are to any suggestion that they might not be inevitable and just how things are. So much of our day to day reality is tied into our frameworks that even shaking the cage let alone changing it is profoundly disturbing.

Let me back track for a moment to explain (hah!) what (I think) Katagiri is saying. The basic idea is that there is no substance in the way our history suggests that substance exists. Even for someone like Plato who was really het up about the Ideal non corporeal really-real, matter is still a form of absolute. Substance might be conceived of as secondary to the idea, passive and just a receptacle for the really-real but it was there nonetheless. I mean god (or some absolute entity) made it right, so it had to be there.

But that’s not at all the assumption underlying Katagiri. Substance has no permanent identity. So what, you may ask, is at the bottom of the universe. Arising only.

And here is where it begins to go bad for my poor head. The nice, stable, firm universe with a material foundation has been replaced by kiya – arising only. This arising only appears as being, the universe in which you and I walk. We are arising only and so is the sidewalk. (That bit I adore.)

But what is it! My mind rebels. The thing is it isn’t an “it” at all. See, this is where my noun-centric cultural origins have no purchase and become willful like a 2-year old in the presence of something it deeply wants but cannot have.

The problem is that arising only is pre-conceptual and cannot be thought. The whole idea of impermanence is that the existence of the ultra-brief moment (60 or so moments in the time it takes you to snap your fingers according to Katagiri) is gone before our minds can grasp it. And in each of the multitudinousness moments being arises and subsides. This the source of our suffering. Our minds cannot grasp this arising reality because it is much too fast for the slow workings of our conceptual, language driven mind. It is like a flicker in the corner of the eye. We know it is there, but no matter how fast we turn it is gone before we can see it. If one lives ones life trying to see it, it drives one barmy.

Cool way to see reality don’t you think?

Despite the fact that arising only cannot be grasped, it can be experienced. Spiritual practice, in this case zazen, is a methodology by which, in the shared arising only of teacher and student, arising only can be experienced.

Here I have greater purchase. Given my own experiential origins, this I know. One term for it is that oceanic feeling, the non-existence of boundaries when the sense of ego or self does not exist and one can feel the universe just as one feels the wind curling around ungloved hands. So I don’t doubt the fundamental purpose of Katagiri’s philosophy, but that isn’t my main reason for reading it. I am compelled by such a different way of framing what is experienced.

It’s annoying how difficult one’s passions can be. But back to the thought system.

What I am coming to understand about what it is like to be a normally functioning adult who is without language resonates with my experience of arising only. I am not speaking of Genie here, but someone like Ildefonso used to be. Language is so overwhelmingly loud in our day-to-day experience of life that digging under the noise to the quiet body of experience that we all walk with ceaselessly is horribly difficult. I was lucky in that the abnormal wiring of my brain has made it relatively easy to trigger that rapture. Still, I don’t really think what we want is to live that way. Damn hard to work with no sense of self. Ildefonso cried when he discovered the power of naming. My niece, on discovering the same, went perfectly still, her body tensing then releasing with the wonder and power of the idea that a hand shape and movement meant all those green things hanging from the apple tree. Humans need language to operate at full capacity. We need a limited, bounded universe to enable social interaction. What we really want is an on off switch that allows us to inhabit arising only (our bodies) when we need to put off the yammering mind. Or even better, two sets of ears or hands, one that lets us language away and one that is tuned to the silent roar that is arising only.

But anyway, this last bit is entirely my own peregrination around what Katagiri has to say. You can see that I have no choice but to understand arising only based on my own experiences and intellectual history. And of course this means that I am almost certainly misstepping since I am deeply noun-centric. Oh well, we can but start.

Qunqun!

On to section two.