Crisis in Consciousness Chapter Two
Crisis in Consciousness Chapter Two:
Zen and Liberation or The Importance of Total Denial
Zen may be true, but is it necessary? And if so, for what and for whom is it necessary? It may be a need with the Buddhist, or with the individual who has a penchant for exotic cults; but is it essential for ordinary human beings seeking liberation from sorrow? For if Zen is Life–and this is how the author sees it–do I then still have to bother with it? For as little as I can avoid Life, can I avoid Zen, and any conscious preoccupation with the word “Zen”, or what has been said about it or in its name, must be superfluous and unnecessary.
On the other hand, if Zen is not Life, but a mere fragment of it, a special discipline, or pattern of action, it cannot be true. Then it is just another “ism”, an invitation of the mind anxious to find security, or it may be merely an intellectual pastime. In that case the question starting off this chapter would not arise at all.
To inquire from a particular point of view, according to a certain “ism”–whether Communism, Roman Catholicism or Zen, is immaterial–is no inquiry at all; for what I find will in some way be dependent upon my premises. Moreover, it is not Zen either.
It is important that the reader be fully aware of the contradiction involved in the last paragraph, on the verbal level. If Zen is the Nothingness of Life, then what more is there to say? Then surely, the moment I utter one word–that is, a word about it–I have betrayed, I have cut up the Wholeness of Life. And is it not this which is taking place in the world today and has happened from time immemorial whenever an individual caught a glimpse of the Truth and tried to communicate it to another?
Because only very few understood and kept tongue-tied, the Truth was so-called “passed on” by the “followers”, and in the process “interpreted”, that is, twisted and stepped down, so that it was no longer Truth at all. Thus Zen as an “ism”, was born, with its philosophy, its meditation exercises, koans, etc., to be greedily snapped up in the twentieth century by the ennuye intellectuals of the West, who are ever looking for some new stimulant, some new fad to cover up the barrenness of their minds and the emptiness of their hearts. And so it came about that Zen Buddhism became a factor in increasing the confusion in a confused world.
Now, the person who really clearly perceives this, is at once free from all flirtation with words, isn’t he? Having seen that all intellectualization, all speculative philosophy, is a betrayal of what is true, he will have none of it. To him the issue is not whether to embrace Zen, but to live totally, to face one’s immediate problems with intelligence, knowing that this intelligence cannot come so long as there is a dependence on authority or the following of a system.
To cling to Zen, or to any other technique, approach or circumscribed path, is to deny Life, which is a pathless land. To find this Life, to discover whether there exists anything beyond thought and experience, one must deny Zen as well as any other school of thought; as Krishnamurti once expressed it so pointedly: “You can only find everything by abandoning everything.”
The denial of everything that stands in the way, i.e., this whole intellectual process of analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, must be made with passion, with intensity, which springs from an instantaneous perception of the fallacy of any positive approach. Thus there is only the negative approach, which–as must now be clear–is not merely the opposite of the positive approach. Nor is it an “approach” in the accepted sense of the word because it is not a movement in time, not progressive, but it is the seeing of things in a flash. The negative approach means the destruction of all false values in one’s outlook on life. Let us first do that, before seeking for “positive values”. Maybe then we shall find that all “positive” values are false—“values” being ideas or ideals–and that their total denial brings into being a positive state which is not a reaction to the false–a form of being which may be said to have “virtue”. But the above implies that what is referred to by the word “state” is far from static; it is a “being without continuity”: the dynamic process of denial, which requires a great deal of energy as passion and alertness.
This revolutionary approach to an investigation of true and false values cannot be learned from another; it cannot be mastered through the acquisition of information, which is adding to one’s store of knowledge and therefore the cultivation of memory. It comes into being the moment that thought becomes aware of its own conditioning, and thus of its incapablity of ever freeing itself. After all, to find out if there is the Eternal, the Unlimited, the mind must first be limited, have destroyed its own frontiers, for can the limited mind ever find the Unlimited, the Immeasurable? And how can the mind destroy its frontiers when it does not even recognize them? There are really two separate questions involved in this problem, namely: can the mind know its own limitations; and if so, can it then proceed to destroy these limitations?
If we go into this problem for ourselves and experiment a little, we shall discover that the mind can become aware of its own limitations; and that this very awareness signifies at once the destruction of these limitations. So in order to go beyond thought, I have first to go strenuously with thought as far as it will go; and to pursue thought in this manner to the very end, I should be able to think straight, with accuracy and patience. In this awareness comes to light the chain of cause-and-effects leading to the exposure of the mind’s conditioning: the seeing that whatever the mind does is from its background and is therefore rigidly determined. This perception is the first stepping into freedom, but it is also the last step; it is truly an explosive shattering of the prison of the mind: the first of the First and Last Freedom.
