Bobby. wrote on Mar 12^th, 2014 at 10:57pm:

Here a few quotes of his ... that perked my interest.

The spiritual master Adi Da used to tell a joke. A man gets lost driving in the country outside of London. He pulls up to a yard where an old farmer sits in a chair. "Can you tell me how to get to London?" asks the lost driver. The farmer thinks for a moment, scratches his chin. Finally he says, "You can't get there from here." So with enlightenment. You can’t get there from here.

In Zen Buddhism, you are not supposed to want enlightenment; you are supposed to sit in zazen merely to sit in zazen. This is called having No Gaining Idea. It is coveted. Ah, but how to gain No Gaining Idea? If you ask Zen masters they are prone to saying, "Just Sit Zazen," not unlike the old Nike slogan, "Just Do It." In fact, Zen master Seung Sahn liked to exclaim exactly that to his students. "Just Do It!" For the record, this is much harder than it sounds.

So why, exactly, are we not supposed to want enlightenment? I mean we are talking about “the peace supreme and infinite joy,” as the Dhammapada puts it. What's not to want? The main reason, as far as I can tell, is that wanting enlightenment is dualistic, meaning that enlightenment is already our True Nature. The sixth patriarch, Hui Neng, said our True Nature is like a mirror upon which no dust can alight. The problem is that we forget this, and on a truly epic scale. Then we project it out onto some objectified future ideal, which we call enlightenment, nirvana, liberation, realization, and try to attain it. But trying to attain something that’s already your True Nature is, evidently, like trying to exist.

Hence, of the True Man of the Way, Zen master Rinzai says, “Not even for a fraction of a moment does he aspire to Buddhahood.”

But this dualism business isn’t the only problem with wanting enlightenment. We also apparently don't have the remotest idea what enlightenment is. In fact, if there's one thing everyone in the enlightenment racket seems to agree on, it's that enlightenment cannot be conceived of.

In the face of enlightenment’s utter inconceivability, I’ve simply made up my own version, a collage of images and emotional associations that have filtered in to me over the years. There’s video footage of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi from when I was six years old (my parents got the family into Transcendental Meditation because The Beatles did it), his eyes glittering with a secret impish light, hands fluttering lyrically in the air. There’s the TV show Kung dam you, with David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Kane, who I was pretty sure was enlightened. These and a hundred other odd, disparate fragments make up the goulash of my emotional associations with enlightenment.

Yet, for all the hubbub about not wanting enlightenment, the world's spiritual traditions, including Zen, seem full of equally fierce exhortations that you should want enlightenment very badly. Zen masters always seem to be saying things like, “You must want enlightenment as urgently as you would want a fire in your hair to be extinguished.”

Oh, there’s one last problem with our desire for enlightenment: Evidently it’s a complete lie. None of us really wants it at all. In fact, according to lots of great masters, enlightenment is the last thing we want. Because somewhere deep in our hissing reptile brains, we sense that enlightenment will have the nasty side effect of annihilating us, and far more decisively than the quaint hiccup of physical death.

More to the point, enlightenment reveals that the whole “me–who–wants–to–be–enlightened” never existed in the first place. To become enlightened is to awaken to the mad truth that the precious personas we've been parading around as all these years, maybe all these lifetimes, are fictional constructs. Smoke and mirrors. In other words, we ourselves are all sizzle, no steak. To awaken is to realize this. Of course, the Heart Sutra and pretty much everything else in Zen Buddhism have been telling us this forever, but apparently it’s quite a different matter when your entrenched ego actually senses its own imminent and non-theoretical demise.

(w)ww.tricycle.com/blog/getting-there-here

Each of the levels of this Great Mandala of the Cosmos represents a quality of energy, or light. In each of the rings or portions of this Mandala that move out from the central Whiteness are infinite numbers of possible worlds and kinds of embodiment. In this gross plane in which you now exist, you are at the outskirts of the Great Mandala of the Cosmos at this present moment. There are grosser conditions of awareness, grosser possibilities, than the present one, which may be called "hells", or degraded states, or states of embodiment less than human. They may appear as forms of worlds other than the present one, as well as states in the plane of this gross world that are not necessarily apparent to vision.

You are presently existing in the outer frame of the Great Field of the Cosmic Mandala. Unless there is responsibility for attention, there will be no movement closer to the Center. Unless there is Divine Enlightenment, there will be no permanent residence in the Center, or the Source, of the Cosmic Mandala, and there is no permanence anywhere but in the Source. All possibilities, all forms of embodiment and experience in the planes of manifested light, or the rainbow of the Cosmic Mandala, are temporary.

It is possible to live a long time in any plane. It is even possible to live a long time in this gross world under certain conditions of Yogic transformation. It is possible to appear as an ordinary human being in this world for hundreds or thousands of years. Typically, people live for just a few years, but they could live longer. To live longer is not to Realize Divine Enlightenment—it is simply to live longer. It is possible to realize a state of relative equanimity, in this world or in any other world, and to live more peacefully, more happily, more pleasurably, more sensibly, more sanely. Even so, so to live is not itself to be Divinely Enlightened, nor is it a permanent condition. Sooner or later life comes to an end.

Subtler worlds exist closer to the Center of the Cosmic Mandala. Even in the golden-yellow ring there are subtler worlds closer to the Center. In the blue field, there are all kinds of worlds. In general, to live in any of the worlds closer to the Center is to live in a condition that is more benign, with greater powers and with a greater range of phenomenal possibilities, than the usual life in this gross world. But to live in these worlds is not to be inherently and Divinely Enlightened, Free, or immortal. Nor would immortality be desirable in those planes, because there is no Ultimate Happiness there, even in the state of equanimity.