"But if you really
understand that Zen, that buddhist idea of enlightenment is not
comprehended in the idea of the transcendental, neither is it
comprehended in the idea of the ordinary. Not in terms with the
infinite, not in terms with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal,
not in terms of the temporal, because they're all concepts. So, let
me say again, I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary
everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being
schoolteacherish, and saying 'if you were NICE people, that's what
you would do.' For heaven's sake, don't be nice people. But the
thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework of a certain
kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of
liberation will blow the world to pieces. It's too strong a current
for the wire. So then, it's terribly important to see beyond
ecstasy. Ecstasy here is the soft and lovable flesh, huggable and
kissable, and that's very good. But beyond ecstasy are bones, what
we call hard facts. Hard facts of everyday life, and incidentally,
we shouldn't forget to mention the soft facts; there are many of
them. But then the hard fact, it is what we mean, the world as seen in an
ordinary, everyday state of consciousness. To find out that that is
really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy, well, it's
rather like this:
Let's suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight,
as seeing light. There's a Zen poem which says
A sudden crash of thunder. The mind doors burst open,
and there sits the ordinary old man.
See? There's a sudden vision. Satori! Breaking! Wowee! And the doors
of the mind are blown apart, and there sits the ordinary old man.
It's just little you, you know? Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In
one blink of your eyes, you've missed seeing. Why? Because here
is the light. The light, the light, the light, every mystic in the
world has 'seen the light.' That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter
than a thousand suns, it is locked up in everything. Now imagine
this. Imagine you're seeing it. Like you see aureoles around
buddhas. Like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante's
'Paradiso.' Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear
light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's beyond
light, it's so bright. And you watch it receeding from you. And on
the edges, like a great star, there becomes a rim of red. And beyond
that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see
this great mandela appearing this great sun, and beyond the violet,
there's black. Black, like obsidian, not flat black, but transparent
black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the
_yang_ comes from the _yin_, more light. Going, going, going. And
along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so
tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it, so piercing
that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then along with the
colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down,
down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so
vibrant that it turns into something solid, and you begin to
get the similar spectrum of textures. Now all this time, you've been
watching a kind of thing radiating out. 'But,' it says, 'you know,
this isn't all I can do,' and the rays start dancing like this, and
the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out, and the textures
start varying themselves, and they say, well, you've been looking at
this this as I've been describing it so far in a flat dimension.
Let's add a third dimension; it's going to come right at you now.
And meanwhile, it says, we're not going to just do like this, we're
going to do little curlicues. And it says, 'well, that's just the
beginning!' Making squares and turns, and then suddenly you see in
all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little
subfigures are contained in what you originally thought were the
main figures, and the sound starts going all different, amazing
complexities if sound all over the place, and this thing's going,
going, going, and you think you're going to go out of your mind,
when suddenly it turns into... Why, us, sitting around here." - a snippet from Lecture on Zen, by Alan Watts
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