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Kensho: A Modern Explanation
Posted March 16th, 2009 by Greg Mayers in Zen Trans-Traditions Realities
“When Wanshi ShÅgaku (Hung-chih Cheng-chio -1091-1157) was asked, 'How is it that substance is lacking in the reality of purity and Void?' he replied: 'It is the instant of origin where refinement has not yet made any marks, and the moment when a message has not yet been conveyed.’” (Recorded Dialogues of Ch'an Master Ta-hui)
Kensho View – No Outside or Inside
Kensho is a Buddhist term for enlightenment. Although a Buddhist term, the reality of kensho is not confined to Buddhism. Meister Eckhart calls it a “breakthrough”. St. Simon the New Theologian calls is: “waking up” inside Christ body.
Most of the knowledge we have of kensho is testimonials from people who have undergone it. Some of the ways the kensho occasion is reported is: “I wasn’t there.” “There was only the tree.” “I was the tree.” “A sense of utter liberation and bliss.” “It is overwhelmingly positive.” “It’s like being drunk, but on reality.” “It’s more real than real.” In a way it is about as helpful as a couple showing you the pictures of their recent vacation. While they might be enthusiastic about their reminiscence of their inner vacation experience, you, being on the outside of it, will hardly be able to share in their gusto.
There isn’t a good explanation of this pivotal event except from a medieval Buddhist perspective. “Kensho is usually translated ‘self-realization.’ Like all words that try to reduce the conceptually ungraspable experience of enlightenment to a concept, this one is also not entirely accurate and is even misleading, since the experience contains no duality of “seer” and “seen” because there is no “nature of self” as an object that is seen by a subject separate from it.” (The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen; Shambhala Publications, Inc.; Boston 1991.) This description is about as satisfying and helpful as saying that Paris is a European city that is known for its lights but it doesn’t have more lights than any other European metropolitan area.
I hope to give a clearer explanation a bit more contemporaneous and relevant and thus more accessible to this current age. In order to do this, it will be beneficial to clarify the ambiguous term “knowledge,” since it is obvious from the examples above that experiencing a vacation and recalling a vacation are two different kinds of knowledge.
Knowledge:
Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know and all the various intricacies of knowledge. The theory of knowledge is also known as “disambiguation,” which is a very good way of saying it since that word “knowledge” gets all tangled up when used in daily life. I say I know mathematics, I know my dog, I know it will rain today and all of those ways of knowing are different enough to make knowledge confusing or ambiguous. So let’s see if we can’t untangle the knotty problem of knowledge and bring some clarity and understanding to it.
In our human experience there are at least two major dimensions or spaces in which we live: the exterior and the interior. It is obvious that there are things exterior to me, all the objects I can observe around me at this moment; and things that are interior to me, such as my feelings, thoughts, etc. For example if I look at the exterior I see the brain, if I look through the interior I see the mind. Furthermore both of these dimensions have an outside or outer view and an inside or inner view. If I want an exterior outside view of the brain, I can open the skull and peer at the organ called the brain. If I want an exterior inside view of the brain I hook up a bunch of electrodes that record the electrical impulses of the organ through an EEG and read the record, or I run the brain through an fMRI and watch which parts light up.
Both the outer and inner exterior tells you something about the human event, knowledge which is very useful for many different purposes. But it doesn’t tell you everything. There are some things that the exterior dimension can’t detect no matter how accurate the instruments or how long one gazes at the organ. Staring at the organ or reading an MRI record won’t show you attraction, beauty, truthfulness, love, repulsion, sadness, streams of consciousness or the thought process. Those are interior realities.
You can know beauty, truth, attractiveness, goodness, etc. All those intangible qualities are real and have real effects but only as an interior reality. You can appreciate the interior from the inside which is to say, how it feels, its mood and the “sense” of it. Or you can comprehend the interior from the outside; what it’s made of, what its parameters are, what events compose it, etc.
Take the example of dreaming at night and analyzing the dream the next morning. Dreaming is an inside interior view and analyzing your dream is an outside interior view. Take the example of engagement with art. Listening to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is an interior inside view while analyzing the musical structure of the score is an interior outside view. Both outer and inner are interior views. Dreaming and listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is an insider’s view while analyzing your dream in the morning, or the structure of Vivaldi’s composition is an outsider’s view.
To summarize it, knowledge of the exterior maps things that occupy physical space, knowledge of the interior maps things that don’t occupy space but have an effect nonetheless. Furthermore, an outside interior view shows the boundaries of knowledge, while an inside interior view show the horizon or the landscape of knowledge.
Outer Views’ Patterns and Pasts
There are two qualities about an outer view that is true of all outer views, whether of interior or exterior dimension. Outer views give us knowledge of patterns. Another word for patterns is habits. Secondly, all knowledge of patterns is knowledge of the past. Because nothing travels faster than light and light travels at 186,000 miles per second – there is a lag time in all knowledge.
Patterns allow us to see through them – like templates – to the cosmos in which we are. The present moment called NOW inherits the patterns from the last moment, which inherits the patterns of the pervious moment, and so on. (This was Alfred North Whitehead’s seminal insight, which he called “prehension”.) The older the patterns or habits, the less wiggle room they offer for variances from the pattern. So the present moment is experienced thru layered habits of ever increasing age and ever increasing stability. And it is a great advantage. First of all the cosmos doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, starting at square one in each moment (this sets up the conditions for the evolutionary process). And secondly it makes the present moment fairly predictable.
Except when it isn’t. There is one critical trait or characteristic of NOW that makes it distinctly unlike all past occasions; namely, this NOW before I can say or even begin to think “now”, has the unique trait of unpredictability. Unpredictability is another way of saying it is pattern-less or habit-less. There is something analogous to a thin creative edge in this occasion we name “now” – call it the leading edge of now – that is unformed or formless. It is influenced by past habits, but not determined by them. That leading edge is timeless and spaceless. Since time is the measure of change as Augustine says. No change – no time. Changelessness equals timelessness.
99.999999% of the time we feel or experience the world and life through the template of habits, and not just personal habits, but the vast array of impersonal cosmic patterns that determine so much of what we consider to be reality. Kensho is that occasion when consciousness spontaneously and unexpectedly breaks through the patterned givens in this moment into the thin leading edge of now’s formless creativity. Since that leading edge isn’t inhibited by the past or by patterns or habits, one’s vista is utterly free. (People who have not undergone kensho often mistake it for a satisfying or revelatory or intuitive insight. Insight is when the patterns fit together yielding a new understanding or view of reality. You see the patterns different. It is a new gestalt. Kensho is seeing an entirely unheard of reality, reality without habit or pattern. Instead of yielding new content and context, it is consciousness itself without content or context).
Leading Edge of Now
Here is the most important point. The leading edge of now has no outside since it has no patterns to define an outside. Since there is no outside, there is no inside either. There are no patterns – no inhibiting habits circumscribing Now. It is essentially liberated from the mold of the past and so it is unexpected. The way the Heart Sutra puts it is: Form is nothing other than emptiness and emptiness is nothing other than form. No outside and no inside – literally “not-two”. This is not an inner or an outer view. It is an entirely new and previously unknown and unanticipated “view”, a view-less “view”. This is kensho. It is what John of the Cross meant when he said in one of his minor poems: “I entered into unknowing… and when I found myself there, without knowing where I was I understood great things…I shall not say what I saw for I remained in unknowing…this is the finest sense of the essence of God.” It is without the dichotomy of inside/outside, but still interior. It isn’t that one’s molecules meld with everything else into a mushy mess, which would be an exterior reality. Rather one’s interior reality momentarily sheds all the patterns and habits that inhibit one’s interior view or consciousness.
This makes kensho liberating. It isn’t just thinking outside the box, it is being outside the box. It is consciousness as such free of all things, all events and all occasions and thus available for all things, all events and all occasions. What a relief! As Thomas Cleary describes kensho, it is the freedom to experience experience.
It would be forgivable to mistaken the kensho occurrence as the terminus or goal of a spiritual journey. Kensho is not the end of a spiritual practice. It is the beginning of a deeper practice. Kensho is followed by a long period of koan study in the Zen Buddhist tradition, which deepens, broadens and integrates the occurrence into the everyday life of the personal dimension. The practice over time establishes the kensho occurrence as your permanent state, available to you are all time and under all conditions.
Buddhists are geniuses in developing techniques, or technologies that herd us in the direction of this occurrence called enlightenment. What their technology does is have us become aware and look at the patterns until we are utterly free of them or we dis-identify from them altogether. Once we dis-identify with all the objects out there in our awareness, we discovered the “pure subject” or emptiness that has always been there all the time. We discover that subject “in here” and object “out there” are not-two. We would do well to take up the Buddhist technology.
Kensho strips away all patterns to allow for the first time that “pure subject”, which is no-thing at all, to come forth momentarily liberated of all habits. The discovery, since there is no outside and no inside, is that form is nothing other than emptiness. That is, all that I experience is emptiness and emptiness is all that I experience. Each occurrence reveals that form and emptiness, form and consciousness as such, are not two.
A Trans-cultural Occurrence
Although kensho is a Zen Buddhist term often translated as “enlightenment,” the reality the kensho occurrence discloses is not limited to Buddhism. To mention a few representative references to the kensho occurrence from the Christian mystical record: Meister Eckhart calls it a “breakthrough”; St. Simon the New Theologian calls is: “waking up” inside Christ body. It is what John of the Cross meant when he said in one of his minor poems: “I entered into unknowing… and when I found myself there, without knowing where I was I understood great things…I shall not say what I saw for I remained in unknowing…this is the finest sense of the essence of God.”
If we could say it another way, the kensho occurrence transcends religious and cultural conditions. It is rooted in the deep structures of the human occasion, as are the enduring teachings of all the world’s great religious traditions. These traditions are the repositories or vessels that carry the cumulative human wisdom, shaped by and into cultural surface structures for sure, but nonetheless reflecting deep human truths and reality.
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Science and Enlightenment
Posted May 9th, 2009 by Richard LaymanKnowledge
Where did you get your explanation of "knowledge"? I am not familiar with any of the arguments you presented as belonging to the study of epistimology. A brief glance at Wikipedia's page on epistimology didn't shed any light either. Your interior-exterior scenario is entirely relative. Your interior is part of my exterior, even if I am unable to directly perceive it. I can tell some things about your interior by cutting you open; by x-ray, eeg, or mri; by observation and inference; and, for the sake of argument, by mind reading. You may argue that there are various facts or aspects of your interior that I cannot perceive, but that says nothing about their reality as part of my exterior world, any more than any other limitation on my powers of observation in astronomy, particle physics, etc. You have only drawn an artificial dichotomy with very limited utility. In every domain of knowledge there is a horizon beyond which lies the as-yet-unknown. If anything exists beyond that horizon, is it more likely to be congruent or incongruent with what we already know? Congruent. The sky is probably still blue beyond the horizon. What is inside you is probably congruent with what is outside you. The laws of reality are unlikely to change radically at some boundary in your interior. If you believe that they do, your burden of proof is very, very high, like the burden on the parallel universe people.
Patterns and Pasts
You don't really say anything significant about patterns, habits, expectations, etc..
Prehension is no more profound than the fact that at some moment my head is already turned right or left and that will influence what I percieve in that moment and somewhat forward. The past predisposes the near future in many ways, but does not fully constrain it. You never suspect the Spanish Inquisition (wink to Barbi).
I don't see any difference between now and the "leading edge" of now. All this talk is imagination. There is nothing said here except perhaps that something can be "timeless and spaceless", but that remains to be demonstrated.
The Leading Edge of Now
More of the same. All you seem to say is than Kensho (enlightenment) is an atypical or "altered" state of consciousness to which you pin various interpretations without any real justification that I can see. Maybe you are having seizures.
You say: The practice over time establishes the kensho occurrence as your permanent state, available to you are all time and under all conditions. ...What their [Buddhist] technology does is have us become aware and look at the patterns until we are utterly free of them or we dis-identify from them altogether.
I am highly skeptical of this, and you offer no evidence. It sounds like "marketing" hype. In the real world, consciousness ebbs and flows, rises and falls, and passes through many stages and states. Some control of attention and other aspects of consciouess can be exerted by the individual--more with practice--but states that are associated with transcendence or contemplation do not become permanent (thank God) because we could not function in ordinary life in these states. Our ordinary states of consciousness are ideal for many situations and we would shoot ourselves in the foot to transcend them all the time. If you only mean to say enlightenment or Kensho can be ever-ready in the backgroud to be summoned at will, I still remain skeptical.
Go to https:// implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ and test your ability to control your unconscious associations.
A Trans-cultural Occurance
Yes, but culture influences the interpretations placed on the experience of altered states of consciousness. It would be very interesting to see if FMRI evidence could reveal neurological similarities between experiences of altered states across cultural lines. (By the way, I found this blog by searching for "FMRI".)
Richard
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There is no answer. There is no solution. There is only practice. (Anon.)