Our faith comes in moments; our vice habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hope of man, namely, the appeal to experience is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. We must explain this hope. We grant than human life is mean; but how did we find out it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is this universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless?

The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis a residuum it could not resolve.

 Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river which out of regions I see not, pours for a season its stream into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and pull my self in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the vision come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay The Over-soul written in 1842 is an accurate description of the self I call human. I am physical energy filled with power from a source that eludes my physical senses. I develop stories and beliefs about the nature of my own multi-dimensional reality and live through the stories that are lodged firmly in my convictions and beliefs. I'm not sure what it is that motivates me to develop the external manifestations of my beliefs, but I have been doing it for thousands of linear years.

The stories change and the people and places within them change in form and substance as I become more aware of my own energy. Stories written thousands of years in the past have a deep rooted truth, but may be covered with the fragile beliefs of the writer. I believe them regardless of their frailty, because my physical senses justify their existence through religion or science. The metaphysical aspects of these stories are woven through each page, but are lost in the translation of human ego.

The history of man as Emerson points out is only partially recorded. The river of man is studied, but the water of life is overlooked and taken for granted. Within the water lies another fragment of unrecorded history that is pack in molecules of mental enzymes, which release themselves in physiological time, as well as linear time. I look at the river and discount each drop of water. Each one is an element of the whole, while being a whole itself. I fail to incorporate my inner senses in the act of physical knowing fearing I cross into the forbidden territory of unknown aspects of my self, even though I feel those aspects every moment. The hopes I feel in those moments are my inner senses expressing a blueprint for me to follow. That blueprint is the ethereal water of wisdom that is a portion of my entity in its completeness. A portion in completeness is a description of one self which is focused on multitudinous realities which express manifestations from a hidden source. Following the blueprint I am no longer a surprised spectator, but an aware component in the action of consciousness. I sense a portion of my own completeness and in that process a drop becomes a sea and I expand using moments as waves of awareness. 

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

The mind is like a crystal ball with no color of its own. It is pure and perfect as it is. But as soon as it confronts the outside world it takes on all colors and forms of differentiation. This differentiation is in the outside world and the mind left to itself shows no change of any character. Now suppose the ball is placed against something altogether contrary to itself and so becomes a dark colored ball. However pure it may have been before, it's now a dark colored ball and this color is seen as belonging from the first to the nature of the ball. Even those who knew it when it was pure now pronounce it soiled by seeing it so and will endeavor to polish it, to enable to regain what it has lost.

That thought is a fundamental belief of the Northern School of Buddhism, which was started in China sometime in the 7^th century. The English translation of those thoughts may not be the exact meaning of Zen, but it does show that consciousness does take on the color and the shape of beliefs.

If I substitute the word consciousness for mind and use the word ego as a metaphor for the outside world, I can begin to understand some of the non-physical aspects of my own being. Inner consciousness can be considered pure and perfect in its own action and it has no physical color. Ego consciousness however is the buffer between the inner and outer world and it absorbs whatever color I choose to believe. Color is truth within vibration and my beliefs create different vibrations, so my ego is continually changing in color. The color of my ego attracts similar colors and I experience those attractions in some way. My inner consciousness is not changed by these vibrations, but my body consciousness is.

Body consciousness is the consciousness that exists within every cell, molecule and organ in my body. My memory is actually stored in my body consciousness; the brain is just the interrupter for those thoughts. The ego and the body consciousness create the reality that I experience, so if I vibrate in dark colors or low vibrations my body consciousness changes and vibrates at that frequency. The inner consciousness continues in its pure state and will raise my vibrational level at any time, once my ego asks for help. Trying to polish my inner consciousness is pointless, but using it as the polish for my ego and body consciousness is essential.

Misunderstanding the nature and action of consciousness creates the distorted beliefs that fuel my choices and I experience probabilities from the action of ego. My ego is always connected to my inner consciousness, but has the free will to ignore it. This consciousness scenario is the foundation for the diverse collection of belief structures that exist physically. There are endless vibrational frequencies that create different colors of ego consciousness.

The blend of the inner, body and ego consciousness is the polish that alters the color of my vibrations. Complete unity of consciousness creates a crystal color, but the crystal color is not the purpose of physical existence. It eternally exists in its own awareness and I am a whole part of that awareness. Physical existence is the experience of different vibrations in order to widen my awareness, using contrast as the catalyst. Crystal clear is always my vibration, but the desire to know my self in other vibrations is the impetus of conscious action in physical form. Every color is a vibrational lesson that is a crucial aspect of becoming. Becoming is the nature of all consciousness.

I am a crystal clear ball but choose to experience other colors and I become those colors to express different qualities of my self. In that process I expand in awareness and never lose what I already have. Purity and perfection are always in a state of becoming. Qualities of my consciousness accept each color and transform it into energy which continues to expand. Nothing is ever lost in awareness.

No drives, no compulsions

No needs, no attractions

Then your affairs

Are under control

You are a free person.

Chuang Tzu wrote those thoughts in Chinese over 2300 years ago. The concept that less is more is now age thought at its finest. Just the idea that I could live without feeling the pressure of modern life is a goal worth achieving, for no other reason than to just be. I know I live in a free world or at least that's what I have been educated to think; the definition of free contains different aspects of human experiences and beliefs. Certainly I do have freedom as long as I conform to the rules that society has enacted and set in motion. Society is me and a group of me's who live to pursue happiness and abundance, and society's definition of freedom is necessary in order to accomplish those desires.

The belief system that has been established as free, in terms of political unity and social righteousness, is nothing like the freedom that Chuang Tzu thought about. It is like daylight and dark. His words are so foreign to my thinking that they are hard to understand. How can I not be driven or compelled to push and fight in order to get what I want? If I left my affairs take care of themselves, I would have nothing but broken dreams and loneliness. I would watch the world pass me by, as I sink in the quicksand of doing nothing. Life would be unbearable and my misery would overshadow any thoughts of changing my situation. No action is what I call death in this modern society and that is the end of everything. Some say it's another life, but that doesn't count because this is reality; the reality of power, of righteousness, of control and conformity. My freedom depends on my ability to believe in that social structure. Without it I am nothing but an outcast; a misfit that is off balance, confused and distorted.

Chuang Tzu didn't buy into any of that. He believed that I innately create my own freedom. It is not something to be earned by external acts of compliance; it is within me and always will be. By believing that I must think and act a certain way to achieve freedom is an illusion created by me. I consider my self a human and only believe what is humanly real. I forget there is more to me than my physical system and I live strapped to chair of a three dimensional world.

I begin to incorporate Chuang Tzu's approach to physical freedom by becoming aware of my beliefs.

 Joseph Campbell the 20^th century mythologist said it best:

Follow your bliss.

Bliss is awareness. My inner consciousness is the doer and the driving force on the road to bliss. The external world is nothing more than a picture of my own thoughts and beliefs. I create it in order to expand in awareness. Bliss is a taste of another consciousness, which is the true nature of my being. It's understanding there is an aspect of pleasure in all the things I create. This is what's known as effortless effort; the spontaneous activities of inner consciousness manifested physically. My body consciousness dissolves into this aspect of self which is free; all striving and doing drops away in this stream of awareness.

Lao-Tzu, who lived before Chuang Tzu, explains this inner doing without doing this way:

Less and less do you need to force things,

Until finally you arrive at no-action

Where nothing is done, nothing is left undone...

The Master does nothing

Yet... leaves nothing undone.

Bliss leaves nothing undone, but does everything freely. When I dip my self freely in bliss I find freedom.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

We are supposedly living in the same world, but who can tell the thing we popularly call a stone lying before this window is the same thing to all of us? According to the way we look at it, to some the stone ceases to be a stone, while to others it forever remains a worthless specimen of geological product. And this initial divergence of views calls forth an endless series of divergences later in our moral and spiritual lives. Just a little twisting, as it were, in our modes of thinking, and yet what a world of difference will grow up eventually between one another!

D.T.Suzuki was born in Japan in 1869. He was a professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto. He was the most respected 20^th century authority on Buddhist Philosophy and Zen Buddhism. Reading his work is certainly a mind opening experience. Just a little twist in a belief and the world changes and everything in it become distorted or sane depending on how I look at a stone, or anything else. My dualistic reality becomes a battle field over words that communicate my beliefs. The hinge on a door can swing in or out depending on how I hang the door and so it is with my belief structure.

Suzuki mentions a monk in the same essay. The monk says:

Drinking tea, eating rice

I pass my time as it comes;

Looking down on the stream, looking up at the mountains,

How serene and released I feel indeed!

My perceptions paint a reality and I live that reality through my choices. Everyone is connected in that behavior, but drinking tea for me may not the same experience as anyone else. I sit eating rice and think and those thoughts become things that are unique to my experience; the same tea and rice are different in the thoughts and perceptions of others. When I accept those common acts without thought, I enter the world of Zen or enlightenment and never leave my seat. When I look at a stone and sense its consciousness, I find Zen sensing me in the common act of being. When I hang a door to swing in and am at peace with the hinge and the door, Zen is the wind created by these two energies.

I could call those experiences by a different name and still sense the oneness of no-thought. I could use my Western religious training and call them the Christ consciousness or Middle Eastern thought and called them the greatness of Allah. I could call them the sign of a new savior or find something in the bible that matches my thoughts and I would still experience Zen without identifying it specifically. Names lose their meaning in enlightenment. The no-thought and how I perceive it creates a different experience for each believer. But as a human connected to a society, I want to merge all thoughts into one common experience and call it a name that denotes compliance and that's when Zen and no-thought move down another stream and over a distant mountain.

There is a collective consciousness, but within that energy there are different energies that create experiences that are not shared in physical reality. There are inner enzymes that are the catalyst for consciousness to expand in non-physical reality and then manifest in other forms, and I experience them without naming them.

 Suzuki goes on to explain:

Even in the twinkling of an eye, the whole affair is changed, and you have Zen and you are as perfect and normal as ever. More than that, you have in the meantime acquired something altogether new. All you mental activities are now working to a different key which is more satisfying, more peaceful and fuller of joy than anything you ever had. The tone of your life is altered. The spring flowers look prettier and the mountain stream runs cooler and more transparent. The subjective revolution that brings out this state of things cannot be called abnormal. When life becomes more enjoyable and its expanse is as broad as the universe itself, there must be something quite healthy and worth one's striving after its attainment.

How serene and comfortable I feel knowing there is no-thought. Expansion and awareness are achieved in my uniqueness. Becoming the air between the bubbles or the flutter of an eyelash is the action of consciousness that exists without uttering a word.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/