The Air Between the Bubbles

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.

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