The external pursuit of truth is a waste of time

Returning from the Steady Hand Pour House (my local coffee shop) I kept hearing faint, hardly audible musicchoir music to be exact. I couldnt locate its source. I even went up into my attic. I checked my portable radio. It was off. The computer was silent. I kept searching for the source of the music. Then I realized my iPhone that was in my right pocket was playing the music!

I said to myself, there has to be a blog here. Yep, there was. It is all about looking within after youve spent a long time in the external pursuit of truth, obviously not getting anywhere.

So what does looking within actually mean? It is not about just listening to ones internal dialogue or dealing with ones emotions, lets say trying to calm them down. In a way, this is still external. Even sitting in zazen is external. Real looking within is more about seeing or beholding the very substance of our thoughts.

As I keep stressing in these blogs, we are intrinsically the absolute substance (i.e. Buddha-nature). But heres the problem: we dont recognize ourselves in a phenomenal mode or the same, in antithesis, which includes this human body together with its psychical life which also includes thoughts, internal dialogue, mental images, and emotions.

Yes, were clueless unwakened Buddhas wandering (samsarana), going from one illusion to the next without seeming end.

The way out of this mess is by looking within, that is, by deep introspection. This means that all phenomena has a limit. While we may think that there is only birth and death, what is really happening is there is an ongoing rise of phenomena followed by its cessation and then a return-to-self or as a physicist might put it, we enter zero-phase for a split second. Then the cycle begins anew. As you, the reader, might guess at this point the properly trained Buddhist adept doesnt miss the zero-phase. The adept yokes with it. His whole being suddenly becomes illuminated as a result. The adept just hit the spiritual jack! pot! Thi s is Zens transmission of Mind to Mind or the awakening of pure Mind to itself (bodhicittotpada). From here the adept then enters the path to Buddhahood, which constitutes a huge magnification of this initial awakening (bodhi).


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