Spiritual knowledge comes in two forms according to Taoism, the 'conscious' and the 'real'. What is believed to be true and what is actually true. Buddhism would couch this as relative truth and absolute truth. In recently re-reading The Book of Balance & Harmony I came across a paragraph I found intriguing. So here I'm going to lightly rummage around in it looking for golden nuggets.
Sages set up symbols as a means to point to traces
What are these symbols,? In a very broad sense they are any spiritual teachings, whether they be a meditation, an ethical practice, study text, ritual or ritual implements, concepts, beliefs or visualisations. These are all symbols that point at the traces. These traces being the elementary fragments of what is 'real' in our current 'conscious' experience, or are dormant within that 'conscious' experience, or are a 'skillful means' to take you to a place of receptivity to 'real' perceptions. Symbols and signs are meant to function as intermediaries between our conditioned perspective, riddled as it is with misperceptions, and pure unconditioned reality. They cross the gap between these. They are the raft to take you to the farther shore. After which symbols will no longer be of practical use.
Understand outside of symbols, and you get to the mystical.
When I read through a Taoist text or something by Dogen from The Shobogenzo, I cannot grasp it fully. Because its frequently written with the deliberate intent to misdirect or block you from deriving any intellectual certainty or satisfaction from it. Therefore I find myself oscillating between my conscious understanding and a feeling for something merely being hinted, implied or intuited in the imagery or the teaching. Whatever is being unconsciously communicated bypasses rational or intellectual tendencies. It speaks from the heart of the matter to the heart of our matter. My response often being an elated, inspired or fizzily intoxicated sense of understanding, that I can never quite put into words.
Symbols or signs, are what Taoism refers to as 'the mysterious pass' they can take you into the vicinity of a mystical perspective, of an insightful, more enlightened state. After any fleeting moment you are there, the heart races and the sense of knowing or perceiving something better, lingers vaguely. Eluding the clarity the conscious mind wants and grasps for. This is what I take to be 'understanding outside of symbols'. The longer you abide there, steering clear of analysing it, the stronger I imagine that felt impression would become.
You must find the intent of adepts outside words;
Zen talks about ' a special transmission outside of scripture' that 'does not stand upon words'. This is similar to what 'understanding outside of symbols' is referring to. But 'understanding' is not a given outcome, not contingent upon doing specific practises, rituals or studies. These simply fertilize the soil, making it suitable for seeds of insight to germinate in. Otherwise anyone could mechanically go through the motions of practicing them, and open sesame - Insight. They are not a car manual. The role of our intent as the driver is crucial.
It says ' find the intent of adepts'. So its not about copying in exact detail what past sages have done, but sourcing the spirit of their intent, will and volition within yourself. At some point this has to become 'real' by locating a depth of response in oneself, an intuitive feeling, that follows an undeliberated path. Little can be sourced just through close examination of the grammer and syntax of words alone. Spiritual paths in the end are experiential and intuitive. As likely to be found in the aesthetics of tone and sound, a gutteral utterance, the silence that echoes and ripples through a valley. Encased in voids and empty spaces. Its in the expression of lichen growing upon stone. Meaning lives in the sheer poetry of it all.
Originally the absolute has no sphere.
The absolute, well its a word with a dictionary definition. Its not really describing an actual experience, but an abstract principle. Absolute doesn't actually exist. It is in the realm of the 'real' beyond our 'conscious' understanding. We may have given it a name and a rough and ready conceptual framework, a sphere. But it isn't knowable through concrete analysis. Originally the 'real', the absolute, didn't have this sphere of understanding within which it is now couched and surrounded. It simply was. Something the Zen term 'suchness' is suggestive of. 'Suchness' expresses the chimeric nature of 'the real'.
To forget the symbol once you get the idea is still nothing special;
There comes a time then to start abandoning words and symbols, all conceptual frameworks, even descriptions of things beyond 'conscious' and 'real' understanding. Abandoning all these 'rafts' prematurely would be foolhardy idealism. You cannot speed date your way through 'the mysterious pass'. Any idea we may hold of special mystical states of attainment, needs to be left behind too. All the conceptual and imaginative things that once motivated our practice need gently to be dropped and forgotten. Its like arriving in a culture that is entirely different from our own. Imagine they don't even speak or understand English!
Forgetting even the idea is the ultimate rule
Any idea, concept or imaginative metaphor will form some sort of expectation, implied or simply stimulated by its very existence. From here on, none of these things will be of any help. Spiritual progress, so it appears is composed of a series of ever more refined levels of forgetting. Forgetting about things, forgetting about symbols, forgetting about the self, forgetting about notions of the absolute. Nothing will be how we ever imagined it to be. So let it all go, forget everything you might have once been told or believed was true. What you were told works at the beginning, will be useless in the middle, what seemed helpful in the middle is redundant by the end. Here Buddhist ideas of levels of sunyata inform what you perceive - eventually even emptiness forgets itself. As The Book if Balance & Harmony states in its concluding sentence:-
'Turn over the legs of nothingness, smash cosmic space to smithereens, and only then will you be done.'
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