ARTICLE- One Singular Creation

As human beings we make judgements based on our perceptions. In most cases these are self referential, about what is me and what is not me, these are my people and these are not my people. Such distinctions are inherently prejudicial. We prefer and desire pleasure, happiness and joy, and don't want anything that might usher in their opposites. All our primary likes and dislikes, are built upon dualities - Me & You, Self & Other, Good & Evil, Love & Hate, War & Peace, Pleasure & Pain, Beauty & Ugliness.

These are themselves surrogates for the primary human experience of Life & Death. All things appear and disappear, are born and then die. Our capacity to love is predicated upon it, we hate it when things disappoint, disappear or die. We become easily attached to particular circumstances that when they change we feel emotionally robbed, we are bereft, we grieve, we mourn their loss, we get angry, we are in denial, we become depressed etc.

Our human tendency to take everything that happens to us in relation to the external world extremely personally, is the primary source of our mental suffering. Modelling our experience around a range of dualities, causes us to mis-perceive what reality is actually like.  Reality - that world that exists outside of us -  holds no opinions about us, is indifferent to what we approve or disapprove of. We are not the centre of its world.

Humanity is bound by a fixed period of life, the length of which no one knows. What existed of us before life ( if anything) and what will exist of us after life ( if anything ) are both beyond our knowing. In The Genjo Koan, by 13th Century Zen monk Dogen, he contemplates the relationship of life with death through the metaphor of 'firewood and ash'. Although there is obviously a causal link between firewood and ash, they are in very different states of existence. They are in this sense cut off from each other experientially, as are life and death.

Dogen concludes his exploration of the 'firewood and ash' metaphor with the statement:-

"Life is an instantaneous situation,

and Death is an instantaneous situation.

It is the same, for example, with Winter and Spring.

We do not think that Winter becomes Spring, 

and we do not say that Spring becomes Summer."+

We have a general sense for what the four seasons are like as experiences. Though we have our official starting dates, there isn't really a clear point where one season finishes and another begins. Even four distinct identifiable seasons has become more unpredictable with climate change. What Dogen is suggesting is that our lives and deaths are similarly inexact seasons of being.

From the experience of those that I will leave behind - one moment I am alive, and the next I am dead. All set into a landscape of sadness and grief. However, from my experience it will be different - one moment I'm alive and then I drift off into the woozy wa wa of who knows what? Will my experience post death, be a complete cessation of consciousness or something else entirely? This is beyond everyone's current experience to know or predict.

There are stages through which firewood passes before it becomes ashes. Similarly being alive passes through stages, changes in the body, mind and spirit that incrementally shift your experience over the years from youth to decrepitude. To the moment when organs falter and fail, and mental faculties falter and fail, and the body falters and fails, and then the body dies, and self consciousness  dissolves and fades away.

We know what happens to the body post its moment of demise, it decays into its constituent elements. What we do not know is what, if anything, happens to consciousness.  It is often presumed that self consciousness vanishes with the death of its bodily host. Consciousness appears not to be a personal individual possession. Buddhist doctrine implies that something survives, but it would be a mistake to believe that it's a recognisible being linked to us, surviving in the form of a distinct consciousness. And Dogen suggests as much in the ' firewood and ash' metaphor:-

"The firewood, after becoming ash, 

does not again become firewood. 

Similarly, human beings,

after death, do not live again. 

At the same time, 

it is an established custom (within Buddhism) 

not to say that life turns into death."+

In other words Life and Death as a misconceived duality, causes us to end up perceiving our existential situation solely in linear causal terms, that one thing will lead into another. Buddhism uses the term rebirth (as opposed to reincarnation) in order to counter this, to double underline that though something is reborn, this is in no way to be seen as continuation of a previous existence.  The past has its influence upon the future, but the future cannot return to being what has past. Ashes cannot become firewood again.

Consciousness is the experience of one 'instantaneous situation' as Dogen names it. Because we are self conscious, we compile these instances into a series that form a distinct life story, our personal history. But in reality we continue to have just one singular experience of one instance. A whole stream of these conscious moments is what we decide to call a life.

 

Because we live and then die, we interpret reality as things coming into creation and then being destroyed. If we take on the idea that there are only 'instantaneous situations', then a dualism of creation and destruction no longer makes sense. Destruction is a heavy duty emotionally loaded word, and represents a very human centric perception of loss and willful violence.

If you remove the human desire to see a dualism, there is only ever one singular moment of creation, one following another. Each momentary flux of creation is a re-configuring of reality. Things change, adjust, transform, to each freshly arisen circumstance. Things appear and things disappear, they arrive and they leave. It is all a flux of creation. To be alive is to be part of the flux of creation. To be dead is likewise.

Circumstances create this creation, and these are in a state of perpetual evolution. There is a person that experiences being alive and then is dead, and whatever persists after that death is not different to or separated from this perpetual state of creation. Human kind's urge and need to create is a reflection of this too. It is all a constantly changing, and you could say evolving state, that Zen Buddhism calls - Thusness.

Now you might want to call that constant state of creation God if you wish. However we chose to imagine it, there appears to be an imperative spiritually to surrender the self to it. Taoists surrender to an enigmatic state that cannot be intellectually grasped called The Way. In Buddhism, it is referred to by a number of phrases, Buddha Nature being but one. The Self tends always to be perceived as an obscuration. It's the thing preventing us from aligning our being with, or some might prefer 'communing' with, the state of Enlightenment, of God, of seeing the way things really are.

+ Taken from The Shobogenzo, The Genjo Koan, 

Translated by Nishijma & Cross, Published by Windbell