“Real freedom is only possible when you are free of the need of it”.
David Ferguson
David Ferguson
Zen Master David in 2001 Boden, Austria.
David Ferguson
One of the most amazing discoveries of modern science is the realisation that what I say or think is determined by brain nanoseconds before consciousness realises what is happening. In other words what I say or think is determined for me before I am aware of it. Such a mind blowing revelation can be quite upsetting as it almost takes away the question of freewill. In other words everything I am doing is determined by brain, seems to destroy the sense that I exist and seems to create an understanding that in reality - I am just a robot!
In reality, separation between I and brain is only an illusion which allows an essential duality to exist, a subjective and objective relationship. I should point out what we are considering here is not a delusion, it is an illusion. In reality I or Me outside of brain is an illusion and has no separate existence outside of the movement of brain.
So if freewill exists and I am just a movement of what the brain does, then freewill must be a process of choice exercised by brain, as in reality there is no I separate to make that choice. So does freewill exist in the brain?This is a question which science is attempting to come to terms with and I have a feeling that whatever answer is produced most people will refuse to believe it. The thought that I do not exist to have freewill is more than most people can accept.
This question of freewill exists for the student in Contemporary Zen as well, but with the realisation that there is no one to have freewill the student is forced to confront the contradiction, that I appear to have choice but no one exists to have choice . This eventually leads to a realisation that brain will always decide on what is best for the survival of the human species, whether that is for the benefit of the individual or the group will vary according to the individual brain and its conditioning, in that sense it could be defined as freewill. In other words it would seem it is often the indeterminate choice based against brain’s need to survive which is considered as freewill and until science can give us a better understanding that is the one we use in Contemporary Zen.
How many times in life have you used the word ego and not really given much thought to what you mean. In literal terms it means a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance. In psychoanalysis it is part of mind between the conscious and unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity. So it looks like we are going to have to agree what it means and being the author of this essay I am going to arbitrarily tell you.
In the many methods of working with the brain around the world, the student sets about overcoming ego with the belief that by doing so it will be of benefit like it will create some freedom or enlightenment. In Zen this is seen as absolute nonsense as no one exists to overcome it.
The purpose of ego is primarily to give us a sense of existence called I to motivate us to survive and it does this in Buddhism in three important ways:-
1. IDENTITY:
My name is David and I live at Peacefields Retreat. I am a Zen Master.
2. POSSESSIVENESS:
This is my house, this is my essay and this is my book, this is my friend.
3. AMBITION:
I would like to become a great teacher, a better human being.
See if you can imagine any activity that does not fall into one on the above three categories?
Now what's all this nonsense about overcoming ego? Who could survive without any one of the above three? Can you not see this is an essential ingredient of living?
The question in zen is not about overcoming ego, but asking the question:-
"Who is attempting to overcome ego?”
So what do I mean when I say freedom? Not an idea of freedom, a concept of freedom, do not make the mistake of thinking that the freedom I am talking about is a method, because it is not. Any method we employ would depend on an idea that we had, or something that we had learned about in the past, someone else's idea of freedom, and that would be a distortion of reality, a limitation of totality. It would be a limitation of the present by the desires our brain had put on the place of the moment. So clearly we need a different approach to experience our life, as the freedom I’m talking about cannot be learnt.
The problem is you have made freedom a limitation by your own demand of it. You see freedom as a goal and it is not. It is the opposite to what you believe. Freedom is not a goal. You don’t have to attain freedom, freedom isn’t something you attain, it is something you have. It becomes limited because you demand something of it.
If I can put an idea of what freedom is, we could let go of all other beliefs. But then you are left with my idea of freedom. This would be just to replace one belief with another and then you are back where you started. It is the process that is the problem not the belief you pick up. But the only way you’re prepared to let go of one belief is if you find a better one that suits your understanding. So what happens, this is where it gets very serious, is as you pull away from one belief system as you scrap it, you feel very vulnerable because you have nothing to hang onto. Your life, your survival is at stake here as far as you’re concerned. You feel threatened because you’re facing yourself alone, perhaps for the first time.
There are many different analogies one can use to explain this aloneness. It is as if there are mirrors around the edge of the table and I am an ant in the middle. These mirrors are closing in on me, so wherever I move I only see myself. That is a frightening experience. There comes the death of ‘I’. But the death of ‘I’ isn’t how you imagine it. It is rather the death of the ambition of ‘I’. I have not met anybody yet who says they were very happy about the struggle, it seems to be a miserable experience. My own reaction was the worst three months of my life. What happened at the end of those three months, was I let go of the cliff — and I didn’t fall. I had to take on my whole ambition around this. I had heard these ideas of freedom, so what could possibly be the value of giving up something that has absolutely no value? We have got an idea of what freedom is. But the freedom I’m talking about isn’t an idea; it is an experience, an experiential reflection not a conceptual one.
Everything that we have deemed to be important in our lives, maybe even our spiritual search, we have achieved by thought and memory motivated by our desires. But this freedom I am talking about is free of thought, free of memory and free of desire within our brain. All desire is thought, thoughts recalled from memory, the process of memory and desire. ‘I’ am my thought.
Leading neurologists recently have suggested that ‘I’ or self is an illusion. Zen has always said that. Clearly that thought of ‘I’ is how I know I exist. But can I exist without the need to have a desire of an experience or even memory of past experiences? In other words can I have an experience with the present without the need to change it with my desire or rely on my memory to interpret it — is that possible?
To do so I clearly must have a thought, a reaction to the present, or I would not know I existed. Supposing as I react to the present I place no value on that reaction, I have no desire for the reaction to be any different than it really is. My reaction then to experience would not need to be limited by the brain’s idea of that experience and I would be free to simply just experience the present.
The senses, which feed the brain are always open to everything. The eyes see, the ears hear, the hands touch. This in reality is the beginning and end of it. It is the brain that makes something of what is seen, it is the brain that makes something of what is seen and what is touched. ‘I’ is the process of brain that limits that openness and creates an identity.
Is there a moment in which everything is? No, everything is in the moment and there is a big difference. The moment is what you have made of it, the moment doesn’t hold everything, you have made a moment of everything.
The way the brain creates separation is by the process of what in Buddhism is called the three facets of ego, dealt with above. For me ego is principally about an identification of self, it is about the survival of the individual, and to augment that survival, we are both possessive and ambitious of our own demands of life. I cannot overcome that process but I do not need to make it a limit. The realisation that ‘I’ is a process of limiting life into fragments — past, present, and future, right and wrong, happiness and unhappiness, ambition and non-ambition, good, bad and so on — that ‘I’ am such a limitation, is an incredibly profound understanding. I have explained this process in much more detail in my earlier book ‘NO CARROT just the Zen of it’, with the chapter on freedom. I feel that such depths of understanding are not needed here for we can quickly change into a belief system of beliefs and I think I may well have bordered on that in my earlier book. For one thing I have learned in this work, is that scrupulous honesty with yourself is essential. If you cannot be honest with yourself what chance have you got of being honest with anyone else. Realise that the truth is always changing, no one truth is fixed in concrete, you are allowed to change your mind. For one who follows the pathway as I have done for many years learns if you’re not big enough to change direction in this work, then don’t start the process.
© David Ferguson 2012