![]() ![]() The longer we stay in this freedom from thought, the more wonderful we realize it is. That’s unfortunate, but it’s the nature of the conditioned mind. They may quickly resort to thoughts in an attempt to exert at least a little imagined control. Quite often people become a little unsettled and resistant to this complete freedom at first. We are completely emptied out and all there is is reality itself. All the spiritual knowledge and experiences we accumulated at 90 degrees cannot touch this at all. All our words, concepts, beliefs, knowledge and previous experiences cannot touch this. ![]() Now we have come face to face with reality, but we don’t yet know what this is. There is absolutely nothing we can say about this. It is not existing, nor is it not existing. It is completely beyond all words and thoughts. None of our mental labels can describe what this is. Because this is beyond the mind, there is nothing we can say about it. Finally, in that great breakthrough, body and mind drop away. The only way through is without the mind. No matter how hard we try, none of our usual mental strategies work. The purpose of our koan practice is to introduce this impossible impasse, barrier or gate that the mind of thought cannot get through. In Zen koan practice, we call this The First Gate. 180 Degrees – The First Glimpse of Freedom But eventually, through frustration and continued suffering if nothing else, we break through. Given the powerful conditioning we’ve all undergone, it may be hard to accept this. Reality is completely beyond all thoughts and beliefs, even spiritual ones. That’s because, even though these are new and exciting thoughts and beliefs, they are still only thoughts and beliefs. Deep inside, we still experience an incompleteness. We may even tell ourselves that we are free and awake because we’ve had some amazing experiences, but deep inside we know this is not true. Somehow we still experience suffering in our lives. We’ve got all these new and exciting concepts and beliefs, but somehow we’re still not awake. We find new teachers who lead us deeper into these new ideas and beliefs. We find new friends who are also practicing these new ways of thinking and experiencing. We can get very excited about our new discoveries. If we read and study The Heart Sutra, for instance, we might now say that Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form, where at zero degrees we were believing that Form is Form and Emptiness is Emptiness. We leave some of our old concepts and beliefs behind and pick up new ones. We start learning new concepts, spiritual concepts. ![]() When we begin a spiritual practice, we move to 90 degrees on this map. 90 Degrees – The First Step Toward Freedom In spiritual terms we might say we are living completely in a dream or illusion. We believe this conceptual world IS reality. We don’t yet realize that these are just abstractions of reality and not reality itself. We see the world and ourself completely through thoughts, concepts and beliefs. We are completely attached to our thoughts. Click here to download this graphic: Zen Circle of Enlightenment Zero Degrees – The Beginning It simply shows the route and process of what happens for freedom from the conceptual world to be directly experienced and lived. ![]() This post does not cover the practices that help this evolve. The Zen Circle of Enlightenment is a useful way of understanding this. September Weekend Silent Retreat Zoom SessionsĪwakening from the dream of conceptual thinking follows a certain route and process.Silent Spiritual Transmission / Shaktipat.Your Story and the Map of Consciousness. ![]()
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