Zen Study Session!

by JAX CAFARK

New Orleans, April 2018

Praise for Jax Cafark:

“Surregionalist Explorations meet the Impossible Community.” 
- Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau

“Liberty, Equality, Geography meets Floodbook.”
-Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein

“Lightning Storm Mind meets the Anarchist Moment!” 
-Jean Lafitte

Referents:
"The Enlightenment of Hui-neng" (from The Sutra of Hui-Neng)
"To Forget the Self" (Dogen, from the Genjokoan)
"Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" (Shunryu Suzuki)
"Chase Them Away!" (Patrul Rinpoche, from Windhorse)

#1

“You are dead alright, but how about that sound?”

These teachers are pretty tough.

And laughing is never safe!

We're so humiliated by everything –

So overcome your susceptibility to the system –

Pound rice!

This is why I'm a pre-ancientist:

deconstruction happened a long time ago.

The evasiveness of Hanshan:

the ultimate story against co-optation!

Write poems on trees and rocks and disappear!
Become Cold Mountain!

What good is usefulness?

It makes sense but doesn't go beyond sense;

The mind that is no-mind...

a space/void in which everything appears...

all dualisms ultimately destroyed.

Nothing is originally anything.

Even saying “the mind” is a problem.

You don't have to create an object.

Mirroring reality is like the correspondence theory of truth.

Buddhism rejects that.

I don't know what the fifth patriarch was thinking!

“Very good answer, you lose.”

There are lots of escapist interpretations of Buddhism.

Zen is very concrete.

It's the mind of the child, amazed and wondering; that's the spirit.

Reflect on yourself:

what's really happening when that happens?

These are the real questions, the important questions.

We should have philosophy laboratories where we actually reflect on our experience.

Void always throws people off, but it's OK.

Try awakening, not enlightenment.

What's wrong with dust?

Focus intently on every speck of dust.

Sitting might be bullshit.

You might as well put bags of rice in a row.

Sitting has been so abused.

You can't even depend on an iconoclastic tradition.

Zen means meditation.

“The miracle is to walk the earth,” says Thich Nhat Hanh.

But what is walking, and what is the earth?

Walking is one of the four dignities

(the others are standing, sitting, and lying down).

What we still have to discover about the earth –

its consciousness in-itself!

“L'Homme est la Nature prenant conscience d'elle meme,” says Elisee Reclus;

Man is Nature becoming conscious of Herself!

Our attention and focus determines what we find.

The Buddha sees no separations, only (inter)dependent origination.

If you're awakened you become compassionate.

(But that's not entirely non-dualistic, as Nagarjuna would remind us, for either

A is B, or A is not B, or A is B and is not B, or A is neither B nor not B.

The last is the most radical; and among the most disturbing aspects of Buddhism.)

“When the mouth opens, all are wrong.” (Mumon)

Reality is distorted by expression.

Can we admit that we're forming reality in one way?

When you forget the self you gain reality.

You dissolve, and everything awakens.

But delusion isn't only in the head.

You just don't believe there's a problem

or you come up with a false solution;

you're doomed either way:

I haven't given you a punch-line, but go ahead...

Getting out...

Or, attaining place and not moving beyond –

Ordinary Joy!

The flow of everything through everything;

the music of the earth; all beings vibrate;

the wind flowing through human action

is the same as the wind in the stratosphere.

Ripening the cheese of the First Ecosocialist International.

May your cheese forever ripen.

#2

To celebrate the end of Zen we're using your good coffee.

The work ethic belonged to a previous society. Now we have a consumption ethic.

The dominant composite character structure of late capitalism:

Thou shalt enjoy! The Age of Desire! (see Joel Kovel)

The child has a power to express itself however it wants.

Then the linguistic/symbolic/imaginary grid descends and imprisons it.

This is the problem we have:

We've lost something we can't express.

I can't give an example!

Maybe I should work on that –

the challenge to imagine the pre-symbolic psyche,

before language and mirrors and conditioning were really important.

Will we ever regain the ability to truly speak?

This gets at individual versus collective immortality –

The constituents continue, but without Social Security numbers.

I'm not a big fan of the image of a blank slate.

There doesn't have to be a mirror to reach the mirror

where you fantasize an integrated self;

one step in giving up the diverse complexity of experience.

The fictitious self makes you deny what you are

to mirror what we're told we are.

Whatever reality doesn't fit into language must be wrong and repressed.

Is there time and space?

It's debatable.

Can you talk about killing the Buddha?

(Particularly while you're on the road!)

[Lin Chi again; “Bodhi and Nirvana are hitching posts for donkeys.”]

We should all think about this. It's not a simple process.

It's not that easy to do it in the American style, with an assault rifle.

Kill the Patriarch!

We have a system of patriarchy;

You have more fathers than you could possibly know what to do with !
Even if you don't have a father!

We have to kill them all, big and small.

Abdullah Ocalan says the same thing – “kill the dominant male.”

(In a matrilineal society, it would be "kill your uncle.")

The place of power must be empty!

Kill, kill, kill, it's therapy.

(Anyway April is the cruelest month.)

It's a particular therapy for the civilized; for citizens of empire,

but the cure changes over time historically,

and we have not made a lot of progress.

“The change can be hastened but there are preconditions.” ("Big Sky Mind")

Sitting means on the ground your ancestors came from,

in People's History.

Sit and sweep the garden, no matter how big...

Seek the beauty that doesn't disrupt the mountains.

Leave it alone!

When you try to control it, it goes out of control –

We see this in psycho-pharmacology: the more we try to control, the crazier things get.

Go out into the dusty world!

The Anti-Mirror Stage:

Weeds give nourishment.

But to bury them you have to pull them up,

before they go to seed.

But there are many kinds of meditation.

Maybe once in a while we should pay attention to what's happening in the mind.

Just follow your mind where it goes and see what's happening;

Don't deny that you're really having thoughts.

It's not special! It's very ordinary.

Once you think you're advanced you're in trouble.

I remember when I decided I had learned all the important things;

5th grade in the 8th ward. Maybe bad faith at that time.

It was a bright sunny day with a friend.

Hanshan means cold mountain.

Einstein means a stone.

One o'clock means lunch.

With neither happiness nor misery,

a fine line between the Buddha and the Zombies?

We could write a collective story about the Awakened Dead.

When in the grips of the death drive, you repeat and repeat.

I've put a lot of time working on it; it's not working though.

Sometimes the reversal is more important than the original –

Humor makes people more intelligent.

Is Dharma Transmission bullshit?

Famous last words of Buddha: Work out your own salvation!

But Zen is defined as direct transmission.

The model is the Flower Sermon.

But there are always causes and conditions

that lead to something happening.

(“There's always a big 'but.' All my friends have big 'buts'.” - Peewee Herman)

Zen is mostly silence.

That's why it's so radical in our society.

Run away from government grants into the forest!

Escape the boiling red dust!

“Sleep by the creek and purify your ears.” (Hanshan, translated by Gary Snyder)

Away from the guns and gold at Fort Knox –

the rain which depresses the city is joy on the cabin roof. (Thomas Merton)

We get 60-70 inches a year in New Orleans,

yet there is no silence,

including that non-silent aspect of silence.

So best to remain silent unless you can improve on it...

How fantasy works in the real world...

Reality intrudes as trauma...

You don't realize until the end that your neck broke;

Nothing is ever over because nothing has ever started.

(But something may have!)

You have a different kind of awakened mind when you get tired.

What is the Buddha? The simplest things are hardest to remember.

….

“Too many steps have been taken returning to the root and source.

Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning!

Dwelling in one's true abode, unconcerned with that without –

The river flows tranquilly on the flowers are red.”

(Reaching the Source, Zen Ox Herding Pictures of Kakuan)

"Do something!"

(Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki)