Why Buddha Touched the Earth

Rough draft of a chapter about the "mystical sense". It could stand a little expansion.

To get around Osaka, I've been doing a lot of bicycling, on a cheap secondhand bike I picked up in my local shotengai. The city is good cycling territory, no steep hills, bike lanes on most of the sidewalks. Everybody has a bike here - it's not uncommon to see a housewife with two small kids and a load of groceries balanced on her shopping bicycle, or a young man peddling along with his girlfriend sitting behind him on his bike's cargo rack. (The down side is that bicycle theft is also surprisingly common - this is my second bike.)

The great thing about biking is that it's brought me right up close to the everyday beauty of the city. Tonight, heading downtown to sit in a bar and write, I had just such a moment as I was waiting at the crosswalk near the bridge by the Osaka Dome. A man about my age, perhaps a few years younger, ordinary guy in khaki windbreaker holding hands on either side with his daughters, maybe six and eight years old. And the daughters were on unicycles! Unicycles, one pink, one yellow, white tires; the girls in matching outfits (unicycle team outfits? or just kawaii?): blue jeans with mutli-colored star patches low on the legs, pink sweatshirts, white puffy parka-type vest over top.

Me with a big smile, trying not to stare; the girls sneaking looks at the funny-looking long-haired gaijin. All beautiful.

All of us have some sort of aesthetic sense, a sense of beauty. What triggers it may be as varied as Van Gough's "Starry Night", or Cantor's diagonalization argument about the infinity of the reals versus the infinity of rational numbers, or the Ramones classic punk anthem "Blitzkrieg Bop", or an encounter with little Japanese girls on unicycles. But every human being of sound mind possesses the ability to experience beauty in some sights, sounds, words, and situations. We would hold a person without this ability to be damaged, lacking, an object of pity.

Similar to this aesthetic sense, but distinct from it, is what we might call a "mystical sense". The experience of the mystical is sometimes expressed as the sense of "the presence of the divine", sometimes as an experience of "Cosmic Consciousness", sometimes as "the perception of emptiness" or a "feeling of oneness with the universe", or as "no-mind", all depending on the social conditioning and religious training of the experiencer. But these are all perceptions of the mystical sense, just as things are varied as the beauty of a sunset, of a Bach fugue, and of a Zen garden are all perceptions of the aesthetic sense.

The mystical sense can sometimes be triggered by experiences of beauty, but it can also be triggered by experiences that would otherwise be unpleasant, or by completely ordinary events. It is an experience of existence rather than of meaning, of immediate and direct connection rather than evaluation or discrimination.

Until relatively recently, Western societies regarded the mystical sense as the province of a few - those who had any sort of mystical experience were sent off to the seminary, monastery, or convent, safely isolating their contagion of our ordinary consciousness. But in the past century or so, an increased interest in Eastern spirituality and in pre-Chrisitian religous practices in the West, began to wear away this belief that the mystical sense was a rare possession. And the notion was pretty much destroyed by the introduction of psychedelic drugs to the mainstream in the middle of the 20th century - suddenly, with the ingestion of a few hundred micrograms of LSD, housewives and investment bankers and thoroughly ordinary, boring people were "seeing the face of God".

(Two notes here: one, this is not a suggestion to go drop acid at random. Two, as I write this I am listening to a woman sing "House of the Rising Sun" with Nihongo lyrics at "Folk Jamboree Night" at the Cellar in Osaka - in a world full of things as extraordinary as little girls on unicycles waiting at the crosswalk, and Japanese folk singers who cover old American blues tunes, are drugs really necessary? More and more, I see why Taoist masters of old used to hang out in inns to spring mystical tricks on travelers far from home, open to new and crazy truths.)

But it is important to understand that the expression of the mystical sense is heavily conditioned by culture. A Christian sees Jesus, a Hindu sees Krishna; the danger in this is that each then concludes that all the associated dogma they've been taught is therefore true, when in fact the dogma and conditioning have only provided a filter for their experience, have determined what color glasses they are wearing when they behold the Clear Light.

With practice, we can develop this sense, and even manage to perceive the mystical experience from multiple perspectives, to swap the glasses for a couple different colors. This is goal of ceremonial and ritual magick.

Is it worthwhile to have these experiences?

Is it worthwhile to have experiences of beauty? we might as well ask. The experience is its own justification.

But the danger of dogma, of mistaking these wonderful subjective experiences as being indicative of truth about the "objective" universe of consensual reality, is not to be taken lightly. Therefore the practice must include grounding, good solid smacks upside the head (figurative or literal) if the seeker becomes too attached to the fantastic.

This is why Zen masters carry a stick, and say things like "If you say this is a stick, I will hit you thirty times, and if you say it is not, I will hit you thirty times!" Attachment to the fantastic is rejected just as much as attachment to the mundane. The Pagan community is developing its own safeguards against such attachment, primarily in the form of sacred nonsense. Rather than a stick, Discordian[*1] teachers carry a joy buzzer, and The Church of the SubGenius will empty your wallet[*2], but the idea is the same.

[*1 Did you know God is a crazy woman named Eris? www.PrincipiaDiscordia.com]

[*2 Eternal salvation or triple your money back! www.subgenius.com ]

Not much can be said directly about the mystical experience. By its nature it is not well-expressed in words, and attempting to do so is what tends to the establishment of dogma.

A classic Zen koan asks us to imagine a men hanging from a high tree branch by his teeth. He can't reach any hold by his hands or his feet. Then along comes a seeker who asks, "Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?" (In Zen language, this means "Please teach me".) If he opens his mouth to answer, he falls (some versions say he falls straight to hell); if he remains silent, he fails in his duty to aid the querent (and thus, some versions say, will be killed and dammed). What should he do?

No answer here. I'll just note that I'm siting in a bar in Japan without understanding a damn thing that's going on around me, the songs people are singing or the conversations or the culture.

But not understanding doesn't mean I can't enjoy the show. Sort of like life.

As Bugs Bunny once put it, "Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive."