Expert: Joe McSorley - 11/24/2008

Question
what happens to a fully enlightened being when they die?  If there is no self and they have lost all illusion of a self then do they cease to exist?  Please be specific in your answers i have had some trouble in the past getting straight answers on this subject and am extremely interested in it.  Also just as background information i have had plenty of experience with non-dual states of awareness so the language of experience is understandable by me.  I guess i just have trouble accepting that a permanent state of non-duality is the point of it all.  This leads me to think that i do not understand intellectualy what Zen is saying about this subject especially as it concerns the ultimate end of persons as such.  Buddhist thought on this subject seems very negative to me.  I would like to transform that perception with better intellectual understanding of the end of the person as it relates to after death and beyond reincarnation, the real end of a person. Also i already know that it is essentialy beyond words but certainly there must be some language for it in Zen.  Thanks.

Answer
Dear Lynn,   
Since you seem to have some understanding of the language of Zen I will present this in the ways that my teachers presented it to me.   If this is too obtuse for you please let me know.  You may need a aspirin after reading this.
(I have just reread this again and I realize how difficult it is to understand.  I had a problem understanding my teachers for years and thought some of their work was incredibly dense.  Dr. DeMartino used to say “read something three times then start to read it”.  It may seem convoluted but it is not, it does however, take some time and real effort to grasp. “The way is long and hard” Bodhidharma.)

   We can’t start with a premise of a person, enlightened or otherwise without first knowing what a person is. How can we talk about the end of a person when we don’t know what began? You want to know what happens to that person, the future of that person and the assumed demise of that person but who or what is it that we are talking about? Who is it that exists?  This is in itself the problem in Zen because we are talking about a person without knowing who/what that person is.  It is the great significance of the story of Bodhidharma when approached by Hui Ka who says he is suffering.  He does not tell him to meditate or to do anything other than to present ‘who it is that suffers’.  Why didn’t he tell him to seek, meditate, pray or whatever?  Because the source of the problem is the “I” that exists without knowing who it is that exists.  I am know that I am but I don’t know who I am.  We cannot talk about something happening to a self, enlightened or otherwise, without knowing what that self is.  Almost all religions presuppose a self that has substance, that came into being as a separate entity and will exist forever.  They never address what this self is and sometimes divert the question with an idea of a soul that is equally problematic.  Are with a soul with a self or a self with a soul?  Either way it still does not address the problem.9
  Anything you can perceive is not yourself. To perceive something is to stand apart from it so that it is an object of your consciousness and thus, not you. When you say “I am” you are making an objective statement from the outside, you are objectifying yourself.  If I were to say “I am enlightened” then I am saying that there is an I separate from the me that was unenlightened.  When I say “I have experiences of non-dualism” I immediately have a problem.  If I experience non-dualism then there is the I that stands apart from non-dualism to know that it had an experience that is now in the past.  If the experience is only after the fact then you or I did not have the experience, we only existed or re-existed after separating from that experience to then ‘know’ we had it.   One cannot experience non-dualism because it would be a dualism between the self that experiences and that which is experienced.  Abe Sensei used to talk about this as an wall between self and other that momentarily becomes invisible but is not actually gone.  There is still a self that remains that has the experience though it is a somewhat reduced or less defined sense of self.  I hope this makes sense to you.
 One of the so-called great mystics of India, who had a huge following in the seventies and eighties, once said “you must create your own non-dualism”.  How can this be?  There is creator and the created; dualism.   By the very act of creating a non-dualism you are asserting a dualism.  To remove yourself is to create yourself to do the act of removing. This is also a problem of the idea  of ‘oneness’.  You cannot say ‘I experienced oneness ‘ because there has to be a  two-ness to do so.  Also oneness stands apart from whatever is not oneness to make it oneness.
   All of this comes back to the nature of human consciousness; it must make dualistic discriminations to know anything, it is how it knows anything. I am I precisely because I am not that which I perceive not to be me.  In other words I exist only in opposition or contra-distinction to everything else. I look around and say I am I because I am not a tree, book, rock or other person.  All of this is said without knowing who I am that is saying it.  Who makes this statement?  So we can’t talk about an enlightened being and what happens to them before or after death before we know whom it is that asks the question.  By merely exerting the question we are immediately creating a dualism.  Again, the only way we can know anything is to create a dualism to know it, the schism between knower and that which is known.  To think something is to create an idea of what that thing is, a tree or whatever, but the thought is not the thing in itself, it is only a mental reflection of it.  To not think it is to be merely blank and ‘not thinking’ is often sadly confused with being a Zen ideal. It emphatically is not so.  To feel it is to have that which feels and that which is felt.  So all of our consciousness is a schism.  You cannot know you had an experience of non-dualism unless you stand apart from that experience; that which is experienced and that which experiences.   From this standpoint to state “I am awakened” is to immediately assert an I that is apart from that which is not awakened.
  I know this is a huge problem in the language of Buddhism today as taught by many modern teachers.  They will talk about the self being empty but then talk about reincarnating.  If the self is empty what can possibly reincarnate?  They talk about levels of awareness but what is the self they talk about that has levels of awareness?  What is it that can perceive these things?  They talk about receiving the direct transmission but where do they put this ‘thing’ they received, what received it and if it is received can’t it also be taken away?  There is somehow always an invisible self behind these ideas, a self that gets enlightened, reincarnated or attains levels of awareness, which ultimately means that it is not empty of self.  So many teachers today contradict themselves with this type of speech not realizing they are hanging onto a self while proclaiming it to be empty.  What does being empty mean?  Is this a negative state that stands opposed to being full of something? The short answer is no.
  How do we define what the self is, how can we pinpoint it?  We all have ways of defining ourselves we are Americans, Irish, Republicans, Evangelicals, white, black, liberals, Jews, Christians or whatever other labels we come up with.  We subdivide those labels into orthodox, reform, born again, Tibetan Buddhist, Pureland Buddhist, post modernist deconstructionist, on and on forever with no end in sight.  We don’t know who it is that lives under this tyranny of labels and concepts.

  This is something we really need to apply ourselves to understand.  As soon as I say “I” I am making many assumptions.  When I say I don’t like something what is that I that doesn’t like something?  Is it my tongue only that doesn’t like a taste or my stomach, or is it my mind/thoughts that classify these things?  Let’s say you were driving down the road and the next thing you know, bang, you wake up in a hospital and all you can see is the ceiling.  You feel no pain and you are fully conscious.  I say to you “Lynn, are you fully you”?  You would reply, “Yes”.   I say, “Do you want to live”?  and you say “yes”.  “Are you any less you”?  You say “No”.  So, as far as you know you are completely you as you know you to be before you woke up. Now I tell you “you lost your legs in an accident”, are you now less you?  Does your perception change so know that you reflect upon yourself as less than before?   Before you were told this you had no idea there was less of you.  But it gets worse, I tell you that all that is left of you is your head, are you still you?  You didn’t feel any less you before you were told but what about now?  You haven’t changed but your perception of who you are has now changed.  But now it’s even worse, you have lost your face, so who is it that you are conscious of?  
  This is the crux of it in Zen.  Hui Ka says “my heart/mind is not at ease” and Bodhidharma replies “hand it to me that I may pacify it”.  Before you reflected on an idea of self in the bed, no problem, after you reflected on whom you think yourself to be, problem.  Were YOU there at your birth?  When did a ‘you’, a sense of self, come into being for Lynn?  If there wasn’t a Lynn at birth then when did Lynn, as known to herself, come into being?  When did you first self-reflect on an I that was not other?  At the same time can you add to you?  Can you subtract from you?  If you can’t subtract by taking away the body then what subtracts from self?  There is the idea that we are our memories but without them don’t you still want to live?  If you didn’t know you forgot then don’t you still want to go on? Self-consciousness is immediate and not confined to or by history, culture or body awareness.   Most of our conscious time we do not reflect upon our past, tastes or culture, we just ‘are’, aware.  Someone with no memory due to brain damage still wants to live and be but does not know who it is that wants to be.  You may want to regain your memory to define a place for ‘you’ in the world and establish a history but you are still completely ‘you’ without these things. You only think you are not ‘you’ when you reflect upon these things and say I have lost them.  They have to be an object of consciousness to be a problem.
    If you were to be able to transport yourself into space and then remove all objects, planets, stars, everything, how do you know yourself to be?  With the entire universe removed from around you what makes you, you?  When there is no other to define self, then what is self?  How can anything exist without other to give it its definition?  You can’t know what a rock is without knowing what isn’t a rock, it is defined by what it is not, so, what it is not is that which makes it itself.  This is the real meaning of emptiness, all creates all, self and other are mutually creating and defining, you can’t separate them, they are empty of a particular self nature while at the same time having a self nature.  This is a positive expression not a negative one. They are non-dual and dual or a non-dual duality. Self is other, other is self, you cannot separate them. Chuang tzu proclaimed, “Heaven, earth and I arise simultaneously”.
    This is something that is, now, and does not come into being later.  What you are now is the ability to separate to say “I am”.  The ego is the act of separation, it is not something contained within a self that a self overcomes, it is that which says” I am Lynn” thus creating Lynn, the idea of Lynn.  It is at this initial “I am” that you, as Lynn, was born but it is an illusion, an act of the universe to ‘know’ the universe, to separate while not being separate at all.   So as you created Lynn and defined Lynn over the years these were just attributes you were ascribing to this ‘self’ that you think exists separately but it does not.
   Let me try to explain this to you by using a analogy that D.T.Suzuki  articulated.   D.T. Suzuki has the analogy of a wave on the ocean as symbolic of man’s sense of self.  A wave arises on the ocean and looks down and sees the ocean all around.  It says, “ I am know that I am because I am not the ocean nor am I all the other individual waves, I exist separate from them”.  It has separated itself from the ocean to know itself as an individual wave.  This separation actually creates the ‘self’; it is both an act and a fact of this separation.  Now it makes all its judgments as a separated self.  In this act it is also separated from itself, it knows that it is but not who it really is.  Now it tries to go outward to find itself but it cannot.  When it goes inward it is also problematic, why? Because the act of going inward is still the act of separating from the ocean to be able to go inward.  So this wave is alienated from itself, it’s surroundings and the ocean. It is a self and has anxiety. But the fact of the matter is, who is the wave fundamentally?  Is it the individual wave?  No, there’s really no such thing.  So who is looking for this awakening?  The fact is that the wave is really just a manifestation of the ocean; it never was separated in reality but only knew itself when it was the act of separation. There is no self without this separation.  It has to stop the ego process, the act of separating, in the hope that the ocean can rise up to see itself as both the wave and the ocean.  It is one hundred percent wave and one hundred percent ocean, not at any point ever separated.  The wave seeking the ocean/enlightenment/nirvana is the ocean seeking the wave.  When the breakthrough occurs it are not new or just starting but a realization of what always really was.  This is a non-dual duality.  Both itself as wave and ocean.  Pure non-dualism would have just been the ocean with a wave never arising.  We rise out of nature and now ourselves as separate from it but in fact we are nature in search of itself.  This is freedom from birth and death; it is all at once, here and now.  This is not an experience the self or a self has but the realization of what already is and cannot be objectified.  Not being able to be objectified it is that which lies ‘beyond words and letters” or “the Way that can be named is not the eternal way”.
  In this sense Lynn becomes the wave when you say “I am me, not you” and yet it is you and the ocean, you cannot come into being without those things.  It is empty of it’s own self nature yet an expression of all nature.  The wave cannot become awakened as wave because that is the act of separating but it is wave/ocean awakening at the same time.  You identify with those things you call Lynn but those things occur after you created the split, you were full before and unaware of a problem or an I but when you came into being as a self reflective “I” then you saw the world as not you and that in which you live in but are separate from.  Nothing was born, the act of separation occurred but the wave is still the ocean, not born, just separating itself in consciousness.  It is the ocean mistaking itself for a wave.  You are universe mistaking itself for Lynn, thinking you are not the universe when in fact you are.  You are the universe in search of itself.  When you seek the universe you create the separation to seek but when you don’t seek you still sit being you.  Whatever you do creates the problem and whatever you don’t do creates the problem.  You are the problem.
  There is not a before and after death here because the self, that thought it existed, was only an illusion.  The dualistic self was created when the wave separated itself in that matrix of thought but it was still the ocean, unborn and undying.  The fully awakened being is unborn/undying.  
   It is the sole purpose of Zen to stop this process of separation so that you are fully the universe in the moment expressed as Lynn, yet not confined by Lynn.   The self you want to know about before and after death is an illusion of separation.  The universe is prior to birth and death.  They are the illusion of separation.  You must know who Lynn is to answer this question for yourself.
  I hope this helps you.  Take two aspirin and write me in the morning.
             Joe