Expert: Joe McSorley - 11/11/2007

Question
Hi joe, been thinking...the idea of zen buddhism that i'm forming is this existense beyond human form, desires and all that, but then I think about how the mind body and spirit are all so connected even though the body eventually perishes it was still a part of you and the mind to, even though your not supposed to identify with it? So when we become ill and it effects the spirit, would zen say that this is to be totally acknowledged but then left alone or something? What I mean is how far does the physical reality and the bodily sensations we experience in it come into enlightenment, does enlightenment only belong in the spirit of us?

Answer
Hi Steph,
  You have a dichotomy set up between body and spirit. This is a creation of the dualistic thought process.  The Stephanie or “I” that says anything about ‘having’ a spirit is a self that is separate from that spirit or body to make the judgment.  At essence who is the person that is making the judgment?  To stand back and to make these statements is exactly the root of the problem in Zen; we are separate from nature and therefore make judgments, seemingly from the outside, of what nature is or who we are.  If you say you have a spirit the ‘you’ that is saying this is not the spirit.  It stands apart from spirit to make this judgment.  It is this separated self that has anxiety and problems.  If you say I feel like hell but my spirit is unaffected what does it matter, because you feel like hell.  The only ‘you’ you know yourself as is what is feeling the pain not some projected spirit.
  Someone wrote me about their soul, much like you talk about spirit and here is what I answered:
We speak of the soul as being ‘other’ or outside of us, there is the self and the ‘soul’.  So we say when I die my soul will go to heaven, but what of the rest of us, this thing that experienced life?   So this thing in us goes away but we as an experiential creature dies?  Where’s the consolation in this?  Another question I have had regarding the soul is: do we become awakened as a soul?  In other words if I lead an exemplary life by religious standards should I then realize myself as a soul and not as the individual I thought I was?  In the East enlightenment or awakening means to realize self as the Universe, not separate but totally integrated.  It means that the self was an illusion that kept us separate and once the illusion is removed we see self and other as self-defining.  It is not that we have a soul that does it but that when our minds are clear it happens, we are the cycle of birth and death and beyond birth and death.

            The mind creates the split between mind, body and spirit but it is only a creation of the mind.  When we do this we infer a separate existence for this spirit apart from body.  Existence is beyond human form and not dependent on human form.  We only experience existence by the ability to separate ourselves from the world around us; we say we exist because we see ourselves as distinct and separate from the world around us.  We say, I am here the rest of the world is there and through this separation say “I am”.
Who is it that is saying I am?  We only say this because we know what we are not. We don’t define ourselves by who we are but by what we are not.
If you were to wake up in a hospital and not be able to move or to see yourself you would still say, “I am”.  If your entire body had been amputated and only your head remained and you didn’t know it you would say, “I am” without any reservation.  I am me, fully and completely and I want to live.  If you learned what happened then you might change completely because your perspective of self changed.  The physical reality didn’t change just your realization of your predicament changed.  So who is the you that says I am?  If at the moment you wake up you have no memory other than “I am” you still say “I exist, I am” even though you might not know your name, tastes or desires and all those things you commonly identify yourself as.
What is the source of this “I am”?  You can say spirit or soul but that is a projection constructed by thought.  What is it that separates from the world to say I am in the world?   At any point in this “I am” series I just wrote about you could say “I am in the world”, it’s the same thing because it creates self and world simultaneously.  The question is who is the I that proclaims this and what is its substance?  We removed body, memory and desires yet something still says “I am, there is the world”.
   Enlightenment is the realization that self and other are one and the same. It is the act of separation that our minds create, also called dualistic thinking, that creates ‘us’. This act of separating is the ego, not that we have one, we are the ego which is the act of separating.  How can you know anything without separating from it?  Once you stop separating in your mind you effectively cease to exist so there is not something that can know things.  To have a thought or to know something is to separate it from that which is known and to create an idea that we hold as that ‘thing’ we know.  We don’t really know it; we only have an idea about it. That which is separating is the very thing it is separated from.  The standpoint of being separated is the only way we know that we exist so our separation from nature creates us and at the same time it creates our alienation from nature.  Once you permanently lose the ability to separate you are no longer a self, you are dead even if your body is still alive as in a coma.  It is the act of separation that tells us that we are, we exist.  Existence was/is before this act occurs.  Before we said “I” as a child, existence is.  It is to realize this in the here and now that frees us from the problematic self-identity that we normally have.  The baby existed before it was self conscious, self conscious was the ability developed to separate and create a mind that is separate from existence when it is actually the blossoming of existence in that individual but not contingent upon the existence of that individual.
  I know this stuff is mind numbing.  I have often been critical that many teachers have not stated this in a clearer way and now I have to fault myself for the same problem.  I find it incredibly difficult to make this any clearer.  You can read some authors where just one of their lines suddenly open your mind to what they are talking about and it makes all of it clear.  It’s a matter of finding the way that your mind and thought processes grasp it.  For many years my teacher, Dr. DeMartino stated, “we don’t have an ego, we are the ego”.  I thought it was nice, made sense and that was that.  Fourteen years later he was in a lecture with several other scholars at a university and almost as an aside replied to a question with “it’s not that we have an ego, we are the ego”.  At that moment for the first time I got it fully.  Afterwards I went up to him and asked ‘why didn’t you say this before” and caught myself and said, “Oh, why didn’t I hear it before”.  Sometimes it takes a while for the mind to be ready to hear it.
 I hope this helps you.  Take care,
        Joe