Ikeda-Zumi & the Boundless Light

 "The Way has its reality & its signs but is without action or form. You can hand it down but not receive it; get it, but never see it."

This universe is like the black charcoal used in the Tea ceremony: ikeda-zumi.

It has a wonderful pungent smell as it burns. 

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Q: Roshi, tell me about this "one-ness" the old sages spoke of. "Everything returns to the One -- to what does the One return?"

A: Here's a parable for you. Suppose there is a problem or a defect with my vision so that I tend to "see double." For example, I "see" not one bird flying across the sky, but two birds flying close together, almost parallel. This is the strictly literal image I "see," but what I really *see* is just one bird flying, because I know that my eyes are defective. Seeing the illusory two birds, I am actually seeing through the illusion to the one bird flying. Everything is like this. One does not ever just blindly trust the evidence of the senses, but sees through the evidence to what is. 

This is Mind over seeing. 

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Q: Roshi, what happens to me if I step out into the street & get hit by a passing bus?

A: Two possibilities:  

One, you are hit by a bus and your consciousness ends there, complete stop, along with your sense of self or of being and all your thoughts & memories & feelings, never to be revived, yet in this total nothingness there is nobody to feel sorry or sad about it, in fact you are in exactly the same "no-where" as before your parents conceived you. To imagine this state one must try to imagine non-being, which is what cannot ever be imagined. Since we know nothing about nonbeing, or nowhereness, we do not know its laws, and so cannot say it is not possible that another consciousness, another body, another being will rise out of it to say & think "I am." And in fact people are being born all the time, animals & reptiles & birds are being born or hatched, trees & grasses are growing -- the world is crowded with sentience. Is it possible that some unknown energy, maybe even some pattern of information persisting in the electromagnetic field that once pervaded your body, gets transmitted to the inception of another physical life? Does it really matter, if there is no self at the level of phenomena? Mind is like space or maybe it is space, and space does not move. It does not die, it is not reborn. Look into it yourself & see if it is not like this. 

Two, you are hit by the bus & your consciousness as self-aware display continues, you enter a transitional state in which your mind is functioning & with it all your senses just as in a dream, like Master Takuan Soho insists happens, you clearly remember your life and you have emotions about what has happened to you, yet you cannot communicate with the still-living so in the end you go off looking for somebody you can communicate with, and that is Bardo -- some of it is hair-raising & if you fix your attention on getting reborn you will certainly get reborn. For some, the end game here would be Moksha. To put an end to rebirth, to abide in the boundless light. Yet isn't that boundless light also just the mountains, the rivers & the great earth spinning like a top?