No Mystery

During a Sesshin (Intense practice to gather the Mind) at Cho Bo Zen Ji, Genjo Marinello Osho was giving a teisho. He was speaking of how his previous teacher Genki Takabayashi Roshi "There is no mystery [in Zen]." Genjo Osho himself had directly stated, "There is not some secret that is being hidden from us. It's all out, shining and shouting at us from every corner." We just have to learn to see truth, through all of our smoke, fog and mirrors that can distract us.

My personal mystery was, "How could I be given something so amazing as life, where the only possible outcome was that I would lose this gift to something called death." It seemed somehow impossibly cruel and terribly unfair. Adding insult to injury, we also don't get to know the date, time or place where our life will end. I was very afraid to die, because it seemed such a mystery and so unknowable.

It took me from the age of twelve until I was about twenty-one years old just to realize that my psychological response was to create a "Hall of Mirrors and Illusions," better know as "My life." To borrow a Pop-culture metephor, I was living in "The Matrix." The net-result was feeling like there were major parts of life that was a mystery that I wasn't sure that I would be able to solve. It can be a terrible moment to fully see that we've been living in a self-created prison cell and we had in many regards been our own jailer.

Through Zen, I honestly learned that most of what I was seeing and observing was not true but rather stuff that I kind of made up as I went a long, fulfilling a script or narrative that I had built within my mind. It was more like being an actor in a film. I came to see that my "illusions" couldn't be solved, if for no other reason that they're not real. That might seem like an odd thing to say, but if you don't understand it now, we will "Over time."

When I say overtime I mean to say, think of a one gallon glass jar, filled with clean pure water. It looks clear and beautiful, especially when the sunlight passes through it. That's the state of our mind when we are very small. Everything is open and accessible. As we get older (teens, early-middle and late adulthood) we not only pour dirt in the jar, diminishing the clarity, but we have the nerve to stick our hand inside and stir things up, with our anxiety, negative feelings, self-centered patterns of behavior and other problems of life. It can seem like the sunlight has no way to penetrate this dense muddied water.

When we remove our hand from the jar (applying The Eightfold Path, The Ten Precepts, etc...), stop pouring dirt in the jar and just sit-sit-sit, the natural force of gravity allows the dirt to sink to the bottom our the jar and as time passes, the natural clarity of the water is revealed. It was always there. There never was any mystery to our life. It was just muddied by our deluded mind and actions. It was never hidden or hiding from us. It was Just right there all the time.

Zen Buddhism is not a philosophy, theory, wishful thinking, fantasy. Zen Buddhism a practice that enables the process of waking ourselves from a kind of sleep or self-hypnotic state. Zen Buddhism is completely knowable and attainable. The price however is resolute practice in The Way of No Mystery.

In Gassho,

Jaye Seiho Morris, Curator
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