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Main Index
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for satori, samadhi, enlightenment -- the very search is a barrier. We search for things only if they are not within our being; if they are within our being, there is no need to seek and search. Just relax! In that very relaxation you have found them. Satori is our nature. Samadhi is our nature. God is our nature. Hence, the man of Zen goes nowhere; he simply rests in himself.
HE SEES THE REAL NATURE OF NOT-KNOWING AS THE NATURE OF THE BUDDHA...
To function from the state of not-knowing is to function in the present. If you function from the state of knowing you are functioning out of the past. All knowing is from the past. Knowledge means the past: your experiences, your memories. If you function through them you are not responding to reality. The only way to respond to reality is to be utterly innocent.
When you function from the state of not-knowing, your response is total and always adequate. It always brings fulfillment, it is liberating. Hence Yoka says it is: "the nature of the Buddha".
And when you realize this totally, you are nothing. Not that you become an enlightened soul, no; you disappear The ego is found no more. There is nobody to become enlightened: that is enlightenment. According to Zen, when there is nobody to be enlightened, enlightenment has happened. When you are just a pure nothing, a silence so profound, so unfathomable that there is no way to measure it; so virgin, so pure that nobody has ever walked into it -- even you cannot enter into it -- only when you disappear, is it there.
This nothingness is the ultimate truth. Buddha calls it shunya, the void. And if you can live in this nothingness, then your ordinary life is another name for the sacred life.
That is one of the greatest messages of Zen. It does not destroy your ordinary life, it enriches it. All other religions have been destructive, they have been poisoners, they have been condemnors. They have been condemning your ordinary life and praising some ideal life which exists nowhere. They condemn that which is and they praise that which is not.
Zen says: This is all. There is no other life, there is no other existence. This ordinary
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