“Your best intentions are not sufficient and will not win. Your best intentions are always countering your alternative or worst intentions, or at least bad intentions. The self-contracted personality, the heart-hardened personality, has two minds, is self-divided, is stuck with alternatives. Depending on the circumstance, the contracted personality will choose one or the other direction. There are always two alternatives”.
ou must be aware of all of your complexity and in all areas you must see yourself in pairs of two minds of someone living in a dilemma or problem. You see when you are fully self-aware and when you are no longer really able to be one or the other side of any position. If you are truly serious you become profoundly aware of the act that is the root of both halves of every conflict.
That act is the self-contraction. It’s not merely this or that kind of activity in a functional sense. It is an act that produces all those kinds of activities. You must become extremely sensitive to yourself to notice that act you see. Otherwise you see and understand these moments as hearing. But you are only observing yourself egoically in action and are not fully observing the act itself, the fundamental act of self-contraction that is producing these actions.
You see yourself as ego in the form of those actions but you do not see the action that is egoity itself. Because you always have an act to do. You always have a functional performance that you are identifying with. Instead of simply observing yourself, you are being animated. So the more profound this mere observation becomes, the more total that awareness becomes and you begin to notice the opposites in every moment.
The more that is true, the closer you are coming to a summary insight, a direct awareness of the fundamental action that is the root of all opposites, all complexity. This is a most subtle observation. It is not a thing. It is not itself a function that can be identified with a part of the body or a part of human function. It is the root of all of them, the governor of all of them. It’s the principle of bondage to all of them and it is what is keeping you from becoming aware of that in which the contraction itself is being generated.
The ego is itself the ultimate koan. It’s a not an unexpected knot that is generating a kind of vision of existence that is untrue. It is the result of an action you are not observing. To cut through that koan is to not only see the action that is the root of everything you are doing but to transcended it through seeing or understanding. You realize that in which it is arising. So you can say hearing is a kind of satori.
All release from egoity is a kind of satori, even moments of so-called hearing and moments of insight. These are kinds of satori or release from the bind, a kind of total psyco-physical release or orgasm even perhaps, a free circulation of its energies. A sense of well-being suddenly comes over you. It’s an orgasmic event and simultaneous with it is a kind of intuitive sense of a greater condition.
That moment of insight and what most fundamental awakening is not the end of the process. It’s only the beginning of it. So much of what is called satori in the Zen tradition, it’s really the beginnings of a process that could go on but instead they just repeat the ceremony over and over again to have more and more satories. Satories only are the beginning.
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You must be free of self-contradiction. It is not that you must acquire something—an idea, a thing, a state. You must be relieved of your contradictions, your dilemma, your fundamental problem, your opposing motivations. You may be somehow or other inclined toward self-transcendence, but coincident with that inclination and moving you more directly is the motive toward self-fulfillment. Until there is only the motive toward self-transcendence, and only That which is Realized only in self-transcendence, you are of two minds, and the stronger in you is the mind that is purposed toward self-fulfillment”.
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“Your best intentions are not sufficient and will not win. Your best intentions are always countering your alternative or worst intentions, or at least bad intentions. The self-contracted personality, the heart-hardened personality, has two minds, is self-divided, is stuck with alternatives. Depending on the circumstance, the contracted personality will choose one or the other direction. There are always two alternative”.