As I see it, our deep connection to explosion comes from the
first stirrings of our sensory consciousness when we came into the world with
the explosive force of birth and our senses met with the explosions of sound
and color, sensations of heat and cold, being moved around in gravity defying
positions, etc. Then, to make sense of this explosion of the senses, we sort
through the dust storm of sensory data with a slow building explosion of mental
distinctions and discriminations that separate, associate, and identify colors,
sounds, touches, tastes, smells that becomes a mental explosion of the
categorization of things.
However, because we see the universe as the expression of an
elemental explosion, as well as seeing our own consciousness as the most intimate
explosion of awareness, we miss something equally as vital: for every explosion
there is an implosion. Because we are
enchanted by the explosions of the senses that we perceive, we usually
completely overlook that the perceptions are based on the actual fact of
implosion: we receive sensory data, Our
usual conception of being a being in a skin bag looking out upon the external
universe betrays the actual experience that our senses never “leave” our skin
bag, and our “perceptions” never leave the mind. We naively imagine in our materialistic
construction of our worldview, that our senses go out of our body, that we see out
into the world, but if we are able to see-through the enchantment of the sensory explosions,
then we can note such insight as the fact that “light” is said to “enter” the
eye and tickle the nerve cells in the retina that in turn tickle other neurons
that they are connected to, which in turn tickle more neurons, until an
explosion of neuronal waves of fireworks are swirling around within the grey
matter of the brain that explodes in awareness of the outside universe. But here’s the rub, in this materialistic
worldview, this “outside universe” of physical matter is never actually “outside,”
because it is completely contained in the grey matter as a mental construction
or reflection of what has been imploded into the brain. If we pay attention, we are forced to
confront the idea that the universe is not exploding but is actually the implosion
of how it all is received by our specialized sensory patches of skin to be recreated as the world within.
Here’s where Zen comes to the soteriological rescue. In Zen meditation we “turn the light around”
or “take the backward step” of awareness, so that from our usual looking
outward at an evolving world, we turn to notice and be aware of this imploding nature
of the universe. The technical Sanskrit term for this is asraya-paravrtti, “to turn around
at the basis.” Though it doesn’t roll
off the tongue very well, this can be called “involution” in contradistinction
to the usual view of “evolution.” This
training in asraya-paravrtti, as the turning around or involution of awareness to
its own source, has been derisively called “contemplating one’s belly button” by people who
don’t know any better and place great value in, and rest
their self worth on, the outward show of explosions.
There are many values of training and practice in sitting
meditation (zazen), but the essential
value is not in developing explosive force, but in the discovery of the
implosive basis of awareness. While we are enamored and enchanted by
explosions, we are also entangled by them in our relationships and killed by
them in our interactions. The explosions of emotions are destructive to our
personal as well as international relationships. We send drones to explode our
perceived enemies and yet we refuse to acknowledge to ourselves as a people
that we can’t really accomplish that goal without also exploding innocent
bystanders. Likewise, this paradigm of international drama is also played our
in our personal relationships, in relations of domestic violence where children
become traumatized innocent bystanders, in our social and financial relations
where people are forced to live in poverty, homeless, and without adequate
health care, all because we are basing our social worldview on the perspective
of people as beings who have exploded apart into separate entities competing
with each other for the finite commodities of the.
What sitting meditation reveals to us is that this worldview,
of an exploding universe expanding into separate units flying apart from each
other, is a myth, a false vision of what is actually happening right here and
now. This universe is also an imploding
universe, condensing into mutual reflections of itself, revealing the absolute
connectedness and unification of the universe, with our own mind and being
seamlessly joined to each and every other node of awareness.
Consciousness is not just the exploding evolution of
awareness, it is equally the imploding involution of awareness. The value of meditation as implosion is that it opens us to the realization that awareness is
only made possible by both its expansion and contraction, its explosion and implosion, and that this activity of expansion and contraction is the activity of the unified mind. This is why the toroid is
the best simple model of conscious awareness as it represents both the
exploding and imploding activities of awareness that form the shape of
consciousness.* The sitting meditation
of Zen Buddhism, with its elegant simplicity, is the most effective way to come
to terms, directly and personally, with this mutually expanding and contracting
universe of awareness that we call mind.
#
[Note
*: For the development of a more complex
and comprehensive model for consciousness, elaborating from a simple toroidal
model to a multi-faceted Mobius bottle model, see “Zen Theory: An Exploration of Space, Time, and Consciousness via the Cycle
of Change Between Binary Opposites.” by Kigen William Ekeson available at his Zen Theory blog.].
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