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ZEN BUDDHISM and one with all humanity. Can you now feel the oneness of all “things" while they, no whit less what they severally are, are fused in one-while having tea ... ?
The coming of satori is about as comfortable as an atom bomb in a dug-out. "Ever since the unfoldment of consciousness we have been led to respond to the inner and outer conditions in a certain conceptual and analytical manner. The discipline of Zen consists in upsetting this ground-work once for all and reconstructing the old frame on an entirely new basis."1 The crisis is usually violent. “Satori is the sudden flashing into consciousness of a new truth hitherto undreamed of. It is a sort of mental catastrophe taking place all at once, after much piling up of matters intellectual and demonstrative. The piling has reached the limit of stability and the whole edifice has come tumbling to the ground when, behold, a new heaven is open to full survey."2 The will becomes fused with the principle of Enlightenment and, weary of the shackles of thought and feeling, suddenly throws the last of its fetters away. The whole being of the man is involved, and the transformation or “conversion” is complete. ... The perceiving I is in one sense unaltered. It still sees the morning paper that it knows so well, and the bus to the office remains unaltered, but the perceiver and the perceived have merged into one, and the two-ness of things has gone. The continuum of sense experience, to resort to modern jargon, is now undivided; we see the film in one instead of as a series of pictures, and the change is not only psychological, as to our "seeing", but metaphysical, as to our understanding of all relationship. The 1 Introduction to Zen Buddhism, p. 99. 2 Tbid, p. 100.
