Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

Page 30

BEYOND THE INTELLECT “When thought is divided dualistically, it seeks to favour one at the cost of the other, but as dualism is the very condition of thought, it is impossible for thought to rise above its own condition." So the fight goes on, the two contestants failing to observe that as they are but modes of one another there can be neither victory nor defeat.
Consider now the intuition, the faculty beyond the sway of the opposites, which moves on the plane of direct experience. Our knowledge is derived through one of two faculties, the senses and the intuition. Both are direct. But whereas the senses only give us knowledge of the things of the physical plane, the intuition enlightens us at its own level. In the words of Plotinus, "It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known." It KNOWS with an inner certainty quite maddening to the mind which, with intellectual arguments, dares to disagree. True, the use of the new-found instrument is in no way under control. These flashes of true understanding come, or they do not. They may be sought, but for a long while they are beyond command. Only the constant use of the newly awakened faculty, testing each new "certainty” in the light of reason and previous experience, will enable the power, as a muscle wisely used, to grow.
All men have this faculty, but few develop it consciously. It is the summit of a pyramid of growth and development. There is, in the words of Aldous Huxley, "a hierarchy of the real. The manifold world of our everyday experience is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; but this relative reality