THE EYE

"The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me"--Meister Eckhart.

WHERE TIME ENDS

With God time ends.  There is nothing beyond God.

MYSTIC'S DILEMMA

A moth is drawn to a flame, only to burn up in it.  The difference is that the moth doesn't know it will burn up in it.

CONFLICT AND THE COSMOS

Life and death conflicts among individuals and nations are like the life and death conflicts among the cells in our own bodies.  In our own bodies the conflicts assure a healthy organism.  Is it possible that conflicts among individuals and nations is for the health of the larger organism that is the cosmos itself?  A curious thought.  For more on this see Alan Watts' KPFA radio talk, "Levels of Magnification."

ALAN WATTS ON MEDITATION

Meditation is simply watching what is.  There can be watching without there being a watcher.

CRANK'S RIDGE

Kalimath, also known as Crank’s Ridge or Hippie Hill, is a pine-covered ridge located on the way to Kasar Devi temple, above the town of Almora, Uttarakhand, India, the ancient capital of Kumaon.  It is considered an ideal spot for spending long hours in quiet solitude, as it has a magnificent 400 km view of the Himalayas, from Api in Nepal to Bundarpunch on the Himachal Pradesh border. Kasar Devi temple is located in the Kashyap Hills, 7 km north of Almora, where, in the late 19th century, Swami Vivekananda once came to meditate.

Crank's Ridge became a haunt for bohemian artists, writers, and spiritual seekers in the 1920s and 30s, including notable western Tibetan Buddhist W. Y. Evans-Wentz, and Lama Anagarika Govinda, who in turn was visited by Anandamayi Ma and Neem Karoli Baba.  Other early people connected to Crank's Ridge were Earl Brewster, an American artist, author John Blofeld, and Danish mystic Alfred Sorensen. In 1934, Sorensen, who was introduced to Nehru by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, visited the home of Nehru’s sister and brother-in-law at their house in Khali, Binsar.  It was while staying with the Nehru family that one of their friends offered Sorensen a piece of land where he could live on Crank's Ridge.  Sorensen subsequently built a hut there and made it his residence for the next 44 years.

In the 1960s and 70s, luminaries of the counter-culture, including Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens made pilgrimages to the ridge to visit these established inhabitants. In 1962, Allen Ginsberg came with Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Joanne Kyger to visit Lama Govinda. Ginsberg commented in a letter to John Kelley that the area was not unlike the Catskills, readily accessible, only more spiritual. In late 1964, Ralph Metzner visited Lama Govinda on the ridge and was later joined by Timothy Leary on honeymoon with his wife Nena von Schlebrügge. Leary wrote much of Psychedelic Prayers, a psychedelic version the Tao Te Ching composed from nine English translations of the book, on the ridge. Later in the decade Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), visited the ridge as a part of his own pilgrimage. Scottish psychiatrist, R. D. Laing spent some time there in the early 1970s, as did Robert Thurman, the Buddhist scholar.  Thurman spent six months with his family studying with Lama Govinda as a part of his doctoral dissertation over the summer of 1971.

A cult destination, it now has a small community of backpackers and hippies living there, the result of its reputation in the 1960's counter culture as a "power center." This reputation is due to the alleged gap in the Van Allen Belt above the ridge, a perception arguably strengthened by the free and easy availability of marijuana on the slopes. There is also a Buddhist meditation center on the ridge.

ALFRED "SUNYATA" SORENSEN: A FULL EMPTINESS

Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen (October 27, 1890 – August 13, 1984), also known as Sunyata, Shunya, or Sunyabhai, was a Danish mystic, horticulturalist, and writer.  He lived in Europe, India and America. 

The son of a peasant farmer, he grew up near Arhus in northern Denmark.  His formal education ended when he was 14 years old when the family sold their farm. He then worked as a gardener on estates in France, Italy, and finally England.  While working at Dartington Hall near Totnes, Devon, England, he met Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel Laureate poet.  This was in 1929. The two shared conversation on a variety of topics.  Sorensen introduced Tagore to gramophone recordings he had of Beethoven’s Late Quartets, whereupon the poet invited him to his newly created university, Shantiniketan, in Bengal.  Sorensen, he said, could ‘teach silence’ there.

Sorensen visited India from 1930 to 1933 and came to see the country as his home. After initially staying at Shantiniketan, he went on to travel around India visiting places of interest to him. In 1933, he returned to the west to tie up loose ends and then headed back to India where he lived until the mid-1970s. When he returned to India this second time, he began wearing Indian clothing, a style of dress he would continue for the rest of his life.

Tagore introduced him to Nehru, and in 1934 Sorensen visited the home of Nehru’s sister and brother-in-law at their house in Khali, Binsar where he stayed and used his horticultural skills in their garden.  During the summer he continued to travel.  It was while staying with the Nehru family that one of their friends offered him a piece of land where he could live.  Called Crank's Ridge it was near Almora. 

India’s rich spiritual heritage provided a perfect environment for Sorensen’s natural mystical inclinations. During his first stay in the country he was initiated into Dhyāna Buddhism, but it was the Hindu Sri Ramana Maharshi who was to provide the biggest influence on his spiritual life. Sorensen had read Paul Brunton’s classic A Search in Secret India (1934), and soon after he actually  met Brunton.  Brunton arranged for his first visit to Sri Ramana.

Between 1936 and 1946, Sorensen made four trips to Sri Ramana's Tiruvannamalai ashram, staying for a few weeks each time. It was during his visit to Sri Ramana that Paul Brunton told him that Ramana had referred to him as a ‘janam-siddha’ or a rare born mystic.  Indeed, a profound experience occurred to Sorensen while he was on his third visit to Sri Ramana.  This was in 1940.  “Suddenly," he wrote, "out of the pure akasha and living Silence, there sounded upon Emmanuel [his preferred name for himself] these five words, ‘We are always aware, Sunyata!’” He took these five words to be mantra, initiation, and name.  He then used the name Sunyata, or subtle variations on it, for the rest of his life.  The word "sunyata" meant "a full emptiness," which he quite liked.

Although Sorensen, or again Sunyata, as he came to be known for the last forty-four years of his life, kept his Almora hut as his base, he continued to travel around India visiting friends and ashrams.  This was especially so during the cold, Himalayan winter months. He met many prominent spiritual teachers in addition to Ramana Maharshi, including Anandamayee Ma, Yashoda Ma (Mirtola), Swami Ramdas and Neem Karoli Baba.

Sorensen lived in India as a sadhu or ascetic, subsisting on donations. In 1950 he accepted half of a grant of 100 Rs a month offered to him by the Birla Foundation, a charitable body.  He accepted only what he needed.  He subsisted on this goodwill and the vegetables he grew in his garden.  Living on Crank's Ridge, his neighbours included W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Lama Govinda, Earl Brewster, John Blofeld and others. Despite his notable neighbours, he put up a sign requesting silence of those who approached his small hut built into the rock.

From at least the 1930s he wrote diaries and reflections using a highly idiosyncratic and at times playful language. Oftentimes he combined English and Sanskrit, used obscure literary terms or invented his own words. In 1945 he wrote Memory, an autobiography.  More of his writing is found in his Dancing with the Void. He acquired Indian citizenship in 1953.

Then, in 1973, some members of the Alan Watts Society arrived at his door, sent there by his neighbour, Lama Anagarika Govinda.  They ended up asking him to come to California. "But I have nothing to teach, nothing to sell," was his reply.  "That's why we want you," they said. When they got back to Sausalito, they found that Watts had died in their absence, so they again offered their invitation, one of them saying later that they saw in Sorensen what Watts had been writing about all his life.  Watts himself often said, "I have nothing to teach, nothing to sell."

Consequently in late 1974 Sorensen set out on a four-month, all-expenses-paid visit to California.  During his visit he 'gave darshan' at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and at Palm Springs, among other places. Finally, in 1978, he moved to California for good.  This was at the age of 88 and after spending nearly half a century leading a life of the utmost simplicity in a remote corner of India.  Settled now in America he held weekly meetings at Watt’s houseboat SS Valejo, where he would answer questions from visitors.

Sadly, on August 5, 1984, he was hit by a car while crossing the road in Fairfax, California, and died eight days later.  He was 93.

Despite denying that he had a 'teaching,' he expounded an Advaitic world view and maintained that he had always known that "the source and I are one." Like Ramana Maharshi, he considered silence as both the highest teaching and "the esoteric heart of all religions." Silence for him was the stilling of desires, effort, willfulness, and memories.  This was the "full emptiness" that he took his spiritual name Sunyata to mean.

For some of his more unusual notions, Sorensen coined words himself. "Innerstand" meant an intuitive comprehension that did not involve the intellect or effort, while "headucation" was mental conditioning. Those who falsely identified themselves with their individuality he referred to as "egojies," and he was fond of the Zen term "ji ji muge," meaning the interdependence of all things and events.

For his understanding of his essential nature, Sorensen used, in addition to "sunyata," the word "mu."  "Mu" is an important term in Zen meaning "nothing," "an empty circle."  He used this not only in reference to himself but as an exclamation.  Alan Watts, coincidentally, is heard exclaiming "Mu!" in some of his audio tapes.

SOKEI-AN SASAKI ON MEDITATION

Sokei-an Sasaki (1882-1945) was the first Zen master to settle permanently in America. In a lecture on November 23, 1940, he offered the following apt description of meditation:

"The Buddha founded his religion upon samadhi (full mental absorption). His object of meditation was his own mind. He did not meditate upon any external object, upon thoughts, or words, or ideas. He meditated simply upon mind—mind from which had been extracted every thought, every image, every concept. He paid no attention either to the outside or to the inside; he meditated upon his own mind. Perhaps we should say mind meditated upon itself, for, in true Buddhist meditation, mind by itself is the meditator and at the same time the object of the meditator's meditation.

I think the meaning of 'his own mind' is not very clear to Western people. Western people think that mind, to be mind, must have something in it; if it has nothing in it, it is not mind. But consider the mind of an infant; he doesn't know the words papa or mama, he doesn't know his own existence, he doesn't know the outside world; nevertheless he has his own mind, pure and empty. We can discover that mind in this world through meditation. The attainment of this pure and empty mind is true samadhi. And this is Buddhism.

The Buddha practiced meditation for six years and succeeded in attaining this pure and empty mind. He did not call it God, or Mind either. He did not call it by any name. For him, Buddhism was very simple and very pure. It is pure mind. If you prefer to call it soul, Buddhism is pure soul. Our teacher used to say to us when we practiced mediation: 'Don't close your eyes; you will be bothered by your own thoughts. Don't keep your eyes open; you will be bothered by outside things. Keep your eyes partly closed and meditate upon your soul.' This is Buddhism."

Note that Sokei-an's use of the word "soul" here is in its broadest sense. Buddhism, in the doctrine of anatta, denies the existence of a permanent or static entity that remains constant, and, for example, migrates after death to another body.

SOKEI-AN SASAKI, ZEN MASTER

Sokei-an Sasaki was the first Zen master to settle permanently in America.

Sokei-an was born in Japan in 1882 and was raised by his father, a Shinto priest, and his father's wife. His birth mother was his father's concubine. His father taught him Chinese beginning at the age of four and soon had him reading Confucian texts. Following the death of his father when he was fifteen, Sokei-an became an apprentice sculptor and went on to study under Japan's renowned Koun Takamura at the Imperial Academy of Art in Tokyo. While in school he began studying Rinzai Zen under Sokatsu Shaku. 

After graduating from the art academy in 1905, he was drafted by the Japanese Imperial Army and served briefly during the Russo-Japanese War on the border of Manchuria. He was discharged when the war ended in 1906 and soon married his first wife, Tomé. She was a fellow student of Sokatsu. That same year the newlyweds followed Sokatsu to San Francisco, California as part of a delegation of fourteen. The couple's first child, Shintaro, was born not long after. With the hope of establishing a Zen community in California, the group farmed strawberries in Hayward but with little success. Sokei-an then studied painting under Richard Partington at the California Institute of Art. By 1910 the delegation's Zen community had proven unsuccessful, whereupon all members of the original fourteen, with the exception of Sokei-an and his wife, returned to Japan.

Next Sokei-an moved to Oregon to work for a short while. Tomé and Shintaro were not with him, but rejoined him in Seattle, Washington, where Tomé gave birth to their second child, Seiko, a girl. In Seattle, Sokei-an worked as a picture frame maker, writing at the same time various articles and essays for Japanese publications. Later he traveled the Oregon and Washington countrysides selling subscriptions to the Japanese newspaper Hokubei Shinpo. His wife, who had become pregnant once again, moved back to Japan in 1913 to raise their children.

Over the next few years Sokei-an made a living doing a variety of jobs, following which, in 1916, he moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York. Sometime during this period he unsuccessfully tried to join the U.S. army. While in New York he worked both as a janitor and a translator for Maxwell Bodenheim, an American poet and novelist known as the king of the Greenwich Village bohemians and who gained international fame during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Sokei-an also began to write poetry during his free time. In 1920 he returned to Japan to continue his Zen studies. He moved back to the United States in 1922, and in 1924 or 1925 began giving talks on Buddhism at the Orientalia Bookstore on East 58th Street in New York City. By this time he had received lay teaching credentials from his long-time teacher Sokatsu. In 1928 Sokatsu granted him inka, the final seal of approval in the Rinzai school. Then, on May 11, 1930, Sokei-an and some American students founded the Buddhist Society of America which was subsequently incorporated in 1931 at 63 West 70th Street. There were just four original members. Here he offered sanzen interviews and gave Dharma talks while also working on various translations of important Buddhist texts. To make ends meet, he sculpted Buddhist images and repaired art for Tiffany's.

In 1938, Ruth Fuller Everett began studying under him and received her Buddhist name, Eryu. Her daughter, Eleanor, was then the wife of Alan Watts, who also studied under Sokei-an that same year. According to Watts, Sokei-an lived at this time in a small temple in a walk-up on West 74th Street. It was just one large room with a shrine that could be closed off with folding doors, and a small kitchen. There he lived in complete simplicity with his Maltese cat, Chaka. In 1941, Ruth purchased an apartment at 124 East 65th Street which also served before long as the new living quarters for Sokei-an and became the new home for the Buddhist Society of America.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sokei-an was arrested by the FBI as an "enemy alien" and was taken to Ellis Island on June 15. He was interned at a camp in Fort Meade, Maryland on October 2, 1942, soon to suffer from high blood pressure and several strokes. Following the pleas of his students, he was released from the internment camp on August 17, 1943 whereupon he returned to the Buddhist Society of America in New York City. In 1944, he divorced his first wife from whom he had been separated for several years. Not long after, on July 10, 1944, he married Ruth in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Sokei-an died on May 17, 1945 after years of bad health. His ashes are interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York. The Buddhist Society of America underwent a name change following his death, becoming the First Zen Institute of America. Many of Sokei-an's writing may be found on their website under Zen Notes.

TATHATA

The Buddhist term "tathata" or "suchness" means that which is so of itself, or as it is also phrased, that which is of itself so.  This means that something just is and is what it is.  Philosopher Alan Watts states, coincidentally, that tathata is the correct interpretation of the virgin birth of Jesus. 

Watts goes on to sight classical music as tathata.  Classical music means nothing except itself, he says.  There is no "message" in a Bach fugue.  It just is what it is.  Rain, another example he gives, is something that needs no translation.  "It is just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what."

Tathata, according to Buddhists, applies to the creation of the universe as well.  They do not accept the notion of a Creator and a God-created universe.  They accept rather that the universe came spontaneously out of nothing.  Out of nothing came something, just as this something will one day again be nothing.  They explain that you cannot have something without there first being nothing, that something and nothing imply each other, they create each other.  And this occurs just so of itself.

In what has come to be known in English as the Flower Sermon, the Buddha transmitted the idea of tathata directly to his disciple Mahakasyapa when he held up a flower.  The other disciples present were perplexed by the gesture, but Mahakasyapa smiled.  He saw that the flower was just of itself so, tathata.

As no moment is exactly the same, each one can be savored for what occurs at that precise time, whether it is thought of as being "good" or "bad."  This also is tathata.

A related word is tathagata.  While alive the Buddha referred to himself as tathagata, which can mean either "One who has thus come" or "One who has thus gone," and interpreted correctly can be read as "One who has arrived at suchness," tathata.