..续本文上一页guage for a fresh start, so we might start by using terms intended for other purposes. It”s common to think that painful events can mark you for life. Childhood horrors, according to psychoanalysis, drive all sorts of adult pathology—creating an unhappiness impervious to good fortune. A genuine fresh start would correct the errors that build up in consciousness. It would ease the pain of wanting what you can”t get, or the absurdity of getting what you wanted and finding that it didn”t make you happy. A fresh start would be the opposite of trauma: it would mark you with a delight in life that also seemed irrevocable. This is one way to look at what happens to us in awakening.

　　In some ways, St. Paul”s very interesting epiphany led Christianity and much of European culture off on the wrong foot, because people formed the idea that an awakening changes what you believe. That was wonderful for him, but changing what you believe is probably irrelevant in terms of awakening. Awakening undermines the stories you live by, as well as the way you make stories—or what you call a story. Switching your thoughts is like switching rooms in what is essentially a prison the mind has made. But in awakening you can”t find any walls or bars. Changing your beliefs about what”s bad and what”s good could even be an indicator that a more fundamental change has not taken effect.

　　Zen people talk about emptiness because when you awaken, the maps that hold your beliefs are suddenly gone. You also notice that new maps appear in the mind, even without encouragement from you. And as the new maps appear, you can take them as provisional.

　　In my own path of discovery, when the maps that had been given me ran out, I found that the obvious solution was to listen to the koans. That helped, though it didn”t really give me another map. The koans aren”t maps; they immerse you in the life that appears when you have stepped past your maps into the vast dark. Each one has something slightly different to offer; it”s a way of being in conversation with old masters.

　　And it”s also helpful to be in conversation with each other. During the Dark Ages, the scholars gathered at places like the University of Paris and began to discuss everything together. From time to time, people tried to stop them but they persisted. Discussing everything led by hard roads to paying better attention to the mind and the world, and eventually to the rise of science and learning, the fuzzy logic in your toaster, an analysis of the shrinkage in glaciers, and the neuroscience underneath the convenient gadget that we call a self.

　　From time to time, I wonder why I teach. The meditation is nice but then there”s all the fundraising and administration. To the amusement of his audience, one of the modern Japanese koan masters used to say that he taught because of bad karma accumulated in a previous life. Although, being Tasmanian, bad karma may be a plausible explanation for why I teach, I think I do it because consciousness, koan work, and enlightenment are all social events. And as an artist of the koan world, I like to collect enlightenment stories. It”s interesting to see how other people come to awakening. It”s an important conversation to have with each other.

　　The nature of consciousness is the great human question, and a fresh start tells us something valuable about our capacities. It”s well known that the mind makes errors, because its maps get out of date. Consciousness mistakes friends for enemies, confuses its thoughts and reality, starts wars that harm itself. It can miss what is good for itself; it can miss what is good for everyone. Noticing the provisional nature of our mental maps and purposes might be one of the kindest things we could do for each other and for the planet.

　　The Zen task is to open the gates of the world beyond our prejudices. Like the Buddha, we can step away from everything we are certain about. I think that this possibility is the best contribution we can make to healing the flaws in consciousness and helping the world. Unkindness comes out of certainty; when we throw out certainty, we have the bare reality of consciousness, and another name for that is love.

　　NOTE

　　I was asked to write about Zen and have written about the path of transformation. It”s fair to mention that there is another flavor of Zen in which people don”t seek transformation. Their position is a subtle one, and it goes like this: if you have the nature of awakening intrinsically, then anything you might do to change yourself is unnecessary. If you set off to get awakened, well, you are making trouble for yourself. They have a point: the paradox in trying to transform your own consciousness is that the effort to change prevents change. It”s like thinking about not falling when you are on a tightrope—it”s just going to confuse matters. So that school, which is called Soto, doesn”t really use koans and favors simple sitting meditation and ceremonies as the embodiment of the perfection that already exists. That approach has its own virtues and Shunryu Suzuki, probably the greatest of the modern masters in America, held it. The two schools, the koan school and the nonkoan one, get mixed up of course, because awakening can strike you when you are not looking for it.

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