Earlier Thoughts On That Illusory Tree (SDRC 2006)

      I’m not sure how it happened. I was just standing there leaning against the truck and I realized that I cannot describe a tree, for instance, without “me”. What do I mean when I say without “me?” I’m referring to that entity that all of us refer to as “me.” When we say, "It‘s you and me," "Do you want to go with me?" or "That’s just me."
      In Robert Kennedy’s book, Zen Gifts to Christians, he says, "The self is the sum of its functions in the present moment.” In similar fashion, I think when we refer to me, the mind is employing the sum total of all that we have learned, and this in turn manifests in our thoughts as the notion of  "I." This aggregate of experiences referred to as I or me is comprised of all that we have learned - memory - and we access this information (or stated another way - we have an awareness of “I”) when consciousness processes our past visceral and mental experience. It is the manifestation of a reflective consciousness; it is a metaphor of sorts. I become the actor in all those recalled experiential moments.
      So I then tried to imagine how would I describe the object commonly referred to as a tree without using previously learned words or ideas, and realized that I could not. This led immediately to the realization that in nature there is no such thing as a tree. There is that which we have labeled a tree but the word, the name, does not describe anything. It simply denotes an entity we commonly agree to call, or refer to as, a "tree." A valuable asset to be sure, but not the whole story.
      It further occurred to me that this is true of all things in our world. If we were to look out into a forest without our memories, words, and teachings, what would we see? There have been any number of words meant to represent just such a thing; “Suchness”, the “One” perhaps, or “No-Thing." And it seemed clear that without “me” the world is something quite different than the one into which the I is born, lives, and ultimately passes through. Therefore it is true that we, as human beings, create the world in which we live. Our world is created in and by our mind, and it is what is referred to in Buddhist literature as the Relative world. There is also, and at the same time, the Absolute world, and it includes all that is in our Relative world and more. However, this Absolute world is void of all the separate images created within a dualistic mind.
      While all this may seem rather trivial or obvious to some, for me it opened the door into asking, "Then what is beyond the limited, dualistic perception of the world around us?" It allowed me to see what the esoteric teachings in Zen were pointing toward. That all things are connected in “Oneness” and that in this regard, even the use of the word One is superfluous. It is perhaps more reasonable to say that all things are “part of the Oneness that has no name." There is nothing apart from that complete wholeness which would require a distinguishing label, so to do so makes no sense.
      Now all this is certainly not new to any student of Zen as I said, but what interested me was that I found a new way to grasp the idea of Emptiness. It was to attempt to describe all things in the universe without using the labels we have learned and agreed upon to communicate a description of reality. In truth all the descriptions which we accept as representing reality, are nothing more than illusions. Illusions because they are accurate only in the relative world of the human senses. In the absence of the human mind there are none of the separate things we call our world. Ultimate or absolute reality is empty of all the separating boundaries that our mind creates. The universe beyond the boundaries of our dissecting mind is empty - yet missing nothing. It is empty of us.