Satori...4
The statement of Zen that 'Every perception is an opportunity for satori' should perhaps be taken in conjunction with the phrase 'The eye cannot see itself'.
Reality is ubiquitous, but also, as Robert Linssen tells us, 'Elle est au centre même de notre faculté de perception.'
The eye that sees, the ear that hears, the tongue that tastes are only apparatus, but the I that sees, hears and tastes is Reality. We only need to realise that and the first perception becomes satori.
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The eye that cannot see itself is the I that cannot conceive itself.
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Sex
In so far as masculine and feminine are positive and negative electrically we may remember that positively charged particles repel one another, negatively charged particles likewise, whereas positively and negatively charged particles attract one another. This aspect of sexual relations needs no exposition.
Stereoscopic Thinking
(ref. Reality and Manifestation - X, Logic and Superlogic, Ch. 29)
Swami Siddeswarananda offers a simile so apposite that it seems more than a mere metaphor: it has something of the character of a symbol. He compares the outlook of a man who has attained realisation with stereoscopic vision.
We look at a couple of duodimensional pictures, two slightly different aspects of an object, and then place them in the apparatus which unites them in focus, and immediately we behold an image that has the quality of a third dimension.
In everyday life our two eyes receive each a duodimensional image which, combined in focus in our brain, gives us a tridimensional picture. One may suppose that the duplication of our sense-organs has this effect as its primary function - in the interest of our protection and efficiency.
Leaving the sensory plane of percepts for the intellectual plane of concepts, we conceive everything dualistically, that is to say everything is conceived as relatively good-bad, hot-cold, light-dark, new-old, but never can we conceive one and the same thing as possessing both characteristics at once, never can we - as on the perceptual plane - see the image from two aspects simultaneously. Well-water at, say, sixty degrees that seems cool in summer, at the same temperature seems warm in winter. In spring and autumn it may seem neither cool nor warm, but never can we conceive it as both. A man or a woman may seem to us to be what we call 'good' or 'beautiful' one day and what we call 'bad' or 'ugly' the next, while on a third day he or she may seem to be neither, but on no occasion will he seem to be both at once.
We have an emotionally positive concept of someone or something, and an emotionally negative concept; at one moment we like someone or something, at another we dislike that person or thing, but never the two at the same time. Were we to discover a means of blending these two tridimensional mental concepts should not the resulting concept automatically have the quality of a further dimension?
If the so-called 'opposites' are really complementaries must they not be capable of blending by focus in a stereoscopic vision, acquiring thereby that further dimension which reveals reality?
For at such a moment we should no longer be thinking dualistically.
Presence in The Present
Every time you watch yourself doing something, perceiving something, you are transcending yourself.
Every time you stand outside yourself (transcend yourself) you leave the river of time and swim ashore. You are on the bank watching time flow past. But, as has already been said, an element of us is always on the bank - otherwise we could not be conscious that time flows. Therefore what really happens when we transcend ourselves is that we transfer our identification from the fictitious entity to the I that is relative to Reality.
But in so far as I partake of Reality I am in the Present, the present which is No-Time, observing the illusory process of 'future' turning into 'past'.
That seems to be the only way in which the non-integrated can approach the state of Presence in the Present, for that is the state of the integrated and a consequence of Realisation, and a consequence cannot be used as a means.
To attempt to seize the present via the fictitous entity is to seek to bring that fictitious entity into the Presence of the Present. That is to attempt to bring the illusory into the presence of the Real.
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When we deliberately endeavour, by some kind of act of discipline, that is by 'will', that is by means of the ego-mechanism, to seize the present we are merely fixing our attention on the more recent past.
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