Daigo (大悟) — Great Awakening | PART FOUR

“The monk Keichō Beiko had a monk go ask Kyōzan, “Do people nowadays even attempt to make use of the great realization?”

     Kyōzan replied, “While spiritual realization is not nonexistent, the question is how can we avoid relegating it to a matter of secondary importance?”

     The ‘nowadays’ of which the monk spoke is the ever-present now. Although we think in terms of past, present, and future thousands of myriad times, all such thoughts arise only in the present moment. Unquestionably, each person lives in the now.

     The question is not whether realization exists or does not exist, nor whether it comes from elsewhere. It is whether one attempts to make use of it.

     Even if it is treated as secondary, it is still realization.

The heads of some who have experienced the great realization are black, and the heads of some who have experienced the great realization are white.”

SENSEI MICHAEL BRUNNER’S COMMENTARY

We open with a very simple question, but it exposes something very profound. Do people even attempt to make use of realization? Not whether it exists, or can be attained. Whether it is actually being lived.

     Kyōzan’s response shifts it immediately. Realization is not the issue. It is never absent. It is not something rare that only a few have access to. The question is whether we are relegating it to something secondary, something we set aside while we continue to organize our lives around our preferences, our fears, our habits of thought. If we’re doing that, it is just an idea. If we are living it, realization is actualization.

     Because we tend to treat realization as something separate from our actual life. Something we touch in practice, or glimpse in certain moments, and then return from as if we are going back to something more real. We give it a place among the pantheon of ideas in our conscious awareness, but it is dead. We grasp an idea of it, but we do not practice it.

     We are spurred on to ground everything in the immediacy of present-infinite. Not as an idea, not as a philosophical point about time, but as the only place anything has ever and can ever occur. Every thought about past and future is present here. Every movement of seeking, every attempt to locate realization somewhere else, is happening here. There is no other field where realization could exist or manifest as actualization. Are we are actually allowing it to function, or arer we are continually setting it aside in favor of something we take to be more urgent, more practical, more real. 

     Even when it is treated as secondary, it does not disappear. This often seems paradoxical. We cannot lose it, but we can push it out of the realm of our conscious awareness. We can live in a way that does not reflect it, that does not express it, that keeps returning to the same patterns of grasping and avoidance as if nothing has ever been seen.

     We are left with nowhere to conceptually grasp to forge it into something abstract. Some who have realized this have black hair. Some have white hair. What is the real difference? There is no special category of person because there is nothing outside. No separation from ordinary life. From this awakened perspective there is no outward marker that distinguishes one from another.

      So now the question is right here in front of us, not as something to think about, but as something to enact. Are we going to remain on the hundred foot pole of our own understanding, refining it, protecting it, turning realization into something rarefied and separate from the life we are actually living? Or are we willing to step off?

To step off is not to abandon realization. It is to stop holding it apart. It is to let it function where we are, in the middle of this life, in the middle of confusion, relationship, work, joy, loss. Not after things are resolved. Not when conditions are ideal. Right here, where nothing can be excluded.

When we step off, there is no ground to land on in the way we expect. There is only this vast ocean of lived experience, immediate, undivided, already moving. And in that plunge, there is no separation between self and other, no distance between realization and life. Compassion is not something we apply. It is what is already moving when nothing is being held back. Let go…