Buddhism
To collapse everithing back to What Is is an ultimate Buddhist practice.
Sitting in zazen is an ultimate practice which teaches the way of observing of and dealing with [“waves in”] ones own mind.
One has to actually experience (realize) that the mind could be in more than one state, and, ultimately, that there are two minds, - one so-called premordial awareness, or the “animal mind” (without any negative connotations - never confused, closest to reality) and socially conditioned, language-based intellect infested with abstract concepts bullshit, which are sort of viruses (we call them “memes” nowadays).
There is overwhelming evidential support from modern neuroscience that the “ancient”, animal parts of the brain are still function in parallel with “modern” cortexes and the actual, non-metaphorical conflicts arise all the time.
The current notions of “emptional intelligence”, “flow”, and so on are just another views of the same “mountain” and has been explored in ancient Buddhist literature millennia ago.
Another actual realization which we owe to ancient Buddhist practitioners is that there is no continuity of the mind, and it arises on demand for a sensory event, only to fade off and to be replaced by arousal of a “new version” of it upon another event.
A “new version” is due to the neorological fact that each neuron changes its state afger bein activated or “fired”.
The best metaphor is an image on the screen of your phone which is apparently (to an observer) continuous, while in fact it arises and fades into complete darkness 60 times per second (just like that electical bulb above your head).
These observations lead to the ultimate principle of impermanence and an illusory nature of what we call Our Mind or Our Self, and a proper realization of this ultimately right understanding is the end of the journey - modern’s day vedanta.
It is important to realize that all the findings of early Buddhists and Vedantists are due to introspection - the only tool available at the time.
As with the methaphor of observing the same mountain from different points of view, all the introspective efforts would ultimately end to the same “mountain” or “reality” and this is why various sects attained one or more fundamental realization which does not contradict (and actually complement) each other.
What Dzongchen calls “Primodrial Awareness” and places it before intellect is that “animal mind” or processes in the older (prior to cortexes and language areas) brain structures. This is what Zen sects call “Big Mind” as opposed to “Small Mind” of a conditioned, language-based intellect.
The point of this essay is to summarize my hacks of Buddhism and reduce mountains of written bullshit back to What Is.
When one calms down or “stops” ones language-based intellect what one “sees” or become aware of is that ancient “animal mind”, and the awareness itself. It is that fundamental.
When one enters the state of “flow”, which is utilizing one’s animal mind “as intended” by evolution one experiences “optimal performance” exactly because the brain-body complex works as it supposed to.
Archery is the oldest known practice of having the state of “flow”, and an ultimate learning environment, among other things. Don’t credit modern pop-sci writers with too much. In the aspect of self-awareness and self-control archery is equivalent to Zen sitting. Again, the mountain is one and the same.
Yes, there is no permanent Mind, leave alone Self. Yes, it is event-driven and reactive (with a lot of priming and caching mechanisms explored by late 20th century psychology).
And, Yes, one constucts actual maps, whuich are not the territory of reality with actual strucutes on top of pre-arranged (by evolution) neural networks, which update its “weights” with every firing caused by some experience.
From the realization of not having any permanent Self everything follows - there is literally nothing to lose and worry about because having something is an illusion. The only thing one can do is to see things as they are and to accept everything as it is.
To see things as they are
This is the central principle of Buddha’s teaching and everything else rests on it. But what it means?
We and all higher animals never deal with reality directly, as it is. We do not posses such a capacity of the brain to deal with the whole.
Instead we construct crude, oversimplified representations of the outside world inside our brain (some call it a map of the territory) with almost everything of our very limited sensory input being discarded.
The most fundamental fact is that the brain deals only with its own representation of reality which it constructs, and never, in principle, with anything else, but his own inner “map”. It is just evolved this way not to be constantly overwhelmend by What Is.
So, there is always a huge gap between What Is and what we think we “see” and know. To see things as they are is to have the smallest possible gap (still as between reality and a novel or a story). This means to have an inner map (however crude and less detailed) with almost no distortions.
Another less wrong metaphor is to have inside your brain a partially complete jig-saw puzzle in which there is no contradictions among what is already “known”, just like in a board game whatever you already solved fits together perfrctly.
The reality (or what we call Universe) is one and single unfolding process, so it has no contradiction (within itself) in principle and everything fits toghether by definition (imagine a giant tree as a process).
Humans have the unique ability to think in terms of an abstract language (in which words are supposed to be labels to the parts or attributes of What Is). They can incorporate abstract words into their “maps of reality” and thus pollute and distort their “maps”. The crucial principle is that most humans can’t tell which is which on their “inner map”.
This is what ancient Upanishadic seers called Maya or the weil which hides and distorts reality. Yes, this weil is made of abstract bullshit and socially constructed make-believes that isn’t out there (like spirits, ghosts, equality, etc).
So, this is what the Buddha meant by seeing things as they are.