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What is the goal of Zen? The answer is Satori, the Zen term for Enlightenment. Satori IS Zen.
Christmas Humphries says, “Since Satori lies beyond the intellect, which alone can define and describe, one cannot define Satori”. Think of awe and wonder - how do you describe such ‘feelings’? Awesome? Wonderful? Not quite adequate, is it?
Humphries goes on to say, “Silence alone can describe it, the silence of the mystic, of the saint, of the artist in the presence of great beauty; of the lover and the poet when the fetters of time and space have for a moment fallen away”.
However, whilst I’d agree with Humphries that words are inadequate to describe satori, I would argue that there’s a crucial problem of language, which affects understanding, in saying that Satori lies beyond the intellect.
I think it’s important to describe the experience of satori as being on a different plane or continuum of intelligence - call it SQ or spiritual intelligence - which might be seen as being at right-angles to, or complementary to, the intellectual plane, or IQ.
This metaphysical (or spiritual) awareness, which I think it’s important to see as a separate kind of intelligence, connects directly to the transcendental and the divine, to a kind of collective super-consciousness, through the faculty of intuition, which needs no words or concepts in order to perceive truth and reality.
Intuition, which has characteristically been neglected in ‘western’ ‘intellectual’ discourse, or seen as somehow ‘female’ and therefore inferior to intellect, is the key mode of operation for metaphysical or spiritual intelligence. It’s what we rather clumsily tend to characterise as a “sixth sense”, though it’s not a sense, and it’s not an instinct either. It’s definitely not a product of the intellect. And it has nothing to do with tests, exams and academia.
It’s not an emotion, and it’s nothing to do with empathy, which are both types intelligence on the third plane of understanding or awareness, sometimes referred to as emotional/social intelligence, or EQ.
Humphries goes on to say that satori “is not out of the body or out of the world; on the contrary, the world and all in it is seen and enjoyed more fully than before. At first it is reached in flashes which come and go. Later it comes in profound meditation, or when the mind, by this device or that, is raised to its highest plane.”
Again, I think there’s an important language issue here, which is more than just semantics, and which tends to hinder a clear understanding of satori and spiritual intelligence. I would argue that it’s not the mind that’s being raised to a higher plane - it’s the whole of our consciousness, or our awareness. And it’s our spiritual intelligence, which is informed by intuition, that’s the motive force which raises our consciousness through the experience of satori.
We talk about ‘flashes of intuition’, and these tend to enter the mind when it is still, when conscious thought is switched off - sometimes though meditation, sometimes through exhaustion, sometimes through just being in a place of great beauty, sometimes in the presence of great art or great music. Intuition, in its very nature, is very difficult to think about, difficult to describe or apprehend.
It just somehow happens when it happens - or, in modern society, it happens much too infrequently. Intuition occurs whenever it’s necessary and appropriate, providing it has an opportunity to break through into our conscious awareness.
What Humphries doesn’t mention is that satori can sometimes occur through the use of certain drugs - so-called mind-expanding drugs such as cannabis, LSD, ecstasy and ‘magic mushrooms’ - at least in the initial stages of their use. Unfortunately such drugs also tend to impair our functioning in various ways, and I believe it’s true to say that the only ‘high’ worth having, at least in the long term, is a natural high.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that Humphries only alludes to the fact that the tantric path, through sex and orgasm, can also enable us to experience a ‘high’ - the satori of “the lover and the poet when the fetters of time and space have for a moment fallen away . . .”
The tantric path can often take us to a peak of satori - can instantly transport us to the mountain top where suddenly we have a view and a perspective of life and the meaning of life that was previously beyond our vision. It’s surely beyond dispute that our bodies of themselves can give us (through sheer physical bliss and release) an instant experience of metaphysical bliss, or satori. To lie in the arms of a lover and experience a sense of blissful togetherness after making love is satori indeed.
It’s also important to understand that through the tantric route it’s not just sensual pleasure, as great as that may be, which transports us so readily to those higher levels of consciousness or awareness. It’s the feeling of wholeness and completeness that sometimes comes after making love, after orgasm.
It’s release, it’s fulfilment, it’s having arrived at a place that perhaps we didn’t even know existed - a place beyond worldly cares, beyond desire, beyond need, beyond anything other than just BEING. Such a wordless state of satori is in my view even greater and more blissful than KNOWING. This is the true essence of Zen, and of satori, and enlightenment, which are one and the same.
I’m putting great emphasis on the tantric route here because it’s something that many of us may be familiar with, even if we’ve never had any other blissful satori experiences in other ways - through meditation, contemplation of nature, etc.
However, it’s important to say that sex and sexual pleasure is by no means guaranteed to take us to satori - even sex with someone we love - and certainly not orgasm through masturbation, even though that provides pleasure and a certain amount of release from physical and emotional frustration.
Satori is about far more than pleasure. It’s THE peak experience. It’s the ultimate feeling that’s beyond sensual, intellectual, and emotional pleasures, though it can be approached through any of those routes - through the pleasures of the mind, the senses, the emotions.
It is simply sheer spiritual bliss, which has nothing to do with god or divinity, other than the pure divine spirit that lies within us all. It’s the recognition of and experience of that spirit. The development of (and continuous connection with) that spirit, and the spirit of the universe, is what I understand by spiritual intelligence, by enlightenment, and by Zen.
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The consequences of the growth of spiritual development in individuals and in society as a whole (though some say we’re now going backwards in our increasingly materialistic world) is a very big subject, to be explored in future chapters of this blog.
The big issue of how we might achieve higher levels of satori, Zen, or spiritual intelligence through attempts to consciously provide for it and develop it in young and old alike, must also be taken on in other chapters.
The important thing to recognise is that our ‘western’ societies and religions hardly even register this as a concern or an issue, and certainly don’t, on the whole, address themselves to raising awareness of it, let alone pursue the urgent need to raise levels of spiritual intelligence in order to deal with the urgent problems of our materialistic and increasingly violent societies, with their ever-increasing levels of mental, emotional and spiritual sickness. What we see instead are politicians and pundits pontificating on how to deal with the effects of such sickness, rather than how to deal with the root causes.
Perhaps the times are beginning to change. Perhaps books like Richard Layard’s Happiness and Sue Palmer’s Toxic Childhood are making us more aware of the need to change the ways in which we live in the modern world.
Perhaps the Dalai Lama’s call for a spiritual revolution, which he makes in his book Ancient Wisdom, Modern World, will sooner or later strike a chord that will resonate throughout the world. Some would say perhaps pigs may fly.
In the meantime those of us who see the need and see the glass as half full must join together and keep on working for this change, this revolution, which tried to get off the ground in various places throughout the western world back in the Sixties, but didn’t have a powerful enough engine.
Perhaps the credit crunch and the partial collapse of the banking system and indeed the shaking foundations of capitalism will be responsible for a sudden shift in consciousness, a sudden demand for change, a sudden urge to unite and fight for a more enlightened world.
Then again, not. Perhaps we must just continue to go forward slowly, individually and collectively - with linked arms, comrades and colleagues determined to do the work on ourselves which we first and foremost need to do, assisting others along the way as best we can.
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