Satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment. The word literally means “to understand”. It is sometimes loosely used interchangeably with Kensho, but Kensho refers to the first perception of the Buddha-Nature or True-Nature, sometimes referred to as “awakening”. Kensho is not a permanent state of enlightenment, but rather a clear glimpse of the true nature of creation.' [2]
- The Mystical Experience
- Descriptions of the kensho/mystical experience
- No Boundary
- The World as Illusion
- Seeking Kensho
The Mystical Experience
In the West the kensho experience can perhaps be referred to as a 'mystical experience'.
William James, psychologist and philosopher, identified four general characteristics of mystical experiences:
| 1. Ineffability | Mystical states are more like states of feeling than intellect, subtle shaded with fine nuances that are difficult to convey in their import and grandeur to another. |
| 2. Noetic quality | Mystical experiences are states of knowledge, insight, awareness, revelation, and illumination beyond the grasp of the intellect. There is awareness of unity with the Absolute, of immorality of the soul, of great truths. Time and space are transcended. |
| 3. Transiency | Mystical experiences are fleeting in linear time, though they seem to be eternal. Most last a few seconds, some perhaps up to ten minutes. It is rare to sustain a mystical state for more than a half-hour, or perhaps one to two hours at best... |
| 4. Passivity | The individual feels swept up and held by a superior power.[3] |
Descriptions of the kensho/mystical experience
Ken Wilber
'It appears that you are looking at the world "out there," which seems very real and very separate from you, but then suddenly there is the realization—the simple recognition—that you are simply looking at your Self, and your Self is the entire World as it is arising moment to moment, right now and right now and right now.' '... the world arises in the Witness, and you and the world are one. You do not see the sky; you are the sky. You do not hear the birds singing you Witness; you are the birds singing. You do not feel the earth; you are the earth. All of this comes in a sudden, spontaneous, uncaused, tacit recognition, the recognition of nondual One Taste, your very own Self, the Original Face you had before your parents were born, the Self you had before the universe was born; this pure, ever-present, nondual Self, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal—and yet it is the only thing you have ever really known. You already know that you are you; and that you is, in deepest truth, pure and nondual Spirit.' [4]
'Time is so slow as to be a kind of eternity, and the flavor of eternity transfers itself to the hills—burnished mountains which I seem to remember from an immeasurably distant past, at once so unfamiliar as to be exotic and yet as familiar as my own hand.'—The Joyous Cosmology
Thomas Traherne
'The streets were mine, the temples were mine, the people were mine. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator [Witness] and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions; but all proprieties and divisions were mine; all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of the world which I now unlearn...'
Henry David Thoreau
'Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.'
Forrest Reid
"It was as if I had never realized before how lovely the world was. I lay down on my back in the warm, dry moss and listened to the skylark singing as it mounted up from the fields near the sea into the dark clear sky. No other music ever gave me the same pleasure as that passionately joyous singing. It was a kind of leaping, exultant ecstasy, a bright, flame-like sound, rejoicing in itself. And then a curious experience befell me. It was as if everything that had seemed to be external and around me were suddenly within me. The whole world seemed to be within me. It was within me that the trees waved their green branches, it was within me that the skylark was singing, it was within me that the hot sun shone, and that the shade was cool. A cloud rose in the sky, and passed in a light shower that pattered on the leaves, and I felt its freshness dropping into my soul, and I felt in all my being the delicious fragrance of the earth and the grass and the plants and the rich brown soil. I could have sobbed with joy".
No Boundary
In the kensho experience there is a sense of Unity.
Our normal sensation of ourselves as isolated egos inside a bag of skin, is a hallucination. Because, when you describe human behavior, or the behavior of a mouse, or a rat, or a chicken, or anything that you want to describe, you find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately, you must also describe the behavior of its environment.—Alan Watts, The Myth of Myself
"..there is no boundary between subjuct and object, self and not self, seer and seen. ..of all the boundaries we construct, the one between self and not-self is the most fundamental. It is the boundary we are most reluctant to surrender. It was after all the first boundary we ever drew. It is our most cherished boundary.
In unity consciousness, in no-boundary consciousness, the sense of self expands to totally include everything once thought to be not-self. One's sense of identity shifts to the entire universe, to all worlds, high or low, manifest or unmanifest, sacred or profane. And obviously this canot occur as long as the primary boundary, which seperates the self from the universe, is mistaken as real. But once the primary boundary is understood to be illusory, one's sense of self envelops the All- there is then no longer anything outside of one's self. and so nowhere to draw any sort of boundary. Thus, if we can at all begin to see through the primary boundary, the sense of unity consciousness will not be far from us."
"..if we carefully look at the sensation of "self-in-here" and the sensation of "world-out-there", we will find that these two sensations are actually one and the same feeling. In other words, what I now feel to be the objective world out there is the same thing I feel to be the subjective self in here. The split between the experiencer and the world of experience does not exist, and therefore cannot be found..."—Ken Wilber, No Boundary
We believe oursleves to be seperate, isolated individuals with private thoughts yet...
"Bells theorem emphasizes that “no theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require specially separated events to be separate.” In other words, all distant events are constantly interconnected and interdependent. This implies that each and every electron must know exactly what every other electron in the universe is doing in order to understand what it itself has to do at any given moment. This further implies that every atom in the universe is constantly ‘in touch’ with ‘all that is.’"[5]
In Hinduism and Buddhism in the heaven of Indra, there is a vast net or web of silken strands which spans across space infinitely in every direction. Every intersection hosts a shining luminous pearl. The surface of every pearl completely reflects every other, and the net as a whole. Likewise, each reflected pearl in itself reflects every other, with the process continuing ad infinitum. Indra's Net is alternatively known as "Indra's Pearls," or the "Jewel Net of Indra".
Indra's Net may be taken as a philosophical allegory for various concepts, from the broad interconnected nature of the known universe, to more specific ideas such as self-similarity, or computer and neural networks.[6]
The World as Illusion
'All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds...all 'material things,' all impressions, are phantoms.' Aleister Crowley [7]
'The whole world is an illusion, for what you see outside - the mountains, the lakes, the people whom you know, they are all illusions, created by the senses and the mind together. When you are not using the senses and the mind, then you'll be able to understand that reality is different from the appearances. The apperances are true only for the senses and the mind.' - Datta The Whole World is an Illusion
Everything is simply a form of consciousness manifesting. Science has long discovered that there is no form or substance to the world as we see it. The atom is merely a collection of energy particles which have no substance. [5]
Senses are imperfect instruments of truth. They cannot go beyond the sense objects. Therefore they actually breed ignorance. [8]
In Advaita Vedanta philosophy, maya is the limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. Maya is believed to be an illusion, a veiling of the true, unitary Self — the Cosmic Spirit also known as Brahman.
[9]
Seeking Kensho
In the zen tradition -'Working towards this realisation is usually a lengthy process of meditation and introspection under guidance of a Zen or other Buddhist teacher, usually in intensive sesshin retreats.
However, Kensho may also be spontaneous, upon hearing or reading some significant phrase,or as result of a profound dream.
Koans are often used as meditation aids. For example, one koan is known as: 'Who am I', since it is this question that guides the enquiry into one's true nature. The realization that there is no 'I' that is doing the thinking, but rather that the thinking process brings forth the illusion of an 'I', is a step on the way to Kensho.'[1]
Triggers for spontaneous mystical experience -
In a study, 3000 people were found who claimed to have had spontaneous mystical experiences, they were asked what had triggered these experiences;
The four major triggers were; 1. Depression, despair, 2. Prayer, meditation, 3. Natural beauty, 4. Participation in religious worship [10]
mystical texts
'Classical mystical texts from widely varying cultures and times seem to prescribe the same basic psychological techniques for attaining the same basic alteration in consciousness. This vast literature can be summarized as follows: If a person wishes to achieve a special state that goes beyond the usual feelings and perceptions of ordinary life, a state in which the person perceives God or his own basic essence, it is necessary that he practice (1) a form of contemplative meditation and (2) renunciation
CONTEMPLATIVE MEDITATION Contemplation is a nonanalytic apprehension of an object or idea — nonanalytic because discursive thought is given up and with it the ordinary attempt psychologically to grasp or manipulate the object of attention. "Nondemanding attention" suggests the appropiate attitude. Ordinary thought is considered an interference; it hinders the direct contact that yields essential knowledge through perception alone.
RENUNCIATION Poverty, chastity, isolation, and silence are traditional techniques used in pursuing the mystical path. As dramatic as such techniques may be, they tend to obscure the fact that the renunciation sought is much more basic than merely modifying external behavior. For example, Walter Hilton prescribes a renunciation of thought: "Therefore if you desire to discover your soul, withdraw your thoughts from outward and material things, forgetting if possible your own body and its five senses. . . ." St. John of the Cross calls for the banishment of memory: "Of all these forms and manners of knowledge the soul must strip and void itself, and it must strive to lose the imaginary apprehension of them, so that there may be left in it no kind of impression of knowledge, nor trace of aught so-ever, but rather the soul must remain barren and bare, as if these forms had never passed through it and in total oblivion and suspension. And this cannot happen unless the memory be annihilated as to all its forms, if it is to be united with God."
A seemingly simple, but perhaps equally subtle and difficult, statement of a contemporary Zen master is that renunciation "is not giving up things of this world, it is accepting that they go away."' [11]
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