The stick was already a dragon to swallow the whole universe

A talk given by Rev. Reiyo Ekai Roshi to a group of Colleagues

A few days ago a friend confessed to me that he supports the theory of a land that, if it is not exactly flat, we could define it as "a little more complex than pizza" , but also than the usual football or mandarin, in short, something a little composite. After all, after pizza, football, mandarin, what is missing? Coffee and cigarette, as soon as you wake up, your mother, the tower of Pisa, the souvenir gondola on TV?

I didn't bat an eyelid, but rather made him jump, telling him that we Buddhists, in the Abhidharma, also say something similar, with Mount Meru, the four continents surrounded by an endless ocean, adding however that these are expositions of a mystical/visionary and - in this sense - geometric geography, where we are not interested in theories, not the most shared ones and not even the strange ones, but something that helps us to remember the infinite and how much this already produces in itself.

In the meantime, one theory is as good as another and it doesn't matter, in fact, whether it is scientific or mystical, what counts is your perception and this has no possibility of being compared because nothing learns or says because everything reflects when you have achieved satori, because satori is not "mystical phenomenology" but is the pupil of everything, as Giordano Bruno and Pico della Mirandola also realized, we quote them, so in the meantime let's broaden this experience a little beyond rigid boundaries.

Ius Vertendi Cardinis Omne Meum Est , our Roman fathers used to say, wanting, I believe, to evoke that light and that courage, like when the swallow, the sky and everything else moves inside you. Courage, because you are alone-with-everything while you breathe that everything.

And, again our Roman fathers, also spoke of animadversion, an idea that today we have pushed more towards "aversion" but which, in reality, meant much more of a "feeling" that we would hope, today, to decrypt or implement through digital technological prostheses.

This friend I was talking about is a man with several degrees but, above all, a genius, so I felt honored by his question: “What do you think?” Well, I thought I had already explained it to him. So, I tried again: “I don’t think so, in the sense that I never believed that the world was something , even when I took intercontinental flights. I-don’t-know-what-happened-while-I-was-flying. For me, all of that doesn’t matter.”

“So, I have to go to California, I take the flight in Zurich, but they make me get off at an intermediate stop, in Chicago. What happened? ...You and those who disagree with you, think what you want”.

He was stunned.

I repeated to him undauntedly: “I-don’t-know.”

Then he tried to buddhize, saying that relative reality is what I said, but that absolute reality, instead, is the effective one, the one that is absolute, because it is proven. “What do you say? But isn’t that the same thing that others who make fun of you say?” “Tell me, what did you mean by effective? Did you mean tangible, unavoidable? Come on, come on…”. I had clearly become the inquisitor: “Unavoidable, then, for whom? Or did you really mean… The Truth, the one with a capital T!?” I couldn’t believe that even he, a practicing Buddhist, had gotten stuck in such Western ways.

“What did you mean by effective ? Instead mine would have been relative, because it was an explanation, while yours, instead?”. His four degrees, all deserved, with two technical degrees out of four, were starting to weigh on him. He too was anti-vax – novax (for us that means nothing) – convinced like me, he was starting to theorize scientifically. Here are the usual cardboard figures cut out in the sky! I tried again to explain myself. “Okay” I said to myself “I will be, in some way, less zen”.

“It must be true that for us Buddhists the world is a mandala with Mount Meru and the four continents, just as it will certainly be spherical or - as they used to say when I was a boy (when there were also “photos”) shaped like a mandarin, that is, with the poles squashed - but, you see, the question is how individually, and then, perhaps, collectively, we perceive the world. Then, however, the matter concerns, first and foremost, me individually, that is, how I perceive the world. The elitist benefactors know this well and that is why they try to convince us collectively of this or that, because they know that when the psychic tide rises, especially if it is a tide of fear, they make us do almost whatever they want”. He scratched his chest and I saw that he was elaborating and elaborating.

“For example (power of the collective tide!), for my part, every time I said 'coronavirus' in 2020, I coughed at least four times; which alarmed me, but not towards a hypothetical vairuz, but towards myself. Had I also entered the “soup”? Was I also dreaming the collective nightmare? My answer was… “Yes”! The next consideration was “damn” and the final one was a “fuck you”.

I continued, while I was watching him now with wide eyes: “Forget about gender fluidity, Brother, we need fluidity in a philological, cultural sense, otherwise civilization becomes only the representation of itself, the fable of our decadence, a total defeat…”. And so on, right? (blah blah blah) “And then be surprised that they no longer make images of the tangerine-shaped earth, but only of the spherical earth!”.

And he sneered: “You noticed too, then!?”. (As if to say “you’re not telling me all this to tell me that the earth is spherical, are you?)”.

It was difficult for him to listen to and understand someone he considers a super-expert say “I don’t know and I don’t intend to know, given that by remaining in this nihil scire I would really risk seeing/living the world”.

In fact we ended up talking about something else. For our Western mind it seems absolutely necessary to rely on a sense and an idea of ​​body, which is the body that can be well monitored and equivocal, ad hoc, today, by the famous medical science, considering that 97% - it is said - of the so-called 'active research scientists' are for sale to the highest bidder. The degeneration since the time of Andrea Vesalius, who dissected cadavers publicly, has given us today the human-pathological-monitorable-at-will body, completely devoid of endogenous, spiritual stem cell pregnancy, but already in line for the ritual exams. In fact we have reached the disease of a-symptomaticity, and I found in the Cambridge Dictionary Online a definition of immunity that seems to have been written by Burioni, given that it is only of the vaccine type. Okay, let's move on.

Well, I am sure that those who practice meditation - more easily than others - break the waves with their chest; I have proof of this also from those of you I know. I will not delve into physics, I leave that to the excellent Massimo Corbucci, Rupert Scheldrek; but I can say something about Buddhism and health. A Buddhist philosopheme is: "no phenomenon has its own existence" ... bang! Here's a good slap in the face!

And someone may remember the master Ummon, when he says, or maybe SCREAMS: “My staff has transformed into a dragon and swallowed the entire universe”. Quick, right? If we enter into this fluidity we see how an entire world disappears, to reappear much more alive and invasive. Entering into this intuition we remain a little breathless, which is also one of the effects of meditation, right?

When speaking of the aggregate (skanda) of form, today's Buddhists seem to speak of something dense, let's say compact, but this is not how the skanda of form would be, especially because body, kaya or rupa, means various things, while the namarupa, that is, the mind-form, would define, according to Western Buddhists, the individual identity.

But, guys, there is no such thing in Buddhism! Here reigns paticca-samuppada, that is, the co-emergence of all phenomena. If anything, it would be an inter-identity or a trans-identity (as we would say today). So: can I choose between a tie and a bow tie? Of course. Can I believe in science? Sure? Maybe it's an oxymoron, but that's your business. So, if you want, you can, I can. But I add: I don't know if it's worth it for me to be pricked with poisons, me plus my poor children. Maybe not. Meh! And, maybe, this wouldn't even have anything to do with the famous science.

This, instead, is the temptation to be in compliance with the collective unconscious, Freudianly sick and zero coherent: because Freud, guys, saw us like this. If we understand, we understand. If we understand, these elitists, these fourth/revolutionists, these deep-statists, are a bunch of losers, or not!? The mental constructs deriving from the double paradigm 1) psychoanalysis plus 2) existential entropy = equals materialism, can produce scams that then crystallize into ideology. You want, afterwards, to be possibilist; you want, afterwards, to reason about signifiers and meanings...

Bravo! You took the membership card of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi party, of the Californian transsexual one – or vice versa – and now you are a slave to them and you have to read the Italian regime press, which tells you that “Crest l'è mort dal frād” (com as des a Bulaggna) that is, that “Jesus died from the cold” (a Bolognese saying). You know that journalist, who, not knowing what to say that was evil about the Russians (who are all evil, mind you), claimed that, not knowing what to shoot at anymore, they had let off steam with the ducks that, instead, were swimming peacefully and happily in a small lake in front. Their hope is always that with a quick shot they can convince the average 'inattentive' person.

Now, moving on, I try to invent an example, hopefully, stimulating. Here it is. I put something on the sink, I turn back toward the window, but after 30 seconds I turn back toward the sink and find that something I had put on the sink: aha! Everything as before! Identical. Nothing has changed. What a relief.

Ah, this would be for the psychology of the average materialist, a reassuring demonstration of a certain existence, almost perennial in its "physical-demonstrability-in-time-duration", that is, that answer to a very human hope, indeed, of a loser who implores certainties, because it wants to be this; and in the end it is. And yet, in reality, few see how this is a chain of sneaky and habitual syllogisms, which would already be contradicted if we were dreaming without realizing it.

It is beautiful, among other things, to meditate while sleeping or dreaming. Early in the morning, you wake up a little, then, instead, you go back, fix some idea, a color, a radiance and stay there. I think some of you have done it, surely. It would be nice, then, to tell us about it.

Or, going back to the example, one can lose everything - how to say - the continuity, the chain of this nonsense, even just with Alzheimer's, for example. So, in that case, I put the keys on the sink, I turn around pretending nothing happened, I turn around suddenly to find the keys that... No, wait... So as not to find the keys... Since they are no longer there, the keys... Oh, yes, that's because my daughter took the keys to go to the market, since in reality with Alzheimer's I may not have turned around immediately - as I thought in this solitary experiment - but an hour later.

[Continues the example] And then, excuse me, I don't have a daughter. They made me sterile by punching me. Cars no longer exist for us serfs because of the fluffonic anhydride and the 15-minute city. There isn't even a market anymore, because they've decided that they'll send us, the survivors, locked inside a fence, a nice drone with our daily bread, or rather, with GMOs and daily crickets, useful for keeping us slaves with planned obsolescence alive, the ones that the 'masters' have decided, with the fourth industrial revolution, to let live, while there are cars and drones, out there, to do everything else.

All this, of course, will not happen, but it is better not to drive around in a two-wheel drive, perhaps flat, in a snowstorm. Even if the snowfall is short-lived. I firmly believe, I repeat, in your strength; I firmly believe in the strength of meditation. I believe that we were born not only to break the waves with our chests, but to swim as one in this ocean of splendor.

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