- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
KoAns
Working with a koan or hua-tou is a method
used to induce deep Zen questioning, orig-
inally developed in China from the sixth
century onwards. Among famous collections
are the 100 koans of the Blue Cliff Record,
compiled in 1125 and later expanded by
many commentators, including the poet
and painter Hakuin (1685–1768), and the
Gateless Gate collection of 48 koans devised
by Wumen in 1228. Koans are mainly used
in Rinzai Zen, one of the two main sects,
and trainee monks may be expected to
‘pass’ a series of graded koans, but really
koans do not have ‘right answers’. the only
right answer is to show that one has ‘seen
the nature’ or ‘transcended duality’ (Watts,
1957; Kapleau, 1980).
many koans are questions directed at the
nature of self, such as ‘What was your orig-
inal face before your mother and father
were born?’, ‘What is your own mind?’, or
‘Who is dragging this old corpse around?’ It is easy to
spend hours, days, or even years on any of these. If you
have been doing the practices in each chapter, you will
know just what this means. Indeed, sue has used some
of these as the basis for prolonged meditation, including
‘Am I conscious now?’ and ‘Who is asking the question?’
(Blackmore, 2011). other koans may seem completely
incomprehensible, such as ‘the east mountain strides over
the water’ or ‘When the many are reduced to one, to what
is the one reduced?’, yet they may have deep effects on
the serious questioner.C
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18.1
face looks like – the face you had before you (and indeed your parents) were born.’
This became one of the most famous of Zen koans and was exactly to the point.
Even so, many continue to reject Harding’s simple insight. Hofstadter calls it ‘a
charmingly childish and solipsistic view of the human condition. It is something
that, at an intellectual level, offends and appalls us’ (Hofstadter and Dennett,
1981, p. 30). He seems unable to imagine that, as
Harris puts it, ‘It is possible to stand free of the jug-
gernaut of self, if only for moments at a time’ (Harris,
2014, p. 11); unable to imagine the state that Hard-
ing describes, and that so many others have too, of
being alert and alive yet utterly without the sense of
an observing self.
John Wren-Lewis was a physics professor with
decidedly anti-mystical views when in 1983, at the
age of 60, he was poisoned while travelling on a bus
in Thailand. A would-be thief gave him a toffee laced
with what was probably a mixture of morphine and
cocaine, and the next thing he knew was waking up
in a dilapidated and dirty hospital.
At first he noticed nothing special, but gradually
it dawned on him that it was as if he had emerged
freshly made, complete with the memories that
made up his personal self, from a radiant vast
blackness beyond space or time. There was no
sense at all of personal continuity. Moreover, the
‘dazzling darkness’ was still there. It seemed to be
behind his head, continually recreating his entire
consciousness afresh, instant by instant, now! and
now! and now! He even put his hand up to feel the
back of his head only to find it perfectly normal.
He felt only gratitude towards everything around
him, all of which seemed perfectly right and as it
should be.
Both doctors and patient thought that the effects
would soon wear off, but they did not, and years
later Wren-Lewis described how his whole con-
sciousness had changed for good.I feel as if the back of my head has been
sawn off so that it is no longer the 60-year-
old John who looks out at the world, but
the shining dark infinite void that in some
extraordinary way is also “I”.
(1988, p. 116)Many aspects of his life changed. The practicalities
of ordinary life became easier, not harder as you
might imagine, because he was not constantly‘It is possible to stand free
of the juggernaut of self, if
only for moments at a time’
(Harris, 2014, p. 11)
thinking about the future. Pain became more of an
interesting warning sensation than a form of suffer-
ing. His sleep changed from a previously rich dream
life to a state of ‘conscious sleep’ in which he was
still aware of lying in bed, and the fifty-nine years of
his former life seemed like a kind of waking dream.
He was no longer living with an illusion of separate
selfhood; rather, everything had become ‘just the
universe John Wren-Lewising’ (2004).
His original experience might be classed as an NDE
(Chapter 15), yet Wren-Lewis came to precisely the
opposite conclusion from that of most NDE research-
ers. Rather than leaping to ideas about consciousness
existing apart from the brain or notions of ‘end-
less consciousness’ or overthrowing reductionism
(Haesler and Beauregard, 2013; van Lommel, 2013;
Parnia et al., 2014), he concluded that his personal
consciousness was ‘snuffed out’ and then recreated
from the radiant dark.
This is more reminiscent of Dan Dennett’s (1991) sug-
gestion that self and consciousness can always be
snuffed out like a candle flame and rekindled later,
or of James’s passing Thoughts, or Galen Strawson’s
sense that consciousness is continually restarting.
Wren-Lewis was acutely aware of that snuffing out
and re-creation going on all the time. This is the same
idea as the Buddhist notion of the wheel of death
and rebirth – the constant re-creation of new selves
moment-to-moment from the prevailing conditions
that we mistake for a continuing self. Our problem
is that we don’t tend to see it that way; instead, we
want our self to be permanent.
As for the spiritual path, Wren-Lewis claimed that
the very idea is necessarily self-defeating, because
the process of seeking implies a preoccupation with
time, and so makes a goal out of what is already here
and now. In this, he is expressing the paradox of the
path to no-path found so often in Zen. He is partic-
ularly scathing about those philosophies which are
based on schemes of spiritual growth or conscious
evolution. Awakening is not the culmination of a
journey but the realisation that you never left home
and never could.These examples show, unequivocally, that awaken-
ing does not have to be the culmination of a long
process of training. Harding woke up through lone
questioning and happenstance, and Wren-Lewis
through a poisoned brain. Research suggests that‘This is just the universe
. . . . . . . . . . . ing’
(write in your own name)