i work in neuro, but only enough to cover my food budget. when i was 28, i thought about going into molecular biochemistry. i worked with a guy named jack shepherd for about a year. jack was not much older than me, but was in a network of maybe a dozen people globally who were then defining the research field we now call chemical messengers. jack was very cool, not full of himself, low key, a good heart. he said, you’re not a biochemist, what are you into? why do you want to work with me? i said, i’m into sentience, like, self-reflexive self-consciousness, i want to understand how you get that out of molecular biochemistry. jack looked at me and said, without hesitation, we’re not allowed to ask those questions.
language is funny. we say, we live, without being able to completely characterize either word. we say, the earth is our home, or, our home is in the milky way galaxy, or, our home in the universe is part of a watershed made up of a cosmic flow of galaxies, and that a surface encloses the limits of the watershed.
our genome, and the genomes of all living beings on our home, the earth, are composed of amino acids. there are precursor molecules that make up amino acids, and in recent years, those precursor molecules have been found to be ubiquitous throughout the known universe.
our sense of time is tied to observation of the known universe. from the frame of reference of western science, which is about 500 years old, the known universe had a beginning, something less than 14 billion years ago, the clock is running, and everything we map, from molecules to superclusters, appeared at a certain point in time.
great master ma, quoting scripture, said: everywhere, everyplace, is buddha considered to be. this does not depend on the time.
he said: if you can attain situational free mastery of the teachings, when you define the realm of reality, all is the realm of reality; when you define true suchness, all is true suchness. if you speak in terms of abstract designs, all realities are abstract designs; if you speak in terms of concrete facts, all realities are concrete facts. bring up one, and a thousand follow: abstract principle and concrete fact are no different.
he said: a buddha is one who is capable of humanity, who has knowledge and wisdom, who accurately perceives potentials and states of mind and can cut through the web of doubts of all living beings, getting out of entanglements such as being and nonbeing, so that both profane and sacred feelings end, and personality and phenomena are both empty.
the web of doubts of all living beings stems from what is called the ordinary mind. if this ordinary mind grasps phenomena, then it gets involved in external causes and conditions; this is the meaning of the birth and death of mind. if it does not grasp phenomena, this is the meaning of original mind, the mind before the attribution of causes and conditions, the mind that resides in nonduality.
ma-tsu says: when you are enlightened, that means you have realized your own original mind.
right now, the web of doubts of all living beings predominates our consciousness. looking at the facts, it looks like greed and selfishness have affected the concentration of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere; it is a fact that the last time those concentrations were at 415 ppm, the shoreline was 20 feet higher than it is now.
now is a good time to choose the original mind, this very mind, heart of hearts, is buddha.
householder zen 