Inherent Awareness
This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows moldy and withers away or is deformed and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts.
D.T. Suzuki, the 20th century's foremost expert on Zen thought, wrote those thoughts in 1926. Suzuki’s work is still considered the best explanation and description of what he and others call Zen. Zen is doing without doing; being without being. It is expressing innate impulses without reflection or emotional ownership. It is the energy that powers the battery within the human psyche and it has been called a plethora of names in order to make some rational sense of its senselessness.
The body is an electrical charged battery that is connected to mental enzymes that create individual impulses within physical consciousness. These energetic impulses create thoughts which are expressed in perceptions, beliefs, and then choices and experiences. In other words there is a vibrational force that lives through physical manifestations. This unidentified force can be altered by beliefs and emotions so the same impulses can be lived in entirely different manners depending on the consciousness experiencing it. In that respect impulses are connected, but are express differently in order to create experiences that produce the mental enzyme of awareness.
There is a freedom within this awareness that treats all consciousness as it is in the spirit of self. The inherent awareness within the energy of self continues to surface as Zen, as God, as Buddha, as Jesus, and as anything else the individual mind of a manifested consciousness can create and then name. All of this energy flows through the stream of awareness and life is defined in rational terms even though life itself is not rational.
Subjectively connecting to this energy is freedom; objective connection is enlightenment. Enlightenment is the inherent awareness of the multiplicity of self.
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