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Sartori Visionary Art by Martin La Spina
The article below describes my experience of kensho or sartori and provides a little bit of information
about this very powerful Zen spiritual event.
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It was January, 2016. I had been a member of the Spirit Mind Body Group now meeting at the Mindfulness Center on Locust for probably 12 or 15 years. The history of this group is written about in another article. Since shortly after our leader’s death, I had been serving as the moderator/facilitator, pressed into this role by the consensus of the group, being first suggested as the leader by our former leader’s wife. Again you will have to read something about this group in other articles. On Thursday, our regular meeting day, January 28, another member and I were scheduled to cooperate in a presentation considering “Women’s Wisdom.” There is a summary of what we had presented on my Spirit Mind Body blog. This presentation had necessitated me to search as my co=presenter had done for something to document, something to present, something that would sound better than just empty aphorisms about wise women’s sayings. My colleague wanted something deeper than that. This had prompted me to do some searching into the legends of The Goddess, and even some modern Wiccan ideas. I had even sent for several copies of the Sage Woman magazine, especially one with a theme called “WiseWomen”.This magazine, along with two others --The Crone and Wiccans and Pagans—all delve into the modern Wiccan religion, which features The Goddess as the icon, in many different forms, dating back to pre-recorded history when the Goddess was worshiped. My colleague had brought along a copy of the current National Geographic magazine the cover article of which Is on the Virgin Mary and her current and previous almost cult worship. I get this magazine thanks to my mother who pays for my subscription of this magazine as a gift, but I had not read this particular one.
Now it was Sunday, January 31, 2016. I had
awakened at about 7:22AM, had tried to go back to sleep and failed. I sat up in
bed. Recently, I had purchased a floor lamp, a reading lamp to place beside the
easy chair in my bedroom. I needed the light due to my worsening cataract I
think, and therefore had made this chair a much more attractive place to read,
especially on a somewhat dark, cloudy day like this Sunday was starting out to
be. I grabbed the “Mary” National Geographic and went over to that chair. As I
often do I gazed out over Lake Michigan, thinking that this was a place in my
house that I didn’t take advantage of as much as I should. Such a beautiful
view, although today it was rather grey and drab. Still that view out over the lake
is always, no matter what the weather, beautiful and a source of inspiration.
As I sat there, I was thinking about this space, and some other spaces I had
recently created in our basement by painting the walls and floor and cleaning
it out, resurrecting my 45 gallon fish tank and stocking it, and creating a
space for my art table and for all my art books and supplies, almost like a
small artist studio, something I had never had beforer. I was planning for
further enhancement of those spaces and just day dreaming, looking out over the
lake. The sky had brightened slightly and the view was much more pleasant,
though still introspective and clouded. I am currently starting a watercolor
painting based on a sunrise photo over the lake and was thinking I should try
to remember this aspect of the lake views as another possible painting subject.
Finally I picked up the NG magazine and
turned to the Mary story, and began to read. Every now and then I would look up
at the lake view. The article opens with the story of Medjugorje, Bosnia
Herzegovina. I knew about this sight of Mary apparitions and miracles because
our former cleaning lady had actually traveled there in order to experience
these visions, healings and sightings of the Virgin Mary. I had always thought
very little of them and also had always thought she was too religious and
following a blind faith. But I knew about Medjugorje through her. I was reading
the following section on page 34, the first written page of the article: “I’m
in Medjugorje with a group of Americans, mostly hockey dads from the Boston
area, plus two men and two women with stage 4 cancer. We’re led by 59 year old
Arthur Boyle, father of 13, who first came here on Labor Day 2000, riddled with
cancer and given months to live. He felt broken and dejected and would not have
made the trip had not two friends forced him into it. But that first night,
after he went to confession at St. James the Apostle church, psychological
relief came rapidly.
“ ‘The anxiety and depression were gone,’
he told me. ‘You know when you’re carrying someone on your shoulder in a
swimming pool water flight—they come off, and you feel light and free? I was
like, wait a minute, what just happened to me? Why is that?’
“The next morning with his friends Bob and
Kevin, he met another of the “visionaries,” Vicka Ivankovic-Mijatovic, in a
jewelry shop and asked for her help. Gripping his head with one hand, she
appealed to the Virgin Mary to cure him. Boyle said he experienced an unusual
sensation right there in the store. ‘She starts to pray over me. Bob and Kevin
put their hands on me, and the heat that went through my body from her praying
was causing them to sweat.’
“ Back in Boston a week later, a CT scan
at Massachusetts General Hospital revealed that his tumors had shrunk to almost
nothing.
“Since then Boyle has been back to
Medjugorje 13 times. ‘I’m a regular guy,’ he said. ‘I like to play hockey and
drink beer. I play golf.’ But, he continued, ‘I had to change things in my
life.’ Today, Boyle said, he’s become, ‘a sort of mouthpiece for Jesus Christ’s
healing power and of course, the Mother, and the power of her intercession.’”
I don’t recall, but I don’t think I could
even complete this whole reading. By the time I read “Back in Boston”, I was
being overcome by something. I looked up at the lake and it was even more
beautiful, still cloudy and grey but more beautiful. I felt a sense of oneness,
of wholeness, of a joining with the whole universe. I felt that everything in
life would be fine. And in death, also. I felt a sense of being taken care of
and of compassion toward others. It was enormously expansive. Tears were just
running down my face. I ignored them and just gazed out at the Lake. This
sensation went on for some minutes. I have felt sensations of expansiveness
before, sometimes consciously induced by meditation or by Buddhist and
mindfulness readings but they were always somewhat intellectual and compared to
this overwhelming sensation, somewhat forced as though they were something that
I was supposed to feel at that time. And except for one previous experience,
these lesser experiences were always quite brief. This sensation completely
took over my body. My breathing was rapid, I think my heart was beating fast, I
don’t know. I felt my head rise and as though I were uplifted. And again the
tears flowed. I have never experienced anything this intense. In all of our
world travels, in seeing so many wonderful beautiful places, I have never
experienced anything this intense. And here it is occurring right in my chair
looking out over our view of Lake Michigan. Even as I write about it now and as
I was restating some of the magazine article above, some tears came and a brief
less intense repetition of this feeling occurred. Wow! I don’t know how to put
it into words
Later, after I had recovered, I was
continuing to read the article, when again I looked up at the lake. A hazy sun
had come through the clouds and created a pink path on the lake surface that I
love so much. I gazed at it, thinking that I had to preserve this for my art
projects and also I decided that I wanted to write about this experience and
this view right now would help me portray it. So I got up and went for Amos’
camera and took several photos. I will include these in this write up to
perhaps stimulate the reader or just help me to focus on this experience again
in the future.
I don’t know what this was. Perhaps my
reading about The Goddess, and presenting about Womens’ Wisdom and my work at
creating truly spiritual places in my home, and then the view which certainly
has stimulated previous less intense comtemplative moments in my life – then
reading about Medjugorje, and the Virgin Mary. Perhaps this was an intercession
by her. I don’t know but it was wonderful.
Unfortunately my memory of this is already
fading. That is why I felt I needed to sit down and write about it. I needed to
somehow recall this sensation of reassurance, compassion, and oneness – this
expansiveness. I want to be able to call upon this in the future. I want to
maintain this feeling. After all these years of Spirit Mind Body, after my
childhood of being raised within the Congregational Church by fairly religious
and practicing Protestants, after all my meditation and mindfulness, all my
intellectual readings and seekings for enlightenment, it is ironic that reading
about the Catholic Virgin Mary and Medjugorje is what produced what I now
regard as a moment of true enlightenment. I think that the very special view of
my Lake Michigan and past number of times that it has inspired lesser moments
also played a role. Now the important thing is to keep it going. Of course, the
NG article proceeds to put a map of all the places where the Virgin Mary has
been seen and the degree of documentation of those sightings. There is a slight
attempt to bring science into the mix in the article. And of course, my
scientific background has me even trying to explain what happened to me this
morning But it is like Arthur Boyle’s
doctor said, that perhaps it was the heat created in Arthur’s body by the
praying that cured the cancer, but “he added, ‘I also believe there are times
in human life when we are way beyond what we ever expect.’”
“Boyle said that although he continued his
tests after his return from Medjugorje, ‘it was faith that enabled me to get
into a state of peace where my immune system rebooted itself and killed the
cancer – that was all done through God.’ “
In thinking about this experience and as
the hours from it have passed, I still find myself falling back on my
scientific background. Did my autonomic nervous system totally create this
feeling? Was there nothing else to it? I am not ready yet to say there is a
personified God somewhere in heaven and a place where his Holy Mother sits
beside Jesus and intercedes for us. But after this experience there is a strong
belief is “Something”, some force, some not understood causal complex
organization of the universe and of being itself that must give meaning to our
existence. I hope to continue to seek and try to bring about this great sense
of expansiveness that I have experienced today. It was so ineffable that I have
to end my attempts to explain it right here.
Nov.
18, 2016.
This past Thursday at Spirit, Mind, Body
Group meeting one of our members, himself an author of a book on spirituality
and science, presented a piece entitled “Miracle of Faith Healing:. He first
told about driving past a deer that had been hit on the road and probably had
his leg broken. Gary drove on by, but then began thinking that he should have
stopped. He is an MD and thought perhaps he could have helped somehow. The
police were there, but he thought maybe
he could have somehow helped the deer. “Maybe I could have healed the deer.” He
told us that he has always wanted to heal someone, even to heal an animal, a
pet dog, or this deer. Then he went on to talk about healing by faith. He read
the introduction of “A Course in Miracles” to us. He doesn’t understand why
more people don’t use faith healing. From his lead, our group’s discussion, as
it often does, went far afield. But it began to center on moments of
enlightenment, or moments of spiritual inspiration, during meditation and at
other times. Various words were used such as the Eureka, or theAha! Moment,
prayerful feelings, and other such feelings. Of course, Gary has written in his
soon to be published book, about non-local reality, and other quantum physics ideas
of his. Then someone asked Gary “What is enlightenment, and how do we know we
have experienced this?” Some were confusing MIhalyi Czikscentmihalyi’s idea of
“flow” with a moment of spiritual expansiveness. As the moderator of the group,
I tried to clear up these ideas. Czikscentmihalyi’s “flow” is different than
enlightenment or mindfulness practice. It goes on for a long time and is not so
much a moving spiritual event. It is joy or happiness while doing a task and
losing all sense of time while perfectly accomplishing the task. I explained
this process of “flow” as described by Czikscentmihalyi involves combining
perfectly or almost perfectly a challenging task with the person’s own ability
to accomplish that task thus creating this timeless sense of accomplishment or
“flow”. I explained that if you put the degree of challenge of a task on the
vertical axis, and you plot your ability to accomplish that specific task on
the horizontal axis, then flow would occur on a bisecting line starting at zero
and progressing at a 45 degree angle from the zero point. If the task is too
easy for your abilities, you will fall down near the horizontal axis and will
be bored. If the task is too hard for your abilities, you will fall above the
45 degree line and you will be frustrated. One member of the group said this
was the best explanation he had ever heard of “flow.” Of course, then in his 2nd
and 3rd books, Mihalyi Czikscentmihalyi tried to explain how to bring
flow into the activities of every day life.
Then others began to talk about brief
moments of spiritual insight often experienced during moments of meditation, or
at other times. But then some described moments of spiritual insight that come
over one at unguarded moments, such as while crossing a street. It was thought that
the surest way to chase away a spiritual moment is to try to achieve that
moment. The harder you try, the less likely it will occur. You have to just
surrender and try to ignore the ego, and then it may occur.
With this discussion I felt I had to briefly
mention the feeling that I experienced which I described above. I had felt it
to a much more minor degree some years ago while going for a walk, after having
read some of the books by Redfield, (One was The Celestine Prophecy). These
books talked about looking at a person and seeing their aura. On this walk in
our Circle Road neighborhood, I was walking around looking at the trees and
trying to see their aura. While doing this I had a shorter period, feeling an
expansional sensation and with a few tears, but it didn’t last as long as the
one described above. One member of our
Spirit Mind Body group, asked me to describe the experience I had earlier this
year and I did. The group was mesmerized by my description because I felt it so
strongly then. Then the President of the Mindfulness Center, a member of our
Spirit Mind Body Group who understands Buddhism better than any of the group,
mentioned the phenomenon called kensho.
After the meeting, Paul said to me: “You experienced kensho. That’s what that was.” I had never heard this word before
and so I had to read about it.
After some research, at this time, the way
I understand it, kensho is a spiritual degree of enlightenment which the
Buddhists say can occur in at least three levels. Some are more minor. Some are
like mine. And others approach what the Buddha experienced as enlightenment. One monk is cited as having had 18 such
episodes during his life as a monk. So guess what? I experienced something really cool. Kensho. I want to read more
about this and I will write more about it.
Later: I
read a little information from Wikipedia. Kensho literally means in the
Japanese Zen tradition, seeing one’s true nature. Other words in other
spitirual traditions are enlightenment, nirvana, in Christianity, a revelation,
an epiphany, a theophany, or the moksha of Hinduism. Originally in Buddhism
kensho referred specifically to the awakening that occurred after a lengthy
training in koan interpretation. But kensho has also occurred during
meditation. The word, kensho, in some traditions has been used for the first
awakening or a brief episode of spiritual “knowing”. Sartori has been used
again by some traditions to mean a kensho that has a more lasting affect or is
more of a process than a sudden single moment of experienceQuoting from Wikipedia for your information:
Encyclopedic and dictionary definitions[edit]
Some encyclopedia and dictionary
definitions are:
- Soothill (1934): "To behold the Buddha-nature within oneself, a common saying of the Chan (Zen) or Intuitive School."[15]
- Fischer-Schreiber (1991): Lit. "seeing nature"; Zen expression for the experience of awakening (enlightenment). Since the meaning is "seeing one's own true nature," kenshō is usually translated "self-realization." Like all words that try to reduce the conceptually ungraspable experience of enlightenment to a concept, this one is also not entirely accurate and is even misleading, since the experience contains no duality of "seer" and "seen" because there is no "nature of self' as an object that is seen by a subject separate from it.[10]
- Baroni (2002): "Seeing one's nature," that is, realizing one's own original Buddha Nature. In the Rinzai school, it most often refers more specifically to one's initial enlightenment attained though kōan practice.[1]
- Muller (year unknown): To see one's own originally enlightened mind. To behold the Buddha-nature within oneself, a common saying of the Chan school, as seen for example, in the phrase 'seeing one's nature, becoming Buddha' 見性成佛.[14]
Definitions by Buddhist scholars[edit]
Buddhist scholars have defined kenshō
as:
- D.T. Suzuki: "Looking into one's nature or the opening of satori";[16] "This acquiring of a new point of view in our dealings with life and the world is popularly called by Japanese Zen students 'satori' (wu in Chinese). It is really another name for Enlightenment (Annuttara-samyak-sambodhi)".[17][note 4]
- Dumoulin (1988/2005): "Enlightenment is described here as an insight into the identity of one's own nature with all of reality in an eternal now, as a vision that removes all distinctions. This enlightenment is the center and the goal of the Zen way. Hakuin prefers the term "seeing into one's nature", which for him means ultimate reality. The Buddha nature and the cosmic Buddha body, wisdom (prajna), and emptiness (sunyata), the original countenance one had before one was born, and other expressions from the rich palette of Mahayana terms were all familiair to him from his continued study of the sutras and Zen literature."[19]
- Peter Harvey (1990): "It is a blissful realization where a person's inner nature, the originally pure mind, is directly known as an illuminating emptiness, a thusness which is dynamic and immanent in the world."[20]
- G. Victor Sogen Hori (2000): "The term consists of two characters: ken, which means "see" or "seeing", and sho, which means "nature", "character", "quality." To "see one's nature" is the usual translation for kensho".[2]
Definitions by Buddhist teachers and practitioners[edit]
Buddhist teachers and
practitioners have defined kenshō as:
- Jiyu-Kennett: "To see into one's own nature. The experience of enlightenment, satori."[21]
- Myodo Ni Satomi, a student of Hakuun Yasutani (1993): "Seeing the-self, that is, the true self or Buddha nature."[22]
Further notions[edit]
The term kenshō refers to
the realization of nonduality of subject and object in general,[23] but the term kenshō may
also be applied in other contexts:[24] "How do you kenshō
this?"[23]
Kenshō is not a single experience, but
refers to a whole series of realizations from a beginner's shallow glimpse of
the nature of mind, up to a vision of emptiness equivalent to the 'Path of Seeing' or to Buddhahood itself. In all of these, the same
'thing' is known, but in different degrees of clarity and profundity.[20][25]
"Kenshō" is commonly
translated as enlightenment, a word that is also used to
translate bodhi, prajna, satori and buddhahood. Western discourse tends to use
these terms interchangeably, but there is a distinction between a first
insight, and the further development toward Buddhahood.
Insight versus experience[edit]
Kensho is insight, an
understanding of reality as-it-is.[26][20][19][23] Contemporary understanding also
describes kensho as an experience, as in "enlightenment
experience"; the term "enlightenment experience" is itself a tautology: "Kensho (enlightenment) is an enlightenment
(kensho)-experience".
The notion of
"experience" fits in a popular set of dichotomies: pure (unmediated)
versus mediated, noncognitive versus cognitive, experiential versus
intellectual, intuitive versus intellectual, nonrational versus rational,
nondiscursive versus discursive, nonpropositional versus propositional.[27]
The notion of pure experience
(junsui kuiken) to interpret and understand kensho was introduced by Nishida Kitaro in his An Inquiry into the Good (1911), under influence of
"his somewhat idiosyncratic reading of western philosophy",[28] especially William James, who wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience.[note 5] Wayne Proudfoot traces the roots of the notion
of "religious experience" to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who argued that
religion is based on a feeling of the infinite. The notion of "religious
experience" was used by Schleiermacher to defend religion against the
growing scientific and secular critique. It was adopted by many scholars of
religion, of which William James was the most influential.[30][note 6] D.T. Suzuki, who introduced Nishida Kitaro
to western philosophy, took over this notion of pure experience,
describing it as the essence of all religions,[28] but best represented in the superior Japanese culture and
religion.[35][36]
The influence of western
psychology and philosophy on Japanese Buddhism was due to the persecution of
Buddhism at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, and the subsequent efforts to
construct a New Buddhism (shin bukkyo), adapted to the modern times.[37][38][34] It was this New Buddhism which has
shaped the understanding of Zen in the
west,[39] especially through the writings
of D.T. Suzuki[40][41][34] and the Sanbo Kyodan, an exponent of the Meiji-era
opening of Zen-training for lay-followers.[42]
The notion of "experience" has been
criticised.[39][43][44] Robert Sharf points out that "experience"
is a typical western term, which has found its way into Asian religiosity via
western influences.[39][note 7] The notion of "experience" introduces a
false notion of duality between "experiencer" and
"experienced", where-as the essence of kensho is the realisation of
the "non-duality" of observer and observed.[23][26] "Pure experience" does not exist; all
experience is mediated by intellectual and cognitive activity.[27][46] The specific teachings and practices of a specific
tradition may even determine what "experience" someone has, which
means that this "experience" is not the proof of the teaching,
but a result of the teaching.[47] A pure consciousness without concepts, reached by
"cleaning the doors of perception"[note 8], would be an overwhelming chaos of sensory input
without coherence.[49] The notion of "experience" also
over-emphasises kensho, as if it were the single goal of Zen-training, where-as
the Zen-tradition clearly states that "the stink of Zen"[50] has to be removed and the "experience" of
kensho has to be integrated into daily life.[51][4][8] In the Rinzai-school this post-satori training
includes the study and mastering of great amounts of classical Chinese poetry,
which is far from "universal" and culture-transcending. On the
contrary, it demands an education in culture-specific language and behaviour,
which is measured by specific and strict cultural norms.[52] Emphasising "experience" "reduces the
sophisticated dialectic of Ch'an/Zen doctrine and praxis to a mere
"means" or set of techniques intended to inculcate such experiences
11/19/2016
This
morning I was flipping through my facebook and came upon someone’s reposting of
Jackie Ivanya’s rendition of God Bless America sang at the Capitol July 4th
Celebration this last summer or maybe the year before. I have so often heard
this song or more commonly the song, Amazing Grace, sung and have had an
overwhelming sense of … well, I have always called it nostalgia. Tears do come
to my eyes and my overwhelming sense is to try to control this lack of control.
But now after thinking about the intense experience of last January and after
reading about the definitions of kensho,
I am wondering if these experiences, certainly more common in my life now, are
really minor episodes of kensho. The
definitions talk about more minor episodes and more intense ones, and then
longer lasting ones which are sometimes more defined as sartori. I now wonder if rather than trying to control these rather
common episodes, I would be better off just embracing the sensation or even
trying to encourage the expansiveness and sense of oneness, and non duality
that is defined as part of a kensho
experience. I am thinking that these common experiences are really a touch of
the Absolute, of our own Buddha Nature. Wow. If so then I am much more in touch
with that Higher Power than I have ever thought. It may be that this
connectiveness, this sense of the True Self is much more easily obtained. It
might be true that you just have to open to it and let it happen. I will try
this in the future whenever I am moved to tears by commercials, family moments,
and things that move me when I am reading
