This is the sole gospel of Mara, the Evil One, so pay careful attention;
Within each seed granted your self,
there is a promise of a beautiful flower.
One of completeness and bliss
or even vengeance and destruction.
In the end, when all things are said and done
and you find yourself confused and suffering
try to recall that pure evil dwells not in any
of these positions of the divided Mind;
but solely in the Body of Perfect Deception.
Once upon a time, in a realm and reality, at the present seemingly far, far away, You where a mind-being [1] more unhooked than hooked to the mind-numbing ideation of becoming.
In a split of a moment though (the span of a single thought), Mara, the evil one, threw in a seed (thought/ideation) of division before your minds eye there to serve as a creator (through your spiritual power) of division, enchantment and attraction (to the thought and sensation of becoming).
Because of spiritual incompleteness and ignorance of your true nature, you selected via your arised desire- consciousness, a suitable womb (of becoming) where a carbon copy of your original super-consciousness could be projected and awoken to discernment of form and emptiness, motion and stillness, thought and no-thought and other dialectical states of beingness.
Though the desire and intention of such an endeavor was present as a multisensoric encompassing experience or overwhelming sensation of being born in a [human] body, your projected consciousness, now hooked with a myriad hooks to the various nerve-nodes of its samsaric construction, were not as powerful and able to act and JUST BE ITSELF, as its original nature (The True You).
Additionally it could be said that such a spiritual transference into an artificial consciousness-agent, could have been other forms of life or agents; for example, one of pure thought, sensation or the lower forms of anger, hate hunger and fear (translated –Brahmas, Devas, animal & vegetation, pretas and demons and so on), all depending on the current level of genuine self-awareness of your higher self – the sleeping Buddha.
Consider your present persona in this temporal now you believe yourself to experience.
If I were to best describe it I would describe it as a mind of 84,000 sharp hooks, walking through a very tight corridor (your present consciousness field) of an impermeable, buoyant material or prime-subset that best could be described as – soft and stick friendly bark tissue.
Upon its surface, your hooks, all in number more than you can ever keep count of at any given moment, and all created by your every desire since beginningless time of countless births you cannot recall in your ordinary state of mind-numbness.
Every such hook was and still is born out of ignorance through your minds constant division of itself into form (to some), sensation (to others), thought and memory (to most), MAKES YOU become stuck on that Bark tissue-like wall of samsara, causing an experience of interdependent origin to your mind and hence a spiritual friction, which is anything but true Dharma and the blissful completeness of noble wisdom and perfect freedom found in the latter.
You who struggle with a spiritual sensation and need of breaking free from the bonds of samsara will, at a certain stage of your pratcise, feel stuck, like a man vedged between two tight walls, stuck in this tight mental space that is suffocating your very Spirit that you know (subconsciously) is far greater than this aging perishable persona.
In Buddhism, every sect had various remedies to this sickness of the “soul”, as to lift it up from the deep hole it stumbled in to due to ignorance and trickery.
In the Tharavadan tradition there were the 84,000 dhammakhandhas (Dharma teachings) here beautifully summarized by Ananada;
82,000 (teachings) from the Buddha I have received;
2,000 more from his disciples;
Now 84,000 teachings are familiar to me.
— the Venerable Ananda, in Theragatha 17.3 (vv. 1024-29)
Each and every teaching served as a reminder to cut a certain hook to that artificial consciousness that belonged to the false self (anatta) Ananda erroneously believed in as his true nature.
In other more radical sects, like the Zen Buddhist sect, it was strongly adviced (especially by the Chan Masters of the Tang and Sung Era) to cut off all hooks in one swift cut hence allowing the freed mind, ascend to its true level of beingself aware as MIND ONLY, instantly curing the illusion of being the lower reflection of itself, or the no-self, which Mara had tricked it into hooking on.
There are of course many other sects in Buddhism that through the millenia have approached the dilemma of the mind of 84,000 hooks, but that is for you to find out if you desire to explore those options, of finding a way to completely unhook yourself from the body consciousness of ignorance and suffering (as I ve written about in the Dharmakaya Sutra).
Whatever you might choose, remember, that Mind is never as powerful to free itself from the extremely subtle yet overly excessive illusion of Birth and Death, as when it find itself in a state of natural one-pointedness (recall the symbolic dragon eye of the Unborn Mind School).
Any good samadhi is found in the eye of the hurricane, not in its outer perimeter of extremes. Any good technique, whether a mantra or dharani, yoga position, or dhyana strives to induce your mind to RETURN to this state of natural samadhi (imagelessness as stated in the Lankavatara Sutra), where you in the eye of your own creation, find peace of Mind to explore the Land of Nirvana.
In Dharma,
Tozen
[1] Mind-Being. A being of pure uncreated Mind-essence, which at a certain stage, when awakening to its own true nature, realizes (identifies) itself as a Bodhi-sattva (a light [Bodhi] – being [sattva]) and finally fully awake, a Buddha, Tathaghata etc. e.g. a perfect spiritual being of Mind Only.
Thanks