If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

So I am flipping through channels the other night and I landed on a scene in the Matrix where the Oracle is telling neo “we cannot see beyond choices that we do not understand.” And I think about for a few days and I have decided that for me “choices” is really “control” and that I cannot think beyond situations that fall outside of my control, and that really situations that fall outside of my control paralyze me because suddenly all of my energy and all actions are somehow spinning around the solution “how do I get past this?”

You might think that, having had this realization, I would feel better or feel comforted in the gentle glow of self-realization, but I wasn’t. Seldom do self-revelatory thoughts provide manuals instructing me how to change my behavior. Instead they leave me feeling more hopeless than ever that the possibility of change will free me of my “character defects.”

That being said, I have had moments of clarity in which I realized that some character defect, which had previously been plaguing me, was no longer present. But that it was not the moment of clarity that freed me from this action, rather it was time. Someone once said to me, jokingly, “change happens all at once over time.” That pretty much sums up my experience.

Self-revelatory moments can be profound. I remember one time I was walking through a park in Santa Fe when it occurred to me that creation, imbued with the spirit of the creator, was looking at me. You might say I stopped looking at the world and began to perceive myself through the eyes of the universe. It was an ecstatic moment, and one in which I wandered around that park for several hours sitting on benches, starring at the stars, and hugging trees. SO powerful was the experience that for the next several weeks all I had to do to summon the experience was to revisit the park at the same place at roughly the same time each night. Sadly, eventually the experience faded and new ones came and went until all that is left is of that moment resides in the faint glow of a memory.

“If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Is a Zen saying used to caution the practitioner to become detached from our everyday conception of ourselves as potential subjects for special and unique experiences, or as candidates for realization, attainment and fulfillment. If you have an idea of what it is like to be enlightened, you probably aren’t, you might find yourself, like me, clinging to a moment or worse falling in to complacency as the ego assumes its place in spiritual glory.

In fact many spiritual traditions equate spiritual transcendence with negation of the self, i.e. Self as Void in the Zen Buddhist tradition and its parallel in the Christian tradition as “I live now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) Where the Christian faithful empty themselves of the contents of ego consciousness and become void in the light of god where the infinite reality of his Being and Love are realized.

The realization of a transcendent reality could perhaps be more easily described as what it is not, but for me it is an existential transformation, one that is realized not in trying to attain the Void or the Spirit, but in the recognition and especially the acceptance of humans as imperfect beings.