UnMind 85. 4 Spheres & Zazen — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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It’s all personal —
but entangled seamlessly
with universal

This is the last of a quartet of essays on semantic modeling, an approach that emphasizes simultaneity of components in a system and how they interact with each other, a more geometric than algebraic framework for portraying causes and effects. This preference for simultaneous interface over linear causality is said to be characteristic of the Eastern mind in comparison with Western thinking, and is illustrated by Buddha’s Twelvefold Chain of Interdependent Origination (not illustrated here), his own model of “how things get to be the way they are,” with which you are by now probably familiar.

Continuing with our exploration of intentionally applying analysis to subjects we usually approach intuitively, Zen and Zen meditation in particular, here is a blank version of the tetrad for you to print out and play with, penciling in various aspects of your practice and/or daily life you may want to get a handle on. You may treat the four components and their connections as representing critical relationships, between which you feel a need to strike a better balance. Such as your job, your family, your household, and a fourth area of endeavor such as a hobby or charity with which you are engaged. In examining the six connectors between the four components, you may discover a disturbing disconnect that is important to re-establish, or you may determine that one of the four principal areas is way too demanding of your time and resources, and you may want to begin emphasizing the others, in order to achieve a more harmonious balance between all four. Balance is characteristic of Zen’s middle way.

There may also be cases where you can think of three components but not a complementary fourth. This may require taking a backward step, one of Master Dogen’s coinages, to see the bigger picture. For example, the three marks of suffering, or dukkha, are often cited as “aging, sickness and death.” If you want to analyze their relationship with the tetrad diagram, you might want to fill in the fourth with “birth,” without which the other three would be meaningless. The exercise might reveal the goes-without-saying truism that birth is the leading cause of death, for example. If you can isolate only three components in a system you would like to look at, you are probably overlooking something. You can always include yourself as the fourth component, for instance in considering the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. What is your practice relationship to each of them? Them to each other?

We introduced the next graphic in earlier segments, also based on four components but expressed as nesting spheres. I term this one the Four Spheres of Influence, including the personal, the social, the natural, and the universal spheres, from inside to outside. This model represents our surrounding context in layers, from the closest and most intimate on the personal level to the most remote and impersonal on the universal level, with the interim social and natural worlds in between. But note that the degrees of influence are asymmetrical. Those incoming from the outside have an effect on our personal sphere that is massively disproportionate to the effect that we can have on the outer spheres. Can anyone say “covid”? Or “climate change”?

Of course, the continuing, seemingly intractable international armed conflicts and wars around the globe illustrate that we are in a perilous period in human history, in which an ever-smaller group of powerful people can have a devastatingly destructive impact on an ever-larger portion of the population. Witness Ukraine. The prospect of unleashing chemical or biological weapons looms, not to mention the dreaded arsenal of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Unlike Iraq, Russia really does have them.

But these four spheres can also be contrasted and compared by modeling them as a tetrad instead. In the next illustration we can structure the order as our personal sphere at #1, naturally; social comes second, natural third, fourth and finally the universal. Subsumed within the personal sphere are included the binaries of nature versus nurture, including DNA as a fundamental dimension of the former. Nurture would include the influences of parents and peers as well as academic and professional mentors. Personal includes such other aspects as our general health, age, and medical conditions, as well as diet and exercise regimens, and demographics such as time-of-life phases, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood, parenthood, empty nester, retirement, and the “golden years.”

Zen praxis as an overview combines the personal dimension of individual practice of zazen with the social dimension of group practice, in harmonious balance. The key term is harmonious, which is not always true of all the many social groups with which we associate. On the social level, relationships to family and friends go both ways, embracing not only their nurturing influence on us, but also our influence upon them, and mutual collaboration with colleagues. We can help foster harmony, or not.

A further extension into the larger community and culture, or social milieu, illuminates the various roles that we play in that context. Which of course changes with personal factors such as time-of-life, career choices, and the maturation of family ties. In Zen, we are chary of the clinging kind of self-identification that we tend to associate with those roles, as they are all temporary, for one thing, and our investment in the role tends to distort or inflate our sense of self. Where the social world becomes problematical is when our roles no longer match our actual function and place in the social system, when we find ourselves living as if circumstances have not changed, when in fact they have, out of our control. Technical difficulties in adjusting to reality.

The corporate entities in the social circle have intruded with ever-more influence in many of our personal lives, including the institutions of elementary, middle and higher learning where we get our education, join fraternities or sororities, which can have an overweening impact on professional careers, working with or against other corporations in business and political enterprise. Owing partly to world-around expansion of commerce and communications, these corporations represent an intertwined network of cities, states, nations and international groups of global citizens. And no, corporations are not persons.

The fourth component I place in the social sphere is that very technological evolution, which has gone global in its impact and influence. I think we have barely begun to scratch that particular surface, and that even the most farsighted amongst us cannot begin to predict where it will lead. Or whether it will be nipped in the bud by the unintended consequences — read climate change — that it has engendered. Everything seems to fulfil the old prophecy of carrying the seed of its own destruction. This would be one variation on the theme of emptiness, that while all things are definitely real they are also definitely not permanent. Poking the bear of Mother Nature out of her hibernation is never wise.

Moving to the natural world, I begin with the three elements of the earth with which we live in symbiosis, and which we have polluted, perhaps to an intractable degree: air, water and land; the atmosphere, rivers lakes and oceans, and the continents with their fragile layer of arable soil and fire-prone forest cover. The intricate nature of these components and their interrelationship to earth’s orbit around the sun is revealed in the whack-a-mole interplay of seasonal weather and climate dynamics, with increasingly unmanageable consequences of massive fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. Day and night are another obvious consequence of the interconnectedness of the planet and the solar system that we take for granted, but which harbor a secret of Zen, as touched on in Master Tozan’s Hokyo Zammai, Precious Mirror Samadhi:

In darkest night it is perfectly clear
in the light of dawn it is hidden

What the “it” is in this declaration I leave to you. It points at the deeper meaning of consciousness, with its internal illumination, no matter the external circumstances. But this insight, however profound, does not amount to an escape hatch from the pressing exigencies of the moment. We are all earthbound.

When looking at the earth itself, especially from space, as we have all seen, the first generation of human beings in history to be so privileged, we enter into the universal. Actually, of course, we have never left the universal. Its powerful influence has been impacting the presence of human life on the planet far before human beings appeared. One only has to look at the moon to see the literal impact of incoming from the universe in the craters formed by that impact. But the earth itself is constantly undergoing change of a universal order, in the form of plate tectonics and volcanic activity, to name a few. The connection to the moon is now being contemplated as a stepping-stone into the cosmos, the possibility of populating other planets, long a dream of science fiction visionaries. Unfortunately, if it actually comes to fruition, we may extend the disposable economy to include whole planets. There is already talk of sending trash into orbit, while it is already a major problem in rivers and oceans.

As we enter into that final frontier, after the moon comes old Sol and the solar system. Then onward and outward to the galaxy, the local cluster, and beyond. Again, how far we can go in this venture is limited by the physics and biology of reality. The point of diminishing returns on a cosmic scale is likely to be in our own backyard, relatively speaking. Especially considering the proposed expansion of the universe. Not only is the rainbow receding, it is doing so at an accelerating rate, if we are to believe the Hubbles of the world. Better to turn our attention to the immediate issues of survival on the third rock from this particular sun, than be distracted by the great cosmic what-if. But embracing the larger context and its jaw-dropping gobsmacking scale may help to encourage this kind of modesty. There is no real separation of the universal, natural, social and personal spheres. But where we can begin to take effective action is stunningly clear. Everything begins at home. And there is no time to waste.

In the next segment we will move on, setting system analysis and modeling aside, and take up other principles of Design thinking and their connection, however tenuous, to our practice of Zen and zazen.