Magnificent Cloud

Things which rise from the darkness of silence, from the wilderness of the unconsciousness, do not belong to the realm of human reflection and deliberation. Hence the mystics are the lilies of the field and the grass of the field as well. They are beyond good and bad, they know no moral responsibilities, which are ascribable only when there is the consciousness of good and bad. If this is the religious life, it is the philosophy of anarchism or nihilism. But the conclusion we can draw from the mystics of two widely divergent teachings (Christianity and Buddhism) seems to point to this nihilistic smashing of all human moral standards.

D.T.Suzuki in his wrote those thoughts and they were included in a work published in 1969, which was three years after his death. The morality that exists above the umbrella of duplicity is always present, but I mix it in a concoction of associations, and the end result is a distorted expression of beliefs. One example of this watered-down morality is expressed by an early Christian mystic:

To affirm God is actually to reduce him. To say that God is good, just, intelligent, is to enclose him within a created conception which is applicable only to created things.

This sort of thinking is not what I have been taught to believe, but when I give my self the opportunity to actually hear the message, I find another self that not only understands the message innately, it is the message. Of course these messages are mystical babblings, which bear no resemblance to physical life as I live it. That fact confirms how separated I am from the self that expresses true morality. In order to affirm anything I must use what I know, and that knowing is rooted in duplicity. There is a silence, a wilderness of consciousness within me, which does not belong to human reflections and deliberations, but is fully aware of those creations. In order to sense this aspect of self, I can enter the space of no-thought where images dance across my mind’s eye. These images come from impulses sent from the silence within me. It is within these images that I sense my innate morality and a hint of the God within me.

My inner consciousness does not transcend intellectualism, it transforms it from a complex system of virtues and expectations, to a wilderness that smashes all egotistical moral standards, and reshapes them into the image of a free floating God; a magnificent cloud that permeates my being.