Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, Lola discusses the distinction between accumulating knowledge and attaining true wisdom.

Lola shares the koan about a monk who asked his teacher, “Is there a teaching no master ever preached before?” And the teacher said, yes, there is. What is it, asked the monk. And the teacher replied, it is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not things..

We require a different kind of perception—what Lola calls "listening with your eyes". She draws a sharp contrast between linear, "horizontal" learning—where teachers and students simply build upon accumulated information—and "vertical" spiritual growth. Vertical growth is an ascent of transcending conditioning, memorization, and ego to simply achieve a state of pure being.

Many of us treat happiness like a math problem, mistakenly believing that putting two and two together through specific activities will consistently yield joy. True bliss, ananda, is an unpredictable consequence that arrives "like a thief in the night" only when the mind is unoccupied by expectation and anticipation.

Lola recalls the famous story of the Buddha holding up a single flower before his congregation, speaking not a word, and transmitting the highest teaching only to Mahakasyapa, who simply smiled in understanding. A flower does not articulate beauty; it simply is beauty, blooming into the void without caring who notices.

If the eye or the ear were not functionally empty, they would be incapable of receiving new images or sounds. We must empty the mind of preconceived notions.

This necessity of an empty mind is brought to life through two pivotal Zen narratives. The first involves Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, who achieved enlightenment and inherited the robe of transmission through the simple, mindful act of pounding rice in the monastery kitchen.

The well known encounter between the master and a frantic, truth-seeking professor. He invites the professor to have some tea. Then he proceeds to pour tea into the professor's cup until it overflows and burns him.

The ego-driven trap of making differences and establishing oneself as higher than others based on wealth, education, or even religious devotion.

Lola explains the need to awaken from three specific slumbers:

Sleeping in things, which is the materialistic obsession with possessions and bank balances.

Sleeping in the mind, a trap for intellectuals.

And sleeping in the ego, where even those who renounce the world become stubbornly attached to the concept of the self.

By disidentifying with objects, the mind, and the ego, one does not destroy the world, but rather cleanses it of projected hopes and frustrations. In this state of true mindfulness—where the self disappears—an individual truly exists in the awake world. June 22, 1986

Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, explores the difference between merely seeking reality and actually experiencing it through the practice of true listening.

Ancient Zen master, Tokai, is abruptly awakened from a nap by a frantic monk shouting about a fire under the kitchen floor. Rather than panicking or leaping into action regarding a future threat, Tokai requests that the monk wake him only when the fire reaches the passageway, instantly returning to sleep.

People often miss this present reality because their minds are busy searching for preconceived concepts of the Buddha or God. The ultimate truth is already at our door.

The vital difference between hearing and listening. Our internal voice acts like a thick fog, constantly evaluating, agreeing, or disagreeing with our surroundings. True listening is hearing with awareness, requiring us to drop our mental commentary and simply witness phenomena without the need to say yes or no.

The attainable and the unattainable. The attainable represents the dualistic world of objects, ideas, ego, and physical forms—things we can mentally grasp and call our own. When we attain something, we form an attachment to it.

The unattainable represents the non-dualistic, transcendent truth that lies within and behind the phenomenal world. The unattainable cannot be possessed or grasped. It can only be realized by abandoning the dualitt of subject and object, and resting in the middle way.

A barrier to accessing the unattainable is our conditioning. Our deepest beliefs regarding what is right and wrong are not objective truths, but rather accidental byproducts of our geographic, cultural, and familial upbringing.

Beneath the rose of our supposedly logical and righteous beliefs lies the hidden thorn of personal desire for an immortal soul that will survive death.

The paradox of clinging to rules, conditioning, and dualistic judgments only creates confusion and chaos.

The ultimate solution is to set aside all conditioning and simply listen. By dropping our "isms," religious labels, and mental defenses, we become vulnerable to reality as it is.

In this state of pure awareness, trust arises naturally. Without the mind's interference, the chaotic events of the world effortlessly align into cosmic order, acting as perfectly and naturally as flowing water finding its way into a hole in a rock.

While breaking old habits requires continuous practice, maintaining this state of active listening allows us to experience a profound unity.

June 15, 1986

Zen Roshi Lola McDowell Lee, opens by recounting the classic Zen koan of Master Dogo and his disciple Zengen. When visiting a deceased parishioner, Zengen asks if the person is alive or dead, to which Dogo refuses to answer either way. Even after Dogo’s passing, another master, Sakeso, repeats this refusal, telling Zengen, "No saying whatever".

The story illustrates that life and death are not distinct realities, but two doors to the exact same cosmic secret. They are experiences to be lived through directly rather than intellectual problems to be solved.

The human mind constantly seeks to placate itself with borrowed concepts and comfortable conclusions, missing the fundamental truth of existence. She cites Sri Ramakrishna’s metaphor of a festival crowd debating the depth of the ocean. While they argue, a man made of salt jumps into the water to discover the truth directly, dissolving in the process.

Lola equates humans to this salt man; we must be willing to jump into the unknown and die daily, allowing our conditioned personalities to dissolve into the greater awareness.

She notes that individuals satisfy themselves with some spiritual terminology, like karma, using it as a pacifier to explain things away and avoid facing the genuine, sometimes frightening mystery of life. Real understanding requires us to abandon the safety of the shore.

She explains that the mechanics of living and dying are intimately connected to the flow of the human energy field. Lee explains that at birth, energy ripples outward, expanding into the world. In contrast, during a natural death or deep meditation, this energy field gradually compacts, subsiding and returning inward to its center to form concentrated light.

When one dies, the physical body is a temporary mechanism left behind outside the temple, while unconditioned awareness effortlessly moves through the invisible door of death. Death is not an absolute end, but a transition of awareness.

Lola discusses the treacherous nature of language and dualistic thinking. Relying on labels separates the thinker from reality, pushing awareness away through continuous subject-object categorization.

She suggests "a-thinking" (the a being like a in amoral, or asymmetric, meaning non-. A-thinking is a wordless, subjective dwelling in non-articulated awareness. The answers to the profound mysteries of existence are found prior to the formation of words, hidden in the translucent darkness within.

Lola explains that the words and stories are merely fingers pointing at the truth, and mistaking the finger for the reality it points to is a tragic error in the spiritual journey.

June 8, 1986