Sun Gong is an independent sonic and visual artist from Americus Georgia, creating dense microtonal soundscapes, evolving video paintings, digital photography & collages, cyanotypes, noise, generative music, and more.
"Every human being while growing up decides that [they] need a strategy, because we cannot grow up without meeting opposition from what we might call the 'not-self,' that which is seemingly external to us. Often we meet apparent opposition from our parents, friends and relatives, and others. Sometimes the apparent opposition is severe; sometimes it's fairly mild. But no one grows up without developing a strategy to deal with it.
We may decide that our best option for pleasant survival is to be a conforming, 'nice' person. If that doesn't seem to work, we may learn to attack others before they can get at us, or we may withdraw. So there are three major strategies for coping: conforming to please, attacking, or withdrawing. Everyone in some way employs one or another of those strategies.
In order to maintain our strategy, we have to think. So the growing child relies more and more on thinking to elaborate that strategy. Any situation or person encountered begins to be evaluated from the standpoint of the chosen strategy. Eventually we approach the whole world as if it were on trial, asking, 'Will that individual or event hurt me or not?' Even though we may do it with a social, smiling face, we ask that question of everything we meet.
Eventually we perfect our strategy so that we no longer know it consciously; it's now in the body. For example, suppose we develop a strategy of withdrawing. When we meet anything or anybody, we tighten the body; the response is habitual. We may tighten our shoulders, our face, our stomach, or some other part of the body. The particular style is unique to each person. And we don't even know we're doing it because once the contraction is established, it is in every cell of our body. We don't have to know about it; it's just there. Although the response is unconscious, it makes our life unpleasant because it is a withdrawal from life and a separation from it. The contraction is painful.
Yet everybody has it. Even when we think we're relatively happy, we may be able to detect a mild tension throughout the body. It's nothing spectacular and may be very mild. When everything is going our way, we don't feel bad; yet the mild contraction never ceases. It's always there, with every person on earth.
Children learn how to elaborate their strategies, incorporating everything that happens to them into the framework of their personal systems. Our perceptions become selective, incorporating those events that fit our system and screening out events that don't fit. Because the system is supposed to keep us safe and secure, we're not interested in having it weakened by contradictory information. By the time we reach adulthood the system is ourselves. It's what we call the ego. We live our life from it, trying to find people, situations, jobs, that will confirm our strategy and avoiding those that threaten it.
But such maneuvers are never completely satisfactory, because as long as we live, we can never quite know what will happen next. Even if we get most of life under control we never know how to achieve this totally, and we know that we don't know. So there's always an element of fear. It has to be there. Not knowing what to do, the average person seeks everywhere for an answer. We have a problem, and we don't really know what it is. Life becomes for us the promise that is never kept because the answer eludes us.
That's when we may start to practice [zen]. Only a few lucky people on the planet begin to see what needs to be done to recover the Garden of Eden, our genuine functioning self.
Perhaps we get a new partner who's just wonderful. (Particularly in relationships, delusion reigns supreme.) Then we marry or live with him or her, and... whoops! If we're practicing [our zazen], this 'whoops' can be immensely interesting and instructive. If we're not practicing, we may trade that partner in and look around for a new one. It seems as if the promise has not been kept. Or we start a new job or a new endeavor. At first it's fine, but then we begin to see some harsh realities, and the disillusion begins to set in. If we're living out of our strategy, nothing seems to work, because phenomenal life by definition is a promise that is never kept. If we fulfill a desire, we're happy for a brief moment, but the nature of fulfilling one desire is immediately to find another one, and another one, and another one. There's no way of being free from that pressure or stress. We can't settle. We find no peace.
As we [do zazen], the endless spinning in our heads reveals to us our strategy. If we label our thoughts long enough, we're going to recognize our strategy. It's the strategy itself that generates the buzzing thoughts. Only one thing in our life is not caught by this strategy, and that's the physical, organic life of the body.
Of course, the body is taking punishment because it reflects our self-centeredness. The body has to obey the mind, so if the mind is saying that the world is a terrible place, the body says, 'Oh, I'm so depressed!' The minute the images appear — thinking, fantasizing, hoping the body has to respond. It has a chronic response, and at times that response exacerbates into depression or illness...
When we rest at peace with our pain, this repose is the 'gateless gate.' And it's the last place we want to be; it's not pleasant, and our whole strategic drive is for pleasantness. No, we want somebody to comfort us, save us, give us peace. Our ceaseless thinking, planning, and plotting are always about this. Only when we stay with what is beneath the imaginary film and rest there, do we begin to have a clue. The way I usually explain it is: instead of remaining with our thoughts, we label them until they settle down a little and then we do our best to stay with that which really is, the nonduality that is the sensation of our life at this very moment. That goes against everything we want, everything our culture teaches us. But it's the only real solution, the only gate to peace.
As we settle into our sensation of pain, we find it so appalling that we skitter off again. The minute we land in the sensation of discomfort, we spin back again into the imaginary film. We simply don't want to be in the reality of what we are. That's human, neither good nor bad, and it takes years of patient practice to begin to touch this reality more and more, becoming comfortable in resting there — until finally, as Benoit says, it's just a hard and friendly rock that is molded to us, and where we can finally rest and be at peace.
Sometimes we can rest for a short time, but because we are so habituated, we soon go back into the same old mental stuff. And so we go through the process again and again. Over time, it's that ceaseless process that brings us to peace. If it's complete, it can be called satori, or enlightenment."
- Joko Beck, from Nothing Special: Living Zen, 1993.
Ring of Gyges by Sun Gong (2022). This is a compilation submission I made earlier this year to AmbientOnline, a forum, and community of ambient composers/producers.
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