Brentyn Ramm's paper 'The Technology of Awakening' has just been published.
Much thanks to the Shollond Trust for funding the publication of the article in an open access format. The copyright is creative commons so it can be freely shared and can be posted or reproduced anywhere as long as the original source is acknowledged.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/3/192
From the abstract:
"In this paper, I investigate the phenomenology of awakening in Chinese Zen Buddhism. In this tradition, to awaken is to ‘see your true nature’. In particular, the two aspects of awakening are:(1) seeing that the nature of one’s self or mind is empty or void and (2) an erasing of the usual (though merely apparent) boundary between subject and object. In the early Zen tradition, there are many references to awakening as chopping off your head, not having eyes, nose and tongue, and seeing your ‘Original Face’. These references bear a remarkable resemblance to an approach to awakening developed by Douglas Harding. I will guide the reader through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments which investigate the gap where you cannot see your own head. I will endeavour to show that these methods, although radically different from traditional meditation techniques, result in an experience with striking similarities to Zen accounts of awakening, in particular, as experiencing oneself as empty or void and yet totally united with the given world."
