This 1400 year-old profound and brilliant poem is attributed to Sengstau, the third Zen Patriarch. This text could be vital in your Truth-seeking. It instructs in the How to realize Truth. Once you know the How, the What will be revealed.

I will provide a translation at the end of this post. In addition, here is another translation with helpful commentary.

I also point you to an awesome speaker, Paul Hedderman, and his site called Zen Bitch Slap. Please give him a listen. He has hundreds of talks on his site, including one specifically on the Faith in Mind poem. Here is that mp3 from 10-7-06 and it would be beneficial to listen to it with the following translation open.

This need be lived to be known, practiced to be experienced. Only when freed from hate and love, It reveals itself fully and without disguise. For the skimmers, I'll bold some of the more provocative statements.
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Hsin Hsin Ming: Verses on the Faith Mind

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.

When the deep meaning of things is not understood the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

The Way is perfect like vast space when nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.

Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things.

Live neither in the entanglements of outer things nor in inner feelings of emptiness.

Be serene in the oneness of things and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity.

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other you will never know Oneness.

Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and passivity, assertion and denial.

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality.

The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth.

Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source.

At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness.

The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance.

Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

Do not remain in the dualistic state -- avoid such pursuits carefully.

If there is even a trace of this and that, of right and wrong, the Mind-essence will be lost in confusion.

Although all dualities come from the One, do not be attached even to this One.

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way, nothing in the world can offend, and when such a thing can no longer offend, it ceases to exist in the old way.

When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist.

When thought objects vanish, the thinking-subject vanishes, as when the mind vanishes, objects vanish.

Things are objects because of the subject (mind); the mind (subject) is such because of things (object).

Understand the relativity of these two and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.

In this emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world.

If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion.

To live in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult, but those with limited views are fearful and irresolute; the faster they hurry, the slower they go, and clinging (attachment) cannot be limited; even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray.

Just let things be in their own way and there will be neither coming nor going.

Obey the nature of things (your own nature), and you will walk freely and undisturbed.

When thought is in bondage the truth is hidden, for everything is murky and unclear, and the burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness.

What benefits can be derived from distinctions and separations?

If you wish to move in the One Way do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.

Indeed, to accept them fully is identical with true Enlightenment.

The wise man strives to no goals but the foolish man fetters himself.

There is one Dharma, not many; distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant.

To seek Mind with the (discriminating) mind is the greatest of all mistakes.

Rest and unrest derive from illusion; with enlightenment there is no liking and disliking.

All dualities come from ignorant inference. They are like dreams or flowers in air: foolish to try to grasp them.

Gain and loss, right and wrong: such thoughts must finally be abolished at once.

If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease.

If the mind makes no discriminations, the ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence.

To understand the mystery of this One-essence is to be released from all entanglements.

When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached.

No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state.

Consider movement stationary and the stationary in motion, both movement and rest disappear.

When such dualities cease to exist Oneness itself cannot exist.

To this ultimate finality no law or description applies.

For the unified mind in accord with the Way all self-centered striving ceases.

Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible.

With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing.

All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power.

Here thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value.

In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other-than-self.

To come directly into harmony with this reality just simply say when doubt arises, 'Not two.'

In this 'not two' nothing is separate, nothing is excluded.

No matter when or where, enlightenment means entering this truth.

And this truth is beyond extension or diminution in time or space; in it a single thought is ten thousand years.

Emptiness here, Emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes.

Infinitely large and infinitely small; no difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen.

So too with Being and Non-Being.

Don't waste time with doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this.

One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction.

To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.

To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with trusting mind.

Words!

The Way is beyond language, for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.

I have no idea why you are capitalizing various words. If you are trying to signify some alternate definition than the standard (not at all deep) meanings, then you ought to explain what you mean by these words. A heuristic that has yet to let me down is that when people do this kind of capitalization, it is usually, at best, a deepity.

This seems utterly ridiculous on its face.

The H in How is for emphasis (perhaps better if I used 'HOW'). The T in Truth signifies divinity. The W in What, given the context, is done for both reasons.
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"Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know."
That's a great example of what that statement is actually talking about. You read that line and what happened in you? The discriminating mind presented you with a judgment: 'This is utterly ridiculous'. You engaged that thought (thinking) and you expressed it in a post (talking). That act is what keeps one from knowing Truth.

Ridiculous or not ridiculous, prefer this or prefer that, good or bad, wrong or right, no caps or Caps Allowed. That mind of endless discrimination cannot know. That type of thinking cannot realize Truth. The type of talking that comes from that thinking cannot discover Truth.

Cease from that act and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

When you use the word "know" what does it mean to you? It isn't being used in the same manner that it is generally used and understood, is it?

You know what know is. No trick meaning. To apprehend clearly. Or something like that.

Okay, fair enough.

Do you believe that one can come to know how to do perform open heart surgery if they cease the act of learning how? Or a more simple (though clearly as important) task, like brewing a tasty batch of home beer, can the intricacies of this process come to be known by someone who has ceased the act of learning how?

The list could go on and on, as you surely see, and each thing on that never-ending list, in my opinion, points out the hollowness of what you are suggesting which, if I understand correctly, is that somehow knowledge can come to you in some sort of contemplative vacuum. Physically knowing how to do something is a central part of "knowing" and I've witnessed no evidence which suggests one can physically come to know how to do something without practicing the act.

I think AJ is suggesting spiritual knowledge/experience is not gained through critical thinking.

On some level I agree that true spiritual wisdom/knowledge is experiential rather than just knowing all the right textbook answers.

However, I don't understand how we can come to know anything without some process of critical thinking taking place.

For example, even if I have a supernatural experience do I not have to process that experience critically to comprehend what has occured?

How can one agree/disagree with your statements without
thinking about whether or not your statements have truth value?

The cease-from-this-thinking that the poem suggests and the "act of learning" how to do a task are different things. In that vein, a reason few people know Truth is that they attempt to find it the same way they learn how to brew beer or study mathematics.

Ok. And the poem is telling you HOW to do something, know the Way of Truth.

OK. How are you going to get evidence? Think about it some more? Or...Go practice what the poem is suggesting. Cease from engaging in the reactionary thought that pops into your head (aka thinking)(aka the constant judgment, commentary and conversation that is 90+% of your mental activity). Allow the One space for revelation. For now, all the space is taken up with what you believe to be "important" "thinking".

Barry Long has a quote that says: 98% of thinking is unnecessary. This is probably pretty accurate. Right now, most people would say 98% of their thinking is necessary. With observation, you will "know" just how false that is.

The poem suggests that the discriminating act of agree/disagree is the very activity that will prevent you from knowing the Way.

The poem gives an instruction to cease cherishing opinions. What happens when you cease cherishing opinions? (Stop here for a moment and ask yourself that question)

This is my opinion and I find the kind of assertion you are criticising to be nothing more than childish mental masturbation "oooh I'll say something highly counterintuitive, how profound".

Interesting opinion.

aj, did you learn about this way of being (is this the way to put it?) from some kind of treatment for addiction? No details necessary, it just crossed my mind (from the link you gave in the OP). If not, what/why got you started (my 2nd guess would be from poker, lots of players started looking at ways to control their tilt through meditation and mindfulness, and no doubt some of them found it so interesting that they dove even deeper into it)?

I find your posts really difficult to follow, and occasionally quite incomprehensible. No offense intended, and I think at least occasionally you are quite deliberate in your vagueness. But if someone really wanted to understand what you were talking about, would you be able to explain it without using the "flowery" language, or link to someone that has? I don't even know what you mean by "knowing", in the sense that one can stop thinking and know everything. Likewise for "truth", a misplaced and overused word imo, given some kind of strange mystical meaning, pertaining to some kind of unspoken wisdom, when usually just asking "is X true?" is a more appropriate question.

No, my "story" doesn't involve alcohol and drug addiction like Paul's does. He often speaks in "recovery language" to express what he knows.

Just stick with the poem. Notice how the mind would rather know my story than experiment with some of the simple instructions in the poem. That's just one rabbit trail the mind will present to you; and there's thousands of them. If I told you a story of self and it was judged as 'unacceptable', you'd stop there. If it was deemed 'acceptable', there'd be another rabbit trail dealing with anything other than the substance of the poem. You can choose to not engage the thoughts popping into the mind.

First, that's not what it says. It says, 'there is nothing you will not be able to know.' Second, stay in don't-know mind. That's a simple statement. But, what does that even mean? Thoughts are constantly running in the head in reaction to circumstances that are basically answering the question, 'What's going on, What does this mean? How does this affect me?' By engaging in that thoughtstream, you are believing the thoughts, and in believing the thoughts you believe you know what is going on. See for yourself. Observe it in you.

In engaging, latching onto, getting hooked by those thoughts, you are in STFU, I-know-wtf-is-going-on mind. In that state, you believe you already know, so guess what, you have what you believe and you don't get to actually know. If you choose to not engage, you are in a space of don't-know mind. And in that space, with practice, there is nothing you will not be able to know. Because that space is now open for revelation, realization, epiphany, intuition to arise in you, in the present moment. And you, not being dragged along by the momentum of the thoughtstream, are in a state of being able to see it.


To seek Mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of all mistakes.

Your attitude seems very cult-like to me. Increasingly you try to discourage people from thinking critically about your claims. You no longer try to respond to the substance of people's objections, but instead claim that even the act of questioning shows their lack of enlightenment. To me, this makes your claims to having a special knowledge not very credible.

you have already processed it by labelling it "supernatural", and so any further processing will take that into account, will assign meaning to that experience, will ask for more experiences of the same, will calculate and work out how this experience could affect you, will require adjustment of beliefs, or strengthening of beliefs. None of what takes place is really anything to do with the experience, its all just your interpretation of it, seen through the lens of currently held beliefs. None of this processing can actually tell you "what has occurred", its all just guesswork and interpretation.

If I tell you , I have a small pink rabbit in my room, you can spend the rest of your life thinking about whether its true, what it would mean to you if I did have a pink rabbit, assigning probabilities of truth to my statement based on previous knowledge of my truthfulness, you could agree with me, you could disagree with me, you could literally think about it for ever.

But the only way to find out if its true or not is to go and look in my room and see if you see a pink rabbit.

*shrug* That doesn't offend. Feel free to believe whatever characterization works best for you.

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way, nothing in the world can offend, and when such a thing can no longer offend, it ceases to exist in the old way.

Lolz

I feel like critical thought and empiricism have done such huge amounts to advance society that I need a pretty compelling reason to abandon them.

Especially when it's so unclear as to what I'm abandoning them for.

Anecdotally, my father used to be heavy into the taoist arts, is best friends with a 70 year old Buddhist monk from Canada and even opened and ran a spiritual community center for about 10 years in the Vancouver area. In addition to that I once spent 4 weeks at Sathya Sai Baba's Bangalore ashram and have spent a fair bit of time in Tibet, India, and Nepal and around people who would claim they have, spiritually speaking, "awoken" to some degree.

My experience with these types of people has taught me, much like my experience with people immersed in the Christian culture, that there are some people who, though I may not identify with what they say and think, I can genuinely appreciate the sobriety, clarity, humility, and authenticity with which they think and say it. On the other hand there are people whose expressed "experience" is contrived; it is noises made with the throat but seemingly unconnected to a thought, much like the sounds of an infant.

One of the common characteristics of a spiritual person who falls in the latter crowd is that their "thing" seems to be speaking in an obnoxiously vague manner which, instead of conveying any meaningful information, condescendingly hints at how much they know and how little I know as I refuse to contort myself or our shared language to make sense of the meaningless riddles they insist in speaking in.

When someone like Jesus spoke in riddles it was either edifying because his followers were spiritually able to see the deeper meaning in what he said or because he was willing to explain it to them in a manner sufficient for their understanding. We've all, almost to a man, confessed that we aren't spiritually able to see the deeper meaning in what you say, yet you insist on continued vagueness.

It as though you aren't sharing what you are sharing for anyone's edification but your own; we are simply meant to watching an exercise where you slowly learn how to make coherent sounds.

You're obviously not a bad dude so I apologize for the snark there at the end.

Again, feel free to believe whatever characterization works best for you. If you are feeling insulted when I say that or feel I am being snide or vague, can you lay that reaction aside and see what the sentence is pointing at? Isn't that what happened with your post?

AJ makes some posts, thoughts pop into your head characterizing my actions and motives, you believe the thoughts, go where the thoughtstream takes you and compose a post based upon those discriminating, characterizing thoughts. That action happens over and over again, millions of times, in many circumstances. The poem says that that action prevents your realizing Truth and I find that to be truthful in my experience.

So, ask about that. No? Why not? What is happening in you for you to not go there?
Can you see how thoughts arise to distract you from going there?
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No worries, mate.

And here is an example of such vagueness.

The thing is that I genuinely think that perhaps what you are hinting at is right, but in a different sense than your vagueness suggests. I think a very meaningful conversation can be held about where (if I may label your spirituality) Eastern philosophy and spirituality gets it (perhaps scientifically) correct, or at least less wrong, when it comes to the role the individual ego and our thought plays in the whole scheme of things, but your comments about realizing "Truth" don't really facilitate that kind of meaningful conversation because the way you use "Truth" doesn't seem to have any meaning at all to anyone but you.

I wasn't trying to be offensive. I am telling you for own edification that a) you should consider whether you are falling into some of the cognitive patterns that are used by cults to shield their adherents from an honest examination of their own beliefs and b) warning you of a flaw in your communication style. Specifically, I have heuristics about who to pay more or less attention to. These include openness to outside checks (especially empirical checks), openness to criticism, humility, and so on. While in the past I've thought you've presented a valuable perspective here, my internal heuristics alarms are going off now. If nothing else, this will make it more difficult for you to get your message across to people like me.

You are correct. If you want to know how to brew beer or how to perform heart surgery then you have to learn how to brew beer and how to perform heart surgery. Nothing else in the world will help.

But the focus of the poem is how to understand the nature of reality, not how to perform heart surgery. In order to understand the nature of reality it is important to understand that the intellect is entirely useless for this task. This does not mean that one should just take things on faith, the exact opposite is true, one should be extremely vigilant and pay attention to the mind's functioning so that one doesn't let oneself be deceived by ideas.

Critical thinking is in no way diminished. Critical thinking is encouranged, and in such a way that it is also applied to mind's functioning. The understanding of mind's functioning is not yet existential clarity, the understanding of mind's functioning makes it possible to allow oneself to let mind rest and allow it to not constantly interfere with things where it is useless, within that mental openness it is much easier to attain clarity. It is also possible to attain clarity even while the mind is in turmoil, but the odds are much better when attention focuses on the direct experience instead of on ideas about it.

I also want to point out that with clarity comes no magical ability to somehow know everything (how to brew beer, perform heart surgery, etc). The goal is simply to know one's own nature, to know what reality is... this knowledge is entirely useless in the sense that it gives one nothing which absent of this clarity can only be gained through mental or physical effort.

There are several reasons. The most obvious is there are some charlatans who are simply using the woo-woo language in order to market themselves, gain followers, etc.

Another reason is that most people who come to understand the nature of reality do so with the help of teachers who come from traditions that are not used to how "westerners" talk and then they simply neglect to adjust their narrative and vocabulary to our culture... and you can't really blame them, because it is an extremely counterintuitive topic that requires a lot of intellectual and linguistic ability if one wants to articulate it somewhat clearly, it is time consuming, it takes a lot of effort. And for most there simply isn't enough motivation for finding new ways of articulation, because those (the students) who are seriously interested in existential inquiry will not let themselves be stopped by the language barrier, so they will have studied the traditional texts and then there is no need for translating any further. There is no shortage of people who don't know who/what they are, and, given a choice, why should the teacher develop a system for someone who hasn't done his/her homework even though there are plenty people who have and are willing to make great effort?

Many also don't articulate their clarity at all, not even to themselves. The articulation is not necessary, existential clarity is not intellectual. And so, naturally, if you talk to them, they won't make any sense, people will reject their "crazy talk" and then they just get frustrated into not talking about their clarity at all. I would say those who don't and do talk are at least in equal numbers. Also, many don't talk because it simply doesn't make any sense to, because they know that everyone is already perfectly clear and that no teaching will add to the clarity that everyone already has.

I also have to add that there are many spiritual teachers who actually do articulate themselves with a degree of precision that is entirely sufficient to be understood by everyone from every culture, the problem is simply that the listener is unable to hear the words from within the correct context (alive direct experience). I think this is actually the biggest hurdle, it seems to be very difficult for people to appreciate the importance of alive direct experience... after it eventually clicks, everything sorts itself out rather sooner than later.