Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Creative Space of The Mind - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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The Creative Space of The Mind - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:23
  Jogen: Good evening, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. I thought tonight I would talk a little bit about Zen and creativity. I've had a kind of creative efflorescence in my own life and I thought it would be interesting to speak to this Doge Nzanji, who is a wonderful teacher in our tradition. In some of Doge Nzanji's teachings talks about there's a circle of practice.
• 0:58
  There's practice, which is what we were doing just a few minutes ago. There's realization, which is the experience that comes from that practice, from the ordinary to the profound. And then there's expression. And Dogen says that the circle of the way is only complete if you have all three aspects. So you stop, you see the depth of what you are.
• 1:31
  You give life to that in some way. And it really is a form of creativity. In another teaching by Dogen Zenji, he says that what characterizes someone who is ripening in their Zen practice is that they can give expression to their experience in a fresh way. They don't have to make a recourse to what has been said before or necessarily parrot the words of others. But because each of us is touching something genuine in our own heart, we can give life and expression in different ways to that which is genuine.
• 2:11
  So I want to talk about creativity. And sometimes we talk about some people are creative people, right? And we think some people are not creative people. But from a Zen perspective, we are all creative people, And some of that is very beautiful creativity and some of that is pretty harmful creativity. You could even say we're a mix of conscious and unconscious self and world creators.
• 2:48
  Sometimes we know we're creating and sometimes creation is going on and we don't know that we're doing it. And this has different levels that I want to appreciate with you. On one level, the very fact of experience right now is your creativity. There is no experience without this body mind. There is no experience without this body mind.
• 3:23
  This body mind is the only body mind you ever intimately know and therefore everything you experience is a creative act. You are the medium for everything that happens. No body mind, no rainy day. No body mind, no difficult morning. No body mind, tree, bird, thought, image, voice, taste of the tea.
• 3:52
  And this is your body mind. Whose else would it be? So on this level, every single moment we're involved in a creative act, the universe and us are in some kind of intercourse and things are happening. Every moment, that kind of vitality. Happening, happening is you.
• 4:21
  You can't say anything happens without you. On another level, we are continual storytellers. Dharma teachers love to talk about how people tell stories, and they like to tell you that it'd be good to stop telling stories. And that could be pretty helpful. Especially when vigilance of practice is absent, we are making up alluring stories about people we haven't even talked to.
• 5:00
  We're making up painful stories about things that haven't happened. Some of them are based on things that have actually happened, some of them are not. We're just creating it. Pops up in our mind, comes with a feeling, comes with images. We react to those feelings and images.
• 5:21
  We have stories about the feelings and images that we conjured with the thoughts we had. It's a very creative act, actually. Human beings paint in the gaps of our actual knowing. We fill in with little tidbits. And some of the sobering studies about this are when people, some people who say they witness a crime and how quickly after the actual perceptual moments, the mind begins filling in details because the uncertainty is hard to bear.
• 6:03
  As soon as there's any kind of pressure, we begin the mind begins turning and associating and adding. Think about how hard it is to not know what someone whose opinion you esteem thinks about you. Think about how hard it is when someone has power over you, let's say in a workplace, and how the tendency is to really fill in the gap with what you don't know and make up story. Right? We create our version of what so and so is thinking or feeling.
• 6:47
  Of course, sometimes sometimes we use this faculty in very beautiful ways and we create, we paint pictures of possibility. But often, it's an unconscious creative act. What do these created stories create? What's the consequence of this? We create conclusions.
• 7:17
  Right? We decide things. We create conclusions that conclude avenues of creation by filling in the gaps, by making stuff up. So that's another level of this, right? To pay attention to this very, intimate capacity for creativity.
• 7:46
  How unconsciously begins to take over our experience, color our experience. Similar identity is to some degree a creative act, Though it largely goes under the radar. If you've ever been away from other people for an extended period of time, it's very interesting, the relief from identity that you begin to experience. I remember doing long solo retreats and just loving loving that I didn't exist in the eyes of other people. I was I was not an object of perception of anybody.
• 8:30
  So that I wasn't created by how they saw me because how people see us draws something forward in us or maybe keeps something in, right? But also the fact that apart from a social context, if I'm not thinking I am such and such, how do I know who or what I am? In this moment, what is identity? I was thinking of adolescents and high school cliques. And I thought we mostly outgrew this, but then I started paying more attention to politics.
• 9:12
  And I realized we don't quite outgrow what most of us did in elementary school or high school. So there were the jocks and the band nerds, and I didn't wanna be a band nerd or a jock. And I couldn't be a high achiever, so I decided I was an indie rocker. But then there were some attractive girls who were punk, so I thought maybe I should become punk. And then later someone said, Jogan, you're not a Zen teacher, you're a spiritual hippie.
• 9:44
  And I thought, okay. Maybe that's what I am. Identity is created. Right? Culture is a force in that.
• 10:01
  Culture co creates identity with us. We get messages, family, society, so forth, says, You're that. You're this way because you have these particular markers. This is who you are. This is who you should be.
• 10:19
  If that is unconscious, we'll take it on. Maybe we'll rebel against it. Both are the creation of identity. I mean, whether we say no, that's not who I am, or we go, yeah, that's who I am. Right?
• 10:35
  So culture's saying you're this, you're this, or you're not this. Internally, we're saying I'm this, I'm not that. And then we, they, you, all together, identity is co created. But imagine, imagine, a child that was raised in a culture that was so homogenous, there was no other, would they have an identity? What would the need for an identity be?
• 11:12
  You know, we would recognize individuals because bodies are different, temperaments are different and so forth. So identity is something that is made out of thin air. Is that going too far? Maybe so. It's a social reality, right?
• 11:33
  The consequences that have it for some people are rougher than for others, you could say. Related to this, we sculpt ourselves, we create ourselves through what we take in. What we read and have read, what we pay attention to, have paid attention to. The things we consume are creating how we see, how we feel. We don't often think about that.
• 12:08
  But what we take in is actually kind of unfolding into our nervous system. I wonder about people who watch horror movies all the time. I just think, Oh my God. There are some that make me nauseous just watching the three second preview that I didn't choose to watch. What do we create when we take that in?
• 12:30
  This isn't a judgment. I'm actually just curious like how do you what happens to you? And what we expose ourselves to or you could say it's a creative act to reject exposing yourself to certain things. When I was one of the nice things, for example, many of you know about punk or indie rock culture is there were some things from the mainstream that you rejected. You rejected it because it was cool to reject them, but it turns out that some of them are worth rejecting.
• 13:07
  Right? That's just my opinion. That's just another creation. But So what are we taking in that is changing us? That is creating us day by day, even mutating us?
• 13:27
  Everybody nowadays knows somebody who has been mutated by an internet dark tunnel. Somebody has a so and so in their family who had too much time and they went down a Reddit path and they never returned the same way. Right? You hear about this. It's an unconscious co creation of a new way of seeing.
• 13:56
  Conversely, we can create ourselves anew by taking in new perspectives. It's interesting. Is it a choice? Do people choose to go down rabbit holes of dark conspiracy theories? Why would they choose that?
• 14:20
  If it's not a choice, then why don't we all go down those rabbit holes? This kind of creativity is mysterious. Mind is a creative space. Right? Your mind, my mind, mind is a creative space.
• 14:40
  In a sense, it's like a space that is totally neutral, deeply neutral. Anything can appear in your mind, almost anything. Any thought, shape, impulse or concept can appear in your mind. You can think it. One of my, old, brother monastics partially went into Zen training because this gripped him so much he felt he had to think all of the darkest thoughts possible.
• 15:15
  Because the fact that he could became so compelling and his mind mutated to the point that it was a very scary place. So he went to take up really strong meditation practice to counteract this habit. Mind will not obstruct the darkest, most evil thought or image. There will be no obstruction. The only thing that will obstruct it is a different thought.
• 15:46
  Mind will not get excited and join with you with the most beautiful thought. It's just completely in a way like a pure medium of possibility. You can think anything. Anything you can think of you can think. In the Dzogchen teachings they say mind is empty in essence, radiant in nature.
• 16:16
  That radiance is the fact that it's it's pregnant with creativity. Stuff arises out of it. It's pure possibility. Now you can work with that creatively. You can clear out old junky creations that don't inspire you and allow new ones to arise in the space of your mind.
• 16:43
  That's one of the beautiful I consider lower hanging fruits of meditation, right? Like if you do a retreat and you're steadily clearing out the mind, eventually you have new perspectives come in on your life. They didn't have room before. Right? If mind is a space that's already always getting filled with the same old stuff, you're not going to be able to have a fresh outlook on life.
• 17:13
  Sometimes psychedelic medicine serves this kind of function. It sort of breaks up the fixity of mind. There's room for a new way of seeing, or at least the clearing out of the stale. You can clear out all creations and rest in the very vibrance of mind. So that radiance is an energy.
• 17:43
  In Zen, we call it jioriki, right? The energy, the pregnancy of mind. And you can use it to make breakfast with zest. We're not talking about having to paint pictures here. You can use it to respond creatively to your neighbor's dog that poops on your lawn.
• 18:05
  I mean, we're talking about creativity. That means there's no limit on the way it can be expressed. Right? You can you can train to have a frictionless space of mind so that all kinds of things come and go. That's not the normal mode of human being.
• 18:29
  The normal mode of human being is we kind of hook onto only certain things in our mind. And we want to keep them around. We kind of go in these small loops. But you could practice just allowing everything to come and allowing everything to go. You can infuse this space of mind which allows anything but decide you're gonna flavor it with compassion.
• 19:06
  Because you know you can think some really dark stuff. Or many people realize, I mostly think self centered thoughts. Where's a sober point in practice where you're watching and you think, boy, I think so much about myself and even when I think about other people, it's about myself. What can I do for so and so, so they'll like me better? This is what we're doing when we chant the four Bodhisattva vows.
• 19:44
  We're recognizing the mind is empty in essence, so let's infuse it with this intention. May this mind be used to beautify life, to bring more freedom into life for as many beings as possible. What's the most creative way to do that? Knowing what we know about suffering and knowing how creative the mind is, what is a way that each of us can help contribute? Some people feel like painting these circles is a way to do that.
• 20:20
  So that's Shoto Horataroshi. He's full of bursting with that kind of vibrant energy that comes from the empty essence. He likes to do calligraphy, paint these beautiful circles that's full of his energy. All of these are, creative acts. So I want to invite you now to just, observe your mind as a creative space.
• 20:52
  So bring attention to the mind. Right? It's almost as if you're now it's like you have your head in a fishbowl, so to speak. But don't get caught up in the thoughts, just now illuminate the space in which thoughts happen. Thoughts, images, impulses, where do they come from?
• 21:37
  See in this moment, where do these come from? Where did they go to? Imagine that this mind is something like a screen that thoughts and images and impulses are appearing on. And just hang out with it like that. Not getting too excited or involved in what appears, but just be that space within which this creativity happens.
• 22:54
  Now think a beautiful thought, think a generous loving thought about somebody in your life or bring in a beautiful, generous image. Now try thinking a mean thought. Think a mean thought that you're not supposed to think. And then relax so all the thoughts and images just sort of dissolve like sugar dissolving in in water. And just feel the very space itself of mind.
• 23:57
  Be awake as that space. So the mind is it says in one Mahayana Sutra, the mind is the painter of the world. The mind is the painter of the myriad universes. And to not let that happen without our consent. Or when it is happening in a way that we might not want to really know what's going on, right, to watch it in action.
• 25:05
  In a sense, just to see it is enough. Yeah. There was, I'll end with a quote from, I believe it was the old master, Zhou Shu. This was one of the great Chinese Zen masters, and this student said, Well, what's the difference between me and you? That's a pretty interesting question, right?
• 25:36
  Just really straightforward. Like this guy's, you know, got a thousand monks and the Chinese government is giving him a special hat and all this, you know, all this stuff. And this person just very innocently, What's the difference between me and you? And he said something like, You are used by the twenty four hours, but I use the twenty four hours. The creativity of mind.
• 26:14
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.