Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Karma, Time & Deep Self Respect - Jogen, Sensei

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Karma, Time & Deep Self Respect - Jogen, 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.
• 0:22
  Jogen: All that's on my mind, we're gonna need some cookie volunteers if we are to sustain this cookie output. Please, no thank you. So if you brought a cook box of cookies, that would be wonderful. I think I might have a long talk, so I'm just gonna start. Good evening.
• 1:02
  It's very good to be here with you tonight. Tonight, I'm gonna talk about karma and time. And I'm not gonna do that much explicit definition of karma, probably just because I can't, but I'm going to talk around it and hopefully this touches on some things that are meaningful to you in your practice. So to the degree that we are under the sway of time, we're under the sway of karma. We're haunted by our past to the degree that our mind is still entangled in it, is a simplistic way to say it.
• 1:50
  And the degree that we are vivid nowness, to that degree, we have freedom and sensitivity with karma. So, have a karmic dimension, which means that this and this, much of it is conditions being transmitted forward. Much of this is a message from the past. And we also have a dimension of our being and these aren't really separate until we know that it's they seem separate. We have a dimension that is totally fresh and not rooted in anything that has ever happened.
• 2:40
  So, a definition of karma to get us a little bit on the same page, let's define it going forward with this talk as what happens in you and what you do in reaction to what happens in you. Not what happens to you, what happens in you and your reaction to what happens in you. And this is no small thing. The Avatamsaka Sutra, which is this great big Mahayana Sutra, kaleidoscopic psychedelic vision of the universe, says that mind is the painter of the triple world. Could even say karma is the painter of the triple world.
• 3:28
  The triple world either means form, formlessness, and there's one other, or past, present, and future. So, karma partially means we participate in the creation of our world. But largely, we participate unconsciously. That is a world is painted forth and we go, Why is this world here? I didn't want this world.
• 3:57
  When it's a little bit like painting, looking away, and then going over, Why did I paint that? Well, your arm was moving. There's a canvas there. It's called mind. So largely we participate unconsciously or our karmic dimension unfolds without us really regarding it compassionately and with care.
• 4:27
  And that is largely problematic,
• 4:31
  right?
• 4:33
  Now, regards to this, we could say there are two extremes. One extreme is that everything we do is of such utmost importance, it's fateful. Right? That's the kind of view that you say something off color at work. Nowadays, actually, that could be pretty fateful, not always a bad thing.
• 4:57
  Let's say you say something off color with a buddy of yours and you feel like, Oh no, forever my life is ruined. We're exaggerating the potency of cause and effect. Though you never know, one action can actually really catalyze and cascade a whole series of events. But the other extreme, which is more common in a culture that is so material based, is that we believe generally that what we do doesn't matter and it's inconsequential. We believe if we sell our homes or we move to Oregon or we move material things around, we believe that's consequential.
• 5:45
  But we don't believe so much that what we say is consequential, maybe sometimes. And we largely really don't believe that what we think is consequential. We take this, first of all, as a capsule. Everything that happens in here stays in here like Vegas. Not true, not even in Vegas.
• 6:08
  Not only that, but we believe there is no consequence just because it's in our own minds. But mind is a painter of the triple world. Actually, might be a short talk. I have two main points that I want to make. So first of all, the invitation is to contemplate what happens to you as karma.
• 6:42
  And I'm going to talk about how you would do that and what that means. This is not some kind of extreme view where we say everything that happens is karma. And so therefore, in a way, you're basically fated. You might as well just float along because it's all in the stars. Oh, you got a moon in Pisces?
• 7:04
  We know what that means. Karma is happening every moment. The transmission of karma or the interruption of karma or the transcendence of karma is happening every moment or it's not. Right? Mostly why to understand this, it's not philosophical or even necessarily cosmological, but as we practice, we don't often understand why what's arising is arising, or how what's happening to us is happening.
• 7:54
  So, there are two benefits to contemplating karma, two sides of one coin. The first is tolerance. I'm gonna call it tolerance. And here's my metaphor for karma. If you put a postcard in the mail to yourself, a future self receives it.
• 8:17
  I don't know if you've ever done an experiment like this. We did it actually at the monastery years ago. We had a vows session where you contemplate aspirations and you're making commitments and then you write a letter to yourself a year later saying, Hey, what's up? How are you doing with that? Are you abandoning me again?
• 8:39
  And we had somebody wait. They dated their calendar and they put them in the mail right before the year, you got the letter and you'd opened it and you're like, Oh. But actually that's happening all the time, but just not in a way that we think. So if you put a postcard in the mail to yourself, a future version of you receives it. The person who sent it doesn't get it, strictly speaking.
• 9:07
  Or at least it's one of the many things that ends up on a pile in your desk. If you send many postcards from the same place, let's say you do visit Vegas. Let's say you're in Vegas and you send over two weeks because you really like Vegas, you send 10 postcards a day, that's 140 postcards that end up on your desk. So your Vegas trip, because you sent many postcards from one place, and I'm gonna guess one state of mind because I've been to Vegas and lived in Vegas. They take up a bunch of space on your desk, it's gonna make an imprint.
• 9:46
  Not only did you send those postcards, but you sent them to the future. Everything you do with your body, speech, or mind is a postcard to the future. If you do it a lot, you send a lot of postcards to the future. They're going to land on your desk and at the very least, they're going to be there in your room. They're going to arrive at your house.
• 10:12
  Now, what you do with those images, those reminders of who you were, those invitations to the same state of mind, what you do with those, well, that's a matter of the strength of your practice. For example, your current self may be well done with Vegas. You may be like, I'm so over Vegas or wherever. You've seen Vegas clearly, you've stopped going there. You're not sending postcards into the future from Vegas because that was the past, but they keep arriving.
• 10:46
  And you're like, What the Why does this keep showing up on my desk? Why is this still coming? Why is this still arriving? I'm not that person anymore. But actually you are a being who transcends past, present, and future.
• 11:02
  You are a past, present, and future interdependent being. So the past is always arriving. It's not you. It's not separate from you. You sent those postcards.
• 11:18
  Now, you could, upon receiving the postcards, I tried to make up a phrase, you could time body backwards. That is you go, Oh yeah, that way of being. It's very familiar. And you become the person who used to be in Vegas even though you're important. The image shows up, the impulses are there because they belong to you, at least one dimension of who you are.
• 11:52
  And then there it is, the invitation to actually be the person you thought you weren't anymore, but actually you still have the potential because here are the postcards. In that case, the past is present. It's actually no longer past. What makes the past past? If you can say the past was like XYZ in that moment, it is actually present.
• 12:22
  It's in your mind. You are touching the invisible psychic cord that connects you to that moment. Energy flows across that cord. Now, if there's consciousness of the karmic dimension, if there is the aspiration to nowness, if there's curiosity, the postcards could arrive and you have no sentimentality. You have cleared away the longing for who you used to be.
• 13:04
  And especially if it wasn't skillful, if it didn't serve you. A lot of bad stuff goes down in Vegas. I lived there. I worked at a hotel where you had to sign a non disclosure agreement just so you wouldn't tell people what went down in Vegas. Right, but of course, this isn't about Vegas.
• 13:26
  The postcards arrive. If you have no sentimentality, then it's just like, Oh, I remembered that dude. I remember that state of mind. I remember that desire. Interesting how I'm free of this thing that used to hook me.
• 13:46
  That's the fruit of your nowness. The postcard arrives and it's like, what do most people do with postcards? Well, you put it on your fridge for a few days. Maybe longer. The postcard could arrive and because you don't like the image you see, you get into aversion with it.
• 14:05
  Do you know what aversion is? It was very helpful last time I taught, someone came up to me and was like, What do you mean by dharma? And I was like, Oh, we got to stop with the lingo. Aversion is the technical Buddhist term for anything on the spectrum of irritation or anger. It's even the slightest, Nope, not that.
• 14:30
  No, thank you. From that all the way up to full blown fury. The postcards arrive and you could respond to them with aversion. But guess what happens when you do that? You really substantiate that image.
• 14:48
  You really say, This is real. This is a part of who I still am, but I reject that. Which is just the flip side of saying, Me? Oh yeah, I remember. I wish I could be like that person still.
• 15:08
  They could arrive with fascination or you could just calmly recycle them after you read them. So, tolerance, in other words, is the recognition that what arises often is an echo. I didn't say everything that arises is an echo or everything is a postcard, but often what arises is an echo. This state of mind, this habit, even this body configuration is an echo. I remember one time in my ordination, I was coming into Portland and getting into some of my old postcards And Hogan Roshi, he saw my posture at the dharma center and he said, look at your posture.
• 16:05
  That's interesting. That's how you used to hold your body when you first moved in. A lot of what we're doing is relating to echoes, and echo is also a good metaphor for our karmic dimension, right? In a way, if it's a clear echo, it sounds pretty much and feels just like the sound did when it was originated, but it is no longer coming from that source. It's just reverberating.
• 16:39
  And yet you still hear it, you still feel it. You can still react to it as if it's happening in the present. We're totally free to be haunted, every one of us. Naturally, good practitioners often are discouraged by how many and for how long they continue to receive postcards from Vegas. You think, What?
• 17:13
  This is still showing up? Clearly the dharma doesn't really work. I have done ten days of retreat and I'm still angry. Or I have done ten years of retreat and I'm still angry. That's interesting because it's not the postcard showing up that's the problem.
• 17:39
  It's how you respond to it. It's not seeing that it's paper thin. It's, Oh, there I am. It's, Oh, there this. No, this is not part of who I think I am.
• 17:50
  I should have gotten rid of these a long time ago. It can be confusing that even over long periods of concerted practice, one is still hearing echoes of old songs. You know, what if there are multiple lifetimes? And maybe this lifetime you're sending those postcards was because of a postcard sent from a previous lifetime. And maybe in that lifetime you sent twice as many.
• 18:20
  And the reason you sent that many is because the life before that you were really into sending those postcards. And so, this seems like it's just one postcard but it's got the weight of many, many postcards from Vegas. And you think, God, I only did coke for ten years in college. What the fuck? Why is it so hard for me to put down?
• 18:45
  I don't even This costs too much money. But you just don't know. We just can't see. Our being is vast in the time dimension. We just don't How long?
• 19:10
  Now, you can appreciate this as actually something very interesting and compelling. It's a kind of time travel. It's a kind of a quantum event. My father died when I was seven years old and maybe 15 ago I was at some kind of psycho spiritual workshop and this person brought me right into that seven year old who lost his father. I could have died from my heart like breaking.
• 19:44
  I thought, what in the world? That was at that point thirty years ago or something. How amazing that previous versions of ourself live on and they continue to arise. And we think they just arise here, but it's not so simple to say. Now, I have been focusing on the postcards you don't want to get, right?
• 20:19
  But the opposite is absolutely true. There are beneficent postcards you can send to your future self. There are beneficent energies you can send into that invisible filament into the future. Before I move on to that side of things, I wanna give you a quote from a Zen koan. There was a practitioner who was going to leave the monastery and his Roshi was very astute.
• 20:59
  And among other things, one of the things he said to this practitioner was, Do not visit your childhood village, they will call you by your old names. Do not visit your home village, they will call you by your childhood names. Now somebody hears this and goes, Yep, not going home for Thanksgiving. Thanks, Jogan. But it's not quite that simple.
• 21:33
  I'm not necessarily saying that. Do not visit your home village. They will call you by your childhood names. It's like many adults actually do become children when they're with their parents. 55 year olds become 17.
• 21:51
  They might not admit it, they might try to hide it, but if you just go out to dinner and you look around at families, you can sometimes see it on their faces. So, other side of the coin of contemplating karma in this way is possibility. Karma means self universe is unfixed, mutable, mutating. It's patternable, and it can't actually be finally patterned. The way I like to say it lately is the way you are is not the way you are.
• 22:31
  It's just the way you happen to be right now. You don't have a final self. You're not off the hook. You don't get to be done and be like, this is just me. Deal with me world.
• 22:47
  Deal with me partner. Deal with me boss. Deal with me Portland, like whatever. There's no final self. Just because you hung out in Santa Cruz and shady chat rooms and collected ceramic octopuses, That's what I thought, so I wrote it down.
• 23:08
  I don't know. I don't know where that came from. You could send different postcards into the future. A lot of times, people do hit a particular texture of spiritual practice where what's happening is they're cultivating and they are sending those postcards into the future. They're in a way, they're blessing future self, but you don't feel the benefit of it in the present because simultaneously the past and the nowness are kind of mixed together.
• 23:47
  And the nowness, which is there, which is blessing your future self, is kind of overshadowed by the echoes of who you used to be. And so you're like, this sucks. I just feel, again, it's not working. I don't like this. Where's the evidence?
• 24:04
  This is a time of faith. This is a time where having at least a conceptual confidence in what I'm talking about is really of service. You could send different postcards into the future. You could strum different chords that will reverberate in someone else's heart mind that you don't actually get to meet. This is part of the problem.
• 24:33
  I was working with somebody recently who does have a pretty challenging substance addiction And it turns out that the part of them that engages that substance does not give a single flying F about the consequence for the rest of that person because in that moment of the pleasure, it's good and I just I'm just here with this baby. In other words, that part of them is totally indifferent to what's going downstream. It actually lacks the capacity to have empathy for the future self. That's why it's so hard to exercise when you already feel kind of healthy. You're like, yeah, but I don't really care about that lady.
• 25:21
  She could deal with it right now. It's Netflix binge. You could take your jog or however you think about it. It actually takes a lot of compassion to bless one's future self. It's akin to loving a stranger.
• 25:43
  If you can't really open your heart to a stranger, it's pretty hard to open your heart to your future self because you never meet them in a way, in a way. So, you send beautiful postcards into the future, that's called doing dharma practice. And then some table is eventually covered with beautiful images. And it will be easy to pick those up. They're right at hand.
• 26:12
  You outnumber the Vegas postcards with the Grand Canyon postcards, if that's your thing. Use your own metaphor. So, when we view this practice that we're doing in linear time, there is reasonable hope for transformation based on cause and effect. This is a kind of generosity. A practice moment is twofold generosity.
• 26:52
  You take a stance that cuts their suffering in that moment. Let's say you practice equanimity. That means you don't fight with what is. You don't decide the universe is something that you shouldn't be feeling. Okay.
• 27:09
  Suffering's reduced right there. At the same time, a blessing is sent towards the future because every time you practice that, you increase that tendency. And eventually it gets easy. Recently, told someone practice is really easy. Suffering is very hard.
• 27:29
  It's actually true. In some sense, practice is easy. Getting a bag full of those postcards, that's weighty. Now there is something also worth mentioning that is maybe a little bit more subtle. What if your future self is sending you postcards too?
• 27:59
  What if your future self, some of the things that arise for you, Maybe because time is immeasurable, your full awakening is already a reality. Are in bodies, we are as bodies, you can think of it different ways, and therefore we get pinned to locations in time and space. And we have some ability to not be limited by our particular location, but it's not a 100% possible because you're tethered to some degree to the body. Even if you leave it, you tend to come back. But there's another dimension of us that pervades this body, but is not limited by it.
• 28:54
  Maybe it's sending you postcards too. Maybe in reality, you're actually receiving postcards from full enlightenment every day. And they land on the table, but maybe they're not as interesting or that's kind of unfamiliar. Maybe they're a little less comfortable than the other postcards. But maybe without deserving it, somehow you're just walking down the street and your mind just goes crystal clear.
• 29:35
  Or you have an experience of awareness with no distance. We call intimacy and zen. Maybe two seconds before that you were thinking about how annoying it is that someone's dog shits on your lawn. Then right after that, boom. It's a non sequitur, right?
• 29:55
  It's a vertical event. Karma is maybe you're unreasonably kind in a way that surprises you. Or maybe you decide to practice Zen or Vajrayana or something like that. Like how weird is that that you are doing this to any degree? Think about that.
• 30:26
  I know some of you, think about how weird it is that you are really doing Zen practice. Where did that come from? My past self, you couldn't have no way that I would be sitting here talking about this stuff. I was gonna work in a record store and retire in a record store. Yep.
• 30:48
  And that would have been okay. But there was a postcard from a future self. So we emphasize in the meditation hall awareness that is not conceptual. We emphasize direct experience, we emphasize being with the dynamic flow, the empty spacious texture of being. But the other side of practice is to actually really contemplate your life.
• 31:24
  Like what is going on? Where does this come from? Whatever this is, where does this come from? Not the question why, why is often a sneaky way of us trying to pin blame on somebody, usually mom or dad, unfortunately. But where does this come from?
• 31:46
  Right?
• 31:46
  Or how is it that this keeps coming? And you can think that through the lens of karma. And I think it's beneficial, not the whole picture, but it is beneficial. Okay, and I did finish in time to have some discussion time. So, I'm curious if there's anything that this brings up for you.
• 32:18
  Kosho.
• 32:29
  Kosho: Could you say just a little bit more about what you meant by practice is easy? You said you said, you know, receiving a big bag of postcards, that's hard. But the experience of practice can feel like you're just sitting there receiving postcard after postcard.
• 32:47
  Jogen: Yeah. Practice is easy because it is what you are in the virgin moment before you do anything. And to be that is the most easeful thing possible. But we practice identification, we practice aversion, and that's stressful, and that's hard. So we continually deviate from a pristine moment in a way because we're enchanted by the postcards and because we think, well, these are arriving.
• 33:29
  I better do something about them. So yeah, I don't know if I would've said to you, practice is easy, but to this person, I said, practice is easy. Suffering's hard. I don't know. We get some questions at home too.
• 33:54
  Oh, we're getting serious echoes online. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not sure why. Oh, maybe it's going into the participant's microphone. Is it good echoes like dub style?
• 34:07
  No. Okay. Alright. I'm gonna mute it while you ask the question and see if that helps.
• 34:15
  I wanted to get a little bit of clarity around the still echoing. Around the question of nonreactivity around the postcards that are arriving from the past? I guess I wanted to distinguish, is that dis identification? I mean, if it was possible to completely dis identify with all conditioning, then that would be total freedom from conditions, right?
• 34:55
  Well that would be another form of separation. In Zen that would be another error. But that's a different talk.
• 35:04
  Or maybe I shouldn't say disidentification, or maybe not discontinuing to appropriate the conditioning as a self.
• 35:17
  I come to think the issue is something like our value judgments about what arises, plus our taking it personal.
• 35:30
  Taking it personal.
• 35:31
  So instead of, Oh, anger. I'm not gonna let that out. It's my anger and I'm bad for having it or I'm right for having it. And then another postcard is sent into the future. So to actually let things arise matter of a fact is what's really meant by equanimity, is to do absolutely nothing and it's very easy in that initial moment.
• 36:04
  It's just But it's hard to not let those spring loaded habits of value and identity come into play.
• 36:16
  Okay.
• 36:16
  Because these are transpersonal forces, you know?
• 36:18
  Right, these are thinking habits. They're what? Thinking habits.
• 36:22
  They're thinking habits, but all the things that arise that we identify with, they don't really belong to us anyway. And we've kind of lost that with the sense of not having polytheism,
• 36:35
  right? All
• 36:37
  this stuff belongs to the gods and it just flows through us. So it's even harder, just let it be. Just let it be. Let it be.
• 36:53
  nigel: Thank you.
• 37:01
  Jogen: Let's see, back Okay, we have Nigel and then Anand, whichever one Anand, excuse me.
• 37:17
  nigel: Thematically with Las Vegas, could you comment on equanimity as it relates to attraction, sexual attraction, romantic attraction, our biology, especially for a lay person with a partner, let's say?
• 37:33
  Jogen: What do you want me to comment specifically?
• 37:38
  nigel: That's a trick question. Think just on the nature of postcards and our karma.
• 37:48
  Jogen: Yeah. I should probably do a whole talk on sexual karma. Wouldn't that be good if we talked about it as if it's not like some special weird thing? Well, one thing to say is there is a difference between mind, body, and intention sending postcards into the future and our instinctual reality. And to find spaciousness around that even a little bit that blesses everybody.
• 38:33
  Spaciousness. But compassion is very warranted because we are designed to make babies. And it takes great intention to not let that instinctual drive animate us. Yeah. So as long as harm is off the table, I really just recommend great compassion for oneself with that drive.
• 39:11
  And there are some traditions that decide to take it head on, right? Put a chastity belt on, cut that thing off or put on a robe, right? But I actually think that head on way is not so useful. I think it's better to work on not creating harm and parallel with that, do deep practice and let the spaciousness organically arise with it. I don't see a lot of success in all that many people who try to take it head on.
• 39:46
  Do you know what I mean by that? I think you'd Yeah. Right. As soon as you make something a demon, you give it so much more power. And it's really easy to do that around sexual desire.
• 39:59
  It kind of calls up all this old religious conditioning. I had a teacher recently who's all, You're all a bunch of Protestants. You think you're Vadriana practitioners and you're all one taste non dual. You're all Protestants. You're caught up in purity.
• 40:16
  Get over yourself, see what kind of say things like that. Do no harm, great compassion, and trust that practice. This was true for me around eating too. I had a lot of eating issues. Overeating was a refuge.
• 40:35
  And I didn't go at that head on so much as I just practiced in the midst of that habit and then it took care of itself. And so that is with the instinctual drives, that's my general advice. Thanks for the question and that would be fun to do a talk on sex or three talks, I don't know. Okay, Anand. Anand is a postcard from my past that I'm very happy to be encountering again.
• 41:08
  He knew me in like 2007 or '8? Yeah. When I used to teach meditation at Reed College.
• 41:14
  Anand: Yeah. I'm Anand. Hi. Vivo, Las Vegas. Uh-oh.
• 41:24
  So this is a complicated thought, feels like, but make it simple, which is that I think for most of us, we don't want postcards that we don't like to read. Yeah. And we have some technology we're trying to practice to help with that, and we have many kinds of technologies to do that, of avoid avoidance or changing locations, changing our jobs, whatever we need. But I feel like part of the reason we've practiced this is to be happier. I think that's human instinct.
• 42:00
  We want to feel well. So what about what kinds of technologies do we have as contemplative practitioners to just stop receiving bad postcards?
• 42:11
  Jogen: To stop receiving the bad or to be happy?
• 42:14
  Anand: To To stop receiving bad postcards because I feel like part of the thing that we don't like receiving in general, I mean we can say, I want my nature of mind to be such that these things don't bother me, but they still bother me. They may bother all of us. What about just only receiving nice things in life with our memories and thoughts? I know this is the past and future, but you know there's certain kinds of ritual practices people do of like burning karmic seeds in some kind of ways, puja practices.
• 42:43
  Jogen: Yeah, there are ways to, Nundro, for example, is a practice of Tibetan Buddhism where you rigorously purify karma, but if that completely worked, you wouldn't need to do anything else after that, so.
• 42:53
  Anand: So yeah, I'm a little confused about what does this mean, you know, if I, Where do we lie with this? Does the karma exist in our bodies? Where are we?
• 43:02
  Jogen: Yeah, well, we have to be clear about one thing, and that the Buddha never said practice was about being happy. He said it was about being free. And once you're free, you're free to be happy more continually. So I think, there are people who dive, who activate the process of purification because they do a lot of practice and we can't tell them, Oh no, just stop receiving those postcards. Just like paint some happiness on that.
• 43:33
  Because the karmic dimension can't be ignored. Those were sent from the past. But we don't have to dwell on them and there's a lot of things we can do to see the whole picture or bring in the whole palette, which I think is part of what you're saying. So, there are many practices where even in the midst of those postcards still arriving, we could be really filling ourselves with loving kindness. We just did a week of that at Great Vow, right?
• 44:05
  Hundreds of hours and people were hearts were really brightened. We can do practices like gratitude, right, where we attend to what opens the heart, right? There's millions of things in that aspect that we can do. So I might be just zeroing in on one thing you said was not to receive bad postcards.
• 44:33
  Anand: Yeah, I mean, that was the only main thought I had. I had a silly thought, can I just not receive them in a way that's still actually healthy and okay for me, you know, because I don't think in general, my habit is that letting those postcards sit up just doesn't do well for my body at the end of the day? Yeah. Yeah.
• 45:01
  Jogen: Yeah. Well, we are whole beings. We include all the realms, we include all the dimensions, and it takes a lot of effort to be only one thing.
• 45:21
  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.