Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / A Mind Open to Wonder - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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A Mind Open to Wonder - 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 Buddha Dharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:15
  Jogen: We got a full house tonight. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the temple. It's good to have you. We got a lot of new folks, which is wonderful.
• 0:31
  Tonight, I want to talk about wonder, gratitude, samadhi, and prajna. And I'll explain what those unusual words are pointing to. Confession. Years of Dharma practice didn't help with my personality shortcomings very much at all. I can see them.
• 0:54
  I can accept them. I didn't change them. I'm mildly better at adulting, I think. I have some freedom from my compulsions. But what the practice did make available is it made me more available to wonder and gratitude.
• 1:23
  And I'll take wonder and gratitude over, you know, being a super high functioning adult or having a better personality. And we could even say the point of Zen practice is wonder and gratitude. The unt untrained mind can so easily, I don't know, like how masking tape attracts hairs, accumulates hairs. Wish I could find a better image, but the unpracticing mind accumulates gripes and regrets and should be's and crusty attitudes. The mind doesn't have its own auto clean system, if you haven't noticed.
• 2:13
  It doesn't just do that on its own. Maybe dreams are trying to do that, but an untrained or an unpracticing mind generally just accumulates, just accumulates all this stuff, crusty attitudes, resentments, in such excess that wonder and gratitude are all but extinguished. And people think, I have nothing to be grateful for, and they just point in some direction at what somebody's doing to other people or to them or whatever it may be. And I, I think about that, and I think, this life is too hard to have no wonder and gratitude. It's just too hard.
• 3:03
  We work really intensely to get our lives together, and then it starts coming apart as we get old. We invest in relationships, and we put so much, and the person changes, or they betray us, or love fades. This life is too hard to have no wonder and gratitude. But then if I flip that around, I'd say a hard life is still worth living when there is wonder and gratitude. And these words, I don't know if you relate well to them.
• 3:41
  They... I don't mean like some kind of sledgehammer, blow your mind kind of experience. This kind of wonder might be very quiet. It might be... It might be just a background appreciation of things, or this kind of gratitude might just be a kind of contentment.
• 4:06
  Right? Or it could be more potent. So what Zen practice has to offer and what we're studying an old Buddhist text called the Diamond Sutra. And what something like the Diamond Sutra, for those of you who are studying it, is pointing at is how do we make available wonder and gratitude. In that text, almost every other page, there's something about just giving a lot, being generous.
• 4:45
  And we only give a lot in our lives in the different ways that we can give when we have some sense of gratitude, when we have some sense of wonder. Well, Zen practice is not a passive tradition. In fact, passivity is the enemy of Zen practice. It's a practice where we say, okay, here's a problem. I do have a masking tape kind of mind.
• 5:14
  It does accumulate all the hairy stuff of life, and gratitude and wonder are, not a common experience for me. So then what can I do about it? It's really a tradition that says, here's some things you can do about it. So it requires us to, engage our agency, right, as much as possible. So the first side of this is, sometimes what we call Samadhi.
• 5:47
  Now in some traditions, Samadhi means a kind of trance that you go into. It's thought of as like somebody sits down to meditate, and they kind of disappear from existence into an object of meditation or into some absolute ground of being or something. And, we notice those experiences. But in Zen, we are more interested in that than those states in Samadhi as a steady frame of awareness. That's not even the absence of thought necessarily, but it's a steady frame of awareness, a stillness of experiencing in which experience comes and goes.
• 6:36
  All of the words are inadequate. And when we learn to settle our minds, when we learn to perceive as the still point, there are various gifts and states that begin to come. Wonder and gratitude being a couple of them. The most tried and true way to train in this is to sit in meditation like you did tonight through, body mind alignment. And I think that we have to really aim for stillness because we are such creatures of movement, we are such karmic creatures, we are so much rivers of habit that we can easily sit down and meditate, and we are kind of meditating, and we're kind of also just letting those things flow as they always do.
• 7:50
  Maybe more subtly. Maybe maybe just as we always do, we happen to be sitting with our legs folded in a meditation hall, and we're still doing all the things we normally do with our mind. So we have to aim for this stillness. I was talking about that earlier with disenchantment. You have to...
• 8:09
  Yes, you're holding your attention in a particular way, but you also have to decide that you're going to be disenchanted with what pulls you into the flow as opposed to holding the flow. And maybe that's a good a good distinction between the mind of so called Samadhi and ordinary mind. Samadhi mind holds the flow. Thought, sensation, feeling, the whole world is kind of moving through you. Ordinary mind is we're just caught up in the flow.
• 8:43
  We're just following the thought, following the feeling, reacting, and so forth. Difference between intentional attention and reactive attention, which just kind of bounces from thing to thing. I realize I... In the meditations, I speak about... I give pointers about meditation, but I don't talk that explicitly, actually, in talks about meditation.
• 9:17
  I'll just take a brief kind of tangent here and say, in talking about Samadhi, here is a formula. It's relaxation, which means two things. It means you're actually relaxing your body, but you're actually relaxing your tendency to react to experience. It's relaxation, that whole side of things, plus alertness, plus awakeness. There is a bringing forth of that quality.
• 9:56
  Relaxation plus alertness. And then you have some degree of disenchantment with the thinking mind and with feelings, and you begin to find a sweet spot where your practice ripens. Relaxation plus alertness plus this, disenchantment. In a way, I I realize I am, sharing a version of, something that in the Pali Canon, the Buddha would say about meditation. He would say, and this is paraphrase around cultivating mindfulness or or Samadhi, he would say, go to the trunk of a tree or an empty hut.
• 10:39
  This is our empty hut. Arrange the body upright, put aside worry and regret for the world, and bring the mind into alertness, intent alertness. That was the the basic stance of meditation that he he suggested. So that's formal practice, Samadhi practice. And then there's, I would call, sense beauty stillness.
• 11:13
  That is whatever engrosses our attention enough that we're coaxed awake. We're dilated open. This is how we can use the beauty of our world and whatever that it means to you to bring the practice in. That could be visual art. That could be nature, music, sound.
• 11:35
  After I finished, work earlier, I was laying on my couch and both my, kitty boys got on me, and they were purring. And so I like to, use the purr as, an object to absorb into. Apparently, cat purrs do something good for your system, but science didn't need to tell us that. We know when we're just with it. All of these are dharma gates, but you have to intend to become available to it because the cultural trance is that we're just always moving past everything.
• 12:13
  It's hard to get us to actually stop. Blake said, eternity is in love with the creations of time. Right? Well, if that's true that eternity is in love with the creations of time, that means eternity is in love with you. Eternity is in love with you.
• 12:32
  You're a creation of time. Eternity is in love with me. So then when something flirts through the timelessness of its being, let yourself be drawn in. Right? And allow the interruption of the the high tempo.
• 12:53
  We can do this cultivation of settled mind and Samadhi. It's up to us. Very close to the surface for many people is all these yeah, buts like, yeah, but I don't live in a monastery. Yeah, but I can't go and retreat. Yeah, but my kids.
• 13:08
  Yeah, but... And I could be wrong, but I don't think any of that's really true. I think the primary thing in the way way is just our lack of trust in the possibility and our lack of enthusiasm for the cultivation. Because always there's movement, even in our retreat, and always there's the possibility to hold a steady frame of awake awareness. And it's just our lack of enthusiasm or or our lack of belief that our life circumstance allows it to be possible.
• 13:48
  In monasteries, where people are doing lots of practice, there are some people who develop very, very, very slowly because they just don't apply with continuity. And there's some people who move very, very quickly. It's because they apply the practice with continuity. The context is not magic. So just as a little, exercise with, this kind of Samadhi, I want to invite you into this.
• 14:23
  You can follow along if you like. Look around the room now with your discriminating judging mind. Don't look directly at anybody. You don't wanna make them feel uncomfortable, but you can kind of look at them. You can look at what they're wearing, but look around with discriminating mind and just, like, you know, ham it up.
• 14:42
  Like, oh god. Really? Blue socks in the Zen Do? Or whatever your version of that is. Okay.
• 14:54
  Taste that. Now drop out of your mind into your heart center and just look around the room through your heart. Is there a difference for you? You could toggle between, go back to your discriminating mind. Feel how your attention goes up into your brain, brain electricity, and drop into your heart center, and then perceive through that.
• 15:50
  So that's a little bit about, Samadhi. You know, sometimes being a Dharma teacher, you're afraid that you just are saying the same thing over and over again. And I am, frankly, saying the same thing over and over again, but this kind of stuff needs to be needs to be said. Samadhi. Right?
• 16:12
  Practice it. If you don't practice it, then you don't experience the fruits of the of the practice, and that... That's up to you. There is also the prajna side of things. Prajna, it means something like, seeing into.
• 16:31
  We translate that word sometimes as insight. The old masters like a master like the sixth ancestor, Hui Neng. So really great Zen text called the Platform Sutra of people who are who are studiers. And he said basically that when our meditation is balanced, samadhi, as I was just talking about, and prajna are simultaneous. And I think that's true, but then sometimes we can intentionally lead into the, prajna, the wisdom, the insight side of things.
• 17:09
  And the Diamond Sutra that many of you are looking at is largely emphasizing this. I don't think... I didn't see a single... I've been chanting it, the last couple of weeks in the morning. I haven't encountered a single passage that talked about stilling the mind.
• 17:23
  I think it's assuming that as a practitioner, one knows that's in the mix. That's one of the things that we do as we work with stilling attention. Prajna wisdom insights can just arise in a stilled mind. People can have... It can just suddenly, erupt, and it happens in different ways.
• 18:02
  But that can be a little bit, not passive, but then, we are kind of waiting for God, so to speak. We're we're we're in a kind of, readiness and receptivity for a deeper seeing to arise. But, we're not separate from the divine, so we can catalyze curiosity. We can catalyze prajna. And we catalyze prajna by being curious, by inquiring.
• 18:41
  So just like the habit of taking what is positive in our lives for granted gets in the way of gratitude, Taking our way of experience for granted gets in the way of prajna, and therefore, gets in the way of wonder. And this is the weird thing about Buddhism. I think it's a little bit different than other religions, maybe. Buddhism says, you and I are really confused. It doesn't say that we're sinners.
• 19:14
  It says that we misperceive reality. Right? We think a rope is a snake, and we think a snake is a rope, to use the old analogy. And and primarily, we misperceive, ourselves. We misperceive space.
• 19:31
  We misperceive time. So we challenge and dismantle concepts with this active prajna to touch a kind of ineffability, to sort of, break the mind out of its crusty, stale way of seeing things. We could say that we rebirth our world, and sometimes that is earth shattering, and sometimes it's just bit by bit. So I want to go through just, a few inquiries based on lines from the Diamond Sutra. Because one of the things I'm interested in is if people are studying this, how do you bring it alive?
• 20:19
  How do you keep it from just being an artifact of Buddhist culture? So, there's a line in the Diamond Sutra. It says, past mind cannot be found. Future mind cannot be found. Present mind cannot be found.
• 20:37
  So now I'm going to invite you into curiosity about your own experience. And if you're not curious, that's not a bad thing, but you might be curious about how you're not curious. If you say, I don't care. Well, that's interesting to me. Okay?
• 20:58
  Turning your, attention upon your own being, ask sincerely, where is my mind? Mind is something we speak about and think about, and mind thinks about mind all the time, talks about mind all the time. Sincerely ask and then... And you're looking as you ask. You're seeing with the help of the question, where is my mind?
• 21:27
  Or where is mind? So have a location in your body. Or you could ask, where does mind start? Really wonder, even if it sounds like a silly question to you, where does mind start? If you don't like the word mind, you could use consciousness.
• 22:06
  Where does consciousness start? Something can be found. It has a location. It must have a beginning. It must have an ending.
• 22:19
  Where does consciousness end? You can ask yourself, really really wondering what is meant by the word mind. Try to encounter the experience of your being really fresh. What is mind? Where is mind?
• 23:17
  Where does this consciousness reside? Where does this consciousness start? This wondering has a quality of alertness. It's got it's got energy in it. We'll move on to another, line from the Diamond Sutra.
• 23:52
  I'm just kind of plucking them out. I don't know. I don't... I didn't write down what section or page or at one point, the Diamond Sutra says, all experience is without experience. And therefore, all experience is Buddha experience or awakened experience.
• 24:16
  And see if you can dig into this query. How long does this moment last? Well, it's interesting. One way of looking at it, it has no duration whatsoever. This is too long.
• 24:38
  How long does this moment last? Blink your eyelid. How long does that last? In that moment of blinking your eyelid, everything has appeared and disappeared. But then from another angle, it's interesting.
• 24:58
  This moment, it just keeps going. Does this moment have any ending? Do you actually experience an ending to this moment? It's like everything is flowing into everything. When do you become aware of something?
• 25:43
  So you could tap your knee. Can just make a make a moment of experience. When do you become aware of that? You can't become aware of something before it happens. Can't become aware of something when it or after it happens.
• 26:09
  Are you aware when it happens? As soon as it happens, it's already disappeared. When do you become aware of something? All experience is without experience, and yet it also says in this sutra that bodhisattvas, that means basically Zen practitioners, do not try to extinguish experience. It's not a path of trying to get rid of life.
• 26:48
  You know, right now, sitting in the Zen Do, how long does this moment last? Might be like, that's not very interesting. But say that you were getting a root canal, and the doctor gave you lousy anesthetic, and you were in a lot of pain. That might be, very helpful to be able to see that all experience is without experience. But what does that...
• 27:10
  What... You have to experience the experience of experience being without experience because these are just words. Continuing, the Diamond Sutra has a lot to say about all dharmas are without self. And, dharmas is a word for, basically all ex... Experience.
• 27:36
  Dharma is an experience. Interestingly, the word for truth and the Buddha's teaching and experience are all one word. Dharmas. Anyway, everything. All dharmas are without self.
• 27:52
  That means you and I are without self. What does that mean? It's not saying, hey, you don't exist. Cool. Here's one of my favorite contemplations.
• 28:08
  So notice that your eyes... The eyes see and that you have nothing to do with that. Seeing is happening independent of anything you could call yourself. Notice that seeing is doing seeing. You, whatever that word points to, are not involved in that process at all.
• 28:48
  Notice that with hearing too. You do not do something called hearing. Same with feeling. The body feels. You have no choice in the matter.
• 29:14
  And thoughts just appear. You don't decide what you're going to think the moment before you think it. Even the thinking mind, which we normally take to be ourself, it just happens independent of anything we could call ourselves. So every manifest aspect of your being right now is doing its own thing. Then where are you in this?
• 29:44
  What is the I? That's very interesting. Body breathes, heart beats, the senses do their own thing. Thoughts think themselves? Where is the being or the entity that has your name in the midst of all of this natural spontaneity?
• 30:16
  What is the being that has your name? So if you are someone who has some, affinity for active prajna or if you if you glimpse something, then you take that glimpse deeper through stitching it, stitching the inquiry through your day. And you're stitching it into your, your your sitting practice. Any of the the little Prajana exercises we just went through, you could bring into your daily sitting. And over time, if you put energy into the wondering, it will bear fruit.
• 31:07
  So I guess my point today is that the point of Zen practice is wonder and gratitude, and the human mind seems to lose touch with these things without an intervention. That sucks. Let's do something about it. Okay.
• 31:33
  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 zendest.org. Your support supports us.