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Sipping From Many Flowers - Jogen Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha. So tonight, So people are taking in wisdom from many different lineages and traditions nowadays. And it's kinda crazy.
• 0:49
  When I was a teenager and I first started meditating, you had to go to Borders books, and there was like three books on Buddhist meditation and a whole bunch of new age weird stuff, and then, you know, you just you just you get what you could get. This is before Amazon. Didn't live in California, where all the cool bookstores were. And, now, there's just this explosion of wisdom lineage availability at our fingertips. Everybody's got a video course or this or that, and we have a, deluge of information on the contemplative path and opportunities to engage.
• 1:40
  And people I work with are taking in a lot of that as I probably would have when I was starting. I just there wasn't that much. And I'm exploring whether I have a warranted concern about the effect of that. I don't really know. In a sense, there's lots in common, especially among Buddhist traditions, and also there are real divergences in the understanding of what one is doing, the path and the practice, and even the goal.
• 2:22
  There was this saying in the sixties, seventies, eighties that all paths lead to the top of the mountain. That's actually just a weird idea because we don't know where all these paths lead. And if you listen to people talking, doesn't quite sound like they're exactly on the same mountain. That's a comforting idea for the part of us that's like, well, I'll just do my buffet style. So and I'm not picking on anyone in particular.
• 2:53
  I happen to have a conversation with someone who might be listening today and this came up, it made me think of it. I'm genuinely personally interested as a teacher, is this, something that creates confusion and obstacles? When we sip from this flower and then that flower, And what I my concern would be is that it makes conviction wobbly. You hit a difficult place in a path and you go, ah, but so and so said something else. Not to mention the the option of something else is always there.
• 3:29
  That's another different problem I have spoken to. Now, may be this concern in me could totally be coming just from a limited view, just some sort of fear in me, and that it all just gets sorted out in the end, maybe. I don't think we know. I don't think we know how it gets sorted out in the end. Maybe somebody does.
• 3:57
  Anyway, I wanna start with, what I want to do today is first of all, talk about things that I think do unify at least Buddhist paths of practice. Commonalities where if you're polyamorous in your lineage involvement, then it's probably not gonna be a problem because there's so much overlap that you'll it'll all work out with a little bit of relationship counseling. I don't know. And then I wanna talk not about what other paths say that is not what Zen says, but just what what what the Zen view of certain things is, and then let you sort out, are there differences in other things you're hearing? And some of these differences, you know, again, maybe I'm just splitting hairs and maybe I'm not.
• 4:56
  Something that unifies the vision and therefore the practice and therefore to some degree the goal of many Buddhist paths is a kind of rhythm of deconstruction and reconstruction. Deconstruction, we take this experience for granted. We assume we know what it is, and because of that assumption, we don't pay really close attention to it. And what deconstruction is, is we're training training our attention to have more stability, more direct contact with actual experience, and we find that there's a lot of noise in our minds and in our beliefs that's very different from the signal. We find that we we undo actually incorrect perception of our own experience.
• 6:18
  One of the things I noticed early on in practice was that there's an image of the body. There's an internal image of the body that we relate to very often. We are carrying a picture of ourselves around that is no more than a picture. It's no more than a picture. But because attention doesn't get close enough to disrupt or take apart that idea, we live in fidelity to that false notion, and that's just the body.
• 7:04
  Everything is, like this in a way. So deconstruction is more signal, more direct contact with our life, with our body, our senses, our actual thoughts, less noise. And then things begin to open up into components. They lose their componentness. They become fluid.
• 7:39
  They open up even further if we take the path far enough, and all experiences open up into a kind of empty fullness. We take this experience apart in order to discover something very fundamental, something luminous, something pure. The deconstruction often in parallel also happens with the self. So when attention is stable enough, we can see that the subjectivity, the sense of, I'm this person that is having experience, even that comes apart, and we appreciate it from a whole different place. We see that there's nothing I can point to that has ever arisen that I can say that's the part of me that's the self or the real part.
• 8:39
  It's a it's a ongoing display of perceptions, thoughts, impulses, memories, feeling tones, that something from a scientific point of view, the brain assembles into a coherent self. But from a Dharma point of view, ignorance does that. It's it's just the absence of looking close enough. It's the absence of really looking directly where we take the self to be more real than it is. And why would you bother with that?
• 9:10
  Because it's a big relief to deconstruct it and get to the ground. So in deconstruction, we're clearing out the noise of misperceptions and imputations, all of the assumptions. I'm really interested in predictive processing. Anybody looking into predictive processing? It's kind of a new area of consciousness studies, and I'm trying to digest it enough so I could actually teach about it, but it's trying to explicate the way that our brain is continually making a model of the world and relating to its model.
• 9:54
  And without training, we relate nearly entirely model from the past rather than what's actually happening in front of us. And they have this term that I really like. They say that, the brain is presenting counterfactuals continually. Counterfactuals means it's presenting thoughts, notions and perceptions of things that aren't actually real. They're not actually here.
• 10:27
  This is this is an illusion generator. So, I had an interesting taste of this about three weeks ago. Swearing my mother's life, a spider as big as my hand started walking through my apartment. Have you seen a spider that big in Portland? My God, my cats barked when they saw it.
• 10:53
  They couldn't believe. And then I think they ate it, which was good because I was really worried. Where did that thing go? And then for the week after that, I I'm really not exaggerating. It was this like tarantula size.
• 11:06
  Okay. Maybe someone's pet spider in the neighborhood got out and found its way into my apartment. I don't know. I noticed for a week after anytime I saw a dust ball on the floor, the first thing, first counterfactual that flashed was the spider. Now, there's actual reason to be scared of a spider as big as your hand, I think.
• 11:29
  I mean, that thing could suffocate you like alien, like, or, crawl down your mouth when you're sleeping. It could be really bad. Anyways, I should stop going on and on about deconstruction because that's what we talk about most of the time. Right? And you could say there's an ineffable rightness when we align more and more with so called pure signals.
• 12:00
  When there's less noise generated by the brain because you've been doing meditation training and more what I was calling earlier, the virginity of the moment, the pure moment. There's something that is soothing about that. Even when it comes to unpleasant things, when there's less distortion around the unpleasant. I sat on a couch for about ten hours a few days ago with really bad food sickness and I was just kinda terrible. I couldn't barf.
• 12:32
  It took me a long time to barf. And I was, yeah. Thank thank you for your schadenfreude there. It felt so good to barf, but in the meantime, the the nauseous feeling, it really helped me this training to just be able to stay with the pure signal of it. I could drop into this is just experience.
• 13:00
  Okay. So then the reconstruction, what I'm saying is the other element that unifies Buddhist paths, many of them, is that we don't, again, deconstruct ourselves just for the point of deconstruction. We don't deconstruct ourselves just because we can. We do it because it renews us. And part of the way it renews us is, for example, when we deconstruct habit patterns and we see through them and we find the courage to live differently, we have to replace that habit pattern with something else.
• 13:43
  Right? So the reconstruction part of practice is we remake ourselves beneficially. We we we make space in the system, we melt some fixity, and then we infuse a new program, a new way of being. One of the things emphasized in our lineage is the is the ethical precepts. You have to take apart this habit body, take apart this habit mind, see what's not working so well with it, and then now there's room to put something else in.
• 14:23
  Or we could say reconstruction happens through the four, immeasurable hearts, compassion, equanimity, sympathetic joy, love. So many paths share this, and if you are listening to a teaching that's talking about, deconstructing yourself, great podcast by the way. Anybody listen to deconstructing yourself? Yeah. Good one.
• 14:54
  And then we understand that that's not the whole thing with practice. We also are looking to have a change of heart for the better, then it will be I won't I wouldn't imagine there'd be any any friction with, Zen practice. But there are divergences. How does a tradition view the body? How does it view the world?
• 15:21
  How does it view meditation beyond the, just the deconstruction phase of things? Generally, the view of the body, the world, even what a liberated person is, what the end of suffering is, that shapes the practices that one does and how one does them. It's like a whole system. Right? In a way, you know, somebody has a kind of spiritual experience, and if it touches their heart deeply enough and they're an appropriate person, they often start teaching and wanting to share from that.
• 16:05
  And they have a view now of reality, and they're thinking, how can I help you meet me here? It's one way to understand what, teachers are doing and what what the Buddha was doing. Buddha had a particular awakening, and his koan was in, how can I have people meet me here because I think this is a good place to be? So I can try and say what the zen view and path is, though there will be wise people who disagree with me. I'll still try, and then let you discern how other traditions might be different, and then reflect, could that create some kind of conflict in my in my practice as I continue?
• 16:54
  First of all, when I was writing this, it came to mind that a Zen ancestor from China said, our school has no teaching to give people whatsoever. He opened up a long discourse with that. He said, essentially, our school has no teaching whatsoever to give people. That's really being regarded with deep respect. That's you and I being thoroughly seen somebody saying that.
• 17:27
  Teaching has yeah. We have no teaching to offer people. In a way, it's it's a little deeper than what I'm gonna say, but in a way, it's like saying nobody's broken from the start. Everybody lives, life, which is whole and complete, so why should we, introduce noise into the equation? Sometimes they would say, old Shakyamuni Buddha sure kicked up a whole bunch of dust, or old Shakyamuni Buddha pulled the walls, wall over the eyes of thousands, you know, trying to get to this point.
• 18:05
  Okay. But another angle is, there is no official zen view on anything because this moment has no view. People sometimes say, well, what's the zen view on sex? Won't you do a talk on that, Jogen? And they say, hell no.
• 18:24
  You mean to get canceled? What's the zen view on the democratic party? What's the what's the zen view on veganism? This moment has no view. A zen practitioner could take up a view about those things and of course they have them.
• 18:43
  There's no official view. This moment has no even this moment. So why make views? But who can actually handle that? Who can actually live their life with no conceptual scaffolding?
• 19:03
  What is it in us that doesn't want some kind of orienting principle that doesn't need that? So how does Zen view the body? First of all, just like almost all Buddhist traditions, the body is viewed as a totally impermanent phenomena. Totally impermanent, subject to decay, gonna fall apart no matter what we do. K.
• 19:37
  We are we are reminded of that. That's the, I think, beautifully sober aspect of this tradition. Just like this reminder is is you can't hold it together quite how you want to. Maybe someone will cure that. I doubt it.
• 19:53
  So it's nothing but change, and this is to be realized. This is to be appreciated in direct experience. Also, we view the body as the whole universe. The whole universe is the true human body, the ancestor Changsha said. An experienced world is a sensed world.
• 20:21
  Sensory experience roots in bodies and a clear separation between the sensed and the sensor is very hard to find. Where does your visual field start? Where does your hearing begin? How is it you actually delineate right now inside and outside? What makes that distinction?
• 20:54
  This body is the whole universe. That that's a kind of koan that has a lot of a lot of, richness to it. You could sit with that, especially if you have a body a method of practice that centers the body, you could use that teaching to bring in some real curiosity, to maybe even, nudge your awareness to get more subtle. The whole universe is the true body. And let that let that be in contrast to how we actually are currently experiencing it.
• 21:38
  This body is also sometimes called the Nirmanakaya. People have done the orioke chants, the meal chants at the monastery, or in other places and talk about the Dharma kaya, the Sambhoga kaya, the Nirmana kaya. Kaya means body, and Nirmana means something like, responsiveness. One of the meanings of Nirmana kaya is that this body is the only way for compassion to happen in the world. This body arose from compassion.
• 22:15
  It is compassion. It's the expression of compassion. And so we really care for the body. Some traditions around, eating kind of, look at eating as something that is, if not a liability, something that should be given very little, appreciation to. We shouldn't care at all about what we eat except for the fact that we don't starve and we have enough energy to do spiritual practice.
• 22:44
  But in the Zen tradition, there's a whole, you know, tome about how the cook should put their heart and soul into making flavor for meals because they're serving the body of compassion. The body of compassion, how do you take care of that? It's part of how we live this this few. We we we live into that question. So the body's definitely not a problem in itself.
• 23:22
  The body's not separate from liberation as if our mind's like a little escape pod that's gonna lift off and like I don't know what people think, but I think sometimes they think like that. So how is this practiced? How is this view of the body practiced? It's really not to settle into a notion about embodiment, Not to settle into an idea about embodiment, whether writ large or one's own, but feel into its textures with curiosity. I think it's an invitation to rediscover the body.
• 24:09
  That's what it's like for me to do meditation with the body. That's my method I'm working with, is I rediscover, and it's never what I think it is. It's never what I think it is. If Zen had a view about the world, how does it view the world? Some traditions, it sounds to me like the message they're giving is that if you really did this right, you would just live in retreat.
• 24:50
  If you really did this right, you would somehow find a cave and get out of here because this place is sort of lousy, And you can't do much spiritual growth here. It's too busy, too many interesting things to watch, whatever. In our school of practice, the world is not an undharmic obstacle. It's a place to prove the dharma. I was always perplexed by the idea that somebody could be profoundly compassionate in a cave.
• 25:24
  I just thought, what a weird idea. How can you be how can compassion be real in the abstract? Isn't that something that we live with other beings? Rather than viewing the world as a place that in ensnares us or our life as a thing that is ensnares us, we view our mind as ensnaring our life. And we get curious about how does my mind ensnare my life, which is my world.
• 26:00
  When I start feeling like my situation is stuck, my situation is inadequate, my situation is lacking. On one hand, sometimes we do need to just make concrete change. Yes, of course. But a lot of times, my mind is ensnaring my world. It's not the world that I need to get away from.
• 26:26
  In a way, I need to free the world from everything I put on it, my illusions. So, for Zen practice, we're grateful to the world. We're grateful to have a place to break our hearts open. I remember a monk from a different tradition came to Great Vail Monastery when I was still a monastic and he saw us all busy and he said, what are you doing? You're a monastic.
• 26:57
  You're supposed to just sit around and meditate. I swear he said that. You're so busy because in the view he was practicing with, to be engaged with life is somehow an counter to the real work. But for us, you know, how we would clean a toilet or answer a phone or deal with the irritating person or listen to the birds as he walked from one point to another, that was all our practice. Everything was mirroring our mind Everything was an opportunity.
• 27:30
  What was there to get away from? When the noise of the world is an obstacle is removed, then different dimensions of world can actually open up just like with the body. If we have narrow mind, we have narrow world. There's some people who only see their whole world as red with a person they despise. Right?
• 28:09
  Some people, they claim some political affiliation and they reject another, but they are so occupied with the people they reject, it's almost as if they're in love with them. Some people love Trump who say they hate him. They love Trump. They wake up with Trump on their mind. They can't wait to read about Trump.
• 28:28
  What did he do today? Does he look sick? Has he lost weight? They look at Trump more than they look at their loved ones really. God, I hate Trump, but they're just always What what is that fucker doing?
• 28:48
  He's like, look up Trump. Oh, sorry. Don't cuss during a Dharma talk. That's rude. I'll edit that out.
• 28:57
  If we have narrow mind, we have narrow world. If we have a a big whole mind, we have a big whole world. We see there's more to life than Trump. There's more going on in the world than disaster. If we have a mind attuned to the divine, we we can experience the divine.
• 29:23
  We have all of these worlds and more. So what the world is is how we are. That's if Zen says something about the world, that's what it says. It's how we are. That's how the world is in any given moment.
• 29:42
  So how would you practice that? This is this is interesting, think, a way. Well, two things. One is notice how other people in similar situations have very different experience than you. Really notice state of mind of beings around you.
• 30:08
  How is it we have such a divergent outlook? How is it that people in very different or very similar circumstances, some people are free and easy and some people are really suffering? What's going on there? Another way that is really pointing back at ourselves is study the interactivity between your attitude and stance that you carry forward and what life responds with. You study that.
• 30:44
  And how do you study it? I think it has to be in hindsight because generally, we don't know, we can't see our attitude. I used to say, all day long, we breathe in our own fragrance. It's hard to know how we smell because we're always smelling it. It's hard to know how our mind is shaping experience because we're in it.
• 31:09
  But in hindsight, you can reflect, especially if you've had a change of heart, if you've gotten outside of a particular way of seeing, and see how things are different. And see how people respond to you differently. See how your day unfolds differently. Study the interactivity between your attitude and what comes towards you. And then, lastly, how does the Zen School view meditation?
• 31:53
  We do not view ourselves as having impurities. We don't have original sin. We don't, we hold the sense that we're deluded lightly. We don't view that there's something to get rid of. There's only something to purify and get rid of unless we think there is.
• 32:18
  And then what we need to purify and get rid of is the sense that we have something we have to purify and get rid of. I didn't mean to just like say some sophisticated thing, like this is important. The very fact that what arises shouldn't be arising or the very fact that these thoughts, perceptions are so solid they're a problem, that's our challenge. Not the fact that we think x, y, or z, or we feel a, b, or c. That's a real kind of confidence you can sit with.
• 33:00
  That's a steadiness when nothing in the mind has to be removed. It just has to be seen for what it is. Related, we take stages and attainments lightly. Right? We take the idea that I'm gonna go to point A, then point B, then point C, and then D will happen.
• 33:28
  We hold that lightly because there's a trust and an innate intelligence to the practice. The practice, which is awareness embodied in different forms, has its own intelligence. It has, in a way, a wild intelligence, and things will come forward as they need to come forward, and things will disappear as they need to disappear. And how do we practice that? We practice that, first of all, and you could try this on in your meditation this week, for example.
• 34:24
  Meditate from the fact of awakeness rather than a battle with a mind. So when you sit down, don't orient to, okay, I've got this problem called a busy mind, and now I'm here to do something about it. Instead, recognize that there is this clear awake basis to your mind, recognize that again and meditate as that. And if you concentrate, concentrate as that. And if you just practice, formless awareness, do it as that.
• 35:07
  If you do loving kindness, do it as that. In other words, base your practice not on, I'm deluded and confused and I have this kind of mess in me that I'm gonna calm down. Base it on a clarity that you can recognize. You can recognize it right now. There is something in you which is basically clear and awake that is not caught up in whatever's arising.
• 35:43
  And from that, you can be present with a steadfast fearlessness. We're not to be afraid. We're not to be worried about what is arising. We're just holding our ground as that awakeness.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: 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.