Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Rethinking Impatience - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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Rethinking Impatience - 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.
• 0:22
  Jogen: Hi, everybody. It's good to be here with you. I'm continuing a series of talks that I started about, I think it was about a month ago now, on the Paramitas, which I've never done, used them as a framework for giving talks. The Paramitas Paramita is a Sanskrit word that translates something like perfections. You could think of the Paramitas.
• 0:59
  Depending on the list, there's six of them or 10 of them. I'm going to do the six list. They are a way of describing what a Buddhist spiritual life is. On one hand, their equivalent term in the West would be virtues, but they're virtues that are implemented. You have to do something with your body, mind, and speech to make them come alive.
• 1:26
  It's kind of like a recipe of a Buddhist life. The first one I did was on generosity. And for whatever reason, I thought I would do patience next. The Sanskrit word is kshanti. And it not only means patience, it means something like enduring.
• 1:50
  To endure, it also means something like forbearance. Now, what you usually find in traditional commentaries by the sages is that primarily Kshanti patience, this Paramita, is an antidote to anger. And it's really emphasized to train in this as a way of not giving expression to anger because the traditional Buddhist understanding of anger is different than what we have in the West. The traditional understanding is that it's almost never helpful to you or another to give expression to anger. Okay.
• 2:37
  So when you're practicing patience, you are suppressing. You're literally just holding back your unskillful reactive anger. There's a sage named Shantideva and he would say things like to give vent to anger is like licking honey off a razor blade. I love that image. It's like, Ow.
• 2:58
  It's so bloody and sweet at the same time. The idea is we like to give expression to this thing, anger. We feel empowered in the moment, but it actually harms us. So, that's not what I want to focus on with this. I want to focus on this Paramita and start with contemplating what is impatience.
• 3:23
  Because I think we can learn a lot and deepen our practice by investigating the experience of impatience. So everybody has impatience, right? Just a part of having a body. I have impatience. Some places we're, more patient and some places we're less.
• 3:45
  Some places we're cool as a cucumber and some places we fly off the handle. Right? Human beings are like this. And so I get curious about, well, what is experience of impatience? Because sometimes it rises up in me and I don't really if I don't pause and investigate, I don't know why I'm experiencing it or what where it's coming from.
• 4:08
  So first of all, in our manifest dimension of body mind, we are experience. Everything that happens, everything that we are is an experience. In our manifest dimension, we are we are experience. And we all have the experience. I'm making a generalization like a stand behind, is that we all want to manicure our experience.
• 4:37
  We all have an idea that, there are experiences that I want to have and experiences I don't. Okay? So, we have this problem right away. We are experience experience and there is no real boundary between us and the world. There is very scant evidence for boundaries between self and other.
• 5:03
  And maybe because of that, we want to manicure our experience. We try to control life. We try to keep out what we don't want and get what we do. And even if we are neurotic and selfish about this, there is a limit to how much we control what we experience. Even if you build a castle, you'll get a boil.
• 5:29
  Even if you get rid of that boil, you'll get a foot ache. Even if you get rid of that foot ache, you'll get a headache. Even if you marry a princess, you'll see her warts. Even if you get a prince, he'll gamble all his money away. No matter what we do, something will happen.
• 5:43
  There is no way we can fully control experience. But the instinct in us lives. Right? And so in thinking about impatience, what I noticed is it was like this. I want to do x, but y is what's happening.
• 6:05
  So I have this feeling in me called impatience. Or I want to be feeling y, but x is happening. I want z to be what is happening, but y is what I'm experiencing. In other words, our desires collide with reality. And we don't we something in us says, no.
• 6:34
  I don't want that. And we have the experience of frustration. And if our desires collide with reality and we can do something about it, you better damn well believe you will do something about it. If something gets in your way that obstructs your desire, you will move around it anytime you can. That's just normal.
• 6:56
  Even bugs do that. Right? But one of the things that the Buddha had real insight into is, first of all, that our desires collide with reality is actually a very big, if not the central problem for human beings. Because when our desires collide with reality, we're very unhappy. We experience these states we really don't like.
• 7:28
  We usually blame the object. The other thing, the Buddha discovered is that, I can let go or put aside my desire that collides with reality. Right? And that is, in a way, a matter of training. So I really like this word stymieing.
• 7:51
  I don't know why, but the stymieing of desire is part of what we're dealing with with impatience. Anger is a stymieing, a frustration of my desire. I want someone to not be doing what they're doing, or a government to not be doing what they're doing, or I want my body to not be doing what it's doing, or the weather to not being what it's doing. My desire is frustrated. When I'm impatient, the feeling movement that we call impatience is a stymieing of my desire.
• 8:28
  I want this person to be done talking. I want this line to be shorter. I want to get on to the thing I actually desire. In a way, it's it's like the mind is operating on this particular binary where in each moment, it's like, oh, I desire this? Okay.
• 8:45
  I don't desire this. What am I gonna do to get rid of that? Desire, frustration of desire. And a lot of us get what we want a lot of the time. And so we're like, Okay, I'll accept the equation.
• 9:06
  But always trying to get our desires met is pretty exhausting, actually. It takes a lot of energy. So we want to think about what impatience is not as some bad thing that's happening, like we have a defect, but like, what is going on here? And so, not only is impatience a wisdom message that shows me I have a desire, I can decode it, I have some desire, it also reminds me of death. If I had ample time in this life to experience everything I want to experience, If I had all the time in the world to accomplish my goals, to learn what I want to learn, to be with who I want to be with, I wouldn't probably not be impatient.
• 10:08
  And I think about if you had a ten thousand year lifespan, would you be impatient on the freeway when the cars are piled up? Probably you'd be pretty chill. So impatience shows that we have some desire that's being stymied, but it's also saying, Hey, you're going to die. That's very important to remember. You are going to die and therefore the time to do what you value is very limited.
• 10:47
  It also reminds us of that conundrum, even though I'm aware I'm going to die, I know I want to do what I want to do, unless I'm neurotically selfish, I can't arrange a life where I always get to do what I want to do. To be, at least to be a spiritual practitioner, is to experience at times the stymieing of our desire. So when you experience impatience, to decode it, it tells you something about what you think should be happening and what you want to be happening. So Zen practice is trying to turn a lot of these things just on their head. What if my orientation to life, what if the stance I practice is to want to do what I'm doing?
• 11:51
  What if whatever comes down the pipe, it's a long email I don't want to write, it's hanging out with my partner while she goes through her menses spell. It's being in traffic. It's breaking a limb. What if I said, I want to experience this? What if I choose to actually affirm what's actually happening?
• 12:20
  Then what happens? That's the first, one of the first experiments you're invited into in this tradition. What if you actually say yes to what you experience? Right? And that sort of, hold back the knee jerk reaction that this is the wrong experience to have.
• 12:43
  Therefore, I'm going to quickly do whatever I can to change it. What if our orientation is to want to do what I'm doing? I think sometimes we hear that and we think, but I What are you talking about? I just feel how I feel about things as if it's just totally faded. Suppose you could actually shift your attitude.
• 13:14
  Suppose that's possible. Right? That's something to check out for yourself. Is that possible? Right?
• 13:26
  Happens further? What happens to impatience if my stance is that every experience is an experience I can be awake within? So this means that, as they say in the Tibetan tradition, we start to say, I want to make my life into the path. All of the things that come towards me that I reflexively try to avoid and see no value in because they don't meet my desire of what should be happening if I say, Oh, this is an opportunity to be awake. This is an opportunity to open into experience, to pervade that thing with awareness.
• 14:21
  It's actually, in some sense, when we're encountering difficulty, it's easier to awaken to the flowingness of experience, the transparency of things. In a way, when things aren't going our way, we actually have the fuel to let go and have a deeper relationship to life. When things are just pleasurable or going our way, we have little impetus. So impatience, to use it, to listen to it, to not just recoil at the experience, but to stop and see what it is, to stop and feel what it is. Otherwise, it just happens to us.
• 15:26
  Now, we all have some experience of practicing patients. Everybody has some experience of that. Even though our culture is basically training us for instant fulfillment, we no longer have to wait for hardly anything. Everyone in this room, I have to imagine, has some experience of practicing patience. It's not foreign to you as a way of being.
• 15:58
  I know some of you have carried babies to term, raised children, companions, sick parents. You've gone through grad school, you've trained athletically. Some people spend a thousand hours in retreat or a thousand days. And so we know what it's like to be patient, especially when there's pressures or forces or rewards that hold us to that. We can make it through grad school because we have some sense that on the other side, I'm gonna get something good, which is a job that's desirable.
• 16:36
  Or I'm gonna feel good about raising my children. I'm gonna have these people I like to hang out with. I'm going to be better at my sport. But I think one of the challenges when it's not clear what we're going to get from it is what is the reward of patience? Why should I implement that?
• 17:05
  Do we value such things as spaciousness? Is that enough of a motivation in itself? To want to not be in that kind of reactive stance? Do we value increased capacity for relationship? Why do the hard thing?
• 17:28
  Why do the thing that doesn't feel good? That's something to come to understand for oneself. The tradition says, don't let anger or frustration come come out. Don't let it be expressed because there are repercussions that you will experience. In other words, they say that non patience means your character is going to get shaped by impatience.
• 17:56
  Your character over time is going to get shaped by anger. It's going to get shaped by low tolerance for, being with things that are difficult. And that'll have a consequence that you you won't want, but you might not know how you got there. It's it's cumulative. But the next moment, you are feeling impatient, and if you happen to remember the teaching, when you bother to apply it, what is your motivation?
• 18:29
  Could be as simple as I don't actually like the experience of impatience. I don't like how this feels. So I want to let this go. Now, dharma is practical. That's one of the things I like about it.
• 18:46
  Dharma is the teachings of the Buddha. And what I mean by practical is rarely is something taught and you're not given a way to implement it. There's some there is a way to increase our patients. And it has different levels. So I want to speak to the different levels of implementing this.
• 19:10
  The first, which is something people who have been around here have heard a lot, is that training in patients is first appreciating your capacity to let experience have its natural lifespan. This thing, this my feeling I have in myself of my desire being stymied, that feeling comes and it goes. It comes and it goes. Especially if we just relax into it. It comes and it goes.
• 19:48
  It's a message that, no, this isn't the thing you most desire. This isn't the thing you want most to be happening. There's some collision with reality between what I want and what what's in front of me, this person, this experience, this feeling, this task. It has that message for us. But this basic thing is the experience of impatience.
• 20:11
  It comes and it goes. Comes and it goes. It has to. It's the nature of things. It's actually, it's so obvious that it's not obvious.
• 20:25
  Think about some desires, we do not feel that we can hold them because we lend them so much reality. They feel like dragons that are gonna devour us if we don't express the desire to eat something, to sex something, to buy something. It's gonna kill me. I have to express this. Part of that is we're making it into a dragon.
• 20:54
  We forget it appears and it passes. Right? So this is actually something you have to, we have to verify this for ourselves. Be with the thing that doesn't feel good, that wants out. Let it be there, let it move through.
• 21:18
  Let it move through. Right? That's not the in a way, that's not the deepest thing. It's not the most exciting thing, but it's a it's a foundation for working with desire, which is such a prominent feature of what we are on a deeper level. That's the first training.
• 21:41
  Desire comes in, I don't have to do anything but let it come in and it can it can go out. Some people would have saved themselves tremendous amount of trouble in life if this capacity was developed. Desire comes, I don't have to express it or act on it. It's just a phenomena. With that as the foundation, we begin to discover spaciousness.
• 22:09
  Because we start letting, let's say, impatience come in and go, and without even really trying, we start to become intimate with that which lets that be possible. How is it that we can let things come into our being and just let them be? What is that capacity? What is the capacity to not scratch the itch? We're not simply talking about kind of self denial here.
• 22:48
  Actually, from my experience, what I'm talking about right now has nothing to do with self denial. I think for some people this can map onto, Oh yeah, you Buddhists, you really are into denying your desires. I don't really deny any of my desires, except the ones that are gonna cause harm to somebody. This has nothing to do with denying desire. Your being is spacious.
• 23:14
  You have so much capacity to let feeling, impulse, textured, embodied, just be there. To just be there. What does the temporariness of your being move through? What allows that to be possible? Then, desire being stymied, oh, that's okay.
• 23:52
  It's actually okay that right now what's happening is not what I want to happen. Remember my own experience, probably some of you have this, I've had a few years where what was happening was not what I wanted to happen. I had chronic illness when I was younger. I had about ten years of something I didn't want to be happening, happening pretty much on a daily basis. Right?
• 24:16
  The thing that was most liberating was this capacity. And interestingly, when the combat with ourselves, with what we're experiencing diminishes, the body can do a lot more healing on its own. So, training to letting things arise and pass, don't don't just dismiss that as, Oh, yes, I understand that, of course. You have to be doing the wakefulness in the midst of the transient. As an idea, impermanence is just like, yes, so what?
• 24:59
  But you apply it, something starts to happen. There's an alchemy in your being. From that, you start to discover the ground of being. Ground of being. Now, just a little bit, deeper or another, aspect of this.
• 25:18
  A state of patience is not the goal of this vital notion of patience. I think the perfection if you perfect patience, nobody should look at you and go, they're super patient. Or you shouldn't be like, I'm so patient. Or you wouldn't be like, right now I'm practicing patience. Because when you're practicing patience, you are still waiting for something that exists to go away.
• 25:42
  If someone is being patient with you, that means they don't like some stuff you're doing. That's not like the state we're aiming for. That's one aspect of it. Maybe we start there, especially with a difficult thing. We start with that allowing something to be there, allowing the feelings to come and go.
• 26:04
  In a way, the goal of this vital notion of patience is to be able to put our desire aside temporarily when that collides with reality. Just be temporarily to put it aside, to do what needs to be done, to respond to what needs to be responded to. There is no way, I don't think there's anybody, except maybe somebody who lives in a cave and loves living in a cave, who doesn't ever have their desire collide with reality. That's you know, body has longings. There are bodily longings that are not under the control of your mind.
• 26:52
  Right? But your awareness is a deeper point of embrace in your body. So it's not that to practice this perfection is that you never have your desire collide with reality. It's going to, it will. But to be able to have our desire collide with reality and put it aside temporarily and pick it back up when that desire is harmonious with what is.
• 27:27
  That's what you get from training in this. You get the flexibility of wanting what you want, but don't have to get it right now. Or wanting what you want, but actually you can hold that in a lighter way. I know I don't often take the angle of desire around the teachings for a few reasons. One is this is a very young group, and young people are more full of desire, and I don't wanna alienate anybody.
• 28:07
  And two, I think it is, easy to misunderstand the message of working with desire. Right? And kind of map that on to a stereotypical notion of of spirituality or Buddhism. The understanding and appreciation of desire in this tradition is actually really deep. Right?
• 28:29
  It's not, this is a bad thing that you should get rid of. For example, we never have an increase or decrease in being. Since you apparently popped into this existence to the last moment you'll experience, there has never been an increase or decrease in being. When you were five years old, was being. When you were 15 years old, that was being.
• 28:55
  When you're six years old, that would be being, if you have that fortune. When you're happy, that's being. When you're sad, that's being. When you're getting what you want, that's being. When you're not getting what you want, that's being.
• 29:06
  It's all being. Being bedside at a hospital with somebody and being with a sexy person at a great concert are equally being. We do not have an increase in being ever. Everyone is given the gift of being and it doesn't fluctuate. Yet, we do have an increase and decrease in the intensity of being.
• 29:40
  The intensity of our existence, we feel that kind of charge up, especially when we're doing things that we love, we want to do. We feel a decrease in it when we're not doing what we want to do. Being has no increase or decrease. Being doesn't even have being. That's just our kind of grasping onto self existence.
• 30:03
  It's just equal all the way through. So when we think about desire and the stymieing of desire with impatience, think about it like this, All I ever desire is an increase or a decrease in the intensity of being. Right? I either want relaxation or I want stimulation of mind, heart or body. What if all we want boiled down to that?
• 30:33
  Some people, the stimulation of being is watching football game with a basket of chicken fingers. That is intensity of being for them. Some people, it's sitting in meditation. Some people, it's TikTok. Some people it's having a conversation at the bedside with their grandma in the hospital.
• 30:56
  Some people want the decrease in the intensity of being. Can't wait to go home and smoke a joint or can't wait to have a drink, or tune out and do this or that? What if all our desires boil down to an increase or decrease in the intensity of being? For you, collecting stamps increases the intensity of being. Wonderful.
• 31:23
  Great. Okay. So bear with me. So our dispositions, whatever they may be, have us looking to this or that for increasing or decreasing our intensity of being. We hang our hat on something.
• 31:41
  Right? We want intensity of being for whatever reason, we've ended up rock climbing, we've ended up playing basketball, we've ended up polyamorous. And so, we want to not be at grandma's house because we have an intensity of being we don't want. Maybe that's an intensity of heart being that we don't want. Maybe we have a relaxation of mind, a decrease in the intensity of being that we take as boredom.
• 32:11
  So we're impatient. We want it over because playing video games at home is the increase in being's intensity we've hung our hat on. What if all we want is increase and decrease in our intensity of being? What if grandma's house and Zelda couch zone are equally being? And it's just about the intensity.
• 32:41
  So, with the foundation of letting desire and other impulses arise and disappear, discovering spaciousness, then the next level of practice that's available to us is we begin feeding on the inherent energy of each moment's being. If you take your Zen practice far enough, if you over time or in any moment you're doing the practice, you will come to a point where you are just feeding on the energy of being. The very fact of existence is sufficient. You are nourished. We tune ourselves to be an intensity of being, and so we're less dependent on externals to excite or relax that intensity of being.
• 33:39
  It's one of the things I think is a really valuable thing about doing like a meditation retreat, for example. You sit in a room with not a goddamn thing going on for a long time. And if you don't react to that, but you really drop into that, you discover that your own being is replete with a fulfilling energy. And you come out with this strange paradox. Oh, I really like all kinds of stuff.
• 34:13
  I love Zelda couch vibes. Not me personally, but some of you do. But actually, I could just actually sit on the couch without Zelda and I've got the intensity of being because the root of that is not the object. I could be with the thing that normally stymies my desire because my hat is not hung on my intensity of being, being some object in the future right here in this experience. Right here in this experience.
• 34:46
  It's not a matter of getting rid of desire. This body, even if it's 80 years old, 90 years old, is coursing with life energy. It's vibrant with existence. So, we begin feeding on the inherent energy of being and that actually intensifies. That actually intensifies.
• 35:12
  And I, you know, I have some practitioner friends who actually, they're very serious practitioners, long time, hundreds of hours of meditation. They do actually have this question of why should I do anything else besides meditate? That's maybe not a problem you want or a conundrum but it's an interesting problem because that is a problem of freedom. I am free to be totally content with the existence that I was, however you think of it, God given, karma given. This body is is is animated by this basic divine truth of awareness.
• 35:51
  Everything else is actually just an adornment. It's like icing on the cake. Imagine that. Imagine not needing something for the intensity of being except for, you know, basic safety, shelter, etcetera. That really affects, although not completely affects in my observation, our experience of impatience.
• 36:21
  I remember one time, I was having this insight and kind of getting arrogant about it. I told my teacher when I was a monk that, Oh, cleaning the kitchen is just as good as anything else that anything could possibly do. It's all equally being. And his response was, It gave me a whole bunch of really boring tasks for a year. And he's like, well, let's see if that's true.
• 36:49
  He's a good guy. So the last thing I want to say about patience, forbearance, is that we can appreciate this as far as having patience with the unfolding of the path. We get in our own way when we make demands on this practice. There's a kind of what seems like a contradiction, and that to really, know what's available here, and you could point at yourself, to know what's really available here, you have to do this with some passion. You're not going to know the meaning of these teachings for yourself with a very casual approach.
• 37:44
  It takes some passion. It takes some dedication. That's different for everybody. And that passion is not, I get to get what I want because I put in the time. It takes a zest and engagement over time and letting go of expectation for I mean, the hardcore teachers would say, Give up all hope of fruition.
• 38:12
  This is a classic Tibetan mind training thing that one takes on. It's one of the first things. Give up hope of fruition. Because we bring our impatience to the practice. And people did this 2,000 ago before Jeff Bezos would just drop an item off on your doorstep an hour later after you order it.
• 38:39
  It's the weirdest reality. I had that experience. My girlfriend ordered something. It was on our doorstep like an hour later. I find that disturbing.
• 38:52
  Don't expect rapid results. Practice patience. Or in fact, don't practice patience, just don't expect rapid results. Don't have expectations of result based on your old desires. Don't expect it to be easy.
• 39:09
  Right? So, Kesanti in regards with our life on the path is a little bit like saying, Just commit to your awakening. Just commit to really knowing the depth of yourself, whether it's through this tradition or any tradition. It doesn't have to be Zen, this is just one way. Commit to the depth of knowing yourself, and if you really commit, all the rest is details.
• 39:39
  It's just the details. The commitment that I'm going to do this, then why be impatient? It's going to unfold. It's going to be interesting. There is going to be discoveries.
• 39:52
  You're going to All of us are going to taste things we've never tasted before. We're going to open capacities we didn't think we had. And so, do want results. We do want it to work, but don't let those expectations cloud over what you are in a moment of practice. And I understand that this is easy to say and not the easiest thing to always implement.
• 40:30
  So, Kushanti, patience, just a quick review. Traditionally, it's to let life's discomforts and indignities wash through you so that you don't do anger that you regret. Deeper impatience can be decoded for what we really care about, reminds us of death, and to actually look into the experience, to use it, Right? To whatever we don't use on the path generally abuses us. So and I get impatient all the time.
• 41:06
  You could just ask my girlfriend. So still practicing.
• 41:17
  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.