Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Nuts and Bolts of Meditation- Jogen, Sensei

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Nuts and Bolts of Meditation- 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.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for being here tonight. And those of you who are joining us at Heart of Wisdom for the first time or the second time, thank you so much for taking a chance on us, checking the place out as one should do. It dawned on me that I don't frequently just do talks about meditation. And it'd be good to do a talk about meditation every once in a while. I give, I guess I feel that I give instruction during the sitting and some of that you may retain and may land and some may not, but the people who listen to the podcast out in the world don't hear that.
• 1:04
  So I'm gonna talk about meditation today, Zen meditation. I'm going to try to talk broadly. There are lots of specifics and specific practices and so forth that I'm I'm not gonna address, but I wanna speak about meditation in a way that, first of all, might be helpful, and then second is encompassing of whatever particular method you're doing more or less. So meditation can be or meditation can become a centerless universe. It can be feeding on silence, space and presence.
• 1:49
  It can be aligning with the life pulse that you already are but can never grasp. Meditation can be never stepping in the same river even once. Meditation is what every moment is and does, but we have to take a backward step to notice that. Meditation can be a foil for the flimsy ego, an exposure of the self to the self. Meditation can be a dream enjoying itself.
• 2:29
  Meditation can be composting the dead matter of the already happened self. It can be weightlessness. It can be spacelessness. It can be vibrating and boundless sky. It can be appreciating the taste of your life.
• 2:51
  Coming so simple that one is just appreciating the very taste of one's life. Meditation is a word for an intimate act that slips out of and defies every attempt to define it or pin it down. I don't care who wrote what book. But how to do it? Because when it comes down to it, that's sort of what we're faced with, each time we come to practice.
• 3:21
  How do I do it and how to understand what I'm doing? So first of all, I wanna talk a little bit about a, the posture. So one can meditate walking, one can meditate lying down, one can meditate sitting and standing. And those are the four postures. If you are fortunate enough to be able-bodied and able to sit upright, this is optimal.
• 3:56
  And it's important that one sits with a straight back. Straight back, a gently lifted chest, shoulders kind of at rest but kind of rolled back, you could say. When we refine our posture over time by bringing attention to how we're sitting, we are optimizing the flow of breath and energy. We're optimizing the flow of breath and energy simply by being in the upright posture, not by doing something special besides relaxing with a straight back. So yes, you can do meditation at home just sort of kicked back in a recliner, but it is not it's not optimal.
• 4:54
  There's something that is, we miss out when we don't take the posture, which has energetic effects. And some, old Buddhist texts even talk about like mystical effects of sitting in the posture of the Buddha, like morphogenetic field kind of stuff, like thousands and thousands of beings, including the awakened one, sat like this. And when you sit like this, you resonate with the Buddha's awakening on a very subtle level. Anyway, the posture is important. Straight back, learning to find stability in that, and relaxation.
• 5:36
  Okay. And I think nowadays, you could find many good videos actually on, meditation posture and if you're if you're not, if you don't have confidence in in the sitting posture you have, it might be worth checking those out. There used to be, at least in Zen Community of Oregon and commonly in Zen meditation halls, a lot of emphasis placed on helping people with posture. There's consent kind of culture has has changed this, but it used to be that somebody would walk around the meditation hall and if you were slouching, they would they would lift your back up. Or if you were leaning, you would get fixed.
• 6:15
  Remember when I was younger, would get fixed all the time. And I was like, oh, I don't want people to see me getting fixed. I wanted to look like the one who did it right. Damn, getting fixed. Because I would leave.
• 6:33
  So posture, that's something to, to work with. It's something that develops over time. It gets easier. It gets more natural. Okay.
• 6:45
  So then we have the basic, method of practice. And I know nowadays there are so many different styles and approaches to meditation taught and this is a place that sometimes people get confused. From my perspective, I believe I represent the tradition, is that every method of practice whether it be some of you heard of koans, some of you heard of mindfulness, some of you heard of following the breath, some of you have heard of with working with sound, resting in awareness, all of these things, and there's more than that. Every method is united on holding attention in some way. They all have to do with consciously holding attention in one way or another.
• 7:38
  And those ways of holding attention are distinct, but they all boil down to consciously holding attention. Because we, all have sensory fields of experience and the sensory fields are just happening because there's a body. There's a body and environment. There's there's sensory experience, body, brain, environment. But attention is what we're most concerned with.
• 8:11
  We're concerned with attention resting where we want it to and not resting or not going to what we don't want it to. You could think of the art meditation is the art of skillful use of this capacity you have called attention. If you imagine that your the world for you as a as a sensory being is a field of six senses, seeing, tasting, touching, thinking, smelling, hearing. Did I say that? Okay.
• 8:44
  Okay. That's that's your world is those six senses. At any given moment, your attention is alighting on one aspect of that or another. Sometimes it's a big aspect, it's inclusive, sometimes it's very particular, but your attention is is is lighting up different aspects of that field. Usually, it happens all by itself per per force of habit.
• 9:13
  So to meditate, first of all, is to hold attention with intention. To hold attention with intention. And one of the things that really differentiates different practices and and actually they're not that different because of this is that attention has an aperture like quality, like a camera, Right? Or or like a lens that zooms. So with the with this lens that zooms, you have both aperture and the zoom.
• 9:44
  Right? They're kinda working together. Sometimes we're zooming in very close. Like a lot of the classic instructions on mindfulness of breathing, those methods are saying zoom in very close on this this experience we call breath. And sometimes we hear practices like Kantaza, which is a Zen practice of, unbounded awareness.
• 10:10
  So the aperture of attention is as wide as possible. It's not zoomed in on anything, any particular thing. Both those practices are dealing with attention. They're just held in a different way. So it's important to know when you are receiving meditation instruction, when you're applying meditation, to know, what the aperture camera lens is with each method.
• 10:40
  Understand that because they all have a way that you are holding attention. As you practice, be conscious of how you are holding attention. Is it is it wide on purpose? Is it narrow on purpose? One is not better than the other.
• 11:04
  You know, eventually, the wide becomes narrow and the narrow becomes wide. This distinction between open and focus falls away. A conscious holding of attention is is at the heart of Zen meditation. And then let me break that down, with more subtlety. Okay.
• 11:33
  So let's say then that there are two aspects of the holding of attention. On one hand, we have what's called staying and the other hand, not clinging. Staying is the power of presence. It's it's attention's ability to not only be where we want it to be, but to actually enter into and permeate that object or that field of experience. Penetrate, permeate, open up into.
• 12:10
  That's staying. And then the other side, non clinging, is really the wisdom of flow. Right? Or the wisdom that informs our life when we are perceiving flow, when attention is capable of perceiving flow. In other words, constant change.
• 12:35
  I'm not referring to a particular state like the guy who wrote the book. I could never pronounce that guy's name and probably nobody can. Thank you. I love it. Somebody did.
• 12:48
  When we talk about flow, we're not talking about a state. We're talking about actually what's always happening. You can't hold on to a single moment of experience. This moment is gone and gone and gone and gone and gone gone and it's always coming, coming, coming, coming, coming, coming and that never stops. That's what we mean by flow.
• 13:07
  So staying and non clinging. We use different words for these but these are I think evocative words as far as words go. You're training attention to stay and you're training attention to not cling. Two sides of the same coin. I want to unpack that, but first I want to say, any place you learn and imprint yourself with staying and non clinging or any practice where you imprint yourself with presence and the wisdom of flow, that could be called meditation.
• 13:43
  So if you do that while riding your bike, more power to you. If you do that while eating a corn dog, amazing. If that's true for you while you watch reruns of Who's the Boss, I love it. Okay. Any place, any practice you're that you have those two qualities, it could be called meditation.
• 14:06
  And some wise people could argue with me and say, no, the desire for liberation has to be there. But we don't need to argue with them right now. So let me go back, emphasize now staying some more. So again, we have sensory fields and we have attention. Just check that out right now.
• 14:25
  See if that see if that if that tracks for you. There's sensory experience and then there is a particular place where in each moment your attention is is alighting. And let go of all conscious holding of attention and watch where it goes. I would guess for most people if you haven't done a lot of training, the tension bounces between thoughts and body sensations and these words and maybe someone else's appearance in the room and it kind of moves around, kind of pinball like. So we train in staying because attention follows habit and instinct when it's not directed or held.
• 15:29
  And it is the Buddha's observation that many people's attention unskillfully dwells here or there. For example, it dwells in anxious thoughts, or it dwells on the sensory thing that we like but can't have, or it dwells in memories of the past that actually doesn't exist. Attention unjoined with consciousness a good amount of the time and you'd have to check out how much of the time that's true for you is functioning unskillfully. Right? I mean, how many people in here have had a kind of compulsive, harmful thinking in their life?
• 16:14
  Just like raise your hand. Your attention could not give up thoughts that were painful. Yeah. Okay? So you are training in undoing that that habit because you will build the power where you have more and more increased power to not have your mind just go wherever it wants to go.
• 16:34
  Right? You become you become sovereign. Staying, this is a capacity that builds over time. It is a power. Right?
• 16:48
  It builds over a single session. It kind of gathers energy. It might be something more like momentum. It builds over the time of you practicing. So I could now hold my attention in situations where I simply couldn't when I was younger because over time the capacity has deepened.
• 17:13
  Maybe there's something that changes neurobiologically, probably that could be measured by somebody. Staying builds through staying. Right? So when you are applying this raw skill, when you are training in this raw skill, the most important thing is what I would call dogged returning. And that is your attention departs from the object that you have decided is your place of focus.
• 17:52
  As soon as it does that, as soon as you notice it does that, you simply come back. Because you have chosen to meditate. And that's really in a way the the rub of it. You bring your attention back because you've decided it's a good idea to bring your attention back. And other people and the tradition has said, hey, it's a really good idea if you bring your attention back.
• 18:18
  Here's some beneficial, virtuous, beautiful, amazing things that could happen if you really do that well over time. But when it comes down to it, it's you sitting there and you apply the power of bringing attention back. Back to staying if only for a moment. This, staying is a applying in a way an equal force of attending to the to the the the velocity of your distracted mind. To talk about this in, from like maybe the more encouraging side, when you've meditated for a long time, staying is more or less effortless.
• 19:11
  You sit down to meditate and your attention just stays with what you choose. More or less, you might apply some, kind of quality of of keeping it on on the in the lane, sort of like when you're driving and and things are aligned and there's not a strong breeze, you just have a little bit of your hand on the steering wheel. It becomes like that. Or even totally effortless. That's the result of training over time.
• 19:38
  And that could be even in a retreat you do, you find some days in, there's much less effort needed. But in the beginning of a session, of a meditation career, of, a retreat, we're meeting the tendency of attention to wander away with with an intensity that overwhelms that wandering tendency. So there has to be sufficient energy. And you could think of it as a flow of energy kind of like, let's say there's a light switch on. When you turn off a light switch, you cut a circuit and you stop the flow of energy that goes into the light bulb.
• 20:23
  Your attention is kind of like that. When we drop the energy that's flowing in and keeping the light on, it just goes off. As soon as you drop it, it goes off. As soon as you disengage from the the, in a way, the desire to be attending, there come here comes your instinctual habitual mind and you're off. Now, this is totally, normal.
• 20:53
  This is the process of meditation, but you bring it right back as soon as you notice. Right? And I wrote sheer dogged returning. That sounds like, I don't know, like some old western movie, like some bedraggled dude, like limping to a gunfight. It's not really like that.
• 21:19
  But I wish to emphasize that this is a very basic skill. You're doing something very basic. You don't need to think about where your attention went, you don't need to analyze whether you're a good meditator, you don't nothing. No. All of that is extra.
• 21:42
  All you do is simply exquisitely come back to the object. It didn't matter whether you thought of, an invisible zebra or World War four, what you thought doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. It's just the raw skill of attending. Now some people, they want to both do that and they wanna see the effect at the same time.
• 22:14
  And I call that, like being at the gym and like lifting a weight and watching and seeing, is this muscle getting bigger? And then you're like, no, it's really not getting bigger and then you put the weight down and you go, well, I'm gonna go to the vending machine or I'm gonna watch oh, I'm gonna watch him. Okay. This sheer dogged returning is is so simple minded in a way. One must consent to being really simple minded to develop the skills of meditation and taste its fruits.
• 22:55
  Not simplistic, simple minded. It's very basic. So that's, staying. And, you know, I talk different at different times about, how staying deepens. It mostly deepens through staying.
• 23:13
  There are nuances to to there's ways of, there are more and more sophisticated or subtle ways that we learn for each of us, how do we do that? How do we deepen the staying? How do we work with our own body, mind and energy? Some things can be said about that, most things are not that helpful, we just have to learn. And the staying deepens through, staying.
• 23:44
  One thing I think is cool is that when you taste and stabilize certain levels of staying, that means your practice is consistent enough that you drop into similar zones on a regular basis, they become kind of like, places that you can eat more easily slide into. An imprint gets made. We are not always starting from square one. But the work, the training has to be done. Training has to be done.
• 24:20
  Okay. Now I'm talking about this other side, I'm calling it the wisdom of flow or non clinging. I'm gonna call it lots of things because I don't cling to words consistently enough, that's probably a problem. And also call it non involvement. This is just the other side of staying.
• 24:45
  It may be there may be a time when we a particular practice highlights or brings out one of these qualities more than the other, but they really are coming together. This non involvement, this wisdom of flow, this not clinging. Okay? So first of all, this body mind heart that we someone put a name on and we refer to as me is pretty much just happening all by itself in tandem with conditions. I'm making some noise you're not doing anything in particular, but the ears are registering it and the brain is processing it into understanding.
• 25:22
  You can't lay claim to that process at all. Body's breathing, heart's beating, thoughts are happening, you don't know which thoughts are next. This body mind is pretty much just happening all by itself. You're much more just like nature's expression than you are like you doing your own thing. Life's really just this living us pretty much.
• 25:48
  There's some of our own agency in the mix. That's that's where a certain power of transformation lies. So this body mind heart is pretty much just happening And we lay claim to and try to adjust, continually this being. We're always trying to get it more excited or less excited. That's one way you could boil down the whole human dance.
• 26:18
  Oh, I wanna be more excited. I'm too excited. I wanna be less excited. Now, wanna be more excited. Just pick your pick your method.
• 26:31
  We do that continually and so, a sense of possessionness seems true. We know that, other people don't experience our experience and so, nature's life we say is mine. It's true. People aren't experiencing your experience. But in a strange way, we lay claim to something that is totally, is is very free.
• 27:02
  It's very free. And, it doesn't belong to us in the way we normally think of it. For example, how is the current thought that's arising in your mind any different than the sound of the lights or the car passing by? Why is the thought you and not the car passing by? So this possession ness that we do to our being causes us to, be afraid, overemphasize identity and feel separate.
• 27:48
  Because by making this our possession, we separate ourselves from from just nature's expression called life. We cut the one into the atomized individual. So what we're emphasizing when we do non clinging is first of all to not, interfere with this process. You're holding attention steady and in the midst of that, this is all just happening all by itself And to deeply see that it happens all by itself depends on a kind of real allowing. When we are always naming it, judging it, trying to control it, being worried about it, when that's constantly going on, it's hard to see just how much space and flow that this being actually has.
• 28:53
  In a way, out of our fear, we fixate ourselves, we thingify ourselves. So to practice this and to see what happens when we reduce this possessingness of this nature process. We let things be as they are. We let things be as they are. That is what stillness is about.
• 29:27
  It's not about stillness is, better or more spiritual or people who move aren't something, I don't know. Stillness is not punishment. I'm sorry if it maps onto some kind of childhood, you better not move and eat your peas kind of thing. In stillness, there is allowing this process to happen all by itself and then we can see that really clearly. We can see that thoughts think themselves and there's never been such a thing as a thinker.
• 30:02
  We can see that the eyes really don't do anything, sights just appear and we can see that the breath comes and goes, the heart beats. We can relax into the greater flow of life. And so we do that. Interfering, we stop trying to improve, we reduce the labeling, the, it's this, it's that, I need to be worried about this, all of that reduces and then something, becomes clear. First of all, the is ness of things becomes clear.
• 30:43
  There's something, inexpressible about our being or someone could try to express it, about our being that is drowned out in constant reification of the mind, in constant inner dialogue. There's something deep, rich, and true that we just don't taste when we're embroiled in this experience. And personally, I've always found that, kind of weird. It's sort of like, why is the truth in some ways not more potent? But the truth depends on the truth.
• 31:24
  You have to be you have to be you become truth, and then truth is very potent. So is ness, this the the ineffable nature of our own being that's deeper and richer than our personality, and also impermanence. There is a whole, lineage of Chinese meditation, Chinese Buddhism that was a major influence on Zen that talked about meditation in terms of staying and seeing, or they might use the word stopping and seeing. And the seeing means when attention stays, we can actually see just how rapidly, continually, transparently and freely, this experience is transforming. And to read that in a book doesn't do much for you.
• 32:32
  To directly, intimately perceive the impermanence of your own being is liberating. You have to find out for yourself. You are finding out for yourself as you are as you are sitting. It is only the direct is it an apperception? The direct
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: for maybe tomorrow, just a reminder.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: Somebody, could you mute, please? Thank you. It's the direct apperception of one's own being and its dreamlike ephemeral quality that lets the heart rest and accept life deeper and deeper and deeper. Could say the purpose of staying is the seeing of impermanence. And when we see impermanence, staying is a lot easier.
• 33:31
  So these this could maybe I presented the essence of Zen meditation, but then what about bringing in the quality of love? That has a place. Bring in the quality of love. If that's important to you at this time, you can find all the methods on how to do that, but essentially bring it in. Let this presence, this this this presence that dances with energy be infused with a quality of love or joy.
• 34:03
  Do that if that is something that your your being is calling for. You can bring in, devotion. There's lots of ways to open to a higher power or a deeper power to ask for support to infuse this kind of practice, bring it in. Right? It's up to you.
• 34:29
  Right? We can bring in inquiry. We can bring in curiosity. There's lots we can bring in, but the nuts and bolts are staying and seeing. Because my intention was to give a clear presentation on how to do meditation and how to understand it, I'm going to pause there and see if there are any questions.
• 35:27
  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.