Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Gift of Disappointment - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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The Gift of Disappointment - 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.
• 0:24
  Jogen: Good evening, everyone. It is splendid to be existing with you in this moment. The only moment we can ever experience, as always, this moment. We don't talk or at least I don't talk about suffering very much because I kind of feel like a dark wizard up here going suffering. Like Sauron or something from Lord of the Rings.
• 0:59
  I don't know. But a Buddhist teacher is supposed to be talking about suffering, I've heard. So I usually don't use that term because I think we get inured to it like many words. Like, I had read New York Times the other morning and I realized the word compassion has become very strange to me. What does that mean?
• 1:26
  Right? These words, they lose meaning. They're just tossed around. But this is an important principle in our practice. As you might know, the Buddha said that life is marked by dukkha.
• 1:43
  Dukkha is the word that is often translated as suffering. And in a sense, this path is a study of what does that mean? What is really meant by dukkha, suffering? What are we talking about our minor inconveniences? Are we talking about the aches and pains that we experience?
• 2:13
  Are we talking about our relationship to those inconveniences, to those aches and pains? Are we only talking about major life ruptures, the deep pains, the profound losses? Suffering is interesting in the sense of the path of awakening in that we only know what suffering is to the degree that we let go of it. So what today might seem like normal might, two years from now or five years from now or tomorrow in your practice, you might be able to recognize that was a state of suffering. Right?
• 2:55
  But a state of suffering has difficulty fully recognizing how much it's a state of suffering. Well, I really don't like saying this word. The more I say it, I feel like sore on. Suffering. You could teach reality is bliss, as many sages have realized and taught.
• 3:20
  But as I reflect on that, people are generally too busy, too guilty, and too moralistic to accept that reality is bliss. So a path like that for most of us is like, no, I'll take I'll take the suffering. Anyways, Buddha taught that clarifying suffering is essential to the path of awakening. So that's interesting. He didn't say, This is a thing you'll encounter on the way to the good stuff.
• 3:54
  He didn't say, This is an incidental feature of walking the spiritual path. In the foundational teachings, clarifying suffering, intimacy with suffering, and releasing suffering is essential to what it means to wake up. Now, it's another talk altogether that whether or not we actually believe in the end of suffering, as is what the Buddhist path is pointing to. I want to talk about suffering in terms of disappointment. Disappointment.
• 4:37
  What is it? What is disappointment made of? If someone said this is a path to become free of disappointment, could you believe in that? Would you sign up for that? Does something in your mind say, well, no, you can't be free of disappointment because life has disappointments.
• 5:09
  Disappointment. Let me explore what maybe disappointment is. Disappointment is I had an expectation that things would go a certain way and they don't. So there's this moment in the future. I have an expectation about how that's going to be, feel, look, how I'm going to experience that.
• 5:33
  I arrive and I had an expectation. It might have been hidden to me or it might have been really overt. I might have been like, this is gonna be the best falafel or the best, most exciting date or the deepest meditation retreat or whatever it might be, or people are gonna treat me with respect today or in the office. I had this expectation, maybe it's hidden, maybe it's something I can catch on the level of my thought, And I arrive at the moment that doesn't meet that expectation and I have the experience called disappointment. I want or I believe things should go a certain way and they don't.
• 6:18
  I have this experience we call disappointment. Is that a kind of a dip in energy? Do we touch into some kind of core sadness or some hopelessness about life? Do we feel cheated? Do we feel like we're doing life wrong?
• 6:42
  I don't know that the experience of disappointment is the same for everybody. I hoped to feel a particular way when doing, eating, being, getting, seeing, or feeling a certain thing, but I don't end up feeling that way. I thought I would get married and it would be like this mostly, but it turns out it's like this and it's like this and this and like this. So disappointment could be something like, I thought x was x and only x. X being plug in whatever your mind could plug in.
• 7:25
  That is, something the mind it seems like it's hard for the mind or maybe it's not even built to take object x and appreciate that it actually is multifaceted. But we tend to say object x is pleasure. Right? But because this is a multifaced object, whatever it may be, whatever experience, pleasure is just one facet of object x. There's also all the other things.
• 8:01
  So I thought x was x and only x, but it turns out that x is also x y. This person is also this, Or this job is also this. Or this body is also this. When you begin transiting out of your thirties into your forties and beyond, enter the great betrayal of the body starts to betray you. Well, what does it betray?
• 8:25
  It betrays your expectations about how it was going to feel or how it was going to go. Some people have physical challenges when they're young and so they're not ambushed by their own mind that set up a sense that I'm gonna feel good, strong, vital forever. I kind of like this formula. I thought x was only x, but it turns out that x is x y. And x is not just x y, x is x y z g.
• 8:58
  But I only wanted it to be x, so I feel disappointed. I might look for other people to join me in my disappointment. So this is all really normal, right? This is all so, normal. I think that we just assume this is a feature of life.
• 9:23
  Right? That you can't actually do anything about this. So what you do is you look for things that won't disappoint. Disappointment is something that's been happening since we were one years old and we didn't get enough attention or we got too much of it here or there or wherever. People have been disappointing us forever, basically.
• 9:50
  I don't know if that's actually true. It's probably true. And we've been responding to disappointment by looking for things that won't disappoint. And everybody's trying to chart their own little course. You know, somebody thinks, I'm gonna move to Chicago and be a firefighter and master the saxophone.
• 10:11
  Somebody says I'm gonna do x y z. I'm gonna get the situation together. I'm gonna get the new friend, a different partner, another community, a deeper experience, maybe a place I haven't lived before. Because I believe that there is some x that is only x. I don't actually believe that all x's are x y and x y z and x y z a b.
• 10:40
  In other words, what the phenomenal world is according to the Buddha, I don't actually believe it. According to the Buddha, the phenomenal world is, if you hang your hat on it, disappointing. But that depends on your mind. So as practitioners, the question is, what are we doing with our disappointment? What are we doing with it?
• 11:15
  Are we letting it be a messenger? You might have heard the Buddha in the Buddha's life story about leaving the palace and the three messengers. Have you heard that before? So the Buddha was this sheltered rich kid, totally privileged. And then one day, he went to a part of town and he saw a sick person and an old person and an ordained person.
• 11:45
  And all of those things really struck him because he didn't know that he was gonna get old. He didn't know that he was gonna get sick. And he didn't know that there were people who said, there's something more than the pleasure of the palace and something more than old age and sickness. Are we taking disappointment and all the other forms of suffering and kind of getting the wisdom from them? It's the divine messenger.
• 12:18
  Those three sites that the Buddha encountered are sometimes called the divine messengers. Do we take those messages, or are we, or are you, like me, where you get disappointed and then you look for the thing that won't disappoint because you believe that x can only be x. I feel that sometimes when I try to make a point, I oversimplify things, so I'm sorry. But now I am not criticizing the joy of discovery or novelty. I like new stuff.
• 12:56
  People have always traveled. I've always walked, traversed landscapes, tried to expose themselves to new experience. I'm not saying that that is not practice. But is disappointment something that's opening our dharma eye, our wisdom eye? So maybe this disappointment is the sting of of what we could call a spiritual wound.
• 13:36
  That feeling after the get together or the hookup of hollowness, it's actually not from a lack of connection or the right people. It's the spiritual wound because connection doesn't fill this particular thing. The wondering and not being sure if our work in the world actually helps. Is it making a difference? Can I actually know that my work in the world makes a difference?
• 14:18
  This could be a spiritual wound. The knowledge of death and probably sickness and death on the horizon, really contacting that and how that scrambles and tweaks our current joys a little bit. We'd like to kind of push it push that away so that we can play now and enjoy now. Certain logic to that. But what if you can't push that away?
• 14:46
  What if you really can't separate yourself any longer from this uncomfortable truth? It's a kind of spiritual wound. Nighttime lonelinesses, anxieties that things are going to change. I'm calling it a spiritual wound because we can use these things we touch rather than pretending that it's not pointing to the way things are across scale. There are some people who have so much dissatisfaction with ordinary life that they can't help but try to find something deeper.
• 15:50
  In a way, kind of gifted if they can bear it. If they have the help to bear it, it's a kind of gift. Because when you really pay attention to and I've been making light of disappointment, but when you really pay attention to all the ways in which life refuses us what we want, ordinary life, it starts to act on your heart in a particular way. Your basic logic can start to shift. Right?
• 16:23
  Your sense making and your your path making can start to shift. Nowadays, this might be masked by the glut, disappointingness. Some of you are old enough to remember when there were only like four shows on TV at any given time. I mean, you would turn it on and there were like four shows. Five shows.
• 17:06
  You had to wait till 08:30 on Friday night or whatever for your show to come out. Now we have this glut of experience at our fingertips. I mean, another thing I remember is I remember when the grocery store only had a few vegetables and like six boxes of cereal. And now you walk into Jeff Bezos' palace and it's just a grand array of new experiences. There's always a new drink.
• 17:39
  There's always a new cereal. There's always a new experience. Drugs are like this too. And so in the overabundance of content and experience, the constant stream that is moving so quickly, we don't we are not invited to stop and feel how all of this really feels. It's just the next thing.
• 18:09
  And if it's not pleasure, it's the next thing to be afraid of coming down the pipe. So maybe a really good dharma teacher, one of their functions is to quicken your disappointment in life. Say, I'm not ruthless enough. I don't have that kind of integrity to do that. And most students don't have the integrity to handle that.
• 18:41
  Because if we quit, our disappointment is quickened, it doesn't mean that the good stuff goes away. Right? Just means that we're not as deceived about what it's gonna do for us. We're not letting our energy get and our and our placement of meaning getting frittered away in all of the fluff. But for some people, there is a quickening of this disappointment.
• 19:12
  One of the important things is to normalize it. If you feel like this world as it is does not offer you deep nourishment for your heart, the Buddha gives two thumbs up and says, amen. No, it does not. That might be a little bit different than some people who said, well, if you only found your deep calling or if you had your passion. Oh, if you only found your passion, you would be like all those other people who are so passionate.
• 19:50
  They're doing the thing they love. They exist in a state of exaltation all the time. Just check Instagram. Find your passion. So many of us disappointed think, the problem is I haven't found my passion.
• 20:17
  There's something more real than the parade of phenomena. There's something more liberating, more valuable than any particular experience. That is the very point of spiritual traditions or at least Buddhist traditions. So as you practice and as you pay attention, if you find that you are disappointed with ordinary status quo life, that's very good. Really feel that.
• 20:54
  Really feel that. It doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It might mean you could look into your state of mind, look into the source of disappointment, and look even beyond that. Yeah, there's always gonna be the up and down life. Right?
• 21:26
  The life that fluctuates. We feel good, we feel bad. Our relationships are going well, they're not. We feel connected, we feel disconnected. The body feels okay.
• 21:35
  It feels not okay. There's pleasures that come away. There's pains. There's interests and boredom that is always gonna keep fluctuating. Right?
• 21:45
  And maybe you can make some decisions to optimize the good stuff. It's sort of what American modern life is. Optimize the good stuff. Still gonna go up and down. But to discover that which all the way through, That which is unmoving all the way through.
• 22:12
  Because I think it sucks to always hope that the next moment, the next year, the next person, the next job is gonna be the thing. The next thing will relieve me. Later, later, It's gonna be good. You know, some people don't seem to care if it's that way. That's that's fine.
• 22:42
  But maybe you do.
• 22:51
  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.