Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / As If Love Was the Point- Jogen Sensei

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As If Love Was the Point- Jogen 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.
• 0:23
  Jogen: So only a couple days left in the session. That was supposed to be a little bit funny, all of you who are lost in the timeless. A poem by Adrienne Maree Brown. Adrienne Maree Brown, Blue Moon in Sagittarius. I am not glowing for love, I am being loved, love, and lover at all times.
• 1:00
  I don't mimic the sun. Don't fold me into anyone else's heat. My scar tissue is my own. While you sleep, I get older. Hurry.
• 1:14
  I have to fill in all my flesh and bones with delight. Orbit is not belonging. I feel currents move from and around me. Orbit is not belonging. I belong to all this motion.
• 1:36
  The in and the out breath, the waves suckling the shore and pulling away, mouth full. Behind the shadows, I am calm, reflecting a wildfire, wreaking a havoc that becomes system and salt. Something is so lovely now, I have to tell you about it, infinite inside me. The fecund and shimmering landscape of this magical world, ripe, ripe fruit above and below everywhere. So I need for nothing but aliveness, aliveness to be a bearer of all this light.
• 2:28
  We do the rigors of real practice because we know we could be otherwise. Haunted on this side and that side, the desire to be special and influential and respected. The fear that we're just like everyone else or even worse, we're not worth noticing. In what ways does this move the mind, or the heart, the body, the mouth? Haunted, on one hand, wishing that inside themselves when we're not there, people are thinking good things about us and extolling our excellent qualities to others.
• 3:23
  How above the ordinary we are, and on the other hand, haunted by being afraid that they do see our shortcomings, that they take stock of our blemishes and they think and talk about them with others. How frequently do these ghosts crowd out other ways of seeing? In an endless tilt, because the trances of seeking stimulation and excitation keep us always on the move, always leaning into what's next. What's next? What's next?
• 4:09
  Leaning away from what's not warm and fuzzy, or confirming of how we think we should feel. What's lost in always being tilted toward that next little hit? That next boost? That next high? Impoverished because what we have does not include what we could have, and the could have is endless.
• 4:47
  Afraid because all we've accumulated or the empire that we build in our minds could be taken apart or devalued. Others might want some of the pieces or decide they're not valuable, So, I got to defend the empire. I got to polish or protect the territory because who I am because who am I if not what I've done? Who am I if not what I know? Who am I if not what I've gathered up to show you that I'm valuable?
• 5:27
  We know it could be otherwise. And you've tasted that it can be otherwise. Robustly here, there are no actual ghosts. There aren't even any other minds. Vividly upright, there is no tilting towards this or that, so it's just one big space.
• 6:00
  Relaxed in our self nature, there's no lacking and there's no little person inside who's lacking. In fact, there is no little person. Alive as love, which is this: without anything extra, you don't even need to warm it up. Awake as kindness, unbordered, unafraid to feel. The profound value of the rigors of real practice.
• 6:55
  And we've broken trance, these trances 10,000 times. How many times have we broken these trances? How many times these trances broke in this room? So many trances of this is not enough, and you were not enough, and it should be, and why aren't you, and why weren't they, and why can't they be, and when will I get? And you keep on breaking trances because you've confirmed and experienced that this is possible.
• 7:35
  We don't quite know what it means to be asleep until we start to really taste the alternative. And before long, the ritual of retreat will be dissolved. And we're back into the collective trance. The collective trance has a general understanding of loving kindness. It's sort of like, You be kind first.
• 8:29
  Let me see if you're going to be kind. Are you going to love me? Are you going to give me affection? I'm going to wait and see. Or it's often, what will I get in return?
• 8:44
  I could give something, but what's coming back? Can I be sure it's coming back? Or in the collective trance, loving kindness is confused as, I'll be polite and pleasant as long as you confirm my self image. Tell me what I long to hear about who I am. Reflect to me just how beautiful and without blemish I am.
• 9:21
  Collective trance love often means, I'll do the good thing so you can see me as a good thing. Because I want to be a good thing. That's how I want to show up in all these consciousnesses, please. Let's all get on the same page, that we're all a good thing. Go back into the collective trance with your wisdom infused understanding of loving kindness, and it's like a candle that has to survive strong winds from every side.
• 10:08
  The winds of our own instinctual being, the winds of how we've arranged our life, the winds of the karmic background of our relationships, the winds of the culture that gives a stamp of approval to the collective trance. Of course, does. We have to protect this flame. We've been chanting Shantideva. To help any beings attain the way I offer, any virtue that I have.
• 10:54
  Dogen Zenji said something like to his officers of the monastery, Just serve and forget about spiritual attainment. Be so caught up in taking care of what's yours to take care of that you forget the idea that there's this little, needy me. You're freed from the idea that there's a little, needy me. To help any beings attain the way I offer, any virtue that I have, we've been chanting Shantideva, and a function of daily prayers and chants like this, I think, is to deeply impress our being with intentions. Like, have you ever seen one of the Chinese seals that are pressed into wax?
• 11:53
  So it's carved with a particular image. Let's say it was carved with the image 'love'. And then the wax is softened enough that it can be impressed and then you firmly place it. It's really pleasurable. I hope you sometimes get the pleasure of that moment.
• 12:14
  And the image is there very deeply. There are thousand year old scrolls that still have that imprint on them. In this chants, in this practice, we're we're making ourselves available to be deeply imprinted by the wisdom that is loving kindness. We can live as if love was the point. We can take that on as an experiment.
• 13:02
  And I made a note to myself, Don't tell people to be saints. It's very easy for spiritual teachings to catalyze something in us that says, Yeah, but I can't do it perfectly. And therefore, I'm a failure and therefore, I can't really try. I'm going to wait until I can do it perfectly, then I'll try. And then we wait, and we wait, and we wait.
• 13:38
  But we can live as if love was the point. Take it on as an experiment. This love is, instead of my complicated, contradicting, having self meeting every situation, to be alert to how can I amplify beauty? Here I am in a room full of tense people. How can I encourage?
• 14:13
  Here I am in a world where so many people have faith in Netflix and nothing more. As if love was the point, I have an idle moment, what could I take care of? How can I shift this environment even a little bit from negative to positive? Can I just add a drop of light? Living as if love was the point.
• 14:45
  We can slide out of the straight jacket of deserving and undeserving. I think that if we watch the discriminating mind and when we close our very big hearts, it's because we have some flash of the discriminating mind that's sort of like deserving, undeserving, Or deserving and good looking. Or even harder slipping out of the shackles of being appreciated, not being appreciated. That sort of zzzz zzzz, will you tell me I'm good? If not, we don't need to wait until we're pure hearted.
• 15:51
  None of the teachings are saying that. I remember numerous times while I was at the monastery, there were very sincere people who wanted to ordain, and their critics told them, you can't ordain because you're not pure hearted. You need to be, you basically need to be a saint or else you're an impostor. Don't even speak of love until you don't have any whatever. Don't even try.
• 16:23
  Just keep on with business as usual. But, if there is such a thing as a totally or robustly purified being, they didn't do it, love did. They didn't squeeze their selfishness out their side like, Get rid of that. They just served others until they thought, Oh, this is better, actually. We don't need to wait until we're pure hearted.
• 16:58
  We don't need to wait until we're fully rested. That's one that people think, I've got to be really resourced. I'm going to mark the calendar when I'm resourced, that's when I'll talk to your mother-in-law. Let's arrange our life around when we're fully resourced. Good luck raising a child or having a partner.
• 17:24
  We don't need to wait for applause. We don't need to wait for apologies, although we often do. We definitely shouldn't wait for total healing, because that's a green unicorn doing backflips in nothingness. You Can't even imagine that, right? And we sure don't need to wait for world peace, because that's not what this place is really designed to show us.
• 17:59
  And we don't have to cut out fun and play and humor. That's part of the problem with the whole religious archetype. You think, Oh, I'm going to feed lepers and wear rags and Being of service or Bodhisattva, that sounds really drab and I just need to have fun or I'll be like a dried up, one of these dried up frogs that you find sometimes in the monastery. Have you seen them? These desiccated frogs, they hop out of the moisture and they get caught in a web and it's a very sad sight.
• 18:32
  You see people take them outside and put them in the wet soil hoping they're going to start. I did that. And we think, Oh, that's going to be me. I'm going to start loving beings and really practicing. There'll be no joy, but we love your joy.
• 18:55
  We love, I speak on behalf of all human beings, we love your joy mostly. Sometimes we're a little salty or annoyed, but generally we love your joy. You are no fun when you are not joyful. Just living as if love was the point. And I'm not up here, I hope you don't think I'm up here saying, I can do this, but I try a lot.
• 19:25
  And I'm not up here saying, You can do this, but you could try a lot. And that's what the Bodhisattva Vow is. At the crossroads of self hardening, we can recognize what that is. There's a crossroad, there are these moments, these intersections every day where it's like, oh, do you know what I mean? It's like I could shrink a little bit and maybe I believe I feel safer or happier, or I can be upright, I can do what's asked of me, I can be bigger.
• 20:07
  At the intersection, those moments of collapsing into me, Why not break trance? Break trance and say sorry, or water the plant, or keep your mouth shut, or give the compliment, or risk embarrassment, or share what I cling to, or move slowly, or hug longly, or send the text, or don't send that text, or sit in meditation, or sign the petition, or pause for reflection, or cook a meal, or imagine listening without brewing a rebuttal, or the way you'll add just how intelligent you are to the mix. And why not? At this kind of crossroads of self collapse, what do we get by not holding firm in this kindness? What do we really get from it?
• 21:16
  And if there are reasons, just let those reasons hover there in your mind and look at them. It's kind of a madness. The Tibetans like the phrase self cherishing. It's a little delicate for us because many of us have beautiful work to do of really profoundly loving ourselves. But what they mean by self cherishing is that we're always holding on so tight to our little piece of well-being that you can't breathe, it's suffocating, it's like those facehuggers in aliens.
• 22:04
  That's self cherishing. Here's a beautiful poem. I like to believe people like Rumi were If I could like hang out with him, if I could spy on Rumi. That's like my dream is to spy on Rumi. I want to go back in time and just see what does he really do when he's alone.
• 22:29
  Rumi said, the clear bead at the center changes everything. Now, don't think you don't know what that is. The clear bead at the center changes everything. There are no edges to my loving now. You have heard it said that there is a window that opens from one mind to another.
• 22:56
  So, there is a practice that is really celebrated in some lineages of Sufism where teacher and student, they just sit together for hours in silence. Zen people are too impatient for that, so we ring the bell, but you have heard it said that there is a window that opens from one mind to another, but if there is no wall, there is no need for fitting the window or for a latch. The clear bead at the center changes everything. Believe that. There are no edges to my loving now.
• 23:40
  I want to give a plug to the rigors of friendship as a true and truly vital dharma practice. Again, we can so easily believe that the real practice, the real work of this loving wisdom is got to be in some other conditions. It's not the life I have, it's not the connections that have naturally arisen in my life, it's somewhere else. It's so easy to really think that. So, the rigors of friendship, the rigors.
• 24:27
  So, self grasping tends to believe in permanence. It loves a non existent world where things are just one way without any of the icky stuff. So, once the person who is always cheerful, always considerate, or always listens well, And we can't find them, and so we're not so sure if any of our friends are really worth investing in. 100%. And even though we can't be that, somehow we want other people to be that.
• 25:10
  Isn't that a strange contradiction? I'm not available for love all the time, but I sure want her to be. Weird. I'm of the opinion that if we really take the relationships of our karma on, that's a raw and rough and therefore real transformative spiritual container. And so, there's the question of steadfastness alongside the questions of, is there mutual enlivenment?
• 25:50
  Is there trustworthiness? Is there compatibility? Just like it takes 100 of Zazen for the 10 that reveal to you something vital, or 50 Sansans for the three where there's a profound meeting, or whatever. It takes steadfastness of friendship in order for what's possible there to actually really show itself. And I'm not just saying you just keep hanging out, that's not steadfastness.
• 26:33
  People can be married for fifty years and totally dead to each other. Just like you can sit session for fifty years and be totally dead to your practice. Nisargadatta said, Jomon's lovely quote from the Advaita teacher brought to mind Nisargadatta. Mr. Gadatha says, 'Wisdom tells me I am not a thing.
• 27:08
  Love tells me somehow I am everything. Between these my life flows. My relationship with this actual being, not the being I think I am, this actual being, is evident in my relationship with other actual beings. When awareness is intimate, a being is a moment of the world displayed exactly so. Each person is encountering yourself with no other exactly so.
• 27:58
  Where does it stop? Whatever you take it to be. Where's the dividing line? This is a single body of mind. However, you're free to say, I stop here.
• 28:17
  You're completely free to say, what's me is within these Guess this is called skin, within this skin. Awareness with no distance. It's all mixed up. It's not so easy to tell who's who. It's not so easy.
• 28:52
  And this is Sanzen. This is meeting each other just as we meet ourselves. We don't know what we be and can't be what we can be without the mirror of others. We don't know what we be and we can't be what we could be or are without the mirror of others. Nobody by their own power can know the jewel of themselves.
• 29:31
  Nobody by their own power can know the jewel of themselves and that includes the sides that have crusty sediment on them and the sides that are fuzzy because of someone's hot breath. The fullness of any being is brought forth by you, and by me, and by them. And this is a secret kindness that is as plain as day. As I was saying a couple of days ago, for self cherishing, we defend against any perceptions of ourselves that don't match the one that we would really like to have. With a rare person.
• 30:35
  Can plot our course through social life, connecting with those who will confirm what we want confirmed, and we will avoid those we know might show us something else about ourselves. Until we can't, or until we fall in love, or we fall in like, and there's enough trust and honesty and realness that we're willing to see. We are not what we are without the mirror of others. This is is Sangha, actually. So, we've been investigating kindness, friendliness, heart, love, all these words.
• 31:29
  And perhaps, you're like me, you're both more confident and less confident that you know what love is. It's like this idea we just can't discard, we can't do away with it, and yet we can't pin it down either. Love is this. This. Or is it?
• 32:05
  Whether this is love or not depends on you. Or you could wait for someone else to give you Shakti pot, or flowers, or the perfect kiss. Rumi. Let's eavesdrop on Rumi. This is what he was thinking one night.
• 32:33
  Lovers think they are looking for each other, but there is only one search. Lovers think they are looking for each other, but there is only one search. Wandering this world is wandering that. Both inside one transparent sky. And here, there is no dogma and no heresy.
• 33:02
  Heresy is when you believe or act or think something that violates the principles that are put down in the great books of God. And here, there is no dogma and there is no heresy. The miracle of Jesus is Himself. Not what He did or said about the future. Forget the future.
• 33:31
  I bow down before someone who can do that. On the way, you may want to look back or not. But if you can say, 'There is nothing ahead,' there will be nothing there. Stretch your arms and take hold of the cloth of your clothes with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
• 34:02
  Good and bad are mixed. Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both, you don't belong with us. Don't take these things at surface value, these are Rumiko ones. Good and bad are mixed.
• 34:21
  If you don't have both, you don't belong with us. When one of us gets lost, he must be inside us. There is no place like that anywhere in the world. So who knows, maybe doing metta together we're invisibly keeping the world or us and all many communities doing deep spiritual practice or keeping the world from just going off the bloody rails. How do we know what this does?
• 35:06
  We inherited this idea that there's this gray, wet thing in here called the brain, and it makes thoughts and it has consciousness and that basically is a private it's a private show. Got my private show here. Okay. First of all, it's all over your face. It's not a private show.
• 35:44
  Where do we get the idea that mind was bounded by the skull? Maybe doing metta, we're invisibly holding the world together. I'd rather not find out what would happen if we all stopped. Whether that's the case or not, it's in your power to imprint this body, heart, and mind with this kindness firmly and deeply. Now you have it, preserve it well.
• 36:26
  You can't really say you don't. And still we forget, but less frequently, less deeply before returning to the stance of the friend. Still we forget. It is in your power to change one world, to free at least one being. At least do that.
• 37:00
  This life you can most deeply know. And may it be so. What could possibly convince us not to step into this wholeheartedly if there was ever a definition of mental illness? So, may all beings, may all beings touch the source of love. May they be a source of love that awakens love.
• 37:45
  May all beings have safety and respect and the dignity to discover who they are. May those who wish to realize their true nature be able to realize their true nature. May they have the patience, and the patience, and the willingness and the patience to continue this experiment until the results are no longer in doubt. It's been so lovely to practice with you all this week. Thank you.
• 38:43
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendest.org. Your support supports us.