Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Difference Without Division: Working with Comparing Mind - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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Difference Without Division: Working with Comparing Mind - 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: Good evening. It's very good to be here with you tonight. If the Darmeshpiel wasn't advertised, I'd probably just be quiet tonight because it feels like there's a nice stillness that was in our sitting and also just in the air this time of year. But I'm gonna share something with you. The community is using something called the Affirming Faith in Mind poem, which is a very old Chinese Zen text that is very beloved in the tradition as a unifying exploration, as a springboard for dharma talks.
• 1:13
  And you could chant with us later this poem. And I was thinking about the meaning of this poem, and there's different levels. There's very profound teachings in it, and there are really just very straightforward observations of human nature. And one of them, I think, I think it's it's not quite explicit, but it's definitely not so hard. You don't have to read too much between the lines, is that, human beings are very afflicted by comparing mind, and then we don't have to be.
• 1:51
  And so I thought I would talk about comparing mind, comparison in today's talk. It says here, See into the true self of things, and you're in step with the great way. The great way means, the way of freedom. Thus walking freely undisturbed, but live in bondage to your thoughts and you will be confused. This heavy burden weighs you down, so why keep judging good and bad?
• 2:27
  Judging good and bad comparison. So I think one of the most common human pastimes is comparing and contrasting ourselves to others. What would we talk about with each other? What would happen to all the bars of Portland if we stopped comparing and contrasting ourselves to others? We would just have to drink in silence, I guess.
• 2:56
  One of the most common human pastimes, we practice it all the time, comparing and contrasting. And we compare ourselves to imagined versions of ourselves. We compare ourselves to imagined versions of how we used to be. I say imagined because we think I used to be so much more or so much less, fill in the blank, always exactly accurate. Compare our current self with our younger self.
• 3:38
  We compare our current moment with previous moments. Right? And there is a lot of emotion and feeling and mood that is generated from thin air out of comparing ourselves to imagined versions of what we used to be or what we're supposed to be. Right? Lock someone in a room and they'll make some feelings based on comparing themselves.
• 4:10
  We make good feelings with comparison. We make better than feelings. We make disempowered feelings. We make bad feelings. We make sad feelings.
• 4:20
  We make all kinds of feelings out of comparison. Right? Sort of, I think there's a term for when you state the utterly obvious, but sometimes that's what the dharma teachings are doing. We don't always know that we make these feelings out of nothing. We don't have to do that.
• 4:43
  Right? But the way the mind works is if it's not interrupted, its patterning just tends to play out and self replicate. So, comparison is interesting to examine, or I found this interesting for me to contemplate. And one of the reasons that comparison happens so easily is that this world is made of difference. The only reason you can be aware of something is because it's not the same as something else.
• 5:20
  This world is made of difference. Nothing is the same. Everything has a uniqueness, has a distinction, at least a little bit. And because our awareness is not separate from the world, we notice difference continually. So a human being cannot live life and not notice that others are different than them.
• 5:47
  This is how the mind is designed. This is how the brain is structured. We register difference. No difference, no awareness. The reason that anything happens at all is because it's different than the previous moment.
• 6:03
  Right? So seeing difference is so fundamental. Right? There's a name for this in Mahayana teachings. It's called discriminating wisdom as in a structure of our awareness, and it basically means difference is intimately known.
• 6:26
  Right? You don't mistake a cow for a goat. You don't mistake hot for cold. It's completely, intimately obvious. But this noticing of difference, which has to be continual because every single person is different, every single moment is different, easily flows into comparison.
• 6:55
  It's like the like, staying with just pure difference is very hard to do. The mind has to make something out of difference, or it's conditioned to make, to elaborate on difference, and it very easily flows into various versions of comparison. Like, they have what I don't have, which is actually a fact. Everybody has what we don't have. True.
• 7:27
  They are what I am not. That's a fact. Everybody is not what we are on one level. There is another level to things. Awareness of difference is prior to comparing mind.
• 7:46
  I remember a long time ago, there was a discussion at the monastery that was based around a lot of the dharma teachings say that there's a moment of experience prior to mental interpretation. And somebody was like, That is just not true. No way. Experience and how I feel about it or how I think about it are not separable. And later through practice, this person changed their mind.
• 8:15
  They came to see, no. It is possible to stay in immediacy. In fact, a lot of what we're training to do is just learning to stay in the immediacy, in this case, of difference. So what to do about this kind of comparing? Because regret, it can be a very, very heavy emotion.
• 8:53
  Or envy can be a very heavy emotion. We easily make envy, we can make jealousy, we can make, I got the short end of the stick, and that is a very painful state to live in. Now, the faith mind poem, affirming faith in mind, is saying, through meditation, you can just learn to stop. In a way, these old Zen masters are just like, stop that. You have comparing lines, stop that.
• 9:30
  And you say, can't and they say meditate. In some sense, that's your birthright to just stop with direct experience, just to be with, just to just to be with. Right? Because you are Is ness, you can remember Is ness. Because that is the basic nature of awareness, it's actually not that difficult to train in resting at that place.
• 10:03
  And you rest at that place, and then you watch the difference between just pure difference and what the mind makes out of that difference. Right? And then envy and jealousy lose their potency. Realize, I can do that. My mind has that capability, but why?
• 10:27
  What for? What do we gain? Do we gain anything from comparing mind? Sometimes it reveals to us what we care about. If we decode it, I compare myself to those whose life embodies something that I wish to bring forward in myself.
• 10:50
  Okay. That's about as much as you can get out of comparison. And when we can't seem to do that, when we can't seem to just stop that operation of the mind, what can we do? Well, I've thought I've thought a lot about this. Wondering what are the other recourses to comparing mind?
• 11:19
  And we could ask, you could contemplate like this, and this is something to hang out with, not to ask yourself once, but to really feel into, especially in the midst of comparing mind when there's an object of comparison in your mind. We could ask, Safety and health aside, is someone else's life actually desirable? Do you actually want to have someone else's situation? If if first answer is yes or if you have yes, the next question might be, how would you know? How do you know someone else's life is desirable?
• 12:08
  Again, safety and health and all of those basic human necessities alive. If you're not experiencing that life, how do you know that you would want that? Part of what is meant by wisdom in Buddhism is just looking with eyes of impermanence, just looking through the truth of impermanence. If someone else has something, in this case they have something we don't, well, it also means they're going to un have that at some point. In a way, nobody has anything.
• 12:50
  They don't have it. It's a temporary configuration in their life. It too is going to, at some point, change. Also, if somebody has something we don't have, that also means there are some good experiences we don't have, but it also means there are some bad experiences we don't have. Right?
• 13:19
  So at some point, I thought, wow, where my partner and I, we really missed the era of $200,000 houses in Portland. But I've had plenty of friends who got those $200 houses and have put a $100,000 into those houses that they didn't know was coming. There are almost no exceptions to this, truth that for everything we envy or think, I would rather have that life, it's a mixed bag. That life you would rather have is gonna come with the good and the bad. Do you really want someone else's life?
• 14:05
  Is someone else's life actually desirable? How about is a past version of ourselves actually desirable? When we're middle age and we're pining to be 20 again. Do you remember what a burden it was to be that horny? It was terrible.
• 14:34
  Or that competitive or whatever it was or that unsure of who you are. And no offense to the 20 year olds who are not horny and not competitive and sure of who you are. More more power to you. But from the mind that compares, it kind of edits things. It really simplifies things down to that is more desirable than this.
• 15:06
  So again, maybe wanting what others have, what's coded in that is wanting to have our own experience of something. And when we compare ourselves to somebody, we don't really want their partner or house or job. We can't know that we really want it because we don't we can't know it because we don't actually have it. It's just really a picture in our minds. But what we might want or what might be coded in that is that it points to a road that we could start walking towards our version of that experience.
• 15:50
  And all the while, we actually walk in a kind of in in the midst of comparison and how it angles us towards being other than we are, we look away from the completeness that is actually right here, which is in a way the subject of many talks, so I'm not gonna dwell on that too much. So this is, a world of difference. Right? And people manifest differently. People are not the same.
• 16:27
  People are very different on so many levels. And the universe is a free space that doesn't reject the array of manifestations of people, even though we might like to reject them. Even though some of the manifestations of people are rightly, repulsive to us morally. But whatever the universe is, it allows all these manifestations freely. And so negative comparison is a very easy thing to get drawn into.
• 17:12
  In a way, the inspiration for this talk and my core message is I was noticing that I have a practice. I don't know exactly where it came from, but I have a practice of whenever judgment is in the air, I tend to think, Oh, but I'm like that too. Or I could be like that. And I feel like that's an important practice for dharma practitioners is to see like that. Whenever we start comparing negatively, feeling better than, I could be just like that.
• 17:52
  Right? It's like if we think that people manifesting differently means ultimately different from me, dharma is being forgotten. Something vital about dharma is being forgotten. I am temporarily in this manifestation that is not that manifestation. Or you are temporarily in this manifestation that's not that manifestation.
• 18:18
  And they are temporarily in that manifestation that is not this manifestation. But that's just temporary. Right? If I'm confined to a tight view of time, I see selves that are ultimately this or that. I see a world of sort of hard objects.
• 18:39
  The mind making mind making people into hard objects. But to train, to practice seeing beings as temporarily temporarily manifesting the way they are because of particular conditionings. And then knowing I could be just like that, or actually in a way deeper, I'm I'm like that. Whatever I see, if I can see it, I'm like that. And when this is really hard to do, it's helpful to, use contemplation.
• 19:24
  In like technical Buddhist terms, this would be contemplating causes and conditions to diffuse sort of a hard and rigid view of somebody or some kind of people or of ourselves. Right? For example, with certain conditioning, with our fears being marketed to, with certain needs for safety or resources, I could be exactly like that. It's it's the self view. It's the self that I have some immutable essence that makes me different from other beings that causes me to think otherwise.
• 20:11
  The right conditions, the right situation, the right catalyst, I could be exactly like someone else, especially in the absence of spiritual practice. I have an instinctual nature. I have mental conditioning. I have social pressures, and therefore, I am susceptible to transforming into any unsavory character. I could be like that.
• 20:44
  I could be just like that. As an antidote for the way in which judgment happens and we start sort of removing ourselves from the human being. Right? The unsavory characters are not separate. They're our own potential.
• 21:06
  It's temporarily manifesting. I can be like that too. I could be like that. There's another level at this at which you could practice. For example, right now, could be aware of your being, the experience of being you, and be aware of someone else at the same time.
• 21:43
  It's exactly the same awareness. You happen to occupy your so called subjective interior. But the awareness of you right now and the awareness of this right now is exactly the same awareness. That's true with everything we see. Right?
• 22:11
  It's completely intimate to us. The differences are this undivided awareness. Could even say the unsavory character that we so easily compare or the person that we desire or the thing that we desire is exactly this awareness. How else would you experience it? Right.
• 22:43
  Right here, this poem, The Faith Mind, says, the one way knows no differences. This true unified awareness knows no differences, but the foolish mind clings to distinctions of this and that as being ultimately true. In a way, the summary of my whole talk is difference is indestructible. It's never gonna go away, but comparison is optional. And that's all seamlessly experienced.
• 23:35
  So if you, sometimes like me, find the ambiance of who you're with or your own watching this or that starts pulling you into comparing mind. And if you feel that it's dissonant, try try this practice. Try really looking at that person not as a as a thing, but in this way. Think, I could be just like that. Feel the truth of that.
• 24:07
  I could be just I could be just like that. And then see what happens.
• 24:23
  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.