Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The River That Holds Us - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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The River That Holds Us - 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.
• 0:21
  Jogen: Taking refuge in Buddha, taking refuge in Dharma, taking refuge in Sangha family, Thank you so much for your continued diligent practice. In the morning, the verse we've been doing is the verse of the Kesa in Japanese, Daisai Gedap Pu Ku Musou Fu Ku Den E Hibu Nyorai Kyo And here's a kind of free translation of that. Great, embraced in the fabric of liberation. This no form, no limit, no walls, field of bright empowerment. Naked thus body, clothed of truth, all beings set free.
• 1:27
  Great embraced in the fabric of liberation. It's clear we have very good fortune to have material conditions such that we can do this. Many, many do not. Right now, it's good fortune to be choosing a harmonious mode of being. That we can join in a container like this and put aside some of our comforts for a collective higher purpose.
• 2:04
  Right now, it's great good fortune to choose the disposition, to be choosing over and over, to look directly at mind, to look directly through mind, not allowing oneself to be a mistreated servant of mind. And some of you have reported seeing that thinking mind poses as a solver of problems. It pretends to be a solver of problems, diligently working away. But that when you unmask it with direct seeing, you see that thinking mind is mostly a weaver of problems. Pretends to solve them, actually it's mostly making them.
• 3:00
  And in your quiet mind you're seeing that a great majority of them, if only for a moment when it simply ceased to exist. So, in right relationship to discriminating mind, we can walk freely, we can sit freely, we can eat freely, we can sleep freely. And I feel compassion when I think of how many people because the anxious mind is invested with so much authority, they cannot so much as eat or sleep peacefully. A miracle of being to just eat, to just hear a sound, to let it all just function freely. The good news is that this dharma we are embodying and celebrating right now is actually functioning for everyone.
• 4:11
  It functions as everyone. Believed or not, recognized or not, able to be lived in activity or not. You are alive with the wish to recognize, to go beyond belief. But even so, it is so. This breath is this breath, not pinned down by ideas about this breath.
• 4:47
  You can't catch it, you can't box it up. This moment, gone as you name it and fresh as ever, And we can't mess that up. The good news is that this dharma right now is more profound than states of peace. States of peace, many of you have verified that if you try to grasp after something, you tasted before, even a moment before, that grasping is a wall that confines you. The profound open handedness that this way is.
• 5:48
  Profound open handedness. What is it here now that allows for excitation of the mind or tranquility to arise at all? Whatever this state of being is for you, what is it that allows that to happen at all here and now? What is it that allows for a heartbeat to happen? Right now, your ground as the unmoving one that contains all moving.
• 6:57
  Hold your ground as the unmoving one and just slip out of time for a few moments. A poem by Edith Sordogran. I was alone on a sunny shore. I was alone on a sunny shore by the forest's pale blue lake. In the sky floated a single cloud and on the water a single aisle.
• 7:34
  The ripe sweetness of summer dripped in beads from every tree and straight into my opened heart a tiny drop ran down. This dharma right now is more generous than simply being the absence of states we don't like. We confine this. Oh, I need a new word, I'm getting tired of the word 'dharma'. We can find this by simply being not anxiety or we can find it by simply being, Oh.
• 8:25
  This is this when it's calm. There are some people who unwind so fully in quiet mind, So patiently, they release agenda. That insights just come in their own time in an organic way. And there are some people who can bring forward their curiosity, where there is a person in us who can bring forward their curiosity and give life, give vividness to this life that is already unfolding in this freeway. What is this moment made of?
• 9:30
  Ask yourself that in all innocence. Look now at a sight, hear a sound, feel a sensation, or take it in all at once. What is this made of? Look, feel, don't think these inquiries are not about speculation. What is this breath made of?
• 10:06
  Oxygen is the wrong answer. Chi is the wrong answer. What is this breath made of? Experience what this moment is made of. Atoms and quarks and minerals are not direct experiences.
• 10:40
  Feel what the universe is made of. It's not one moment behind you and one moment ahead. What is this thought made of? Look, feel. Allowing thought to arise.
• 11:06
  What is it made of? What is this mind made of? We're really activating our faculty of wonder and when we do, an answer is not the point. The first beautiful thing is the surface chatter gives way a little bit. The surface chatter begins to bow down before deep curiosity.
• 11:57
  What is this moment made of? It has been said that Buddha nature is impermanence. But what is impermanence made of? The mind that heard the beginning of this sentence didn't travel from the past to the present, did it? Where is the knower that heard the first sentence, first word of this sentence?
• 12:42
  Where is the experience or the beginning of the breath at the end? Don't give up at the first, is just the doorknob. Persist in activating wonder. What is this breath made of? It has been said that anything that depends on you thinking about it doesn't truly exist.
• 13:33
  If it goes away when you stop thinking about it, it is not the real. So the third ancestor in inscribing trust in the heart says, When all thought objects disappear, the thinking subject, which doesn't mean, Oh, I stopped thinking about Swiss cheese and therefore Swiss cheese stops. The thinking subject is the sense of I. When all thought objects disappear the thinking subject drops away. Through relaxation and thorough commitment right now dissolve all thoughts.
• 14:38
  You can even dissolve the thought, hey, there's no thought. Feeling breath like this. Feeling sound like this. Reality is without echoes. Reality is without without witnesses.
• 15:21
  Sometimes if we're not careful to understand that the teachings are springboards for direct seeing, for direct attuning, for direct contemplation, then the more we talk about these matters, the more notions stick to us. Believing that what we're trying to do is make something arrive on the level of understanding. Now I understand what the sutra is about. But understanding has no proclamation like that. Understanding doesn't have understanding.
• 16:13
  Actually, right now the unmoving one in you, for that one the dharma is kind of redundant. It's very clear. The capacity for wonder, to stick with wonder. I was very struck when I was beginning practice as a teenager, Doken Zenji said, If you pursued your spiritual questions with the same zest that you pursue, getting someone into bed, awakening will be yours. Bed on it.
• 17:11
  That's my paraphrase of Dogen's. But then someone thinks, I'm not like that. I'm off the hook. But that's not the point. The point is you exercise the faculty of wonder.
• 17:31
  The point is that you bring forward this dharma which you can't excuse yourself from although you could if you want to. Of course, you are you. You don't have someone else's karmic configuration. Your practice isn't supposed to look like Jogan's practice or Peter's practice or whatever. This dharma is a primordial generosity.
• 18:14
  But it's a little bit different if we verify it. It's very different if we have a hunger to verify it. Then we need to verify it. Emily Dickinson said, The infinite, a sudden guest. The infinite, a sudden guest has been assumed to be.
• 18:42
  But how can that stupendous come which never departed thee? Despite the testimony of very confident thoughts that we are stuck or that we're hot stuff or that we are worse than or better than or same as fill in the blank. It is officially declared that such very confident thoughts are fake news generated by artificial intelligence with a poorly programmed algorithm. My mind is mostly fake news. The chatter mind at least.
• 19:38
  Right now, don't have a separate self. In the past, didn't have a separate self. And in the future, you won't have a separate self. You hear the teaching in the evening and it says, no self, no fear. And we think that's going be nice someday.
• 19:59
  And then get rid of this thing. No. Uh-uh. Right now you don't have a separate self. In the past you don't have a separate self.
• 20:11
  Actually even when we're being what other people would verify as very selfish, even at that moment there's not a separate self. That's the very reason that you can go from one thing to another. You're unfixed. In the future you won't, you can't have a separate self. Dogenzhengji said, To study the awakened way is to study the self.
• 20:35
  He's saying, To study separation. Where is this thing called mind that looks at body? Where is it? Why do we believe in it? To study awakened way is to study separation, to study separation is to release separation.
• 21:09
  Could you bear being ultimately without problems? Could you bear being ultimately, basically free? Things will be responded to, causes will have their results. Can you accept that right now this is whole, complete, not broken? You like a little bit of drama?
• 21:55
  You like a little bit of drama? Some of you had confessed that you like it a lot. You like drama. Not ready to stop having drama. What some people sit in this place and the disease or the pains that they've traversed in life or whatever have brought them to the place where they are ready to put down drama.
• 22:43
  If you have a emotional or physical, a concept that you have an emotional or physical problem right now, look right at it, zero in on it. That which exists has a location. Where is this affliction or problem? Now if it's a pain, it's not so hard to find it. What if it's emotional?
• 23:18
  Whatever that means. An emotional problem. Try and locate that. There's some styles of mind that can't locate an emotional problem and then go looking for one. Human beings love soap operas.
• 23:52
  But even just work with a physical unpleasantry, which you probably have one of those. So tune into that whether it's your shoulder or your your whatever. And wonder very directly, where is the Experiencer of this? Where is the one afflicted by this sensation? You cannot find the afflicted one.
• 24:49
  You have to keep on over and over not finding the afflicted one. This thought I is like this this feeling thought symbol that so much turmoil swirls around. There are so many fully alive beings that don't have this thing, this idea that turmoil swirls around like animals. Wonder in all sincerity, what does this thought I refer to here and now? You could just think one of your usual I thoughts.
• 26:06
  I'm just not that kind of person. What is the I of that thought referring to here and now? See, just like that. Easy. No more problems.
• 26:39
  Experience appears. But when opposition drops away, the opposition of I experienced that, obstructions cease to be, they have to. You're an ultimately frictionless being. You're totally frictionless. Things arise and they pass at the same moment.
• 27:10
  Nothing sticks to you. You could be renewing it right now. That's what the experience of being stuck is. The experience of being stuck is being well practiced and thinking the thought feeling, I'm stuck. Or in thinking that thought in response to a particular repeating sensation.
• 27:32
  It arises again and again and I make a thought. Oh. Conventionally we all, I think, would agree we have a life to respond to. A life with weeds and flowers. A life with dense things and soft things.
• 27:59
  A life with sweet things and bitter things. Flavors exist and are not the same. Nobody is saying your pain is pleasurable. Nobody's saying your sorrow is happiness. If we wonder closely about those things, we might find there's a lot more in common with all of these than the brain can approach.
• 28:42
  Response happens. Flow doesn't stop. It's like, it's like we're always floating. Right now, right now you are floating in space. Right now you are floating in sound.
• 29:16
  Right now you're being carried in rivers of tingle and pressure. Heat pulsation. Right now you're being breathed. Right now there are sights, and you don't do that. Right now there are sounds, and you can't claim to be the doer, the hearer of those.
• 30:00
  We're carried along in a river of being. We're held, we suffused in the heart of life. But the fearful mind is free to thrash around. And then we seem to sink. Or because of that fear or mistrust we seem to drown.
• 30:32
  Even the thrashing and the sinking and the seeming to drown are being carried along in the river of being. Held and suffused in the source of life. You cannot take a step where the ground will not eventually meet your feet. And maybe we have mostly only known people to thrash about or to mistrust the river. It's kind of what mostly human culture is.
• 31:31
  It's people thrashing about and mistrusting the river, trying to build castles. This is one reason why maturing our practice and beginning to live it out in our activity is an offering to others in a world of thrashing people. People who float a bit. You embodying the trust of this moment, you are suffused by the source of life, you are animated. I don't have any idea what the next word is coming out of my mouth and neither would you.
• 32:24
  In a world of thrashing people, people who float a bit or a bit of hope in the world. The way is perfect like vast space where there's no lack and no excess. This open attention and feel, appreciate everything happening all at once. Body pulsing, sounds vibrating, space and light. Open this attention as wide as possible.
• 33:52
  Open it so wide the word becomes redundant. The world is puny compared to this mind. Feel it beyond the edges of the room. Feel how this and the body bleed into each other, are not different. Close with the poem.
• 35:10
  Heart sleeps in the deep forest of mind silence. Love aligns itself against thingness, innocent of demand. I had forgotten the carpet of tiny flowers blossoming wherever you tread. Anyway, you are lovelier than remembrance could. Now, waking again from the slumber of worldliness, I can see we are spun and woven together.
• 35:43
  Odd the detoura water that makes us forget and dream phantasms of danger. Detoura is one of those psychedelics that you should never take. How odd the detourable water that makes us forget and dream phantasms of danger. We see a vast nakedness of freedom and open expanse of possibility, we call it death. We see a miasma of reproductive imperatives and resource allocation management, we call it love.
• 36:28
  Comforting habits are wisdom's worst enemy. Whatever protects you from emptiness seems a friend. It is not. Existentialists turn the words emptiness, nothingness into dread. A backward philosophy protecting the chattering mind.
• 36:57
  When you go from bright daylight into a dark room, you can't see anything. But the eyes adjust and soon enough you can see your home with its tables, chairs, sofa, and bed. The story is old as Plato. The path is a time passing wherein your eyes adjust. Meditation, contemplation, devotion are words describing the heart's eyes adjusting.
• 37:32
  And then, they see and you remember. You remember this vastness so alive that even the word life stands next to it, pale and embarrassed. You fell asleep and dreamed a place of only births and deaths, toil and loss. Seeing now things as they are, first you will sob with sorrow for having taken a dungeon for a home. Seeing now things as they are, first you will sob with sorrow for having taken a dungeon for a home.
• 38:15
  Then you will sob for joy. Heart sleeps in the deep forest of mind's silence. Love aligns itself against thingness, innocent of demand. You are engaged, we are engaged together in the most profound, the most precious. All the words fell short of touching the gift of recognizing your true heart.
• 39:00
  Please, if you vacillate, come back to your vow. Please, if you wonder, don't drop it. Please, if you hurt, feel it all the way to the core, don't dance around it as only a problem. Please continue for the benefit of all beings. Thank you.
• 39:37
  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.