Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Advice To An 18 Year Old Practitioner- Hogen, Roshi and Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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Advice To An 18 Year Old Practitioner- Hogen, Roshi and 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 morning, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to those who have never been here before. Welcome to those who took a chance on us for the first time today. We just had a four day silent meditation retreat here that was for folks under 35 years old.
• 0:48
  So a good amount of the people in this room are here from all over the country to have been here to participate in that retreat. And it was sponsored by, is sponsored by an organization called Darmagates. And Darmagates is a nonprofit that is funded by older folks mostly who feel that the practice of dharma has really changed their life, has been of deep benefit to them. And so they donate so that young people can come to retreats at low to no cost. They basically just have to get here.
• 1:30
  And it's a wonderful organization. And we had a great retreat. And Hogan suggested him and I get up here and do this talk. This wonderful person has been my teacher since 2003. And trained very closely with him night and day here for sixteen years.
• 1:54
  And he said we should just get up here and see what happens. So we don't actually have a plan or a particular topic. But I had one idea, and that was to ask Hogan Roshi, what advice would you give your 18 year old self who went to Rochester Zen Center and it was practicing then?
• 2:23
  Hogen: Actually it was Jogin's idea that I'd be up here, it wasn't mine. Jogan said, They've been hearing from me for days, so why don't you come up and do something else? And I said, Well, alright, see what happens, because often we can bring things out in one another that we can't bring out by ourselves. So I'm very delighted to be here, delighted to see everyone. And when I was 18 and when I'm now 75, a few decades more, probably twice what Jogan's age, right?
• 2:56
  Jogen: I'm 47.
• 2:57
  Hogen: 47. Alright. Not quite twice. I've been around for a long time. The number one thing that I would encourage myself as a younger person and everybody here and Jogan, always is to have confidence.
• 3:11
  Have deep confidence. You know, there's this teaching in dharma, four noble truths. Is this on? Turn it on. There's this there's this teaching in Buddhism, four noble truths.
• 3:25
  The third noble truth is liberation is possible. That it is possible even in the vicissitudes of our life, even in the difficulties of the political and economic and social ups and downs. It is possible to find meaning, to find stability, to find clarity and to engage fully in one's life purpose. So that is possible. It was possible for me when I was 18 and it was possible now when I'm 75 or almost 76.
• 3:55
  So that's my essential advice to all of us, all the time. So what was the essence of this retreat? What was the essence that you were trying to communicate to this group?
• 4:07
  Jogen: The essence I was trying to communicate was, first of all, as far as our internal sense of suffering and difficulty, the first real experiment to do is 100% non resistance to one's experience. What is left? What is available when we have a feeling moving through our body, or we have a state of mind, or we have a life situation. What actually changes when we 100% say I'm not going to resist this, I'm going to experience it. And I'm not going to experience it as a passive victim of it, but I'm going to experience it within the context of awareness.
• 4:56
  And discover a couple things. One thing we can discover is that everything is in transit through us. Seems like so obvious it could be like a bumper sticker, Buddhism, everything changes. Great. So what?
• 5:12
  But if you have despair, if you have sadness, if you have anxiety, if you have physical pain, and you actually do the practice of watching how something moves through you, and something in you doesn't quite move, that is very liberating. It's very empowering. And it's not something the culture invites us to actually do. So the experiment of total non resistance. And then I'm interested in the dharma gate of total yielding to experience.
• 5:52
  It's one thing to not resist, to not be actively fighting with what we're feeling. It is another thing to align with what we are in any given moment so fully that the past and the future fall away. And that's something everybody can taste because you have a life, you have either yielding or not yielding to it. And to taste what happens when we just embrace this so fully. That was one of my intentions.
• 6:31
  Hogen: So that sounds great. But I was talking this morning to a professional wobbler. You know, not this, not that, can't do this, can't do that, maybe what about the future? So how do you how do you you're dealing with a professional wobbler, you know? What do you do?
• 6:48
  How do you how do you go forward with that? You know, I give myself fully to my wobbling, give myself fully to my indecision, I give myself fully to to not knowing. What about the future? How do you deal with that?
• 7:04
  Jogen: Yeah. That's a very good question.
• 7:07
  Hogen: Thank you.
• 7:09
  Jogen: Might send them to Hogan Roshi. That's the real answer. Yeah. So this practice, what is unique about it in the world is that we really stop. We stop and we let that wobbling happen within this commitment to feel and to experience.
• 7:37
  And I think it's a different thing to be wobbling, than it is to do the experiment of stopping and let that wobbling arise within the steadiness of a community sitting together. Or the steadiness of the teachings which give confidence. So I guess I would invite that person to Sunday program.
• 7:59
  Hogen: So I'm sitting here, my mind is calm, you know, no problems, at ease, wobbling, not wobbling, whatever the case may be. But I don't know what to do with my life. I don't know what the future is going to hold. I don't know where to go forward. I've to earn a living.
• 8:16
  I've got to Do I become educated? What do I do with myself? How do you answer those questions which are on people's hearts?
• 8:24
  Jogen: Do you want to go first? No. On
• 8:29
  Hogen: here is a provocateur.
• 8:33
  Jogen: Twenty something years. Yeah. Well, let's say that somebody is doing this practice. I'll speak from that point of view. You're doing this practice and you then are opening the ability to listen to your life in a different way than maybe is normally possible.
• 9:06
  You can listen to your life with your body. You're inhabiting it enough that you can feel what opens it and what contracts it. You can read that opening and that contracting. You can feel your energy and what brings you alive or what scares you. And you might be able to figure out the difference between what scares you that you should step away from and what scares you that you should step forward to.
• 9:37
  We can see that if I make a life plan that's only based on my own happiness and pleasure, it becomes so tight. It becomes so narrow. We start thinking about what should I do and with the reflection of the teachings we can see what an interesting, how tight my scope is. What if I ask what would be of benefit, not just for me, not just for my partner, not just even for my family, but what if I include other circles? And then I think again through the teachings we can think about cause and effect.
• 10:17
  First of all, there are echoes moving through us from our life already. Maybe the answer is already there. We just have to follow through with something that is not so easy to follow through with or that needs to be picked back up. But also, what I do is going to have an effect. Right?
• 10:38
  My twenties are going to be a major force in how my thirties look, and how I spend my thirties, and what kind of mind and body and actions I take in my thirties are going to have a major effect on my forties and so on. And so, the proposition is that if we contemplate in a kind of bigger way than might be the reflexive, oh no, I got to figure out what I'm going to do. Let me just sign up for grad school, which may be a great choice. I know some of you are signing up for grad school. Then with those like different angles of contemplation, I think we're more likely to make a choice that's coming out of a deep discernment.
• 11:24
  And the good news is we can pivot. We can pivot. Nothing is nothing is fixed and you know a lot of the things I did when I was a teenager, never thought they would have any like valuable bearing on my life. I thought I was just messing around. And now they're actually of value.
• 11:43
  Things I've learned. Things I was interested in. There's a way to apply them. So Especially if we're really trying to be a person of integrity. And we have some practice that helps us see into the mind, we can't really go wrong.
• 12:04
  We're just going to respond the best we can. I didn't plan for my life at all and I think that turned out pretty okay.
• 12:15
  Hogen: So when you were young, you used to do ice hockey, and I hope that helped that helped help who you are now. But the future is always unknown. We never know what's gonna happen next. We lift our foot, and we don't we don't know if it's gonna touch the ground. It's probability, of course, but it's but it's we never really know.
• 12:33
  So here all all all of us, I don't know. It's a mystery, it's it's a mystery. I don't know. I try to make the right decision, but I don't know. How do we face this darkness that surrounds us?
• 12:50
  Well I like
• 12:50
  Jogen: that space. I think not knowing adds a vibrancy to life. Like I really like that we didn't know what we were going to do. I didn't have to have some big plan when I got up here what I was going to say. And there's We can build our capacity for uncertainty.
• 13:09
  What easily the very same energy that can become anxiety can just be a kind of bubbling appreciation for things just appear when they appear. And it's very interesting. And it's not that we don't have intuition. It's not that the future is going to completely blindside us. Everybody knows something of what human life is going to bring their way, right?
• 13:40
  Hogen: Old age, sickness, and death.
• 13:41
  Jogen: Good stuff's going to come, bad stuff's going to come. Good stuff's going to come, bad stuff's going to come. How much of that is really worth worrying about?
• 14:00
  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.