Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Quiet Power of Worrying Less - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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The Quiet Power of Worrying Less - 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.
• 0:23
  Jogen: I think my talk today sort of winds and meanders a little bit. I probably a coherent theme, but I'm not sure. So maybe it's an amalgamation of things I I've been wanting to share. I was, at a fourth of July barbecue, And I don't know if this is normal among your friend groups, but people were worrying about politics and AI and climate change and preppers and alien abductions and middle age because we're getting middle age. We are middle age.
• 1:07
  And they were worrying. And one person in particular was was like, I worry about this, I worry about that, I worry, I worry. And very innocently, I just said, Why do you worry? And then because I don't worry. And then she came up to me later and she said, That was really striking that you said, why don't you worry?
• 1:32
  Do I have a choice? I said, Yes, you have a choice. Right. And then I described the basics of our practice to her. And of course, first it involves beginning to bear witness to what your mind does.
• 1:54
  That beginning separation where you're like, oh, I'm not this ongoing narrative in the sense that I can observe it. And we talked a little bit about, interrupting thoughts. I called it cutting the tail off. As soon as you notice you're starting to worry, stop because what does it do? If I think about how I was before I learned to do this, I think of worry as a form of self harm, actually.
• 2:29
  Now maybe some of you know somebody who's in their 60s, 70s, 80s, whatever, and they have worried their whole life and their face is actually shaped by that worry at this point. Or their physical or their mental health is shaped by that worry. And I do think it's strange that we do something, so fruitless. It's almost as if worrying masquerades as some efficacious activity. And we think if we do it enough that a) we'll make a different decision or b) like something in the world might magically shift if I worry about it enough.
• 3:13
  But people have done that forever and it's never helped. Now, a concern is not the same as worry. I am not saying you can be un you should not have concerns. I think it is possible spiritually to be free from concern. In fact, that was sometimes a description of some of the old masters.
• 3:38
  They were were people who were unconcerned, but they weren't indifferent. That unconcern came from very penetrating insight into the nature of reality in one's own heart. They didn't just decide to not care about stuff. But concern is not the same as worry. And if you do this work of stopping worrying because you see that it doesn't help you or anybody, you're still left with concern perhaps.
• 4:10
  You're still left with caring for your life, caring for the world. A lot of concern presents as concern about others but it's mostly concern about what happens to them and how that will affect me. Most concern is actually mostly about us and I'm worried about so and so because if they get sick, how will I handle it? I'm worried about the world because if that happens, how will I we can uncover that. But what to do about our concern as, as practitioners?
• 4:55
  I I think about spiritual activism probably mostly as a way of rationalizing that I like to sit down and believe that that does something magical. But I think there is more to it than that. And, you know, people believe some crazy compassionless stuff in this world. I mean, people are believing some crazy stuff. Maybe some of you in this room believe some crazy stuff.
• 5:32
  Many people who believe crazy, compassionless stuff are people in power, and they make decisions that impact many people. Buddha taught that an unchecked mind causes dangers to others. In some sense, our civilization, for example, however you feel about the fact of police, the fact that you can be penalized for an unchecked mind helps keep some degree, some form of order. But an unchecked mind, an untrained mind, if it's not limited in particular ways, it seeks objects to place its fear, its hatred, and its desire. It's almost as if if we don't have an enemy or someone who is wrong or someone who is beneath us, we're profoundly uncomfortable.
• 6:38
  We need the other of some form. That person or group or people who were a little bit better than, we know a little bit more than, we are superior in some way. We have concern in us or we have fear of change and death. We don't have spiritual practice. We don't know what to do with our fear of change and death and so we get angry and right and lusty and we spill that out on the world.
• 7:13
  I know that's rather simplistic but maybe not. So the fear of change and death drives people to imagine and then believe really weird shit about other people mainly. And then you add the amplifying force of tribalism and groupthink to the mix. This is why I often, in my talks, I poke fun at Buddhisticness. I poke fun at it because if we become tribalistic or elitist or in group y, then we lose the living dharma medicine.
• 7:55
  Then actually, don't want to be in this club if it's exclusive. Here. I resign. Now, one way to think about the world, and as I say, when I believe, there isn't the world, there's your world, which is the world you're able to experience based on your perspective and scope of awareness. But what's happening in our worlds, what's happening now is not solely caused by now.
• 8:33
  It was seeded in the past. So if you're worried about this or that, it has been in the making. Some of it for decades, some of it for centuries, some of it for eight years or whatever. Right? Worldviews and ways of seeing are passed on.
• 8:54
  And worldviews and ways of seeing gather body. Right? That's part of how karma works. The more you think something, whether individually or collectively, the more it gathers a kind of psychic body as a belief system. And the longer it endures, the harder it is to break it up.
• 9:15
  I mean, it kind of gets fibrous. So what's happening now is the embodiment of this state of mind. Yes. But it's mostly passed down from previous nows. So if we don't like what's happening now, we might have some ability to counter what's happening now.
• 9:40
  If you're a politician, you might have some real power. There are people who have more power than we do in different situations. But in a lot of ways, you can't stop what's happening now because the cause of now is the past. What we can do is seed causes for future arisings. This place and this community was the fruition of decades of practice that culminated in a place like this existing.
• 10:21
  Somebody didn't just one day decide it would be a good idea to have a zen temple in Portland and make it happen. Things don't come out of nowhere. So you could say that we take a long view as practitioners as far as thinking of spiritual activism. This is the result of previous actions. You can't stop those previous actions now, whatever this you point to.
• 10:52
  You can't do anything about them. You can see different states of mind. Sometimes you have the power to counter what's going on. Yeah. If you're somebody with a brilliant mind and AI, you might be someone who has some power right now to start trying to get a more ethical sensibility into these companies.
• 11:16
  I have a person I work with who is part of some Stanford lab that is now and I guess a number of those people are part of a OpenAI or one of these companies. And a good number of these very smart young people feel like there's two years left. That's it. There's two years left of us as human beings. It's a very cheerful view.
• 11:45
  I think it's a little extreme, but they're the smart people. And he said that he has decided he's just gonna live his life to the fullest for these two years he has left, but he's not gonna buy a house. He's not gonna have any children. He's not gonna think about long term partnership because the probability of there being more than two years is really slim. But his friends are still in San Francisco trying to get make ethics happen.
• 12:12
  They have power. That brings me on to my next point is if you have concern, what is your real power? We don't all have equal power in this world. We have power according to our race, class, educational background, gender, wealth, situation, interest, etcetera. We have different situations of power.
• 12:45
  The Buddha, for example, had no problem teaching the what was in India, the ultra wealthy. I don't know if they would even be like lower class American in wealth compared to, you know, what they had. But relative to other people, they were the wealthy. He had no qualms whatsoever. There was no sense that, oh yeah, you're sometimes we give a free pass in judging the wealthy.
• 13:13
  Oh, the wealthy. But the Buddha didn't really do that. And I think one of the reasons was these people have power to be of benefit. There are different kinds of power. That's a different, talk.
• 13:28
  So we might have different degrees of power, but often we have to bear the fruitions of the past while seeding future results. Myself, I think feeding and supporting dharma communities is a most beautiful form of caring for human beings. Right? And I try to seed and support universalist dharma communities that don't have elitism as a feature. Now, what can you do if you wish to counter loveless groupthink?
• 14:04
  What can you do if you have concern? If we say we can't do anything, that's really not true. Like, what is that when we say we can't do anything? Like, we hooked into despair or indifference or laziness or I find some instruction in Tibetan religious culture. There's something called liberation through seeing and liberation through hearing.
• 14:36
  And the idea is that Tibetan religious folks believe if one person even sees the mantra of Avalokiteshvara, Om Mani Padmehom, to even see that and have it make an impression on a consciousness for one moment is to seed wisdom and compassion in that being in a future life. And because wisdom and compassion are seeded in a being, universalist wisdom and compassion, that eventually will liberate that person and everyone they come into contact with because of the Bodhisattva vow. And so they have mantras everywhere. I've not been to Tibet. I've only seen pictures.
• 15:19
  And I know the actual culture is more complex than this. Thank you. Mantras everywhere. Right? Because to even see that is to plant a seed that can change someone's world.
• 15:37
  So your practice as it is, and I don't have an opinion or an idea about your practice as it is actually, sidebar, is not meaningless. It's not an acausal thing that you're doing. To let your state of mind be a counterpoint to worry, to indifference, to polarize righteousness. I didn't have any particular intention of I don't don't bring, like I don't I'm not like a I don't have Buddhism on my sleeve. Right?
• 16:19
  I didn't have any intention of trying to teach this person something. She was just like, I worry. I worry. I worry. I was like, why would you do that?
• 16:27
  Ding. Right? Ding. Something kind of caught for her. You know, she's she's thinking about her consciousness in a way she never has.
• 16:37
  If one person's suffering being reduced is not meaningful, then why would 10,000 people's suffering being reduced be meaningful? Think about that. And sometimes there's sort of this argument that what we do doesn't matter because a 100,000 people are suffering. But if one person's suffering going down matters, It's it's they both have to matter or neither matter. So let your state of mind be a quiet force.
• 17:14
  You don't actually know. You don't actually know, the effect of it. And if we actually influence one person, if your mother-in-law is like, wow, you're not pissed off and freaked out like everybody else, how do you do that? Or whatever other examples. Because if one person not suffering doesn't matter, then what does?
• 17:48
  Second, support organizations that have the fragrance of love. What's what's the fragrance of love? Well, my opinion is they don't perform the contradiction of hard othering. Right? Sometimes you have organizations that are like, we're we're so on the side of the right and fuck all those other people.
• 18:17
  They are idiots. That's not the fragrance of love, actually. That appears to be helping, but the backside is the effect of that state of mind. Right? You call out actions, but not people.
• 18:37
  So support organizations that have the fragrance of love. Does they take a stand on issues not to favor one group over another but through their different tendals to defend, to uplift? Are you people who need that? Because some of us don't have power besides our whatever we can contribute, but that gathers in people who do have the know how and power to do something. It's really not insignificant.
• 19:11
  There aren't any perfect groups. There are no perfect groups. This is the conditioned world. You're never gonna meet a perfect person or a perfect being, a perfect whatever. It's such a fantasy.
• 19:26
  And sometimes I think, cultural cynicism has a sort of looking for the imperfections of things right away. And you, if sometimes if you Google in like a spiritual teacher, the first thing that Google feeds you is because people searched it, the scandals of so and so. People just wanna know, can I what's what's gone wrong here? Maybe there are times where that's important, but is that the first thing we think about? Is that the first thing we do?
• 19:59
  Do we look for what's wrong with a group or a person? Do we look for the weakness? Guess what? You will find the weakness. Guess what?
• 20:12
  You will not find the person or the group without the weakness. This is the condition world. There is nothing perfect anywhere on the phenomenal level. If only because everything is unstable and being act on by forces that change it. Everything if it's if it's having some stable existence, it has to in a way, fight against all the things in the world that wish to mutate it.
• 20:40
  Just like you. The world wishes to mutate you in some ways that aren't great, and you have to push against that or you will be mutated. Organizations are like that too. So, generosity is core to our practice. It's core to our practice because to not be giving in some way means that we're really clinging to ourselves or or fear really has us to have a life where there's no, like, outflow of the different things that can outflow.
• 21:22
  Of course, it's not just money we're talking about here. Sometimes money is easy. Sometimes it's not. The third, it's not really a point. It's more a I'm gonna have a question to share with you is, have we really exhausted possibilities?
• 21:53
  Is this world a place where everything has been done? Do you believe that? For example, if we care about having a world that is caring, is it have we really thought through what what is possible? Are all the avenues exhausted? Right?
• 22:20
  What is creative spiritual activism? What is generative spiritual activism? I don't think it helps to tell people that they're wrong, that they think wrong. I think when people tell me I think wrong, I don't think about what they're thinking. I think I'm not wrong, you're wrong.
• 22:44
  That's the knee jerk response. I see a lot of, I only dreadfully go on Facebook like once a month in order to do particular things and it's like walking through a town littered with corpses. If you're not there very often, it's a horrific place. It's so terrible. And I'm just I'm amazed at how much people put energy into pointing out how other people are thinking wrong and how right we think.
• 23:14
  And I don't know, is that maybe there's some function of feeling better, like having camaraderie? But it seems like they're thinking that that's a helpful thing to do. But I think it's a bunch of rotting digital corpses. How do we make deep respect for all being sexy? That's the question.
• 23:41
  How do we make non certainty and openness a meme? That's really interesting. Can't say we've exhausted those possibilities. I don't think so. So right now, I'm I'm with a friend of mine.
• 23:57
  We're practicing with different designs of a sticker that says, love all beings. It feels better. But she was like, oh, that's a little bit like, you know, like, love all beings, it feels better. So we're kinda trying to fine tune it so that it can, you know, maybe land better. Then we're gonna pass them out in your town, wherever that may be.
• 24:32
  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.