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New podcasts every Tues, Thurs and Sat. Here you can find talks from various teachers involved with the Zen Community of Oregon. We share talks from our retreats, as well as our different weekly offerings between Great Vow Zen Monastery and Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple.
Zen Community of Oregon's purpose is to express and make accessible the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha’s teachings, as transmitted through an authentic, historical lineage. To support and maintain Zen Buddhist practice in order to realize and actualize our Buddha nature in everyday life.
For more information, please visit zendust.org.
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.
Speaker 2:I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha. Tonight, I want to address something simply because I haven't myself heard a Dharma talk about it or heard it spoken to, and in a way I have a very simple point that I'll try to fill the time with. And my point is, as follows.
Speaker 2:People, and I don't know how many people, how common it is, but there are people, and you may be one of them, who have an inborn sense of the divine or awakening or God or love or whatever you may call it. There's something you already know. You already know. You might know it much better than the guy with the robe or the lady with the pointy hat, whatever it may be. And knowing that, but because it is something that is not graspable, which is the nature of spiritual experience, because it's something that you cannot hold onto, because it's something that flirts with you rather than you control, your mind can doubt it.
Speaker 2:Right? Or also is the case somebody can touch something really profound, know something as clear as any mystic of the past knew it, and you're like, I'm not sure what that is. There's this weird thing that happens to me sometimes when I sit down under a tree or I don't know what happens to me. I look at my cat's eyes and like the whole universe explodes. Is there something wrong with me?
Speaker 2:Do I need a pill? Believe it's possible to have doubt about the profound. There's a whole tradition that let's say it's a flavor of spirituality that permeates both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism called pointing out. And what pointing out instruction is in essence is somebody who is confident, However, they've come to that confidence in that experience reflects to you, yes, exactly that. Yes.
Speaker 2:That is vital. Yes. That is worth cherishing, treasuring, recognizing, protecting. And I guess the concern that I have and I didn't know there were people really like this until I started teaching. I wasn't one of those people.
Speaker 2:I've had to work really hard. I didn't know that sometimes people have that inborn sense of the divine, then they come to a tradition that's got so much authority. Buddhism with a capital b. Some guy wrote a book and said it's the best. And then you read the words of Buddhism and you go, I'm not sure if like what I experience maps on to all this stuff like nirvana, buddha nature or whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:And so one could come into the tradition and totally dismiss or not trust or push aside something that they intimately know that they could be, we could say, bringing on to the path. That they could be sitting in the company of the ancestors because they already know it. But it doesn't match the words, the teachings, and you see people trying real hard and wearing funny clothes and you think, well, who am I to trust what I know? That can happen I think. That's basically my whole point.
Speaker 2:I wanna invite you into some kind of guided guided meditations of a sort. And whatever way you resonate or feel into this or imagine into this is good. Okay. See if now you can find your your version of experiencing that this whole moment, every bit of it is God. Every bit of this moment is God.
Speaker 2:From the taste in your mouth to the echo of sound, even the thoughts flitting through consciousness. You look inside, you look outside, there's no non God. In fact, god is looking. And god is aware of the looking. If this is resonant, imagine what it would be like to live in this place, which paradoxically you have to be living in it.
Speaker 2:Or maybe try on, let's say, shift just a little bit. Change key maybe. Everything is love. From the feeling in your belly to the reflection on the wood floor, every memory is love, your anxiety about the future, all of it, everything, nothing excluded, everything is love right now. Like everything is a massage of being, to being, and for being.
Speaker 2:And if it is resonant, still might find that you refresh the sensibility. You what's called in Mahayana, you sustain the view. Everything is love. Inside, outside, past, present, future, no non love. The mind the mind is like air conditioning in a Minnesota winter, completely useless here.
Speaker 2:And let that let that one go if you want. And just really shift register. Not really. Seemingly. Engage the view, the experience that everything is a dream.
Speaker 2:Feel your breath as a dream. Hear your thoughts as a dream. Receive these vibrations as a dream. Look at your hand as in a dream. So life is as real as a dream.
Speaker 2:Where's the dreamer? I don't know. And we'll come back to the realm of the mind a little bit more. So, you know, childhood, I think is so wildly diverse, the experience of that for people and what we actually remember of that, no. Generally, pain is the thing that we most remember.
Speaker 2:Somehow we're we're more wired to retain memories of pain than pleasure, it seems. But what was your childhood sensibility of what the universe is? Can you remember that? And if you can, remember what your childhood sense of the universe was or is because some of us some of us retain our childhood sense, How was that received by your culture? It's the same problem for a spiritual practitioner who's an adult.
Speaker 2:You have the same friction with the culture in a way before even there was any religious or scientific conditioning. Was there a sense of what the universe was before the authorities descended into your mind and told you what a cloud was, told you where things came from? Does that ever just phase in for you now in your life? Let's say you're meditating. Let's say you're not.
Speaker 2:All of a sudden, some kind of knowing dawns. And then what happens? What happens after that? For a lot of people, seems like the mind happens. The rational box happens.
Speaker 2:The yeah, but this doesn't pay rent happens. What was the childhood sense of spirituality? And why is that less true than what some authority says? Is anybody familiar with Ken Wilbur? A little bit.
Speaker 2:Somebody who's into that world could listen to my talk and say, Jogen is doing the pre trans fallacy. I'll tell you what the pre trans fallacy is. The pre trans fallacy is a belief that was probably more prevalent in the new age eighties that spirituality is a regressive state, that if we just act like children, if we just kind of go back to that innocence, that's what awakening is. I mean, that's where the divine is. And many thinkers informed this sort of principle of the pretrans fallacy is that to be before the ego is a particular kind of Garden of Eden like a child.
Speaker 2:But to have an ego and then see beyond it is actually awakening, is actually knowing the divine. You have to know it after you have a personality, after you've fallen into separation, after you fully have bought into being this, mostly this only. You fully bought into it, then you can wake up. If you've not fully bought into it, there's no waking up because waking up is waking up from feeling that you're only this. Anyways, that was just for the Wilbers.
Speaker 2:The Wilberites, who I think are going extinct and is probably just fine. Did you, when you were younger, have a sense of a prayerful sense? It's almost like an animistic sense, really. I was thinking, oh, if I say the word prayer, some people cringe because they have church trauma, But then I thought, well, let's call it communicative contemplation. A sense of a sense of communication with the universe.
Speaker 2:Did you have that sense? And then maybe somebody said, don't talk to yourself, only weirdos talk to yourself. I used to go around the playground and I was, Michael Hasselhoff in Knight Rider. If you don't know, you need to know. This was a really good show.
Speaker 2:And I would be talking tonight. A kit was the name of my car which had powers, but it was my version of this. Now, you and I cannot go too far in practice with a closed heart. Sometimes there's this sense that we're doing this clinical thing called meditation. It kinda takes place in our brain.
Speaker 2:We're gonna get really good at the art of attention, and that's kinda basically all of it is all there is to it. But it doesn't really work that way. I don't I have not observed it to work that way Because a closed heart means that there's some kind of imperviousness. There's some we're living in some sense that we're a closed self system. I'm I'm totally just in here, and you're just totally out there, and and there's a reason why there's that closed system because we're not naturally like that.
Speaker 2:In a sense, when we're If we're younger or if now you have it and we have a communicative relationship with the universe, a prayerful universe, there's a kind of permeability that's going on. There's a sort of there's a reciprocity between what we're experiencing and there's there's like it's like there's an intercourse going on with the universe. And if in your practice, you encounter what I'm referring to as a closed heart, great. You're normal. You're in the club of a human being who's been wounded and so you close your heart or who's been disappointed or who is afraid.
Speaker 2:That's we're in that club. Right? I I just have to imagine. But then how do we open beyond that? So if we have had a communicative relationship with the universe, we might know to bring that back in, and one of the ways to bring that back in on this path is, please help me.
Speaker 2:Please help me. And that could be to a person, but it could be you don't know. You don't need to know what you're asking. You certainly didn't need to know when you were a kid. It's a sense of, higher power.
Speaker 2:People again, I I talked about this, I think, recently, this false western sterilized idea that Buddhism is like not supernatural or that it doesn't have, some of the things about other religions that we go, ew. Ew. You guys believe that stuff? That's why I'm a Buddhist. Sorry.
Speaker 2:That's not actually, you know, the Buddha would just chill with angels and teach them the Dharma. That's like straightforward. You could get that in a Google search right now. Not not not making that up. Now you could think of it as a prayer to your higher self, because if nothing is separate from you ultimately, then when you call out and you say, please help me wake up, it you don't have to imagine that it's a little floaty Buddha in the sky.
Speaker 2:What are you calling to? Nothing is separate from you. When you bow to that, that's not separate from you. But I actually think higher self is an interesting idea. I'm super new agey, if you actually knew.
Speaker 2:I'd smuggle crystals into Zendos. We would, Kisei and I, we'd we'd put them under our cushions, big crystals. Then like one time, somebody like found out they're cleaning the Zendo, and they're like, what is this? And there was like a pile of giant rocks that we were meditating upon. No.
Speaker 2:Those who know, know. What's that place in Milwaukee? Do you know the big crystal store with the mural? That place, okay. Higher self, what we mean by that, what we can mean by that is that in us which is unbound by our instinctual, our historical, and our personality bodies, and yet can include them.
Speaker 2:Something in us which is always free of what we love to play and get entangled in. We love to play and get entangled in all that stuff. We're calling out to that. Sometimes I just pray to to space, or I just say, ah. So one of the things a child might understand that an adult has trouble, a a a cultured adult may have trouble having a feel for, is that we live in a communal reality, and therefore, awakening is communal.
Speaker 2:The spiritual path is communal. It's a little weird in our context to hear something like the Buddha saying, be an island unto yourself. That lands on American ears, I think differently than it lands on, I would guess, ears from 2,500 ago in Asia. And then also, this is kind of a little bit of a key change here. If you like Zen, but you wish you could include your devotional sensibility, then include your devotional sensibility.
Speaker 2:We don't do it explicitly. You know, in a way, when I bow to this scroll, I feel a sense of devotion. It's not like, oh, I'm this little insect and let me raise this altar above me because I'm puny or something. It's not that at all. It's a sense of devotion to the profound.
Speaker 2:Right? But your sense of devotion might be juicy. It might even be little a little have a little arrows in it. It might be it might be passionate. And the most passionate love affairs that have ever happened have between between people and God, actually.
Speaker 2:And your you people are zen, you can let me say God. I like that. Some some dharma centers, can't say God. Not good. So you bring in devotion, and yes, there's lots of technique you can find.
Speaker 2:You can find the technique. Right? In fact, it actually exists. It actually does exist in Zen Buddhism. It's just kind of, coded.
Speaker 2:There can be devotion to a human embodiment of love or wisdom. I feel devotion to my teachers. It's not an ordinary kind of affection. It can be a devotion to a nonhuman embodiment. It can be devotion to silence or energy or awareness or love or clear light space, but, you don't you're not passive about it.
Speaker 2:You bring that in. Right? The love affair metaphor is in mystical traditions for a very good reason. We get lazy about love affairs. We're like, I brought her so many roses like she knows I love her.
Speaker 2:Well, sorry, it doesn't work like that. You have to keep bringing the roses. Do you know what I mean? You know what I mean? The juice of devotion in spiritual engagement, it just may happen by itself if you're fortunate in a season of your practice, but it may not.
Speaker 2:It's it's so I'll say a little bit about devotion in Soto Zen. Soto Zen, if it was more formally practiced, which I'm the least formal kind of teacher of this lineage. I don't want anyone I don't wanna alienate anybody for no good reason, but it's entirely a devotional practice. People are understanding that they put on a robe and they come to Zen do, and they are embodying Buddha. They are sitting as the most divine.
Speaker 2:Not to get somewhere. They are enacting that. They are walking as the perfect embodiment of wisdom. They are eating as the perfect embodiment of wisdom. The whole thing is devotional theater.
Speaker 2:It's not so easy for us to slide into that in our culture. So circling back, if you had a natural childhood sense of spirit or divine, how to include that? What a shame not to, like really, like what a shame not to. If you have that and then you don't include that, I imagine this would get very dry. So first of all, trust it.
Speaker 2:Only you have your experience. Even someone who's incredibly sensitive that we might even call them psychic, they're not having your experience, they're getting intimations. But only you dwell as your experience and it will never that will never change. And so you have to trust it. Doesn't mean you have to be we we should be arrogant or closed or not get feedback.
Speaker 2:In fact, in a like, a lot of spiritual autobiographies are someone who has, a profound or meaningful sense of the divine, and then their struggle is, can I trust it? And meeting people that help them trust it over time. So don't be concerned if your experience doesn't sound like the words of lamas or priests or roshes. You take in their what they're pointing at, but don't think it don't don't it's sort of like a the way a child's, is crumbled if a parent were to say, oh, that doesn't exist. No.
Speaker 2:There's no spirits in trees. Let me show you a YouTube video about the science of trees. You can imagine somebody doing that. Let me let me teach you out of your wonder, young one. Initiate you into my two dimensional sorry world.
Speaker 2:Come come suffer with the rest of us. It's funny because if you you if you watch the psyche, there's times where you you seek you you want to destroy innocence. You want to crush innocence. It's threatening. You want to crush wonder.
Speaker 2:Okay. Then the second thing is to include your childhood sense of the spirit or divine. Play with approaching meditation like a child. Yeah. I remember Trungpa Rinpoche, he was observing westerners meditate so seriously, and he was like, I just never saw that in Tibet.
Speaker 2:And he said, meditate more folksy. That was the word he used. Have a folksy attitude about meditation. It's no big deal. It's the biggest deal.
Speaker 2:It's no big deal. To to approach it in a sense of, oh, this is interesting. What happens when I give myself over to just being? Let me like just feel that out. What is it like to not try to fix anything at all?
Speaker 2:Or or you're gonna find your way into that. The when in the Chinese and Japanese texts, when they describe a seasoned old master, they describe them as someone who roams and plays in Samadhi. Not some shriveled up old serious guy or gal. They're described as roaming and playing in Samadhi because there's just innocence. There's just not there's no weight anymore.
Speaker 2:W e I g h t, weight. Hirata Roshi had an awakening sitting on a mountain and someone asked him what it was like. He said, I realized I was always sitting in the lap of Buddha. I've always been sitting in the lap of Buddha. You might be able to call in your deep knowings, the qualities of the divine that you know through felt memory or image.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Doesn't work for everybody. I'm not saying sit down and like, let me get back to that thing experienced. How do I get back to what I experienced at the last retreat? Good luck.
Speaker 2:But this is different. This is almost like you know the station. You know the station and so you just like, how do I like oh, okay. In the advanced teachings, they basically say, just take the view that all is spacious luminosity, brilliant with awakening. It's the same thing.
Speaker 2:Just take the view. So don't dismiss your inborn sense of spirituality just because a tradition says x y or z. Yeah. And also don't don't be closed to what a tradition might say. It might be that the meeting of your inborn spirituality with a tradition is a very potent mix because every, contemplative needs training.
Speaker 2:Just like you could be a great painter and yet if you meet someone who can really help you refine that, you could be a great, great painter. Something like that. Okay. That's my point. People at who listen to podcast don't know that we have these rich q and a's because we don't put them up because we don't wanna get sued.
Speaker 2:So I'm saying that so people at home know that I don't just pontificate and then like don't take questions. I do, but you don't get to hear them because we don't wanna get sued. Okay. What do you think of all this stuff I've been saying?
Speaker 1: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.