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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:Isn't it interesting how light it is outside? And I was gonna say good evening. Is it really? It's like late afternoon. Still adjusting to that.
Speaker 2:Thank you for coming. It's good to have so many fine people here. There have been a number of questions recently or just seems to be on people's minds, awareness. I thought I'd talk about awareness. And somebody could say the whole essence of spiritual practice is simply awareness.
Speaker 2:Or they could say the whole practice of Zen is awareness. Or they could you could ask somebody, what was the point of sitting on that cushion for three years? And they might say awareness. And the word, like all words is pretty limited, but what it points to, might be the most vital thing in the world for you. So this is more, I think, exploration rather than a talking about awareness because talking about awareness, that's pretty boring, think.
Speaker 2:No offense, YouTubers, but exploring awareness. Now that's a little bit more interesting at least for me. So right now, dial up your alertness and open open wide and steady. And feast on all experience. Alert, wide, open, steady.
Speaker 2:And every bit of experience inside and outside, feast on it. Swallow it. And I appreciate that this open wide alertness has no preference for what it devours. Awareness consumes all experience equally. If you're a person who has a kind of an imaginative faculty, imagine that you're a giant mouth, a vast mouth.
Speaker 2:And everything that's happening, thoughts, sensations, impulses, whatever, you're just swallowing it all. As soon as it arises, you eat it. You taste it and you taste it and it's gone at the same time. So there's maybe infinite different ways that we could try to approach this experience of awareness. It's an experience and it's beyond experience.
Speaker 2:And it's so, marvelous and also weird that something that is so intimate to us, we need to approach it. Or that approaching it seems to be all we have available to us sometimes. So we'll come back to direct exploration in a little bit. So just to reflect with you, you have gone through so many changes today. Think about how many moods, feeling tones, body sensations, thoughts, concerns, memories have cycled through you today Since you woke up, would you would you guess it's 10,000 thoughts, 5,000 feelings?
Speaker 2:I don't know. It'd be interesting. Maybe somebody who gets paid well could tell us. You've gone through so many changes today. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, they blink in and out continually.
Speaker 2:You're a blinker. Blink in and out continually. Thoughts you want to have, don't stay. Thoughts you don't want to have, keep blinking in. You've gone through so many changes today, but what didn't change at all?
Speaker 2:Assuming you're with me on the first point, you've gone through so many changes today. What didn't change at all? In other words, why doesn't this freak you out? Why is it not freaking you out that right now you're blinking in and out? Did any you ever have a dorm room experience where you smoked a joint and you're like, I can't feel my arm.
Speaker 2:Do I have an arm? And you freaked out. Few few people smiling. We we've outed you a little bit. But all day long, you're being is blinking in blinking in and out.
Speaker 2:That's just this is just a fact. Why doesn't this disturb you? How is it that you're okay in the midst of this impermanent dance? This impermanence, is that kinda cheesy? No?
Speaker 2:Okay. Why is that not scary? This is a real this is a real question for you. On what basis are you not frightened that right now you are blinking what you take to be yourself is blinking in and out of being? What is it that's okay with this continual play of there and not, this continual play of flow?
Speaker 2:What is it in you that is okay with that? What is the feeling of being you that persists as you go through all of this? Why do you still feel like you're you? So let's say this morning you were crabby pants, somebody denied you your smoothie and coffee or whatever. You had to rush to work.
Speaker 2:Somebody looked at you poorly. I don't know. You're crabby pants. Okay. That's gone now.
Speaker 2:What's the feeling of being you that was true then and true now? Is there a feeling of being you? This is an interesting question because that's like asking a fish, are you aware of water? What would a fish say? If you said, hey, do you notice that you swim in water To talking fish, grant me that.
Speaker 2:No. It's not a fish that pops out of the water, out of the ocean and goes back down. I know the metaphor is flawed. Cut me some slack. If you're a fish, do you know water exists?
Speaker 2:This is a very serious question for us. What's the feeling of being you? Do the thoughts that are happening now have a you signature to them? Do they carry that feeling? Is it the tingling in your arms?
Speaker 2:Does that have a you, a me, a me quality? Does the experience of, sense gates and sense experience, Does that feel like you? What is what is the you quality? Why do you not wake up and say, no, I'm not Jim. I'm Lacey.
Speaker 2:It's kind of interesting if you've ever been away from your home. I've always been a real decorator, like I have to customize every little space. It's gotta have my signature. Right? But if you if you're like that and you get away from it and you don't have anything around your environment that's reflecting to you who you think you are, there's something that shifts a little bit.
Speaker 2:It's like maybe one of the reasons we like extended time in nature. Nothing is like saying, hey, Jim, or hey, Lacey. Is there a feeling of being you? Where is that feeling? There are some traditions that said that, the seed or the essence of awareness is in the heart.
Speaker 2:But I don't think they're talking about location, like my keys are in the glove box kind of thing. Go back to, like a direct contemplation. Now, I'm gonna give an instruction and my confidence is that everybody can do this. Okay. So just take this instruction like, yeah, can do that.
Speaker 2:Alright. So I invite you then to exhale completely and just stop all your thoughts for a moment. And just do that repeatedly. Just use a full exhalation till there's nothing left in your lungs, and let your mind just subside, your thinking mind. Let it dissolve.
Speaker 2:And do this over and over and the invitation is to directly apprehend that in the absence of thought, if you're not looking at your body, there is no experience of identity. You don't know whether you're green or yellow. You don't know whether you have a gender, you don't even you can't even say you have a name in that place. There's not a past there. There's not a future there.
Speaker 2:There's not even a present there. Just keep trying that. You exhale completely. Let your thoughts subside like bubbles naturally subside. And directly apprehend that there is no experience of identity.
Speaker 2:You can think, oh, I'm Bob from Beaverton. But don't do that. But what is there? So this outer sense of identity is not there. You can bring it back into being, it rearises that experience you can have.
Speaker 2:But what is there in that moment? Thought has subsided. There is no narration about yourself. It's not nothingness. What remains?
Speaker 2:Now you can't sustain what remains because you are eternally rooted in what so called remains. Whether there are thoughts or not, whether there's a dance of identity or not. But make that place of beingness intimate, and look around and look around and feel and see the same beingness in every other person. Notice the the thinking mind gets caught on the form, the name and the form. That's Bob from Beaverton.
Speaker 2:Don't do that. Try relaxing as this beingness before personal identity, and just look at something like a hand. I wanna offer you an image from the Bun Zogchen tradition. And as is the case, I think, I think with all of these different kinds of contemplations for some people, some of them land and some, it's like, what's this dude talking about? Just it's why there's 10,000 kinds of teachings.
Speaker 2:This is like a visual metaphor for awareness that sometimes clicks. So imagine that you are a hollow vessel. Okay. You're a hollow vessel but you have apertures. You have the eye aperture and the ear aperture and pore, pores as apertures.
Speaker 2:But you're a hollow vessel and a light is placed within you, something like a maybe like a votive candle or a lit globe. And experience that this globe is awareness. And actually, you're not the globe, But you're the vessel that the light has been placed within and it's just illuminating. It's just experiencing everything. And so experience experiencing as not your doing.
Speaker 2:It's this light that's been placed within your empty vessel. Thoughts appear, not your doing. Sounds are heard, not your doing. Sensations are felt. Impulses appear, and it's all the action of this light.
Speaker 2:And imagine that is a profound relaxation. You're not operating this flesh ship. That's all the action of this light. Effortlessly, there is experience. If we were to, like, puzzle over why we don't appreciate what this word awareness talks about, one thing we might find is that we lay claim to consciousness.
Speaker 2:We lay claim to something that, well, it's the action of the light. Again, you could never never in your whole life stop seeing. Even if you lost your eyesight, there would still be a visual field. In fact, there's there's a wonderful French mystic who went blind, or was he born blind? I don't remember.
Speaker 2:He wrote a biography about this. And for him, all there was was luminosity. There was just the divine light. And he had some kind of almost pity for sighted people because the way we relate to our eyes is with, we lay claim. We think and therefore feel, I see.
Speaker 2:I'm the seer. I'm the hearer. But there's actually if you take the time to really investigate this, there's no basis for saying you are the seer or you are the hearer or even you are the thinker. Someone could speak from another angle and say, you are all of this, and that is awareness. It's just a matter of which angle do we explore this from.
Speaker 2:Often in meditation traditions, the first thing that is encouraged as far as training is awareness as the mode of witnessing. People think this is more like a nineties thing, but people would talk about the witness state. And the idea is that there's a knowingness, a stillness knowingness that is steady and not caught up in content of being, content of the person, or content of life. Since you are awareness, be be the mode of witnessing. Witness, for example, the arising and passing, another word for the blinking in and in and out.
Speaker 2:Witness the blinking and in and out of body sensations. Just relax as the knowingness of this blinking in and out, the tingling in your hands or even the beating of your heart. It has a kind of cool freedom to it. It's not a thought. Only something which doesn't move can apprehend movement.
Speaker 2:So witness the arising and passing. Now try it with, thinking. Witness witness thinking mind. So that means that you're not trying to quiet it in any way. Just be present as if you were a screen and thinking mind was just a play of light and shadow on that screen.
Speaker 2:Just be that screen. You see there's a freedom to it. This is so close to the vital insight that I am not my thoughts. I knew somebody who younger, earlier in their life, they were so beleaguered by their thoughts, they were often suicidal. And they read in a spiritual book, you are not your thoughts, and they got it.
Speaker 2:And that whole so much of that suffering dropped away. To witness the blinking in, out, the changingness of any any field of experience, And now turn that around and look right back at the looker, right back at the witness. Witness the witness. What's that like? Suzuki Roshi in the, classic, very good book, I think, still so many years later, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Speaker 2:Suzuki Roshi says, there's something with no shape and no form that is always ready to take shape and form. What is this life experience made of? Wonder about that, as if you don't know. As if as if science is just one way of looking at life. What is this life experience made of?
Speaker 2:It's not a it's not a question that you think on. It's something you you feel into, you you experience into. So on a more practical application level, which that's not quite right because all of this is is, actually so practical from the standpoint of all we're trying to do is feel intimate with life, feel feel close to the source of life, feel free. It's very practical, but practical application of awareness in this tradition is to really be, alert. Right?
Speaker 2:To really be aware because when we're not aware, we become automatic. I wonder if this is true for you that even the good sides of your personality that are automatic as you've started to do spiritual practice, even those have a distaste to them. You don't like that you're always whatever. Awareness is essential not to be automatic. Awareness is never fully enveloped in habitual tendency.
Speaker 2:I noticed when I was younger and I I started meditating, it it was really interesting that I don't know how I got how I got brought back to the present moment. So you're sitting there meditating and your mind wanders and you're thinking about coffee, really good coffee for like ten minutes on your cushion. It's like really good coffee. And then, of a sudden you're back, but nobody tapped you on the shoulder and said, hey, remember you're meditating. What brought you back?
Speaker 2:You're completely caught up in the thought of your pour over. I mean, it really is the highlight of your day, smells incredible. You know what I'm talking about? Some of you do. Okay.
Speaker 2:Peak Samsara experience. You're totally you're fantasizing about it. You're drooling a little bit. That's not meditation. No offense.
Speaker 2:Okay. All of a sudden, presence. What? Where does that come from? I have little bullet points.
Speaker 2:I make bullet points. That's how I scaffold, like, my talks. And sometimes I look at them, I'm like, that's just so boring, Jogen. Don't say that. Who says that stuff?
Speaker 2:Who says that stuff? I'm not I'm not telling you. I'm trying not to be embarrassed by the things that I say if I have to hear it later. I'm gonna end with something called, this is a old Zogchen teaching called the nine amazing things. And we might not at the moment feel like it's that amazing, but the state of mind finds it amaze amazing is in the root of the amazement.
Speaker 2:So this is the text, the nine amazing things. It says, this self originated clear light, which from the very beginning was in no way produced by something before it, is the child of awareness, and yet it is itself without any parents. Amazing. This self originated primordial awareness has not been created by anything amazing. It does not experience birth nor does there exist a cause for its death.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Although it is evidently visible, yet there is no one there who sees it. Amazing. Although it has wandered throughout samsara, so in Buddhist cosmology, we've lived countless lives and we kind of just wander around bumping into stuff, eating things, dying, and repeating it. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's that's in the nutshell version. Although it has wandered throughout Samsara, it has come to no harm. Amazing. Even though it has seen Buddhahood itself, awakening, it has not come to any benefit from this. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Even though it exists in everyone everywhere, it goes unrecognized. Amazing. Nonetheless, you practitioners hope to attain some fruit other than this elsewhere. Amazing. It's funny, but not funny.
Speaker 2:Even though it exists within yourself and nowhere else, yet you seek for it elsewhere. Amazing. Somebody of a profound mind said that a long, long time ago. So, the point is your own, uncovery. The point is your own, curiosity about what this word points to.
Speaker 2:And sometimes we can can get resonated or we can pick up the fragrance from a teaching, a teacher, a community. But it's really our own real interest in what is this mind that does the work. The words aren't gonna cut it. Okay. That's that's what I wanted to say.
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 zendesk.org. Your support supports us.