Speaker 1: 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: Good evening. Good to be here with you all. Am I echoey? No. Okay.
For whatever reason, the topic that came to mind for the talk today was how to be a mystic in the city. Not gonna define mystic, not even gonna define city, so that if somebody in clatters or wherever hears this, they'll be like, oh, that applies to me. So and I do a style of talk that I kinda just make lists, and sometimes it's clunky, and sometimes it works, and we get what we get. So hopefully, there's something of value. I have one, two, three, four, five, five categories, okay, of any practices or outlooks on how to be a mystic in the city.
The first category of the city mystic is depth. And to connect every day with stillness. To connect every day with stillness. Zhao Zen is a good way to do that. It's designed for that.
There are many ways to do that, But every day for a time, being the unmoving that you can't objectify. Right? You can't you can't know stillness as a thing that is separate from you. You can try. You can try to grasp it.
You can try to pin it down, but to be the the stillness, to let body, mind, and heart align with that, and that is not merely the absence of thought or the presence of it. That is not even the absence or presence of calmness. It's just being being the unmoving. Just to touch that every day. Recently, a Dharma teacher was worried about me because I say microdosing in talks, and they thought I was going astray or something.
They're not from Portland. Microdose stillness every day. Macrodose it. Very good, but if you could at least microdose it. Because it's so easy to get lost in all the commotion.
It's like city life, media life, it's all motion. It's all commotion. It's all it's a bunch of noise. And I like noise and maybe you probably like noise or you wouldn't be a human being, but to know what is what is free and crisp in the midst of noise. And then as a city mystic, which is different than maybe a city monk, you're engaged with life.
You you are not, siloing yourself from the range of experience. And how to practice in the midst of different experiences. And the the essence of that practice to me in the range of all different experiences, Symphonies and meals with your mother-in-law and funerals and sitting on I 5 in traffic is you're feeling the feeling of experience. You're feeling the feeling of experience. You're getting underneath.
You are It's a form of courage that you don't You're not pulling back so much in judgment and analyzation, but you're tasting your life from within. A word I like now is withinness. To do Zen practice is within ness. To be within the texture of the body, to be within sounds, to be within sights, to be within even thoughts. And when you're within experience, then fear really has no place to to land in the same way because fear is about being apart from.
So to feel the feeling of experience, and that's, you know, I think also a good description of meditation generally. Another aspect of depth that came to mind for me is if I think of those who I consider deep, they see things from different perspectives. They're not caught in one way of looking at something. There is a phrase in Japan, and there's two phrases that are interesting. This is how important this is in, Zen Buddhism, which is Japanese Zen Buddhism.
One is something like we can so easily be a person who tries to view the sky through a tube of bamboo. And usually, it's our identity structures. I am this, this, this, and this. And that's a tube. And when you are something, you take up a tube and you can't see what's outside that I am's tube.
And so the the the the bamboo tube of our, our beliefs which tend to be fixed, which we tend to organize around. The other Japanese phrase is don't be a board carrying person. And a board carrying person is like somebody who's carrying a big board to build, like build something, and they carry it like this and so you can't see what's on the other side. Well, actually, that's like saying don't be a human being because to be a human being is to be a board carrying person where we're carrying a board and therefore, we don't see what's on the other side of it. And so, you practice seeing things from different eyes, from the different parts of you.
Right? How do you how do you feel? How do you see experience from this state versus that state? Right? Think of some people in your life that, sometimes you really love them and sometimes they annoy the shit out of you.
You're seeing from different angles. Right? Or sometimes you look at your Dharma practice as a big burden and sometimes you just love it. You experience differently. It's a different vantage point.
You practice seeing things from different eyes by seeing through the eyes of others as well. To be a bored caring person means we depend on each other to see. Nobody can see by themselves. Everybody has a limited vantage point because look, I'm just kind of right here. I can only see from right here.
Because I'm right here and I can see from right here, I can't see what can be seen when I'm not sitting here. We depend on each other. In a way, that's the understanding of, Sangha. Part of the point of spiritual community is for people to be like, hey, do you see this thing you don't see? Because family usually is too lazy or don't wanna argue with you And friends, you know, we don't wanna rock the boat so we're not so honest with each other.
Call it in voice style and call that a positive bonding pattern. Positive bonding pattern is when the relationship between two people is based on, you tell me what I need to hear and I'll tell you what you need to hear and we'll keep it copacetic. Hopefully, song is not like that. So to be deep is not to be monosighted in this sense. It's to be willing to look at things from different points of view.
Right? Like I'll pull up The Guardian, and then I'll pull up Fox News. Try that on as a yoga, especially if you're a liberal. See that reaction in you? That's a way of seeing.
Okay. Then, my next category, it says here, birth, death, birth. Birth, death, birth. It's weird to talk about death because that's talking about birth and it's weird to talk about just birth because that's also talking about death. That's right.
This moment disappears. You can you can recognize that a moment is gone, but the goneness of a moment means the arising of a new one. The death of the previous words means the birth of new ones. It's always really the same thing. It's just that we're looking at it, appreciating it in a different way.
So to be a mystic in the city and not get lost in the the, panoply of pleasure and pain. It was interesting when I was first, a monastic and I would stay in the monastery for a long time and then I would come into Portland, I realized, oh my god, everything is organized around pleasure. Everywhere you look, there's something that is designed to give you pleasure. And there's like a new seasons in every corner, three coffee shops, four Thai restaurants, every other block, there's a place you could buy pot, and then there's like medical clinics to help you recover from all that stuff. It's just like So birth, death, birth, what I mean here is stay connected with the raw tenderness of how delicately whatever exists, exists.
Whatever exists, however precious, beautiful, however hard we worked for it, however much we invested in it, it exists really delicately. It could all unravel so easily. Think about the kind of courage that we have to invest in communities and people when they can just go just like that. Look how beautiful that is that we're willing to play this game even though everything exists so delicately. So to stay connected to that is, I think, part and parcel was staying connected with the timeless.
And the more you appreciate that the tender fleetingness of existence, you're also therefore in relationship with the background, which is not the background, which is the withinness. So especially in the midst of, good times, to try to stay aware about how just how delicate that is. Just how just how fragile the situation is. Not to be pessimistic, but to really appreciate. The other thing I think is important about this is it's not really true that things disappear in life.
I think it's more true to say all of life's flavors are permanent. Everything is permanent. Okay? But shape shifting. Everything that we we all the different aspects that make up the richness of a human life, they're always kind of trickster popping in and out of existence.
Yes. And if we try to make one particular instantiation stay the way we want it, we suffer. That was Buddha's main point. But actually, if we really open up, everything is totally permanent. It just keeps coming in different forms.
If we fixate on the form that we insist it has to be in, then we have suffering. If we open to the form that the universe is willing to present it in, everything is permanent. Permanent, but shape shifting. You know, so we watch our kind of fluctuations of our heart and our our, our disappointment and our longing and all of those things that are part of the the juice of living a life in a city. And when we start believing that the whole thing is not available, we're starting to miss this point.
All the flavors of life are always. They're always. But where am I looking? Thoughts on birth, death, birth. Then, the next category is play.
Engage activities that liquefy your fixity. Okay. And I suppose you have to agree that you have fixity in order to want to liquefy it or appreciate this truth, and probably you do. Our fixity is our I am this wayness. It's it's the the patterns that actually we are really bored of, but we don't quite know how to break out of just being the same old me day after day after day.
It's the boredom of an identity, and all identities are like this that is just too small. It's just too small for what we really are. So to find activities that that, liquefy that, I'm still in contemplation about like what it is, what makes an activity do that. I had a period of my life where I was fortunate to study with a theater teacher, a man named, Antero Ali, and he taught something called paratheater. And when we would do paratheater, he would work our butts off with something, he called the warm up because he felt like if you do not have sufficient energy in your system, physical, emotional, energetic, if your energy is not stirred up, then you don't have that which can break through your fixity.
So my theory is that the activities that liquefy our fixity through play are situations where there's enough energy. There's enough energy to go from whatever degree of solid we experience ourselves as and phase shift into liquid or gas or even light. And then we return to solid, the play ends, it's time to go home or whatever, but then we're imprinted. We've had, kind of the literal meaning of ecstasy. Ecstasy means sort of to kind of get outside of your stasis.
I keep thinking of basketball even though I don't play basketball. I don't know. Maybe some of you play basketball and you liquefy your fixity in basketball. Maybe some of you watch a Knicks game and you liquefy your fixity or you like to believe that you do that. I don't know.
Also with play, enjoy engage joys where pleasure and vibrance interrupt the self serious gravity. That's part of maybe playing as a city mystic. Can we have the fluidity to bring gravity to that which warrants gravity and then drop it? Do you know what I mean? Like know how to be serious, whatever seriousness is.
What is serious? Is it a gathering of intention? Is it like a a valuing of the engagement we're doing? Seriousness tends to come with this sense that if I don't do it right, the sky's gonna fall. If I don't do it right, they're gonna toss me out of the tribe or whatever it is.
At, Great Vow, we used to play in we had a marimba band. There are some people in this room who were ace marimba players from that band. And, part of it is just Chosen Roshi was like, oh, how can I do what I like to do and call it Zen? As as spiritual teachers do. But actually, so many of us were like really just really really serious.
We were doing the serious thing. We were we were ordained. We were not there to have fun. And she's just like, lighten up. Let's play some marimba.
And it's really hard to retain your kind of grimace when you're playing marimba. It's really hard. A mystic is interrupting self serious gravity. That's maybe you could If I had a definition of a mystic, I'd go with that one. One who interrupts the gravity of identity, the the heavy gravity of identity.
So when we think of this play is it's The question is, is it play for trying to be the best? I know lots of people say they play sports or they play this or that, but I watch them and they're like really wanna win. They really wanna be better than other people. And I'm not saying that's bad, but I'm not sure that's play. Maybe it's mixed in.
It could be mixed in. Right? You could be trying to beat people and playing. I'm not sure. I'm that person who plays a board game and I don't care if I win and it frustrates the other people because they want you to really try.
The other point I have under play is we need to wander. We are overly purposive Even if there's no purpose to that purpose, we're overly purposive with our, you know, Google calendars and our, yeah, I'll fit you in for coffee at four kind of life. It doesn't what that kind of life doesn't leave and all all respect due to the parents who are scheduled because you're taking care of a sentient being, What a overly scheduled life doesn't allow to be possible is for the universe to encounter you. If there's an agency in the universe that wishes to communicate with you, if you are rigidly arranging your time, you're kind of impervious to that. Nothing can get in.
And so what I mean by wandering is times where you roam and you encounter people, places, things, feelings, experiences without purpose or agenda of hemming you into your familiar dance. This is kind of again connected to how boring it is to just be the same person every day year after year. That's so boring. And you're not the same person. You're not one person.
You're not one way. And if it seems like you're one way, I would venture that, we're hemmed in by our familiar dance. We are all actually pretty nuanced beings because we're a wholeness. So how to wander, that's a kind of a really personal thing. How would you create those conditions?
So that's what came up for me under play. And then, the category of love for a city mystic. And I think really broadly about this term, love. I think this is a vitally important word and I think defining it is completely problematic. I think love is love, but it's not love.
And the koan is, well, what is love if we don't decide to discard that? Or defining the heart. The heart is not the heart, but it's the heart. What's the heart? So whatever opens your heart and draws out your admiration and affections, go towards it.
Go towards it. Go towards it. Serve it. Share it. Protect it.
Whatever it may be. The other day, I was walking on Burnside and there were some a group of like five gentlemen dressed kind of like they were guys from, The UK in the twenties with like those cat, like those hats and like, I don't even know what to call that clothing. Just sitting there delighted talking about their classic cars in a in a lot and I thought there's love. Whatever opens your heart and draws out your admiration and affections. Beauty is often looked at suspiciously in spiritual traditions, But I think the function of beauty is to draw out our affections.
When when nothing is opening our hearts or drawing out our admiration and affections, what's going on? Is that I don't like to make normatives about human beings because there's no state that is what people should be. But when there's nothing that is and I hope you're not getting caught on these words. Maybe something is going on. Maybe something is shut down.
What's the risk of innocence? What's the risk of openness? You could ask it from the other side. What is the risk of letting the heart remain closed or less open than it yearns for? What is the risk of that?
So it, I think, goes without saying that all of our relationships are every day, all the time presenting us with an opportunity to practice love. Do we say that enough? Do we remember that enough? And again, what that means if it's easily pinned down, at least for this person, that's too small. Relationships are a place I practice love, but what is love anyway?
It has to include a lot of flavors, a lot of states, or else it's just a little bandwidth of feeling. It's gotta be bigger than feeling. For whatever reason on my How to Be a Mystic in the City goals ended up on it. Interestingly, in the reports of people at complete awakening, goals are completely left behind. So across traditions, those who have liberated their heart, they are said to no longer be operating from intention.
Intentionality has fallen away like, you know, a piece of technology that no longer serves you. And they're they're together with all beings just conducted into action. So they can just be totally chill because they don't have an agenda and they don't know what's supposed to happen, but the perfect thing happens all the time for them. But we might not be able to currently relax into such a profound trustfulness. To just pretend we're going to live that way may not may not be honest.
It's definitely an experiment to try out. In a way, that's what I'm talking about with the experiment of wandering. Try out intentionlessness and see what happens. See how much you can bear of intentionlessness. See how much anxiety comes up.
Oh. If I'm not planning and agenda ing, isn't it all gonna fall apart? Don't I have to think about what I'm gonna say before I see so and so? All that. All that.
So as a city mystic, we need at least skeletal principles nor stars that we're guided by. What are they? What if you went home tonight and you wrote your code of life? You wrote your precepts? Would they be clear?
Do you have a sense of what they would be? That's like saying, I'm gonna like dig into my heart and see what my operating principles are. Like how would I articulate my integrity and like what what behaviors of this person I approve of and give thumbs up to? And maybe those are depth, birth, death, play, and love. Maybe those are mine.
Like, this is really just all self serving, talking about my own proclivities. Because almost everything I talked about is really not about, making something manifest in the world, but you have to incarnate your practice. We have to. Not like we have to like someone's gonna say you're a bad Zen student, but I think in order for us to be satisfied with our practice, we have to complete the circle. This is something that Dogen Sensei said.
He said, there's practice, there's confirmation or realization, and then there's expression. And he said, that completes the circle of the way. They flow into each other. You've gotta give life to it somehow. And you do live in a three-dimensional or more universe.
You do have a flesh body. You do have hands that can make things and move things around. That's what human life is, think, just move stuff around. We have thoughts. We're thinking them.
What's what's what's gonna guide that? What what's the North Star? Maybe it's raise a child or start a business or refurbish the basement or clean the park or run for office or support a song guy. It could be this can be a lot of things. Hogan Roshi used to like to say, I'm not sure why still, and he said, the most bodhisattva job is to pump gas.
Yeah. I think he was thinking everyone really needs that. I mean, unless it's a self serve place, then you don't need it. But imagine a place you needed gas pumped. Yeah.
You have these these skeletal principles. What I mean by skeletal is you don't put so much flesh on it that you kind of make your life tight. But there's enough bones in how you are orienting in your life that in all of this play and love and stillness, you don't get lost in that where it becomes discarnate. I mean, it has to be incarnated. Yeah.
So depth, birth, death, play, love, and goals. Okay. Would you add anything to this list? I'm curious.
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