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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.
Jogen:Good evening, everybody. Can you hear me at home? Yeah. Okay. Good.
Jogen:Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting each other in practice. I have maybe a few things that I want to talk about tonight, so it's a little bit of a smorgasbord. Smorgasbord? Smorgasbord.
Jogen:Smorgasbord of a talk. And so that's just how it goes. And sometimes people email me and say, Jogen, your talk was kind of lousy last week. Could you do a better one? And that's very helpful to me.
Jogen:I'm a little bit exaggerating, but if that happens, email me because as I've said, I'm in a particular time where it's challenging to know what to address because I've given a thousand ARMA talks. So But the first thing I want to talk about tonight is space. Now, in any lineage that you engage with, it has its body of practices, its approach. And if lineage works for you, what that will probably mean is that you find your way with those practices. You make them your own.
Jogen:And that is how it is, and that's how it should be. You receive an instruction, there's an attitude, a stance towards experience that comes with that instruction, and ninety nine point nine percent of teachers are not intuitive enough or psychic enough to really know how it's going for you. And though you report and you share and there can be a lot of dialogue and that communication can get refined over time, most of the time it's you trying to make a method work. Right? And for me, I want to talk about space because space, spaciousness, has been the aspect of Zen practice that has worked the most for me.
Jogen:Meaning, those are the practices I turn to. Those are the experiences that most enrich my life. And to whatever degree I've been freed up, it's had a lot to do with space. In a way, space is my spiritual food. Now, you might be like me, how I was in the past, that you have no reference for this word space.
Jogen:It sounds like a vague New Age hippie word. Like, what do you do for a living? Hey, man. I hold space. People pay you for that?
Jogen:Space, you are swimming in space, and it is swimming in you. The very fact that you can have a thought at all is by virtue of space. The very thought that you can take a breath is by virtue of space. The very fact that anything is happening at all is by virtue of space, and this is something that you can experience or appreciate, because experience involves an experience or an object, and it's a little more subtle than that. We know the absence of space pretty well.
Jogen:We know when we feel tight or crowded or suffocating. People complain about people who take up too much space. People like spacious places. We feel something in our bodies when we go outdoors, when we get out of the boxes. Our body, mind, and our spirit are attuned to space, and yet we tend or we can easily default to being really passive about this.
Jogen:Right? That we when we experience space, it's great. The in laws went home. Ah, space. Or meditation happens to open up in a way.
Jogen:But to be more direct about it is actually a lot of what the two core traditions that inform my practice and teachings, Zen and Zogchen, really emphasize. So many, many years ago, I was in a Zen session, my first Zen session, and my being was so tight. I was like the tightest dude in the Zen Do. I guarantee it. And I was just looking around, and I was definitely like, I'm the tightest.
Jogen:Not like in the good tight, but I was just tight. And, I was doing my best to follow a method, which I was told, just follow your breath, which now after thirty years of practice, it's a really bad instruction. If you have a teacher who says, Follow your breath, I recommend getting another one. Okay. That's me being snarky.
Jogen:But So I was following my breath, and I was doing that as best I could, and I had so much body pain and emotional dissonance, and the intensity of the Zen monastery I was at was already kind of making me nervous and like I was doing everything wrong. And out of all of that stuff, I discovered space. That's what it was for me. All of a sudden, I realized I could rest my awareness in space and everything was okay. Tight body.
Jogen:I hadn't pooped in like four days. It was terrible. There were no prunes. All of this was going on in my conditioned being, and yet I discovered space, and that was all okay. And I remember going to the teacher telling him about this, and I kind of was like, Is this okay, Mr.
Jogen:Roshi? And he was like, It's not okay. Follow your breath. And that was my was my first experience about how as a meditation teacher, you just defy or as a student, you just defy your teacher and do what you feel like works, which all of you will do. And is the right thing to do if if you really are like, no, this is I've stumbled upon something that's liberating for me.
Jogen:Just to zoom out a little bit, let's say there's this time when the Buddha was doing the original teachings. Okay? The Buddha did not say, here's the one and only right method. That is not, accurate if you go back into recorded scripture. It's not true if you go back to the early Zen masters that they said you must work on a koan or do shikantaza.
Jogen:There were no such ideas. Right? Human beings who are teachers like me say, Oh, space really worked for me. And if they're a really zesty teacher, they make a lineage out of it, or they say, Now this is the best way to practice. But that really is not how it is.
Jogen:There are just technologies that have been tried many, many thousands of times, and people have developed systems out of them. So I cheated with my method, and I basically never stopped. Although, what I'm talking about as far as spaciousness applies to every method of spiritual practice. Applies to every method. Now, in the traditions I've studied the most, which are the so called Mahayana Buddhist traditions, northern tradition, so called as well.
Jogen:This would be the Buddhism that is practiced in East Asia, in Himalayas, now all over the world. If you read those teachings and transmissions, they often talk about space as a Well, they talk about it on different levels. They talk about space, first of all, as a metaphor. They would say awakened mind or Buddha mind is like space. Or the dharmakaya, which means the body of truth, the body of realization is space like.
Jogen:So they used the metaphor over and over, or they would say emptiness is like space, to the point where some later texts stopped using the word emptiness and they would just use spaciousness. Or in Zen, sky. Just the character sky, Ku, replaced the word emptiness, which I think is excellent. So you fight it as metaphor, but then you also later find it as instruction. Right?
Jogen:In the Chan, so Chan is the Chinese Zen teachings, they would say, Just practice a mind like space. Or in the Anzogchen tradition, you explicitly train in being able to more and more
Jomon:awareness just in the space of the room you're in, or if you have
Jogen:the fortune, outside and let it rest in the sky.
Jomon:And
Jogen:Marinating in our own vastness cannot be praised enough. There are no words. For what an edifying experience it is to know this dimension of being that is not yours, but it is yours, it's not personal, but it's intimate, that is so free, so vibrant, and so indestructible in the midst of a body mind that is not under our control, that is subject to so much vagaries of the world. It's almost like the number one gift you could get yourself. Put it in all those holiday gift guides that fall out of the weeklies.
Jogen:Spaciousness. To really discover it because when you recognize it, it will generally be like, oh, or oh my god. Depending on how deep we tasted and also depending on how tight we are. I was really tight, super tight. So just to discover space was like, oh, now I know now I have the ability to not be anxious.
Jogen:I didn't have that ability before. Now I have the ability to be relaxed. Now I have the ability to not judge other people. Now I have the ability to love myself. Now I have the ability to make sense of this tradition.
Jogen:If what I'm saying is like really touches something in you, there are like immersive practices you could do to really familiarize yourself with what I'm talking about. So for example, sky gazing. I recommend it to so many of my students over time. I don't know how many of them actually take me up on it. But sky gazing means you find a place, generally elevated, where you can sit for a long period of time.
Jogen:In fact, I was on a hike in the gorge just a few weeks ago, gorgeous hike. Catherine Creek, I think it was called. Unbelievable. And there are these, you know, outcroppings, and you can look over the gorge, and there's the expanse of sky. And I just sat and did it for fifteen minutes in such a wonder.
Jogen:Once you learn this practice, you essentially, with your eyes open, just let your awareness, however you understand wakefulness, awareness, attention, you let it blend into and mingle with the sky. And you just practice sustaining that. And ten minutes is good and ten days is even better. Another, immersive practice of appreciating space is to do a dark retreat. So you can either get some goggles or just cover all your windows, and you just sit in complete darkness.
Jogen:And what that does is it opens you up to unconditioned space because you don't have visual depth anymore, but space is still there, the vastness of darkness. These kind of practices are not absolutely necessary, but they can really give us an initiation into what I'm talking about such that we don't lose the taste after that. So when I first began to discover space and then find supportive practices about it, I realized one of the basic things that any of us can do is just start paying attention to space in the physical world. Just beginning to notice it, to feel it, to contact it. Try that right now.
Jogen:Don't shift your attention right now off of things, including the thing of yourself, and just feel, be aware of the space in the room. Feel, be aware of the space in the room as a single body of space. For me, my eyes open, it's very helpful. I'm not looking at space. You can't look at space.
Jogen:That's not possible. But with a soft and open gaze, it can help you feel spaciousness. So you could train in this while you're driving, while you're at the office, whatever you're doing, make a mindfulness practice, which eventually will become habit, where you are sensitive to the space of the room. Now, this doesn't mean you're going to feel something in particular. And yet there is a texture of spaciousness.
Jogen:We all know it when we have it. We definitely know it when we lose it. So when you start paying attention to space, you start training your mind in non grasping. Non grasping is the very heart of the Buddha's teaching of liberation. You could say all the methods, from the complex to the very simple, are to untrain the mind in its habit of always fixating on this or that object.
Jogen:It's always grabbing on stuff. It's grabbing on people, then it's grabbing on our thoughts about the people. It's grabbing on our body sensations, and it's grabbing on our feelings or our thoughts about the body sensation. Right? It's always going out towards objects because when we don't have space as a ground of our mind, it can't help but do that.
Jogen:So space welcomes everything that happens. It welcomes everything. I'm not saying get spaced out or get spacey. It is a medium of welcoming that is your mind. A way to think about it is like an aperture.
Jogen:So our aperture can be so vast it's beyond words, and I hope you experience that at some point. But then it can be, you know, bigger than usual through practice, more encompassing. Usually, the aperture is fairly tight. It's fairly what we mean by attachment to self is not a judgment of one's behavior so much as saying the aperture of awareness, which could be so beautifully vast, tends to be narrowed around what am I thinking and feeling at this very moment. My spirit is this big.
Jogen:And sometimes if I really care about somebody, it's this big. And but then when it comes time to watch the show, it's this big. And actually only seemingly so because our true nature is unconfined. So all the while we are hooked into, all the words fail. We're hooked into this dimension.
Jogen:But to really enjoy it and have it empower your life, generally, one has to train. I'm going do a guided meditation in just a minute here, with space, but I also want to emphasize that there is no practice that anyone is already doing that you can't recognize space with. So if you are feeling the flow of breath, to notice the space around the breath, to notice the space within the breath. Because we always do Zen practice with our eyes open to notice the space of the room that contains this body breath. So, a way, whatever practice you do, set up your aperture of awareness such that you at least subtly include space.
Jogen:You'll begin with having some taste in your meditation of physical space, and then eventually you start to touch the truly unconfined that you could do it in your closet. There was a great hermit poet named Muso Soseki. And Muso Soseki wrote a haiku about he lived in a hut that was not that much bigger than it was kind of like this mat and this mat together in a little area to make tea in. And he said, sitting in my hut, the boundless space is breathtaking. It contains the whole universe.
Jogen:It's actually not a metaphor. It's poetic language, but that is his direct experience when we begin to touch the unconfined. Okay. So let me guide, a little meditation. So eyes open.
Jogen:Now, if you're not used to this, you could begin by just letting your gaze be just open your eyes the bare minimum. You have an eyelash filtered visual field. And just let your gaze fall softly on the floor. If you're more habituated to eyes open meditation, let your gaze be kind of low horizon level. You're aware of the points to the periphery on the left and the right at the same time.
Jogen:This is called Kuan Yin's gaze or Avalkyiteshvara's gaze. And just feel feel the change in your being just from letting your eyes be soft and open like this. Soft, open, and at rest. And now tune into your body as a container for sensation. As if it was a hollow sculpture with space inside.
Jogen:And all the goings on in the body are happening within that hollow sculpture. So embodying the container of pulsation and tingling, heartbeat, All the sensations happening within the body. You may be able to feel spaciousness amidst the sensations happening within this body. Body as a hollow container for sensation. It's not something you can make happen.
Jogen:It's already happening. And because there's space inside this body, you can just allow these sensations that are happening to just happen without you getting involved or upset or interfering. And for some people, it's a little bit more challenging than others. And now we'll shift this scope a little bit. Still feeling this alive body.
Jogen:Be aware of the room containing the happening of the body. So you're expanding your frame of reference now. Aware of this body happening within the room. You could turn up the alertness so that you also notice the edges of your body fading, fizzing into the space of the room. Like a ripple within a larger body of water.
Jogen:Don't try too hard. See if you can just appreciate this body happening within the space of the room. Each sensation a shimmer of emptiness, rejoining emptiness. Now offer up your thinking mind into the space of the room. As if your thoughts and images are emitting into the space and just evaporating as they enter into that openness.
Jogen:Offer up the thinking mind into great space. You may be able to feel the space even beyond the room. Attune, feel the space that contains even the room you're in. Definitely not through trying hard. So you can practice in this way, and it's worth having a lot of confidence in this kind of practice.
Jogen:Just like building one pointed staying power is a skill, there's a skill to intimacy with spaciousness and the ability to not just space out or get lost in it. And all kinds of when you are open, when the scope becomes more spacious, the different aspects of the dharma have room to come through in an organic way. Different beneficent states have room to come through in an organic way. But they need this, they need room to arrive. What time am I supposed to stop?
Jogen:Kind of now? Maybe that's good for today. Maybe the talk today is about space. Yeah, okay. What?
Jogen:We discovered it We discovered it together, thank you. Yeah, let's see if there's any comments or rebuttals. Some of you hate space.
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.