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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:Okay. It's good to be here with you tonight. Welcome to spring. It's good to be here in spring. A lovely time of year here in the city.
Jogen:I am continuing with the series on the perfections. The perfections are a group of spiritual capacities that are taught to have infinite breadth and depth. They are aspirational, developmental, beautiful, virtues of the heart. They work together, these different qualities. They work in independence, interdependence.
Jogen:And I don't know if I shared this, but the context in Buddhism for the perfections is that one roots a desire for awakening in the heart, and that desire for awakening continues life after life. Whatever form this energy infuses or flows into next lifetime, that desire for awakening is thought to continue. And parallel with that, the qualities we develop continue in this way of thinking. I find that, rather beautiful and really interesting contrast compared to our culture which basically thinks, oh, it's game over. And maybe your legacy is like your bank account or what you, something you made that people might remember.
Jogen:But in Dharma, you are your own legacy even though the being you are now and the being you are then will never know each other. Right? So this is called a vast view. When one thinks of the perfections, for example, so far we've covered patience, generosity, and ethics, one can think, I'm not going to master this. I'm not going to perfect these in the few decades I have to practice.
Jogen:But this is a millennial or eons long trajectory. Right? And in the lore of the dharma, some people would say the facts of the dharma, the Buddha became the Buddha because of this very thing. These qualities were cultivated lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, And they eventually culminated in someone of great spiritual potency. Right?
Jogen:So we've covered so far patience, generosity, and ethics. What are left are the other three, or wisdom, effort, and then today I'm going to talk about concentration. Concentration. So always the world has been pulling at human beings. And always it has been the case that there's a mind and other minds influence that mind and other thoughts of other minds pull on this mind, and one's own mind is never hermetically sealed off from the world.
Jogen:So always the world pulls at the mind of human beings. Thoughts of others, thoughts of institutions, desires of all kinds entangled and contradicting in each individual. And so by what force do you maintain your center? By what force do you maintain your center given that you are pulled on from so many directions. How to not think only Nike's thoughts.
Jogen:Nike would like you to have Nike's thoughts. Or how to not only think Jeff Bezos' thoughts because Jeff Bezos would love for you to have Jeff Bezos' thoughts. Or meta thoughts or social pressure thoughts. How do you maintain your center? By what force?
Jogen:By what force do you stay the course that you've discerned matters? So in your life, probably if we looked at it, we could look at how you spend your time, what you put on your walls, what you dream about, we could say, there is a hierarchy of what matters to you. How do you stay the course with what you have put at the top of your hierarchy? How are you not blown off course? Earlier this year, I did some teaching on the eight worldly winds that the teachings say, Blow us off our course.
Jogen:Those are wanting to be praised, wanting to avoid criticism, wanting pleasure, wanting to avoid pain, wanting to hold onto things, not wanting to lose anything, Wanting to succeed, whatever that means, and wanting to not fail. How do you stay your course? Concentration is one answer. Concentration. How do you think a thought deeply?
Jogen:How do you think a thought deeply? Now, I've been thinking about how one thinks a thought deeply and I think the modern answer is a book helps one think deeply. You join with an author who has followed and unfolded one thought or a body of thoughts deeply, and they kind of take you for a ride. And that text or that book, whether it be a Buddhist scripture or a Jeff Vandermeer novel, holds your mind in its container of thought. But how do you think a thought actually?
Jogen:Because you might notice that every thought leads to another thought. It's an associative web. Right? You're thinking about grandma and to take care of her, and then you think of grandma's brisket. And then you think about, well, now I'm a vegetarian.
Jogen:I don't eat brisket. And then you think of, well, tofu might give me an excess of estrogen. Is that bad? And then you think, can I trust Wikipedia? Is that accurate information?
Jogen:And then you think the whole internet is shitified. And then what happened to grandma thought? You've gotten far from the thought of grandma. How to think a thought deeply? How to contemplate when monkey mind jumps from this branch to that?
Jogen:I just demonstrated it. That's just kind of the associations that popped up. Without concentration, we can't think a thought deeply. We think of sometimes concentration would be the absence of thought or the absence of following through with desire but concentration is absolutely necessary to follow through with desire. Concentration is absolutely necessary to think a thought deeply.
Jogen:Some people talk about psy ops. Have you heard the term psy ops? Psy ops are when governments or other organizations basically cripple the capacity for real reflective thought in a body of people or a culture in order for them to not think through the consequences of what they're living under. By what force will you counter the psyops of the empire? Are our thoughts even our own?
Jogen:Where did your thoughts come from? The thoughts you're thinking, the thoughts I'm thinking, are they examined? Let's say we have examined there are these thoughts that, are mine and these are thoughts that are are others, but how will you go with the thoughts that enliven and animate you and not go with the thoughts that actually bring you down? It's got to be a matter of concentration. So the perfection of concentration, I wanted to start there, lest you think this is only about some kind of one dimensional idea of meditation, about getting rid of thoughts or only absorption.
Jogen:Concentration is the power by which whatever agency you have and wherever you want to put it, that's the fuel behind it. And for that matter, concentration is not inherently ethical. Concentration can be used to build biological weapons. Concentration can be used to make public art murals. They both depend on concentration.
Jogen:Now, let's talk about concentration in the context of meditation. So one of my favorite quotes of Buddhas from Dhammapada, great classic text is, Buddha said, after their awakening, there's nothing I see that is more harmful than an untrained mind. Then the next verse is, And there's nothing more beneficial than a trained mind. Now, one way to appreciate this is that when mind can inhere in its own transparency, there's a bright energy that comes. There's bliss that comes.
Jogen:Stillness is discovered. For mind to inhere in its own transparency, it has to have the intent of concentration. It has to be its energy has to be concentrated either within itself, and I'm making a gesture as if mine had a location or a place and it doesn't. But it has to inhere in its own body of energy, or it has to be channeled toward a particular object. But what an interesting thing that the mind, the same mind that, its thought expressions can drive somebody absolutely mad, can drive other people absolutely mad, can design weapons to, you know, eat away people's organs.
Jogen:It also, when it rests, when it inheres in its own nature, it starts to vibrate with bliss, luminosity, and stillness. Every human mind has that as its actual Its actual basis is a spiritual core. It's misused in all the ways we've talked about. Only concentration can give us a taste of that. I have to believe you being here, you've had some taste of that.
Jogen:Thinking of the perfection of concentration, we could think in terms of there are many, many stages of concentration. And the Buddhist writings and different treatises have delineated all these different stages of concentration. Essentially, how your experience would unfold if you endeavored to develop it single mindedly over a period of time, whether that's in a retreat or your lifetime. Some of these texts say there are 30 different states. You know, one of the classic ones that the Buddha taught had eight, excuse me, 12 different states.
Jogen:And there are many, many different ways to slice it. Concentration is a place where your agency developed this power can lead to you going beyond ordinary limitations. Now, a lot of the limitations that we feel of our body and mind, we think that's just the way it is. I just have this limitation. But it's actually not true.
Jogen:I've lived with Zen teachers who slept three hours a night because of their concentration. I've lived with practitioners who had intense chronic pain but never had a moment's complaint or pity for themselves because their mind rested in stillness. So, this was just sensation. Right? I've known people whose energy level was absolutely off the charts coming from their concentration.
Jogen:Not to mention or I'll mention, this is the power to go beyond the opinionated and distracted mind. That power to cut through, that power that can cut through is developable. So there are all kinds of, what are called samadhis, different levels of absorption. There's the samadhi of boundless space. There's the samadhi of nothingness.
Jogen:There are samadhis of bliss. There are Samadis absorptions where the sense of unity in life becomes greatly heightened, right? Kind of obliterate a sense of being an isolated, lonely being. Right? When the Buddha was old and sick and their body was a very uncomfortable place to be by their own report, they wouldn't dissociate from the body but every day they would go into a particular Samadhi and they would tell their students, When I go into this concentration, I have relief.
Jogen:It's like the original Vicodin or something. Is Vicodin a painkiller? And what's the one that people like a lot? Yeah, that one's pretty good? Okay.
Jogen:But there were no negative side effects. No negative side effects, only a bright, clear mind afterwards. So when we think of concentration, this isn't necessarily inherently positively ethical, but it can reduce your suffering in very interesting ways. In very interesting ways, the power to concentrate can reduce other people's suffering. You can really have your mind cut through distraction when something needs to get done that's urgent.
Jogen:It's also true that the tradition has lots of reports of this, but I think you'll experience it too. The more concentrated your mind is, the more intuitive capacity you have. On one level, everyone has deep intuition, but it's buried over by constant thought and doubt. Right? So, you have an intuition that could come, could be delivered in various forms, but because the mind is churning, it's either not heard or doubt says, Nah.
Jogen:Thought says, Nah, don't believe that, believe me. I'm thought, I know a bunch of stuff. So people who develop concentration to these deeper degrees, they often have psychic capacities. Sometimes they were more spontaneous where they just happen to know stuff for a while. I had this stupid one for a while where we would be in retreat and I always knew what was being served for lunch.
Jogen:It was the worst psychic power you could have. It just was of no use. I would just be like, oh, it's polenta today. Okay. So what?
Jogen:But some people have cool psychic powers that arise that are actually really useful. You know, it's said that, a high level teacher, someone who's at the level of master, one of the things that qualifies that is that they know the minds of their students. So one's mind is transparent to the teacher because they have such a clarity of mind from concentration that there's not a border between brains that we think there is. And I actually worked with a teacher who was psychic like this and it was quite actually relieving because you knew that you couldn't hide anything. And he would chastise me for shopping on the days off and things like that.
Jogen:So that was helpful. Now, concentration is part skill building and it's part heart yielding. Now the first thing of skill building is really good news because, you could excuse yourself from this, but if you want to develop it, there's nothing stopping you. Concentration simply depends on the intention. You have to desire it.
Jogen:And then you do the basic raw training, which is decide, decide, place your mind, and then when it leaves where you decided to place it, repeat. So in your sitting, every time you place your mind, it wanders and you bring it back, you've built that capacity a little bit. Right? Desire, the desire to be concentrated with either faith in its benefit or confirmation of its benefit and just doing that replacement. How many times in one period do we do that?
Jogen:Is it a thousand times? Is it a 100 times? Eventually, it'll be maybe 10 times for you. Now, there are nuances to the skill of concentration. One of the nuances, learning when to press the gas and wanting to ease up.
Jogen:There's something about modulating your intensity. I like to use the image of a dimmer switch. It's cool. We have this modern technology that is applicable. You know you can turn up a dimmer switch.
Jogen:It's the same bulb, it's just brighter. I would have to imagine that more current flows in the wire. That's what happens with the dimmer switch. You turn it down, the current is reduced. It's not always beneficial to have a really bright light in your room.
Jogen:It's not always helpful to have it dim. So, you learn from the basic skill that you have a modulation of energy. The most basic way to think about this is when you're drowsy, you brighten. And when you're too tense or too intense, you dim. Learning the dimmer switch.
Jogen:The other aspect of the skill we could say is learning non interest in thoughts. The least the less you're interested in the thoughts going through your mind, the easier it is to concentrate. Okay. I like to tell people who say that there's a particular thought that they keep thinking, I'm just like, why don't you just think it once? You already thought it, you already have, it's information.
Jogen:Thoughts tend to not disclose new information. Your thought is, I don't like my roommate. The next time you think it, generally, it's the same damn thing. Okay. So you learn non interested thoughts.
Jogen:We learn that concentration can be one pointed and that that one point can become vast. And we learn that the vast field of experience can be gathered into one. And those are different dimensions of concentration. So, I said it's part skill building on one hand, which is really good news. You could just decide to build that skill just like if you decided pickleball is worth doing.
Jogen:You can build the skill of pickleball. The heart yielding is a little bit different. The heart yielding part of concentration is, I think, why we call this spiritual practice. It's a matter of the spirit. It's a matter of the heart.
Jogen:So, to stay in a concentration lane, we have to surrender to life. If every time uncomfortable things come up for us when we're in concentration lane, and we let those knock us off course, then it's not going to be able to get that deep. So in order to deepen concentration, life asks us to feel life. Life asks us to yield to life. We have to feel, experience that which we reflexively reject.
Jogen:We reflexively reject things. We say no, no. During this last retreat we're in said something very interesting. He said, Why are you fighting against a feeling? You're already feeling that feeling.
Jogen:It was so true. The people have some feeling and then they're fighting that feeling and it's really silly to fight it because you're fighting it doesn't make it go away. It's still there. You just added something on top of it that's worse. You are the feelings that arise.
Jogen:There's no there's no separation. Okay. Further, there are subtler things that are asked of us as we approach more profound levels of concentration, which you could do. We have to give up the addiction to time. We have to be willing to not always project a future.
Jogen:We have to be willing to not always be in reference to a past. Something in the heart bristles at that. We love being beings that exist in time, but you'll have to give that up, at least temporarily, you'll come back. We have grudges and biases surface as we go deeper in concentration. Right?
Jogen:Because there's something interesting that's like as the mind There really are no words for it, I'll just say as concentration deepens, somehow some of the lids on the heart are removed, and often people feel grudges and judgments that they, Oh, I didn't know I still had that. Oh, that's in there. And if they're not met with a humble gaze, then we won't have further passage. We'll get there'll be an eddy. Right?
Jogen:There'll be a limitation until we can see that grudge for what it is, yield to a bigger view than I'm right and they're wrong. So, heart yielding. Concentration traditionally is thought of having a very interdependent relationship with wisdom, which I'll talk about next week. So concentration is not inherently wisdom. As I've said, a sniper can be excellent at concentration.
Jogen:And it's not inherently wise to apply that to putting a bullet in somebody. Of course, the contrary is true. But concentration holds a space that is clear and open enough for wisdom to arise. Buddhist confidence in the human mind is that it is pregnant with wisdom. It is spring loaded with wisdom, but there's not room for that wisdom to come forth because the mind is so turbulent, because it's so thick with thought.
Jogen:You might think of it as like, if it comes from the depth of a body of water, but it hits this thick level of kelp and debris and, I don't know, plastic stuff, it can't penetrate to the surface. It's trying to come up. Wisdom is always trying to come up, but it hits this thick layer of distracted and and agitated mind, and it can't penetrate. So, concentration is holding open longer and longer a space that is clear, that is lucid, and then wisdom can arise and different levels of wisdom can arise. Talk about some of the levels of wisdom later.
Jogen:Another way to spin this is concentration is enough focus and stability in your mind for sanity to be a feature of experience. Right? And I don't know what a good definition of sanity would be. I guess sanity would be, I'm not generating my own anxiety internally in my own disaster scenarios, or I'm not harming myself so continually with the inner critic that everything else gets soured. When the mind is concentrated, those things really start losing potency.
Jogen:In a Zen training environment, we don't really have that environment set up here, but the old time environments concentration was expressed in two ways. And one teacher would say, It's negative Samadhi and positive Samadhi. And negative Samadhi is not negative. It means it's when you are doing sitting meditation, negative Samadhi is you work at dissolving your mind so that this clarity can show itself. And then positive Samadhi is you get up and you sweep the floor with 110% of your being.
Jogen:And there's this interdependent relationship between dropping into that source of energy and then doing what you do really fully. So in this sense, the way you live your life can be concentrated. It's very hard in our modern culture to not multitask. It's very hard to not multitask. I mean, when was the last time you went in a restaurant and there was no music and you could just taste the food?
Jogen:Even with those kind of environmental happenings, concentration can just really do one thing fully. And you might take this on as a practice, one thing that you do each day, practice just doing that thing fully. So, if you walk from point A to point B, see what it's like to occupy, to inhabit that activity 100%. That's the undivided embodiment that is part of Zen training. And then there's communication.
Jogen:And concentration is a kind of communication with the world. It's almost as if, a concentrated mind, a mind that is present, stably present, is a bridge whereby the world can touch us in different ways. And it's actually flowing both ways. The concentrated mind is touching the world just as the world touches the concentrated mind. So we begin to have this experience of life.
Jogen:We begin to walk down the street, and we and the trees permeate each other, and we and the dog pooping on the sidewalk permeate each other, we and the sound of the chimes permeate each other, the mind starts to resume its interdependent capacity. It's back to what I said earlier, there's an obliteration of loneliness that can happen because we really feel that we're a participant of the world. We really feel that we're an ingredient of the world. You are an ingredient of the world, just like it's an ingredient of you, But you can't know that beyond theory without concentration. I like this word, enchitification a lot.
Jogen:This is a really good word. And I, I wanted to make sure I understood it, so I googled it, which is apparently part of inshitification, is things like Google. And they said, oh, inshitification is all these platforms losing their quality over time. But I think it's interesting just to think that through distraction, which is related to the interwebs, human culture is getting in shitified. I'm afraid there'll be no real musicians in ten years from now.
Jogen:Who can learn to play an instrument with all this distraction? Who can learn to paint with all this distraction? Who can write a book of any substance with all this distraction? What's the cultural product going to be in ten years, in twenty years? So the antidote to cultural and personal and shitification is actions, thoughts, creations, heart born from concentration.
Jogen:Now this is not, a suggestion that we should walk around in these little, like, world resistant chambers all day long. That's not gonna cut it. But in the midst of all the hubbub, to really like have some clear energy, some clear stable energy. And so concentration in Samadhi are vast. That's why it's called a perfection.
Jogen:It's not some just little thing you do in order to feel calmer. The significance of concentration in Samadhi is actually profound. The potency of love that concentration can unlock is profound. Think of the people in this world who have embodied love to a great degree. They did not budge from that desire.
Jogen:They did not budge from that desire. They held to it day after day. They held to it in the difficult. They held to it in the easy. Teachings say that the entire multi billion world universe Buddhism is cool like that.
Jogen:It's not just about earth. It's not earth centric. There are billions of worlds. The entire billion world multiverse is permeated by the Buddha's luminous concentration. The Buddha is eternally in, in Samadhi, and that not being separate from Buddha, when we drop into concentration, we begin to be resonated, we begin to, you could even say, be animated by Buddha's luminous concentration.
Jogen:Pervades his whole body. So, let's ongoingly put energy into concentration. If you do it in your morning practice, try doing it when you make your breakfast. If you do it when you make your breakfast, try doing it when you call your mom. If you do it when you call your mom, try doing it when you scroll your phone.
Jogen:If you do it when you scroll your phone, try doing it when you pick up your guitar and on and on. There's actually no moment really where we can't practice concentration unless we just want to be distracted. That's okay. Concentration depends on distraction. So that has a place too.
Jogen:So the perfection of concentration, I barely, of course, scratch the surface of this. In a sense, I'm always talking about that, but really to consider it as something that can profoundly bless your life, can profoundly bless your life. Perfection of concentration.
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.