Good morning, everyone. Good morning.
Welcome to Jikoji
Before we begin, I always like to offer a land acknowledgement to the Ohlone people. Can you hear me over there, everyone? Yes.
Yeah?
I'd like to offer an acknowledgement to the Ohlone people who are the native people of this land and of the entire Bay Area for over 10,000 years.
They did not seed this land that they did not surrender it willingly.
And I also like to point out that that kind of seeding of land and
Dissolution in some ways of people and their culture continues to this day.
So it's nothing ancient. It's happening right now in Mongolia, in China, in Peru, in Brazil, in Tibet
And all over the world as Indigenous peoples
try to hold on to their culture and their language and their teachings
When any culture is diminished, we are all diminished.
So if you feel inspired to help
Any group
Kind of maintain and
Remember, their own traditions. Please feel free to put your money where your heart is. And in particular, if you want to help
the Ohlone people, there is a foundation. Just Google Ohlone Foundation.
And you can support them.
This acknowledgement is not meant to induce guilt.
It's meant to remind all of us.
I'm going to need some water. Someone would please get me.
Oh my goodness, thank you. Thank you.
It's not meant to induce guilt. It's to remind all of us of our interconnection and that if anybody anywhere is being diminished, we are all being diminished. So
I thank the Ohlone people for taking care of this land so that we can continue in their wake, taking care of this land
Oh, thank you. I might go there.
So at Zen centers all over the world, we talk quite a lot about
The Buddha's first teaching, the four truth
Today, I'd like to focus our attention on the precursor to that teaching. All of his teachings, his 45-year career of teaching by looking at and considering the story of his awakening
I first was exposed to, you could say the Buddhist teaching in high school. I was 16 and I read Herman Hess's book, Siddhartha.
It's not actually the Buddhist story, but it's close. It has its threads of similarity
I was 16 years old. It's a very tender age. It's maybe the first time we get a good whiff of how confused we are about who we are and how we fit in to the whole world.
And the Buddha's awakening story has always been kind of a light in the darkness for me around that confusion.
And for me personally, in my practice
something like a psychological map.
of how to live my life.
So that's why it inspires me.
So this is the basic story.
After leaving home, literally shedding his former life
And then following many different teachers and mastering their teachings over a period of six years.
Siddhartha Gautama
the Buddha to be
sits down under a Bodhi tree
Along the side of a river.
and he says, I'm sitting here
until I get to the root of suffering.
The root of all suffering
Which is to say the root of our suffering.
And his
Now, I will say that no one, of course, was sitting next to him a scribe taking notes. What's happening now?
And the story that comes to us was first written down
like 300 years after his life
And as we will talk about a little later on, it was embellished much later by the Mahayana tradition of which we are a part.
But the original narrative from the Pali canon
Tells a story of three
kind of shifts. He calls them watches the Buddha
So the Buddha sat through three watches
As part of his awakening.
And they have, if you look it up, they have some times associated with them. I don't think he was wearing a watch. But later on someone decided this is what the watch meant.
So in the first watch from about 6 to 10 PM
He remembered his own past lives.
And the second watch from 10 to 2:00 AM
He observed the cycle of death and rebirth and karma for all sentient beings
And in the third watch from 2 to 6 AM
He penetrated the truth of dependent origination
And the cessation of suffering.
You'll find out later, he says, cessation, cessation to his students.
And then that led to his full awakening.
As I said, later in his life, the Buddha taught his students.
who are now today hear us
Over and over again, he would say
The entire awakening is about cessation. Cessation, naroto, norodo in Pali
He is speaking to the complete stopping.
The complete extinguishment
of suffering
And that happened through the unraveling of its underlying causes.
his own
Underlying causes.
You can probably see why I think this is a psychological map.
Excuse me.
So just like Siddhartha
We take our seats.
I'm sorry. I just have this voice and someone was kind enough to give me a pause and so I'm going to
Use it
This will be a first
I might sound funny.
So just like Siddhartha sitting down under the Bodhi tree, we too take our seats this morning under the oaks
And the laurels
And the Doug fur is here at Jikoji.
And we consider these through watches that Siddhartha sat through here in our own body and mind experience.
You can see the first watch when we first sit down is we start
Reflecting on our lives because all this material usually shows up when you sit down to practice
We see our actions and our inactions
Everything with which we have engaged in our lives. Everything to which we have been subject to in our lives.
In other words, when we sit down, we sit down
With this array of selves to encounter, to meet
And an array of stuff.
We picked up
And identified as ours
So that's the first watch.
The second watch is understanding how these various selves arise
and pass away
How our actions
have consequences
How what we do with our energy with this life matters
Sitting here
We can experience, for example.
How generosity and awareness.
And selfless care
create a particular kind of community or world
While harmful actions
And self-centered grasping
create a different kind of community.
in a different kind of world
That's the second one.
And then comes the third watch
This is where Siddhartha sees the origin and cessation. Let's say, of his own suffering
He sees greed, hatred, and delusion. We call those the three poisons
You see them and you recognizes the possibility
And then
attains freedom
In other words, he's able to let go
Of his suffering
So the third watch is where we also
Encounter
How one thing conditions another
How suffering continues through generations, really
Through a chain of causes
And how none of it exists.
Independently.
Anything else?
In our little quiet Zazin here facing this wall.
We each have a front row seat.
To our own mental links.
and unlinks
So in our Buddhist teaching, these links
are called the 12 links
Or interdependent co-arising.
I'll give you the traditional list, but then I'm going to give you a cheat sheet that somebody gave me one time that really works for me.
Traditionalists, ignorance, formations, consciousness, mind and body, six sense organs, contact, feeling
Craving, grasping
old age and death. and then it comes right back around ignorance again, and you keep going.
Somewhere along the way.
Someone gave me this little very pithy way of looking at it.
I wish I could say thank you to this person. I don't know where it came from. Or maybe I made it up, but I don't think so.
The whole thing was reduced
This whole complex chain was reduced
To something simple.
From ignorance, and I'll define that in a minute. From ignorance.
From ignorance I make
I grab
I attach, I acquire. So from ignorance
I make, I grab, I attach, I acquire.
I use this every day.
So ignorance here is not a lack of information. It's not checking the news and not knowing what's going on in the world. It's a different kind of ignorance. It's a deep foundational, I guess, misunderstanding or misperception
of what this is.
In a very specific way, what this is, is
Impermanent
Meaning changing all the time.
And interconnected.
Endlessly interconnected
For daily survival, our brains
really want to create a narrative that makes sense.
So we interpret the world as if it were permanent and unchanging in any given moment.
But that illusion is exactly the root of all human suffering.
So one way I practice with this is very simple.
Because I forget, I'm ignorant
This vast interconnection and how everything's moving. It's a moving reality because I forget that
I start to create these rigid ideas about things. In other words, I make something
Usually a story with some meaning.
Out of just the raw experience.
And now, because there's a kind of a meaning attached to my raw experience
What do I do? I started having preferences.
Well, I like this, and I definitely don't like that
I want things to go my way and
Sorry if they're not going your way
I need him to go my way for me to be happy.
And then I attach something to this whole experience. This raw
experience has now got
Meeting, and now I attach something to it.
And what do I attach?
And I
I attach this distinct separate sense of I.
Living inside of world that it has constructed.
Entirely forgetting.
that I helped build the house in which I am now trapped by my own ideas and opinions and preferences
Trapped I am.
Trying to find the door pretty regularly.
door window
Any exit
When we practice regularly
We get to watch this whole cycle over and over again
Kind of in real time. Not just sitting zazen.
But in every aspect of our lives
We start to notice, because we spend so much time noticing here what comes up in that whole cycle.
We start noticing all the time
That
The world that we experience through this body and mind
kind of making it up
And when we start to see that on a very regular basis.
Then arises the possibility.
Of not making.
Not grabbing
Not attaching.
And not acquiring a separate identity that then has to be protected and defended all the time.
This happens not because we've figured out
everything, and we have nice little continuous story about our lives and the world's life
But because we have finally stopped thinking that we have to figure something out
So I'll give you an example.
I can give you one that happened, or I can give you several. They come up constantly for me. One is something that just happened a few minutes ago while you were sitting
I know 1 person here actually experienced it pretty up close
We're sitting in the first period, and I just happened to look up for a sec. Usually my eyes are like your eyes
down there
Just as I looked up
Big bird. Yeah, came against that glass plate window
And I saw it coming, like, you know, this fluttering thing, and boom
Against the glass.
This happens.
Immediately, it's amazing how fast we interject a self here. What did that mean?
I actually thought it meant something. So the raw experience is just this bird flying into the glass, but the mind goes so quickly to trying to make a meaning out of it.
Another example from this week is we have some repairs going on some construction. By the way, this whole talk is a construction, by the way, but we have some construction going on up there. So we've been sitting in the morning and the evening with the
And power tools. And the first day this happened, I thought it was quite hilarious. I was laughing, thinking, well, now let's see what your practice is like. Because you're sitting here quietly
It went on. It was pretty funny.
But after a few minutes
You know, you couldn't have an opinion that this is bad or this is good. Because you would not be in your exact experience. After a few minutes that went away and you're just
sitting, and that's just like a burn sound. It's just another sound without any extra weight. No story that it's good or bad, just a sound.
But the big experience I had with this, I'm calling it a big experience for the first time
We're sitting here, as we do twice a day, looking at a wall
And suddenly, in the middle of my Zazm comes waltzing my
grandfather
And my grandmother
And my father
And any
little array of long gone people whom I love.
And also
My not-yet-born grandchildren
I'm sitting here, and they're all waltzing through my zazen.
The experience was I was four year old again.
I felt my body with my pixie haircut and my little small, strong little body and my grandfather
was slipping me some candy
And then I was 15 years old
sitting next to my
grandmother was probably then my age now
And I was stroking her arm.
And I was telling her
I really love her arm, always spelled like Juergens lotion, kind of almond
I was stroking her arm and saying I love your old skin, which now I'm wearing, by the way.
She was
It's terrible skin milk. I love this skin
So soft.
Then I was back in my six-year-old body
I was sick when I was a little girl. I was in the hospital
And I woke up
And my father, a cardiologist, had his hand
on my heart right here.
And I was feeling it.
Right again
I can still feel his hand there.
Then, as I mentioned, my yet unborn grandchildren, neither of my son's wives are pregnant. But yet I saw this person as an older person holding these babies.
One after another, they appeared
It was all so tender and sweet and
Kind of without any barriers.
And it struck me that you could, in retrospect, say that I was just imagining and fantasizing and not doing a very good job being in the moment.
But somehow, in that moment
There wasn't a separation of time
And now and the future.
For a little bit of time, this ordinary structure about time
Was loose. Very loose.
I didn't feel that there was a past me and a present me and a future me or any of these people were anywhere but
In this kind of dimensional time.
Wasn't a sense of the timeline, not this way, but this way.
No time separate.
There's a whole fascicle by Dogan called Uji that covers this. But there it was right in my lap
So I felt that
The past wasn't behind me, and the present wasn't here, and the future wasn't over there.
They were all present within the same field at the same time.
And in that field, there was no sense of
This self
Experiencing it
It was an unlocatable self.
There wasn't a separate me standing outside looking at this.
I embodied all of it
At the same time, somehow
And there is no sense that I had to be a separate me. Either.
Just this kind
Endless, vast unfolding of causes and conditions and relationships and memories
and bodies and lives
It felt like a big relief
Like
And I did not try to make any meaning or make a narrative about this at all.
And then the bell rang.
And immediately some words popped into my mind
I'm going to ask you to repeat them with me in just a minute, but because they're so short, I just want to know how you feel about them. And maybe you'll take them with you and use them.
the words were
So
This is how it is.
Can we do that together?
So this is how it is.
This is how it is.
Yes.
In any given moment by moment by moment.
This is how it is. So this is how it is right now
How is it right now?
This is how it is
Not good, not bad. Just how it is.
And then after those words popped into my mind like a little caption for the whole sit.
So this is how it is
I stood up
Straightened my Zabuton
I made some grateful bows.
And I started thinking about coffee and breakfast
And that is how it is too.
This feels like the most important part of this story.
The coffee and the breakfast
The experience came
It didn't last
I couldn't grab it
Couldn't do anything with it. It changed. I couldn't hold on to it.
And then it was over and it was time for coffee and breakfast.
And in fact, I haven't mentioned this story to anyone, even my partner, because I was afraid I would hold on to it.
But I guess maybe I am.
So I'm telling you about it. I can tell you about it now.
I can make a profound story about this
I can decide that it means something monumental about my incredible practice.
I can also notice that very impulse.
to do that
to make a story
There I go again.
Out of my ignorance.
Making
Grabbing
Attaching
And acquiring
Another story about who I am, what reality is, and what's going on.
So our practice is actually noticing this tendency all the time. How the mind is always reaching
To try to make sense.
And how we can
Gently
Let go.
And this is where the Buddhist story come back to me
So I mentioned that later on after the polycanon, this is the version I'm going to talk about right now is kind of the non-canonical version. So the Mahayana version
Later yet
So in the Zen kind of telling of the Buddha's awakening
The Buddha says something when he's awakened. He has this beautiful expression of his realization. He says
There are many versions of this. This is the one you get today.
I and all beings and the great earth together attain the way.
I hear this as the fact the Buddha is pointing out that awakening isn't the Buddha's
solo achievement. How could it be?
If everything is interdependent, there is no Buddha awakening separately from you. Right here right now
in this kind of multi-dimensional space of time.
My liberation is not about me. My awareness is not about me. My suffering is not about me. And by me, of course, I mean you.
We
The Earth itself isn't separate from us.
So letting go is not this withdrawal from
everything. Look what I've done. I've let go
It's actually entering like more intimately
More completely.
Because there's less
A sense of a me separate from we.
Less of me trying to make.
Attach. You get it.
The issue with making and creating this identity that is separate is then you spend an enormous amount of energy
Having to protect it
and defend
So even at the age of 16, at the tender age of 16, I think I had a whiff that I wasn't going to really ever going to grasp.
who this is and what's going on. Not completely.
Maybe moment by moment. But not like this narrative that says this is the meaning of my life and life.
I understood my basic ignorance.
And I think I understood it not in a negative way. I think I continue to understand ignorance in a way of
and wonder.
At the interconnection and the endless
Changing nature of reality.
That's not to say that I don't often desperately try to create a story of me that has some continuity.
It doesn't really work.
And I was not some kind of teenage Buddhist savant.
I really was not. I had simply noticed that my mind could create
story
One explanation after another.
And I could easily become attached to those explanations. And make them about me
One thought leads to another, one desire leads to another.
One story leads to another story.
And before we know it, we believe our stories.
And then retract in the house.
We are caught in a world that seems terrifyingly rigid and cold.
And we forget that we helped construct it.
We forget we can let go.
Fortunately, the Buddha's story
reminds us
We don't have to carry around these stories.
They show us
The fears and the doubts
and insecurities, and the expectations
and the projections
That we have to wrestle with.
and they're no different than the ones Siddhartha sat down with.
Maybe a little different, but not significantly.
So Siddhartha, when he sat down under that tree
Sat down with the intention, as I mentioned, to wake up to see the root of all human suffering.
To see everything exactly as it is.
In the Mahayana version of his awakening
There's this
Personification of his fears and doubts
And kind of a cinematic version of the Buddha's awakening. The name of this being is Mara, M-A-R-A, Mara.
And
This
Is a personification of everything that he's worried about.
Mara shows up in successive little times in the Buddha's life after this episode as well
But here he shows up representing the exact ways that the Buddha's mind tried to pull him out of the present moment of his intent and his resolve to wake up.
So first Mara sends in an army of demons, let's call them demons.
And she he throws them at Siddhartha. And Siddhartha just tolerates it, does nothing about it, just
sits through it
Watches it like you watch.
When you're watching your life arise while you're sitting.
And because he does not fight them, try to grab them or get rid of them in any way
These
Demons or materials, things that are being thrown at him. They dissipate mid-air. And they fall down as flowers around him.
So suffering is transformed into
flowers
Then Mara sends daughters, these three daughters. It's always these women. Trouble.
Since $3 to seduce Siddhartha.
They represent craving
And aversion and passion
They try to seduce him, to pull him into wanting or rejecting. But again, he does nothing but observe.
He doesn't grasp and he doesn't push them away. He simply stays with his discomfort.
And they dissipate.
Finally, Mara attacks Siddhartha directly.
Who do you think you are?
What right do you have to sit in this seat?
of awakening
It says, who will testify?
that you belong here
And instead of fighting or arguing or pulling out a diploma or a list of credentials of all the things he's passed with all these prior teachers over six years.
Puts his hand on the ground
This is called the earth-touching Mudra. And he calls upon the earth. You could say the earth goddess. She has a name. Doesn't really matter. He calls upon the earth.
witness
To witness that he has the right
to be in a seat
And so the Earth goddess appears to bear witness
to his countless lifetimes of good deeds and practice, and finally Mara calls it a day and quits
I really love the fact that the earth goddess appears, that the earth is the witness. You know, when you see us bowing, we are touching earth.
We are touching Earth. I like it because awakening into your own life is not Achieved by
escaping the world is achieved by being in the middle of this dusty, muddy, messy life.
Together
Everyday life
So you can see that this is like a psychological map.
Mara
You have yours, I have mine.
Mara is whatever shows up to convince us.
Do we have to hold on to something fixed?
that we have to hold on to something that makes sense, and that has some continuity.
And it won't change
For example, Mara shows up as fear that says
You're in danger.
You can't trust.
Or Mara shows up as craving that says
you're not going to be happy unless you have this
Or maybe Mara shows up as a version.
You definitely got to get this out of your life.
Or
Mari shows up as this kind of endless chattering voice in your head that says you're not good enough.
Coban, Chino, Otogada Roshi, the founder of this temple called that the little policeman
It's whispering. You're not enough. You're not good enough.
You don't belong here in the seat of your own awakening.
So the ego tells us to fight these voices, right? To fight them.
that we need to defend some self.
And so we fight. We fight our anger, we fight our desires. We try to deny our experience.
We tried to kill off the parts of ourselves that we don't like.
We fight reality itself. We refuse to agree with what's right in front of us if we don't like the story because it doesn't match our ideas about ourselves.
But Siddhartha did not bite Mara.
You notice he did not once fight Mara. He did not defeat Mara by becoming stronger or angrier.
He just sat
I like to call this in my own practice, tolerating my discomfort.
He just tolerated his discomfort
So that he could see it for what it was. He didn't take the bait of his own stories
And
In that moment
All of that became flowers. Everything that was coming at him was transformed.
So this is
The radical practice of
Letting go
It is not forcing something away. It is not rejecting. It is not denying.
It is not making ourselves into some kind of new shiny spiritual being.
Letting go is not
Winning
Against reality
Letting and letting go is simply
This is how it is
This is how it is
In this breath
This is how it is. It will be different in the next breath.
This is how it is through this body and mind.
Do this body in mind
This is how it is
Just seeing
And then watching and seeing the making
Seeing the grabbing
Seeing the attachment, seeing the identity.
And then letting go.
This is being awake.
So as I practice with this little
special version of the 12 links of origination. Remember, ignorance out of ignorance I make, I grab, I attach, I acquire
I personally practice
Every day with letting go
Of what I've made up.
I do this when I'm sitting
I do this when I'm walking. I do this when I'm talking. I do this when I'm talking to myself.
What you do more and more of as you get older.
I do this while I'm grieving loss.
I do this
When I'm enjoying
And the practice gets really, really rich. When I feel defensive.
Because there's something. There's a little identity I've attached. And now I got to look at that
This is me facing my Maras.
I welcome them.
I welcome them
I see how they help me see how it is
Letting go does not mean becoming indifferent. It does not mean not caring.
If we become numb to our own suffering, we become numb to everyone's suffering
If letting go makes us indifferent, it isn't letting go at all.
Letting go, there's nothing left but compassion. It pours in
True letting go is probably the definition of compassion.
Letting go does not mean we stop making choices and that we're not responsible for our choices or that we should become passive.
Letting go actually is the opposite direction becomes
more intimate, closer.
Because we've let go of our rigid ideas, our plans for who we are in this big
scheme
And instead, we just meet each moment as it arises
Being upright
Transparent
Really deeply truthful
Not wholly.
completely ordinary
His Holiness the Dalai Lama calls any kind of self-promotion
A self-deception
I have a crush on the Dalai Lama. Just no question about it.
So this letting go is a loosening of the grip.
It's a humble admission of something that I knew when I was 16
Don't really I'm never going to get a total grip.
And who this is
who anybody else is
What should happen? What just happened, and what might happen next?
What happens instead is I notice things happen. I haven't experienced through this body and mind raw experience
But it doesn't need to be solved.
That experience is not a problem that needs to be solved.
Even if I'm totally bewildered. Which I am pretty regularly.
Doesn't need to be fixed.
I can tolerate that discomfort and see what happens next
With the kind of curiosity
Because I cannot know
So just like Siddhartha
We sit down
Wherever we are
And we meet ourselves.
Including our own Mara's.
We sit
Tolerate our discomfort
And watch the things that are difficult become
flowers
Yes.
We touch the earth
We discover that when we stop trying to make a big narrative story with meaning that makes all sense. We don't have to hold these fabricated selves together.
Absolutely nothing falls apart.
Let me let go of that
There is just
This
This.
This.
All of us together, this
Even when we were afraid to trust each other, be together
Even when we completely surrender to the joy of being together without having to impose a separate self.
This is how it is
So thank you for listening. And this is how it is.
When you get to ask questions or make comments.
Express concerns.
In other words, it's your turn.
What do you think the role of art is in
This is how it is. The question is, I'm just repeating this. What do you think the role of art is in this is how it is? Well, I was just having this conversation this morning
This is how it is art and music, not just
Not just our conventional ideas of art, right? Anything that we create without a desire
Be recognized
Just kind of art could just be the expression of the experience without a desire for it to make sense.
You with me? Without a desire for it to have meaning.
It can be just this and there are lots of artists in this room, so maybe some of you would like to speak to this
Maybe we're all artists in this room.
But
Just the expression of the experience without the need for it to mean something or demonstrate something or fix something or be seen as something.
I think that's one way I would look at it and probably other ways. Any artists want to respond.
Thank you.
One sec, there's somebody there. Go ahead. There's Omar grow as your sense of this grows?
Does Mara grow as your sense of this is it grow?
I don't know if Mara grows. I think there's an endless supply of Mara so far. I don't know if it's getting bigger. Does Mara grow
Desmara grow as your awareness of this is just how it is grow. I don't know if it grows. That's interesting question.
My own experience and maybe you can answer this from your experience
is that there's just an endless opportunity because we've been really conditioned to feel separate.
So every time there's a self to defend, there's a mark to address.
And every time there's a sense that I needed to stay like this, meaning it shouldn't change.
Or it should change. There's Amara to address.
So I don't know if it grows. Maybe your sensitivity to the awareness, oh, there's another Mara it grows. I would say that's awareness. And that definitely gets kind of tuned.
That's why this is a practice and not a once and done.
But yeah, I would say that's the way in which it's not that Mara outside of us or our issues get bigger.
You could say they shrink because we become aware of the whole making process.
So I had a question about how to get along with our ego
And sometimes how to let the ego let it go
Did you hear that?
Okay, the question is how to get along with our ego and how to let the ego let it go.
Maybe this is my intuitive question from your talk about
Your experience about your life and sometimes the intuitive on my body
I just didn't have to ego
We are fighting with the ego and we always defensive with the ego. So make a travel
An example of
End of mind sometimes control your
I'm sure you're sensing like that. So
Your experience when the ego or, like, some of the shadow
That's exactly what the Siddhartha was doing when he sat down, right?
He faces Mara, the personification of his projection, fears, doubts
Insecurities.
And that's ego. Yeah.
And
What does he do?
Doesn't fight them
He doesn't try to beat them into submission.
He observes
He observes and he develops this incredible kind of
Unmovability of being able to bear it.
Tolerating it
Just seeing it is a huge step.
And the way that in my own life, the way I see it
is through my body. Like, I don't… it doesn't get up registered in my brain until after I've noticed it in my body. My body's feeling some discomfort, and it's an awareness
Hmm.
What is that?
What is that? What's going on? What's happening?
Who's it happening to? I've said this many times.
in my experience, it's never the person sitting here
So
I would say that when you feel that there's something to defend
Or something to fight.
You have to notice.
That happened
And not necessarily defend and fight
Stop
Take a breath.
take a walk. Absolutely do not speak in that moment. You will hurt yourself.
You will hurt others
Do not speak.
Let the whole nervous system calm down. For me, I go for a walk.
I have to go for a walk. I have to keep my mouth closed.
And I observe what I've created, the story I've created
And I try not to kill it. I try to let it teach me
So I would say to turn your whole
System
Upside down
Instead of saying the ego is something to fight. See the ego as your teacher
Every single time you feel you got to go
Go.
You try
Me too.
Yes, sure hope.
Yeah, he did ask, does Mara grow with your understanding
Does Morrow grow with
No, does Margo? Does Marigro? Do all the projections grow?
As you begin to notice that you, am I right
You want to repeat? Yeah, the question was does Marlboro
This is if gross
Besides what you said, and that you could
It occurred to me with that question
that in one sense, Mar
Does grow, but not Mar
itself
But the effects of
Because
What happens with this practice?
It's not something we make
Like you said, talk about something that happens naturally
With this letting go that Nenzer talked about
naturally arises a sense of
Interconnection
or non-separation
With all of life
And with that non-separation
naturally comes
compassionate response
So they say
from the arising of wisdom
naturally arises
So I would say that
Not there, not in response, I would say that
Marla doesn't grow
But you've noticed more the effects of marla
in yourself and in others
And naturally, you become
You know the image of many hats
It's very sensitive to
Why should everyone who's suffering
So I would say one of the effects of meditation is
You'll unavoidably become more sensitive
And we're compassionate
That will happen
This awareness and this letting go
Thank you.
What Shouhou is speaking to was the first question or one of the early questions about
Does Margro, as your awareness of So this is it grow.
And he said that the effects of that grow so that you become
More and more compassionate.
And I want to say, actually, because this is very alive for me, that in my own life that
This sensitivity and compassion
Is
An interesting animal because if you're
Feel
other people's suffering
Or you notice
what's happening is suffering.
There's this tremendous compassion
You have to also then say
This is so this is how it is.
It's not a project that you get to go fix them.
You don't get to use your deep compassion to make them into a project that should be solved.
You have to bear witness to their suffering.
To your compassion
And this is hard, folks, because you see when you have a heart full of compassion that oh my gosh, a one degree shift and they would feel liberated from this. They could just trust, if they could just open their hearts
They'd be fine, but that's not your job, and it's not even true necessarily.
So that
This is how it is, has to apply.
To other people's experience
You can't use your compassion.
To try to fix anybody. Okay.
Some of us are fixers. I'm a recovering fixer.
I have a question regarding
I found it like one I'm with myself
practicing this asses
Let me rephrase it.
When I'm practicing acids
The work feels easier. I don't want easier if the word easier is the right word, but I'm going to use that
When you're practicing with yourself. Yeah
The work feels easier. Not the work, but like just like being able to be to be
Your existence feels more tolerable. Yeah
Not necessarily. Let me maybe finish my okay, go ahead.
However, when there's a need of expressing it
Sharing that
responding to things or responding to another people's inquiry about your experience of this. That's the there's a subtle moments of I I often observe
As I speak, it starts ignorance
And wanting to grasp
Not necessarily
Lend myself toothpaste, because there's
I think I struggled. I almost struggled or I thought about it afterwards almost all the time
About
Because I feel like there's almost only two ways. One is responding, continuously responding
And I'll be with my towards the feeling of
Like the discomfort of ignorance, arrogance
And the other way is just like not talking at all
And I feel like not talking at all is probably also not an option or it's not the most natural state as well, because just like that lady mentioned about heart, sometimes
I write things. I make things just because of the pure
It comes from pureness
to really expressed
arrogance again like equal rights again
There's often kind of struggle
You were sharing the story that
Yes
Yeah
So I wanted to, yeah, it's I guess it's a confusion I'm still
wrestling with a student
Thank you so much.
The question concerns
The awareness of being
Having a pure or raw experience and being kind of non-assessing and non-judgmental and being just
With it
And then when she is asked to kind of, I would use the word produce something out of it.
like, share her experience or
Demonstrate something
She notices this arrogance and this kind of like, well
this being emerges that she doesn't know how to address. Sometimes she lets herself be that arrogant person and do it. Sometimes she feels she should just
clamp down and and neither approach it seems like
There's not a way other than these two approaches, which is
squelching
And not offering herself at all.
Or being arrogant
And
Wanting to be seen
And
This is your koan, my friend
That's a very, very fertile place to practice. I wish the whole world were practicing with you right there.
It's very kind of poignant, right? We see that we have this pure wholesome experience and we have a pure wholesome desire to share it because we're interconnected. There's nothing wrong with that impulse
It's like
But it's not
Look, it's a very different kind
And I gotta say, from my heart to yours that we are conditioned
To ask for recognition.
Everybody in this room has long
Breastfed basically on the idea that we have to be seen. As an individual
And look how special we are. It's endless
It's endless.
But you have this awareness already.
This is huge. This awareness that there is somebody who wants to be seen.
For maybe a reason that doesn't feel quite
So selfless
And I think this is a beautiful place to be. I know it's not so comfortable and I'm sorry.
It's not comfortable for anybody, but you have the strength and the courage to even just see that is huge.
And now you get to practice with this question.
Who is it
Who is it
That wants to be seen.
Who is that one who didn't feel seen?
This is something that
I don't know if everybody on the planet experiences
But I think it's a fair bet to say most of us do.
The Buddha did
You're in good company.
Thank you for your courage and sharing that.
Okay, there's I just want to check online and then you, and then I think it's going to be the last question. Anybody have anything that they would like to express?
I was just wondering, may I put a fun twist on your experience of timelessness that before we close, that I think at that moment, your self turned into a photon because photon doesn't experience any time. It's everywhere and nowhere at the same time
And according to block universe model, everything that's going to happen is already happened. So you could actually go back and forth between your past and your future. That is just a fun
Well, now I have a new identity. I don't know how to work with this. I'm a photon.
Well, just try to be like a photon more
I don't think I tried to get there, but I really love it. So thank you to think about photons a lot now.
Yes, Michael.
Yeah, I just had a realization. Listen to this, I've always wondered what this Myra thing is, you know.
Mara, Mara
Mara, Mara, right. Mara. It's just ego. That's all it is.
I mean, I always thought it was like, okay, what is this, some kind
The creeping religion in here with the devil and all that. It's just simply ego, right?
Good.
Now thank you for that
Thank you for that.
And since I'd like to…
Thank you so much for…
so many different
ways of looking at letting go.
Letting go is such a misunderstood term.
I'm going to be chewing on your explanations for a long time. Thank you.
Please write me and tell me.
What
Happens when you chew on them.
I'm sorry, I didn't hear that.
I really appreciate seeing you, hearing from you. And please write me and tell me what happens as you chew.
Okay, I will. Okay.
Thank you
Thank you.
Okay, one more, and then we got to go to cookies and tea.
Beginning instruction. Yeah
We are the king
Queen of your domain driver of this map
I will try to
Precision ourselves
Here to be in control
So I tried to
Sure, this is a good question for you. She's saying that in beginning instruction
You told each person that you were the king or the queen of your domain, that you're driving this bus
You're driving this Budapest
And she… All that many people would do. You're driving your own car, right? Okay, not a bus. You're driving… you're driving your Zabouton. Yeah, and so she asked
Please direct it to him. Speak up. It's not so good.
Who's who's driving? Yeah.
Yes, she said, who's the eye that's driving.
Who is the eye that's
Sitting on the cushion.
Or who is that that you tried
Who is the eye that is asking the question, who is the eye?
So I don't know if you heard the question. It's a great question.
They're all great questions.
Hiroshi, in beginning instruction told the students that when you're sitting.
in charge. You're the king or the queen of this little domain and you're driving.
And this
practitioner asked, well, who is that I who's driving?
And
Shoho responded, who is the one right now asking the question?
about who's driving.
Who is the one is a big question.
Okay, dear friends, we'll have more time to talk.
and up above, if you'd like to it's wonderful to practice with you. Thank you. We're going to do a closing chant