Embracing Your Darkness - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei
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Jogen:Good evening. Happy autumn. It is lovely to be here with you. Last week, I did a talk I called Protecting Your Brightness, and I said I would do part two, which is Embracing Your Darkness. So I'm going to do that tonight.
Jogen:Carl Jung said, Where there is will to power, there is no love. Where there is love, there is no will to power. So we have an ancient path that we're practicing in a somewhat modern way. And the path we have here is not a path of power over life. It's not about mastering life.
Jogen:We don't master life after all. We don't get the whole picture of this situation. It's not the lot of human beings to get the whole picture. That's why we love narratives that propose to offer the whole picture, because it's not something we actually get, but we can be given a facsimile. So our path is not a path of power over life.
Jogen:Despite our best intentions, relationships splinter. You can do everything right. You can take all the workshops. You can do all the NVC or the PVT or whatever's sexy these days. Relationships splinter.
Jogen:Despite our diligent practice, longings surface that are incongruent with our aspirations. We don't get rid of the things that we hoped we would get rid of. Although we tend to hope someone else out there or on our screens has gotten rid of those longings that we feel are incongruent with our aspirations. Despite our careful mindfulness, we still say or do some things that are hurtful sometimes. We don't extinguish that despite our spirituality, our humanness.
Jogen:So the first thing that comes to mind about embracing our darkness, and this is not darkness as in the negative is the dark. It's our lack of fully knowing what we are and what we do that is never extinguished. Who we are now is partly contextual. People, situations, body states draw out aspects of what we are, but we could be put in a different context with different people, with different body states and something else might be drawn out. And you don't know until that's happening.
Jogen:We don't fully know what we do. I find solace in that. I don't fully know what I do. Right? Because how my actions echo in other people and in the world, how much of a view do I have of that?
Jogen:Like, this much of a view? Even that sometimes is distorted. We don't fully know what we do, what we put out and create in this world, and we also can't claim total innocence about what we do, what we put out and create in this world. So in a sense, we walk this path in the dark, This path of human being, this path of dharma. Are we wisely walking?
Jogen:Are we informed by previous sages walking? Are we poking the universe and listening to its response walking? Are we learning through mistakes walking? Are we like a pinball bouncing off stuff walking? Pinball bouncing off stuff is like an image of not having our own compass or our own center of gravity.
Jogen:So situations just bat us here and there. Lights are going off and there's noise and a pinball machine. Is some divine thread pulling us? Is that how we are walking in the dark? So the first aspect to think of your life and to think about the areas in which there is friction for you because you wish to be mastering life, which refuses to be mastered.
Jogen:All that comes in, up, and out of us believing that we could do such a thing. Think of your different domains of your life. Think of the world. Ultimately, this isn't even power over your own mind. That's an important stage of practice, realizing that you have more sovereignty than you probably believe.
Jogen:You have more sovereignty not only about what you think, but about how you respond to what you think. You have more sovereignty to rest in awareness then you probably think. A thinking mind doesn't really touch it. So embracing our darkness or embracing darkness as a fact of reality, again, is not about the bad or the immoral stuff, but the things in you and the world that cannot be domesticated. You as a being will not be fully domesticated.
Jogen:Things will find a way to leak out, at least a little bit. At least arising internally. Embracing our darkness means not getting rid of things that feel a way that we don't want them to feel. Because whatever we keep a distance from, whatever we try to kind of lock away into some sort of chamber, some silo. That's a good word.
Jogen:We try to silo aspects of ourselves. We try to put things in cages. So I am advocating for companioning our pain and confusion And not othering it, and also not selfing it. Right? It's mine.
Jogen:It's my pain, Whatever it may be, whatever this experience is, it's actually the shape of my nature. At the same time, it's not fixed. No, it's not fixed. It's not dismissible. You and I are not beings to be sterilized.
Jogen:There is an old understanding of a zen sickness, of somebody who clings to quiet mind or clings to the rules so much they get a particular kind of sickness. And the sickness is not that they're doing it wrong so much as they're siloing themselves. They're not willing to companion in whole way. Companioning our pain and confusion. So in a way, realizing some measure of brightness of spirit, as I was talking about last week, is easy if you center practice in your life.
Jogen:It's actually not all that hard to realize some measure of bright, clear mind. This is what's there when you clean up a bit. It's just what's there. It's just a basic existential fact. It's not, as I said, for special or spiritual people.
Jogen:Anybody who's willing to do the work will recognize, oh yeah, there's a bright clarity to my mind when it's not full of stuff. It's not so difficult. What's hard is seeing that your pain and confusion, first of all, is not necessarily obliterated by that brightness. What's hard is seeing, experiencing, or even just to have faith that your pain and your confusion is that brightness itself. Now I don't know how much of a there's an interesting thing because that is experience, that whatever we experience is brightness because experience is brightness, so my darkness is brightness, my confusion, my pain.
Jogen:And yet, we so quickly silo and reject and are afraid of aspects of experience that this is not so easy to appreciate. That our pain and confusion and whatever the flavors are actually actually belongs to the very heart of the world. And actually, as a beginning way to practice this with this in your particular style of pain and confusion. See what happens if you stop and say, This belongs to the world. It's not a problem to fix.
Jogen:This belongs to the world. Now talk about there's an old Chan saying that says, Preach what cannot be practiced. Practice what cannot be preached. You know, to say something about how we might companion our pain and our confusion, because there is a kind of middle way with this. Indulgence is wrong from a dharma point of view.
Jogen:Making a narrative, making a personality wardrobe out of our pain and confusion is considered wrong in dharma. That's one side. The other side is rejecting, saying no to, saying this doesn't belong. Between those two, there's some other opportunity. So to not immediately reject heartbreak and aches and sorrows and confusions, all that we fear to feel, but first of all to try to live inside them.
Jogen:And I'm not talking about this as some kind of long arc like, Okay, you're someone who has seasonal affective disorder. I encourage you to, you know, make a long term plan. Forget that. Take vitamin D, get a sun lamp. Maybe leave Portland.
Jogen:This is about immediacy. This is about the moment of experience, to not immediately reject it. So that means the groundwork is practicing, this belongs to the world. This belongs to me. This wasn't like a pile of poop that is now dropped inside me, like some kind of mistake of the universe that I'm feeling these things.
Jogen:That is a knee jerk response for many people. Oops. Kind of defect of the universe error. I'm feeling pain, heartbreak, confusion, all of what we might put in those categories. If you pay attention, you might see that you immediately try to antidote such things.
Jogen:You reach for the whatever. Most people do that. Right? That's a habit that I have. Try to hang out in sorrow's eyes for a little bit.
Jogen:Be like, oh, now I'm seeing through sorrow's eyes. What is it like? What is it like to go to work with sorrow's eyes? What is it like to do what I have to do with sorrow's eyes? But not with the burden of thinking it's wrong.
Jogen:What can you see with those eyes? What can you see with those eyes that you don't get to see with your other eyes? Hanging out in sorrow eyes without making a great conclusion about the way your life is or where the world is. Or allow confusion as one of your modes. For some people, the sorrow thing is easy.
Jogen:They did goth in high school. Sorrow, no problem. The rains are coming, easy. But then confusion is really hard because something in us feels like I'm supposed to know stuff. I'm supposed to have answers.
Jogen:I'm supposed to be clear. What's so scary about not having the answer? What's so scary about being stripped of certainty? Why is that so hard? To allow confusion as one of your modes, to wander a little bit of confusion.
Jogen:Again, don't identify it. Don't make a grand narrative. Don't make personality wardrobe out of confusion. Oh, this is one of the ways the universe likes to experience life. Why don't I try on how the universe likes to experience?
Jogen:I'm confused. I don't know what matters, what's right, what is on TV tonight, what's for dinner. That one drives my girlfriend crazy. I never know what's for dinner. She wants me to know what's for dinner.
Jogen:Inhabit your anger and frustration. Again, for some people, confusion easy. They're good at confusion. Confusion is a personality style for some people. Yeah.
Jogen:You might know them. You might be them. But anger is really hard. Anger is scary. Anger is bad.
Jogen:It's dangerous. It's unrespectable. Fill in the blank. For some people, it feels good or it doesn't feel good. Depends on the intensity.
Jogen:Depends on the amount. Depends on inhabit your anger and frustration. Now we have this precept that says, do not indulge anger. Do not unleash it, but seek its source. Right?
Jogen:You could say, do not mindlessly spew your anger out on the nearest object or the object of blame, but inhabit its energy. What is that like? I think it's very important not to unleash it. You can mess your life up. But if you never inhabit it, then you have you have something about the universe or at least human beings that you just don't understand.
Jogen:So wearing anger and frustration, it speaks, it communicates through its very energy and illuminates through its very energy. You can't cut it out. If you cut it out, you'll be depressed. You can't indulge it. If you indulge it, you'll hurt people and yourself.
Jogen:So wearing but not unleashing or solidifying irritation, anger, this is a this is part of awakened practice. There were some Zen scrolls from the past that, you know, the Zen art that have like demons sitting on cushions. That might have been very helpful in a monastery where there's people who when you're in just religious organizations, the archetype of purity tends to get called up. People think I should do this purely, and they feel they're supposed to be pure. Right?
Jogen:But then there would be hanging outside the zendo kind of a monk with horns sitting pissed off on a cushion. That's that's a visual koan. So with all of these heartache, sorrow, anger, confusion, not othering it and not selfing it. This is the koan. In a way, this is just as it is.
Jogen:This is already how it is. But then we do something. So the precious mirror samadhi and the wonderful rich chant says, Turning away and touching are both wrong. Think of your pain, your confusion, your darkness. If you don't turn away and you don't touch it, you don't relate to it as some object that is separate from you, what's left?
Jogen:So aim for experiencing and sharing brightness. That's the Bodhisattva path. We aim to touch it and share it in a way that's appropriate to our karma. One has to have a strong personal practice for that not just to be a concept. Aim for experiencing and sharing brightness as only you can through your karma and along the way embrace darkness.
Jogen:And then when you encounter someone else, what they feel is their darkness or what they make dark because they're afraid of it, you're not. Whatever you're afraid of in you, you're afraid of in someone else. That's sort of a law, don't you think? I had a really long poem I wanna read you, but it's really long. It's, I'm gonna tell you about it in case you're the kind of person who looks things up.
Jogen:It is by Chan master, Zhao Zhao Zhao Zhao Zhao Zhao Zhu. Zhao. He's a great and very important Chinese Zen master. And this person, is renowned as one of the the most illuminated. But when he was a younger practitioner, he lived as a kind of a solitary monk in a temple, and he wrote something called the song of the twenty four hours where, for example, I'll read the first first stanza.
Jogen:The rooster crows three in the morning, aware of sadness, feeling down and out yet getting up. There are no warm underclothes to wear, just some tattered pants and something that looks a little like a robe. Wishing to practice the way and help people, actually, this is just being a fool. Right? So he's kind of dejected about his life choices.
Jogen:He's kind of depressed. First light, five in the morning, a broken down temple in a deserted village. There's nothing worth saying about it. In the watery morning gruel, there's not a grain of rice. Idly, I face the open window.
Jogen:Only the chattering sparrows as friends. Sitting alone, now and then, I hear dry fallen leaves blow by. You can almost feel the loneliness of the life he's chosen. Who says that to leave home is to cut off likes and dislikes? So an old axiom of becoming a Zen monk is that you're cutting off likes and dislikes.
Jogen:You're casting aside preferences to just be with what is. He says, if I think about it before long, tears start to fall. Sunrise, seven in the morning. Doing anything with a goal in mind is to get buried in the dirt, yet the boundless domain has not yet been swept. He's expressing the sorrow of that every sincere practitioner will encounter.
Jogen:I know I haven't broken through to my true nature, and yet I also know that trying to do so gets in the way. This is the day I wish I had the Chinese finger trap. It's perfect. Doing anything with the goal in mind is to get buried in the dirt, yet the boundless domain has not yet been swept. Often, my brows are furrowed.
Jogen:I mean, he's frustrated. Seldom is my heart content. It's hard to put up with the decrepit old man in the village. He's a complainer. Even Joshu was.
Jogen:Donations have never been brought here. An untethered donkey eats the weeds in front of the hall. It goes on and on. And actually, as the day goes on, he rests more and more in his brightness. Maybe I'll return to this later.
Jogen:Aim for experiencing and sharing brightness. Embrace the darkness. See its nature. That's our practice.
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