The Desire to Go Beyond - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei
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Jogen:I take refuge in Buddha mind, I take refuge in Sangha heart, I take refuge in the teachings of the dharma. This is the Ancient Way Sashin. We are underway with the ancient way. Master Shen Yin in 1982 translated the Affirming Faith Mind poem. Here is an excerpt.
Jogen:The great way is broad, neither easy nor difficult. It's not easy, it's not difficult. With narrow views and doubts, haste will slow you down. Attach to anything and you lose the measure, the mind will enter a deviant path. Let it go and be spontaneous.
Jogen:Experience no going, no staying. Accord with your nature, unite with the way. Accord with your nature doesn't mean, Oh, I'm joking, I'm kind of a lazy guy, so I'll just nap during evening Zazen. Chord with your nature means harmonize with the moment that you are. Chord with your nature, unite with the way.
Jogen:Wander at ease without vexation. Vexed by our minds. Bound by thoughts, you depart from the real and sinking into a stupor is just as bad. And sometimes we just alternate between being beleaguered by a swarm of thoughts and then just going unconscious. That's not meditation.
Jogen:It is not good to weary the spirit. Why alternate between aversion and affection? Why alternate between aversion and affection? So we do our practice on the ground of reality. And isn't it poignant that no matter how happy or skilled or connected or wise or accomplished or at ease we become this character with our name.
Jogen:We don't get to be them for all that long. We have to give up. Isn't it poignant that all the beings we love and admire and make meaning together with, they don't get to be those beings for all that long and we have to give them up. Isn't it poignant that all we accomplish, sometimes contorting ourselves into ultra tight balls of stress to accomplish these things. Isn't it poignant that all we accomplish is shaped, is changed, is received or even ignored beyond our control.
Jogen:Isn't it poignant that however much work we do to bring something forth in this life, we may never actually see the full fruition of it? Is it poignant for you that your mistakes, our mistakes, however we've learned from them, however we've transformed them, they still leave a mark on our lives and the lives of others. Our mistakes like branches that twist in the course of growth. So we're doing our practice on the ground of reality, one of these realities is the obvious ephemeral nature of things. It's totally, totally obvious.
Jogen:The Buddha did not need to tell us that. The seasons come one after another and time quickens as our years gather. And suddenly it's autumn and the rains again, the shorter days, the longer nights. Isn't it poignant to be 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 and still have a sense that we don't really grasp what we're about? What this is about?
Jogen:What we're all here for? And so all of these things have always been a texture of human life. And I didn't even mention the things for those who don't dwell in heavenly realms like we do. All of these things have always been a feature, a texture of human life and always running through them has been the ancient way. Always parallel to the vicissitudes and the burdens and the displeasures of human being that you cannot opt out of always has been this truth running right through it.
Jogen:The sting of our mortality. The way that if we let ourselves really dwell on death enough, it can wipe away a sense of meaning to all this. This practice of session invites us into a deeper inquiry of what is it I believe to be alive anyway. And we can open to a bigger view and experience. Our lack of control of just about anything.
Jogen:On one hand, can count the things you have a good measure of control over. Loneliness often felt as something to be extinguished. In the session we can see how this whole moment is our body and life. Right now, feel the whole moment as your body and life. So the gravity with which we conduct this container of retreat, the holding it together as a sacred vessel is because we are doing something that is rare to do.
Jogen:We are doing something precious for those who resonate with the intention. These conditions that we create together and the practices being suggested enlarge the possibility for each of us to verify and experience transcendent truths. Even just sitting in stillness, what resonates in stillness begins resonating in us. So if we're lost, what brings deepest peace is not being handed a map, a bunch of instructions but experiencing that we're already home. If we're heartbroken, what brings deepest solace is not someone telling us we'll be okay and it's not even someone embracing us, companioning us, but experiencing the true root of the heart, tasting that for ourselves.
Jogen:If we're burdened or unhappy by being the responsibilities and challenges we have being the character we are. What brings deepest relief is not running away from our karma. The reverberations of our actions. Burdened or unhappy being the character we are. What brings deepest relief is not trying to be a super polished self.
Jogen:What brings deep relief is clearly experiencing our basis. Beneath the thought feeling I am. And everybody, everybody can do this. So, session, this gift passed down from the ancients, fresh as ever, relevant as ever. Session is multi dimensional.
Jogen:And the practice is multi dimensional. Our culture, many of the institutions that were there to help us mature as human beings are now things that are commonly rejected, mistrusted, no longer function like they do. We have no rights of passage generally in our culture. Almost every commitment we make can easily be undone. People walk away from each other like with the weight of a swipe right, swipe left.
Jogen:The one dimension of the benefits of this practice is sitting in commitment to our own integrity, moment after moment, day after day. We build, you could call it strength of character. We build an inner power. Being present, not needing to be entertained, but bearing witness, being intimate with life, with no cookies. Except, a little bit of cookies.
Jogen:With few cookies. The practice has the dimension of because you are sitting in that so rare commitment to inhabiting life, you will definitely learn things about the conditioned mind that are hard to see when we are always in motion. Because we stop, we can see patterns. Because we stop, we have the vantage point to watch the fluctuations of our mind and to watch how those mind fluctuations weave our feeling into perception and back into thought. How much we construct our world.
Jogen:As Hogan Roshi was emphasizing, we can see that thought is thought. And, whatever power it has, to some degree we're giving it that power. This is a great benefit. We cultivate the skills of attention, the skills of letting go. Just being carried by this gift of the ancients, we come out more grateful, we come out with a softer heart.
Jogen:And yet, the purpose of session, the highest purpose of session is really none of these things. These are beautiful side effects. Highest intent of this work together that we hold together, the true north of this sitting, walking and chanting is the intention to wake up and taste and testify to our real nature. And we can, and in continuing you will, in the mystery of time and karma, and one's own longing. But let's say there are three ingredients for waking into transcendent truth.
Jogen:In transcendent truth these are just words. Transcendent truth is not one thing which is not verified and realized in exactly the same way for each person. It has facets. And yet has a common source. Let's say there are three ingredients.
Jogen:Three ingredients that each person can bring in their own way. And you couldn't help but bring them in your own way. This chant affirming faith in mind, I don't know, what is it, three thousand years before social media is partly pointing at the pain of comparing mind. How ridiculous, inaccurate, unhelpful, and just plain painful it is to carry and be burdened by the comparing mind. As if you could have someone else's life.
Jogen:As if you would really want it. So you bring these in your own way and that's just how it should be. The first, the desire to go beyond. Second, a steady vivid mind. Third, bowing to what is.
Jogen:So the first is the desire to go beyond. And, nobody comes to a ten day session without the desire to and you might put it in very different words than I'm putting it. My first session, I really did, in the middle of it, look for a plane ticket home. I had lost touch with my desire to go beyond. So we sit here and we live here over these days and so much of our character and way of being is reflected back to us.
Jogen:All the people are blank screens for our projection. The silence is a field whereby we can imagine people are thinking anything about us and we believe they are. We can weave big heavy stories out of a glance of a stranger's face. Just catch the mind and its construction of a world in action. We can make long echoing disturbance out of transient things like meals.
Jogen:It's just food. You need some really good food. It's just food. What's underneath the disturbances that don't come from a quiet room surrounded by a beautiful forest? What's underneath?
Jogen:So in this sacred container we can feel our insecurities and it's important to own them. We can see and feel our combativeness. There can be an aspect of the mind that's just looking for something to make an adversary, someone to be a problem, predisposed. We can see our pride. We can see our poor me.
Jogen:We can see or feel our basic fear of life. We're not supposed to come into a practice like this and not encounter these things. We are human so we have our particular combination of the human stuff. But to see it and feel it and to stay close to its vibration in our bodies rather than exploding into a world of suffering. We can see our sensory perception, a taste, a sight, a sound, a movement has gotten a hold of by the thinking mind.
Jogen:It's elaborated into a self referential entanglement. And the perfect shape of the leaves is lost. Fragrant breath of the forest is lost. Luminosity of awareness for now is lost. So the first ingredient of the meal of transcendence is knowing our own suffering as our own suffering.
Jogen:To know our own suffering as our own suffering is actually the Buddha's recommendation and the Buddha's first level of spiritual awakening was testifying with your own body, heart and mind to the noble truth of suffering. Alright and we're holding ourselves right on the spot. The container holds ourselves right on the spot. So we feel it normally in life but we're able to keep adjusting, keep shifting, keep medicating, keep enhancing, keep sweetening up the soup. But here we really just we make it intimate so that it can work its magic.
Jogen:What what of the pain and whatever other stuff we are burdened by that we carry, what of it do we do to ourselves? To really feel that. What does the mind do to the mind? To face it squarely, to take responsibility. And having compassion for this suffering sentient being wishing to end that, to go beyond that for the benefit of all our relations.
Jogen:You have tasted release, you have a genuine basis of confidence or you could not undertake something like this week. Some people have practiced for a good amount of time and that doesn't just include Zen. Sometimes that means raising children or taking care of aging parents or they've done the practice of AA or all the A's. All the different ways that life purifies us, reveals to us our extraneousness. And they're not sitting here suffering the rough edges of the personality.
Jogen:But the curiosity still exists, the words of the ancestors, great hearts, the great spaciousness, the great ease that is talked about by our ancestors. We may have an intuition that our insights have reduced a lot of turmoil, but there are things pointed out by the lineage that we haven't quite tasted. We're not tasted deeply enough and we want to taste them. And so, desire to go beyond has the flavor of curiosity, has the flavor of refinement, has the flavor of bodhicitta, how can I be a freer being for the benefit of others? So, the ingredient of the desire to go beyond can be curious, it can be desperate, it can be full of wonder, it can be existential dread.
Jogen:One who has the forbearance to sit still in the midst of existential dread is blessed and worth bowing to. Ordinary mind is a prison. You know that by the moment you have stepped out. Ordinary mind is a prison. It's so confining, it's such a liar, it is so small.
Jogen:Of course there's the desire to go beyond. Who doesn't want to get out of prison? So the second ingredient in transcendent insight is a vivid, clear mind. Or call it an alert, still mind or a bright, spacious mind. The evening chant, the great master Hung Zhi is calling it illumination and silence.
Jogen:He's talking about these two aspects of the practice. These two qualities, vividness and clarity or stillness and alertness, when they're in tandem we call that awareness. And this is the aim of meditation in the Mahayana. Some people do come from other schools that have very venerable and respectable methods such as going into kind of deep states of absorption where you kind of blink out from existence. The aim of meditation, the Mahayana is still and bright.
Jogen:Not imploding inwards. So I want to talk a little bit about vivid clear mind. And all of you, even though I'm going to say some stuff, you definitely know things about the vivid clear mind. You definitely do. So you take this with a grain of salt.
Jogen:It's not that you follow the breath like a tail follows an animal. It's not like the breath goes out and down and so your attention goes out and down. The breath is happening within unmoving awareness. Whether the so called still point is your nostrils or your tendon, your belly or it's the whole body breathing, you have a steady frame of reference that you hold steady and the breath unfolds within that. Chozin Roshi used this beautiful metaphor, it's like a knife sharpening stone running the blade across it.
Jogen:The vivid sharp edge of the breath, alighting in stillness bit by bit. Listening, we don't reach out. We don't wait. We don't move from one sound to the next. Rather, we're being vivid, not moving receptivity.
Jogen:And all at once the whole soundscape is unfolding within you. Whole body awareness, the whole body is like a steady frame. And so the moment by moment pulsations and tingles and pressures and things are happening within that unmoving frame. That upright, that dignified, that intent posture of yours. So no matter the method we use, it is to deliver us into still vivid mind.
Jogen:It's not like breath takes you to the juicy dharma bus and listening takes you to the squishy dharma bus. Or that koans take you to the great place and open awareness takes you to the almost great place. All of them have the same intent, just a slightly different approach. Clear, vivid mind. Steady, alert awareness.
Jogen:People have all kinds of sophisticated things to say about thought and thinking, but real meditators know that they have to be disinterested in thoughts for things to really begin to heat up. And it's not so much that we do a thing called disinterest with thought, so much as being minutely engaged with direct experience. Minutely engaged, not missing a single raindrop. Aspiring to not miss one particle of breath, that quality of intention. Now the goal is not to not miss a raindrop.
Jogen:The goal is not to be someone who can say, I breathed for a whole hour, I didn't miss a single particle of breath. The goal is the engagement. The goal is the steady unmoving awareness. The goal and the fruit is the vivid awareness that comes from doing so. So, the greater the disinterest in thoughts and engagement with direct experience, the more vivid and bright and penetrating awareness can become.
Jogen:Silent and serene, forgetting words, bright clarity appears before you. That is straight talk. Not metaphor. So this is part of why we talk about, we use thoughts to talk about how lame thoughts are. I just think, well, most of what I thought, I have already thought multiple times, probably even today.
Jogen:And just watching that, it's not all that interesting. Sometimes there's a little creative juice. There's a hump to get over. When a practitioner gets over this hump, things get a lot easier. And this hump is knowing the brightness of awareness is so much more nourishing and true than thoughts which are just little pale emissions of that brightness.
Jogen:Then it's not so hard to put them aside. The more vivid clarity, the less reenactment of I am, the greater the chance of verifying true essence. The less reenactment of I am, the more possible to really taste non separation. Perception, thought about perception, thought about thought, feeling about the perception, We get more and more split off from the intimacy of this. And we can undo that.
Jogen:Still and alert. Steady and vivid. Your method is in service of that. My method is in service of that. It's not in service of special states.
Jogen:They're more likely to arise if the mind is steady and vivid. It's not in service of congealing in a state of utter thoughtlessness. We might taste times of really profound quiescence. To really know how optional the thinking mind is for happiness is quite a boom. Still and alert.
Jogen:The third ingredient of transcendence, the stew of transcendence. Bowing with what is. We could also call it total yielding. Thoroughgoing acceptance. So with human consciousness came the ability.
Jogen:We're the first animal, I think, that can argue with the universe. Cats are next. Once they start talking, I guarantee they're going to argue with us. We have the ability to argue with the universe and that's great because we have created so many beautiful and helpful things from our dissatisfaction with the way things are. This roof is not leaking because people were dissatisfied with being wet.
Jogen:You're not shivering because people were dissatisfied with being cold, etc. This bowing to what is pertains to immediacy. This total yielding is not passivity that many good hearted people react to as some sort of statement that they should not be engaged in good, helpful work. This yielding, this total acceptance of what is pertains to immediacy. It's never about something happening somewhere else in some other moment when you hear these teachings.
Jogen:One of the factors, consequences of human consciousness is that it kind of splits in two and it makes an object of itself. That which is one pretends it is two and it approves or disapproves of the half it's looking at. It accepts or rejects its own body really. This is happening all the time, every time we, mind discriminates and says, Not right, not right. Shouldn't feel this way.
Jogen:Let me adjust it, let me fix it, let me dream about a better state, let me tune out so I don't have to feel it. Bowing with what is, is learning to relax the oppositional stance with this life. It's, it becomes mostly a deep pleasure to do session after, I don't know, what your number will be. Because a lot of the fight just gets worked out of you. And as you work with bowing with what is, this is what you're doing is you're relaxing the fight with your own life.
Jogen:When opposites arise Buddha mind is lost in old sutra says. So bowing with what is in session. These ideas live in us, suss it out, get clear. There's these ideas in us that say, I know what I should be experiencing when I should be experiencing it. From that idea we begin moving in different moods of dissatisfaction or doubt and because of dissatisfaction and doubt we are less engaged with the method and because we're less engaged in the method because of the dissatisfaction and doubt because we're not getting what we think we should be getting, then the mind is more active which is dissatisfying because the mind weaves dissatisfaction and you see the whole problem.
Jogen:And so we just cut that whole thing by continually keeping in mind it is my primary task, not separate from the stable vivid mind to bow with what is. Don't bow to it, it's not separate from you. I know what I should be experiencing when I should be experiencing it. I tend to think of this, when I encounter this in myself, I consider it like some kind of primordial arrogance that somehow I, Jogan, know how the universe should be unfolding. I have the authority to decide what reality should feel like at this moment.
Jogen:And that state of mind is evidenced by complaint especially in conditions like these and I know some of you have real physical challenges. I bow to you for sitting session in the midst of them. It's evidenced by complaint, this not bowing to what is. It's evidenced by reaching for something a little more. It's evidenced by restlessness.
Jogen:Dogen Zenji said this about being Zazen. Dogen said, Settle the self on the self. That's a phrase to keep company with, to orient with. Settle the self exactly on the self. So this ingredient that flirts with the transcendent is embodying no complaint, no next.
Jogen:You are invited to let go of next. No better, no should be, no could be, and this is not passive. It's not a dead state. It's alive as whatever the texture of this, this is. Bowing with what is is one moment as ten thousand years.
Jogen:So, have fidelity to desire to wake up and go beyond. That is in your power to stay close to the deeper intention that lives in you. Make consistent and strong effort at soft, steady, alert awareness through your method. This is in your power. Keep applying the method over and over and over and over and over.
Jogen:It's in the dogged repetition of the method that it really comes alive. That you can really taste what it is and what power can be. And practice yielding to the perfect exactness of each dreamlike moment. And know when to give up power, know when to put down the illusion of control. And so the vessel we make together carries us.
Jogen:So much of what I'm saying is just woven into this gift of session that really practices us. Can you just drift along and really unlock its potential? No. But, is it all up to you? That's not true either.
Jogen:Because in our sincerity we carry each other. So, may it be so. Please continue.
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