Everyday Zen #2
JJohn PulleynJun 18 at 7:30 pm41min
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Hmm. This is day six of this. June, 2025, seven day seshin. And today I'm going to continue reading from the book everyday Zen, love and work by Charlotte. Joko Beck, you, so
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yesterday, we finished up with a piece titled The price of practice. And this one is the reward of practice.
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You know, want to get something.
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We are always trying to move our lives from unhappiness to happiness, or we might say that we wish to move from a life of struggle to a life of joy, but these are not the same. Moving from happiness unhappiness to happiness is not the same as moving from struggle to joy. Some therapies seek to move us from an unhappy self to a happy self, but Zen practice and perhaps a few other disciplines or therapies can help us move from an unhappy self to no self, which is joy. So much of self help and therapy psychology is just trying to make ourselves, our self feel okay in the midst of our illusions. Make it so other people will like me. Make it so I'll like myself. Make me feel good about myself. There's nothing wrong with that, feeling good about yourself, but that's a relative sort of thing. Feeling good about the good, noble things you do and how outstanding you are and morally upright, there's a deeper feeling good about yourself, which is the nature of yourself, just the wonder of who We are, the unlimited aspect of who we are. I
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unlimited because our true self is no self.
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Hakuin says it right in what we just chanted, the cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.
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Joh says to have a self means we are self centered. Being self centered, and therefore opposing ourselves to external things. We are anxious and worried about ourselves. We bristle quickly when the external environment opposes us. Easily upset and being self centered. We are often confused. This is how most of us experience our lives. This is normal, self centered human beings to one degree or another. It's what we all are. I
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although we are not acquainted with the opposite of a self which is no self, let's try to think of what the life of no self might be. No self doesn't mean disappearing off the planet or not existing. It is neither being self centered, nor other centered, but just centered. Life of no self is centered on no particular thing, but on all things that is it is not attached. So the characteristics of a self cannot appear. We're not anxious, we're not worried, we do not bristle. Easily. They're not easily upset, and most of all our lives do not have a basic tenor of confusion. And thus to be no self is joy. Not only that, no self because it opposes nothing is beneficial to everything you
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the six patriarch Hua nung said the foundation of our school is not abiding
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that's stuck anywhere, not stuck in the past, not hung up about the future, not chasing after phantasms i
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to be no self is joy for the vast majority of us, however, practice has to proceed in an orderly fashion, in a relentless disillusion of self. The first step we step we must take is to move from unhappiness to happiness. Why? Because there is absolutely no way in which an unhappy person, a person disturbed by herself or himself, by others, by situations, can be the life of no self. So the first phase of practice should be to move from unhappiness to happiness, and the early years of zazen are mostly about this movement.
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The chan teacher Guo Gu says that contentment is the foundation of real Zen practice. We have to recognize on some level, to some degree, that it's okay. We're okay. We
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and we are okay. Just see it.
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Everybody. Is doing what they need to do. Everybody is the way they are because causes and conditions. We're all a tree in the forest. It's grown a certain way. It's okay, it's a tree, it's perfect.
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She's saying that the early years of zazen about moving from unhappiness to happiness, and she says, for some people, intelligent therapy can be useful at this point, but people differ and we can't generalize. Neither we cannot, nor should we try to skip over this first movement from relative unhappiness to relative happiness. And she says, What do I Why do I say relative happiness, no matter how much we may feel that our life is happy, still, if our life is based on a self, we cannot have a final resolution. Why can there not be a final resolution for a life based on a self, because such a life is based on a false premise, the premise that we are a self, without exception, we all believe this. Every one of us, in any practice that stops with the attempted adjustment of the self is ultimately unsatisfying. I
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it 10 Ways to a better me doesn't get it.
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That adjustment of self can simply be racking up achievements only I become a good Zen student, finally, happiness will be mine
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to realize one's true nature is no self. Buddha is the fruit of zazen and the path of practice. The important thing, because only it is truly satisfying, is to follow this path. As we battle with the question of our real nature, self or no self, the whole basis of our life has to change adequately wage this battle, the whole feeling, the whole purpose, the whole orientation of life, must be transformed. What might be the steps in such a practice, first, as I've said, is to move from relative unhappiness to relative happiness at best. This is a shaky accomplishment, one that is easily upset, but we must have some degree of relative happiness and stability to engage in serious practice. Have to be fairly stable. We have to be okay enough, and then we can attempt the next stage, an intelligent, persistent filtering of the various characteristics of mind and body through Zazen. We begin to see our patterns. We begin to see our desires, our needs, our ego drives, and we begin to realize that these patterns, these desires, these addictions, are what we call the self. As our practice continues and we begin to understand the emptiness and impermanence of these patterns, we find we can abandon them. It's the unconscious. It's what we're not aware of It's Our predilections and shortcuts that we don't even know about that trip us up. We have to be willing to see we have to be able to have a true moral inventory,
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saying nothing about beating ourselves up, but seeing, seeing, Oh yeah, this is what I do. You.
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He says, we don't have to try to abandon them. They just slowly wither away. For when the light of awareness plays on anything, it diminishes the false and encourages the true, and nothing brightens that light as much as intelligent zazen done daily and in seshin. With the withering of some of these patterns, no self, which is always present, can begin to show itself with an accompanying increase in peace and joy in
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I want to read something from Anthony de Mello really speaks right to this
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little piece of his in the book. Stop fixing yourself. Wake up. All is well. And this one is entitled your sad history of self improvement. Compare the serene and simple splendor of a rose in bloom with the tensions and restlessness of your life. The Rose has a gift that you lack. It is perfectly content to be itself. It has not been programmed from birth as you have been to be dissatisfied with itself. So it doesn't have the slightest urge to be anything other than what it is. It possesses the artless grace and absence of inner conflict that among humans is found only in little children and mystics, only the human only the adult human being is able to be one thing and pretend to be another. Think of the sad history of your self improvement efforts. They ended either in disaster or they succeeded only at the cost of struggle and pain, and we could add a rigidity, separation. You're always dissatisfied with yourself, always wanting to change yourself, always wanting more you. You so you're full of violence and self intolerance, which only grows with every effort that you make to change yourself. Thus any change you achieve is inevitably accompanied by inner conflict. Now suppose you stopped all efforts to change yourself and end in all self dissatisfaction, would you then be doomed to go to sleep at night having passively accepted everything in you and around you? There is another choice besides laborious, laborious self pushing, or we could say self punishing, self pushing on the one hand or stagnant acceptance on the other. It's the way of self understanding. It's far from easy, because to understand what you are requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else. Have to forget about trying to get somewhere. Says this is one you may have heard before. Consider the attitude of a scientist who studies the habits of ants without the slightest desire to change them. He has no other aim. He's not attempting to train them or get anything out of them. He's interested in ants. He wants to learn as much as possible about them, and that is his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change effortlessly and correctly. Change will happen. You will not have to bring it about if what you attempt is not to change yourself, but to observe yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things without judgment, just to notice without judgment, condemnation or desire To reform yourself, your observations will be non selective, comprehensive, never fixed on rigid conclusions, and always open and fresh from moment to moment. Then you will notice a marvelous thing happening within you. You will be flooded with the light of awareness. You will become transparent and transformed, because you'll see you don't see because we're looking for the wrong thing. We're looking for results. We're looking to be okay. We're looking to perform well. Looking to be acceptable.
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Need to look in order to see no other reason you
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Joh ko says this process, though easy to talk about, is sometimes frightening, dismal, discouraging, all that we have thought was ourself for many years is under attack. We can fear, feel tremendous fear as this turning about takes place. It may sound enchanting as it is talked about, but the actual doing can be horrendous. Can be scary. Things start to fall away. We've made a nest for ourselves in our habits and views. It's not always pleasant when they're shaken up. It doesn't mean that anything's wrong. Fact, it's often a good sign somebody comes in to dokusan, fearful, upset, they've seen something beginning to move in the right direction.
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And Jo Gu says, for those of us who are patient and determined in our practice, Joy increases peace increases the ability to live a beneficial and compassionate life increases and the life which can be hurt by the whims of outside circumstances suddenly alters. This slowly transforming life is not, however, a life of no problems. They will be there for a time. Our life may feel worse than before, as what we have concealed becomes clear, but even as. This occurs, we have a growing sense, a sense of growing sanity and understanding of basic satisfaction. Our contentment grows, and our enthusiasm for practice increases, our ability to be in the moment, not thinking about being in the moment, but just there, responding, doing what comes next, non abiding, not stuck anywhere. She says, to continue practice through severe difficulties, you must have patience, persistence and courage. Why? Because our usual mode of living, one of seeking happiness, battling to fulfill desires, struggling to avoid mental and physical pain, is always undermined by determined practice. We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are, not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life, not in avoiding pain, but in being pain when It is necessary to do so, too large in order, too Hard. On the contrary, it is the easy way you
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once we commit, once we see and understand the value of opening up in this way, it becomes possible to do it is easier. You
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It's funny that we say it's not easy to let go. What could be easier than letting go? It's not easy because we're fighting ourselves. Got one foot out the back door. But through zazen, through long practice, begin to get both feet in the door. She says, Since we can only live our lives through our minds and bodies. There is no one who is not a psychological being. We have thoughts, we have hopes, we can be hurt, we can be upset. But the real solution must come from a dimension which is radically different from the psychological one. Practice of non attachment, the growth of no self is the key to understanding. Finally, we realize that there is no path, no way, no solution. Because from the beginning, our nature is the path right here and right now, because there is no path, our practice is to follow this, no path, endlessly and form, no reward, because no self is everything it needs, no reward From the no beginning, it Is itself complete fulfillment. You
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going to turn to another talk in entitled, great expectations. I'm
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she says two book titles recently jumped into my mind. The first was Great Expectations by Charles Dicken Dickens, and the second was paradise lost by John Milton. What is the intimate connection between them? We are all seeking paradise, enlightenment, or whatever name you choose to give it. It seems to us that paradise is lost. It's not much of it. In my life, most people would say. It. We want this paradise, this enlightenment. We're desperate for it. We're here to seek for it. But where is it? What is it? We come to seshin with great expectations, and we struggle, we search, we hope, some of us even expect the human gain continues we have, if not, great expectations, some hope that sometime paradise is going to appear to us. Now we don't know what paradise is. We know for sure what it isn't. We are certain that paradise is not about being miserable. Paradise is not failing at something. Paradise is not being criticized or humiliated or punished in any way. It's not physical pain. It's not making mistakes, it's not losing my partner or my friend or my child. Paradise just couldn't be confusion or depression. It's not about being lonely or working with when worn out or sick. We have definite lists of what paradise is not. But if it's not these states, then what is it? Is it having more money, more security? Is it having dominance or power or fame or recognition from others? Is paradise being surrounded by people, being supported and loved. Is it having more peace and quiet, more time to think about the meaning of life? Is it any of these? Or is it not? Some people here have made it into the second list. They've got some of these things, a little of the good life. And yet, no matter what we have, once we have it. Oh, is this it? But no, this isn't it either. Where is it? We never quite seem to catch it. It's like chasing a mirage. When we arrive, it disappears. It's interesting that some people, as they near their death, finally see or realize what they had never seen or realized up till that point, having that realization, they die peacefully, even with joy in paradise at last, what Have they seen? What have they found? She says, Remember that tale of a man being chased by a tiger, something we read recent teisha Just briefly.
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The setup is
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the famous Buddhist parable, a man was chased by a tiger. His desperation, he dove over the side of a cliff and grabbed a vine as a tiger was pawing away above him, he looked below and saw another tiger at the base of the cliff waiting for him to fall. And to top it off, two mice were gnawing away at the vine. At that moment, he spotted a luscious strawberry holding the vine with one hand. He picked a strawberry and ate it. It was delicious. So that's the story.
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She says, facing death before him and behind him, eats a strawberry, exclaiming it's so delicious, because he knows that for him, it is his last act. Now let's return to our first list what paradise isn't and give it a fresh slant. I'm so miserable and it's so delicious. I really failed, and it's so delicious. I've never been so humiliated in my life, and it's so delicious. I'm so lonely and it's so delicious. We thoroughly understand this any circumstance of life is paradise itself because we feel it completely, because we're not resisting joy is to feel what we feel be what we are at any given moment, not to be divided. She says, Now let's turn to the words of Dogan Zen G he once said, let go of and forget your body and mind, throw your life into the abode of the Buddha, living by being moved and led by the Buddha. When you do this without relying on your own physical and mental power, you become released from life and death and become a Buddha. This is the truth. Do not serve. For the truth anywhere else, Joko says, let go of and forget your body and mind. What is meant? Throw your life into the abode of the Buddha. What is the abode of the Buddha? He refers to human error in his first words, let go of and forget your body and mind. Instead of referring everything to the comfort, protection and pleasure of body and mind, which we do, he asks us to throw your life into the abode of the Buddha. But where is the abode of the Buddha? Where are we to throw our life?
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Since Buddha is none other than this absolute moment of life, which is not the past or the present or the future. Can't call it anything.
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He's saying that at this very moment, saying that this very moment is the abode of the Buddha. Enlightenment. Paradise is nothing but the life of this very moment. Whether we are miserable or happy, a failure or a success, there is nothing we experience which is not the abode of the Buddha. Throw your life into the abode of the Buddha, living by being moved and led by it what is meant. We cannot live without being this moment, because that's what our life is being led by. It is to see it, feel it, taste it, touch it, experience it, and then let it dictate what is to be done. He says that when you do this without relying on your own physical and mental power, that is, without your personal opinions as to how things should be, you become released from both life and death and become a Buddha. Say, you become genuine. Why? Why do you become a Buddha? Because you are a Buddha. You are this moment of life. You can't be anything else.
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Really. What Dogan is saying, exactly what Anthony de Mello was saying.
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Forget your agenda. Leave it all behind. As Tangen roshi says, throw yourself into the house of Buddha. When we sit, when we live our daily schedules. We are in the abode of the Buddha. Where else could we be? Every moment of zazen, painful, peaceful, boring is what it's paradise, Nirvana, the abode of the Buddha. Yet we come with great expectations to seshin, to attempt to find it. Where is it? When you leave here, where is it? The abode of the Buddha. Is your body and minds direct experience, not something else, somewhere else. Dogan Zen ji said, this is the truth. Do not search for the truth anywhere else. Where can you search? There is no Paradise Lost, none to be regained. Why? Because you cannot avoid this moment. You may not be awake to it, but it's always here. Cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeing it. People know that their death is very close. What is the element that often disappears? What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way they want it to. Then they can see that the strawberry is so delicious because that's all there is this very moment. I
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wisdom is to see that there is nothing to search for. If you live with a difficult person, that's Nirvana, perfect. If you're miserable, that's it. And I'm not saying to be passive, not to take action, then you would be trying to hold Nirvana as a fixed state. It's never fixed, but always changing. There's no implication of doing nothing, but deeds done that are born of this understanding are free of anger and judgment, no expectation, just. Pure and compassionate action. So Sheen is off in the battle with the fact that we absolutely don't want our experience to be the way it is. We definitely don't feel it as the enlightened state, but patiently sitting through it and turning away from all such concepts. It's hard, it's wonderful, it's boring. This shouldn't be happening to me. Enable us in time to realize the truth of our lives.
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Always, we're seeking a way around such troubles into the elusive paradise. But again, Dogan Zen G's words, let go of your body and mind, remind us just to maintain clear awareness of all conditions of body and mind, noting our desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain, both are this very moment. So he says, throw your life into the abode of the Buddha. Throw your life be this very moment. Cease to judge it. Escape it, analyze it. Just be it. He says, this is the truth. Do not search for the truth anywhere else. Why? Why can't we search for it somewhere else? There's no other place to search because there is nothing that ever happens except when, right here, right now, it is our very nature, enlightenment itself. Can wake up and look
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to begin to understand what we want is right under our nose. Don't need to escape. Don't need to get out of it. Need to get into it. Come to trust that you
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we're not being pulled in different directions. When we're not dissatisfied feeling I'm not there, this isn't right, then we can't settle in continually pulled out of our Zazen. Have to be willing to let the process unfold. Really have to be okay. Make up our minds, however it is, I'm there for it very hard to do that absolutely. Everybody has a point in which it's just too much. We have to back off and lick our wounds. But gradually we grow regrow. We grow stronger. We can hold more become what Joe Gu calls a bigger container.
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Begin to realize what a privilege it is to open up to this moment. As Joko says, This moment is our life. That's what our life is. It's only this moment, moment by moment, you
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don't need to waste our time regretting running through a list of things we should have done, lamenting our condition and
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trying to get those ants to perform tricks you
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this last day or so of seshin we have behind us all the sitting that we've been doing, we have the ability for things to turn we. Things to drop away i
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Whatever happens, it's okay, success, failure,
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open, open and see. Just the breath, just mu who? Just this? You?
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Roshi says, Trust the process.
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All right, stop here and recite the four vows i.
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