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An Experience of Enlightenment #2 | Otter.ai

An Experience of Enlightenment #2

John Pulleyn52min

Dhara Kowal

00:04

This is the second day of this March, 2025, seven day seshin. And yesterday we started from reading the book called an experience of enlightenment by Flora court Hua and we being we began with Yasutani Roshi is introductory remarks and barely got into her story. And where we left off, she was describing her early years and the challenges she had experienced as a teenager, feeling very self conscious, preoccupied with what others were thinking about her, and just feeling like she didn't fit in. And for a lot of people, that's what it's like to be a teenager.

Dhara Kowal

01:17

It can be what it's like to be an adult as well, as part of this transition that we all make from childhood into adulthood, We develop an identity, this idea that we are a distinct, separate self, and as that self concept, and it really is a concept As it solidifies, so do our ideas about other people's self concepts in the World.

Dhara Kowal

02:14

These days, I wonder if that transition into developing what we experience or think to be a fixed identity. I wonder if it happens much, much sooner than it used to, now that technology and media are such a big part of our lives. When I was in Mexico last month, we were at a restaurant and just enjoying dinner and the table over from us, there was a family gathered around people of different ages, including a little girl, probably maybe she was two years old, she was seated in a stroller, and her mother handed to her

Unknown Speaker

03:18

cell phone,

Dhara Kowal

03:21

and she was as quiet and as happy as could be for the next hour. I imagine that, you know, I've never had children, first of all, but I imagine that handing an infant, a cell phone is a kind of pacifier in the same way that television was when I was growing up. And nowadays, at a very early age, there's a great deal of pure pressure to have a phone and to have a social media account before you even become a teenager.

Dhara Kowal

04:12

I've heard that there are like seven and eight year olds that have their own phones and and this exposure to so many messages and so many ways of comparing oneself to others only leads to amplifying feelings of of isolation and separation, feeling like you don't measure up,

Dhara Kowal

04:56

turns into a habit of mind that does last. Into adulthood. And the thing is, it's all the stuff of fiction. It's a story that we tell ourselves about me and about others. It's mental chatter.

Dhara Kowal

05:32

And so when we ask, Who am I, or we're also asking, Who are these? So called others.

Dhara Kowal

05:47

Where'd that idea come from?

Dhara Kowal

05:56

Picking up from where we left off. Flora describes an unusual experience that seemed to have really propelled her into a spiritual journey.

Dhara Kowal

06:15

When I was 16, minor surgery had to be performed, an ether an ether cone was placed over my face, and as I breathed in deeply, a great whirling spiral of light approached from an enormous distance And at a great speed. At the same time, a voice of unmistakable authority seemed to say that when the center of the spiral reached me, I would understand all things just as the center reached me, I blacked out, but after recovering, there remained an unforgettable conviction that what I had heard and seen was in some inexplicable way, the deepest truth I so this is pretty remarkable. She has some kind of revelation at the moment that she was going into an unconscious state.

Dhara Kowal

07:42

Was it a hallucination, a side effect to the ether, maybe. But for her, it didn't matter. What triggered this, this vision that she had hearing this voice of authority, telling her that she'd understand everything, everything will be resolved, everything will be Clear.

Dhara Kowal

08:18

Whatever it was, it gave her faith that there was some, some truth, some universal truth,

Unknown Speaker

08:31

that was accessible

Dhara Kowal

08:39

today. Flora court war is thought of as some kind of American mystic. And we know that throughout history, there have been people across different religions and cultures regarded as mystics, someone who has had a deep experience of union with God or the divine or the absolute. You

Dhara Kowal

09:23

a Flora continues sometime during my 17th year, quietly, unobtrusively, a process began, which was to build up over a period of several years until it literally took over my life. This began with a growing sense of doubt, which spread until it encompassed everything I'd been taught and everything I knew I.

Dhara Kowal

10:06

A growing sense of doubt about everything.

Dhara Kowal

10:18

That kind of doubt is not the same kind that a typical teenager experiences about their place in the world, uncertainties about who they are and what they should do with their lives. So much deeper doubt than that, and it's this, this sense that things are not as they appear on the surface, but there's something more to life that's beyond my perception, which is to say Beyond duality,

Dhara Kowal

11:17

beyond self and other, subject and object.

Unknown Speaker

11:34

What is it?

Dhara Kowal

11:45

It's the kind of doubt that can leave you feeling unsettled and determined to come to understand what this is. I

Unknown Speaker

12:06

mu, what is mu? What

Unknown Speaker

12:15

is it?

Unknown Speaker

12:22

Kay, soy,

Unknown Speaker

12:29

why am I?

Dhara Kowal

12:42

This? Is the doubt that brings us to practice actually,

Dhara Kowal

12:52

and it brings us to seshin.

Dhara Kowal

13:04

She goes on in the house where we were living, there was a number of books of maxims written by the great persons of many ages, I read these collecting favorite sayings in a scrapbook, which I still have. However, I began to think it strange that with all the books of advice in the world, all the laws and admonitions from parents, teachers, priests and other elders, there was still nothing to assure me of living fully in any given moment, since every moment was unique, how did one fit the rule to reality? When by the time one found the right rule, the moment was gone? I

Unknown Speaker

14:24

what is the right rule to reality?

Dhara Kowal

14:36

It's interesting that she asks how, how one can learn this rule how to live in every moment, when every moment is distinct, Every moment is new, unique,

Dhara Kowal

14:57

and that's just a different way of saying. That life is dynamic. Everything's in flux. How can there be a right answer when everything is changing from moment to moment? And that includes each one of us.

Unknown Speaker

15:29

We are of that flux,

Dhara Kowal

15:39

and a lot of people do absorb themselves in reading books about Zen by this teacher and that teacher, learning about the various traditions within Buddhism, doing Sutra study, attending lectures, group discussions, and also listening To teisho and encouragement talks during seshin. All of that can give us inspiration, especially if we're struggling or feeling stuck with the real work. The real work is Zazen. It doesn't involve exploring ideas or explanations about reality, what it is and what it isn't, but just the pure, direct, intimate experiencing of it, living it,

Unknown Speaker

17:16

living this, living Moon,

Dhara Kowal

17:24

living the breath.

Dhara Kowal

17:37

And that means that if it when listening to a TA show or any talk given in the Zen, do you need to forget it? Remember Roshi used to say that the way to listen to words spoken in the Zen do or in dokan is to let them just wash over you,

Dhara Kowal

18:17

like rolling waves in the sea and not

Speaker 1

18:20

Dhara Kowal

18:26

sit there and reflect on how they apply to me,

Dhara Kowal

18:39

me and my practice.

Dhara Kowal

18:55

Flora goes on in a vague, groping way I now began to search for some single law, some one basic reality so primary that it permeated all else. I had been brought up as a Catholic. Each Sunday I dutifully attended mass with neither much understanding nor any real sense of participation. I was an onlooker, and I felt ashamed of this. The problem I concluded, must lie in the fact that I didn't understand my religion. So shortly thereafter, I made my way to the study of the parish priest, where, sitting on the edge of my chair, I asked him to explain these matters to me. He went over the various doctrines of the. Church of the Trinity and the virgin birth, of salvation and redemption, to make sure I knew them. I felt intensely disappointed that he didn't seem to come to the core of the matter. He then sent me home with three or four books to read further on doctrine. Dutifully, I read them all, only to finish with more questions and doubts than ever. I remember thinking, surely, there must be something that applies even to the everyday tasks of life, even to how I wash the dishes at night. But how do I find it? I

Unknown Speaker

21:06

Where is it? How do I find it?

Dhara Kowal

21:14

She had some inkling that it has to be something real, practical, tangible not abstract.

Dhara Kowal

21:35

Bodhidharma, the first ancestor, ancestor of Zen said, the truth is beyond words, the truth is beyond words.

Dhara Kowal

21:58

And here in seshin, we're becoming more and more intimate with having no words, intimate with silence.

Dhara Kowal

22:21

And this arises naturally, in part because we've made a commitment to not speak and not read. The exception being in dokan or sometimes it's necessary to communicate in the context of your job or with the monitors.

Dhara Kowal

22:53

And this, this letting go of words,

Dhara Kowal

23:02

goes along with letting go of thoughts.

Dhara Kowal

23:13

It helps us to be more aware of what's going on in our body to

Dhara Kowal

23:27

become more aware of just being In a body that move moves through space,

Unknown Speaker

23:41

walks sits,

Dhara Kowal

23:45

eats, Drinks, all the activities we do throughout the Day and

Unknown Speaker

24:06

there aren't words for it. I

Dhara Kowal

24:24

uh Flora then says, if not in church, I decided, then certainly back in school, in the works of the great philosophers, the answers would come at this time I had finished one year of college and then had to stay at home a year because of the economic depression. So this was in the 1930s and actually it's quite remarkable that as a woman, that. She enrolled in university, she must have had some degree of privilege in order to do that, the means to go to university in a time when few women had that opportunity.

Dhara Kowal

25:30

She goes on now, through a tremendous effort, I return to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, borrowing the tuition, arranging to help with the housework and care of children in a home about three miles from the campus, in return for my room and board, and at the same time, taking a nearly full class load. Okay, so she still had to have a side job in order to make this work, this busy schedule of homework and class work was all on the surface, however, because underneath walking back and forth to campus, doing my chores, I became increasingly preoccupied with pursuing my doubts to their limits. During the following year or more, with a desperate intensity, I read from the works of most of the leading Western philosophers from Plato to Spinoza, Hume, Berkeley and on to Kant Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bradley, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Wittgenstein and others. Yes, fascinating as much of it was, it all seemed fragmented and one sided. Nothing satisfied me. Nothing went to the root of my need. I seem to be moving in endless theoretical and verbal circles, chasing a mirage of ultimate finality. At times, I had periods of Bleak despair, feeling my quest was hopeless. I

Dhara Kowal

28:00

uh. So there she was, filling her head with theories upon theories, philosophical arguments, terminal terminologies, much of philosophy does deal with the subject of human doubt, actually, but it's a different kind of doubt. What is knowledge? How do we come to know what we know?

Dhara Kowal

28:47

Can we trust that which we perceive through our senses? I

Dhara Kowal

29:04

The debates about these questions date back to the fourth and fifth century,

Dhara Kowal

29:17

but none of it deals in a direct way with the great matter.

Dhara Kowal

29:36

Our living and dying are not a concept,

Dhara Kowal

29:47

they're not ideas.

Dhara Kowal

29:56

They're embodied truth.

Dhara Kowal

30:09

And it seems that in Flores case, even though she couldn't articulate this in Zen terms, because she hadn't yet discovered Zen practice, she had This intuition that thoughts and words conceal,

Dhara Kowal

30:41

that their mirages appearances, they do give us The illusion of knowing, but it's Only conceptual knowing,

Dhara Kowal

31:09

not embodied knowing.

Dhara Kowal

31:21

And as we've heard, reading a menu doesn't satisfy hunger,

Dhara Kowal

31:37

we've heard that, but we've also experienced it. And

Dhara Kowal

31:46

and it's the same thing with reading about Flora's or somebody else's awakening experience. It's not a substitute for doing our own practice,

Dhara Kowal

32:10

having our own experience, and

Dhara Kowal

32:27

everyone here has the faith, the doubt and the determination and

Dhara Kowal

32:44

we've also got each other. We've got Sangha, the never failing help and support of Sangha, whereas flora, she had to rely on her own resources and

Dhara Kowal

33:08

she goes on. Then one day in a psychology class, the instructor made a casual remark to the effect that the world as we saw it was, quote, simply a projection of neural activity in the visual centers of the brain.

Dhara Kowal

33:40

I walked out of the class and along the street thunderstruck, saying over and over to myself, all I know, the whole world, even the universe, is myself. I

Dhara Kowal

34:04

The answer somehow lies in myself. I was filled with an extraordinary sense of exhilaration with this realization, I

Dhara Kowal

34:25

so what she realized was that she had been looking outward up until that point, turning To books and experts, looking for answers out there,

Dhara Kowal

34:54

from the perspective of neuroscience, what we call. The Self isn't singular, nor is it fixed.

Dhara Kowal

35:15

There's nothing even physical or tangible about it. It's a product of brain activity.

Dhara Kowal

35:30

Brain activity that involves the interconnections between and among different regions of the brain, especially the prefrontal cortex.

Dhara Kowal

35:52

So the self is really just a process. It's dynamic, it's

Speaker 1

36:00

generated

Dhara Kowal

36:05

by the brain, and that's amazing, because we don't even need to think about it, our brain and our whole body functions. Including breathes and digests, food,

Unknown Speaker

36:31

sleeps

Dhara Kowal

36:33

with without us having to think and plan and strategize. I

Dhara Kowal

37:00

She says, shortly after this, another incident occurred which made a deep impression on me, standing at the kitchen window one day and looking out at where a path wound under some maple trees, I suddenly saw the scene with a freshness and clarity that I'd never seen before, simultaneously, as though for the first time, I fully realized that I was Not only on the earth, but of it an intimate part and product of it, a door had briefly opened. I stood there transfixed. I remember thinking distant places on the map, such as Tibet and North Africa are extensions of right here, all interrelated. For a long time, I had been reading books on how to swim. Now, for a moment, I had plunged into real water.

Dhara Kowal

38:34

This is the process of zazen, the more we do as the hours and days go by, we see more clearly. We experience in our whole being more vividly. Our senses come alive. The fog of thoughts lifts,

Dhara Kowal

39:12

but then it moves back in, and then it lifts again, moves back in

Unknown Speaker

39:27

and on and on.

Dhara Kowal

39:31

That's part of this flux that we experience, and that's just how things are so it's a waste of time to get frustrated by thoughts at any point during seshin, just leave them alone. Our only task is to give our attention. To our practice, moment by moment, to do it through whatever arises,

Unknown Speaker

40:14

just staying with it, steady, Patient

Dhara Kowal

40:38

if you don't keep returning to your practice, you won't notice when the fog lifts.

Dhara Kowal

41:02

You i She continues. After these two incidents, I ceased to search for an answer in reading and became intensely interested in exploring everyday experience, the very nature of sensation itself absorbed my attention. I became increasingly aware of sights, sounds, touch, smells and feelings, all for their own sakes, and the more observant I became, the more endless the VISTAs which seemed to open, What is more immediate than sensation, I ask myself, surely reality must somehow permeate immediate sensation, yet each sense is so limited, so partial and incomplete. How does one sense reality hold all at once. Is that impossible? You

Dhara Kowal

42:59

so she had these two little insights, little glimpses,

Dhara Kowal

43:11

and that was a part of her process of opening up. They taught her to look inward and and

Dhara Kowal

43:26

she didn't need to have a teacher to tell her to do that. She just intuited it and trusted. She trusted what she was experiencing, not what she was thinking.

Dhara Kowal

43:52

And that's when she really started to engage with this question, what is reality in a whole new way, no longer looking for an answer or An explanation, but just observing what she was experiencing.

Dhara Kowal

44:32

She goes on like a strong Undertow, pulling me down and away from the routine surface of life, my inner quest absorbed more and more of my time. I began to stay alone in my room for long periods, just sitting, observing, struggling inwardly for some direct contact if there is a. Basic reality that is common to everything. I thought it must be within my experience too, as well as in everything and everybody else's surely I can grasp it immediately and at first hand. Any other way would be only second hand and would not be it at all. But how can I get at it? How can I know it firsthand? I became preoccupied with the most elementary processes of getting myself reoriented to the earth and to the people and things around me, it's difficult to describe this period and the rather eerie feelings that pervaded this groping. It was if I had been living in a world of ideas now, having lost confidence in these and having let them, let go of them, I had to start all over again, looking at everything, feeling touching and sensing it again, almost as An infant does, to realize what experience truly was. I

Dhara Kowal

46:28

sense. Babies experience the world through senses. They don't have a language in the way that we do as adults, they experience it through sight, sound, touch, taste, and they experience a whole range of emotions, just like adults do, but they don't have labels for it. They just experience it, and they're all in there's no hesitation or regret, no guilt. They don't care what others think of them.

Dhara Kowal

47:32

One of my nieces had a baby last year, a little girl named Leilani, and when the family got together to meet her for the first time, she got passed around from one person to the other. There were a couple dogs there too, and they were checking her out, and all the adults were engrossed in conversation about her, commenting on who she looked like the most, what she'll be like, what when she grows up, what her personality is, what her future will be, etc. And meanwhile, she was just busy being a baby, all that talk going on, and she just smiles,

Unknown Speaker

48:37

burps,

Dhara Kowal

48:40

cries

Dhara Kowal

48:49

and before you know it, she'll become a self conscious person, just like Flora described and just like the rest of us, it, it seems kind of sad, like we acquire all this baggage, but it's actually necessary to have a self, Right? We couldn't function in the world without it, we need to have an identity in order to engage and interact with people. We're not trying to shut ourselves off from the world. So we don't need to deny or reject who we are. The only problem is when we cling to it. It's the clinging that causes our suffering and.

Dhara Kowal

50:04

There's a koan in the Blue Cliff Record called Joshu, newborn baby. It's very short. A monk asked Joshu, does a newborn possess the six senses or not? And the six senses are, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, together, they they form our window or windows to the world as we experience it.

Unknown Speaker

50:38

And uh,

Dhara Kowal

50:43

so yeah. Monk asked, does a newborn possess the six senses or not? And Joshu replies, it's like a ball bobbing along on Swift flowing water. It's like a ball, bobbing along on Swift flowing water, just bouncing along. One moment joyful, one moment sad. One

Dhara Kowal

51:22

moment the clouds darken the sky. The next, the sun shines,

Dhara Kowal

51:40

aware

Dhara Kowal

51:47

experiencing without abiding in it.

Dhara Kowal

52:06

Well, our time is up. We'll stop here and recite the four vows we.

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