This is the third day of this. January 2025, rohatsu, seven day. Seshin, going to read again from the book Silent illumination by Guo. Guo,
I'm picking up from the chapter entitled The underlying feeling tones.
We had just begun reading from a section called how to cultivate right attitudes. And he starts out with contentment. First attitude we have to cultivate is the feeling of contentment. Contentment counters and overrides our constant tendency to grasp and chase after things. If you're like me, you you worry about being content. If I'm content, am I going to work? Aren't I going to just sort of backslide and go through the motions? But that's not really the flavor of contentment. It's not what we're talking about. She said, it overrides our constant tendency to grasp and chase after things, although it's our dissatisfaction, our feeling that something's missing, that brings us to practice. You
if
we if we don't realize don't see through that dissatisfaction, if we don't recognize that actually everything we want, everything we need, we have already perfect,
amazing, effortlessly. We see sights, we hear sounds, recognize thoughts and
he says, contentment has the flavor of being at ease, grasping nothing, lacking nothing. It is being open and leisurely. In this state, we don't make anything into a big deal, while at the same time, we engage with the freshness of each moment, cultivating an attitude of contentment, is engaging With and yet not grasping at causes and conditions you
such a great thing, such a relief, such a balm, sustenance. When we become okay with how we are, how things are
the complaining dies down and we recognize we're okay
Do this.
Like the word leisurely, no rush. I
I see the hurrier. I go the behind her, I get i.
Guo Gu says we are we are swayed by causes and conditions. When we feel a sense of lack and when grasping is present, we inevitably get sucked into the vortex of grasping and rejecting having and lacking. And these polarities bring up all sorts of other issues, such as trying to escape from who we are, or alternately, trying desperately to be somebody we're not.
My life really changed for the better, somewhat. What is it now? 34 years ago, 33 years ago, when I stopped drinking and found myself in AA, and ran into the whole concept of being okay in your own skin who you are, of being able To admit your faults, not having to be somebody I it not having to worry about your image. People used to say you're just a garden variety drunk. Something extremely liberating about that
don't have to be a monkey performing for others. Can work so much more effectively. Can work so much harder really, when we're not trying to live up to an image, we have this feeling of contentment being okay. Here I am, it's okay.
Everything slows down. Chatter dies away. I
the body becomes calmer, more relaxed,
again, not trying to escape from who we are, or ultimately, trying desperately to be someone we're not.
There was a rabbi, I think, some, many, many years ago, centuries ago, perhaps I think his name was Zia. He says, When I get to the afterlife, and they ask me, why were you not Moses, I will have the answer. But if they ask me, why were you not Zia, I will not know what to say. I
Gu goes on, there's no formulaic way to cultivate contentment or non grasping. We need to personally explore the flavor of contentment and digest this feeling little by little, becoming familiar with it in our lives. I like the fact that he says little by little. Takes time to change things. Take time to soak in. Practice requires patience, faith and patience. This is really a lifelong process. A lot of people come at it as if I'll work hard come to awakening, then everything will be okay. Yeah, good luck with that. Roshi Kapleau said to me, John, you just want to grab Kensho and run. You could see that, because that was him too. I
He says, We can't just force this attitude, this attitude of contentment, on ourselves and expect to be able to plow through all our problems. Contentment is not a mere concept. We need to appreciate the depth of what it means to be content. You. It's not just being disinterested or detached from everything.
It's not the product of cleverness.
It's really, really comes from the heart, doesn't it?
We're okay with things as they are. We're okay with others as they are. When we're content, We're not dwelling in our resentments, keeping score, because we're not beating others up. We don't beat ourselves up.
Gu says when we're content, we appreciate what we have, and we are able to fully engage with whatever may arise. There is a freshness to it, with contentment. We're able to avail ourselves openly of everything without rejecting anything. In this process, there may be pain and grief, but we are cultivating the ability to feel fully, to be present to whatever arises without judgment. Allowing such feelings to move through us will make us stronger. We are incredibly resilient. Our hearts and minds will eventually accept and release whatever comes through us. You
this quality of contentment, we're able to grieve, able to open ourselves up to our feelings without indulging them.
There's a sweetness to life. We're not walling off our disappointment and our sorrow, letting the bad in, letting the good in, and it passes right through.
He says, To do this, we have to be in tune with the body and anchor ourselves in it. Contentment resides in the heart, and it has an associated bodily component. Really, everything has an associated bodily component. Every thought, every feeling, says the easiest way to become familiar with contentment is to physically relax the body. We relax from the crown of the head to the toes, section by section, we relax the skin, the pores, muscles, tendons. This means actually feeling different areas of our body. Most people are so out of tune with their bodies that they really don't know how to relax or what their bodies feel. So this requires practice something outside of seshin that I've recommended to people and benefited myself, is just having a relaxation practice, sort of a guided meditation. It's not strictly Zen, but no, there's one I've heard by Jon Kabat Zinn and another guy named palous. Well, it's usually about 20 minutes, 30 minutes of just going through the body, from the head to the toe and seeing what's in every part. It's really like doing an inventory, feeling it, letting it go, its ability to relax the body so supportive for Zazen and for seshin,
a lot of it starts with awareness, just knowing that we're tense, knowing where we're tense and and being able to let that be so many negative feelings that we have, whether they're physical or mental, the first reaction the default, is to Wall them off, push them away, go for denial. I
It says, As you explore relaxing your body during meditation, as you become physically. And emotionally familiar with it, you will then be able to tune in to contentment. The more familiar, familiar you are with contentment, the more likely you will be able to apply it to your daily life, responding to changing conditions. You will have no need to solidify your viewpoints, narratives and emotional afflictions. This is the side effect of practice. We just become lighter, able to move with conditions, able to admit when we do wrong, able to apologize, able to forgive.
He goes on being in tune with bodily feelings of contentment and non grasping releases physical pain. For example, sometimes after long hours of sitting meditation, we experience waves of bodily pain and an attitude of repulsion sets in naturally we want to escape the pain. If we are oblivious to the subtle undertone of repulsion, the pain becomes more acute and intractable. Soon our whole body is burning up. However, when we expose what is happening within us, we can detect whether we are feeling aversion, perhaps we are bolstering this discomfort with stories and images. Is there an underlying tone of fear when a version is present? Pain becomes exaggerated?
One of the techniques in these body scans is to when you, when you scan through and you come across an area of the body with pain, is just to be curious about it. What's it like? Does it come and go? Does it wax and wane? Is it steady? Is it dull? Is it sharp?
My 10s up around it.
So it's sort of a leisurely approach to getting in touch with our feeling.
He says, if any of these negative feelings are present, we need to first expose our attitude and then relax the body physically only then will it become easier to soften our negative feelings and to release them. Actually, the exposing and relaxing are in themselves a way of working with these negative feelings in this and this work will naturally bring about a shift in our attitude towards physical discomfort. Not only does our threshold for it increase, the pain itself actually becomes bearable. But if we can't even recognize how we're feeling and how it's shaping our actual experience, how can we let go of negative mental states? A lot of interesting experiments that have been done with pain and meditation. Just to summarize the basic finding, people who meditate are far, far more tolerant of pain done various setups where they hook meditators up to electric shocks, and compare their tolerance to that of people who don't meditate. There's another one where just put your hand in an ice bucket and see how long you can leave it there. Now that we've all done more than two days of sitting could probably all stick our hands in an ice bucket for longer than when the seshin began. What an accomplishment.
He says, contentment is traditionally expressed in chan as non grasping. Really, they're the same, not grasping in the platform scripture, Master way nung provides three principles to deal with, to deal with it, no thought, no form, and non abiding these three principle. Our antidotes to our grasping of our inner world, outer relations and identity. In order to appreciate these three principles, we need to recognize grasping as a deep seated feeling tone. It's a sense of lack, a thirst for some thing. Of course, being discontented can bring about change for the better in our lives. But here I'm referring to a habit of possessiveness, which arises from self grasping. Hui Ning says, good friends. Since this, since the past, this teaching of ours has first taken no thought as its principle, no form as its essence and non abiding as its foundation. No thought means to be without thought in the midst of thinking, no form is to transcend form within the context of forms and appearances. Non abiding is your fundamental state. All worldly things are empty and Guo Gu says, thoughts, feelings and narratives are what we grasp internally. Form is what we grasp externally, and this can include our bodies, objects, environment, status, wealth and appearances. None of these objects of grasping are in and of themselves bad. Sometimes they're needed to help us navigate through life and improve our circumstances. However, when our grasping is driven by possessiveness and obsession, it brings about suffering for ourselves and others. Non abiding is just a chan way of saying non grasping. Everything is fluid, changing, open to opportunities. This is how things including ourselves are. Nothing is fixed or rigid. How can anything be grasped?
Grasping and rejecting are always based on our self referential obsessions. If we are captivated or repulsed by whatever comes up in our practice, then it gains power over us, and the problem becomes worse. When difficulties arise, it is important to see them clearly, accept them, work with them and let them go. The true nature of things is non abiding, fresh and dynamic, relating to our feelings and thoughts through grasping and rejecting ruins everything. We grasp at them, then we're going against their nature. We suffer and probably cause everyone around us to suffer when we grasp and reject. We're ultimately concerned with me, I and mine, we're thinking self referentially, thinking of ourselves. The habit of grasping is an addictive behavior we all have it to one degree or another. You
the opposite of thinking grasping and abiding is contentment, and it's the most important of all attitudes to cultivate in order to see our inner experiences and outer relations as our true nature. I
it says, how do we relate to our inner experience in the above passage from the platform, scripture, no thought does not mean cutting off thinking. It means there is no fixation. With regard to the free flow of our thinking. We don't need to reify or solidify what we experience into my thoughts, my feelings. If self grasping is present, then thoughts don't flow. When we suffer, we are caught in the middle of the stories that we're fabricating, and in this way, we prolong that suffering.
Find ourselves thinking the same thing over and over and over again. You uh, half aware of the thought. One of the benefits of Zazen is to just sort of notice those habitual thoughts that keep coming up, usually about whether we're. Worthy or not, how we're doing what we have to fear. Once you notice, they arise again and again, they lose some of their power. Begin to see how tedious and pointless so many of them are. Guo Gu says, ordinarily, our happiness is completely dependent on thoughts, narratives, concepts and words. So if we have negative self disparaging thoughts and we automatically identify with them, we will feel very unhappy. If someone praises us and we identify with that, then we will feel very happy. This is quite normal. Unfortunately, when we're tailored to our thoughts, we actually lose our autonomy like a puppet. We are tied up by the strings of our thought, completely at the mercy of our narratives. Problem is not with thoughts. The problem is with the strings that tie us to those thoughts are grasping and rejecting. We can say the problem is that we believe those thoughts
become like a little performing monkey looking for the atta boys of others, paralyzed by our fear of disgrace, dishonor coming off in a bad light.
Anthony de Mello says that's not human. That's not human living to be like a little puppet. It's
one of the qualities of someone who's been working sincerely the Zen practice, probably with any spiritual discipline They're less tied to the to their image, and as a result, they can be content. You
it okay with being imperfect.
It's a passage from de Mello that I've read before. I won't read it through now, but just remind those who've heard it and there used to be a book out called I'm okay, you're okay. Well, I'm sure it still exists. It was quite a phenomenon, sort of a self help, one of the early self help books, I'm okay, you're okay. Debello said he would like to write a book entitled, I'm an ass, you're an ass. Says how liberating it is when we admit that we're an ass. He makes a distinction between I and me, there's our i is, is our nature, our true self, and the me is all our conditioned habits and ways of that have built up over the years due to our conditioning. You
if you criticize him, he can say, Well, what do you expect of an ass?
There's a there's a freedom in being realistic and
you
can't be content if you're not willing to see your failings. It's one of the one of the great things about doing prostrations, it's just the humility of lowering your forehead to the floor,
not a basing yourself just opening you it.
He says here, thought has two levels of meaning. The first refers to our mental activity. Community, our brain's natural ability to think, symbolize, conceptualize, cognize and perceive the second level refers to our fixation our own constructs, notions and story lines. In other words, our tendency to reify ideas, that is, make them concrete. Reify ideas and feelings into discrete realities, into things. There is no problem with our natural ability to think, imagine and so on. The problem is when we start to solidify our thoughts and feelings into fixed notions of me, I and mine. To practice contentment, we need to first expose our sense of lack or our need to possess something. Don't identify with these subtle feeling tones and at the same time, don't block them either. There are reasons why we feel and think the way we do. Our thoughts and feelings reveal something about us, recognizing them as they arise, and not grasping or rejecting them. Is itself a way to own and embrace them. When we can allow ourselves to be with them, we can start to work with them, to work through them, and to let go of them, which means they no longer have a stronghold over us. Hmm. I always start by seeing what we think is bad news is often very promising. It's good to see that, to be reminded we have a chance to work with those things we're not grasping and rejecting. We have some distance. There's some space. He says, we generally believe that the way we think about ourselves is how we actually are. We cannot distinguish between our thoughts and the reality of who we are. Moreover, we tend to treat ourselves according to whatever subtle feelings we happen to have at the moment, if we're feeling negative, we don't see anything good about ourselves when we're in a good mood, even a shortcoming is adorable. This projection happens so quickly that we don't usually recognize it, but this subtle feeling is what the passage above calls, calls thought. So when you feel something within, recognize it, but don't reify, identify and solidify it into a thing. Definitely don't build a whole narrative around it. This is the meaning of practicing no thought amid thoughts. It's learning to have a healthier relationship with our thoughts, instead of being conditioned by them, instead of being controlled by them, manipulated by them.
Sometimes we build a whole narrative around some spiritual experiences we've had this is another way we reify the natural flow of thoughts. When we have powerful experiences and want a teacher to verify it as awakening, then this very need for verification is a form of self grasping. If a person has woken up from a dream, why would they need verification from someone else? Why would there be a need to announce to the world that they've woken up? Why would they want a merit badge? I
a teacher can have mixed feelings about confirming the insight of a student doesn't always help, and it can be made into a thing.
It's a really deep experience you have the phenomenon of what they call in Zen, the stink of enlightenment. See that in a number of the koans, the good teacher, the perseverance that will pass and what's left is wonderful. We have to be careful. You.
The free flow of our minds is the wonderful dynamic activity of our creativity and intellect. There's no need to stop thoughts at the same time, it's necessary to develop the ability to be free from thoughts. One way to do that is to cultivate. Through meditation, the ability to bring the mind from a scattered state to a concentrated state, and from the concentrated state to a unified state, and then to feel free our grasping of even the unified state, the place where subject and object merge. You.
Concentration is something much easier to do in a seshin.
Again, he says it's necessary to develop the ability to be free from thoughts. This is hard for us to do. To be free of thoughts, sort of analogous to people's inability to simply sit still and
as the French philosopher Pascal said, inability to sit alone In a room,
gradually we get used to it takes a while. It's enjoyable to be free of thought, but it's unfamiliar, and we lapse back in. We go in and out. Over time, we learn it's a place of refuge. It's our home. Can move so much more efficiently so freely. Can turn from one thing to another as we as is needed. We're not constantly pawing through our thoughts. It's enjoyable be with the flow of life, not with the internal monolog you the
next section is no form says no form is a teaching on how to relate to the external world. Ordinarily, we grasp appearances and characteristics as discrete things, but there's really not a single thing. Nothing is fixed. There is no fixed objective reality to transcend form within the context of forms, is a teaching on not denying or divorcing ourselves from form, but allowing all appearances and characteristics to be with, to be without us contaminating them with our projections, ideas and feelings we must engage with the world, while at the same time, we have no vexations about it. When there's room for improvement, we try our best to improve the world of form. When things need to change, we make the change, but emotional afflictions only lead to more vexations. They can contaminate and ruin everything we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. How do we contaminate forms and appearances? We defile them by attaching to them and making them things out there, we make everything into a thing. Everything we touch can become a problem. For example, I have a student who makes a big deal out of everything, every task she takes on, however small she makes, into a thing. And it's always a struggle, always complicated, because she overthinks things. I have another student, and for him, everything he encounters is not a big deal yet, because he feels it's not a big deal. All sorts of unexpected things come up and he makes mistakes, still that doesn't really bother him. Both attitudes are problematic. Both follow their own ideas about things out there, both have contaminated the form with their own habit tendencies. This is not this is not the meaning of no form. Engage with forms and appearances. Do what is appropriate, but without grasping onto a fixed way of doing things, no form also applies to meditation practice. The platform. Scripture says, good friends, what is meditative concentration? Chan, the Chinese words are. Chan, ding, which I suspect is exactly the same as hakuins zazen, samadhi externally, to transcend characteristics as meditation or chan internally, to be undisturbed, is called concentration or ding. You you. This passage says that meditation means not to be externally swayed by causes and conditions and not to be internally disturbed by our own thoughts and feelings. But to do this, we have to first become aware of what's going on inside us, how we're projecting our own standards, ideals and expectations onto the world of form. So No thought is intimately connected to no form. How we feel inside is how we relate to others outside. We externalize our internal habits. You
uh, whether in daily life or in meditation, the world of form operates through causes and conditions. All appearances are fluid. How then do we work with the changing appearances of form? How do we live in the world of causes and conditions. What about injustice, discrimination, wrongdoing? Of course, the wrongs of the world must be corrected. Each thing is exactly how it's supposed to be through the workings of causes and conditions.
This means we need to engage with causes and conditions if we are to better the world. Causes and conditions are about relationships. Working with various relationships, we have to recognize, adapt, wait and create the right causes and conditions for change, otherwise emotional afflictions or follow our follow our every move
to not attach to form we must practice no thought, which means being more open to new ideas and less rigid about our opinions. When we expose our own subtle fixation to thoughts and ideas, we will be able to work with form. If we're thinking that the world out there is unjust without seeing what's going on inside of us, then we may be simply contaminating the world, the world of form, with our own attachments. Tremendous amount of damage has been done by people trying to address the injustice in the world. So much goes off the rails when people are not aware of their when they trust their thoughts. I was always struck by the fact that both Paul Pott, the dictator in Cambodia, was the cause of death for millions of people, had been a student at the Sorbonne in France, the home of intellectualizing. And I think that was also true, also a student. There was Carlos the Jackal, a terrorist in South America, if you just follow thought, without being grounded, without feeling, without in, without intuition, without fellow feeling, can do a tremendous amount of damage. I
Well, our time is up. Today, we'll stop here and recite the four vows you.
