This is the second day of this. December 2024, two day seshin. Yesterday, I'm going to continue reading from deepening Zen by Mitra Bishop Roshi, and we will continue a little bit where we left off, and then move into a new chapter on working with thoughts. I'll read again the beginning of the chapter that we read yesterday about embodiment, because it is such an important theme in her work, and it's such an important aspect of practice for us as well. Embodiment means to feel, to experience. And this is an experience practice. Enlightenment of by all accounts, is experience not something you can purchase or make happen. It's intuitive. It comes from our deepest yearning and our deepest nature.
Attention and awareness are extremely important, not just for our Zen practice, but for our life. One aspect of attention awareness is known as embodiment. And to explain this a little here is a writing from a man named Kardon Rabin, who recognizes as many other mental health practitioners have that embodiment is a key to comprehending what we're experiencing, not thinking about it, but turn tuning into our bodies even while experiencing challenging feelings. So we went a lot into embodiment, and then he said, Rabin said, I like to say we usually come to embodiment, work to repair, but stay with it, to transcend, to transcend the limitations put upon us by disassociation from our felt experience, when We can safely embody again. Life goes from black and white to Technicolor, from pixelated to high definition, from 2d to 3d and then he gives the example before embodiment, I knew I loved my wife. After embodiment, I could feel my love for her. So
now we go to working with thoughts. I the
following quote is from the introduction in a book called you are the eyes of the world, a translation of the teachings of a deeply respected 14th century Tibetan Buddhist master known as long Jen PA. He says our experience of life is in large part determined by our conditioned belief system. We believe in certain things, cherish particular hopes, entertain specific fears, and generally point ourselves in some direction based on this focus. The teachings in this text advise us to relax our focus and allow the wider perspective of total openness to flood through us and light our world from within this openness may be as simple as being alone and quiet at peace when we are able to relax like this, the energy we invest in maintaining our usual focus is released freed into its natural condition. You
So just breathe in and breathe out and let the body go.
In the process of letting go of specific focus, however, we tend to let go of one thing only, to replace it with another, something we leave to be believed to be more true or more spiritual. This has a significant impact on our lives and in our Zen practice, for as we begin to let go the anxiety that comes up from having a firm ground under our feet. To causes us to scramble to replace what we just let go of with something else, a different identity, something that makes us feel like we exist. This is not particularly helpful, because we don't want to keep serially letting go and replacing what we let go of in an endless round of suffering. In order to allow that letting go to lead us to freedom, it's vital that we dare to open to the experience of having no ground under our feet. When we dare to do so, the possibility of moving in any direction is revealed and we are able to respond without fixation, to a compelling, limited way of reacting. There is unlimited freedom in this. This is the gift of our natural way of being.
Thoughts control a lot of our perception of reality, and we control a lot through thoughts. This is why it can be so challenging for beginning and intermediate Zen students doing meditation practice. Wein, the sixth Chinese ancestor of Zen, said, good friends. 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 concepts of form and appearances. Non abiding is your fundamental nature. All worldly things are empty. So what does it mean to be without thought in the midst of thinking,
when you're doing a piece of research, or you're even baking a cake, or whatever you're doing, if you're completely absorbed in it, you might you're still thinking you got to follow the recipe. You've got to investigate if you're doing research, but you're not thinking about yourself. You're just doing this thing, and that is what no thought, in essence, really means same thing with no form. There was an incident at the forget which zoo it was, but let's say it is a real Zoo, and I just can't remember. And this guy, Richard Swope, he came to watch the chimpanzees with his kids, two kids and chimpanzees can't swim, and there was a moat, therefore, around the enclosure for the chimpanzees, so that the two chimps would not, you know, obviously, get out and climb over the fence, and he is watching there with everyone else, when suddenly, one of the chimps falls into the water and struggling because he can't swim. The other Chimp is beating his chest in the Hua whoa, whoa. And then so Richard jumps over the barrier, rushes down and pulls the chimp out of the water. He's going back up the slope there to get back over the fence. When he hears the other chimp going even more agitated, and he turns around, and the chimp that he pulled out has now slid back into the water, so he rushes back, pulls the chimp out again and then makes its way safely out of the enclosure. Now, chimpanzees are, you know, more than 300 pounds, and when aggressive, can be very, very dangerous. He was in action. That's no action. I mean, we all have done this. I remember being by Lake Michigan and my two kids, David was in the car. We had a very heavy, old, inherited behemoth from his women's mom and dad and I was cooking or something, and waymon was just doing fixing fishing, real probably. And suddenly I hopped, to my horror, this car is rolling down the slope towards Lake Michigan. I. In once in less than a flash. Wayman was running beside the car, pulled the door open, jumped in, and because it was if you don't have your assisted power thing on, it's extremely hard to press a brake and stop a car, but with that kind of energy that comes with with being fully present, he was able to stop the car with the two front wheels over the edge of the small, little cliff. David, of course, had been in the playing around with the pedals and he had released the break. So I only give that example as that's what it means to be in no no action. It's not that you're not doing it. It's that you are not your eye is taken out of it.
The mind, I'll go on now, that mind is already here and now and never wasn't. We don't have to make anything different. We need only to become aware of when we're caught in the thinking that overlays this experience of no thought or no abiding arouse the mind that abides nowhere as we awake from sleep just before we're fully awake, in just those few moments when we're between wake and sleep, we can open into that mind state of non abiding and in the same way we can do so just as we begin to drift off to deep sleep, because we again enter more readily into letting go. I think for anyone who suffers from insomnia. You know what it's like to want to sleep, but you can't let go of just staying awake. And then just before you sleep, there is that sort of letting go that happens. You can't will it, but it is a different mind state.
It needs to be clarified that in Hua non quote no thought does not mean cutting off thinking. In the early years of Zen Teachings that came to America from Japan, the expression of cutting thoughts was completely misunderstood because of that wording, many of us assumed it meant to stop thinking, and we worked hard to try to not have thoughts. But cutting thoughts means to cut our attachment the strings to thoughts, not to prevent them from coming up. It means to treat thoughts like the clouds in the sky. Momentarily, they may obscure the bright clear sky, the bright clear mind, but that sky, that clear mind, is still there and cannot be otherwise. In reality, thoughts and clouds are just passing phenomena, and those passing phenomena have no basis in reality. What you thought 10 years ago, the thoughts that went through your mind. Then, where are they now? In another part of the book, she mentions a neuro scientist who has investigated different brain things and her thesis or her, she posits that, in fact, early man simply was, you know, just existed in without having thoughts really, just like animals are aware just being surviving, doing whatever. But then, because man needed to feed himself, hunting became a necessary function, and that required planning and thinking and making decisions in order to be more creative in finding food and surviving, and that the intellect developed, therefore much later. And so we're not it's not an embedded in that sense, and this is sometimes hard for people to hear in Zen practice that you're not your thoughts. Of course, I'm my thoughts. This is my world. This is the world of my project. Action, definitely me, maybe not.
Guo Gu disciple of Chen mu chan master Sheng Yen, who died in 2009 in his book Silent illumination. Wrote the following 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. 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, then we feel very unhappy. If someone praises us and we identify with that, then we will feel very happy. This is normal. Unfortunately, when we're tethered to our thoughts, we actually lose our autonomy, like a puppet. We are tied by the strings of our thoughts, completely at the mercy of our narratives. The problem is not with thoughts. The problem is the strings that tie us to those thoughts are grasping and rejecting. We might look here at anger. Every one of us gets angry, and it's not a bad emotion, it's just a way of responding to a situation.
But in fact, anger doesn't come to you. You get angry, right? It's not that something made you angry, necessarily, it's that you got angry. So that's the and there's a choice in that too, you know. So instead of saying I am angry, just anger, identify that emotion, just anger, not I am angry, just anger. It has a different feel to it. I then you can investigate it, embody it, let it go, and certainly try not to blame yourself for getting angry, but just recognize that it was a phenomenon. You experienced it, you let it go and you move on. How do you deal with grasping and rejecting? We've shared this solution many different times by opening to the experience. This means opening to the bodily sensations that come up when we are grasping or rejecting all mind states. By offering these bodily experiences radical acceptance, just anger, they cease to be a problem. We don't have to like them, but only recognize that they appear to be here at the moment. If we metaphorically open our arms and embrace these energies, then there's no problem, because we're not trying to prevent ourselves from feeling certain mind states or trying to change what we're feeling. We are able to open and flow, not grasping and not rejecting. This doesn't mean being willy nilly. It means being fully, completely present. When we're able to do this, life unfolds in a very different, truly free way. How do we get there? Through zazen, through paying real attention through the experience of our koan, extending the breath with a sense of potential practice with that that there is something, if we reach far enough through our practice, it will open us and it will free us. Not only will it free us, but it can return us to our original state, which is naturally free and unobstructed.
No hindrances. You.
Thought has two levels of meeting. Meeting thought has two levels of meaning. Writes Guo Gu the first refers to our mental activity, our brains, natural ability to think, symbolize, conceptualize, cognize and perceive. That's our left brain. That's a nice tool. It's very helpful. The second level refers to our fixation on our own constructs, notions and story lines. In other words, our tendency to turn ideas and feelings into realities into things. I'm this, I'm that. It's this, it's that. That's what catches us. We build ourselves a whole series of boxes that constrain us. Gu continues. 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 have to first expose our lack of or need to possess something don't identify with these subtle feeling tones. Mitra Roshi says that's maybe easier said than done, but again, we have this extremely effective way of doing this. Let's quote long center. That's the Tibetan master on this, whatever pleasurable things arise, and we could say also whatever unpleasant things arise, whether forms, sounds, tastes, touches or smells, in their appearing, they are like a dream or an illusion. They appear without any truth to them. The forms or whatever is experienced are empty. In reality, your own mind is an open dimension. Scary thought. If it's an open dimension, what on earth can we depend on? Yet somehow built in we are able to survive. We don't have to latch onto things, particularly not to an identity, in order to survive or even thrive. Consider an infant just born naturally. They reach for the nipple to nurse naturally. They poop and they pee. Naturally. They cry when they're uncomfortable, cold, wet or hungry, without any thought. This behavior naturally takes place. It occurs without any sense of me doing it. You could say, Who wakes us up in the morning?
I from long chan PA, again, the key whatever pleasurable things arise, whether forms, sounds, tastes, touches or smells, in their appearing, they are like a dream or illusion, and they appear without any truth to them. Look nakedly at whatever appears at the moment. It appears by relaxing in that state awareness in which there is no grasping at appearance as something arises. Non dualistically, I'll say that again, look nakedly at whatever appears at the moment it appears by relaxing in that state, which means just being awareness in which there is no grasping at appearances as something just arises. I Roshi says, just open to possibility, allowing that openness in the midst of whatever sensations are present, the Beatles rose wrote that wonderful song about let it be I
can't remember the quote exactly, but anyway, say in words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be so many times, you know, we try to fix things, solve them, and just waiting, just having, you know, that parameter of patience, of things resolve themselves. She goes on. Here's the core of this practice, though attachment, aversion, dullness, pride and envy, or any other mind states that are challenging may arise fully understand their inner energy by experiencing that energy, not the idea, not the thought, but the energy in your body, recognize them in the very first moment before karma has accumulated. That's the thing about anger. You know, anger does. Come to you. You are angry. Just anger. Stay with that. Then there is a gap you can breathe, maybe in out, and instead of reacting, you respond. It may be that you need to do something radical, but you have that space just the emotion, same with the love. You know not I am in love. No love. You
still start out with I am afraid, you know, but the feeling is fear.
So long chan power continues in the second moment I interrupted it. Excuse me in the second moment, look nakedly at this state and relax in its presence. What does that mean? Relax in its present. It means, allow open, let it be. Then whichever of the five passions arise becomes a pure presence, freed in its own place without being eliminated. It emerges as the pristine awareness that is clear, pleasurable and not conditioned by thought. We all have this capacity. It starts with awareness, with presence, with attention. Long 10 pa expands know the state of pure and total presence to be a vast expanse without center or border. It is everywhere, the same without acceptance or rejection.
Know the state of pure and total presence to be a vast expanse without center or border. Anybody who has been in the mountains or by the ocean, vast expanse without center or border. This clear mind of awareness is everywhere yet nowhere. It is your original face. It is the face before your parents were born. It is mu it is what it is, who it is, the sound of one hand. It when we are able to open to that experience, even briefly. And everybody here has had that tiny moment or a big moment of knowing, it requires a letting go of identity, at least temporarily, and it's very different. This, in a nutshell, is what we're called upon to do. It is not easy, but it's quite simple. It does require effort, even though Zen practice talks about effortless effort, it requires training ourselves in awareness with a willingness to tune into our body, to feel the energy of the body. If we've experienced trauma that is a very difficult thing to do, and may require some external help with a trained trauma therapist, but keep at it. Be stubborn. Be persistent. It works. We'll stop there now on this site, before.
