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Everyday Zen #1: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Everyday Zen #1

John Pulleyn39min

John Pulleyn

00:04

This is the fifth day of this June, 2025, seven day seshin, and we're going to move today to a book of talks by Charlotte Joko Beck, the late Zen master, Zen teacher in San Diego, read from her often before she tells it like it is, or as Hubert. Hubert Humphrey said, tell it as it is,

John Pulleyn

00:52

and going to start with something entitled The fire of attention, she says, back in the 1920s when I was maybe eight or 10 years old, living in New Jersey, where the winters are cold, we had a furnace in our house that burned coal. Was a big event on the block. When the coal truck rolled up and all this stuff poured down the coal chute into the coal bin, I learned that there were two kinds of coal that showed up in the coal bin. One was called anthracite, or hard coal, and the other was lignite, soft coal. My father told me about the difference in the way those two kinds of coal burned. Anthracite burns cleanly, leaving little ash. Lignite leaves lots of ash. When we burned lignite, the cellar became covered with soot, and some of it got upstairs into the living room. My mother had something to say about that. I remember at night, my father would bank the fire, and I learned to do this too. Banking the fire means covering it with a thin layer of coal and then shutting down the oxygen vent to the furnace. Well the air vent so that the fire stays in a slow burning state. Overnight, the house becomes cold, and so in the morning, the fire must be stirred up and the oxygen vent opened, then the furnace can heat up the house.

John Pulleyn

02:30

Not too many coal bins left these days there. There was one at Arnold park when we first moved into the building. It was taken out, got rid of it, got rid of all the coal. And that was the dorm for a lot of the trainees down there in the basement, in the old coal bin. We've really come up in the world, haven't we? I now we can sleep out in a garage.

John Pulleyn

03:14

What does all this have to do with our practice? Practice is about breaking our exclusive identification with ourselves. It's a great definition of practice. So so much of our problem is me, maybe it's all the problem, and we're all caught up in it to one degree or another. Practice is about breaking it, softening it, moving into a different locus. Everything doesn't revolve around this little person.

John Pulleyn

03:59

She says, this process has sometimes been called purifying the mind. To purify the mind doesn't mean that you become holy or other than you are. It means to strip away that which keeps a person or a furnace from functioning. Best furnace functions best with hard coal, but unfortunately, what we're full of is soft coal. There's a saying in the bible he is like a refiners fire. It's a common analogy found in other religions as well. To sit through sesshin is to be in the middle of a refining fire. Edo Roshi once said this, Zen do is not a peaceful haven, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions.

John Pulleyn

04:57

Zen do is not a place for bliss and. Relaxation, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions. What tools do we need to use only one. We've all heard of it, yet we use it very seldom. It's called attention.

John Pulleyn

05:20

Attention is the cutting burning sword, and our practice is to use that sword as much as we can. None of us is very willing to use it, but when we do, even for a few minutes, some cutting and burning takes place when our attention really lights up, when we really come into our natural awareness, when we just are aware that we're aware, it's a dramatic change. Things change, and they change in a good way. And

John Pulleyn

06:03

all practice aims to increase our ability to be attentive, not just in zazen, but in every moment of our life. As we sit, we grasp that our conceptual thought process is a fantasy. And the more we grasp this, the more our ability to pay attention to reality increases. One of the great Chinese masters, Wang Po, said, if you can only rid yourselves of conceptual thought, you will have accomplished everything. But if you students of the way, do not rid yourselves of conceptual thought in a flash. Even though you strive for eon after eon, you will never accomplish it. And she says, we rid ourselves of conceptual thought when, by persistent observation, we recognize the unreality of our self centered thoughts, then we can remain dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by them. This does not mean to be a cold person. Rather, it means not to be caught and dragged around by circumstances you

John Pulleyn

07:30

attention is a cutting burning sword, she says. She said, I

John Pulleyn

07:43

but it's also open. We think of attention often as narrowing our focus on to one particular object, but the attention that she's talking about is awareness. Maybe a better word. I

John Pulleyn

08:04

not knowing what we're going to see, not having a precond preconception be

John Pulleyn

08:16

open open eyes, open ears, open heart,

John Pulleyn

08:26

not caught up in that internal monolog that we drift off into every few seconds. It's a cutting, burning sword.

John Pulleyn

08:56

Again, she says it means not to be caught and dragged around by circumstances most of us are not much like this. As soon as we get into our work day, we discover we're not at all calm. We may have we have many emotional opinions and judgments about everything. Our feelings are easily hurt. We are, by no means, quote, dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by what is going on. So it's extremely important to remember that the main purpose of doing sesshin is this burning out of thoughts by the fire of attention, so that our lives can be dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by outward circumstances. I don't think there's anyone here of whom that is wholly true, yet our practice is to do that. We truly accomplish this burning out of attachments. There would be no need to sit. But I don't think anyone can say that we need an. Adequate daily period of zazen in which we attend to what's going on in our minds and bodies. We don't sit regularly, then we can't comprehend that how we wash our car or how we deal with our supervisor is absolutely our practice. So much importance to sitting every day, or as close to it as we can possibly get, there's value, tremendous value, in seshin. Make progress in seshin That's would take many, many months just sitting a little bit every day. But I know, I think Roshi has said this, I certainly believe it. If you had to pick between daily zazen and going to sesshins, I'd pick daily Zazen. Otherwise, what are you doing when you're not in session? How quickly you can backslide into old habits, confusion, selfishness, I

John Pulleyn

11:23

and she says master Rinzai, Chinese as Lin chi said, we cannot solve past karma except in relationship to circumstances. When it is time to dress. Let us put on our clothes when we should take a walk. Let us walk. Do not have a single thought in mind about searching for Buddhahood. Somebody once asked me, Joh, Ko do you think you're ever going to achieve great and final enlightenment? I replied, I hope a thought like that would never occur to me.

John Pulleyn

12:08

There is no special time or place for great realization, as Master Huang Bo said, On no account make a distinction between the absolute and the sentient world. It's nothing more than parking your car, putting on your clothes, taking a walk. But if soft coal is what we're burning, we're not going to realize that soft coal simply means that the burning of our life is not clean. We're unable to burn up each circumstance as we encounter it. The culprit is always our emotional attachment to the circumstance we carry things after we have some little upset stays with us, and because it does, we're no longer aware. We're not paying attention to what's happening in that moment, the next moment, the next moment,

John Pulleyn

13:22

soft, coal is what we're burning. We're not going to realize that soft coal simply means that the burning of our life is not clean. We're unable to burn up each circumstance as we encounter it, and the culprit is always our emotional attachment to the circumstance. For example, perhaps your boss asks you to do something unreasonable at that moment. What is the difference between burning soft coal and hard coal? Or, suppose we're looking for employment, but the only work we can find is something we dislike, or our child gets into trouble at school. In dealing with those what is the difference between soft coal and hard coal, if there isn't some comprehension of the difference, we've wasted our hours in sesshin. Most of us are here chasing after Buddhahood. Yet Buddhahood is how you deal with your boss or your child, your lover or your partner, whoever our life is always absolute. That's all there is. Truth is not somewhere else. We just got that one point the truth is not somewhere else. We'd wake a little bit

John Pulleyn

14:55

when we're when we aren't overlooking what's in. Front of us, it's joyful. Things just flow, one thing after another.

John Pulleyn

15:14

She says, we have but we have minds that are trying to burn the past or the future, the living present. Buddhahood is rarely encountered. When it is encountered, it's memorable. Most everybody has experiences in their lives when suddenly they were just fully present. Remember it for years.

John Pulleyn

15:47

Bird calls and there's only the sound.

John Pulleyn

15:58

When the fire in the furnace is banked and you want a brightly burning fire, what do you do? You increase the air intake. We are fires too, and when the mind quiets down, we can breathe more deeply, and the oxygen intake goes up. We burn with a cleaner flame, and our action comes out of that flame. Instead of trying to figure out in our minds what action to take. We only need to purify the base of ourselves. The action will flow out of that. The mind quiets down because we observe it instead of getting lost in it. Then the breathing deepens. When the fire really burns, there's nothing it can't consume. The fire gets hot enough there is no self, because now the fire is consuming everything. There's no separation between self and other.

John Pulleyn

16:56

Talking about Samadhi,

John Pulleyn

17:02

we disappear, there's only this. We don't like to think of ourselves as just physical beings. Yet the whole transformation of sitting is physical. It's not some miraculous thing that happens in our head when we burn soft coal, we are misusing our minds so that they are constantly clogged with fantasies, opinions, desires, speculations, analysis. We try to find right action out of that bog.

John Pulleyn

17:38

When something goes wrong in our life, what do we do? We sit down, try to figure it out, mull over it, speculate about it. It doesn't work. What does work is noticing our mental aberrations, which are not true, thinking. We observe our emotional thoughts. Yeah, I really can't stand her. She's a terrible person. We just notice. Notice, notice, notice, notice. Then, as the mind and body quiet down, and the fire begins burning brighter out of that will come real thinking and the ability to make adequate decisions, the creative spark of any art is also born in that fire to try to do everything with your intellect, you end up in analysis paralysis, and you end up going down twisted paths, very, very educated, intelligent people can make absolutely horrendous decisions, Be completely tone deaf in their relations with other people.

John Pulleyn

18:51

She says, we want to think, we want to speculate, we want to fantasize. We want to figure it all out. We want to know the secrets of the universe. When we do all that, the fire stays banked. It's not getting any oxygen, then we wonder why we're sick, mentally and physically, the burning is so clogged, there's nothing but debris coming off, and that debris doesn't just dirty us, it dirties everything. So it's important to sit every day, otherwise the understanding of the burning process gets so dim and cloudy that the fires stay banked. We have to sit every day. Even 10 minutes is better than not sitting at all. I tell this to students all the time. If you have a day when you can't sit your normal half hour, whatever. Sit for 10 minutes. Sit for five minutes. Stop in the middle of your day and be silent for a few breaths. Just interrupt the flow. You. Remember your center, come back to your own awareness. Of course, sitting for five minutes is better than stopping for a few breaths, and 10 minutes is better than that, and it just kept, keeps getting better and better.

John Pulleyn

20:21

She says, so let's just continue with sesshin. There's nothing you won't face before you're done with it. Rage, jealousy, bliss, boredom. Watch yourself as you cling to feeling sorry for yourself, as you cling to your problems, as you cling to the awful state of your life. That's your drama. The truth is, we like our drama very much. People tell me they want to be free of their troubles, but when we stew in our own juices, we can maintain ourselves as the artificial center of the universe. We love our drama. We like to complain and agonize and moan. Oh, isn't it terrible? I'm so lonely. Nobody loves me. You enjoy our soft coal, but the messiness of that incomplete burning can be tragic for me and for you. Let's practice well,

John Pulleyn

21:19

our focus normally, for most people, for most of us, really, most of the time, our focus is solve this problem, get this unpleasant circumstance out of my way. And so we never look at it fully. All sorts of things are digging at us sort of half in our awareness and half out, end up twisted. When I was young, I used to find myself in a funk and wonder, wait a minute, how did I start feeling this this bad, and I would trace back what had been happening. And sure enough, there was something or other, some insult or some disappointment that had occurred a while back. And I just sort of tried to ignore it there. It was eating away. I It's why bringing awareness into our lives is so healing and so helpful. At least when we're upset, we know why we're upset a lot of times it has to do with our own shortcomings. You are

John Pulleyn

22:59

going to move on to another section, another talk, and it's entitled, the price of practice. She says, when we find our life unpleasant or unfulfilling, we try to escape the unpleasantness by various subtle escape mechanisms. In such attempts, we are dealing with our lives as if there's me and there's life outside me. As long as we approach our lives in this way, we will bend all our efforts to finding something or somebody, somebody else, to handle our lives for us. We may look for a lover, a teacher, a religion, a center, something or somebody somewhere, to handle our difficulties for us, as long as we see our lives in this dualistic fashion, we fool ourselves and believe that we need not pay any price for a Realized life. All of us share this delusion to varying degrees, and it leads only to misery in our lives. As our practice proceeds, the delusion comes under attack, and slowly we begin to sense horror of horrors that we must pay the price of freedom. No one but ourselves can ever pay it for us. When I realized that it was one of the strong shocks of my lifetime, I finally understood one day that only I can pay the price of realization no one, no one at all, can do this for me. Until we understand that hard truth, we will continue to resist practice, and even after we see it, our resistance will continue, though not as much it's hard to maintain the knowledge in its full power.

John Pulleyn

24:57

It's a saying in alcoholics. Anonymous. We tried to find an easier, softer way, but we could not. This is where commitment and renunciation come in, willingness to see objectively and step away from the things that are getting in our way. So easy to hope that we can just continue on our pleasant course and everything will work out. Well, I'm sitting I'm a Zen student. Someday I'll become enlightened. Have to do the work. You have to actually step up. You up only you can pay attention

John Pulleyn

25:50

to the forest fire of your life. She says, what are some of the ways in which we evade paying the price? The chief one is our constant unwillingness to bear our own suffering. We think we can evade it or ignore it, or think it away or persuade someone else to remove it for us, we feel that we are entitled not to feel the pain of our lives. We fervently hope and scheme for someone else, our husband or wife, our lover, our child, to handle our pain for us, such resistance undermines our practice. Not going to sit this morning. I just don't feel like it. Not going to do seshin. I don't like what comes up. I won't hold my tongue when I'm angry. Why should I we waver in our integrity when it is painful to maintain it, we give up on a relationship that no longer fulfills our dreams. Underneath all of these evasions is the belief that others should serve us. Others should clean up the messes we make you.

John Pulleyn

27:10

We have to live our own lives. Great Master Zhu said of urinating, it's such a little thing, and yet I have to do it myself.

John Pulleyn

27:28

In fact, nobody but nobody, can experience our lives for us. Nobody can feel for us the pain that life inevitably brings, the price we must pay to grow is always in front of our noses, and we never have a real practice until we realize our unwillingness to pay any price at all.

John Pulleyn

27:52

Think everyone here is willing to pay some price, at least just going to seshin is paying a price, but still, we forget it's a real change in attitude when things go badly and you realize that that's Something that's fruitful to open up to to see you. We grow by not getting our way.

John Pulleyn

28:32

In the traditional Buddhist teaching of the six realms of unenlightened existence, the so called highest realm is the Deva realm, the heaven realm, and the human realm is below that. Yet it's from the human realm that people can come to awakening when people live a life of ease and they don't have problems. There usually isn't a whole lot of growth. There's no motivation. There's no you need some sand in the in the shelf or oyster to make a pearl. We need difficulty. We don't like it, but we can learn to work with it, to welcome, welcome it a little bit. Is my chance to look at my reactivity, to feel the ways that I tense up. Instead of going, Oh God, I'm tense. Please change things so I don't get so annoyed. I.

John Pulleyn

30:19

Underneath all these invasions is the belief that others should serve us, others should clean up the messes we make. In fact, nobody, but nobody, can experience our lives for us. Nobody can feel for us the pain that life inevitably brings. The price we must pay to grow is always in front of our noses, and we never have a real practice until we realize our unwillingness to pay any price at all. Sadly, as long as we evade We shut ourselves off from the wonder of what life is and what we are. We try to hold on to people we think can mitigate our pain for us, try to dominate them, keep them with us, even to fool them into taking care of our suffering. But alas, there are no free lunches, no giveaways. A jewel of Great Price is never a giveaway. We must earn it the steady, unrelenting practice you

John Pulleyn

31:28

we always try to do just enough. We don't want to go all in. There's a difference between trying to be open and opening. It's a dramatic difference. It's

John Pulleyn

31:50

not that we should suddenly wrench ourselves into some state of frantic endeavor in order to open fact that won't work. You have to see where we close down, notice. Pay attention. Then change can happen. Gradually find ourselves willing to do what once we were not willing to do. It's okay not to be willing. It's natural.

John Pulleyn

32:26

Told this story before, but when I was early on in AA, I noted the recommendation to let go of your anger when we're wrong. Promptly admitted it, and I got into an argument with my wife, and I thought about that, and I couldn't do it. There's no way. So I pointed out to her all of her shortcomings. I

John Pulleyn

33:05

But I but I did learn a little something. I noticed that I wasn't willing, and down the line, I've gotten a little better. Have to check with her and see how much better I

John Pulleyn

33:25

her. We must earn it with steady, unrelenting practice. We must earn it in each moment, not just in the spiritual side of our life. How do we keep our obligations to others? How do we serve others? Whether we make the effort of attention that is called for each moment of our life. All of this is paying the price for the jewel. Not talking about erecting a new set of ideals of how I should be, I'm talking about earning the integrity and wholeness of our lives by every act we do, every word we say, from the ordinary point of view, the price we must pay is enormous, though seen clearly, it is no price at all, but a privilege. As our practice grows, we comprehend this privilege more and more. And as we comprehend it, could add we become more and more willing.

John Pulleyn

34:29

Going back to my AA experiences, I remember some old guy was in my home group who used to say, Yeah, I'm doing aa because it's a good way to go, gruff old guy, but it is opening up to awareness is a good way to go. You.

John Pulleyn

35:04

Willingness. The difference between seshin That feels horrible and a seshin that's just hard but wonderful is willingness, willing to undergo whatever comes down the road, willing to do things wrong and suffer the consequences,

John Pulleyn

35:36

willing not to run away. I

John Pulleyn

35:45

She says, in this process, we discover that our own pain and others pain are not separate worlds. It's not that it's not that my practice is my practice and their practice is their practice. Because when we truly open up to our lives, we open up to all life the delusion of separateness diminishes as we pay the price of attentive practice. To overcome that delusion is to realize that in practice, we are not only paying a high price for ourselves, but for everyone else in the world. As long as we cling to our separateness, my ideas about what I am, what you are, what I need and want from you, that very self separateness means that we're not yet paying the price for the jewel. To pay the price means that we must give what life requires, must be given, not to be confused with indulgence, perhaps time or money or material goods, and sometimes not giving such things when it is best not to always the practice effort is to see what life requires us to give, as opposed to what we personally want to give, which is not easy. This tough practice is the payment exacted if we want to encounter the jewel. I We cannot reduce our practice simply to the time we spend in zazen, vital, though this time is our training, our paying the price must take place 24 hours a day. As we make this effort over time, more and more we come to value the jewel that our life is. But if we continue to stew and fuss with our life as in, we're a problem, or if we spend our time in seeking to escape this imaginary problem, the jewel will always remain hidden. Though it's hidden, the jewel is always present. We'll never see it, though, unless we're ready to pay the price. The uncovering of the jewel is what our life is about. How willing are you to pay the price? Yasutani Roshi said that you can start even with 5% sincerity, just pay a little more. That grows grows in sincere practice. Don't have to be perfect,

John Pulleyn

38:34

but we do have to work we have to work hard. You

John Pulleyn

38:49

we're well into the fifth day now. Lot of sitting under our belts still a lot ahead. I

John Pulleyn

39:08

we can all make a tremendous amount of progress if we're just willing to stay with it, not to run away, not to wince and flinch, open up as best we can start from where We are, always where you are, this breath.

John Pulleyn

39:42

Forget about the past. Forget about the future. Meet your life right in front of you. Time is up. We'll stop here and recite the four vows you.

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