The feeling, the words, I am living my life in ever-growing rings or mudras, I'm circling around the ancient tower, come to my mind. circling around the ancient tower. Rilke said, God, or the ancient tower. This ancient tower is this non-abiding place where things completely become themselves and thus transcend themselves and thus make anything possible.

[01:18]

It's also, I think, the place where this infinitely gentle and infinitely suffering being lives. So I'm circling around this infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering being. As I've said often, I feel that circumambulation is a good relationship to live with the divine. To turn away from it doesn't work.

[02:26]

We'll freeze to death. And to grab it doesn't work. will burn, but to always respectfully walk clockwise around this way, this Buddha way of completely becoming and completely transcending. of being gentle enough to be completely what we are, to be gentle enough to accept infinite suffering, infinite in time and space. This infinite suffering, its core is this thing which human beings are born to, and that is a mind that can separate, a mind that can feel a wound in itself

[04:03]

And this suffering is infinite because it separates itself from everything in the same way. There's no end to this suffering because there's no end to this separation. But if we are infinitely gentle, we can settle into this place of limitless suffering and thereby be liberated. These six subtle methods are six ways to walk around this ancient tower.

[05:21]

And as I've mentioned and have gone into in some detail before and may do again, each of these six include the other five. these six are circling around the ancient tower and all six circle around each one. Rilke says that he is circling around in ever-growing orbits, in ever-larger rings. And I feel that it's both ever larger and ever smaller, getting closer and closer to the center of this tower, getting closer and closer and more and more intimate with this infinite suffering and infinite gentleness.

[06:27]

As we get closer to infinite gentleness, we also get wider in our circles because we can use more and more of life in this circling. When I have been talking about these six subtle methods, I've noticed that I tend to feel I should warm up to whatever method I'm talking about because, again, these methods are a circle. I used counting to warm up to following, and counting and following to warm up to stopping, and stopping to warm up to contemplation.

[07:44]

And yesterday I started to use contemplation to initiate into return or reversal. So I want to talk more about, I want to talk more about contemplation today to start to enter into this return subtle method, the subtle method of returning or reversing. But again, before I say anything about contemplation, I want to remind us that again there's this cycle here of the birth of the mind and the death of the mind.

[08:56]

So just a brief history of time. In terms of evolution of consciousness, the beginning of consciousness is that some physical energies, which for all practical purposes of living beings, and I think physicists have not come up with anything more, there's five types of physical energies or physical realities, electromagnetic radiation, mechanical waves, chemical stimulation and gaseous stimulation, and then the most basic of just touch, actual physical contact of not those other four ways on the organism.

[10:04]

So some organic material, when impinged upon by these physical things, in a place, organic, some localized mechanical clump, I mean organic clump, gets stimulated by these energies and at the place where the organism, which maybe not quite yet an organism, but where there's organic material, the place where it's sensitive, the place where it responds to this, for example, electromagnetic radiation, at that place, at some point in the history of the universe, by that interaction, by that stimulation, consciousness arose. A sense consciousness. something not localized that was born of this localized interaction.

[11:10]

And when the mechanical waves, that sometimes are called sound waves, touch the organism and the organism was sensitive to that and responded to that, that became the way that the organism received it received the sound waves into itself. And as that pattern of reception became established in the organism, consciousness of sound developed. And at this time in the history of the organism, the consciousness did not have objects. It had a field. because the consciousness did not think of these stimulations as outside itself. It was still close enough to its birth to realize that it was inseparable from this interaction, and the thing stimulating and the thing stimulated were its parents, and its parents were not outside itself.

[12:32]

And a lot of time passed and this pattern of relationship of something, of some physical energy running into...a physical energy is located. You can find it. You can measure it. No one knows what it is, but it's located and you can measure it. It touches other physical realities. physical locations, causing this consciousness, this pattern of consciousness, of awareness with something sensitive and something sensitizing. This pattern started to somehow leave some trace in the consciousness itself. Again, a non-localized trace, a kind of shadow. of the basic paradigm of physicality giving rise to awareness. And at some point this paradigm became reenacted in the consciousness itself.

[13:49]

And parts of the consciousness became like stimuli, and part of the consciousness started to respond to it according to the model of the physical world. And then consciousness started to become aware of its own contents. It started an awareness of the contents of mind, of the traces of the past workings of the mind. of the effects of the mind operating for some number of eons started to become part of what was going on in the mind. And then at some point, quite recently in the history of the mind, this thing happened where the mind thought that the things that it was aware of, in terms of its own contents, were outside itself. And I don't know what you want to call this, but in some sense this is when the lights went on in the human mind.

[14:52]

This is when, not when the life went on, but when the lights went on. This is when objective knowledge was born. This is when the human mind started to know things. And at that great moment there was also born Actually, we don't know if it was born right at that time, but now, with human beings, exactly at that moment, there is also born a sense of self. Because once the organism can think something is outside of itself, it is able to think it's a self. And then it's able to think its death is outside itself, that it has limits. And also somebody is responsible for this wonderful thing. So at the time that there is the ability to think something is outside yourself, the mind also gives rise to the view of self, the delusion of self, the love of self, the pride of self.

[16:02]

And it's fortunate that these afflictions, they're called four afflictions, it's fortunate they arise because the trouble they cause forces us to study the mind. Before they arose, it was not required to study the mind. But with the birth of knowledge and the birth of a sense of a separateness, with the birth of this wound in the mind, various afflictions arose which forced the organism eventually to study itself, to understand itself, to liberate itself from its own patterns which naturally wound itself, which trick itself and delude itself. So contemplation is to study this field of separation and as a preparation for studying the field, what we do is we try to establish a basically peaceful situation.

[17:34]

Once the mind was wounded, once the mind was able to think of something outside itself, then it was disturbed. It became agitated, and the objects that it worked with, that came to it, disturbed it. It was disturbed because of being wounded, of being cut. and it had no way of understanding how to heal the cut. So again, it's good that it got upset because the upset is part of what spurred the organism on to reestablish the calm which was there before there was separation. Before there was separation, there was what we sometimes call biological bliss or dark bliss.

[18:41]

It was just union with love. The psyche and love were in union in the dark, as is taught in the Greek myth of amor and psyche. But the Psyche and love became separate by this evolutionary breakthrough. However, the light went on and now Psyche knew something and Psyche knew that she was suffering Again, as a preliminary to studying the situation, what Buddhist meditation does is it teaches a temporary way to heal the wound. It gives a temporary healing. It brings the subject and object back together under some limited conditions.

[19:57]

It chooses a friendly object. the breath, or the posture. And it says, bring the mind close to the breath. Bring the mind in intimate contact with the breath until the mind is with the breath completely, at least for a moment. And if the mind can be with the breath completely for another moment, all the better. In other words, concentrate on the point that the separation occurs. Pick something, pick some object that you feel separate from and study that object and notice more and more how you can join it. Because anything you're separate from, you can join through that separation.

[21:02]

And breath is a good target because it does this nice thing of hanging around you all the time. It moves a little bit so it doesn't make it too easy, but it's basically nearby and you can at least imagine it following in a regular pattern. So you can jump on, so to speak, the track of the breath. You can join the flow. You can jump the rope. there still is this upset and turbulence all around this subject-object relationship. So it's easy to fly off in various other directions and not focus on this point of separation. But by repeated sincere application, the mind and the breath can come to rest upon each other. You can realize how they naturally do rely on each other and are in close relationship.

[22:17]

And under these circumstances, one can reestablish union and quiet, experience the quietness of the mind. Actually, the mind was always quiet, but it got confused and thought that it was separated from things that it was actually connected to. it split itself into two and fell for the illusion and got upset about it. Now, without thoroughly understanding that this is an illusion yet, let's just go on the basis of the illusion and bring these two together. Let's yoke them. Let's yoke body and mind. Let's be yogis. This is stopping. This is realizing that the mind is already stopped because at the very place where the mind is separated and gets upset, at that very place it is also always sitting there completely calmly at the same time.

[23:21]

In other words, the mind is contradictory by nature and paradoxical by nature because it is upset because of being wounded and it is calm because of being joined together at the wound. It is also joined together everywhere else where it's not wounded. The whole field is actually perfectly unified all the time and perfectly concentrated both in the realm where there's objects and in the realm where there aren't objects. However, in the realm where there's objects and where there's knowledge, there's also the disturbance of the illusion of something outside happening to us. Which again is a reiteration of the organic world where things happen to organisms. But there it's just organic life, it's part of the show, there's no problem.

[24:25]

They are born and die without any anxiety. But we transmit this into a fantasy of that and we get upset about it. Again, stopping is to temporarily calm the mind, to temporarily re-establish and re-confirm that the mind is calm. Once the calm is established, we're ready for contemplation. And when contemplation starts, what we do is we activate the mind again. We get it a little bit upset. We start to say, oh, that thing which, the object which we just got unified with, we're going to make it a little bit outside again. The breath which I just got unified with, I'm going to now make a little bit outside again. Or even if I should happen to start to have felt that I was unified with all the people in the room, or all sentient beings, or the sky, or the ocean, all the things I felt united with, or at least one of them, I'm going to pick and I'm going to make it a little bit separate again.

[25:40]

I'm going to think about it. I'm going to contemplate the relationship between the two sides of the wound. A slight bit of such awareness, a slight bit of leaning on the separation, rather than using the separation to achieve peace, causes a little disturbance. If too much disturbance occurs, we should probably go back and remember the peace. But looking with a peaceful mind at a little bit of disturbance, we can see this interplay. And instead of just closing the gap by concentration, we can start to see how the farthest and nearest reaches of causes and conditions create the peace and create the disturbance.

[26:41]

We can also notice the pain that arises there. Rather than just gently merging with the pain and settling with the pain, we can now see how the pain is born. Some people say that if you can understand how things work, you will be able to create. But I say, if you can see how things are created, you will understand. If you can see how the mind splits itself and how that split causes the pain, if you can observe that, this is creation. If you can witness the creation, you will understand. And on some level, you'll never be fooled again. But it's a little bit disturbing to witness the creation. You don't necessarily also have to push yourself into this contemplation. It isn't that you get calm and think, okay, now I'm calm, so now I should activate the mind, disturb the mind a little bit and study.

[27:51]

It doesn't have to be that way. Once you feel calm, as long as you keep in contact with a teacher, you can just keep developing the calm deeper and deeper and deeper. There's some possibility some people do get intoxicated and become addicted. And they can just stay in that calm over long. And actually, they stay in a fairly shallow calm over long. But if the calm really does get deeper, the calm naturally gives rise to the thought, it's time to go on to figure out what's going on. You've had enough rest. It's time to understand the fundamental problem. Because although you're doing very well with your breath and posture, you might not be able to do so well with a great white wave of noxious material.

[28:57]

You might not be able to do so well with certain things that happen in this world. So let's get down and understand how this thing works. Then we'll be permanently protected and permanently calm and permanently imperturbable and lots of other good stuff, which I won't get into right now. In fact, the composure which gets deep naturally says, it's time to go on. And even though it gets deep and says it's time to go on, going on and working with a little bit of turbulence then deepens the calm. And then that deeper calm says, okay, let's have some more turbulence.

[29:59]

And handling more turbulence then deepens the calm. Until you can handle whatever. That's the deepest calm. That's the calm of the infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering being. The being who can embrace infinite suffering because of infinite gentleness. This is also infinite composure. This is what we're circling around. So contemplation. Contemplation means from the place of already calming somewhat. Now we're going to get a little bit upset here. Maybe you're already upset enough. Maybe this is enough. Probably it is.

[31:03]

If anybody's not the least bit disturbed right now, then maybe they should get a tiny bit disturbed. If somebody's mind is not the least bit activated, then maybe a little bit of activated would be good so you can listen to me. But maybe already you have enough. We're in the field of contemplation now. This is not the end of the story, but this is where you are equipped now to handle a little reality, to begin to understand. to approach understanding, but as I say, approach understanding through witnessing creation.

[32:07]

Witnessing how, when things are completely themselves, they transcend themselves and create something new called not-that or not-themselves. This is called witnessing the forgotten self. This is called witnessing the giving away of yourself. So I've been looking for this quote for some time. I finally found it this morning. my little brain that can categorize things. Remember the little notebook I wrote it in. This is the last thing that Camus wrote, Albert Camus, who I kind of like because he wrote a book called The Rebel. I like him for other reasons, too. He's kind of a cool guy.

[33:14]

I like the way he looked. He looked a little bit like... He looked tough. But he was really a sensitive guy, I think. So how does this work? He said, one may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a rest, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist, then that she finds in the heat of combat. And combat, you know, is a rough word there, sorry, but anyway, that's what he said. Combat.

[34:16]

But I would say, you know, make it more general. In the heat of the subject and object meeting. in the confrontation of self and other, in the heat of that, it may be the only place, there may be no other peace for the artist than in the heat, not the gentle heat, but whatever heat there is, not hotter than this, not colder than this, but in the heat of meeting the other. This may be the only place of peace for an artist, for a yogi. The heading that I wrote in my book was, Good Advice for a Yogi, Good Advice for Sashin. Every wall is a door, Emerson correctly said.

[35:17]

This is Camus quoting Emerson. Every wall is a door. Let us not look for the door and the way out anywhere but in the wall in front of which we live. Let us not look for the door and the way out anywhere but in the wall in the floor in the table in front of which we are living. Instead, let us seek the rest where it is, in the very thick of this confrontation. In the very thick, he said, of battle. Heraclitus said,

[36:20]

What is it? Polemos. War is the father of all things. There's not just a mother, there's a father too. At the point of creation, when things are created, there is a confrontation. There is this stimulation in the stimulated. That's what makes life. It's not just a sensitive little thing going, eh. Something's touching it. Something's stimulating it. That gives rise to consciousness. It's not just, you know, gangs of stimuli running around not finding anything either. It's when they touch something that's sensitive that consciousness is born. And that confrontation is like a battle sometimes.

[37:25]

In my opinion, it is there. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever endangered truth. that from each and every person on the ground of his or her suffering and joy is born for all of us. This is the last thing he said before he got in a taxi cab accident. And he called this talk, Create Dangerously. We have to go into this field. But again, you don't have to go in like, you know, as a wreck. You can put on a nice suit or dress or even Buddhist robes.

[38:32]

You can, you know, eat a nice breakfast. You can be calm and cool and stable and feel good and be up for it. And then carefully walk out there and face the heat of subject and object doing their thing. Face the pain of separation which your mind inexorably creates. Go into this difficult dark world. This is a book by Toni Morrison. called Playing in the Dark. And the part I wanted to read you was, is, I am interested in what prompts and makes possible the process of entering what one is estranged from and in what disables this entry.

[39:38]

She says, for purposes of fiction, for purposes of writing, fiction. But leaving that out, she's interested in what prompts and makes possible the entry into what one is estranged from, into the corners of consciousness held off and away from each of our imagination. My work, her work, requires me to think of how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my generation of genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world, to think about, to wrestle with the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society.

[40:44]

For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking at or looking, nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming. So for her to look at how she would work with her imagination to enter into what she's estranged from, she has to take into account who she is and the society she lives in and what that society has done to her mind and all that.

[41:45]

That's part of what you have to face as you approach fully inhabiting your consciousness. All the more reason to be calm and cool as you enter this field of study. And to respect yourself and stay close to yourself and be still with yourself as you happen. But you and I are complex beings with histories inside and outside us which we have to feel and deal with.

[42:52]

and stay close to and be gentle with and that hurt us and disturb us. So there is an art here of learning how to fruitfully study what's happening and not get too upset so that we just... I don't know what. just get carried away by and overwhelmed by what happens when we start to open up the field and study. Not to get overwhelmed when we enter the field of battle, but to be able to stand there in the middle, cool, and to learn and to study. That's what the sitting is about. To find some way to sit quietly in the midst of ever growing rings, ever intensifying complexity.

[44:00]

But for now, in this fairly simplified situation, try it here. You don't have to get any more activated than just a little to do the contemplation. Once you feel calm, and some of you may not feel calm enough to make any activation, which is fine, I'm just telling you for the time when you do feel calm, enough. That a little bit is enough to work with. You don't have to get really excited. Just a little bit is enough. And with that little bit, Still continue to be still. And concentrate on what's there. And use what's coming up. But again, if what's coming up is too threatening and too much you're going to lose your composure and you won't be able to see it anyway because you're just going to close your eyes and curl up in a ball and roll away, then just

[45:16]

Again, come back to the concentration. Until you're ready to face at least a little bit of this battle of subject and object, of this wound and the pain there involved. Until finally, in one moment anyway, you can settle with some of this pain. completely settle with some of this pain while simultaneously being aware of it. So I think that cutting through also in a sense ends one. So you do end them in a sense when you cut through one. Every time you cut through one of these things, every time you see how one of these delusions causes you pain, you do in a sense end that delusion. Like when I came out of Tassajara Zendo one time and saw that freezing blue jay out there on the deck looking at me, all fluffed up trying to keep warm.

[46:19]

And I saw him. At that moment, I cut through that delusion of me and blue jays being in different, you know, worlds. I finally said, okay, you can be in this valley too. I respected, you know, that he was suffering just like me with the cold. without even the aid of, you know, a zendo to keep him warm. So that was one delusion that ended, that was cut through. Anyway, the principle, as I said before, is stay close to yourself, be still with yourself, and you become available opportunity for illumination.

[47:27]

You forget yourself, you give away yourself when you stay close to yourself. When you're really gentle with yourself, your self lets you give it away. it allows itself to be given away, which it's allowing itself to do all the time anyway because the self always is being itself and transcending itself. But if you stay close to it, you can join in the fact, in the reality of the self by becoming itself, giving itself away. And at the moment of giving itself away, it becomes a suitable candidate for illumination. And it is illuminated by the process, exactly the same process that gave it away. The contemplation is to be there and watch this process until you see that the way consciousness works is not the way it works.

[48:34]

And consciousness changes into wisdom. which is not consciousness. And it's consciousness and it's an awareness that's not a consciousness. It's an understanding of the fact that consciousness is not consciousness. So by calmly studying how consciousness works, you will understand that the way consciousness works proves that consciousness isn't consciousness. And suffering, by the very fact of the way it works, shows that there's no such thing as suffering. Because there's no suffering floating around by itself, big, clumpy, yucky old suffering just roaming around the world. There's no such thing. There's always only suffering in this special, individual context in which it occurs. It always occurs in some context. It occurs for reasons. It's all hung up and stuck in its causes.

[49:36]

There's no such thing. And its causes are not separate from it either, so the causes aren't there either. The way consciousness works will show this to you. All you've got to do is sit still. And the world will take its mask off and say, hello, we've just been kidding you. And then, after it says we've been kidding you, it says, remember we told you we were going to be kidding you and now we're going to kid you again. Watch this. And it puts the mask back on, but a different one. And then the mask starts changing and says, can you still remember? This is a joke. Watch this. This one you won't be able to go for. Watch this one. So again, you know, you just sit still.

[50:42]

close to yourself. And that enters you into this world, the self-fulfilling samadhi, the samadhi of how you receive yourself and use yourself. You watch this until you forget yourself. And there, in the abandoned boat, swamped in moonlight, drenched in moonlight, the moonlight of its own giving away, of its own being relinquished by its fulfillment. And then the wind blows. And you see the wind break the water and the moon is broken up into millions of little shining moons brilliantly coming in your eyes. And you see, oh, these aren't waves. This is light. You're not fooled. And then all those little waves turn into little seagulls.

[51:48]

And then the little seagulls turn into big seagulls. And the big seagulls come swooping in and splashing around. And then bats come up. And they have rabies. And you say, wait a minute, this is too much. And the world says, just kidding. Go back to your meditation. This was just a test. Go back to your meditation and come back again and we'll try this over. But it won't be like this next time because that wouldn't be a good test. But if you really need the same thing over again, we'll do it just like this until you understand. until you fully manifest your wisdom, which is to study this play of consciousness. Study it and study it and study it from this place of composure, from this upright sitting, until you understand.

[52:58]

And it is painful just to study. Pain is part of the price of admission to this study because it hurts to see the source of creation. Birth hurts. death hurts. But all the more, if you're calm, you can practice patience. Patience is important to protect us from anger. But most important about patience is patience makes it so we can stand the pain of birth and the pain of death. and the pain of birth of wisdom, and the pain of death of wisdom, and the pain of going beyond wisdom. It hurts. But if you know how to get to the center of that hurt, you can stand to let the truth say, okay, here's a new truth. Come on now. You're ripe.

[54:30]

Come on. It's time. Let's go. Time for Zazen.

[54:46]

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