So, we have been studying now, for half a practice period, the Four Noble Truths. And, let's see, what, Erin, do you want to say anything about that? Rebecca says they're true. Now, some people feel, Thomas, and I'll say it lightly like that, some people feel that actually it is required that one understands these Four Noble Truths in order to become free. Now, put it another way, if we understand these Four Noble Truths, we will be free.

[01:17]

Okay? You've sort of heard that before, right, that sort of way of talking? I'm saying it kind of in a light-hearted way. The other side of the story is that if you don't understand them you won't be, and also another way to put that is, if you're not free, it's not going to be a pretty picture. So, some people say that the Buddhist picture of the world, of the universe, is that in the background of these Four Noble Truths is, if you understand them, there's going to be a large-scale, thorough-going, unassailable freedom and happiness. A freedom and a happiness which puts ordinary human happiness, which would see ordinary

[02:22]

human happiness, ordinary human happiness, not ordinary human misery, but ordinary human happiness as like being in hell, as a very pitiful situation. That's a happiness which would make the ordinary human situation look really bad, and a freedom which would make ordinary human situation look like extreme bondage. The other possibility is the ordinary human situation, which is seen as… This is the background of the Four Noble Truths as traditionally taught around the time of Shakyamuni Buddha and then downed by some of his disciples until the present day. The other side is that what's available to… The other side of what's available to human beings and other conscious beings is a beginningless, delusion-based, life-after-life pain and sorrow.

[03:24]

And there are joys, but the joys are transient, and there are miseries which are also transient, but they keep coming at you, and all of our hopes and desires will be unfulfilled by the structure of that other world. And there's not like kind of like an in-between where it's kind of like not so bad as one, or kind of like not as good as the other. In other words, there's not like samsara and nirvana and kind of in-between. There's just samsara and nirvana. And they don't overlap, and they're non-dual, but they don't overlap. There's not like an in-between state of sort of nirvana or sort of samsara. But they're inseparable, these two opportunities or two ways of being, and the thing that separates

[04:27]

them is understanding the Four Noble Truths. And the Buddha himself said that before he understood the Four Noble Truths, he wasn't in the nirvana department, he was in the samsara area. But after he understood the First Noble Truth, and after he abandoned the conditions for the First Noble Truth, and then he attained cessation by the path, and he did everything that was necessary, and then he was free. Also, it is also the case that when he taught, when he started to teach, people did not believe him right away. The first person he met, according to one story, would not even listen to him,

[05:27]

explain the Four Noble Truths. The next group of people that he met, his old friends that he practiced with, they listened to him. But they listened to him just because he was kind of like... He was like, what do you call it? They considered him a trustworthy person, not a liar. So if he said he had something to say, they were willing to listen to him. But they didn't suddenly think that it was going to be true or something. But after they listened to him, they did think what he was saying was true. And they did attain liberation. So we, even if there was a Buddha here, teaching the Four Noble Truths, some of us actually might not listen to the Buddha. Not to mention if there was a lesser disciple of Buddha, we might not even listen to the

[06:29]

person. Or even if we listened to them, we might not right away believe it or see the truth of it. It might take a little work. How are you doing? I'm scared. Really? What are you scared about? It's not fun to think about no intermediate state. It's encouraging to think that things can get a little better. Samsara doesn't preclude things getting a little bit better.

[07:43]

It does not preclude that. In samsara, things do get better sometimes. But that getting better is transient. They just get a little bit better and then they get worse. Like one time I had this cyst on my thumb right here and I got kind of worried about it. I don't know what I thought was going to happen. Maybe they just keep getting bigger and bigger. Anyway, I watched it and watched it. And then it went away pretty fast. I don't know, like in a day or so it went away. I looked down and it was gone. And I got kind of happy. But then I felt kind of ashamed of myself. You're so happy about a little cyst going away? It's so small scale. And I looked over and there was a cyst on the other finger. So things can get a little better. Actually they can get quite a bit better. But then that goes away. And then we have a problem with that usually. And if not, if we don't have a problem with it, then not having a problem with it goes away. And this is like minor, right?

[08:49]

These are minor problems. We have much bigger ones. We have situations where starving children get their food stolen from them by people. So you have to have soldiers there to shoot the robbers who are trying to steal from the starving children. This kind of stuff. People are capable of this. But it's all part of the same, you know, circle. Now, you know, part of this is about like, I mean, is it really? Well, we know it's really sometimes, well, we feel sometimes like it's really bad. Like it really is painful. And we really do feel sorry for people and sometimes sorry for ourselves. And then we imagine that this is going on forever. Or even get an inkling that this would go on forever. And we just imagine the things we might do in some of the situations we might get into.

[09:53]

Contemplating this, we might come to think that there really is a problem. Really. So that might be possible. Then the other thing would be, we might think that actually there really is, there really is a possibility of becoming free of this problem. Now, some people here have told me, and this is fine to say, if you have doubts about, you know, the Four Noble Truths, it's good to sort of get them out there. So some people maybe think that they actually cannot practice the Eightfold Path thoroughly enough so that they would attain a cessation of suffering. Some people feel that they cannot study themselves thoroughly enough to see the cravings and see the outflows and understand them in such a way that they would like, you know, be free of these cravings. And that's not totally unreasonable because it is very difficult in the midst of this situation which I just described as samsara

[11:00]

where you get just swirled around by this stuff, you know. All these concerns for yourself. All these concerns born of delusion. It's pretty hard to study in such a mess. I mean, if it was really easy to study, it really wouldn't be samsara. I mean, if samsara was a really great place to like, you know, real easy to study and you could just sit down there and just see all the problems very clearly and meditate blissfully on all the problems, you know, it's kind of like nirvana. So how are we going to study under the painful situation of samsara? You might think it would be difficult and it seems to be. And actually, lately here and also in some of these workshops I've been doing in the Green Gulch this weekend, I've been pointing out to people how, a little bit about how difficult it is because of, you know, what is it, the beauty contest world, you know, where you're being asked to, you know,

[12:01]

you're being asked to look like you really want everybody else to win and if you can convince everybody else that you really want them to win, you'll win and you really do want to win. So you pretend like you want them to win. We live in a world like that, so it's very hard for us to like, pay attention to what we're doing when we're putting on all this, on this show. So in such a mess, some people in the modern world actually recognize the mess and then they say, well, how could you imagine that a human being could become free of that? Once you start seeing how deluded we are and how selfish we are, then how could such a person, how could such an incredibly, constantly selfish being ever become selfless? Wouldn't that be hard? I mean, some people would think, well, somebody who's a little bit selfish, maybe they could become unselfish. But actually, you know, it's probably just as difficult for somebody who's a little selfish anyway. But there, I don't think, I don't think Shakyamuni Buddha was a little bit selfish.

[13:06]

At the same time, I think Shakyamuni Buddha was, had a lot of compassion, even though he was selfish, and had a lot of desire to become free of being selfish, and to become free of being deluded, and to become free of believing in his independent existence, although he didn't quite know that that was what he should become free of. He did want to become free, he really did. He really didn't know he was miserable. He didn't know, right away, the extent of the first truth, but he had a good sense of it from early age. So again, so this is what I've been talking about, I've been trying to say, we can't skip over the first truth. We can't skip over recognizing some sorrow. It's not going to work to sort of pretend like it's not there. You can't forget the first truth and skip to the next ones. And also, it might be hard for us to study the first truth, if we don't really think that the third one's true.

[14:08]

If you don't really think it's possible to become free of a little bit of suffering, or a little bit of selfishness, how could you dare to open up your heart to a lot of suffering and a lot of selfishness? But if you think that it's actually true that you could become free, and that part of becoming free is to practice the path, and part of the path is called right view, and part of right view is to admit samsara is big time. And there is this cyclic existence. And yet, without getting into some heavy metaphysical attribution to samsara, we have to study it as though it were kind of like a really true. We have to take it seriously. We can't sort of say, well, I'm not really going round and round here. Otherwise, again, we'll back off of it, and then backing off of it means we back off the other thing. We back off the first fold of the Eightfold Path,

[15:10]

if we fight this. So I'm going to move into that now, pretty soon. And I'm not going to tell you that this is true. Rather, I'm going to tell you that you sort of need to think it's true. And reason with you about how you have to think that the first truth is true, and you have to think that the fourth truth is true in order to make the third truth true. But I'm not going to actually try to force this down your throat. I'm going to try to, like, I don't know what, establish the truth of the Four Noble Truths, somehow. Meantime, I still keep, bringing up the main mode of study in all this, is being upright. That's the most trustworthy mode of study of these Four Truths. So our Zen, our traditional Zen practice, our ceremony, as a matter of fact,

[16:10]

in all of its non-formal manifestations, is, we keep coming back to that as the way to study these Four Truths. But, but I'm proposing that we need to understand them. And it's hard. so I think I'm going to start, like, what do you call it, I'm not going to necessarily do this selfishness thing too much more, but I'm going to start getting into, like, rebirth and karma now. Which, probably, you know, I don't know exactly how to do that. I haven't really, I haven't really gone that deeply with people about that before, but I'm going to try to do that now, for a while. And this has not been really done at Zen Center, if you noticed. But I think it's time, maybe.

[17:11]

Well, it is time, but whether or not people will be able to work with it enthusiastically, I don't know. Probably you will. One time you did it at Green Gulch on a Sunday, people went nuts during the first meeting. Yeah, they did. And again, one thing I want to say about this thing about, you know, some people today, you know, some may be Buddhist and some may be non-Buddhist, I think, feel that proposing the idea of a human being realizing selflessness, okay, proposing that possibility of selflessness, and I think a lot of people, like when I was a kid, I saw, maybe I told you, I saw when I was 13 years old that basically selflessness would be my happiness. I basically saw, hey, if I would just like, you know, be nice to people and, you know,

[18:13]

think about their welfare, I would be happy. I thought when I was 13 years old, that occurred to me like on some Sunday afternoon, but then I went to school on Monday and I opened the door to the school room and there was these people in there, those students, and I forgot. And I kept forgetting all the way through high school. I would remember a couple of times, but basically I couldn't remember when I saw those faces and then I started to do my face to their face kind of thing, right? My pimples meet your pimples. I won't see your pimples if you don't see my pimples. I'll like your pimples if you like my pimples. Anyway, I forgot that that was really the point. So, I think some people feel like if you get into like thinking about realizing a state where you're selfless, what that may just lead you into is massive self-deception. And, you know, I don't know. And many people who come to Buddhism want to realize selflessness. So, the idea that they're selfish is like

[19:14]

practically inaccessible. They go around thinking they're nice people. And I'm not saying they're nice people. I just say they're walking around thinking they're nice people. Not all nice people walk around thinking they're nice people, but some do. And some nice people, if you say, you know, you're not very nice, they say, oh, really? But some other people, if you say you're not very nice, as a matter of fact, you are thoroughly selfish, this is really hard for them to hear, and they will punish you for saying that. They will shut you up if they can. Anyway, I'm not suggesting you go around for like thinking all day long, I'm selfish, I'm selfish, you know. Like some person said to me, I know I'm selfish, but I don't feel like going around thinking all day, oh, I'm so selfish, oh, I'm so selfish. I'm not suggesting that. I'm not suggesting you go around telling yourself how selfish you are and thinking of how selfish you are. I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting,

[20:15]

what am I suggesting? Tell me what I'm suggesting, please. Huh? Be upright. Yeah, I'm suggesting being upright. And I propose to you that if you're upright, your selfishness will pop right up there. You don't have to think of it. As a matter of fact, thinking of it means you sort of like go, oh, I'm selfish, I'm selfish, I'm selfish, ignore all this selfishness. You know? You look at the selfishness which you're happy to look at. Oh, I do this selfish thing, oh, I do that selfish thing. If you just sit upright, you're going to see more thoroughly how selfish you are. It's going to be more horrifying than anything you could think of if you went around thinking, I'm selfish, I'm selfish, I'm selfish. As a matter of fact, if you think, I'm selfish, I'm selfish, I'm selfish, you will soon realize, this is ridiculous, this is a sick thing, this is unhealthy, I'm going to stop. So you just do it for about three or four minutes. Anyway. So you say, I'm not going to go around all day doing it, you know, thinking that. Yeah, you won't. Nobody will. People are able to go around all day thinking, they're selfish, they're selfish, they're selfish. That people can do. All day long. They can do that. They're depressed, but they can do it.

[21:16]

They're not happy, it doesn't make them happy, but they can do it. But nobody can think about themselves that way. It's intolerable. I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting you just be upright and you'll get a good dose of seeing how selfish you are. And then, when you see it, what do you do when you see the selfishness? How do you handle it? What? Be upright. Be upright. Then if you're upright, when you see that you do a selfish thing or have a selfish thought, what does it mean to be upright when you see that? Don't lean into it? Don't lean away from it? What? Don't pull away from it? Admit it? Anything else? Admit it. What? Admit it. Stay with it. Admit it? Don't so much stay with it, just admit it. It'll change. Admit it, let it change. Admit it. Don't activate, don't cough at it. No coughing or sighing with it. Don't get excited about it, don't get depressed about it, don't calm yourself down about it, don't jazz yourself up.

[22:19]

Just be upright with it. In other words, be friendly with it. Just kind of like, hi. That's enough. Hi. Hi. How do you do? See you later. Friendly, gentle, and ready to let it go and get the next one. Which might, you don't know what it could be, okay? So that's basically how to work with this, any of this stuff that comes up. That's what I'm proposing anyway. Have you tried it? Does it work? Pretty well? How does it work? Unfortunately, it works pretty well. What do you mean unfortunately? What's unfortunate about it? It's unpleasant. It's unpleasant? What's unpleasant? To see yourself in a way that you don't want to see yourself. Yeah. And again, as I proposed, we are, we are built that when we look at this stuff, to feel bad about seeing it, and then feeling bad about seeing it, maybe we won't look at it anymore. Okay?

[23:22]

That's our habit. So feeling bad about it doesn't mean you shouldn't be looking at it and also doesn't mean you should be looking at it. It just means you feel bad about looking at it. That's all. Would you look at that? But that is part of what makes it hard to look at. Is that we're not, our natural habitual way of being does not encourage us to look at this unless you hear that it's possible to become free of this whole thing if you would just be upright with this material. And that's what I'm telling you. And if you have any question about it, I'll show you, you know, the Buddha said the same thing and the Buddha did the same thing. And you know what I told you when he was out in the forest, you know, what did he do when he was out in the forest and these terrible things came? What did he do? If he was walking, what did he do? He just kept walking. If he was sitting and these terrible visions came to him, what did he do? He kept sitting. If he was lying down, what did he do? If he was standing, what did he do? Yeah. That's the way he handled, that's what he did when accosted by these dreadful things, these dreadful revelations,

[24:23]

outside and inside. Same practice. And then he, then he wasn't, then he was relaxed. And then he got to like, actually enjoy seeing this stuff and became free of it. And then his eyes got clear and he saw the Four Noble Truths. So if you can face this crap and be upright with it, your vision clears, the outflows end, the craving drops away, you see the Four Truths and you become free. Simple and extremely difficult and what I'm gonna, what I'm predicting I'm gonna do now is to try to bring up some stuff and talk about how to, without leaning into it, how to understand that it's true. In other words, work on right view quite a bit here for a while. Okay? So. I don't know,

[25:26]

maybe that's enough for tonight. Unless you want, unless you have something, I mean, I'm happy to discuss with you if you want to, but maybe it's enough material to be offered. Anything, any questions or comments you have? I was gonna say that for me, it feels like it's like a fish trying to look at the water that it's swimming in or something like that. It's so, it's like waking up you know, halfway remembering a dream and then turning over and forgetting it. It's just such a slippery quality. Uh-huh. You know, to try and remember it and still miss doing it. Good point. So, that's part of the, I don't know what the word is, that's part of the inconceivable wonder-working function

[26:29]

of upright sitting is that it, you can see a different way. So, for example, Dogen talks about if you don't understand that the mountains are walking, you don't understand your own walking. Now, ordinarily, people are shocked by the idea that mountains are walking because in the usual world, the world we normally flow in, mountains are not walking, the river is walking. But the fish don't think the river is flowing. They think it's a stable world. If you tell them that the river is moving, it's like telling us that the mountains are walking. If you practice upright sitting with your own walking, you'll understand your own walking. When you understand your own walking, you understand the mountains are walking and you understand that for the fish, the river is not flowing. You'll also understand

[27:31]

what the Buddha understands, that this world is non-stop misery. You'll understand that. It's the same. The vision that this world is misery, in other words, understanding the First Noble Truth, understanding that, is the same as understanding mountains are walking. Same thing. It's like it's different from our usual way. You hear that it's suffering. But the difference between the usual way you understand that the world is suffering and the actual understanding that truth the way that the Buddha understands, it's like the difference between understanding the mountains as not walking and the mountains walking. But it's very slippery and it's not something that's not slippery. What's not slippery is our established world. That's not slippery. That's well established. You can depend on that. Like I said, you know, before, if you want to see delusion,

[28:34]

just look at what you think is true. And then the delusion will come, come forth. You know, in other words, the First Noble Truth will come forth. Namely, you think the permanence, you think the impermanence is permanent, and so on. And then you think So you don't go around thinking, oh, this is impermanent, this is impermanent, this is impermanent. No, you go around thinking this is permanent, this is permanent. In other words, you look at what you do think is permanent, you face that, and then you'll see that you do think that this is permanent. And then you can see that it's not. But you don't go around

[29:41]

thinking, you don't go around telling yourself that it's permanent no more than you go around telling yourself it's not permanent, it's not permanent. You take credit for the fact that you think it's permanent. And that you're anxious about that. And you're also anxious if it's not like that. In other words, what you think is true goes with being anxious. Right? But facing your anxiety doesn't go with being anxious. That's something new. That's something which you would do

[30:42]

maybe by accident, maybe by innovation, maybe by a creative whim, but you would definitely do that eventually if you heard the Buddhist teaching, which is you know, admit that you think things are permanent. Face that. In other words, yeah, admit it. In other words, look at it. This is not, this is not part of the system of samsara. This is the path. To realizing nirvana. Facing these facts. So you're doing this pretty well. Right? Most of you people are working on this already, aren't you? Well, yeah, there seems to be a choice. What? Yeah, there seems to be a choice of whether you do this a little tiny bit, quite a bit, really a lot, or wholeheartedly, you know, 100%.

[31:43]

So I feel like, I feel this practice is really going well because I feel like you folks, we are doing, you know, we're doing some. We're doing a little of this. That's great. And now I'm just trying to like, you know, turn it all the way up to, you know, 100%. And get you to look at the whole, the whole obnoxious situation. And get you to look at it as though, like, as though some of these things which are a little difficult to believe as like, to be taken as true, to be taken as true, should be taken as true. I mean like, as true as you take their opposite. As true as you take, as true as you take permanence, to take impermanence, that truly. Now that would be, that would be what I would hope that we could do. That would be like understanding, that would be like really understanding this first truth. Yes? I guess I, when I said we have in the program, what I meant was it seems as though once you kind of like open your valve, the water starts

[32:45]

flowing through. at least in my experience it's, it's, you can't really turn it off again. So all of this, um. Well maybe you're enlightened. No, I'm not enlightened. Once, once you're enlightened, you can't, you can't, okay. But once, once you get, once you get disoriented, you know, and you actually see from the other side, and actually, once you see the first truth, you know, you never forget it. So in that sense you can't turn back. But until you see the first truth clearly, you can keep flipping back and doing, and being half-hearted. So there is a, there is a kind of thing of where, you know, where one, where one becomes irreversible in the path. Before that, you can mess around for a lot, a lot many years and be half-hearted and then be pretty whole-hearted and then be half-hearted and... Well, that's what I mean by...

[33:46]

They have just been doing it for a long time. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's what I mean by, you know, that's where the choice seems to be in terms of whole-heartedness. Of course, there is no such thing as an unwhole-hearted person, but there is such a thing as a whole-hearted person who is being half-hearted about it and suffering because of that. So, just before I left Tassajara, I felt like I hit my stride. I felt like I was finally like, you know, I kind of felt like I was the scheduler, I was the scheduler, finally. It was no longer me trying to get with the schedule. I finally felt like it was just like a perfect match and I don't know if I'm, I think I might have slipped a little bit, so I may have to get back, it may take me a while to get into it again, but I really felt, I really came together

[34:48]

with it and I wasn't lagging behind or getting ahead or whatever. So, I look forward to getting reattuned to the situation. I'm probably a little off now and continue to tell you the Four Noble Truths with you for the rest of the practice period in the context of this ceremony. The ceremony will go from now until Buddha's enlightenment and then at the day after Buddha's enlightenment we enter our seven-day session and then we have a day off and then we rake leaves and stuff and make, did you make any requests? Dietary requests? And then we'll make whatever's on the piece of paper and then we'll eat it and she'll have a ceremony or reverse, I have to show you a ceremony,

[35:48]

we'll eat it and then we'll have a precept ceremony for a few people and then we'll end the practice period. But during that whole time I'd like to study these these teachings which the Buddha said he needed to understand and that before he understood them he wasn't enlightened and after he understood them and did what was required based on that understanding he was enlightened. Anything else tonight? Yes? I just wanted to say that tomorrow morning early we're going to all go up to the Zen Do and sit there and sincerely hope that you'll take that as encouragement. Don't worry, I will. I always do. When I see people

[36:53]

sitting in Zen Do it's really encouraging, isn't it strange? It's strange I guess some people don't. Don't feel encouraged when they see a bunch of people going to a Zen Do. Are you encouraged when you see that? No, but when you see other people going are you encouraged? When you come in and seeing them sitting there does that encourage you? Yes. You're not like most people, are you? Okay, is that it then for tonight?

[37:40]

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