The title for this retreat was Sudden Enlightenment and Transforming the Mind of Delusion. And we could use that same title now, if you'd like. Or we could use a different title, like Sudden Enlightenment and Gradual Transformation, or Sudden Enlightenment and Gradual Practice. We might speak of two paths of meditation.

[01:39]

or two paths of practice. One path of meditation is meditation prior or before or without sudden enlightenment. And the other kind of meditation or the other path of meditation is the path of meditation after or together with sudden enlightenment. Whether enlightenment has happened or not, there still is practice. But the practice is different if enlightenment is present with it.

[03:06]

And so sometimes maybe we are practicing meditation and perhaps there doesn't seem to be enlightenment, or put it the other way, there seems to be the mind of delusion. And the mind of delusion is... I would just propose to you that the mind of delusion is innate. We're born with it. Little babies have it. The mind of delusion is a mind which constructs appearances which are false. A mind which constructs the appearance of objects that seem to exist on their own, independently.

[04:15]

A mind which, we have an innate mind which constructs things appearing in a false way, but also then it implies that the constructing mind is also separate and existing independent of those independently existing objects of knowledge. So we naturally are born with the mind, or rather when we live in the world where we're born, when we live in the world where there's birth and death, and all of us probably have some experience of the world where there's birth and death. In that world, I could say, our mind constructs things in a certain way. Or another way to say it is, when the mind constructs things in a certain way, we live in the world of birth and death. When our mind constructs its own objects,

[05:20]

as existing independently and substantially, the mind also feels independent and substantially existing. And in that construction project, there's birth and death. If the mind was not constructing things in this false way, and did not misunderstand what life was, then it lives in a world where there is no birth and death, where there's life, but not the kind of life that is born and dies. In this retreat, I I think I'll probably talk about, go back and forth between some stories of sudden enlightenment and stories of gradual practice or gradual transformation, back and forth.

[06:28]

I have a number of stories of sudden enlightenment and a number of stories of gradual transformation of the mind of delusion. Also during this retreat I would like to stop talking occasionally and have us all sit quietly and walk quietly. Now, the practice of sitting quietly is a practice that is done before Sun Enlightenment and after. The awakened ones sit quietly, sit still, and in that quietness and stillness, wake up. And after they awaken, they practice sitting quietly and still and wake up again.

[07:34]

And after that awakening, they sit quiet and still. When we're quiet and still, we can hear the teachings of enlightenment. When we hear the teachings of enlightenment, hearing these teachings transforms our deluded mind to open And one of the things that the teachings which are received with a calm mind do is they help us open to our delusion. Opening to our delusion and calmly contemplating it, we can become free of our delusion. Some people here have gone to retreats where the whole retreat, which was one day, two days, three days, several months, the whole retreat was focusing on trying to develop a calm mind.

[09:00]

This weekend I don't want to spend the whole retreat doing that, but I would like you to... I would actually like you to Practice being calm this weekend and for the rest of your life. To practice being in the present right now and being calm and relaxed right now. I would like you to be calm and relaxed because I think that would help you be happy. But in addition to that, or along with that, if you can be calm and relaxed, you can hear teachings which will transform your mind

[10:14]

into awakening. And then you'll not just be happy and relaxed and calm, you will be able to understand reality and help all living beings with that understanding. Looking around the room, almost everybody is sitting. Two people are walking, but it looks like they're going to sit down too. And in sitting meditation we often recommend paying attention

[11:24]

being attentive to posture. And be attentive to your, particularly your spine, your torso, from bottom to top, and attempt to sit upright. Some people say attempt to make your back as straight as possible That's one way to put it. Another way to put it is attempt to have your spine be upright and awake and relaxed. I sometimes say it's like an erect swoon, that you're erect, you're upright like a mountain and relaxed. and also in walking, to walk in an upright posture that's relaxed.

[12:30]

So I would encourage you throughout this weekend, throughout the day, to try to be mindful of your posture in sitting, in standing, and in walking. throughout the day, even while having lunch, try to work on your awareness and mindfulness of your posture to make your posture such that you can be upright and relaxed. And in the formal sitting, I'd also recommend that you try this mudra, this hand mudra, where in this school we place the left hand on top of the right hand and join the thumb tips lightly together, forming a lovely oval. And place this mudra below your navel.

[13:37]

if you can find a comfortable position below your navel. This is called sometimes the Cosmic Meditation Mudra or Cosmic Meditation Circle. And also during meditation to Have your eyes open, but have your eyes relaxed. The relaxed eyes will help your body relax. And place the tongue on the roof of your mouth. And let your whole body be relaxed. while you're making this effort to be mindful of the posture. Eyes open and relaxed.

[14:55]

Forehead relaxed. Face relaxed. Neck relaxed. Whole spine relaxed and upright. And in this mindfulness of the upright, relaxed body, you may notice lightly that you're breathing. Again, notice you're breathing in a relaxed way. Calm and relaxed in the present moment.

[17:32]

Letting go of worries about past and future. The feeling here is to practice this way not just to be calm and relaxed, not just to be relaxed and calm, but this practice is devoted to the welfare of all beings. And learning to be calm and relaxed is to help all the beings who are not calm and relaxed, to help them learn to give up their worries of past and future.

[19:14]

This is an art to learn so you can help other people, other beings learn this art, to learn and maintain it, and help it be alive in the world to help others. I may have said, so that you can help others, but another way to say it is that by learning this way of being relaxed and calm, the relaxed and calm helps others.

[22:01]

practice is transmitted. Now I intend to ring a bell. And when you hear the bell, I invite you to try to stand up in a relaxed and calm way.

[23:12]

I now invite you to sit down, to calmly sit down in your relaxed breath. The first teaching, and are you able to hear me well?

[26:28]

The first teaching that is usually attributed to the historical Buddha is called the Sermon of Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dharma, the wheel of the truth, the wheel of the teaching. And in that scripture it is said that the Buddha was living in a place called Deer Park near Varanasi, the Nares, in India. and he was addressing a group of five monks, five yogis. These five people were men, and they were highly practiced in being relaxed and calm.

[27:46]

They had developed calm and clear states of mind and body. And the newly awakened Buddha, now giving her first speech, knew these monks, these yogis, from prior to his great awakening, or prior, I should say, to the great awakening. he knew that they were very calm and awake, calm and relaxed. And he said to them that there are two extremes that most people are involved with. One is the devotion or addiction to indulgence and sense pleasure.

[28:56]

The other is addiction to self-mortification. These are generally the two extremes. which people are addicted to. And he said that avoiding both these extremes, the Buddha has realized a middle path which gives vision and knowledge and leads to calm, insight, enlightenment, nirvana. which means peace and freedom. And then he said, well, what is the middle way? And then he said, it's the Noble Eightfold Path. So he found this middle way, he awoke to this middle way, he practiced for a long time and awoke to this middle way, and then he teaches this middle way.

[30:11]

which he practices after enlightenment. But the people he was talking to, whose minds were calm, had not yet awoken. So he taught them a practice which he practiced after awakening and also it's a practice which he's transmitting to them before their awakening. He's teaching them the path of awakening before they're awake. And they are very calm and can hear this teaching and receive it, the Eightfold Path. And the first part of the Eightfold Path is Right View. So, and he tells them this Eightfold Path of right view, right action, excuse me, right view, right intention, right action, right speech, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness.

[31:39]

right meditation. He teaches this to them and by the time he finishes teaching them, and the teaching can be written out on two sides of paper, one of them understands, one of them develops, actually realizes right view and has sudden awakening. as this one person was listening to this teaching in a calm state, which he was walking around in all the time, as he listened to it, at some point in listening to it, he understood it, or rather, understanding arose in him. And he developed, and right view arose in him, the first part of the path. And when the first part of the path arises, The other parts can follow. Buddha was teaching him such that he overcame the deluded mind, allowed for undiluted mind to arise.

[32:55]

The deluded mind, which was calm, could hear the teaching, could hear this teaching, this dharma, and it awoke from this dream that things in the world are existing separate from us, that our experience of other living beings, that our experience of pain and pleasure, that our experience of colors and sounds are out there, separate from us. That's our ordinary, deluded mind. That what we're looking at is separate from us. That what we're smelling and touching and tasting is separate from us. That we're here and those phenomena that we're experiencing are out there. He awoke from that dream and realized that there's no separation between ourselves and our experience.

[34:00]

that we have no self separate from our experience, that our self and our experience are intimate, that our self and what we're experiencing, what our self experiences, are completely intimate. He awoke to that, this one of the five. And That was a big event in the history of the Buddha's teaching. His first student who heard him, or heard the teaching which he realized, heard the truth which he realized. And it happened in, I don't know how long it took him to say these few words, and it doesn't say exactly when during the talk this monk woke up. But when he woke up,

[35:06]

that he woke up suddenly. But he had a long practice leading up to this awakening, a long cultivation, making it possible for him to hear. And after he heard, then he had a period of meditation where he meditated on what was coming up for him, in light of what he awoke to. So that is the path of meditation after his awakening. And in his case, this one particular person's case, within less than a month, maybe even within a week, having the Buddha right there with him, he actually finished the next, he finished the path of meditation after awakening. And all the other before others, also during about a month or so, also had sudden awakening and then entered a path of meditation after the awakening, so that by the end of a month or two or three, all five had done their practice prior to awakening, had sudden awakening, and then did the practice of meditation after awakening and completed it to the extent

[36:34]

that they became completely free of their deluded mind. So the Buddha was successful in liberating these five people, these five humans, from their suffering. And they were successful in practicing the teaching in becoming free of their personal suffering. They had insight, calm, knowledge, peace and freedom. However, and this is a big however, they were not Buddhas. The Buddha was there with them and there's another path which they were not taught at that time, which is a path of becoming a Buddha, where not only do you become personally liberated, but actually, I said not only do you, but actually you set aside your personal liberation after awakening and continue the practice of meditation after awakening until

[37:52]

and for the sake of all other living beings. And that is another path, which is a path that the Buddha walks, in which the bodhisattvas, the enlightening beings who wish to become Buddhas, they do not actually grasp and hold the nirvana. They experience it. They experience personal liberation, but they let go of it. and re-enter the mind of delusion together with all beings in order to make a Buddha. But in this first story I'm telling you, it's a story of people who realized personal liberation, and that's a very happy thing for them and for the world. But I just mention that it's not the path to Buddhahood to stop there. So part of the path prior to and after awakening is to develop calm.

[39:08]

Part of what leads to the moment of realizing the truth is to practice calm. But on the path of becoming a Buddha, there's six practices which are practiced before and after sudden awakening. And those six practices are giving, generosity, ethical discipline, patience, enthusiasm, and concentration. The calming practice which I introduce first is the fifth on the list, and the sixth is wisdom. But strictly speaking, practicing wisdom before awakening, the wisdom is not yet realized.

[40:16]

The wisdom is realized at the time of awakening. But still, before awakening we are taught that there is a practice of wisdom. We hear that teaching. We let the teaching that there is wisdom come into our deluded minds. And if we have awakened, we let the teaching that there's wisdom come into our deluded minds. So there are deluded minds arising before and after sudden awakening. The transformation of the deluded mind leads up to sudden awakening and continues after sudden awakening.

[41:19]

The story I just told you about these five yogis who had deluded minds, who had not yet awakened, but who had cultivated and worked with their deluded minds so that they could be very calm and concentrated. They had deluded minds at that time that they woke up, that they woke up to reality. However, after they woke up to reality, deluded consciousnesses continued to arise. In their case, not very long, but for many others, for a very long time after awakening, deluded minds continued to arise. What's the difference? The difference is that after awakening, the awakening, the understanding of the truth includes the disbelief in delusions, the disbelief in false appearances.

[42:40]

Before this awakening, when deluded states of mind arise, we've heard, long before this awakening occurs, many of us have heard the teachings, you've heard it today, that the mind appears, arises in such a way, the mind appears in such a way that the mind appears to be separate from itself. The mind is generated in such a way that it appears to itself as though it were not itself. The mind appears as subject and object. The objects of mind are mental constructions. That's the way it appears. And you're hearing that teaching, and that teaching may be actually transforming your mind right now as you hear it. So you hear the teaching and maybe you maybe you believe it.

[43:53]

And that receiving and accepting this teaching transforms your deluded mind. But there comes a time when you actually really let go of believing this appearance, this false appearance. And then after that, when these deluded states arise, they are actually cured at that moment. They're actually antidoted. They're actually dropped. And the support of the current false appearances, the support of it is an unconscious mind.

[45:00]

And the unconscious mind which supports current deluded mind, current production of false appearances, that unconscious mind is the results of all our past action, of all of our past action based on believing that others were not us. And that unconscious mind is called sometimes the storehouse consciousness or the foundation consciousness. And that foundation consciousness, for everybody, is constantly being transformed because it is the effects of all of our action. So it has been transformed through our whole life. All the things we've done have transformed it. And it has been transformed in such a way that it supports an active consciousness which

[46:12]

thought that it might be good to come to this retreat. Somehow the thought arose in many of our minds to come to this retreat. And that active consciousness, which we're aware of, which, you know, I have an active consciousness which imagines that many of you had an active consciousness of thinking of coming to this retreat quite a few times. you know, innumerable times actually you thought of coming to this retreat, probably as you came to this retreat. That's what I think. And my thought that you think this way is supported by an unconscious mind, which is a result of all my past thinking. All my past thinking in terms of subject and object being separate has made an unconscious which is allowing An active consciousness which thinks of going to a retreat and talking about active consciousness.

[47:21]

An active awareness, conscious awareness that thinks of going someplace to study conscious awareness and learn about where conscious awareness is supported. And if you have a conscious awareness that doesn't think of going to a retreat, which often people do have, and actually a conscious awareness which thinks, I do not want to study conscious awareness. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to transform my unconscious so that it will support a conscious awareness that wants to study. Because that's possible too, which most of us know something about. But now we're here and somebody's talking about being aware of conscious awareness because conscious awareness is constantly transforming our unconscious, because our unconscious is the storehouse of all of our past conscious awareness. And by paying attention to conscious awareness,

[48:29]

the support of conscious awareness gets transformed to support more awareness of conscious awareness which transforms the unconscious support more and gets the unconscious awareness ready to support a conscious awareness which will receive the teaching and in a moment, not believe false appearances, completely abandon the belief of false appearances. However, the conscious, the unconscious, which has been supporting all of our deluded minds is still, hasn't been completely transformed, and it will support the arising of more deluded minds. And when deluded minds arise after awakening, they're just like deluded minds before, until we look at them with this awakening.

[49:34]

And when we do, we understand what they are. And we don't believe this false appearance. We look at someone and we think, we see they look like they're separate, but I completely don't believe it anymore. I know that I'm looking at myself. And when I apply what I've understood to that, then there is the same relief and freedom that there was at the moment of sudden awakening. This is part of the explanation of a phenomenon which people have noticed in various meditation traditions. For example, in the Buddhist meditation tradition we've seen examples of people who had either self-proclaimed or their teacher proclaimed that they had some awakening.

[50:43]

And we have seen them still have deluded states of mind. And some of them have confessed that they still have deluded states of mind. And some of us are surprised by that and think that maybe the awakening was not authentic. But what I'm saying to you now would say there can be authentic awakening and then that can be followed by deluded states of mind. And sometimes what happens is there is authentic awakening, however the person does not, the awakened being does not receive instruction about how to apply that awakening to deluded states of mind. And then we have a tragedy. Because there is awakening, which is wonderful, and I would say auspicious, in other words conducive to success in awakening, but unless they've received the teaching that more deluded states will come and that they should apply the teachings to those deluded states, they sometimes think that deluded states are not deluded states because they and other people think they're awake.

[52:03]

And it's true that they are, but the deluded states are still deluded states. And they're just like the deluded states before, it's just that now we should be able to know that they are, and I fortunately do not believe them anymore. Or if I do believe them, that's another deluded state. And this could be a very long path of meditation where we're still dealing with deluded states. And the word long practice or long path is another deluded state. Or if it's short, that's another deluded state. prior to awakening, long and short, no longer encourage or discourage us.

[53:05]

What encourages us is being kind to these calculations and not getting involved in them, because we know, we understand them now. And this process, before and after this awakening, transform our unconscious transform the effects, the results, of our long history of delusion. That unconscious mind becomes transformed into what? Into the true body of a Buddha or a Buddha. So sudden awakening is wonderful, and again I'll tell you more stories about it, but the Buddha is actually not just a sudden awakening, but the sudden awakening applied to the mind of delusion.

[54:11]

The sudden awakening applied to the mind of birth and death makes a Buddha. Now, I intend to ... I have an active consciousness which I'm noticing, and in this active consciousness I see an intention to ring a bell twice.

[55:13]

And when you hear two bells, that's an invitation to do upright, relaxed walking meditation. And I also see an intention to tell you that after a little while I'll ring the bell some more, which is an invitation for you to come back and sit down. And I feel quite relaxed about all this. I'm not trying to control you. There's a silverfish running around inside this bowl. He gets very excited. Very excited. Then you strike it, he just starts going like... I'm going to take the silverfish after a walking meditation.

[56:15]

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