Here we have the time for this morning, a three-way discussion about the spiritual past, which will also include the group. And I'd like to welcome our guests. You already know Brett Anderson, who's been a few days with us. We have worked at the San Francisco Zen Center and also the Zen Mountain Center in the Sahara, the Sahara Hot Springs. I just found out that I hope I can... be in this screen that he is in the process of writing a book, which will be on Sashin. And our two remaining guests are Francis Bourne and Roger Walsh, both of whom have been real pioneers in the field of transversal psychology, have been really in transversal psychology from the very beginning. They have written, as you can see, a number of books. Some of them they co-authored, particularly Beyond Ego, which is a compendium of papers, articles on transpersonal dimensions in psychology.

[01:15]

They've also both been interested in The Course of Miracles and the applications for psychology and psychotherapy. And they've written two books, related to The Course of Miracles. The first one is called Accept This Gift. And the last one is called A Gift of Peace. And then we have some books that they have written separately. Frances has been interested particularly in intuition. Her book is called Awakening Intuition. And her last book It's called The Inward Art, which was inspired by Ken Wilder's work. And then we have some books by Roger. There's a major book on meditation, classic and contemporary perspectives, which he wrote together with Dean Shapiro.

[02:17]

And another book with Dean Shapiro is called Beyond Health and Normality, Explorations of Exceptional Psychological Well-Being. One that I think is particularly important is his book, Staying Alive, which is the application of trans-personal psychology to the global crisis and to politics and the development of trans-personal politics. It's a real pleasure to have you all. Thank you. Thank you. Well, when we talked last night about how we might coordinate this morning's discussion, we thought we would ask Reb to lead off since he knows what you've been covering during the week. And so perhaps you'd like to start with just a little bit of what we talked about last night, Reb.

[03:20]

I thought a... a topic which I think is relevant to all spiritual traditions might be a way for us to center ourselves and that topic is the topic of ascending and descending or going beyond and coming back This is really a major aspect of Buddhism and I think is found in other traditions but maybe not as much emphasis in some other religions on the coming back part. But in Mahayana Buddhism the descending of the spiritual being back into the world is

[04:27]

equally or maybe even more strongly emphasized than leaving sometimes. I haven't been talking too much about nothing this week. I didn't think I have. Maybe you do. But nothing or emptiness is the key of this whole process. or it's the driving suchness of the whole process. It's what makes possible the realization of the emptiness of all phenomenon, all experience, is what makes possible the ascension of the enlightening being. And the ascension is done through various practices like generosity, ethical conduct,

[05:31]

patience, courageous effort, concentration, and insight. These are the processes or the practices which lead to the realization of emptiness and freedom from the pains of existence. But this emptiness, this fact that all phenomena lack inherent existence, is what makes possible complete freedom. In other words, the very fact that all conditioned phenomena, or rather the very fact of phenomena being conditioned, is exactly what makes them completely free. Because things don't exist independently of other things, because they're conditioned by other things, they have no inherent existence of their own.

[06:39]

Because they have no inherent existence of their own, they're empty. And because of that, they're completely unlimited. So this realization of emptiness is the ascending mode. But also because of emptiness, the bodhisattva is perfectly willing, the enlightening being is perfectly willing to come back into the world. Because they see the world as a place where everything is empty, and that's their playground. But again, this is a paradoxical thing, because once the bodhisattva realizes that all beings lack inherent existence, Why would they want or even care to come back and save these beings who don't even exist? And there's two processes here.

[07:50]

One in relationship to the to the enlightening being's attitude towards what's called nirvana, or the place where the realization of extinction or non-existence. And one is that the bodhisattva attains a kind of nirvana which is called, I won't say the Sanskrit word, but anyway, in English it can be translated as not clinging nirvana, or not abiding nirvana. In other words, when they go into transcendence, they don't stay there. They don't cling to it. And as I said in the story about the dog and Buddha nature, once they enter into this non-clinging nirvana, they willingly and knowingly go back into, descend down into the world again.

[08:50]

And the reason why they do this is because of emptiness itself. Emptiness is driving them to transcendence and emptiness is bringing them back into the world. So we say, you know, a bodhisattva, an enlightening being, does not hang around where there's Buddha and also passes quickly by where there's not Buddha so if there's not Buddha they transcend that situation and if there is Buddha they transcend that situation they keep going beyond and the practices they do are called paramitas or sometimes translated as perfections, but the literal meaning is the going beyond.

[10:01]

Each of these practices is a way to go beyond themselves. So the bodhisattvas do spiritual practices to transcend the world, but then they do spiritual practices to transcend spiritual practice. So the descent is the transcendence of spiritual practice. Bodhisattvas don't get stuck in spiritual practice. They go beyond spiritual practice, back into ordinary life, where they have absolutely no advantage over anybody else. The fact that they have realized the emptiness of all existence, they throw that away, go completely beyond it, forget all about it, and are completely a normal person, except that they are knowingly and willingly a normal person. do it with their whole heart. They come into the world with their total energy, just like everybody else does.

[11:03]

But they know it and they will it. So this process, again, all religions have this, but what I've been emphasizing this week is the coming back part. And there's something here, there's something I want to say about beauty and emptiness. And that is that I think also in many traditions, like Keats, truth is beauty and beauty is truth. And I think doesn't Rilke say beauty is the beginning of a terror that we can just barely stand? Didn't he say that? Something like that. And this whole process is very closely related to each of us being ourselves.

[12:09]

And what I would define as beauty in this case is congruence in our being. That we come into congruence and contact with our inner splendor. that we really become one with what we really are and that that's beauty. And that beauty itself is not a pretty thing because it's a beauty that is terrible because that beauty also being exactly what we are also brings forth what we aren't or not beauty. and therefore death, and not us. So when beauty becomes very clear and sharp, it naturally outlines not beauty.

[13:15]

And when our life settles on itself, it naturally outlines and implicates not our life. And that beauty is also sending this process around and around. And referring back to the thing I mentioned about this thing I saw about Carl Rogers working with a patient, that what I saw in his reflective behavior was a way for the patient to come into congruence with herself. She didn't improve her life situation at all.

[14:19]

She just came more and more into congruence with what she was and became more and more beautiful without changing a thing. And at the culmination of this process of becoming beautiful through being in congruence with what you actually are in a given moment, there is also something frightening about that. So sometimes we hesitate to enter into this beauty because of what it implies. But anyway, that's the guiding principle that I'm trying to point to. These are just some words, not to refer to it, but to do it. That's a kind of, anyway.

[15:32]

There are several things that I would like to pick up on from what you've said, and one is that I really appreciate so much the Mahayana perspective on that cyclical nature of our striving, or our hopes and fears. And it occurs to me that there's a parallel to that when we talk about evolution and involution. and that it appears as involution in Sri Aurobindo's teaching, and then when he talks about the descent of spirit into matter, or the transformation of matter through the infusion of spirit. And the language is different, because the language in Buddhism is the language of emptiness, and so that When we talk about spirit, it's as though we're talking about some thing, or it's easy to conceptualize it as some thing rather than no thing.

[16:37]

However, I think that there's a convergence in speaking of absolute spirit as no thing. So in order not to get caught up too much in the language, I think that I'd like to... focus in rather on the process that we go through as we see ourselves, or the experience that we have as we see ourselves either ascending or descending. And that in some way that cycle that Reb was describing seems to take place in little ways along the way. It's not as though it's some great thing that is out of reach for us. It's something that really exists in our experience in a very basic way. It seems to me that any of us who have had an experience of self-transcendence, whatever form that may take, have in some way tasted that. We know that we can attain moments of self-transcendence, of illumination, and yet we return to our ordinary normal waking state.

[17:51]

It's that connection that seems to be what we want to solidify when we do spiritual practice. And one of the traps along the way, of course, is becoming attached to the experience of transcendence or clinging to that experience. As you were saying, we need to remember that that too is a passing thing and We have to be willing to let go of it in order to move back into our ordinary daily life. I remember meeting Claire Myers Owens when she was 83, and it was a wonderful sense of someone who had had a very profound spiritual awakening. She said, you probably remember this, it was in Boston at the Transpersonal Conference, and she stood up there and she said, well, you know, I had this tremendous spiritual awakening when I was in my 50s.

[18:51]

She said, but like all such experiences, and she had written several books after that, she said, like all such experiences, it was temporary. It only lasted 12 years. At the end of that 12 years, she took up meditation and became a practitioner of Zen. She actually said, then I had to resort to artificial means, so I took up Zen. And really at 83, he was an inspiration because he was one of the most sparkling and alive people. But I think it's true for all of us, whether you've had some experience of transcendence in a spontaneous way or as a result of spiritual practice or as a result of psychedelics or whatever the doorway or the opening may have been, if you've had an experience of really letting go of your ordinary sense of self, then you know that there's another way, another possible way of being in the world.

[19:54]

You've had a glimpse of big mind or consciousness that transcends our individual separateness. And I think that as we do practice, that we get sometimes caught up in thinking that that's all there is, that most spiritual disciplines emphasize the way up. and not the return. Most of the practices or the stages along the way are different stages of practice along the way. And I think I'd like to hope that we can talk something about that, particularly in psychological terms, which is my way of looking at it. There basically, you might say, there's the beginning, the intermediate, and the advanced stages of practice in all different forms of spiritual discipline. So I think that the emphasis tends to be on attaining something in our culture particularly because we tend to be very goal-oriented and we don't see the point in doing something unless we're going to get some results.

[21:02]

We tend to be very practical. It's like, what are they going to do for me? So much of the meditation research in this culture has been on the physiological effects of meditation. It's as though we're just scratching the surface in terms of looking at what meditation in fact can do for you if you look at it from a point of view of psychological change. And the emphasis of course in Zen is that it doesn't do anything for you, that it's not a path of attainment. And it is true that the very striving, the very The harder you try, the more you get in your own way, and the less you are able to allow the dropping of that separate self-sense or that identity, which is essentially what we need to transcend. As long as I think that there's somebody there doing something to get something that, in effect, is solidifying the problem. Keeping in mind the larger view, which Reb has outlined, I think is really important whenever we look at any of the different paths and whenever we look at choosing a path or choosing a practice, to be aware of how it fits into the larger view or the larger perspective.

[22:22]

And I think for many of us who have had glimpses or who have had some taste of a transcendental experience, We all know about the return. We all know how easy it is to forget what that experience meant to us. We do know that those experiences fade and the task seems to be again to bring it back in such a way that it really does transform our lives. It's that process of integration that seems to be the challenge of the return. And it's that process of integrating those experiences that I find is one of the important things that we can do as a part of psychotherapy, for example. Many times we see psychotherapy as being only problem-oriented, only solving problems. But in my view, it's also growth-oriented, that you can learn a lot about how the mind works and about yourself and about the possibilities for transcendence and the possibilities for return and being in the world out of the kind of self-exploration and self-awareness that can develop through at least through a transpersonal orientation in psychotherapy.

[23:37]

So I think that there are problems along the way. There are certainly universal kinds of pitfalls that we encounter both on ascending and on descending. And I hope we can get into examining some of those a little more closely as we go along. But I just wanted to, in general, say that I feel we all can relate to both the ascent and the descent out of our own experience and use it as a way of recognizing where we are and also what we have yet to do. I've always liked the phrase that Houston Smith uses to describe the process of integration and he says that challenge is to change those flashes of illumination into an abiding light and it's that abiding light of consciousness that allowing what is always perhaps in the background of our awareness to come into the foreground so that the experiences don't

[24:45]

disappear or fade or we don't totally divorce our daily life from those experiences of transcendence so that we truly integrate them in such a way that that our perception in the world is changed so that we really see things in a way that holds them in a different perspective whether it's remembering the inherent emptiness or whether it's being aware of the presence of spirit doesn't As I see it from a psychological perspective, it doesn't matter what the language is that you use, except that we need to be aware that the language we use does tend to shape our perceptions and influence how we see things. But nevertheless, the process is a universal one, and the experience is a universal experience. So I think that that's the main thing that I wanted to point to this morning is say that the different traditions offer different ways of talking about a universal process and a universal experience.

[25:50]

Perhaps Roger would like to have a go at it? It seems that the There have been two extremes mentioned. And one, Reb was talking of the Bodhisattva, which from one perspective is all beings of goodwill, or perhaps one way of looking at it, there are only two types of people, those who know their Bodhisattvas and those who don't yet know their Bodhisattvas. But from one perspective, the Bodhisattva is perhaps the greatest ideal the human mind has conceived. what greater ideal could there be than to live not just one's lifetime, but unlimited lifetimes for the welfare and liberation of all sentient beings. So that's one extreme, the extraordinary ideal that has been presented by Mahayana Buddhism.

[26:58]

And Francis has presented the complement of that, the point that all of us go through this cycle in various ways and perhaps repeatedly, perhaps in a day, reaching out to some new level of being and then bring it back into our lives to contribute in various ways. So here we have two extremes of magnitude which actually overlap and may be the same. And it points, I think, perhaps to the universality of this theme, an archetypal theme of the great journey of awakening and return. It's one form of the hero's journey. Those of you who have read Joseph Campbell's wonderful book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, will know well the description of this archetypal voyage which all of us are heirs to.

[28:04]

That voyage comprises a number of stages which again can be seen both on the vast universal cosmic scale of the Bodhisattva or within our own day-to-day lives. The stages being the growing up in a culture which is by nature a samsaric culture enmeshed in the illusions that we share in our culture. Being faced with a challenge, so-called call to adventure, in which we face some existential confrontation which calls into question the presuppositions and beliefs on which our lives have been unquestioningly based until this time. And out of that, at that point of confrontation, then there are two choices. The easy choice is to repress the discomfort or the technically cognitive dissonance that is aroused by recognition of the inadequacies and distortions of the cultural illusions and to repress that dissonance from awareness and to go back into the cultural games, playing them with whatever amount of unconsciousness is necessary to try to reap

[29:34]

the benefits from the social milieu. And all of us do that repeatedly. On the other hand, there is also the option of acknowledging the limitations of what we thought was true about ourselves and about our culture and about our world. And then being willing to confront as deeply as we can the implications of those shortcomings. And it's in the confrontation of those illusions and the recognitions of the state of enmeshment in which we have lived that comes the motivation to go on in this great journey. And this would be another way of saying what Reb was saying, the call to congruence. to be congruent in oneself and one's recognition of what is true.

[30:34]

So out of this pull then comes the call to adventure and the quest, and then the subsequent stages, which many of you know, the seeking for a teacher or path or tradition, then a stage of practice or training in some tradition, the stage of discipline, this is, then the stage of temptation, With discipline, with practice come various capacities, power, various temptations of one sort or another. They're archetypally described in the story of the Buddha's final enlightenment, or Christ's temptation in the wilderness, or Carlos Castaneda's traps of power and clarity. coming to some realization, coming to some, finally, the culmination of the work, the path of ascent, some insight, some recognition. And from that, then having plumbed one's own depths for wisdom, then the final stage of return to bring that wisdom back to the world.

[31:53]

then to find a way to communicate that wisdom to the world in some form which can be acceptable to a world which fundamentally doesn't want to hear it. Because it is at that stage you are threatening to the belief systems of the culture and the people in the world. And it's absolutely crucial to remember that when you don't share a belief system, you weaken it. And since everyone's belief system centers on what they think they are, then the weakening, the non-sharing of and weakening of that belief system is perceived as a fundamental threat to one's being. Hence what we have traditionally done with the great awakened ones is crucify or burn or poison them or attack in various ways. These people are literally perceived as threats to our survival to everything that we hold most dear, because we hold our illusions very dear.

[32:57]

So the task then is how to come back into the world and live in the world in a way which combines a couple of things, one which enables one to live in the world and be indistinguishable from it, both for one's own safety and well-being, and also because of the going beyond the dualism of needing to react against the conventions. So this is not an anti-conventional stage, but a trans-conventional stage, which includes and incorporates the conventions of the culture as appropriate, but also recognizes their limitations and distortions and goes beyond them. In psychological terms, this is called detribalization. It's the... stepping back from the limiting and distorting beliefs of the culture so one no longer now looks through them but hence now can look at them and therefore can work on them to transform them.

[34:00]

So those are two of the tasks and the third task of course is to communicate this wisdom. Here one is effectively becoming a communicator of what has been called the perennial wisdom at the core of the great religious traditions of all throughout human history. And as such, there's a wonderful, one becomes what Carl Jung called a Gnostic intermediary, which is a wonderful concept, which refers to a person who has imbibed the wisdom so deeply into themselves that they can now communicate it directly from their own experience. And they can... And the task is to communicate that wisdom into the linguistic and cultural systems of that culture. And the task is threefold. First, it requires a becoming wise, a literal embodying of the wisdom of the tradition. Secondly, a learning of the language and belief systems and concepts of the culture to which one wishes to communicate.

[35:07]

And thirdly, the capacity to translate the wisdom into that language and concept system so as to create a kind of aha experience. And all the time living, perhaps, as an ordinary person, as Reb said, no distinction. It's what Carlos Castaneda called living the life of controlled folly. That is perhaps doing all the, from the outside being totally indistinguishable, but living with one's folly under control to some extent. This of course is the ideal and there's always a danger in presenting ideals in that they then become expectations and attachments and things we measure ourselves up against but if we use ideals skillfully as perhaps guides and arrows pointing us rather than as things to beat ourselves over the head with if we don't measure up or to push ourselves then perhaps it can serve a useful function yeah okay well I yeah that completes that cycle next cycle I'll try going so sorry

[36:24]

Perhaps I would like to comment on one thing that you said about the problems with the ideals and the idealization holding the ideal image. That it seems to me that the challenge for each of us is to really connect with that part of ourselves that is already wise. And in a sense I feel that that's accessible to all of us. That's partly what I was talking about in the intuition book is how do we tap into that deeper part of us that knows and that the more we're willing to acknowledge that wisdom that is within each one of us and the more we're willing to risk following that and speaking from there the more accessible it becomes and the more available it becomes and one of the things that the course in miracles says that i like is that There's no difference between teaching and learning. And that we teach what we want to learn and that we learn what we teach, so we might as well begin to teach what we want to learn.

[37:38]

And it's a different view from saying, well, you first have to be perfect and then you can teach. The fact is that we can, in my experience, we learn a lot from sharing our experiences and that we learn from each other's experience. greatest teachers have been my clients, my students, the people that I've had an opportunity to work with closely because I feel that they've enriched my life so much by the experiences that they have shared with me, that I truly have learned a lot from other people's experiences as well as from my own experience and that ultimately that is a source of wisdom in our lives. If we pay attention, if we are willing to pay attention, I think that's the key and I think that that's where Spiritual practice can be so complementary to our ordinary experience in daily life. It's in a sense a training of attention, that when we do some type of meditation that enhances concentration or perhaps an emptying practice, whatever it is that essentially trains the mind, we can pay attention in a different way.

[38:51]

And in my own experience as a therapist, I found that There's a quality of attention that we bring to our experience which allows healing to take place. And that has been called by different names in different psychotherapeutic practices. Freud talked about free-floating attention. Rogers talks about unconditional positive regard. Let's see, there's, and Fritz Perls talked about awareness per se is curative. That training of awareness, that giving ourselves that kind of unconditional positive regard that we want to extend to others, this has an interesting effect because it brings about healing. Healing in the sense, I think of healing as making whole, to become whole. To be healed is to become, to be whole. And that this happens, we grow into our wholeness as we learn to pay attention to our experience in a new way.

[39:56]

And so this is where I feel that spiritual work can be so important along with personal work in the terms that we usually think about it in psychotherapy. I don't see a split at all. I think it's very unfortunate that many traditional spiritual teachers take a rather dim view of psychology and many conventional psychologists take a dim view of spirituality and most of them, they tend to think the other is irrelevant or perhaps an escape or a distraction. And I think on the contrary, I feel that they're both important and that they're both valuable and that our wholeness calls for paying attention to both sides of that dichotomy. So I assume that with all of you who are you've already acknowledged that in your life because it seems to me that this is the one place where the two are really integrated in terms of a lot of that work that is done on a personal level also opens up to the spiritual dimension.

[41:03]

You just used the term dim view and I thought in a way, that's good because whenever you're working on something, in a sense, you take a dim view of everything else. And so I think maybe we could take a positive attitude towards our dim view. So if someone's being a spiritual teacher and they have a dim view of psychological work, then they should say, okay, now I should take care of my dim view, and vice versa. Dim view is good in a way. There's a light view of what you're aware of now, and then there's a dim view of what you're not working with, that kind of thing. And a Buddhist teacher should not be caught by that. I mean, they should know, okay, I'm working on this, so I have a light view here, but there's everything else I'm not doing. So of course I have a dim view of that. But dim view is not a negative thing.

[42:15]

I like your interpretation of the term. How often dim views are taken as in whitened views? I wanted to weave another little thread through this theme, and that is that, as I said, this whole process of the life of the awakened being is based on the fact that nothing has an inherent existence of its own. But the whole story of this emptiness has sort of two aspects. The one aspect is that emptiness is not non-existence, but non-existence is a definition of emptiness, is one of the definitions of it. So one aspect of emptiness is non-existence, namely, nothing really has an inherent existence. But the other aspect of of emptiness is the existence of that which doesn't exist.

[43:16]

That's the whole concept of emptiness, is non-existence and the existence of that which doesn't exist. That there is non-existence that really is so, and there really is the existence of something that doesn't exist. or there is the existence, for example, of illusion. Illusion doesn't exist, but there is the production of illusion. That really is true. It's really true that things that aren't true are produced. Okay? So in Buddhist history, their first was the study of, in some sense, the philosophy and psychology of experience, where people actually by coming in contact and aware of their experience, they saw that there was no, that's all there was and any self of the person was actually just some kind of thing in this field of experience.

[44:25]

It didn't stand out in addition to that. It was just one of the elements of the thing and you could never really get a hold of this self of the person. The next phase of Buddhism was to say that all the elements of the field out of which we dream up a self, each of those elements also has no inherent existence. And the next phase was to say, there is the existence of the non-existence of these things. And the going up, in terms of ascending, the going up and attaining side is the side of the non-existence of all things. And again, non-existence does not mean they don't exist. It means that they're free of any category of existence. It means they don't exist, they don't not exist, they don't both exist and not exist, and they neither exist nor not exist. That's what we mean by not existing. Okay? Completely free of any idea you have about things. Actually, everything's completely free of anything you can do with it.

[45:30]

Totally ungraspable. Everything is extremely profound. So... the realization of the profound aspect is the going up. You go up, you ascend, and you realize how profound everything is, so profound that you can never grasp it. It's like I don't know what was funny about that. The cutting down, the return, to the world, the not clinging to nirvana, the return to the world which you also don't cling to, but the plunging back in, totally thoroughly plunging back into conventional reality, that's due to the existence of that which doesn't exist. So the non-existence drives you up and the existence of non-existence drives you down.

[46:34]

because nonexistence exists through illusion. That's the way it exists. So in order to play the whole story of emptiness, you have to go all the way around. And in Buddhist history, they first realized the emptiness of the person, and then they realized that the elements which the person really was, they were empty. And then the next stage was to complete that process. the return. And in terms of schools of Buddhism, just for your information, the Madhyamaka school, the school of emptiness, is going up, and the Yogacara school is coming back down. It's totally new words to you, but I just thought I'd get that on tape. I'd like to ask also for a little clarification of the different I think it's the ascending stages, and there's the nirmanakaya and the shambhogakaya and the dharmakaya and then the svabhavikakaya.

[47:43]

And I have a certain psychological way of making those distinctions, but I would really appreciate it if you could comment on what they mean from your perspective. So the Buddha, the enlightened being, has these three bodies, so to speak, or four. Can I talk about just three today? Sure. If I talk about the fourth one, I think everyone will go to sleep because it's too interesting. The Dharmakaya I've been talking about all week actually, it's the body, the real aspect of what Buddha is, is that Buddha is the

[49:01]

The non-duality of the existence of the non-existent, in other words, karmic life, straight out without any leverage on it, without any advantage, just straight on karmic life as karmic life, is non-dual with non-karmic life. That's the real body of Buddha. fundamental affliction of ignorance itself is the immutable knowledge of the Buddhas. That's the Dharmakaya. And that's the basic thing which, when it interacts with the living being, produces experiences. Some of the experiences are felt by the individual consciousness and those experiences of this dharmakaya in relationship, this reality body in relationship to an individual life, the experiences they have at that time are called the sambhogakaya, or the bliss body, or the reward body.

[50:13]

In other words, it's the reward of letting the real aspect of Buddha interface with your life and then see, watch what happens. And what happens is called It's the reward of your meditation practice on what you experience. Or it's bliss. If someone was here yesterday, oh, she's still here, she said, when I was talking, she was reminded of earlier stage in her path when she had what she called simple-minded bliss. In other words, to have such a simple view or have such a huge view, to have such a no view or have such an immense view, that you can actually see, That your experience right now is the reward of your meditation. That this right now is bliss. This is bliss right now. This is what bliss is. And it's just your preconceptions that bliss should be some other way that makes it not bliss.

[51:20]

But if you work at the meditation called this is the only place bliss can be, and you work at that meditation, your reward will be bliss. You actually will agree, it's bliss. In other words, if you just drop your preconceptions, then you realize that your experience now is the interaction of this real aspect of Buddha, this Dharmakaya, with your life, which is this Sambhogakaya, the bliss body. And when you can let yourself join into that bliss body, you can also see other people as glorious, too. You can see other people with auras around them and light coming out of their forehead and things like that. And the third body is the nirmanakaya, which means that this dharmakaya, it's very similar to the other ones. When the dharmakaya comes up and interacts with the human life, it produces innumerable transformations.

[52:23]

Nirvana means illusions or transformations. And it means that it interacts with life and produces all these transformations, all these illusions. So it looks like these people here. Or it looks like trees or plants or animals or cockroaches or rats. It goes into these forms so that everything, of course, can be a teacher. Everything is actually showing this non-duality of the karmically created and the uncreated. Everything is showing that perfectly. Even inanimate things. The fact that a cockroach can only practice meditation to a certain extent is, you know, the way things really are. It's the way that the reality body or that the non-duality of that karma and non-karma interacts with that life.

[53:33]

That's the way it's working there. And inanimate things are also the result of karmic activity, according to Buddhism. The entire world is due to karmic consciousness. What makes the world? Karma. And karma is produced by living being. Did you want to say something? I have a question about the all of life and the karma in terms of how it relates to our concepts of time. Because it seems to me that in order to have... that karma only has meaning within linear view of time. that if so that in another way perhaps of opening the doorway to the recognition of illusion it would be to recognize that the past and the future only exist in our minds as memory or fantasy and that in fact the only time there is this right now so that all the karma also also exists only in the mind that imagines it that extends into the past and future that's right

[54:50]

That's a way of... Okay. So karma, the definition of karma or action, is the overall pattern or the, I would sometimes say, the watershed of an individual moment of consciousness. If you look at a moment of consciousness, and in a moment of consciousness, there's no movement. It's a static event. And if you look at it, it has some tendency in it, or which you can see or not see. If you can see it, then you say it's going that way or that way. And it basically goes in wholesome directions, unwholesome directions, or directions you can't discern. Anyway, there's some pattern in an individual experience. That pattern, that direction, is the action. That's what karma is. That's the definition of karma, is that shape of an individual static moment. But that indication or that direction never happens. It never really happens. It just looks like it's going in a certain direction and that whole thing goes away and you get a new experience which has another direction which also never happens and that goes away.

[55:58]

Karma is definitely dependent on the idea of a future and a past. But those ideas exist in that present moment and they are what make possible the view or the illusory shape that looks like it's going someplace. But it never goes there. However, that pattern can tend to be reproduced because there's an effect of making that pattern so that in another moment a similar pattern can occur. And then in another moment you can look back and say, you can create another image which is a story about that that moment occurred and that moment occurred. And that way you make history. But there is no such thing as time. Time is constructed in the present. So this whole karmic thing is an illusion. That's why the world of karma, the world of action, is non-dual with the world of no action and no time, where there's no movement. So in reality there's no movement, no karma, no time.

[57:03]

But there is the illusion of movement in the present. Those two worlds are clearly the same thing. One is when you see what the other one is. But seeing what the other one is, you can't separate that from the other one. So they're non-dual. You can't have one without the other. So you use the impure to articulate the pure. But the impure and the pure, of course, are non-dual. So the nirmanakaya is just simply the transformations of the Buddha body so that going up, is the Dharmakaya, and then you could say right there at the top is the Sambhogakaya, and then coming back down into the world is the Nirmanakaya, is the various illusory transformations of this same process. So actually sometimes they say going up and attaining, coming down and transforming.

[58:08]

And the Buddha, sometimes they say the Buddha comes down and transforms beings, or converts beings. normal way to talk about it. But another way to talk about it is that the coming down of the Buddha is the transformation of the beings. But there's no Buddha before the beings are transformed. If Buddha came down and the people weren't transformed yet, that wouldn't be Buddha yet. Buddha is actually the transformation of the beings. You see? You're all transformation bodies of Buddha. But actually you're not transformation bodies of Buddha until either you are transformed or someone else is transformed. When other beings are transformed then you're the transformation body of Buddha. So Shakyamuni Buddha actually wasn't Buddha until he started teaching, according to Shakyamuni Buddha. His enlightenment wasn't real until he transformed beings. It wasn't really what it is.

[59:13]

that the transformation of beings is part and parcel of the whole awakening. However, there is the idea of a solitary enlightened being. In other words, some beings can solitarily all by themselves be enlightened and not transform beings, but these beings do not have the awakening of the Buddha. They have all knowledge, but it's not the knowledge of the Buddha. The knowledge of the Buddha is realized through the transformation of being. Which is similar to what I was saying the other night about there's no teachers prior to the student learning. The teacher and the student, the teacher becomes alive when the student learns. but the aha is simultaneous. How about that?

[60:23]

I'd love to raise some questions too, but I think it might take us into a little bit esoteric so I wonder if maybe we should open it up. One of the universals I think that has to be addressed in every tradition is the role of fear and desire and that these are motivators in psychological terms and that we aspire to what we desire. In other words, we have all the higher desires that tend to get activated on spiritual practice, but they're still desires. And we also have fears. And it seems to me that one of the problems that we see in the beginning stages of practice and the intermediate stages maybe all the way along is the fear of the loss of contact with that awareness or that transcendent

[61:38]

bliss, that the dark night of the soul, for example, is a process that happens in every tradition in one way or another. It's not just Christian, just Buddhist, but there are periods of depression, say, that come along or periods of disillusionment, disappointment. I think the term disillusionment is useful because I think many times people come to an interest in the spiritual path out of disappointment in life. And as Bernard Shaw said, I think there are two ways of arriving at disappointment in life. One is by not getting what you want, and the other is by getting it. So that this can be, in a sense, it's disappointment. And I think it was Chogyam Trungpa that said, disappointment is a great teacher, that we really learn through our disillusionments. When we see through an illusion, then we wake up, or we let go of a dream. Many times in our ordinary experience, particularly I see in people that I'm working with who say are going through a divorce or the breakup of a relationship, the sadness and the pain and the difficulty of that process of letting go is not so much letting go of the reality, which was generally pretty awful, but it's letting go of the dream.

[62:58]

It's letting go of the dreams that were shared, the dream of the happy family, the dream of All those wonderful romantic illusions which have crashed, that's very hard to let go of. That's where the real attachment is. It's not to the dailiness of interaction, because by that time, if people are getting a divorce, the dailiness has usually become unbearable in one way or another. So it's that letting go of the dream, that disappointment, that disillusionment that is part of the motivation for continuing the work, or at least initiating the work. But then once you get going on doing the work, at first there may be a honeymoon phase of, oh, I'm doing spiritual practice now and I'm special and I'm feeling better because I'm more calm and I can see through things and so forth, so that we get problems of inflation. The term spiritual specialness, I think, is a useful one because we see a lot of that around, particularly in California, I guess. But it's not unique to any tradition, I don't think.

[64:03]

I think you see it everywhere. I think you have a term, the stink of enlightenment or the smell of zen or something like that. This is one of the pitfalls that we get to. But along with that then comes the fear of the loss, that as soon as you have attained to something that you think is special, then along with that comes the fear of loss. And so fear and desire seem to go with us all the way along. Perhaps even, certainly again, perhaps on the descent, I don't know, perhaps desire for integration or desire for contributing to the well-being of the, for the welfare of the world or something. Just say something about fear and desire and their role in this process. Well...

[65:27]

I'm in the process of writing a paper which is about Buddhists, many Buddhists, and Wittgenstein and Shakespeare. And the connection between them, there are many connections, but the connection in particular that I want to point to is that I feel Shakespeare and Wittgenstein and many practitioners of Zen experienced unusually profound disillusionment. And they experienced an unusually profound disillusionment and yet they did not succumb to nihilism and therefore bitterness, resentment, not maybe fear, but bitterness and resentment.

[66:34]

They overcame the nihilism by entering the heart of the nihilism, and they were able to stay in there until they overcame it. And there were speakers, the Zen people are speakers, and Wittgenstein was a speaker too, and Shakespeare was a speaker too. and also they wrote. So we can see how they sort of worked up through this disappointment to produce. What we see is they're working with this disillusionment and at the same time not becoming bitter about it. And that process, when we look at that, this is a tremendous encouragement for us to look at our disillusionment without saying, you know, well, it doesn't matter. nothing matters because there isn't anything. There's no truths, so who cares, you know? And whoever said there was anyway, let's go get them, and so on.

[67:41]

But really facing that there are no truths because truths are also empty. And so that's very close to me right now, that kind of thinking or that issue. See, Wittgenstein, in terms of what I was saying yesterday, Wittgenstein realized that language never talks about anything but itself, and stories are just about stories. And that he realized very deeply, and he was tremendously shocked by that, and he barely survived. And for ten years he just taught school in the mountains to overcome the unusual disillusionment that he experienced about what language and human beings are. And yet he came back from that to write more, and his writing is a testimony to his transcendence of that nihilism. There's no nihilism left at the end.

[68:42]

He realizes that all these stories are baseless, but he also knows, and he also says, after he takes your stories away, he says, but go ahead now and make a story. You need to make a story. You have to make a story as a human being. You can't live without them. But after you make them, then again, don't stop there. Look at them and find out again that they're baseless. And when you hit the bottom, then make another one. The challenge is what kind of a story are you going to create in your life? What kind of a story? And then also after you make that story, then don't just let it sit there. Then dive down into it again and go through the bottom. And then naturally let another one come. Don't try to starve yourself from the other side of reality. Don't block the existence of the non-existent. Let the next story come. But don't just let it sit there, then realize, oh, this story's empty too. And I think if you look at Shakespeare's writing, he goes round and round like that, and so does Wittgenstein.

[69:43]

Wittgenstein, especially in the philosophical investigations, he just scans back and forth over the landscape of stories and just sort of empties them, and then comes back and finds a new set of them. Back and forth across stories. emptying them and finding new ones. They keep cropping up all the time because there is the constant production of that which doesn't exist. There is a constant production of stories. And just keep going back over them and letting them empty and let them come back. And there's a lot of the stories are about desire. And Shakespeare, of course, gives us the two masks that Truth wears of comedy and tragedy, and they're resolved. Someone pointed this out to me just the other day, that his later comedies particularly all resolved in love and forgiveness, that this is the resolution of the, or perhaps that's the key to not getting caught in despair with the ultimate disillusionment.

[70:52]

Yeah. Come back. I keep being reminded of Carlos Castaneda's controlled folly, because it seems such a nice description of that. Seeking a path with heart, yet realizing that all powers lead nowhere. At the end of one of our daily chants, we say, practice secretly, working within, as though a fool, like an idiot. You didn't like that, huh? I'm not talking about anything. A lot of times when you're reading Zen material and you don't get it, remember the guy's talking to himself. That could be true of any of our books, by the way.

[71:58]

It's certainly true of most psychological theories. They really reflect the psychologist's personality. And if that person is talking to themselves, guess who else is talking to themselves? Another example of this is one of the main scriptures that is chanted in Zen monasteries, but also throughout Mahayana Buddhism, is something called the Heart Sutra. It's actually called the heart of wisdom that has gone beyond wisdom. The essence of a wisdom which has even gone beyond wisdom, or it's the essence of spiritual practices going beyond spiritual practices, okay? And it starts off by saying, this Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, which is the bodhisattva of infinite compassion.

[72:59]

Maybe you've seen. It's the most common, probably, Buddhist deity throughout China and Japan and Korea and so on. Not so much in Southeast Asia. But anyway, it's the being of infinite compassion. And sometimes she or he, because it can be a he or a she, depending on the statue. The point is it can transform into any form that would help beings. Sometimes it's pictured as having a thousand arms. and eleven heads. And there's one story about its eleven-headedness. There's a girl, a young Chinese girl, his father was sick, and he needed the, the herbologist at once said he had, in order to cure himself, he had to have human flesh. So she cut off her arm for her father. And then her head blew up, exploded, and had eleven heads. Anyway, this being of infinite compassion, it starts out, the Heart Sutra says, that this being was contemplating deeply the wisdom which goes beyond wisdom and realized that, you know, all the five aggregates of existence are empty of inherent existence.

[74:11]

And then it goes on to say all this stuff, no eyes, no ears. But the point is, again, this enlightening being did not get bitter about this. And her compassion or his compassion is simultaneous with this realization of emptiness, without bitterness. I think that in some small degree the experience of transcendence that we may taste from time to time can give us some insight into that sense of how much unnecessary suffering there is in the world, because a lot of times we tend to think that suffering is, well, inherent in a sense in our state of separateness or our experience of identifying with the body and so forth, but that in fact we create additional suffering by our fears and desires.

[75:19]

Particularly I would say that And I don't know if this is in Buddhism so much, but in the Christian tradition, there's the cultivation of love as the antidote to fear, that if to the extent that we are able to love ourselves or each other, that that allows us to let go of fear. That is, it's a means for refocusing attention in such a way that we become aware of our natural state of beingness as love, that we really truly want to give and receive love, that that's our deepest desire, our heart's desire in some way. And we're afraid to do that. Because as many of you undoubtedly know, we sometimes have fear of intense emotions and we have fear of expressing anger. But the deepest fear seems to be of expressing, really expressing our love.

[76:21]

And that that, in order to come more fully into that experience of love, we usually have to find some way of dealing with fear. And this is a lot of what we do in psychotherapy, is deal with fears. You find a safe place in which you can tell the truth about your experience, and that allows you to let go of some of the fear that you may have of being in the world as who you are, as the loving being that you would like to be. So I think that that's something that is an important quality to be aware of in terms of your own process, because you can do spiritual practice in a loving way, or you can do it in a striving way, or in a punitive way. There are many different modes of doing spiritual practice as there are different modes of relating. And so that seems, I just wanted to bring that up as one of the universals, because I think that although love is talked about in different terminology, it nevertheless is a universal experience that comes into anybody's awareness by virtue of being born, I suppose.

[77:35]

It's also the one point of real departure among traditions in that you mentioned the Christian tradition where the The path is the path of love, and love supposedly cultivated sufficiently will bring grace and release. And yet in the Buddhist tradition, love and or compassion is supposedly insufficient by themselves. Well, I think compassion is a little different from love. There's a little different flavor there. Do you have any? Why is compassion insufficient? Well, my understanding is that it's insufficient for, usually stated to be insufficient for release. Oh. There's two understandings of compassion. One is that compassion is an expression of release. The other one would be that you attempt to practice compassion as a way to work towards release.

[78:40]

But the experience of love and or compassion by themselves, the cultivation of those qualities is usually not described as sufficient for release, wouldn't you? Well, I guess there's two kinds of compassion. One kind of compassion is sentimental compassion. The other kind is just, let's call it compassion. And so compassion of the enlightening being is based on realization of emptiness. But if you mean sentimental compassion, then actually that's not recommended even, it's not just insufficient, it's not even recommended. Right. Except in states of, maybe as an antidote to anger, you can do it. If you're really angry at someone, then it's good to sort of meditate on how it is that what they're doing is not because they're not doing what they want to do, they're just doing what sort of, they're crazy, you know? Reacting. So they're just doing the only thing they can do. And it looks maybe irritating to you or something, but actually they're just acting according to what they think is right, according to what they can see.

[79:47]

And they just don't see. The way they see produces this reaction. That kind of compassion. But this other kind of compassion, kind of what's called sentimental compassion or loving view compassion, actually wears you out. Or it gets hooked up with sacrifice. Sacrifice, yeah, like I'm helping them and all that stuff. And all that's based on self-clinging. You know, I love you. This is not only not sufficient, you've got to be careful of it. It can really wear you out and scare you away from spiritual practice. If you go to people to help them with this point of view, you get burned out fast. And that seems very important because that distinction between compassion, the strengths and the near traps is not something that's clearly made in Western therapy. We don't have that distinction so clearly. Well, I think that sometimes it's the reaction against the sentimental compassion, as you describe it, that psychology is

[80:58]

In other words, for example, one of the issues I wanted to at least mention this morning was the issue of women in spiritual practice. And I think that the sentimental compassion is a trap for many women who have been, in the conventional way, brought up with the expectation that life should be about service. And they do burn out, and it does come sometimes from a place of self-sacrifice and so forth. This is something that in terms of psychological health, it has to be let go of. And therefore, psychology is often viewed from a conventional religious perspective as being self-indulgent or self-serving or selfish. It talks about self-love, that really we learn to love ourselves better. And yet it seems essential to In order to make the shift to outgrow the traps of sentimental compassion, it seems very important to really turn that around so that one is really counting oneself as equal, not better or worse, but as equal to everyone else.

[82:12]

So that there isn't that sense of I love you and I'm going to, and I'm good and I'm serving you while you're going about your business. But that really we're in this together and that it's our... or a relationship that grows out of our both participating fully that is a very different kind of relationship that comes out of that sense of being in it as equals rather than as one up, one down. That's another big subject, though. We could go on for a long time. Particularly, I think it requires a kind of warrior spirit to overcome that sentimental compassion. And women are told that they can't be warriors. It requires a kind of thing like slapping yourself in the face and say, come on, get serious. You're not helping these people. You also don't need to tell yourself that you're doing good things. You're a big girl now. You don't have to go around and pat yourself in the back all the time saying you're a good person. You can actually get on to what you really are rather than sort of trying to be something you think you're supposed to be.

[83:17]

That's it. And that's pretty tough. And women sometimes are told you shouldn't be that tough and strict with yourself. That's the conventional expectation, role expectation, which women seem to have to break out of in order to, both for their own self-actualization as well as for a different kind of... And part of it's very sweet, you know, that they are empathetic with people's desire for them not to be warriors. That's very nice of them to give up their journey for other people. It's part of the people-pleasing part. The other part is, of course, maybe it's based on fear of what would happen to them if they became warriors. Yeah. because people might not like that. Yeah. And in fact, women are like that are pretty scary. Can be. Can be. Even scarier than men in a way, because they not only are that way, which is scary in itself, but they've just broken out of a cultural, you know, vessel. Yes. So, you know, what? Who are you talking about? Who am I talking about? I'm not talking about anything.

[84:18]

I will... I'll fight on that one. It's a universal hour. I'm talking about language. The way language works. No, I think I can't stop my team recording. LAUGHTER Well, it really is time to really talk to each other more fully. I think that my teachers on this issue were a group of students from Yale Divinity School, a group of women who came to a seminar I did on psychotherapy for women. And I was talking about the value of service from a transpersonal perspective, because the whole idea of service in the world is central to the return part of the journey.

[85:18]

And what they pointed out to me was that in traditional churches, this is what has kept women in positions of subservience. And this is not only true in Christianity, it's also true in Buddhism. It's true in all of the world religions, which are all patriarchal systems, and all of the spiritual practices, which are essentially designed by men for men. So that in order to find their way, women have... a more difficult task, you might say, or from the way I see it, I think it's a challenge for women to be more honest with themselves and to find their true way, path of the heart, which is outside of the conventional role expectations that The women will fulfill, you know, taking care of fixing the meals and the church bazaars and things while the priests officiate. So I think that these are challenges that we need to be aware of when we talk about spiritual practice and particularly for women in this culture because many of us have really done a lot of work to get out of some of the more conventional constrictions and expectations and certainly in terms of psychological health it's very important.

[86:32]

I guess I feel like I'm talking about a lot of women that I've had the opportunity to be with as well as my own experience. In Zen, I often experience that women who come to practice are very good at helping other people have the opportunity to be able to take care of themselves. Other women are very helpful often to help other people get some time to be alone with themselves and go down in their own dirt and get to the bottom of that. But they often feel like that they themselves are not allowed to do that same work. They don't take care of themselves as well as they take care of other people. And another thing, you know, this is kind of just throwing these interesting little tidbits in, I know this woman. Her name's Einstein. She's a German woman who has now come to America, and she's a top big business lady.

[87:40]

She's a business consultant for like five big computer companies on the peninsula. And so she was married to another friend of ours, one of my wife's and mine, and then she divorced this guy, and she got together with kind of like a... excuse the expression, what's called some guy, a little bit redneck kind of guy. She comes from this very, you know, sophisticated German family, right? And well-educated and very, very cosmopolitan, sophisticated woman. She's not married, but she's going with this guy now who's kind of a redneck. He's a probation officer. And, you know, she says that he's, if you excuse the expression, a real man. And she goes out to dinner with him, you know, and then he does stuff like he uses his regular knife, you know, to get the butter or something like that. And she says, well, you know, usually use the butter knife.

[88:41]

And he said to her, you know, I'm never going to be able to learn this stuff. You know, I'm not going to be able to be like you. I'm never going to be able to do it. And that story conveyed a lot to me. Number one, that people like that are somewhat attractive sometimes, especially to women. But also that if I was at the dinner table with some sophisticated woman and I didn't follow the ritual and she corrected me, I would not say, look, I'm never going to be able to learn this. I wouldn't say that. I would appreciate it. And what's the difference between me and that guy? The difference is... that I'm a priest. And who designed that etiquette in the first place? That woman was training this man of this etiquette, but men are the ones who usually design the rituals, and women are the ones who teach the generations how to do them.

[89:47]

Women are the civilizers. They generally take the role of being the civilizers. They get the kids to bow at the right places and put the... They're the ones who actually get the thing to happen. The men more play the role of setting up the design. So for me, I don't mind women training me because I'm also a designer. So I don't feel like some other man's design is being plunked on me. To me, it's an education in design. And the women often understand the minute details of the design better than men. So... If a man doesn't feel like he's in on the designing, then he feels like these women are training him. And he feels like, get away, don't suffocate me. But actually, if he would participate in the design more, he would see them as facilitating it. So as long as we don't get stuck in these roles, so you think somebody else's process, somebody else's design is happening to you through women, or that you women don't understand that you're executing a design which you can share in, then I think it's okay.

[90:49]

But anyway, women are... really the civilizers. In Japanese Buddhism, you know, if you go to a temple where there's all women, where there's just nuns, the way that this level of civilization there is much more, it's just, it's so endearing. The way they take care of the physical world at their temples, usually, it's really impressive. But the sad part is that they don't seem to take credit, they don't seem to say, yes, and we also designed this whole thing. Whereas the men, the extreme of the man is, you know, we designed it, we're done now, you take care of the details. But the men should, if they're really going to be fully a person, they have to be aware of both sides, and women also have to take credit for the design. It shouldn't be something that you're just carrying out for the men. And you should either make a new design or realize that this design is actually yours.

[91:53]

And the men also shouldn't either feel like this civilizing thing has had something that women are doing to him and therefore take credit for the design or design their own thing and see if they can get people to help them implement it. That's a question I have about Buddhism in America and that really Zen, of course, brings us a Japanese design and it certainly has a degree of refinement and aesthetic appeal that is quite extraordinary. And yet, on the other hand, my feeling is that in some way that probably it will be adapted to whatever American Buddhism turns out to be. But there is a change process going on. And that's true for the other forms of Buddhism, too.

[92:55]

Theravada Buddhism coming from Southeast Asia or Vajrayana Buddhism from Tibetan. They all have their cultural They all have their cultural trappings. So I think it'll be very interesting to see what emerges as a more indigenous American form of Buddhism. And I suspect that one of the major changes will be the equality of participation of men and women, that that seems to be what's happening, beginning to happen here, which is truly a new form, in a sense, because there are as many women as men interested in practice. But the issues that have to be overcome by women are sometimes different from the issues that have to be overcome by men just because of the cultural conditioning with which we've all grown up in one form or another. I was just about to say that, and I'm glad you said it instead of me, about that this thing of designing the ritual or designing a form is a very...

[94:02]

much on our minds as American Buddhists now. And that's why if I go to your house and you teach me how to use the utensils, I don't mind because you're actually giving me hints about what American Buddhism would be. Because we have to make another form eventually. But I don't want it to be any less beautiful than the form we inherited. I'm going to hold on to the old form until I get another one which is equally beautiful. And again, beautiful means it's so beautiful that it's almost frightening because that beauty implies vast emptiness. And the Japanese have given us some forms which are so simple, so elegant, that you can see the rest of the universe just sort of hovering right at the edge there. You can barely stand it sometimes. It's so beautiful. And it It was the aesthetic dimension that attracted me to Buddhism, actually. You're talking about your task as a Gnostic intermediary in our time.

[95:09]

It's a task which anyone who really goes on the upward part of the path is faced with in our time, because really the demands of our time and our culture are so different from anything that has been based by Buddhism before, that anyone who does any real degree of work in the tradition is going to be faced with how to bring it into the appropriate form of this culture. That's very exciting. We've never had a psychology such as we have now or such philosophic power or, well that's not quite, let me amend that slightly, we have a lot of information and technology and and capacities for operating in the world which have never existed before. And the challenge of how to bring this wisdom into those forms and technologies and capacities so as to optimize the return of the contribution is really an extraordinary, exciting challenge.

[96:14]

Whenever Buddhism exists in a culture, it always interacts with those things that are there. So when Buddhism moved to China, it interacted, it met... Confucianism and Taoism. And it adapted and adopted and changed in relationship to that. And now Buddhism's coming to America, and America's a very psychological society. So Buddhism is going to be affected by, and the psychology is going to be affected by Buddhism. There's going to be some change there according to that, and it's going to be more psychological sophistication is going to have to be, you know, just... imbued to Buddhism and vice versa. I think actually the psychologists are doing better than the Buddhists so far in the sense of psychologists seem to be, a lot of them anyway, seem to be really good at absorbing the teachings of Buddha into their work and the Buddhists, I think, are being a little bit, some of them anyway, a little bit proud still to not incorporate these mundane practices.

[97:23]

There are a lot of psychologists that don't know, that haven't opened the door to Buddhism yet. Maybe it's the same, actually, since there's more psychologists, maybe percentage-wise it's the same, I don't know. And it's interesting, you pointed out that Buddhism has gleaned from every culture that it's gone into, and yet you also pointed briefly at the other side, which Arnold Toynbee, the great historian, pointed out so well that every culture in which Buddhism has taken root has been drastically changed by it. in the process. So we're looking at this dual evolution of Buddhism being changed as it comes into American culture, American culture being changed by Buddhism. That's quite exciting. In terms of this theme of ascent and descent, I also thought I might tie it in with male and female a little bit. One time I was visiting, I was in Austria and visiting a friend there That's where Brother David's from, by the way.

[98:26]

And a close friend of his is also a close friend of mine who's coming from Austria to be head monk at Tasselhara this winter. And I was visiting him in his house in Austria, and he took me for a hike up the mountain one day. It was spring, but there was still lots of snow up there. And in not very long, we were up in the snow, and we were also, and I had never gone really mountain climbing like that before. And they gave me no instruction. but they did come with me. And we had, you know, the actual... They didn't give me real high-tech stuff, but I had the mountain equipment, you know, ropes and picks and stuff. But the higher we got, the more instruction they started to give me. And the instructions, and particularly on one ridge that was going kind of like this, and we were sort of walking up the center of it. As we got higher, my friend said two things to me.

[99:28]

One is he said, don't look around, you'll get dizzy. That's one instruction. And in fact, if I do look around up there, especially if you're a beginner, you look down, you get dizzy. You feel like you're going to fall this way. So that was a good instruction. And the other one he said was, I think he said, stick your pick in and take a step. Stick your pick in and take a step. Don't take a step and then stick your pick in. Does that make sense? Then a step. Those are the two instructions. Those are the main ones. I sort of stuck to those, too. And I got up there, and that was nice. Once I got up there, going down, sort of ran down, though. Which also has to do with what I'm talking about. And Zen, generally, he might say the going up or the going down, Well, I want to bring that in. But anyway, when I got up there, or halfway up anyway, I thought of my wife who was down at the bottom of the mountain.

[100:30]

And what was she doing? She was washing clothes, taking care of my daughter, talking to the wife of the man I was with, arranging for train tickets, making telephone calls, changing money. So the thing I'm kind of emphasizing here is that what came over me as I was climbing up this mountain was that this is boys' activity. Not that women can't do it, but this idea of transcendence or the idea of don't look around, you'll get dizzy. This very narrow thing oriented towards an accomplishment is a kind of like a boy-like adventure. And that really, but that's not enough because If I don't remember this thing down here, my wife doing all this work, somebody's going to get mad. Somebody's going to get angry. So for a man just to do this thing, even if women are supporting him to do that so that he doesn't have to worry about airplane tickets while he's climbing a mountain, if he forgets about that and isn't grateful to that at the same time, some great disharmony starts to occur.

[101:46]

So when men are doing this, they should remember this. But also women should do this, too, and not forget this. And men should actually do this. They should remember it and appreciate it when they're able to do this, but they should also do it. Not just in theory remember it, but actually do it. And women have to do this very narrow thing sometimes, too, I think. Do a practice which is don't look around, you'll get dizzy. I know a lot of women, again, you know, there's... They look around, and they run around trying to help people, and they get dizzy. It's very nice of them, but they get too dizzy. They need to spend part of their life not looking around and putting their stick in and taking a step, and putting their stick in and taking a step. And somebody should help them, maybe their husbands, so they don't have to worry about the kids, which maybe is impossible when the kids are little. Another story is, one time I was doing tea ceremony, Japanese tea ceremony, and I was doing the tea, and my teacher was watching me, and while I was doing it, she said, when you're doing tea, don't think about your girlfriend.

[102:58]

And she was right, but she had the wrong sex. I was thinking not about my girlfriend, but about another teacher who was in the next room talking about me. And I was distracted from my tea by listening to him. And she said, don't listen, you know, really concentrate on what you're doing. Forget about your girlfriend or anything else when you're doing tea. Again, that's kind of like a boy-like narrowness. But then she said, Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, left his family. And then she said, but of course when you have Akachan, you can't, you can't, it's hopeless. In other words, Akachan is a baby, Japanese baby, right? When you're a woman and you have a little baby, at that time, you can't do it. That's one sort of law of nature. At that time, anyway, you cannot forget about your baby. You cannot forget about your baby when you're doing tea. That's sort of part of the story. So one side of us can forget about it.

[104:05]

Another part of us can't forget about it. That's sort of the whole story. And that's, again, the going up is the forgetting about it, being very narrow and transcending and forgetting. The other side is you can't forget about it because, in fact, there is the existence of the non-existent. These babies, which are non-existent, exist. And they really exist, not just sort of theoretically, they really exist and that really affects your life. So these two sides, again, you know, male and female, sides of the path, The male's transcendent, the female's coming down into the... Thoroughly, thoroughly down into it. I'd like to ask a question about being something, being something, coming down into it. It's all you were talking about earlier. Do you have any thoughts, any questions about us or the group that we have a week left and as we share our last week

[105:12]

experiences in the pad and low pad and as we prepare them to go home, to go back to our world. Thoughts about how to integrate what this explodes, how we balance it, ideas about what things should we try to share this with many people, should we hold on to it? I don't know if you can speak to everybody, but in a general way, I've been saying going up and coming down, but also you can reverse it and saying going down and coming up. And Zen actually is a little bit more like going down and coming up. In other words, you start here and you go down to the bottom of existence and then you come back up into the world.

[106:18]

So either way. Anyway, one point is very narrow and cutting through all illusions to the bottom and being completely free of all illusions. The other part is being free from liberation from illusion, coming back up into the world and going beyond liberation. Okay? I want to reverse these two because I feel like the work you're doing here, the breathing work, to me it seems a little bit more like going down. You're going down. And some people are going down like this and coming back up. Other people are going down like this and coming back up. And some people might even go all the way to the bottom and come back up. So some people might get to the actual bottom, which is birth and death itself, which is samsara. Samsara means birth and death. So that's what Francis is saying, too. All of us know something like this. Some of us know this, some of us know this, some of us know this, some of this.

[107:21]

But we all go through these cycles, and the depth varies according to circumstances. And so when you do a breathing session or a meditation session here, you go down, and then the breathing session ends, and you come up. So while you're here, you're actually going through this process, too. And how you, every time you do a breathing session, afterwards you come back into the world. And then you have a sharing thing. You see, this is part of the cycle. And you should willingly either go back up or come back down, whichever way you should willingly do that. And, you know, this is very personal, I'm sorry to say this to you, but I overheard you having a conversation on the telephone. And that's an example of coming back into the world. You should see that as part of it. It really is part of it. I'd like to give you a little focus.

[108:26]

They say that the difference between a fool and a mystic is that a mystic knows who not to talk to. Return to what you were saying about beauty. That non-beauty is applied when it's beauty or inherent in beauty or terror is. And we've seen a lot in the breathing that people have difficult going into beautiful experiences or ecstatic experiences. So you say, well, maybe it's because a lot of us grew up with the feeling that we don't deserve something like that. But one thing I know for myself is that there is a terrific pain when something is so beautiful it hurts. And that may have been behind your question the other night.

[109:30]

What do I do with it? How do I express it when I feel it? And so I'd be curious in all of your reactions to that. A friend of mine just got back from Japan and so he was there during the autumn and Japan is been constructed in order to take advantage of spring and autumn. So he was up in the hills of Kyoto and they put these trees up there that make it very clear to you when it's spring and when it's autumn. They have cherry trees to let you know when it's spring and they have maple trees to let you know it's fall. And when maples, you know the colors that maples can turn? He said, if you If you don't focus your eyes, then they're just, it's nice. But if you focus your eyes, your body starts to hurt. What he means, his body hurt if he actually focuses his eye on the maples. Again, I think that's a good, that Rilke's statement, that beauty is a terror that you can just barely stand.

[110:41]

That beauty is an entry into reality itself. and implies not ugliness exactly, but just, you know, not beauty. And when beauty gets very clear, it's that tension, that dynamic between beauty and everything else at that tome, or that thing being itself, and everything else being itself, that dynamic is just almost, you can barely stand it. That's why it's good to practice some kind of calming meditation so that you can stand beauty. It's fascinating what barriers we have to experiencing the positive. For me, it was astounding to realize that I had at least as many defenses against the positive as I did against negative experiences and pain. We keep ourselves in such a narrow range and won't allow ourselves to push above that. It seems like there are all sorts of components to it. One is Well, in terms of what you just said, experiencing the positive exactly, you know, in focus, what is implied?

[111:54]

The negative. So we don't want to experience the positive very clearly and sharply because then the negative will come into it. So our fear of the negative says, well, you can't have the positive. Yes, there is that sense that if I'm enjoying myself too much, then I'm going to get my comeuppance. I'm going to have to pay for this in some way. It's as though we carry that with us. We're afraid to experience too much joy, too much bliss, because we're afraid that we're going to crash afterwards. It's an interesting assumption, which I've noticed, is that We're afraid of too much joy or too much love because we might have to pay in terms of pain. But we never assume that if we have too much pain, we're going to have to pay in terms of joy. No. There's no limit to the amount of pain we're willing to endure. And we never worry about, oh dear, we're going to have to put up with a lot of ecstasy in this conversation. But we really make that assumption in terms of the positive experience.

[112:58]

And I think there's another way in which there's an element of fear here, which is... a sense of dissolution of ego boundaries, that when we really are overcome or overwhelmed by beauty, light, or such experiences that take us out of ourselves, as Roger said, the ecstasis, standing outside oneself, that there is a sense of loss of self, or perhaps it's like one is such an infinite speck in the midst of all this beauty and light, or there is a dissolution of the sense of self altogether and that that can be very threatening. That can either be ecstatic or scary depending on how you hold it or where you're looking at it from or who and what you think you are. There are a lot of assumptions that go into, I think, creating the emotional response here in terms of whether it's fear or a sense of liberation or ecstasy. For me, one of the One of the interesting and useful ways of working with that has been uncovering some of the beliefs underlying it.

[114:05]

And you mentioned unworthiness, which is certainly there, I don't deserve it. And another one is, I find coming up all the time, if I'm in some very positive state, this can't continue. And another is, it's too much. And literally, there's the fear of being torn apart by it. I find it very useful, as my mantra, it's not too much, it's just enough. And it seems like it's one aspect of Maslow's Jonah complex, the fear of our own potential positivity and greatness. It really is just an extraordinarily powerful force. And then, of course, there are all the distractions, too, which is to have a moment of appreciation of beauty, and then this is my way out of avoidance, is that I remember all the things I'm supposed to be doing, or, well, I have to get on with this or that, or I'm going somewhere. No, there are always a million distractions that come along to take the attention away from that moment of experiencing intensity of it just at that moment.

[115:15]

How are we doing on time? Are there questions or issues that people would like to bring up? One of the things that Roger and I were I was thinking about wanting to ask you for input in terms of what kinds of things you would like to get into in our next two sessions. We have some ideas, but we would like to welcome your input, too. If you have any questions that have come out of our discussion this morning or any particular issues you'd like us to address, please give us your input. Well, I did hear one thing, is how do we make that transition back into the world. That's an important one. I'd just like to share that. I experience extreme beauty. I find myself running to that barrier of keeping myself from the positive experience. And also I find it extremely painful as the maple tree. It only has a certain amount of time before it loses the green color. And I compare that to that death of going up and down and it's so terrifying to me.

[116:22]

Also the cherry tree, depending on what the conditions, how long it will last. And I just, it's, I can't allow myself fully to go right into the beauty of it because I feel like terror at the same time of it being non-existent and existent. That's why you have to work on your, on your state, so to speak. You need to develop composure so that your body can stand that, that pain or that that exquisite tension there. Otherwise you have to look away from it or I don't know what, you know, it's hard to stay there. So by concentrating on something, you open yourself to that experience safely. And it is exquisite. It is exquisite. We're afraid to love because of the fear of loss. And that happens whether it's in terms of the temporary nature of any relationship, really, because even if you're with someone for a lifetime, it's still going to be temporary.

[117:26]

One of you is going to die. And I think that that often can be an obstacle to opening the heart and really entering fully into relationship is the fear of loss and temporary nature of that experience. Because maple leaves, it doesn't draw, I hope, the limit there extends to everything. Right. You can't see the leaf. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. One thing that I'd like to hear about, and I've heard other people mentioning this, is it can be possible to talk a little bit about yourselves and your own experiences as you've come along, but it's kind of like the source of inspiration, I think, for all of us. Inspiration? Or disillusionment. Yeah. Tied in with that too. I'd also be interested in hearing Sunday experiences.

[118:30]

About a retreat. Yeah. Let me suggest maybe some possibility of what you're doing and I know what this group has been doing. In terms of Francis, what... The other area where I think Francis has really special contributions to make is a transfer of psychotherapy, and how transfer of psychotherapy relates to the spiritual path, psychotherapy, and the relationship with those two. In terms of Raja, Raja has a lot of experience with Buddhism and meditation, so somehow the interface of Buddhism and Western psychology and transpersonal psychology would be probably one very interesting area.

[119:35]

The other one, as I mentioned before, would be transpersonal politics. How would political strategy be different if you have a transpersonal perspective? How can the spiritual class be integrated with social responsibility? Does it mean if you're spiritual that you lose interest in the problems in the world? Or are you going to be still interested in the world? And how will your approach differ if you are on the spiritual class where you are a transpersonal standpoint? You have a whole new conference here. Another four weeks. Thank you. This is...

[120:41]

If there is some more time, and you are not going to be able to sit here either, because I'd be very curious if you want to talk about how you came from being a boxer to give the epitome of 10 years. It's just another story. He was hit over the head. Another boxer. You're a really good one. Humiliate our guests before he enters. I just want to mention that Plato was a wrestler.

[121:46]

Well, the longer I practice, the farther back I see the beginning of it. The longer I practice meditation, When I first started practicing meditation, I thought I started right at that point that I started. But then when I practiced this much, I saw that I actually started before I thought I started. So the farther I practice into the future, the farther back I see the origins of the practice. I see the practice going back as much as it goes forward. So you see in your childhood, your Buddha nature coming forward as you practice many years, until you finally, of course, see your your Buddha-nature coming from even previous lives. So where to start, you know, it's hard to say. Where I should say the story starts is, it's kind of arbitrary. And since there's not much time, I don't know, maybe I should start with yesterday, or?

[123:02]

I'm particularly interested in the extreme change of energy state that you must have come from life. Pure physical energy. Well, in a way, that hasn't changed. No, I'm still kind of just pure physical energy. In other words, there's two schools of Buddhism that I would talk about. One school is called mind-only school, which is to say, which is emphasizing that the mind is, you know, everything is mind. The mind is really everything. but it splits in two so that it can be aware of itself. Okay? Everything's mind. The trees are mind, the stars are mind, your mind, everything's mind. But also you could saw there's a body-only school. In other words, everything's body. Or, for example, see, this is mind. But this is, in some sense, a deeper mind than ordinary mind. Do you understand?

[124:09]

Do you see how deep this mind is? This is mind which has transcended the idea of mind. So body is, in some sense, the mind transcending itself. So in some ways, for me, being an athlete when I was young is very, very... It's almost the same thing as being an abbot. The Japanese term for abbot... is juji, which means to abide and maintain. In other words, to be physically present is what the abbot is. It's actually the abbot's body. So working with your body and being a spiritual practitioner or being an abbot are very similar. physically active, overtly active, and having that activity going on inside, right?

[125:19]

Uh-huh. Yeah. So, again, I was attracted to Zen because it was very physical. I found out that these wonderful Zen people, they would go like this. So I went like that. And I found this to be quite physical. You want to try it? You'll have strong physical sensations. Even in the process of crossing them, you'll have some strong physical sensations. And if you don't have them immediately, then after 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, eventually the physicality of the situation will become so strong that you'll probably say, I want to go someplace else. So I was attracted to Buddhism or sitting practice over athletics because it was the physical practice that I felt the most uninhibited. The physicality in this situation had no limit.

[126:27]

So it's like the ultimate sport, the ultimate athletic or physical exercise. Now it's true that maybe people don't see from the outside looking at me, they think I'm not doing anything physical, but try it. There's nothing more physical. So it's actually that if I look at my path, it's that I was always heading in the same direction, but it was kind of like I was going like this, and then I saw that this path was actually going to go over like that, off to the side, and then I took another one. And I saw that was going off to the side, so I took another one. I kept going for in some sense, the way of greatest heart or intensity or involvement. And I found this sitting practice the most involving thing I had ever done. And I also thought before I sat that my mind was able to control my body.

[127:30]

And I realized that I didn't have so much self-discipline as I thought. That just sitting like this, somehow I couldn't do it. And the... The Zen people that I read about and whose lives I thought were so beautiful, they did this practice, and they did a lot of it. And when I did it, I thought, I can see why this kind of practice would lead to a real development, because it really throws you into the intense center of your physical and mental existence. And again, body and mind are one. So you need to do a physical practice in order to realize that, usually. Most people, if they do a mental practice, they don't necessarily realize body and mind are one. But if you do a physical practice, you do realize it. Some people maybe, I think some people who have great sickness or something. Like in Western tradition, I notice most of the thinkers I like are thinkers who had great physical illness. Because in the West, many of our thinkers did not have a physical practice.

[128:37]

They didn't have yoga to work with. So the only way a lot of these great thinkers were able to ground their thinking was through physical sickness and through physical pain. Somehow in the Christian tradition, at some point, the physical yoga was lost to many of the great minds and great beings of the West. So the only way they could return to the physical side of the practice was through the good luck of having physical affliction. So Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy. I don't know what sickness Shakespeare had. I think his sickness was this utterly excruciating disillusionment that hit his body too, I think. Otherwise, I don't think he would be able to sing like that. So I see the physical side as being really my entry into Buddhism.

[129:39]

And mentally, Buddhism wasn't that interesting to me, except in terms of stories. But once I got to this posture, then I felt like, after sitting once, I felt like, this is it. This is what I want to do with my life. And I didn't think it was fun or not fun. The only thing I could say about it When my friends asked me why I thought it was so important, I just said, I feel like it's real. I couldn't exactly explain why, but it seemed real. It seemed like this is what life for me is about. And from then on, I went forward in that practice, and also from then on I saw how the origins of that went back. The last moments was wrapped.

[130:48]

Thank you very much for your time. I hope this is a sketch of being with us all this time. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for all the wonderful contributions. Well, you beat me to the punch. I want to say how grateful I am to you two for inviting me and how what wonderful host you are. And hostesses too, I guess. Thank you all for having me.

[131:27]

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