Thinking about this class tonight, this afternoon I thought about this class and I felt very happy at the prospect of giving and sharing all these Dharma treasures in this teaching here. Also, I'm very happy because the members of the Koan class are doing their homework They are expressing themselves, and they are meeting the dragon around the campus. I had the thought that this practice period is

[01:15]

his kind of practice period of emptiness and self-expression. And Linda Ruth told me, she said that she's getting very enthusiastic about emptiness. You know, for a long time I've heard it said, and I've read it said in many books, that bodhisattvas must understand emptiness. And every morning we chant this thing, form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

[02:19]

And I almost never have heard of anybody getting upset about that. But if we chant something that says, you know, like, and so-and-so practiced diligently and finally was no longer reborn as a woman, then people get upset. But why don't they get upset about form as emptiness? Why don't you get upset that your five skanas are empty? How come that doesn't bother anybody? Well, How come that doesn't bother people? Because we don't understand. It seems so abstract. It seems so abstract, you don't understand it? How about you don't listen, too? Try that on. How about you're defended against that? People can say, emptiness, you're empty, blah, blah is empty, all you want. People say, hey, no problem, man. That's abstract. That's not going to get to me. You take my, what do you call it, you take my dessert away from me.

[03:31]

You take that bread with the jam on it that I have after dinner, take that away from me. I can relate to that. The word is full of baggage. What? The word is full of baggage. The word emptiness is full of baggage, yeah. Anyway, at Tassajara last fall, somehow... people started hearing this teaching about emptiness, and they actually started getting upset, you know. I mean, also people say it's intellectual and abstract, or abstract and intellectual. But if you study this material, little old intellect, you know, this little intellect, which a lot of people aren't that interested in, starts getting reworked. And sure enough, we actually do have some deep emotional feelings about the arrangement of our intellect. And people start getting really upset.

[04:33]

They did get upset. And, you know, when I saw that and heard about that, I really felt like they were starting to hear the Dharma. When you hear the Dharma, it isn't like you're walking along the street, you know, and the Dharma comes and you say, hey, thank you. Sometimes I give talks after, you know, on Sunday, particularly Sunday. I mean, I'm not criticizing people who come on Sunday, but anyway. Afterwards, sometimes people say, that was a great talk. That's exactly what I think. And I say, oh, thank you. I think, gee, I really wasted my time on this person. But anyway, that's nice that they're happy that They heard me just say back what they think, and that they were happy, because now they probably think they're more right than they were before. Maybe I represent this incident. I know all those incident reviews. But when you hear dharma, actually, when you hear dharma, unless you already completely realize it, when you hear dharma, it turns you around.

[05:43]

first 180 degrees, and then either 360 or back to the original. You don't really know anymore, but anyway, it turns you and it disorients you. It changes your orientation. And it's not necessarily pleasant. I can't say for sure it's unpleasant, but it's definitely reorienting, which is disorienting. And so this teaching about emptiness is reorienting, disorienting type of teaching. And I mean, it's not that it's reorienting, it's just that since we're not in orientation to it, we get reoriented. It's actually just middle-way teaching, that's all. It's just regular teaching, but if you actually let it get to you, it turns you. So, since I kind of like, when I read something over and over again said by sage after sage, century after century, I think, well, maybe I should study this and And then I get enthusiastic about it and I share with people. So generally over the years at Zen Center, when I brought this kind of teaching up, people go to sleep, get angry or leave the room.

[06:52]

Or if they don't leave the room and don't get angry, well, yeah, they go to sleep. One of those three, basically, most people. And then the next time they don't come back, pretty soon the class is just me. So then I just go study. And I try again and again, thinking that things might have changed, and actually, like I said this last fall, it changed. And somehow, time had come. But still, it wasn't that the resistance went away. I think part of it was that I realized that resistance is good. That the resistance to this teaching is actually good. Especially if I'm trying to express it, the resistance to my expression of it is good, because in that resistance comes the interplay where we realize the emptiness of my position, I realize the emptiness of my effort, emptiness of the resistance, and so on. It's in that interaction that the real experience of emptiness starts to come forth.

[07:55]

So, I haven't yet seen the resistance of this group. I mean, I can sort of see it. You already look like you're ready to go to sleep, but I haven't really experienced the resistance to this yet. We haven't got into it enough yet, I think, to experience it. Are you reading in the sutra in the morning? You're reading Nagarjuna in the morning now? He did it once. He did it once? That was it, huh? Well, I tried. We'll do it again. Can you do it again? Tomorrow? Did you do chapter 1? Yes. So now tomorrow is chapter 24, okay? Oh, I thought you wanted chapter 1 a few times. No, chapter 1, chapter 24, chapter 1, chapter 24. Then the resistance will start to develop, probably. I think there's a rumor that it's a good thing. Yeah, I was just spreading that rumor. Yeah. and talking it up, which is nice to hear, right?

[09:08]

But when you actually get into it, most people start getting, well, you'll see what happens. So I guess part of, we don't have very many classes either, so it's kind of a hopeless situation. So since it's so hopeless, I think all I can do is like just a few piddly little things in this class. And maybe after the Sashin's over, the last week we can somehow, if the Green Gulch administration can figure out how to do it, we can maybe have a lot of classes the last week after Sashin. And maybe after Sashin, when you're kind of like, what do you call it, opened up, Maybe this stuff will kind of go in easier and so we can accomplish like two or three weeks of work the last week, maybe.

[10:11]

We'll see. For now, I'm kind of like, I'm partly like trying to spread the rumor that this is really good and give rise to your enthusiasm to study this material because we can't do much in class. So mostly what I'm going to do tonight, I think, is try to rouse you to throw yourself into this study. Another thing I wanted to mention while I'm at it is I was talking in terms of last practice period a little bit about these two truths, you know? Truth number one and truth number two. Conventional truths. Ah, here comes a person who's very enthusiastic about emptiness. We've been waiting for you. Yeah, jammed up. Are you sleepy? Are you sleepy? Okay.

[11:14]

Conventional truth and ultimate truth. Ultimate means not, you know, best or anything, but ultimate from the point of view of ultimate goal. or truth seen from the perspective of human perspective and truth seen from enlightened perspective. I just want to mention in this conjunction that there's two kinds of meditation practice. There's conventional meditation practice and ultimate meditation practice. Conventional meditation practice is practice in terms of I practice meditation. Me, who is not you, practices meditation. And you, who is not me, may or may not practice meditation.

[12:17]

But let's say there's both of us, and each of us then do this thing called practicing meditation. That's meditation from the conventional side, or practicing meditation while still believing it was a self that does meditation. Okay? Practicing while still believing in a self independent of other. So conventional truth is there is a self which is not other, there is rain and snow and grass and trees, and grass are not trees, and snow is not rain, and people are people, and you are you are not me, and I practice and you practice, and practice is not us, it's something we do. Okay? That's conventional practice. And also on this side, there's concentration practice that you can do in the conventional world, where you do the concentration practice. And I do not want to, I really, somehow, it's hard for me to say this, but I really don't want to put down conventional meditation practice.

[13:21]

Sometimes this kind of meditation is called bomb shelter practice. In other words, when there's a bombing raid, it's nice to have a bomb shelter. So you can go down and not get bombed. And sometimes we feel like we're in a bombing raid, right? At that time, it's nice to have a practice where you can put your feet on the ground, fill your body, return to your breath, and, like, you know, give some, kind of some shelter and some protection from the onslaught of experience, which is, like, practically going to overwhelm you. And then if you just do that, you can actually go down in the bomb shelter and feel that somewhat, somewhat safe and calm. There are such practices which you can do. You, who's afraid of getting hurt and overwhelmed by it, can go down in the dom shelter, and it is not so much overwhelming you.

[14:28]

And after a while, the air raid may pass or whatever, and then you're down at the bomb shelter. And you can stay down after it's over for a while if you want to, that's fine too. But eventually, if you stay on the bomb shelter too long, it starts to get stuffy down there. Also, you're going to get vitamin D deficiencies and stuff like that. So eventually, it is a good idea to come out of the bomb shelter. However, when you get back up there, even if it's not a bombing raid, you still have to cope with sunshine and things. And if it's too much, you just go back down to the bomb shelter for a while. But there's another kind of meditation which is not about getting away from the bombing raids. It's about dealing with the bombing rates. And this side is the ultimate side. This is Zazen. We actually deal with what's happening somehow.

[15:32]

You face it and meet it in uprightness. You don't back away and go to the bomb shelter. You don't Pretend like it's not there. You just sit still in the middle of it. This kind of practice also, when I say you sit still in the middle of it, you don't do the sitting still either. Over here, this is not practice, but you do. This is just sitting still. The sitting still is not another karmic act. Sitting still is done, but there's no actor. There's no agent. There's just sitting. And that just sitting can cope with whatever happens. As a matter of fact, just sitting cannot go in a bomb shelter. It can't move.

[16:36]

It can't do anything. It's totally unbusy. Case 21, Book of Serenity. Sue will be talking about that soon. That is practice from the ultimate point of view. That is the point of Buddha's practice. This is practice where the self and other are not seen as separate, where there isn't an independent self which can do a practice. The teachings of this practice period of emptiness and dependent core arising are... What is studied here? Again, as I've said over and over, we cannot do the practice over here unless we are grounded in these practices. If you don't know how to go into a bomb shelter and protect yourself from experience, if you feel like you can't stand it, you're going to freak out, then you should know how to do these practices so you can take care of yourself and not

[17:44]

hurt anybody or yourself. Once you can take care of yourself pretty well, then you can enter into actual Buddhist meditation practice. In one Zen center, they explain what the practice at the Zen center is about, basically to practice Zazen, which is basically to study yourself. to study yourself. Not to use yourself to do things, but to turn around and look at the self. Rather than more running the self around on tracks and getting it to do stuff, the practice is to turn around and study the self, and put study of the self above all karmic acts. However, if you're doing any karmic acts,

[18:46]

it definitely should be wholesome. In other words, in the conventional world, you should be practicing conventionally in a wholesome way. You should be practicing good with all get-out, impeccably. But the practice of zazen is to then turn around, in the middle of doing wholesome karma, turn around and look at the self. Try to find out what it is. Understand it. Study it. This is a major reorientation. This is called backward step. This is called renouncing worldly affairs. Worldly affairs are conducted over here. You renounce them. Which doesn't mean you get rid of them, dislike them, spit on them. It means you let go of them. And you can let go of them if they are operating in a wholesome way. So they just keep churning away, generating wholesome karma, positive energy.

[19:49]

But you give them up. And in the middle of doing those things, you turn around and look at the self. This is a new type of journey. This is not... the conventional world running straight ahead anymore. This is like turning around and going the other direction. In order to go over to the other side you have to renounce the world. You have to give it up. You have to turn around and go the opposite direction. What does that look like? What does it look like? It does not look like anything. If it looks like something, it's over on this side. The Buddhist practice has no marks.

[20:51]

It doesn't look like anything. Thanks for the question. Okay, so I just want to read this thing from Moby Dick. Moby Dick's about going on voyages after whales. And in the beginning, he has a little kind of like short course on whales called Extracts from the Lore About Whales. And there's various interesting things said there at the beginning of Moby Dick, but a couple of them that I liked a lot. One of them was, it is generally well known that out of the crews of whaling vessels, the American ones, which we happen to be on American whaling vessels here, Few ever return. Among the crews, out of the crews of whaling vessels, few ever return on or in the ships on board of which they departed.

[21:57]

Now, of course, some whalers lose their life. But not so many. But few ever come back on the boat that they set out on. That's the key factor. When you go whaling, you usually wind up losing your boat or having to change boats. I don't know if Melville made this quote up, but that's what the book is about. The book is about you don't come back. Most people do not come back on the boat they go out on. Do you understand? It's not... But we have a hard time changing boats. I wrote this down in this book. This book's about light. I wrote down this book because this book has some stories at the beginning about people who are either blind from birth or blinded shortly after birth

[23:09]

and then had the eye organ restored to normal functioning in later years or adulthood. This is an example of dependent core rising. I'll say this to you now, and maybe we'll say it again and again, but one of the interesting statements about dependent core rising is that the eye doesn't see. The light doesn't see. The eye consciousness doesn't see. Seeing is the conjunction, the independent co-arising of the eye organ, the light, and the consciousness. But not one of those three is the seeing. None of them can see. Now, most of us most of us in this culture, never occurs to us that the light would see.

[24:16]

But there may be cultures where they think the light sees. Some of us might think the eye sees. I don't know, maybe we don't. But some of us might think that the eye consciousness sees. But Buddhism, a long time ago, before any of these researches were done, said the light doesn't see, the color doesn't see, The organ doesn't see, and the consciousness doesn't see. The seeing is all three of those working together. That's the seeing. Okay? So, we know that when there's consciousness in a person and they don't have the organ, but there is the light, they don't see. We know that when there's consciousness in the person and they have the organ, but there's no light, they don't see. All right? And we also know, maybe sort of know, I guess, that when there's light and they don't have the coordinate and they don't have the consciousness, they don't see.

[25:22]

So these people, what they had was neither the organ nor the consciousness. They had not the ability to sense consciousness. to respond, the body couldn't respond in this way to the light, plus they didn't have a consciousness that had arisen with it yet either. It turns out that at a certain time in our development, when there's a certain time in the history of these kinds of living organisms, when light touches the organ, the organ stimulates the brain in such a way as to give rise to this consciousness. But if you miss that window of opportunity, it's very difficult then later. It's kind of like, it's like at a certain time in our history, it's easy to give rise to the consciousness. But if you don't get that time, then later you have to learn the consciousness. So these people who learned later, they really had a hard time.

[26:29]

The eye was repaired and in fact, you know, the stuff came on the screen, but it was, you know, it was fuzzy or whatever, or mushy and blah, blah, blah. And one guy, for example, he couldn't see anything, you know, faces even long after the operation were never easy, this person reported. Nor were his struggles with seeing confined to faces. But what he finally learned how to do was, if he touched something, if he got his feeling of touch in there, then he could see. In this case, this person who said, now I can see that I felt it, the slow process of learning to see continued for the next two years until his death.

[27:40]

He got his operation two years before his death. The slow pace and limited success were sources of deep disappointment to him, as they inevitably are to all such patients. In many situations, this person, like others, came to neglect sight entirely. For example, they leave the lights off when they came home and just walked around the house in their accustomed way as a blind person. Even though their eyes operated, they didn't use them. In most instances, the effort to see was simply too great. those newly given sight may give up entirely, sometimes even tragically, ending their struggle by taking their own life. In a systematic study of 66 case histories of recovered sight of those born blind, a certain person concluded that innumerable and extraordinary difficulties need to be overcome in learning to see.

[28:41]

The world does not appear to the patient as filled with the gifts of intelligible light, color, and shape upon awakening from surgery. The project of learning to see inevitably leads to a psychological crisis in the life of the patient, one that can end with the rejection of sight. the sober truth remains that vision requires far more than a functional physical organ. Without inner light, without the formative visual imagination or visual consciousness, we are blind. And this person says, in many ways we act like these patients. The cognitive capacities we now possess define our world, give it substance and meaning.

[29:45]

The prospect of growth as much as the prospect of loss and threat to security as a bounty. The prospect of growth is as much a prospect of loss and threat to security as a bounty. One must die in order to become. Newly won capacities place us in a tumult of new psychic phenomena. We become like Odysseus shipwrecked in a stormy sea. That's why I thought of this Moby Dick thing. Like him, we tenaciously hold to the shattered keel of the ship we originally set out upon. our only and last connection with familiar reality. Why give it up?

[30:47]

And in response to that, again, I thought of Moby Dick, where he says, suddenly, a mighty mass emerged from the water and shot up perpendicularly into the air. It was a whale. That's the only reason why we're going to give it up, that I can think of, is if the whale comes out of the water. Otherwise, we're just going to hold on to it because it is just too much trouble to make the change. And I don't know what it's going to take for us to get that whale to come out of the water, for us to do the work, the, what is it, the innumerable and extraordinary difficulties of giving up our old way and learning to see. What is the book?

[31:55]

It's called Catching the Light. It's the intertwined history of light and mind. Yes, Grace? Right, they're attached to that. So I don't know quite where to go here now.

[32:59]

Brad, can we go back to that question you just asked? You said, what will it take? What will it take for us to see? Well, why give up the ship that you're sailing on in order to grow? Because it starts leaking. Yeah, well, that's one thing, but he held on even while it was practically nothing to hold on to. If it completely sinks, then we, of course, give it up. But the problem is that usually when it completely sinks, what happens is we get reborn and get a brand new ship. We go down with the ship. We go down with the ship and then we get a new ship, which, you know, because we chose it, we have to grow up with it, and it gets to be this great ship, and then we hold on to it for a little while until it... Yes? What are you going to say? Well, I mean, I've always been curious of that question of how, you know, it seems like wanting to wake up or wanting to see or wanting to learn isn't enough.

[34:12]

Oh, wanting to see and wanting to learn is enough, but you have to want to very, very, very much. Very, very much. So what does it take for us to want very, very much? So one of the whales, one of the ways to talk about the whale is, the whale is this teaching here. If this teaching could come out of the water, it may be startling enough to us to change boats or whatever. But we have to get really devoted to this project somehow. That's what's necessary, because we've got to give ourselves wholeheartedly to this study, otherwise it's not going to get in. We have to really work to get this, because it's a whole new thing. Yes?

[35:15]

Is there a difference between really, really wanting to see and wake up and really, really wanting to get enlightened? Because we're not really supposed to do the second thing, are we? We're not supposed to want to get enlightened? Yeah, I think we weren't supposed to want to get enlightened. Oh, I'm glad you came to the question. No, you are supposed to want to get enlightened. It's not that you're supposed to want to get enlightened. It's just that bodhisattvas make a vow based on wanting to get enlightened. They say, I... I vow to get enlightened. That's the fourth line of the Bodhisattva vow. I vow to get to realize Buddhahood. In other words, I want to realize Buddhahood. I wish to, I would like to, I hope to, I want to, I really want to. And Buddhists want people to get enlightened too. They want people to get enlightened and their offspring want to get enlightened too. They want other people to get enlightened. They want to get enlightened and they want other people to get enlightened before them.

[36:16]

They want to get enlightened and they want other people to get enlightened before them. It isn't that they don't want to get enlightened and they want other people to get enlightened. Bodhisattvas, it's not that bodhisattvas don't want to get enlightened, they definitely do, it's just that they want other people to get enlightened before them. Because if you want people to get enlightened before you, okay, then as soon as they're enlightened, you're enlightened. Because your enlightenment is exactly that you want them to get enlightenment before you. Bodhisattvas want other people to get benefited before them. But other people do not get benefited before them because as soon as others are benefited, bodhisattvas are benefited. But they want them to get benefited before them. You see, the Buddha wants everybody else to get benefited first. But that's because that's the way Buddhas are enlightened. So when you want others to get enlightened first, it isn't that you don't want yourself to get enlightened. You do want yourself to get enlightened. In other words, you want this self to be enlightened.

[37:18]

In other words, you want to forget this little self and understand what's really happening. You do want that. If you're a Buddha self. I don't know if you want that, though. But what if you walk into the zendo and you sit down and say, I'm going to sit down here and get enlightened? Well, if you want to get enlightened, the best thing to do is, as you get to the door of the zendo, check yourself at the door. Okay. Which means, check yourself out, and then there should be a little thing, yeah, there is actually a sign above the door which says, check yourself at the door. And then what enters there is the forgotten self. And that's what realizes the Buddha way. That's what realizes enlightenment. Not the individual self. The individual self is renounced. It's dropped. It's given up. But you can't give it up in theory.

[38:20]

You have to bring it into view and say, okay, bye. Take a walk. Whatever you want to do, I'm letting go. You're on your own. That's called not returning on the vessel upon which you departed. This thing about having no designs on becoming a Buddha, that's a little different. You don't have a design on becoming a Buddha, you just want to become a Buddha. In other words, you have no Buddha design. You just, you study the self, that's how you become a Buddha. The... Yeah, so what does having a design set extract Jason to become a Buddha?

[39:29]

Having a design is like, I got this idea and that's what I'm working towards. Okay? I got a Buddha design or a Bodhisattva design or a practice design and now I'm going to do that practice. In order to realize the Bodhisattva way, you have to renounce that kind of thinking. So, if you want to realize the Buddha way, you have to renounce trying to make, you know, yourself into a Buddha or make other people into Buddhas, you have to renounce that style of thinking, that karmic approach to practice of designs and plans and architectural, you know, stuff about how you're going to proceed. It doesn't mean you don't think that way or have those kinds of thoughts, just that you renounce them. All right? So, I just thought I might mention again, just to sort of always remember this story, you know, is that the main events, the main events on Bodhi Eve, on Bodhi night, okay?

[40:41]

The two main events, from my point of view anyway, are, number one, the Buddha said, I'm not going to move, I'm going to sit, and I'm not going to move until something happens. He didn't, again, have a design... He did not have a design on Buddha. He just was going to sit until there was some kind of like something happened. Until there was some resolution of the situation. He renounced all his karmic trips. He renounced all designs and he just sat. He stopped. He just practiced wholeheartedly and he stopped interfering with what's happening. The conventional approach to life is that you're constantly interfering with what's happening. There's a situation and you do something to it. This is our karmic life. It doesn't mean that Buddha stopped that. It just means he gave it up. And give it up means you just be still in the middle of that world and just let it go.

[41:48]

It means things come up, and you don't mess with them. Still, somebody might be messing with that stuff, and you don't mess with that person who's messing with stuff. Somebody's just sitting there, not moving, in the middle of all this stuff, and again, As it said there, when you come to this place of being this kind of, of trying this new approach, okay, you are thrown into a tumult and a crisis. Because in this new form of life there is a tumult, a crisis. Because all you're doing, instead of using yourself as an operator, You're simply expressing yourself. That's all you're doing. You're just admitting and acknowledging and expressing yourself. You're not using yourself anymore. You're dealing with yourself as what is rather than what it can be used for.

[42:53]

This is called renunciation. That was the first thing he did that night. And as soon as he really did that, then Mara came and challenged him, and he was thrown into a great tumult, which is something like what our life is like, except more so because he did not back off from simply this new approach As long as you are manipulating the situation, manipulating the tumult, it seems to, like, calm it down a little bit. You get distracted from it. But if you stop that, then you see how challenged that approach is. Anyway, he did that, and then the next thing he did was he observed the... in, you know, observe the pentacle arising.

[44:00]

Those are two things you did, basically. Sit still, and when you sit still, you enter into the world where there you are, and everything's coming at you. Instead of there you are messing with everything, there you are, and everything's coming at you. And instead of fighting back, or trying to change what's happening, or back into a, back into a a safety place, a lesser place, a bomb shelter. You just sit there in the middle of whatever's coming at you, and you watch how you are how you are realized by what's coming at you. Instead of going back at it and trying to exert yourself on it, you stop that, you give up exerting yourself on the world and you just sit there and let the world happen to you until you understand that you are simply nothing more than the arrival of all things. This is Buddha's enlightenment. if you're pushing back or manipulating or modifying the information at all.

[45:06]

But also you can't see it if you back off. So you have to come up and meet it. So I like this image, you know, which some of you have seen, you know, like it's a story from that book, Reverence for All Life. Have you read that book? It's a real sweet little book about reverence for all life. And this guy... He learned about this from a dog, the author of this book. The dog was named Strongheart. He's a movie star dog, one of those German Shepherds in the movies, but one of the smartest ones. Anyway, this guy babysat the Strongheart and got transmission from the animal world and started to develop some sense of, you know, relationship with the animal world. And somewhere along the way he went, spent some time in the Southwest with Native American and he spent time with a particular group of people who were very good at riding horses bareback, riding ponies bareback.

[46:07]

Very good. And so he watched this for a long time, and he asked the chief of that group, he said, well, how do your boys learn how to ride bareback so well? And I don't remember the story exactly, but the chief said something like nothing for a long time. And finally, after not saying anything for like a really long time, he said, well, you have to be an Indian to understand. And that was that. And a couple years later, he said, you want to know about riding ponies? He said, yeah. He said, well, it's very difficult. And then a couple hours later, he said, it's like this. So here's the ponies, right?

[47:15]

Or here's stuff coming at you. That's happening all the time, right? If you sit still, it happens more. As you know, people have somewhat emotional daily life, but they go sit in a zendo and they sit for a while, they get more emotional, they feel more emotional. And the more still you sit, the more stuff comes at you, not less. Not less. If you practice concentration and go in a bomb shelter, then it's less. But eventually you come out of the bomb shelter when you're feeling better, you come up and then stuff starts coming at you again. And then if you don't go back in the bomb shelter and you stop moving, don't run away and don't go to the snack stand or anything, you just stay there, standing there on the earth, don't move, stuff starts coming at you. Then, when stuff starts coming at you, you just sit there, you know, and pretty soon stuff's coming at you, coming at you, and you start to just, like, you know, until you meet it. And you just stay there, and [...] you keep being with this thing.

[48:20]

Pretty soon you start realizing that there's something about you in it, and there's something about it in you. You know? And you start to go like this. And when you're like this, then... the world is created together. And then you can do all kinds of interesting things with the world. You can ride ponies, you can dance. But this entry into the realm of where all things come forward and create you, it's not going to be revealed if you push it back Shove it down or back off yourself. You've got to be nothing more or less than who you are. And nothing's harder than that and nothing requires more skill. But that's all you have to do. You don't have to make the stuff come at you.

[49:22]

It will come by itself, on its schedule, not yours. And it will come just exactly where it's going to come and not where you put it. The hand will meet you when it's going to meet you, and it's going to feel like it's going to feel, not like what you expected it to feel. It's going to be a surprise. Rilke said, love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, touch, and greet each other. Solitude, just sitting. Everything else is also just sitting. When everything else is just sitting and you're just sitting, then you protect the other. You protect the other. You're protecting yourself already by being yourself.

[50:25]

You've done that. By being in solitude, you're protecting yourself enough, perfectly. Now you protect the other. Let the other be a solitude, too. Don't squash the other back. Push it down, lift it up. Leave it alone. Protect the other's solitude. Let it be. And then, when you're yourself, and you let it be itself, or her be herself, or him be itself, whatever, then you protect, touch, greet. Sit. Don't move. And then meet and study how you dependently co-arise. That's love. And also, it is difficult. It's very difficult, that to me. Okay, there's a whole bunch of hands. I don't know, I see Berend, and I see, I see, uh, Corinne, and I see Brooks.

[51:32]

Who else did I see? So is that what's called non-duality? What? It's reading, and it's, um, questioning, looking at it. No, that's not non-duality. That's oneness. Nonduality is that the world of where everything's a problem, you know, is no different from the world where everything's working out well. That's nonduality. Therefore, you shouldn't, like, try to make this wonderful story I just told you about happen. You should give that up. But that's not nonduality either. Nonduality is the reason why you don't have to do all this stuff. So what is nonduality?

[52:32]

What's nonduality? It's, I don't know, it's sitting that you don't do. But you don't do means you don't try to get rid of the brooks that we used to have around here either. and who still may be here doing zazen, doing meditation. So he just, all that stuff is still there. Nondual meditation is not, you know, meditation done by you, or by me, or by both, or by neither. And that's what Nagarjuna's teaching is about. Nagar, nondual teaching, nondual meditation is a meditation that's not caused. Okay? It's meditation that dependently co-arises with everything. Non-dual meditation is how everything's dependently co-arising. That's non-dual meditation. But when you said, is that? Okay? Then you put it over there, what about over here?

[53:34]

What about, what isn't that? So you can't point at non-dual meditation. It's not that. That story I told, that's a story. Now, to realize that the story I told is just a story, that opens the door to non-dual meditation. But the story isn't non-dual meditation, or the enactment of the story isn't non-dual meditation. But we must enact both that story and other stories which are not so happy. Like the story, you know, I don't know the other stories. Bernd? Can I voice my doubts? Pardon? Can I please voice my doubts? Yeah, sure. Do you have some resistance here? Yeah, I guess so. Good. Let's say when I listen to you tonight, I have a feeling of needing heroic strength. You have a feeling that you need heroic strength?

[54:35]

Yes. Oh, yes, you do. You need heroic strength. I don't have it. That's right. You don't have heroic strength. Nobody has it. Can I continue? What are you doing? Are you strengthening it? Some kind of criticism arises, which is, For example, Moby Dick, I mean, that's a whole bundle of stories. But for me, one story is, one very big story in this book is about obsession, very big obsession. Somebody is greatly obsessed. Yes, and what happened to him? So, the big question for me right now, these days, is how can I really know the difference between, let's say, a strong... wholesome, healthy wish and possession and obsession. How can you notice the difference between a strong, healthy wish and an obsession?

[55:40]

And I don't mean it in quote-unquote abstract way, but in my life's existence here. Do you want to know the difference between a strong healthy wish and an obsession? Well, do you want to know the difference between a strong healthy wish and a strong healthy obsession? Or do you want to know the difference between a strong healthy wish and a strong unhealthy obsession? Well, I used obsession in this latter definition. In what? I used obsession as something unhealthy. Okay. Obsession means a kind of routinized, habitual, cast or set way of doing things. Okay? And there can be wholesome obsessions, like you could have an obsession of, for example, trying to be kind to everyone.

[56:42]

You could have an obsession to do that, and you could try to make a habit of that. Or you could have an obsession to cleaning your room, or concentrating on things, or an obsession to be careful of everything you do. And those would be wholesome obsessions, all right? So if you want... But if you had a wish to do those same things, and you had no habit to do it, and there's no habit, but just a wish, then one would just be a wish, and the other would be a habitual, you know, established pattern of behavior or thought. That would be the difference, is that the obsession is a tendency or a disposition, and a wish is just a wish. But if you do anything like that over and over, and you do it according to your set way of doing it, like you think Berndt does something, and if you're like most people, that's a well-established pattern of Berndt does things, then it's an obsession. Basically, everything people do all day long is obsessions.

[57:43]

Karma is an obsession, all right? But there are wholesome obsessions and unwholesome obsessions. Now, is that clear? I mean, is that... Yeah. Okay. Now, you talked about heroic courage, right? Now, heroic courage, there's two types of heroic courage. One kind of heroic courage is where you have a person who's, like, courageous, and this person's going to do something courageous, right? By his own power. And most hero stories are stories of people who do that and then fall on their face. Yeah, right. But that's obsession or that's the usual way of being pushed to its limit, which is fine. But the bodhisattva's real courage is the courage

[58:49]

to do things with everybody, or to do the practice which is the practice that everybody's doing. And we need that kind of courage, which I wouldn't say exactly is greater than the other kind, it's just that, what do you say? I was saying to somebody today, if you want to do some little thing, You can do it with a little bit of help, or maybe not any help at all. And if you try, you can be somewhat successful. But if you want to do something pretty big, like real big, you're going to need a lot of help. And if you want to accomplish the bodhisattva vows, you are not going to be able to do it. You're going to have to get not just a little help, you're going to have to get help from absolutely everything.

[59:55]

And the courage of a bodhisattva is to be enthusiastic about the practice that you do with everybody's help. And to be courageous about doing that practice. And bodhisattvas need that kind of courage. The other kind of courage they may have or not. It's optional. The courage of, I'm going to do this. But I told that story about Babe, that pig, right? Babe had the kind of courage, he had a little bit of the courage of trying to do things on his own, but he was not too good at doing things on his own either. Like he tried to fight a sheep, you know. He didn't do very well. He tried some other stuff on his own. He wasn't too good. He was all right. But what he was really good, he was fantastic at doing things with sheep and with all beings. He was fantastic at that. And that was his gift. He could accomplish these amazing things because everybody helped him.

[61:02]

We can accomplish amazing things with everybody's help. We can accomplish failure at little things with some people's help. Or success, maybe, at some little things with some people's help. Or maybe success at some really tiny things all by ourself. Like, there's one tiny thing which is very meaningful to us that we think we can accomplish by ourself, and that is we can suffer by ourself. We can torture ourself by ourself. We can think, nobody's helping me with this. And we can have just as good a suffering without thinking that anybody's helping us as we could have by thinking a few people are helping us. Now we can also maybe slightly increase our suffering by thinking, not only is nobody helping me, but a few people are hindering me. But actually that doesn't make sense, because if they were hindering me, then they were hindering me in my suffering, I wouldn't be able to suffer as much. So actually I can suffer all by myself without anybody's help, in a big time way. That you can do. But to realize happiness for all beings, you cannot do it without everybody's help.

[62:04]

Now do you have the courage to do that? That's what you need. And that is not an obsession. That's not an established, or what do you call it, a disposition. That's not an established pattern because you can't have an established pattern when you're working with everybody because they keep changing the thing on you all the time. What's coming at you is always different. Corinne? When I think about meeting... or sitting still with things, I can sort of imagine what that would be while I was actually sitting, while I'm actually sitting. But I don't understand how that would be in a situation with other people where I was being forced to move.

[63:05]

But... But I somehow needed to stay still, and I don't know if I... You mean like you're... Like now I have to come up with a shot moving you? You don't understand what it would be like if I'm going like this? You seem to be forced to be moved. No, that's not exactly what I mean. Let's say that... First of all, I just want to say, can I say something? Sure. This is not about imagining what this would be like. It's giving up that too. You hear this instruction that we've been talking about tonight? It's not about you not trying to imagine what I'm talking about. So you say, I can imagine blah, blah, blah. It's not like that. It's not like, that's over here. You can... Over here, this kind of practice, you can imagine what it's like, and that's what it's like. It's exactly what you imagine it to be, that's what it is. It's what you say it is. You get to say what it is over here. Over here, you don't say what it is.

[64:08]

Right. But I'm not there now, I'm there. Right, you're here. Okay, so fine, what's the problem? Well, I want to know how you can sit still when you're in a position like you're driving a car on the freeway and people keep on cutting you off. What is sitting still in that position? Is it braking? Is it going at the same speed? Is it, I mean, really like practical, everyday things? Sitting still is not driving a car. But that's what I'm saying. When you talk about meeting things, when you go like this, you're meeting things, are you only talking about when you're sitting? No. You can sit still while you're driving the car, but driving the car is not sitting still. Walking over to you is walking over to you, it's not sitting still. But I can sit still while I'm walking over to you. Talking to you is not sitting still, but I can sit still while I'm talking to you.

[65:09]

Okay, how do you sit still while you're talking to me? While you're walking or talking to me? Okay, there's no how. That's the difference. It is how. Okay. What if you're in a situation... I'm not asking the right question. You're asking the right question, and I'm answering the question. You don't like the way I'm answering it. No, no, no. Try again. I'm walking back and forth, and I'm talking to you while I'm walking, too. I'm talking and walking right now. So you say, how does one sit still? And there's no how, but the how is the sitting still. For me, the how of me going over here is the city still. Watch. Can you see the how? Look at the how. What would you be doing if you were meddling? What would be different if you were meddling? Oh, I might be trying to make this into Buddha walk or something.

[66:17]

Or I might be trying to calm myself down. or say something smart, or I might try to get over there a little faster, or a little slower. I might think that by manipulating the way I get over there, that that would be the Buddha practice. That's meddling. That's still thinking, I, that I'm going to make the practice happen, that I'm going to practice and confirm this walking and this talking. That's meddling. Giving that up means I just walk or I stand, all right, and I concentrate on how it's happening. What, your feet on the ground? What do you mean, how it's happening? Yeah, like, how is it I'm standing here? Do you see how I'm standing here? Everybody can see it just as well as I can. There's no more... This how belongs to me no more than it belongs to you, but each of us... What is your mind doing at that point? Is it inactivated in a certain sense? No, I'm just like you. Do you have an active mind?

[67:20]

Yeah. So what? We can talk. See, I'm talking because I have a mind. But it's not a meddling mind at that point. It's not a meddling mind. There is not a meddling mind. There is meddling with mind, though. And meddling with mind is that you take the mind and you interfere with what's happening. You try to modify what's happening. You, the self, exerts its will on what's happening. In your mind. Yeah. You get the mind going around what's happening. You try to use the mind for your own purposes or whatever, or for the purpose of some agenda. Isn't there an agenda to go meet her? Don't you have an agenda from getting there to there? Is there an agenda to go meet her? Let's say there's an agenda to go meet her, okay? What's the agenda? The agenda is an object of my unconsciousness, which all you can see the agenda too.

[68:23]

Imagine an agenda that I've seen you walk over there. There's an idea. Agenda, go talk to the woman. Okay? There's the agenda, right? You see it? What do I do with the agenda? Do I try to pretend like I don't have the agenda? Or say, this is really a good agenda? Or whatever. Or just let the agenda be there, and just let it be there, and then just go over there. That's what I did. I didn't interfere with the agenda. The point is the non-interference with what's happening. The non-manipulation of what's happening is just how things are happening. If something's happening, how it's happening is un-interfered with. You understand? How things are happening is just how they're happening. There's no interference with that. But we often try to interfere with how things are happening. That's interference. Is studying it interfering with it? No. That's the point.

[69:25]

The answer to that is no. That's what we mean by study. Study means you watch how. So the difference, the not moving, when I walk over to talk to this woman, the difference between conventional approach and ultimate approach is I study on the way over there. I'm looking at how. And the how, not even me looking at the how, but the how is really the study. And the how is not moving. How never moves. How cannot move, do you understand? You can't walk how around. How never moves. How things are happening. How things are happening never moves. When something moves, how that moves never moves. But you can make a decision that will affect the how. No? The way things happen is that decisions have effect.

[70:27]

That's how. Now, the decisions that you make, which let's say it's an action, you have to decide on an action. The decisions you make are you make decisions. Over here. You make decisions. This is conventional world. Now, sitting still or renouncing the world means you turn and look at how you make decisions. Your concern is how that happens rather than if you make this decision rather than that decision. Somebody may care about making this decision rather than that decision based on... This idea or that idea. Like, based on being selfish or unselfish, whatever. Anyway, somebody's thinking like that. That's what is happening. But how that's happening is not moving. How it's happening is not trying to do something. How things are... How the rain falls is not trying to do something. How the rain falls is exactly how it doesn't fall. Do you make a decision to renounce? Do you make a decision to renounce?

[71:29]

you want to renounce, and when you make... and when you want to renounce, you actually can settle into renunciation. So, can going like this involve an action? Meeting, coming to meet... To meet? Yes. First of all, you have to... first of all, you have to, what do you call it, renounce worldly affairs in order to meet. If you don't renounce worldly affairs, whenever you go to meet something, you do something to it. You push it or shove it. That's not meeting. You haven't yet sat. You haven't yet sat still. You're not a solitary being anymore. You think you're into affecting the person or not affecting the person. You're still over on this side. You haven't renounced the world. You're still basically exerting yourself upon things. You are still doing the practice. You are still doing the meeting. Meeting is when you've given up all that. Okay, but let's say that I'm not here yet, because I'm not there.

[72:32]

So I'm over there, and I want to know what is the best way of trying to meet things, realizing that I'm there, I feel like I'm separate from you. Well, you did pretty well there. You said, I'm over here. He said, I'm not over here, I'm over here. In other words, I am still thinking in terms of me doing this and me doing that. That's where I am, that's what you said, right? When you admit that you're over here, the admission that you're over here is not another one of those things, necessarily. You could say, now I admit I'm over there. But you didn't do that. You just said, I'm over here. The simple admission that you're committing karma, the admission of committing karma is not karma. The admission of what karma you're doing, if it's going to be real, you have to admit how you're doing karma. So you did a general thing.

[73:33]

it would work better and be more this. If you would not only say, I'm not over here, I'm over here, but how are you over here? Specifically, I am here now, and I'm talking. I'm committing an act of talking. I have these thoughts. I have these thoughts. I have these opinions. I have this particular opinion. The admission of the specifics of what you think you're doing is the orientation towards studying what you're doing. So the way that I can try and meet something over there... You can't meet things over here. Okay, but... The way you can move towards meeting is to admit how you're on the side of things where you're not meeting things. If you admit how you don't meet things, if you admit how you manipulate everything in the world, if you admit that, then what you're doing is turning off... You're not stopping that behavior. Because that will go on by habit, by disposition, by obsession. The obsessions just roll forward. You cannot stop them. You cannot stop them.

[74:36]

But what you can do is part of you, in a sense, can say, I give this whole thing up. I'm not going to move until something happens. I'm not going to move until I understand these obsessions. That's it. Then what you do is you just sit still. And how do you sit still? You just, huh? You sit still. You sit still. And how do you sit still in this case? What's she talking about? You admit... So you say, she said, what'd she say? She said, I'm not here, I'm here. So what'd she do? She sits here. In fact, she doesn't sit in general. She sits specifically in the middle of where she thinks she is. And she is karmically determined. So she admits her karma. You take your seat in your karma and you just sit there. Moment by moment. New karma, you sit there. New karma, you sit there. So if you're over here, like you said, with the practice of not sitting, it's for you to be here and don't do anything about it.

[75:37]

Then you're over here. When you're over here, you can meet. When you're over here, in order to renounce this side, you just like this. Just this. So in a way, you practice meeting your karmic activity, which is not meeting, but you meet it. You settle completely onto your karmic activity, and that is not doing anything. In other words, how did I make this circle? How did this happen? Like this, right? The how that that happened does not move. I settle into the how of that. I turn towards the how. I study, and I... To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To model yourself on the Buddha way is to model yourself on the self. So that's how... Boom! That's sitting still. The best thing I can do is to... Let's say that I am acting.

[76:42]

The best thing I can do in the conventional realm is to act in an upright way. Yes, but acting in an upright way is not the conventional realm. It's the ultimate realm. But in the conventional realm you're not acting upright. In the conventional realm you're doing this and doing that according to your tendencies, according to your obsessions and compulsions and dispositions. That's the conventional realm. You have an obsession to think that you're suffering from her. You do that. That's the conventional realm. To be upright is not the conventional realm. To be upright is to renounce that stuff and just let the stuff be. That's not the conventional realm. It is unusual, rarely seen, a new thing for you just to let yourself be this person, this karmic person. That is a new thing for you. That's not something you can do.

[77:43]

That's not moving. for you to just let yourself be like this is not moving. And you can't imagine, you cannot imagine this thing. But for whatever you are imagining right now, whatever you're imagining, okay, to let that just be what you're imagining, that's sitting still. Buddha sat and imagined this and imagined that and imagined this and imagined that. Imaginations were coming at him heavy. What did he do? He just imagined. He was experiencing anxiety with all this stuff coming at him. What did he do? He experienced anxiety coming to him. His mind did not stop working. It was working very vividly, like ours. Just like ours, exactly. It said that all he did was let that happen and didn't mess with it anymore. He said, I'm not going to mess with this stuff anymore until something happens. And he just sat there and let this stuff happen, [...] and then something happened.

[78:47]

Finally, he met the situation and saw the pinnacle arising. So the sitting still cannot be practiced on this side, but to let that side be that side is sitting still. Being upright, you cannot be upright. You cannot be upright. You or I cannot be upright. I cannot do uprights. But me being this person, this dualistic person who does things, who thinks he can do this and do that, and let myself be that, letting myself being that, and admitting I'm that and nothing more than that, admitting I'm that and not adding anything to that, not trying to be different from that, at that moment just being what I am, being how I am, being what I am, being who I am, being where I am, being when I am, all that is not moving. That never moves. And everybody has exactly the same thing. So I just end by reading this sutra.

[79:49]

Two sutras. One is this sutra of... This is the Avatamsaka Sutra. This is a section on the ten stages of bodhisattva. This is the sixth stage of the ten stages. The sixth stage deals with the sixth paramita, perfection of wisdom. The subject of perfection of wisdom is dependent co-arising. Okay? This is about sitting still. What chapter and verse? Well, in this thing, it's on page 56, but it's a section on the sixth stage. And the sixth stage is called presence. The stage of perfection of wisdom is called the stage of presence. The stage in which you study dependent co-arising is called the stage of presence. And it says that the bodhisattva enters the sixth stage, the stage of presence,

[80:58]

They enter by way of the ten equalities of things. I wonder if you're going to be able to get this. Try us. They enter by the ten equalities of all things. All things are equal in these ten ways. There's more than ten, but they just chose ten. Ten ways. The equality of the signlessness of all things. What is the signlessness for? This thing is a different sign from this thing, right?

[82:04]

The sign of this is different from the sign of this. They don't enter by the difference between these two signs. They don't enter by the signs of these two things. They enter into presence by the signlessness of these two things, and the signlessness of everything. What is the signlessness of things? Emptiness? Well, it's the emptiness, yes, but also what is the signlessness of things? Mutual identity. Mutual identity. Assignment. The signing of. Right in the... They enter by the equality of the non-origination of all things. See those two things? What's the non-origination? Are those things different? Is there any difference in the non-origination of those two things? No. No. They enter by the absence of characteristics of things. They don't enter by the sign of these two things.

[83:12]

They enter by the equality of the signlessness. Can you see how the signlessness of this is the same as the signlessness of that? Can you see how the signlessness of Suki is the same as the signlessness of Lena? Same signlessness? They don't have two different signlessnesses. That's how they enter this stage of presence, not just by the signlessness, but by the equality of the signlessness. That's in some ways easier to get into. Can you understand that the non-origination and the signlessness and the lack of characteristic of all things? Now you say, well, what is the signlessness? Well, of course you're not going to be able to figure out what the signlessness of something is because it is signless. You can't deal with the non-origination of things because it's non-originated. You can't deal with the lack of characteristics of things. But you can enter into the fact that everything is the same, the non-origination of Martha and the non-origination of Tia, I can enter that equality.

[84:13]

That's how they enter. They enter by the equality of the non-origination, of the signlessness, of the lack of characteristics. What is the primordial purity of all things? They enter by the equality. I don't know what the primordial purity is, because if I knew what the primordial purity of things was, it wouldn't be very pure. Do you understand? Can you realize it? Can you realize it? No, it wouldn't be pure if you could... Well, you can realize it, yeah. How do you realize it? You realize the primordial purity of things by entering the equality of the primordial purity of all things. That's how you realize it. But you can't conceive of the primordial purity, otherwise it would be defiled. It would be then a sign. It would be not such a primordial purity. It would be kind of like a derived, what do you call it, modified... Secondhand. Secondhand processed purity. They enter by these ten equalities.

[85:17]

And observing all things in these terms, and according with them. So not only to observe and enter into the equality, all these equalities among all things, but accord yourself with them. That's how bodhisattvas enter this stage. Now, once you enter in this way and have this vision, and you do this by practicing this, but when you have this vision, then it says, With this understanding, the bodhisattvas, all the more guided by compassion, commanded by compassion, and in order to fully realize compassion, they contemplate the dependent co-arising of the world. So you enter into this presence and then you use the presence.

[86:27]

So this entering into presence is not moving. Do you see how you enter into the presence of not moving by entering into the what, the how? The what of all beings is the same. You enter into the equality of the how of all beings. You enter into the equality of the who of all beings. The who of all of us is the same. The what of all of us is the same. The how of all of us is the same. You enter into the equality of all those hows and whats and whos and non-originations and signlessnesses. In other words, you don't move. Whatever is happening, all things, you don't move. And then you contemplate the dependent core arising of the world. Now, it would help if you memorized this text, at least those two paragraphs.

[87:31]

You didn't do all ten, though, did you? No, I didn't. But it's not that long. See, it's just this one paragraph here and this one. If you memorized that and you thought about that all the time, that would be good. You basically, that's all Buddhism right there. First chapter, the first paragraph is, sit still in the middle of all things, enter the equality of all things. The equality of all things is not moving. And then contemplate, once you're in that presence and you've entered and you're not moving, then contemplate the dependent core rising of the world. Guided by commanded by compassion. And in order to realize fully compassion, the bodhisattvas contemplate the dependent core rising of the world, the origination and destruction of the world.

[88:34]

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