As usual, I will be discussing the practice of being upright. Being upright while sitting, standing, walking, reclining, Being upright is the mode or the medium in which the teachings of the Buddha are revealed and realized.

[01:02]

What I mean by being upright is the mode in which the truth of the Buddha is revealed to you and realized through you in your practice of being upright. What is the teaching of the Buddha, of all the Buddhas? It is the teaching of great compassion. Not just talking about it, but actually manifesting it in the world for beings to see it and receive it and realize it. And the way the Buddha manifests this compassion is to teach beings the way that they can realize this great compassion and in turn teach beings and so on.

[02:30]

The Buddha taught that none of us have any independent existence, that we all depend on each other. And we all are supported by each other. And we all support each other. This is what the Buddha taught. This is what the Buddha realized. This is what was revealed to the Buddha when the Buddha was sitting upright under the bow tree. This is what the Buddha realized. But the Buddha also realized that many beings do not understand that they are supported by all other living beings, by the kindness of all beings. The Buddha understood that too. And the Buddha saw that that is the reason people suffer.

[03:35]

So it followed that to teach beings a way to see what is really going on would help them become free of their misery in feeling alone and independent. but not just alone and independent, but also more or less harassed and attacked and threatened by the other. By the other which is not understood as supportive and life-giving. No being

[04:44]

in any manifestation does not support the life of Buddha. No exceptions. The most deluded, frightened, miserable, cruel being supports the life of Buddha, is Buddha's life. Buddha understands this. Entering this understanding is what Buddha wants for us. Being upright is the gate to this understanding. So I talk about being upright in many ways. not that being upright is anything itself, all by itself, and yet sometimes I feel that words help us practice it.

[06:02]

One of the ways I talk about this mode in which we can see the truth of the Buddha is that it is like being thoroughly attentive to what you perceive without any manipulation of it. In the moment, right now, not yesterday, not tomorrow, being attentive to what is happening for you. In other words, what you perceive, what you experience. to be attentive without manipulation. This is the mode of revelation. In a sense, manipulation, when we fall into manipulation

[07:17]

we fall into duality and manipulation, in a sense, comes in two varieties because manipulation is based on believing in duality. Since the basic manipulation is of this self manipulating the other, there's basically two kinds of manipulation. Well, maybe three. One is to try to increase the other. Another is to try to decrease the other. Another way to say it is we indulge in the other or we reject the other.

[08:20]

Being upright is not to reject or indulge in what is happening. And yet, one of the ways of indulging is to close our eyes and go to sleep. And when we're asleep, we can indulge and reject. But to stay awake and be attentive and devotedly attentive to what's happening without indulgence or rejection I was looking up something in Walden, a quote for a citation in a book, and I opened up this thing and I saw a little note I wrote in there 37 years ago in high school.

[09:45]

When I was a senior in high school I wrote this in this book and it says, humans are rich in proportion to the number of things she can afford to let alone. And so in this case, Thoreau is what he's calling being rich, I call being upright. You're upright in proportion to the number of things you can afford to let alone.

[10:51]

And you know that play on the word alone, you could say, the number of things you can afford to let be all one. The things, the number of things you can let be what they are. When you or I can let things be alone, then things reveal the Buddha's truth. Everything that we can leave alone will reveal the truth. Its truth and the truth of the Buddha will be revealed through everything we can really leave alone. But also, leave alone doesn't mean close your eyes to. It means, leave alone means you have to be there. It doesn't count to leave things alone that you're not aware of. The things that you're not aware of that you leave alone

[11:54]

are not the practice. That's just things you're not aware of. There's a nice tennis shoe sitting at the edge of the parking lot by the stairs to the parking lot. Someone put it there because I guess somebody lost it. Or anyway, it looks like it's got a partner that is far away. Now you didn't know about that, most of you didn't know about that before I told you. So, leaving that alone was not being upright. Now that you know about it, leaving it alone will be upright. Especially if you go up there and look at it and see how nice it is. That doesn't mean that you don't spend the rest of your life trying to find out who it belongs to so that they can have their shoe back. It means you leave it alone. And the shoe says to you, my partner is over there four feet away.

[13:04]

someone said to me, a lot's going on. She was kind of shaking, a little bit shaky, and looked like she could go a lot of different directions from where she was, like she could cry, she could laugh, she could fall down. But a lot was going on, she said. And I think she said, my job is to clear it up I think I said understanding all that's going on will clear it up. In other words, what I'm suggesting is when a lot's going on, to be attentive and non-manipulative will lead to understanding.

[14:57]

And understanding will clear it up. But if I try to clear it up, or you try to clear it up, It may seem to get cleared up for a little while, but it'll come back later and take revenge on you for trying to clear it up. It's presenting itself as a lot is happening, not for you to try to make not so much happening, but to express your respect for what's happening. when you express your respect for what's happening, it clears up by itself. If you disrespect it and try to rearrange it, eventually it just gets worse, more confused. I'm not sorry, but I ask you to please forgive me for what I just said, because I just said that all your human activity, if you act on it, will make your life worse.

[16:24]

And not only that, but mine. Please forgive me for saying that if it upsets you, but that's actually what I think. Human activity means human power, means I'm going to clear it up. So when she said, my job is to clear it up, I think that's not, I don't agree. At the time I thought, oh yeah, but actually what I said was understanding will clear it up. Not, I didn't say not you, but now I see I was saying you aren't going to clear it up. Understanding is going to clear it up. People don't clear things up, I'm saying. Understanding clears things up. However, people can understand, and when they do, they just sit there and understand, and it gets cleared up.

[17:27]

Or they just stand there. Now sometimes they just stand there and their arms move up like this, and they start giving signals like, It's okay to give signals. But the signals are not like trying to manipulate. The signals are, I understand. I understand. I understand. Thanks. I get it. Thank you. And then everything gets clear. or everything is clear, and then you say, thank you. I don't know exactly which happens. First, I think it's at the same time. Another way that you can do it, another signal you can give is this one where you put your hands in this, make this oval at your abdomen. Put your hands in this cosmic concentration mudra, make this lovely oval with your hands and place it against your abdomen, under your navel.

[18:30]

That's a signal to the universe that before, during, and after things are cleared up. Before things are cleared up, it's a signal to say, I'm not going to try to clear a universe up. I'm going to sit here and let wisdom manifest right here, and I'm going to let that wisdom reorder and clarify the entire cosmos. And afterwards, I'm going to say thank you by this same mudra. I might change this mudra into this mudra. This mudra can transform into other mudras of thanks and understanding. I might even do the door opening and door closing mudra. The question is, what's your understanding? What's the understanding? Is the understanding, or is it like, this is wrong, I'm going to fix it. Things are off, I'm going to fix it.

[19:33]

You're rich, you're upright in proportion to the number of things, like for example one, that you can leave alone. Being upright you understand, understanding things are cleared up. But another word for being upright is love. When something happens, rather than trying to control it, you appreciate it. You love it. It doesn't mean you like it. For example, if it's cancer, you don't like cancer necessarily. Almost never do you like it. Maybe somebody likes it. It's okay if you like it. I'm not prohibiting liking cancer. But liking and disliking is not love. Liking is... Love is more like being really interested, wondering... respecting, paying attention, being devoted.

[20:44]

Loving is like not wishing the thing were better or worse than it is. Liking goes along with wishing there was more of it. Disliking goes along with wishing there was less of it. Loving is not wanting it to be more or less. Loving is being upright. So love is also another word for the medium in which revelation occurs. Love is the medium of realization. Understanding is the fruit of being upright. Understanding is the fruit of love. Wisdom is the fruit of being upright in love, or being in love being upright. Our job is to be upright, not to fix things, not to clear things up. I mean our job as Buddhas. Our job as troublemakers is to try to clear things up. And everybody seems to be doing that pretty well.

[21:49]

Don't worry. You can always do that if you want to. Well, maybe a few people aren't doing that very well. Maybe a few Buddhas are not good at that. Quite a few people are, I've heard in the last short period of time, quite a few people are sad and grieving in this group here. I'd like to say a little bit about that because I feel like grieving and sadness are part of love. Grief is not the same as being upright. It's not the same as love. But grief is part of the process of settling into love. Sadness is part of the process of settling into being upright.

[22:55]

So the phenomena of sadness, the word sadness in American English these days is a rather broad term, and it can be used as a synonym for melancholy, depression, low spirits, sorrow, grief, dolefulness, and so on. But I feel that when a lot of people say sadness, a lot of Zen students anyway, when they say sadness, what they mean a lot of times is grief. And for me, what grief is and what sadness is, is that it's the body, minds, it's the... But let me say a little bit more about those words.

[24:08]

The word grief means, is related to, its root means to be weighed down, to be oppressed, to be heavy and grave. That's grief. To be weighed down and heavy. And sadness, in its old middle English, is to be... also grave and heavy, but also its earlier root is to be full of something and weary. And I think both of those etymologies I find are appropriate to a phenomena which I call sad when it happens to me, and I think a lot of other people use it that way, and grief. It's a kind of a drag on us, a dragging us down.

[25:10]

And I think that it's a healthy mental process or it's a healthy psychic process. Because what it's doing is it's giving us a feeling of being dragged down. And the reason why we have this feeling of dragged down is because there's something that's gone down. Something's gone down and we haven't let it go. So for me, grief and sadness have to do with going down, not going up. Something has gone down. Something has happened. Something has happened. It's over. It's done. It's passed. But we're holding on to it, so it's pulling us down. And the feeling of being pulled down is tipping us off. to that we're holding on to something, but we don't know what it is because it's down there. It's healthy that the psyche gives us this feeling of being pulled down, this grave, heavy feeling.

[26:21]

Because there's something that's gone down, but we didn't let it go down. We're holding it. We're not letting it go. And it's normal day by day, we lose something. We lose ourself. We lose ourself today. We lose ourself this morning. We lose all of our old selves and all of our old friends. We've lost them. They're gone. But on some level, we may not have let them go. And our clinging to these things that have passed pulls us down. But if we will feel, if we will be attentive to that feeling of being pulled down without manipulating it but just feel it and let it pull us down let it feel how it's pulling us down leave it alone and feel it that will help us be upright and that will be loving

[27:29]

the sad feeling, not liking it, loving it. Not liking our attachment, which is pulling us down, but loving the consequence of our attachment, namely grief. And when you love the grief fully, you let go and the grief passes. Now if then again you hold on to something, then there's more grief. So until we're not holding on to the passing of our life at all, we're going to have to keep being sad and grieving. And grieving is part of the, I call it lubrication, which helps you come into the present, which helps you slip free of the past and not hold on to it and come into the present. So by loving the sadness you come into the present where you can really love and even perhaps love and let go at the same time.

[28:35]

Someone told me, I saw someone and this someone lost something. And this someone asked me how he looked and I said, you look lighter. almost like you lost weight. But it's not exactly that you lost weight. You just look light. You look like you weigh less. And you look more bright. But I knew this person lost something big and important not too long before. But I had to say, that's what the person looked like. But this person was grieving. So I sometimes say, you know, we grieve over the loss of our 4,000-pound teddy bear, this sweet little teddy bear that's been squashing us down for whatever number of years.

[29:49]

When we finally set it down and feel light and free, we still feel kind of like, It's so difficult to be light. And where's my teddy bear? So I think sadness is very good opportunity. It's your healthy body and mind saying, here's something to feel. You don't know what you're holding onto. You're being dragged down. Feel this and you'll be free. Just feel it. And again, for me, sadness is down. So feeling it means feel it. Right now I have some feeling about it.

[30:51]

I don't know, I'm feeling it someplace in my head, in my throat, in my eyes, in my cheeks, It's a place that I can often feel sadness. You can see it in people's face. The sadness is in the face or the eyes. Even in the forehead, not usually in the top of the head, but somewhere around the eyes or eyebrows, and then it goes down from there. But sometimes people only feel it in the eyes or the cheeks, and the quivering mouth and the tears show that. But it's also in the throat. You follow down the throat into the upper chest and into the heart. and then down even lower, even to a place where you can hardly feel it. The part that's untapped is down. The place to go is to go down all the way with the gravity of it. And it has a bottom in terms of feeling it. Things don't really have bottoms, but in terms of feeling a feeling, a feeling has a bottom.

[31:57]

in terms of you reach the fullness of the feeling and it's down. And when you get down to the bottom, you've done your job. You've loved the feeling to its fullness. You've grieved to the bottom of the grave. And then you bounce up and you're ready to start over with the next thing. So unless you're a perfectly unattached person, probably every day there's something that passes that you didn't let go of. So there probably should be, there's an opportunity to practice sadness, to grieve every day.

[33:05]

Now what you can postpone it, you know, and just do it once a week and just do it for all seven days once a week. You can do it that way. But then you've got to be sort of pulled halfway down for all six days until you get to the seventh. You can do it whatever way you want to, and you may not have a choice, but I just would predict that if you don't feel a little sadness each day, you probably are overlooking something and you're probably being dragged. It just hasn't gotten heavy enough for you to realize you have to go to work. It's okay to wait until you store up a big pile of, you know, back debts of stuff you're holding on to, but I recommend that you do it every day, if possible every moment. Because probably in every moment, actually, you either have back debts in terms of back things you have to let go of, or there was a little tiny bit of clinging to the last moment.

[34:07]

And clinging to the last moment not only includes holding on to things, but trying to get rid of them. That's another way you hold on to things that are gone. That's gone and we're not going to come back. That's holding on. Basically, everything that we don't fully experience, which is the same as fully letting it go, haunts us. sadness is a way to, what do you call it, exercise those ghosts. The other night the head student for this practice period gave a talk and did you say something about life is praise or something like that?

[36:45]

What did you say? She said the purpose of life is to praise. The purpose of human beings is to praise. The purpose of human beings is to praise? Okay. So another way to talk about being upright is that being upright is praise. Praise of what? Praise of life. And it's praise of life, right? Not praise a part of life. Praise of life. And life is as you may have noticed, is something that's quite pervasive. It's like, for example, it's all over this room.

[37:46]

Right? Some of you may know, somebody gave me an article. Maybe, did you give it to me, Lynn Ruth, about what's in a cubic foot of air? Like, we can see all the people in the room, right? Right now, there's people all over this room. There's life in the form of humans all over the room. But if you took this little space of air in front of your face, this cubic foot, there are virtually innumerable living beings in that space. There's life. There are millions of living beings in the air in front of you. There's life completely filling this room. Up in the corner there, there's, you know, in that one little corner over there, there's many living beings. Under the meditation mat, underneath the meditation platforms, there's many living beings. Inside of your cushion, there's many living beings. The room's full of living beings.

[38:48]

Right? You knew that, right? Life is very widely spread around here. And, and, uh, intensely and densely happening. So, being upright is to praise life. It's not to praise evil that living beings sometimes do. It's to praise life. It's to praise the living And to grieve, to actually grieve is part of praise.

[39:50]

Is that clear? I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. People don't usually think of grieving as praise. But when you actually grieve, you are praising life. Because there's grief happening, and you're grieving. You're praising the grieving process by grieving. When you grieve wholeheartedly. one-pointed, single-mindedly grieving his praise of life. I kind of laugh because I thought of grief, I mean, I thought of praise and I thought of the word intensity. Intensity. Because praise is not, praise is an intensity.

[41:00]

Praise is intense. It doesn't really praise when you hold back. Like, you know, a backhanded comment is not really praise. You say, well, it's a little bit of praise. Yeah, but I'm talking about actually just flat out praise. And none of that but the appropriate praise. the praise which is just right for the occasion. There's an intensity there. Being upright, grieving, there's an intensity. Love is an intensity. Rilke said that poetry is basically praise.

[42:09]

And poetry and religious speech are very similar in that they have intensity. Religious activity, poetic activity, has an intensity. It has the intensity of something being born. Praising life is to be with the life and share the intensity of it being born. And if you can't share the intensity of it being born and can't share the intensity of it dying, then you have to practice grief. which brings you up to, if you can't face the birth and death of it, if you can face the grief which comes from not facing the birth and death of it, that gradually brings you into being willing to just face the intensity of the birth and death of life that's always here.

[43:29]

This is called love. By me. This is called being upright. So if you shirk, if you shirk, I guess we shirk responsibility, if you shrink back from the intensity of life's births and deaths, your psyche does you the favor of giving you sadness and saying, feel this then. feel the sadness and grief of not being able to face this death and this birth. Usually we don't feel grief over a birth, but you know, sometimes we do feel grief over a birth that we didn't pay attention to. Like if you were at the birth of your child and you looked away when they were born, you might grieve that you didn't look at it, that you didn't see the first moment.

[44:38]

So we can grieve over things we've lost and we can grieve over things that we receive that we didn't witness the gift. I had a birthday party but I was spaced out. I missed my whole birthday party. You can grieve that. You lost the thing by not even being there for it happening. How can you how can you make a container in your practice, in your meditation, for the intensity of birth and death? For the intensity of something arising and going away. For this face, for this feeling arising and going away, how can you be there for that intensity? Gently, carefully, settling into this intensity of birth and death, is being upright.

[45:45]

In this intensity of birth and death, the Buddha's teaching is revealed. It's here that you can see how all beings help each other be born and how all beings help each other die. We help each other be born. We help each other die. All you helped me be born this morning. Some of you, I don't know, you didn't look like, some of you are younger than me, so you were somebody else when you helped me be born 54 years ago. But you all helped me be born, and you all helped me die. When I die, you will help me. Even if you say, don't go, that will be your way of helping me. Praise

[47:06]

Praising life is being upright. No matter how it manifests, you praise it. How do you praise it? What's the greatest praise? What's the greatest praise of something? To let it be what it is. That's the greatest praise. I cannot add or subtract anything from what's happening now. That's the praise. and I'm intensely attentive to it, which shows that I'm not just saying, I can't add anything or subtract anything. I can see that I can't. I don't want to. Is there anything you'd like to say?

[48:52]

I think that's enough from me, unless you have some questions. You're welcome. Yes?

[50:14]

Could you hear what she said? When she has an intense feeling of grief, it feels liberating. But most of the time... But most of the time, there's a queasy, possibly half-way, half-way feeling of grief. And I almost sometimes try to Can you hear her? She said a lot of the time when grief comes it's kind of half-hearted or she feels kind of queasy about it. She can't quite give herself or there's some hindrance to giving completely to the grief. Mm-hmm.

[51:44]

You're courting in the sense of being a little bit coy? Wanting the grief? You want the full feeling of grief and sadness. That's not necessarily courting. I think, you know, you could have the feeling in your heart of there's some sadness there, but your heart's not, you know, only part of your heart's feeling it, and you maybe want your whole heart to feel it. That's maybe helpful, that kind of feeling of wanting a fuller experience. But part of it also is to, if you have a partial grief, Do you just have partial grief when you have partial grief? And if you can feel the partial grief, then that will open you to feel the greater grief, until you feel the whole thing. It's like a flower opening. When it's partway open, it's partway open.

[53:03]

In other words, life sometimes manifests as a heart that's kind of closed. So you praise a closed heart. Not like it or dislike it, but just say, my heart is closed. I praise that closed heart. The feeling of praising a closed heart is an open heart. So a heart can open inside of a closed heart. Some people have kind of open hearts and they see lots of closed-hearted people. But these open-hearted people have to praise the closed-hearted people. Otherwise, although they have an open heart, they have maybe a closed mind. Maybe their eyes are not appreciating, even though their heart is. It's like you have to do your whole body. Yes? Can you just distinguish

[54:12]

Between grief and regret? Between grief and regret. I think they're related because mainly what you regret, I think, really, is you always regret something you didn't do fully. Something you did half-heartedly. And you can do a lot of unwholesome, negative things, you do, but really you weren't wholehearted. It seems like you regret because they caused trouble and so on. But really what you're regretting is that you weren't completely alive at that moment. Because if you were wholly, completely alive, you wouldn't have done something inappropriate. And being wholly alive means that you did it and it's over. Everything you do partially, I say, haunts you.

[55:18]

Everything you do partially means you didn't completely exhaust the activity at that moment, and therefore you still hold on to some extent. We can't let go of something before it's fully experienced. And similarly, if you fully experience something, you let go. you give it away when you fully experience it. But if you're with someone you like, for example, someone who's pleasant, friendly, beautiful, loving, you're with them, and you kind of like sit there and sort of enjoy the presence of such a wonderful person, but you don't do it fully, then when they change, or the moment passes, you're haunted by that loss of that person. But if you're fully with the person, even the most wonderful person, even if you could have like an interview with Buddha, if you're completely with Buddha, when the interview is over, that would be it.

[56:25]

And there would be no longing or regret that you weren't still in the room with her. But if you go to see Buddha and you don't fully experience it, you feel grief at the end of the interview. And you regret it. That you didn't say what you really wanted to say if you didn't. That you didn't pay attention the way you really wanted to pay attention if you didn't. You regret. You regret being inattentive to the great opportunity. And you're haunted by that regret. What is the medicine for that regret? Wholeheartedly feel the regret. Then you do the thing which you didn't do before. And your life says, okay, you did it. Until we're wholehearted, we'll be haunted by every moment of half-heartedness. But when you start being wholehearted, that's the medicine for all of our past laziness, all of our past inattentiveness, all of our past distractions from praise and slipping into manipulation.

[57:34]

Could you imagine going to bow to Buddha and then say, you know, your eyes aren't quite in the right place. Move them over there a little bit. Yes? Do you say greed, hate, and delusion? Yeah. Is it the same? Yeah. If you're living a life of greed, let's say you had some greed. Okay? So how would you praise the appearance of greed? You wouldn't exactly praise the greed. You'd praise the life form that gives rise to the greed. Like when you see, you know, a child or an animal being greedy, you don't exactly praise the greed. You praise the life. You appreciate the life. When a flower opens...

[58:36]

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