I vow to face the truth about the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Oops. Well, I was going to bring this out later, but it's insisting on appearing now, so this is my prop. And... Did I grant our wishes? Well, no, I was going to ask you a question. Was that what you were wishing? What is this? Magic wand. It's a star on a stick. Star on a stick. Diamond cutter. Diamond cutter, yeah. Empty. Empty. That's good. You're good. Part of the truth is Halloween custom. That's true. I let her borrow it. Star on a stick. So, the reason I brought this is, first of all, it's just so cute, and my house is full of things like this,

[01:06]

which is one of the privileges of living with a child, and her with me, because I get them for her, you know. So, star on a stick. This is what the Buddha saw the morning of his enlightenment. Star on a stick. Star on a stick. He saw a star, right, without the stick. So, what that means is that he saw a star without the grabbing, the holder, of a concept of a star. So, he saw this, just like you're seeing, just like this, with no imputations. Before you name it, before you jump on it, before you decide whether it's goofy or not, or whatever you decide, or whatever you're thinking, all of you have a different thing you're doing in there, in the privacy of your own minds. Whatever that thing is, before that jumps out, just this.

[02:06]

It's very simple. It's really simple, but it's almost impossible for us to hold that. Just this. It's very hard. We immediately start the storyline, the narrative. What's a star? Oh, yeah, that's helium, and blah, blah, blah. See, somebody told me that once, and we go off on this whole, how far away they are, and, you know, so on and so on. So, the magic of the Diamond Sutra is to see if we can cut away all the notions and just the star on the stick. That's all. It's a lot. It's great. It's wonderful. I was looking at the stars last night and, you know, trying to not take a hold of them. Just let them be alone up there with me, together. So, that's what I want to talk about today. And I was thinking before I came down that I wish you all could have been up in my house with me for the last couple of hours,

[03:09]

because I didn't sit down at all, which is what you've all been doing. I was pacing around. I had different stations where I had all these books, most of which I brought. And I was trying to put together some kind of narrative relating to the Diamond Sutra. And fortunately, one of the things that I read is an article by a man named Gerald Dougherty. And I brought it. If anyone's interested in a copy, later you can let me know. But what he says, his article is called Form is Emptiness, Reading the Diamond Sutra. And he's one of these really bright guys that's probably working on his Ph.D. or something, who plays with language and meaning and structure and, you know, using the Diamond Sutra as a kind of example of how to deconstruct story making. So what I began to think about was, here I am trying to put a story together.

[04:14]

I've got all these post-its all over my house. And I want to find a through-line or a connector to make the post-its into a story that I can then come and tell you. With a beginning, a middle and an end. The Diamond Sutra has no such narrative. No beginning, no middle, no end. And we're all going, what? What is this? It's just these stars jumping out. So Gerald Dougherty basically says the Diamond Sutra is kind of an anti-story making mechanism. It's sort of like demagnetizing your ATM card, you know. It won't work. You can't make your stories. So that was encouraging. That was an encouraging story for me. Why I can't get it together. So I went ahead and did it anyway. And I brought my post-its, most of them.

[05:15]

And I'm going to share them with you. And I decided yesterday that this was really going to be a post-it talk. That I would just bring each of them and tell you what's on it. And then that'll be the end when I'm done. When 10.30 hits. There's no chalk? What? I didn't even chalk. You have no idea. That's the worst. When Norman asked me to teach a class, I said, that's fine. And then I immediately said to Rin, I have to have the chalkboard. So I was thinking about that. Why do I have to have the chalkboard? And I thought, well for 20 years I sat in a class with someone writing on a chalkboard. That's what you do when you teach. Right? Isn't that how you learned everything you ever learned? So, I'm going to write on the chalkboard. But I'm not, because there's no chalk. Oh, thank you, Suki. That was how we knew what notes to take.

[06:20]

What they wrote on the board. What was important. That's right. That's right. What was important. So, like all those who preceded me, I found some poetry that I like, and I want to share. And this first one is, I guess, maybe some of you hate her, I don't know, but I think a lot of people like her. Mary Oliver? Probably a yes and a no from some, no, some yes. This is called The Buddha's Last Instruction. Make of yourself a light, said the Buddha, before he died. I think of this every morning as the east begins to tear off its many clouds of darkness to send up the first signal. A white fan streaked with pink and violet, even green. An old man, he lay down between two solitaries, and he might have said anything, knowing that it was his final hour.

[07:21]

The light burns upward. It thickens and settles over the fields. Around him, the villagers gathered and stretched forward to listen. Even before the sun itself hangs, disattached in the blue air, I am touched everywhere by its ocean of yellow waves. No doubt he thought of everything that had happened in his difficult life. And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills like a million flowers on fire. Clearly I am not needed. Yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value. Slowly, beneath the branches, he raised his head. He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd. So the Buddha is a response to suffering.

[08:27]

And what the Buddha taught was medicine for suffering. That's why he spoke it all. And I think when we study the wisdom teachings like the Diamond Sutra or the Heart Sutra, it's very easy to wonder, where's the compassion in all of this stuff? Where's the heart of the Heart Sutra? Where are the feelings, the caring? And so what's helpful to me in remembering about the caring part is that Buddha's teaching is basically, you know, the image of a bird is quite common, and the bird has two wings. And one wing is compassion, which we all pretty much understand. And the other wing is wisdom, which is how you have true compassion, is by understanding wisdom.

[09:29]

Without wisdom, compassion kind of flaps. It doesn't know what to do. It doesn't know how to respond. It's maybe sympathy or empathy. You don't even know if it's helpful what you're doing. So wisdom helps you to see what's helpful. And what the Buddha said was helpful was to help people to wake up. That's the medicine that he had to offer was the teaching of awakening. So the wisdom teachings are the teachings of waking up, which is compassion. To help people wake up is the greatest, highest compassion. So if you start to look at the history of Buddhist teaching, you know, in the beginnings, in the old wisdom schools, it's very easy to get a sense of how to practice. You be good. You be generous. You be peaceful. You work on purity, purifying body and mind.

[10:32]

So, you know, it seems like a kind of simple, straightforward way of training. The teachings are simple. Practices are simple. And as you get into the wisdom teachings, in later centuries, you know, it's like the teachings get very hard to understand and the practices are like ambiguous. Well, do we do this or don't we? Are we being silent or not silent? I mean, what are we doing here? So, it's there. Something's happened in this conversation among practitioners over the 2,000 years and that something is what we are trying to understand for ourselves because it's also what's happening within us. You know, we start off with a kind of simple idea about practice and then we get confused and get more confused. The longer you stay here, I promise, the more confused you'll get. So, I think part of what's been happening is a very intimate relationship

[11:40]

between practitioners within the very same temples. Like, if you stayed around here for a while, you'd begin to notice that those of us who live here are not in agreement. You already noticed that? About anything. And, you know, and this has been true. If you can imagine just projecting us back a couple thousand years, it's always been so. The monks are not in agreement. And so, these conversations about understandings of the teachings have been going on within the monastic communities for many, many, many thousands of years. And it's very intimate. And it's very much about, are you carrying something extra? Are you imputing something extra to your understanding? Are you making it so heavy that the bird can't fly? Have you reified something here? Have you made something real?

[12:40]

No. This bird has to be very light to fly. So, what are you holding on to? What do you have that's extra? What can we get rid of that will reveal the Buddha's mind, the lightest substance in the universe? And there are many systems. If one of the things that's very confusing and has been confusing for me for my several decades of Buddhist practice is, by dipping into these various systems, they're contradictory. So, if you read the old wisdom teachings and commentaries, well, that's not what it says, and that's not what so-and-so says. You actually hear the opposite. And one of the teachers I was reading was saying he went to a conference of Buddhists that they thought was going to be just a lovely occasion, gathering all these traditions together, and they said people came away so confused. One tradition said, you do it this way, and the other one said, no, no, no, you do it this way.

[13:45]

And I certainly have had that experience myself. Like, well, which one is it? What is ultimate reality? What is enlightenment? It's all these different understandings. So, it's helpful to me, at the moment, I found a really neat book that I've told my small group about, called, you know, this isn't the final answer by any means, but it's a good step along the way, it's called Appearance and Reality, and it's the Two Truths in the Four Buddhist Tenet System, by Guy Newland. And these are the Tibetan monks debating. They're good scholars. And what they basically have done, this is a system about systems. So the Tibetans have come up with a way of understanding the old texts, the Mahayana, the Yogacara, which is the mind only, it's part of what Norman's been teaching, and Majamaka, which is the Middle Way teaching,

[14:49]

which in this tradition, the Dalai Lama's tradition, is considered the highest understanding, Middle Way teachings, Nagarjuna. So they rank them by the finest layer is on top, and the thicker layer is on the bottom. And then they describe to you how each of these systems understands ultimate truth and relative truth, and they're each different. So I found that very helpful. I was like, oh, that's why I keep running into these distinctions. There are distinctions of definition. And of course, everyone is thinking that they're describing non-duality, which is the, you know, if we're going to, I've always thought that if we're going to put something up at the gate there, at the top of the road, it might be best to put non-duality as the kind of pointer

[15:58]

to what we're trying to realize. And certainly that's what all of the systems are attempting to explain, is what the Buddha saw. And what the Buddha saw was a world that was clean of duality, the star, just the star, just the star. Not two things, not one thing, not two things. Now, do you all have a pretty good sense of what duality is? I mean, does anyone not feel like, you know, well, what... Why don't you say what it is? Oh, okay. Thank you. Well, I'm really visual. I can't think without a picture. All my books are full of these little drawings. So anyway, this is a drawing of an Egyptian god. And I'm going to...

[17:00]

You like that, Lucas? Okay. So I saw this in a picture book one time, and they have different versions of this. Some of them have bird's heads and then human feet, human skirt and feet. And I thought, that's really curious, you know. This is a god. But then it struck me as just exactly what it's like to be a human being. You have this human, hairy toes and ankles and knees, and you get up to here and you kind of... After a while you can't see anything anymore, you know, except the sun and the trees and the birds. So you go from some kind of sense of yourself, lower half, to the universe around you, as what you perceive. So this is like our eyeballs looking out. And this dual nature is the basic problem for human life.

[18:10]

Is it inside? Is it outside? Is it right? Is it wrong? Is it me? Is it you? That's duality. All the ways that we see things as two things. Dual. Two things. And so all of the teachings are pointing at the fundamental fallacy of this inborn way that we see things. We come by it naturally. Nothing we did wrong. The only thing we do wrong is to teach duality. That's where we go, you know, we start with little kids and we teach them all the dualistic ways of thinking and then they're stuck. And they become adults who are really, really stuck. So the Buddha was teaching the opposite of our inborn perception. Now he didn't say that we're going to change our perception.

[19:14]

He said we're going to change our understanding of what we see. The idea of seeing through it rather than having it go away. You're going to understand differently. That's what changes, is your understanding. Not the world. You know, it's still going to look like this. I'm really sorry. But this is it. This is it. And it's not bad. Except we're kind of making a mess. We're hurting this world terribly. So non-duality. All right. And what? Oh, okay. So I did want to get back to the example from the first time I was here,

[20:15]

which was Amos's boat. You know, if we think of the old wisdom teachings, one way to understand that is kind of like Amos and his boat. You know, he trained himself, he studied, he learned navigation, he built this beautiful boat, and it was seaworthy, and he set out on the ocean of reality. And that was a very good story. Until we turned the page. And he fell off the boat. So part of what the wisdom teachings are trying to prepare us for is the stuff we're not prepared for, we're not ready for. We're not ready to fall off the boat. But that's what's happening to us all the time. I mean, I'm sure you've noticed that. No matter how well you get it set up, there's that phone call at midnight. And so we fall into reality, the ocean of reality, without our boat, without our system, without our strategies.

[21:16]

You know, and then what? I heard a story from Toro Toku, who was teaching here years back, and he was a wonderful teacher, Tibetan teacher, and someone asked him, he'd been talking about fearlessness in Tibetan practice and so on. One of the signs of enlightenment is fearlessness. And somebody said to him, well, what did you do when the Chinese came into Tibet? And he said, I ran. And I thought, now that's enlightened. There's flexibility there. You don't just have one idea about what fearlessness is or how to behave or what to do. It's like you figure out what's going on here and you respond appropriately. You run. So one of the things that we often do is we get stuck in our notions. We get stuck in one side or the other of these dualities,

[22:22]

and this is called holding on to views. And it's one of the first central teachings in the Diamond Sutra, which is Samyak. We recite this every morning in the Heart Sutra, the perception or notion. It's one of the five sthandas, forms, feelings, perception, impulse, consciousness. Perception is what you think you know. What you think you know out of all that's going on. You think you know something. That's a perception. And that's the reason it gets its own, of all the stuff going on with you, the reason it gets its own category among the five sthandas is because it's a big troublemaker. And what you, it also means to grab hold of. Norman mentioned that the other day. Grab hold. To grab hold of a sign, a notion of a sign.

[23:28]

Any being who grabs hold of a notion of a sign is not a bodhi being. So perceiving, these are called nimitta, is a word for sign, you know. Grabbing hold of a sign is not a bodhi being. Taking hold. So, this is the mechanism of how we fall out of truth. It's an important mechanism by how this happens. And this is what we're trying to study. How does this happen? What's the experience of this? And zazen is a kind of, one way, I don't want to define zazen, but it's one, let's say inside the zendo is one place you can study this process. Provided one small thing. And this is one of the main things I want to talk about today. You are not asleep.

[24:31]

So, I don't want to be rude to anybody because I've been watching you guys and I have a sneaking suspicion that many of you are doing this. When you're sitting. I'm supposed to be looking down, right? Yeah, that's right. Maybe there's a little bit of stuff going on there. But, so I want to talk about that. Buddha means awake. Why did they give him that name? That's kind of interesting. What does it mean to be awake? That's, you know, the name of the game. Game of the name. Awake. Buddha is awake. So that's the edge we're exploring. And I also thought, I had a secret agenda today. One reason I brought the props is to see if I could keep you awake. Because I've been watching you and I've been you in this class and I feel like it's a good time to catch up. And so, what is that?

[25:37]

What is that tendency we have? We all know it. I know it really well. To just drift into sleep. And there's a lot of different forms of sleep. Trance is a very pleasant. In fact, it's considered by Epicurus to be the highest form of pleasure. Is a trance. Good old trance. Not a cigar. But a trance. Actually, if you've ever smoked a cigar, they are trance inducing. And drugs. Sex. Sleep itself. Fantasies, dreams, notions. Are all ways of extracting ourselves from studying how this works. So, there's no judgment about that. But that's just, I think it's important for us to know, what are we doing? What am I doing right now? I'm taking a rest. Good. That's good. Probably more comfortable somewhere, like in your bed, than sitting on a Zafu.

[26:41]

But that's good to know what you're doing. Like, what am I doing? What am I doing? If it's pleasant, it may very well be trance. It's a good sign. And if you're rocking, it probably for sure is a trance. You ever seen this one? Ever done this one? Like Rock-A-Bye Baby? That's why you do that with babies, you know? It's a trance. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about trances, which I've been studying recently, because I think it's really interesting. And I also have become really convinced that that's most of what I've been doing in my Zazen for the last 24 years. Is trance. And one of the reasons I want to talk to you about it is because, not because I'm suggesting you don't do that, it's that I'm really interested right now in not doing that. And what it would mean to not join into the trance fields.

[27:46]

To, you know, flip around into trances. So anyway, yeah. Okay, so... So, as I was saying before, the wisdom teachings have, in terms of what they're teaching, as the teachings progress through the centuries, through the millennium, they go from having a lot of data and information and kind of affirmations of practices and teachings and lists and so on and so on and so on. You know, the affirmation side is quite thick and long. And as through the millennium, what happens is the affirmations get thinner and thinner and thinner. The Diamond Sutra is virtually affirmationless.

[28:48]

You know, it's negations. It's not this. It's not that. It's not that either. No, not that. No, not that. No. No, no, no, no, no. Now, I don't know what happened to you when we all read the Diamond Sutra together. And actually it would be really interesting to ask each of you, separately, what happened to you. Anything interesting? At all? In our small group, there were eight of us, and we each kind of said something about that. Oh, no, that's not true. It wasn't that eight people. About eight people came up to me after the class and said, Do you know what happened to me? And I didn't ask them, but they told me. And one person said the light in here was so bad she couldn't read. Someone else said, It's pure love. Someone else said, Why don't we do that as a play next time? Someone else said, I don't get it.

[29:55]

So it was like I kept getting these different people. The first one I thought, Oh, maybe we should do it as a play. You know, that must be right. And then the next person I thought, Well, gee, what did happen? And then I began to believe that each person in this room had a different experience. And I think that's probably true always about everything that happens. And it's good to remember that. There's nothing happening like one thing. So what I had as an experience, which I must admit I assumed you were all having at the same time. I almost said, Wow, look at that. You see that? I've read that sutra, you know, again, for many years in the way we're reading it in class. And, you know, I read a little bit. This is the structure of the sutra. So, you know, I've read it by reading a little bit over here.

[31:03]

A is not A. Therefore A. You know that pattern? Therefore A. So these are all A. A is not A. Therefore A. So in the years I've been reading it, I've read that one and that one and that one and that one. And I've read this one, too. But for the first time, this one, it was really weird. I was reading with you all and reading the whole thing. And all of a sudden, page 25, it says, I hope I have it. What do you think, Subhuti? Does the fleshly eye of the Tathagata exist? Subhuti replied, So it is, O Lord, the fleshly eye of the Tathagata does exist. And I saw this eye open. Like it was like, Whoa! What do you mean it does exist?

[32:04]

And it was like, who's looking at me? What is this? It was kind of like a trick. You say boat, everyone can see a boat, right? Well, it says eye, so I saw an eye. I didn't think that was so mysterious. But it did strike me as a wonderful, if it was intentional, which I'm sure it was, because I think these guys were the great geniuses of the world, that there's one affirmation. Buddha's eye, Buddha's wisdom, consciousness. And that's your eye, when it's free of all of these notions. The eye of the reader, which is the only thing alive for 2,000 years, in any direction, is you. That's your eye, Buddha's eye, one eye. You're looking at this old Buddha said that, you know, and died. And you get to read that wisdom eye is still alive, and it comes to life through your fleshly eye. You're the fleshly eye of the Buddha.

[33:06]

The wisdom eye is the one that you perceive and recognize as wisdom. So that's what I experienced, this reading of the Dhyana Sutra, which I really liked. I thought it was a wonderful possibility. So, just as the ocean amongst has one taste, the taste of salt, my teaching has one taste, the taste of liberation. So just one taste, the taste of liberation. Now, the thing about taste is that each of us alone knows the taste of something. So, the Buddha's teaching or your study of the Dharma and of yourself is not available to anyone else but you. You know, the taste of liberation only you can recognize for yourself.

[34:10]

Now, you can go check it out with somebody and say, what do you think of the soup? You know, how does it taste to you? And they might say, yeah, it's the worst soup I ever ate. And what do you think if they say that? Do you then doubt your taste? Yeah. Some of you do, some of you don't. Maybe you doubt their taste. I mean, they don't know anything about food. So, this is the tradition of taking your understanding to the teacher. It's basically, it's your understanding, you've accumulated through your years of study and you bring that forward. And the teaching stories of these presentations by the students are quite helpful to us, I think. Tozan, who is the founder of the Soto, one of the founders of Soto Zen, our tradition, when he went to his teacher with his understanding, he said, you know, his soup, he said, how do I find my true self? Where's the taste of liberation?

[35:14]

And his teacher said, ask the messenger within. You, you taste it, what do you think? And Tozan said, I'm asking him now. Tell me. And the teacher said, well, what does he say? Very sweet, very sweet. Sweet taste. So, this was Tozan's confirmation, confirmation class. Now, there are actually only two ways that we know, or that I can think of, to learn how to cook. And these are the two ways that the Buddha taught. And one of them is theory. And the other is training, practice, cooking,

[36:20]

farming, growing, gardening, cleaning, karaoke, chanting. So, so you know the story of the Buddha, you know that he, he had a vision of reality called the Four Noble Truths. And what he saw was, so this is theory, what he saw was that there is suffering and it has a cause. Suffering and its cause, suffering and its cause, suffering and its cause. The word for this is samsara. It means endless circling. Samsara. So also if you, you know, if we had a CD-ROM of all of this,

[37:23]

you could push this button for Noble Truth 1 and 2 and you'd get the 12-fold chain. That's the elaboration of how this works. That's the clockwork of 1 and 2. Ignorance, clinging. Ignorant, clinging. Desire is the cause of suffering. Round and round and round. I put a drawing of the Tibetan's depiction of the 12-fold chain in Cloud Hall. If you've seen it, the pictures, again I like pictures, they help a lot. So at the center of that clockwork is our common ground, our most common ground. Greed, I want it. Hatred, I don't want it. And confusion, I don't know if I want it or not. A rooster, a snake and a pig. You'll see those in the middle. And that's the center, the driving, the drive wheel of the 12-fold chain. Greed, hate and delusion.

[38:26]

So that's Truth 1 and 2. 3 and 4 is another set, another pair of cause and effect relationships. So these are two sets of cause and effect relationships. What the Buddha studied was causality. How does this come to be? How does the world arise? What's going on here? Suffering comes to be, pleasure comes to be, through desire and clinging. Round and round and round. So this one, 3, is cessation of this. And this one, the circles go this way. Renunciation. We renounce the causes of suffering. And this is called, we call this one nirvana. Nirvana.

[39:27]

Cessation. And the cause of cessation is your way of life, how you live. How do you live your life? So the way you live your life is the cause for the end of suffering. It's no quick fix. Okay. So, Eightfold Path. This is all theory. Eightfold Path. Easy way to remember is this clam. Ananda Dahlenberg taught us that years ago. I've never forgotten Eightfold Path, thanks to Ananda. This clam, if you can remember this clam, you've got the Eightfold Path. View. Intention. Speech. Conduct.

[40:33]

Livelihood. Effort. Mindfulness. Meditation. The first two, right view, right intention, are the theories. That you're understanding, right view means that you understand the Four Noble Truths, you understand dependent co-arising, impermanence, all of these basic principles, you understand intellectually. That's, that you have the theory in your mind. You know the theory, you've drilled in the theory. Oh yeah, what was that, what's number one, what's twelve, one through twelve, what are they? You've actually learned them, they're in you. You've got the theory, right view, right intention is that you really intend to learn this stuff, you're really going to do it, and you also intend to save all beings through your understanding. You are a Bodhisattva, intent on enlightening

[41:35]

yourself for the benefit of others. So this is the theory. That's what you set out, each day you set out with that theoretical basis. And then you practice, you train, you practice cooking with these other six. How you speak, how you behave, what you do for a living, what kind of efforts you make, your mindfulness practices, your meditation practices. Okay. So this is how you learn anything. Particularly this is how you learn the Buddha Dharma. So. Okay. Okay.

[42:41]

So non-duality is the theory that we're pointing to in our offerings, all of our sutra offerings during morning service, our non-dual teachings, the Sandokai, the Heart Sutra. Each one of them, if you read them with an eye to non-duality, you'll begin to understand why they're like that. What is that flavor? Non-duality is the flavor of liberation, taste of liberation. So what I want to talk about is, in a little more practical vein, is this second step, which is the training practice step. And that's why I was wondering about what you're doing in the Zen Dharma. Because because I think it's good to know what you're doing. And

[43:44]

recently I had the fascinating experience of studying for half a day with a jhana master. There are eight jhanas. This used to be a popular number in Buddhism. Eight jhanas. And these are trances. Do you all know about jhanas? Have you all studied jhanas? Anybody studied with a jhana master, jhana teacher? Anybody know they've been in a jhana? A few of you know. Okay, most of you probably have. And I'm going to tell you what they're like. I'm going to describe them to you. And what I really enjoyed about this, listening to this teacher was, I went, Oh! Oh, oh, oh, I see. That's what's going on. The Buddha practiced jhanas. His first two,

[44:49]

you do actually know jhanas if you've heard the life of the Buddha, because he first started by studying with jhana masters. His first teacher taught him the realm of non-perception, where everything just disappeared. A thousand ox carts went by and he didn't hear a sound. That's pretty good. So his teacher said, You teach this, you're really good at it. And he said, No, this isn't the end of suffering. As soon as I come out of the trance, I'm miserable again. And so he left. And he went to the next meditation teacher who taught him the realm of perception, non-perception, which is the highest, the eighth jhana. And he could do that. And he said, This isn't it either. He came out of that. It's a very, very refined state of mind. It's like, you know, just a wisp of being. It's all you are. A little wisp of being, like a cloud in an endless sky.

[45:49]

So, I got this book in our bookstore, by Aya Khema, who is a great jhana master. That was her thing, was teaching jhana. And people would come from all over the world to study how to do this. She could teach about 75% of the people that went to her, well, her student said. And he's had the same percentage of luck. So it looks like it's a pretty large percentage of people can enter these jhanas during these meditation times. And they can describe what's happening to them. And then the teacher can say, That's right, you're in jhana two. You're in four. You're in five. And this man, he uses the jhanas to sort of relax. The reason I'm bringing up the jhanas is because I think if you don't know that you've hit one, you might think, this is it.

[46:53]

And what they say is that when you hit the first jhana, which is very pleasant, jhana number one is characterized by pleasure, you get very interested in meditation. So if any of you are very interested in meditation, I promise you, you've hit jhana one. That's the sign. It's so nice. Now, one of you brought up The Mission, the movie The Mission. There's another scene in that movie, maybe you remember. Robert De Niro is a conquistador, and he's killed his brother. And he goes to a, this is like in Peru or something, and he goes to a priest, my brother David, and he says, I'm just going to stay in this cell until I die. He stops eating. He's so horrified at his action

[47:56]

of killing his brother, who he loved. But it was over a woman. Anyway. They just go out for dinner. It's crazy. So he's killed his brother, and he's basically dying. He's wasting away. He's not cleaning himself. He's completely given up on life. And this priest comes and says, come with me on this mission to the Indians. So Robert De Niro finally agrees to go, and there's this huge waterfall, and they have to climb up the slippery slopes to where the Indians are, the native people. And Robert De Niro assigns himself the task of carrying his armor, his metal armor, in a sack as his penance. And it's a huge sack with his sword and everything in it. And he's climbing up here, and it's a long scene, remember that,

[48:57]

of him climbing where he's slipping and falling, and just like, you're sure he's going to die any second. And he's kind of hoping that's what's going to happen. Finally, he gets up to the top with his sack. He's laying there flat on the ground, absolutely exhausted. And this Indian, has beautiful markings on his face, native Indian, yeah, I guess American, comes up to him with a knife, and you think, ah, he's going to get it now. And the Indian cuts off the rope that's holding the armor, and the armor goes crashing down. And Robert De Niro stands up, free. First John. It's like that. It's so obvious, it's so wonderful to drop that burden that you've been carrying all your life. That the sense of relief, you know, right away. It's a tremendous gift when you hit the first John. And that's why people spend a lot of time.

[49:59]

The problem is, it's like the monkeys with M&M's. You keep pushing that button, and don't eat anything else but chocolate, you'll get very sick. It's not good food to just go into a trance. This is a trance. It's helpful for calming the mind, but it's not the point, and it's not, it's not what the Buddha was doing. He wasn't trancing. So that's just number one, you know, all the way up through eight. Now once you've had the experience of the first Jhana, the rest of them aren't like that. You don't have this great big yahoo experience over and over again. It's more subtle. It's little steps of refinement. Now the Buddha, he went from one to eight, and when he finally sat down under the Bodhi tree, he was trying to figure out

[51:00]

how to approach his mission, his mission, which was to find the cause and end of suffering. And he thought about first Jhana, which he had quite accidentally fallen into as a young child when he was fourteen years old, and I know many people have these kinds of experiences as children, and probably children are having them all the time, of slipping into a trance with a butterfly just, you know. So he sat down, he was at a festival and there were many animals being hurt, I don't know if you remember the story of the agricultural festival, and everyone's celebrating the harvest, and all he could see was all the animals being cut in half by the plows. It was terrible carnage to this young man. He was a very sensitive young man. So he sat down by himself away from the party, and quite by accident he entered a trance,

[52:02]

first Jhana, which is accompanied by pleasure and thinking. It's not blank. There's thinking. So when he sat down as a grown man under the Bodhi tree, he went there first, and that's where he studied himself from that position of relaxed, pleasant feeling, with thought. And he studied reality with his thinking mind. And that's how he was able to articulate the Four Noble Truths, the Twelvefold Chain, because he saw it, he was thinking about it. How does this world come to be? What's going on? What is it that's creating all of this before my eyes moment after moment? How does it work? What's going on? He studied the theory. He learned the theory and then he taught the theory.

[53:02]

And what he taught, you know, now, this is great, I mean, he got enlightened, we all know that, that was great, but it's not really that important. It's not important at all that one person gets enlightened. What was important is that he taught others. He was a teacher, and he taught other people how to do it. That was what was important, was the self and other, the gift, the emptiness of the giver, receiver, and the gift of enlightenment. That's why we celebrate the Buddha. That's why we know who he was and care about him and put him on the altar, because he taught others, still alive, he didn't die, because he taught. And what he taught was expressed by his first disciple, Kongdana, who was one of the ascetics. And Kongdana said,

[54:05]

all that arises, ceases. And Buddha said, that's it, you got it. All that arises, ceases. Knowing that the world arises is the antidote to isn't. There's nothing. Nihilism. Knowing that the world ceases is the antidote to is. Eternalism. This is non-duality. That's what Kongdana understood. Non-dual reality. Neither is nor isn't. All that arises, ceases. It is there. It isn't there. Which is it? All that arises, ceases. It's this. Whole. One whole eyeball.

[55:10]

That's the watcher. Observing reality. But not from outside. So, non-duality. Is and isn't. That's the whole thing. The Diamond Sutra is just another version of that. And what it does, you know, this A, not A, is it forces us to sit right in the middle of this spin. A, not A. A, not A. And by doing this, by putting us in this contradictory position, the paradox, we can't stand paradox. Is it or isn't it? We want it to be one or the other. That's our nature. So by forcing us to experience this point, it's vacillating, oscillating, we can actually see how the mind fabricates the mechanism of creation itself.

[56:14]

How the mind fabricates the world. How we make this into something more than just this. For good and for ill. Beautiful poetry comes out of elaboration too, but so does terrible suffering. So the main point is that you see how it works, so that you're not subject to it. You're not just at the whim of is or isn't, because your mind says so, you think it's true. Well, start to doubt your mind. It's a very good idea. Is it in one of the jhana states? Well, he was in the first jhana, just as a way of kind of being pleasantly comfortable so he could study. You don't do your homework, you know, standing on one foot. You usually find a chair with a cushion, good lighting, a cup of tea. So that's kind of like jhana, first jhana.

[57:17]

And you're saying, too, that what we do is a way of relieving the pain of the paradox of is it or isn't it by elaborating and substantiating and embodying it? Don't you think? Don't you think so? I think I do. Yeah, I think I do too. You can watch it, you know, watch yourself on the main screen any day of the week just getting carried away with your narrative, you know, the Truman Show. It's like we're all just kind of like doing these narratives. And the thing that, another part that is important, you know, in the Heart Sutra it says inverted views, that it's very important, it's key to the Heart Sutra, is when these are reversed to their proper... Right? Yeah, when they're right. Thank you. So there are four inverted views

[58:20]

that we all quite naturally, no blame, assume to be the case. And we assume that there's a self, a unity called a self that we defend to the death. You know, the best way to see this self is to be wrongly accused. Who, me? I didn't take those cookies. So anyone wrongly accuse you, and you can see, that's why we do all of this self-revealing activity around here. You know, would you be Kokyo? People will see me, they'll hear me. That's right. You can see you and hear you too. This is the artificial self that you've created and try to protect. It's an imagination. So there's that belief. The second one is in permanent entities outside of yourself that you can get a hold of. Lots of examples of that.

[59:20]

Gold, silver, knowledge, cars, sexual partners. The other is going to complete you, make you more perfect. So this self believes in itself and it believes in the other and it believes, number three, that chasing after the other is pleasant. Our entire culture is based on this belief. Shopping. That we will, by virtue of acquiring these objects, be happy. This will make us happy forever. We believe it. We do believe it. I believe it. I admit it. I believe it. It can get more and more, you know, Nirvana is a good one. I don't like to shop. Nirvana.

[60:21]

Oh, not shopping, that's a good one. I like to stay home. Whatever, you know. Anything you want or don't want will work just fine. Oh, good. You were released. I thought maybe I wasn't part of the group. No, no, you're not. Everyone's in. So this is pleasant. This pursuit of happiness. It's in the Constitution. It's pleasant. And the last one is that the above three are truth. All of the above. All of the above is truth. We really believe what we believe. You know, this is the conviction level. When in fact, these are upside down. There's no self. There are no permanent objects. This is suffering. Pursuit, you know, it's the first and second noble truth. Suffering is caused by desire. This is suffering. Wanting things.

[61:23]

Imagining there are things outside of yourself that you can get, that you don't already have, like the sun in the morning, the moon at night. You already have it. But you put them outside of yourself and long for it. The star in the sky. And all of these, this whole adventure is empty of any inherent existence. It's all empty. And that's what it is. It's empty. That's what you can say. That's the affirmation of the Prajnaparamita Sutras. It's empty. You don't get anything else. It's all gone. Except you get all of it back empty of any inherent existence. The stars, the moon, the sun, your friends, you get them all qualified by being empty of any inherent existence.

[62:24]

So it's just the same thing. All that arises ceases. All that arises, it is empty. It's the quality. This is the qualifier. You can put anything in the blank. Anything you name, all phenomena, self, any category of existence, any language form that we've invented is qualified by being empty. And including empty. There is no such thing as emptiness that's floating around out there. The concept of emptiness is empty too. it's very peaceful. Such a place. Very peaceful. It's just, it's right here. It's what's happening.

[63:26]

What's peaceful? What's happening. But isn't peaceful kind of pleasure? Isn't that pleasure peaceful? Well, that would be maybe like, what are you going to do when it's not? Where do you go to live when it's not pleasant? No, you'd have to start sorting. And that's what we tend to do. It's like, I want all the pleasant things in my house with me and all the unpleasant things in his house with him. That's not very nice. I know. And we try that. We try to make that happen. You know, not to get those unpleasant things. It's much better to see how it's all empty. To actually understand the emptiness of pleasant, of unpleasant. That's more like true pleasant. But I'm going to be like, ripped out of these jhana states to get to that. No, jhana states are helpful. The first jhana is okay.

[64:27]

And actually all of them are fine. If you find yourself in a jhana state, it's just fine. But don't think that's the point of the exercise. It's good to get rid of your stress and stop running around, you know, to relax and calm down. You calm the mind and study the real. You don't study the real from the back of a pickup truck. You can't. It just, it looks like the back, you know, it looks like movement, erratic movement. So you need to calm the mind in order to see. And then if you get better at it, you know, like Amos, he could ride the ocean waves. You can see what's happening regardless of the conditions. You just stay with what's going on. But that's pretty fanciful. Sometimes you need a way out. Sometimes you need a way out. Yeah. Coast guard. If you experience that,

[65:30]

such as the state of experiencing itself as just a little speck in the great universe. Is there a step out of that in meditation, like coming back to something concrete, like a breath? Is that, if you're saying that that is a kind of sleepiness in meditation, then what's the step? Oh, to come back? To come back. Well, you know, we ring the bell for you, and that's one way for you to check in about what you've been doing. When the bell rings, like, I've been, for some time I've been working with someone who actually is fairly well trained in hypnotherapy. So, I asked him about trance, like, what are the characteristics of trance? He said, well, it's kind of a, if I snap my fingers, you'll know you've changed your state of consciousness. You'll snap out of it. So that's one way to tell you've been in a trance. If you hear that bell, and it's like, oh, where have I been? You've probably been in a trance. So,

[66:31]

what I've been trying lately, just, in the spirit of experimentation, not as like, nothing more than that, is to open my eyes more, which is kind of why I was bringing that up. The way I used to be sitting, my normal way, and I'll still do it automatically when I sit down, is to start with my eyes open, and pretty soon, they are all the way down. And, I'm cruising around in thought forms. You know, I got, Red gave a great teaching about this in the last session. How many of you were in the Rahatsha session? A few. I thought this was really helpful. He said that one of the students came to him with this image, and Red thought this was a good insight about how it works. So here's this iron pole covered with Velcro. And here's this ball covered with Velcro on a string.

[67:37]

And this, these are magnetized. And this is a thought form. You may, anything. Last week, what you ate for dinner, your mom, you know, what you want to do with your life, anything like that is in this ocean. I kind of added for myself this kind of, you know, vast ocean reservoir of all the things I've ever heard, learned, or stored in my consciousness. And I don't know what's in there. I can't access it. It's just stuffed. I'm stuffed. So, out of all that stuff, one of these pops up. Have you noticed that? Randomly. Did you decide to think about that? I don't know. I don't think so. So, up it comes. And then, when it comes, it is drawn to your attention. And it sticks. And there you are.

[68:39]

You're in it. You know, for a while. And then it stops. And you're released. Back to my meditation. The next one. You know, and this goes on and on and on. And if you watch with your eyes open, I promise you, well, I don't know, I don't promise you. But anyway, I think what you'll maybe see, let me know, is how sickening this is. That you can't stop doing this. You know, over and over and over again. And release. And release. You know. And some of these things are really happy. And some of them make you cry. And you know, it's just like wild what's going on. And these are the six realms that you're migrating through in Buddhist terminology. You're just visiting the six realms. You know the six realms,

[69:40]

right? No, that's eight. But you know it's not eight. I gotta get there. It's frustrating. Thank you. Okay. Six realms are heaven, hell, human, they're all eight. Stock, excuse me, I used the example of stock brokers. Fighting gods who want to get into heaven. A hungry ghost over here. Who are just longing all the time. And animals who are fighting, period. So above the line are fairly good realms. These are more on the positive vein of good incarnations. The reward for good deeds. The lower realms are not so pleasant. You know.

[70:40]

This is kind of like teenagers. Animals. They're just, you know. Amen. I'm speaking for myself. And hell, you have no choice. You're just there. You're pressured down. There's nothing you can do. Just like, I can't move. The worst depression you can imagine. That's hell. Hungry ghosts, just, what about this longing? So all of these kind of circulate around us human beings as states of mind. These are states of mind that we go through. And that's what we're visited by. Over and over and over. So, okay, what do you do about that? Well, if you watch it, if you keep your eyes open and you watch this process. What happened to me is that I thought this was so sickening. It was so sickening

[71:45]

that my urge to get away from this was so strong. To either join it, like, well, let's just go to heaven if we gotta do this. You know, let's just think about nice things. Was to either distract or to trance. Well, just the same thing. Trance. I'll go to heaven. That's a trance. Go live with the gods. The only problem with heaven is it doesn't last. Everything's impermanent. All of these states are impermanent. Ends. So, usually, from heaven you tend to go right to hell because you want to be back in heaven. You're longing for, yeah, you're longing for heaven. So, this is so sickening that the next instruction is, so the first instruction is watch this. See how it works. The next instruction is let it get as big as it wants to get. Meaning, sickening. How sickening can you get?

[72:49]

How disgusting can you get? Well, it gets pretty big. Our usual way is to try and get out of it. Make it tiny. I'm uncomfortable, so I'll shrink it. But instead, if you go the opposite direction and let it, let it get big. This is the same direction for going into the jhanas, by the way. You just expand the feeling. This is how you enter the jhanas and how you move up them. You keep expanding on what's there and letting it get big until you're in infinite space. That's number seven. Your mind has become the universal mind. You let it get really big. Sickening. Biggest sickening that you've ever, you know, you never get it that big because usually you'll avert. So you let it get really big and what'll happen is it pops. Popped. Popped. It pops because it has no contrast. That's my favorite.

[73:51]

My favorite. There's no contrast. Sickening depends on duality. All things depend on duality. Pleasant, unpleasant, you know, they are in relationship to one another. So if you stay with this until it's all there is, it has no relationship and it can't live. Then what happens is for a while I'm a little confused like do you let the feeling of being sickened get huge or the the thought form No, no. You stay away from the thought forms. That's what'll make you sick. If you don't get caught in them and sort of go into the story, the narratives. Right. Stay out of the stories. Okay. And with nothing there but the floor or the wall in front of your eyeballs.

[74:52]

That's pretty sickening. All by itself. The wall. I have a floor right now as I'm sitting out but it's really hard to stay with the floor. We're having a great relationship you know, landscape very dense hardwood. So this again this is an exploration I don't know I don't know if you like it or not you could check it out see if you like it but my sense is that this is one way to dispel this process of you know, for a while and I was I was noticing that in a recently in a staff meeting I was starting to get into my usual one of my realms which is often it's kind of a hell realm where I feel oppressed by what people are saying I can't believe they just said that you know it's the stupidest thing

[75:53]

I've ever heard in my entire life you know and unfortunately this is a friend of mine so I can't really respond the way I'd like to and it's just pressure to not move or not act so I did this exercise of just letting that feeling get very big how angry and disgusted and frustrated and you know just to let it grow and [...] it just it went away and then I was able to actually talk about the issue that we were discussing without all this kind of contraction you know and I thought God that's really nice that's to me a nice way to function would that be one way to confront fear or anxiety just to indulge indulge it not to indulge it but exaggerate it leave it alone leave it alone let it have its way with you it's there it's calm

[76:54]

unbidden what's it want to do it wants to go away it's impermanent it won't last but our thought forms the stories we'll do around anxiety what we tend to do is you get an anxious feeling and you look around for the cause of your anxiety Fred you know and I'll make up a whole thing about and then I'll remember all the times of it and pretty soon you're in that conceptual world which doesn't have that same apparent impermanence that just the feeling itself will actually go away and let you think again come back I think you all do this some way or another children do it it's kind of you know we kind of know how to stop we've learned this a while ago

[77:56]

I don't remember when you gave a Dharma talk and I remember you asking us in the beginning to watch our feelings throughout the talk throughout the hour whatever it was just notice them maybe you'd say something and I'd feel sad or I'd feel happy and it was really amazing for me because I saw that in that period of time they went like this constantly just on anything you know I just went from oh to oh and it was good to see it really helped to not believe in them quite as strongly because I saw how quickly they arise and fall it doesn't mean of course I believe in them all the time but it was just a good example to tie it to this I think you know I was just getting a little worried that I was making this into a system another system you know like here's food system for something or another please don't

[78:57]

be burdened by it it's really just you know for me this is an example of study the self well trances trances if you're going to study through trances know what trance you're in it's good to know what you're doing so study trances then if you're trancing fine learn about trances learn how to go up to number 8 and back down again I think it dispels the magic of them if you actually engage with them they're not quite so like the end all just a bit another tool for studying the self for studying reality can you distinguish in any way between these trance states that you're describing and samadhi no I don't know I'm trying to get that all worked out I don't know yet if they mean the same thing if it's the first jhana has anyone studied do you read up on it

[79:58]

at all do you know is there a difference do you know what it is I don't know may I do you know no we don't know my concierge doesn't know so it's not known it can't be known it can't be known Diana would you call Reb sometime ago I was having a yoga assignment with Angle and I was I was so distressed and I felt at some point as I was talking to him that I was using every title from every existential writer I'd ever read you know no escape nausea and I couldn't even stop it because it goes with the words I had described what what I hear you describing the difference for me is that it isn't that I let it get bigger it just gets bigger

[80:58]

and there really is no escape I mean there just isn't and I remember going through this and complaining I mean like complaining like I can't get out of here and it's horrible and I can't stand it but I can't not stand it I mean what else is there to do and Angle said to me this is why you came here and I just started to laugh it's like you've got to be kidding me he had his pushpins but it after describing it when that happens when I don't get out of there by distraction it does it just kind of goes it gets so big that it isn't a decision to stay with it it's just there's nothing else to do and and then it was gone onto the next onto the next

[81:59]

just watching that that's what we're arising and falling arising and falling all that arises ceases and Emma Sheldon has a story in one of the books I don't remember which one called Invite the Dragons in for tea have any of you read that? she told us that one when she was well those of us who were in the room yes but that's a wonderful wonderful way of reading reality is to see do all of you know that story? why don't you tell it I don't think they do short and sweet there's a Tibetan monk that was very old and had been living in a cave for years and years and he went out one day to get some fresh air and flare and he came back and his cave was filled with dragons spewing smoke and fire

[83:00]

and angry and he looked at him and he was terrified and so he kind of pulled himself together and he said get out get out and he swish waved his arms and a lot of these dragons just looked at him and walked out of the cave but there was still some there and he waved his arms and yelled and he chanted and nothing happened and so he said well will you have some tea so they all sat down and drank some tea and whereupon most of the dragons all but one got up and got shown in light and then there was the last dragon who was still spewing smoke and was angry and snorting and the dragon wouldn't leave no matter what this poor old monk did and so he said well you're here I'm

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here

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