drop in to the experience of being here this morning and welcome, welcome one and all. And before we begin, just reflecting for a moment or two on how it is that you come to be here this morning. Can you hear me at the back? just resonating with the energy that it has already taken this morning to get the body from wherever it was to ring-gulch.

[01:15]

And so taking a few moments and simply settling, dropping in. realizing that your intention to be here is already approximately realized. So giving yourself over to simply potentially being completely here. And letting go of whatever the motivating factors were that have brought you. And attending for a moment or two to what we might call the soundscape.

[02:31]

the fact that sound and spaces between sound are always presenting themselves continually to our ears and to the consciousness associated with the ears, so that no effort is required other than to be present not so much striving to listen for or reach out to sound, but to simply allow the sounds to come to you as, of course, they already are. Sounds near, sounds far, sounds validably soft, delicate,

[03:47]

So just sitting with hearing for a moment or two. immersed in the air and therefore in the soundscape, where there are sounds and the spaces between sounds. And noticing that in the arising of the sounds, they are met in a certain way in awareness and recognized, known, even before thinking wells up.

[06:02]

and we start to interpret and name our experience. Just the bare actuality of hearing itself without preferring one sound to another, without seeking anything, simply resting in attending in hearing just what's here to be heard. And since the sounds, whatever they are, are carried to us through the air, bathe us in the soundscape.

[09:08]

allowing our awareness for a moment or two to include the experiencing of the air around the body, in the room, so that as we are drinking in the sounds, realize that we're also bathing in and drinking in, breathing in air. Coextensive with what we might call the airscape, the fluid in which we continually move, are embedded, and on which we depend for every, and in particular this, very

[10:44]

life giving vital breath. So allowing the awareness to hold the entirety of the soundscape and the airscape outwardly as well as inwardly, if you care to see those as two. which, of course, they're not in any fundamental way. And rather than identifying with the sounds or with the air or with the breath or with the hearer or the knower of any of this, resting in the knowing, the hearing, the breathing itself,

[12:19]

In other words, in wakefulness, in awareness itself, in being itself. in the only moment that is ever available to us. This one. And when you're ready, if you care to, allowing your eyes to open so that you can now drink in whatever presents itself through the eyes.

[15:17]

And allowing that awareness to be co-extensive with the ear awareness, the breath awareness, the air awareness, including the skin. And just allowing this awareness to unfold moment by moment for the entire day, even as we move in and out of various aspects of what we will be engaged in and encountering. So welcome.

[16:23]

It's really nice to see you all here. And let me just suggest that if you care to come up closer, you're welcome to. I don't bite. It's really nice to see a full house on the sides, you know, people just going for the cushions. Not that there's any virtue in sitting on the cushion, but you're welcome. If you think there's virtue in it, it could be a problem. But sitting on the cushions is no problem at all. I mean, only do it to the degree that it feels sensible for you to do it. So don't get into... I'm in absolute agony, but they're on the cushion, so I better stay on the cushion. You can always get up and sit on the chair, or for that matter, lie down on the floor if you want to.

[17:28]

This space for this time is our own, and we can be in it, and you're invited to be in it any way that feels comfortable to you. Sitting, standing, walking, pacing, lying down, sitting on chairs. So the subject of this gathering today, workshop, and you'll notice I'm reading this. Coming to our senses, the body door into shikantaza and clear present wakefulness. Those terms don't mean anything to you, don't worry. How many of you were at my talk last night? I'm glad you were there. I guess I wasn't in a certain way. The whole talk was about how easy it is to not see what's actually going on.

[18:31]

And I think I completely embodied that unwittingly and without knowing it. to my ultimate chagrin, I sensed at the time there was some little energy that I wasn't really understanding. And I get home to here at the end of the evening, look at the description and the title of the talk, and I actually stated last night that I was giving a talk that was the title of this workshop, Coming to Our Senses Instead of... American Karma, American Dharma and evolutionary perspective on how we can heal ourselves in the world through mindfulness. So I guess you get in every moment exactly what you need in order to wake up. And it's not that I would have given a very different talk because really I've discovered over the years that I'm always saying pretty much the same thing. no matter what avenue I start from,

[19:36]

But it was actually quite humbling to realize that I hadn't, for various reasons, bothered to look and just made an assumption about what the subject of the talk was. So I had 250 or 300 people there last night who came with one expectation and I was the only one in the room that didn't know it. And here I am talking about how easy it is to not know something and to not perceive something. So Winston Churchill once observed that, said, I've had to eat my words many a time, and I've found the diet to be quite nourishing. And while it's not a question of eating my words, I don't disavow anything that we touched on last night. It was a perfect object lesson on how easy it is to in a certain way be slightly out of touch, especially when you get into thinking that you're in touch or that you know what you're supposed to be talking about without maybe checking.

[20:48]

And I always check. I have no explanation for why that happened. I mean, I could create millions of them. But I'm not inclined to do that, but to simply say that in a way it's the... the heart of what I was talking about anyway. And nations can do that. They have an opinion about who they are, what they are, and their own goodness and value of what they're doing in the world, and just be completely off. And everybody else knows it, but we don't know it. Just read the foreign press sometime. So that was very interesting for me to reflect on last night. The subject of this workshop is, in fact, coming to our senses, and they're intimately related.

[21:50]

I mean, the fact that this is happening in America, that there are Zen centers like this in America, that people practice in monasteries in America, that people devote years and years and years of their lives to doing this kind of work in places like Green Gulch is very unusual and fairly new. It's like really one generation. And so there is an interesting karmic thread that's moving in America in the direction of dharma. And the real challenge is if dharma has come to every country in Asia, it goes through a transformation and becomes part and parcel of that country. It's not a skin graft. It's not an add-on, so to speak. And so our challenge in the West now is to understand what American or Western Dharma actually is and take, of course, from the traditions and honor the source in every conceivable way.

[22:58]

But at the same time, not fall into some kind of parochial understanding of what practice really is so that we really digest it, we really imbibe it, we live it. So how many of you are brand new to meditation? This is like your first exposure. Welcome. Great. So you have no idea what I'm talking about anyway. Welcome, especially to you folks. Basically, what I am talking about is living our life as if it really mattered while we have it to live. And if you start to pay attention, you notice. I mean, it's unavoidable that we wind up noticing that a lot of the time we're kind of zoning along on autopilot. thinking we're pretty much present, but it's mostly thinking. And then all sorts of things can happen which are really outside the realm of our immediate awareness because we're too absorbed in what we think is happening.

[24:06]

And so we can actually work at, practice reclaiming our capacity for being fully embodied in our lives as they're unfolding. And as I was suggesting in this brief meditation practice, although it's become something of a cliché, it's nevertheless, you know, controvertibly the case that we only have moments to live. We think we have forever, but what we have are moments. And a lot of them spill over the dam and are lost to us because we are much of the time zoning along, as I said, on autopilot and out of touch. If you start to pay attention to where the mind is from moment to moment, a lot of the time you'll find that it's in the future.

[25:13]

How many of you would say that worry is a major part of your life experience? Just worry. Just raise your hand if that is the case. We practice worrying. We get really good at it. And what about blaming yourself, like attributing things that have happened to particular causes and then beating yourself up? Anybody do that? I noticed like last night that that was like I was right for that. If I wanted to like how could I possibly not look at the program and see what I was supposed to be talking about since I was the one that gave it that title in the first place and because I really wanted to give that talk at the Zen Center. So, you know, one comes to see at a point that, yeah, you can do that, too. But it really is not to be sort of taken personally. Like it was like just happened.

[26:18]

So no need to be anything but generous with yourself and maybe laugh and smile and realize how easy it is to miss what's right in front of our faces. The whole theme of last night, for those of you who weren't there, I showed a lot of slides of things changing in pictures. Many people actually never saw what was changing in the picture. You have one picture, another picture flashing on and on. It's the same picture, but one thing changes between the one thing and the other. And it's unbelievably hard to see, even though it's right in front of you, so that you can actually look without seeing. And the same is true, you can listen without hearing anything. or eat without tasting, or touch without being touched at all or know that you're touching, or get caught up in your expectations of what you think the title of the talk is and make that the reality or anything else, and so know or think you know without knowing at all.

[27:31]

And I even said last night, you know, I was just kidding around. I said, you know, none of the women asked any questions. And I said something about, well, you're knowing and not saying. I wish somebody had actually said to me, hey, John, how about the talk that we came for? But, you know, you were too kind. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I did almost. I almost did. And you know, it's a funny thing when you're teaching. Even if you do know what the title of the talk is, you know. Before the talk, you have an infinite number of ways that you can sort of paint it. And by the end of the talk, you've got the talk that you gave. All the 10,000 possibilities collapse into the one that you have. So people say, well, how was your talk?

[28:34]

Well, B plus, C minus. And then you sort of like, you have some idea that you could impose on it. I mean, we're so conditioned to do that with grading ourselves or whatever. But the fact of the matter is that it's beyond that. It's just what it is. And we are so conditioned to want to judge and frame everything in one way or another that we saddle ourselves with incredible burdens, in part because we take everything personally. So thank you for your observation about that. And the fact of the matter is that, as I said, I always say the same thing. So it doesn't matter what I title it, except that there are nuances around it. And so there were certain things that I just realized in my own little grasping mind that I could have done quite differently if only I had gotten up on the stage realizing what everybody else was there for. Yes? That's also possible.

[29:42]

And I'm not saying this in some way. I'm not actually even bringing it up as a mea culpa or, you know, sort of an apology. I'm using it as one more example because there's a tendency to always put the person who's sitting up here on something of a pedestal and say, wow. And it's very humbling when you start practicing mindfulness because you're not looking at anybody else's mind. You're looking at your own mind and you take a deep gulp at times and realize, my God, it is so easy to be off. It is so easy to actually be blind, even though you see. And when I was studying with this Korean Zen master, one of the things he used to do, he had this incredible Zen stick carved out of some completely demented, distorted piece of wood, you know. In fact, you've never seen a stick like this. And when he would give Dharma talks, this is Sonsanin, maybe some, how many of you know about him or have seen him or encountered him?

[30:49]

Nobody. Anyway, and he had a very unusual way of speaking. He never bothered to learn English. He just made it up as he went along. Which made it much more interesting than if he spoke English. So he would take the Zen stick and he'd hold it up. This is how he'd begin his Dharma talk. He'd just hold up the Zen stick and then shout at the audience, that you'll see this. And then he'd take it and he'd bang it right down on the table that was in front of him or a piece of wood, you know, sort of the surface. Do you hear this? And, you know, when you're hearing a talk that begins that way, it's like, you know, do you see this? Well, of course I see this. What do you think I am, blind or something? What is he talking about, do you see this? And then bang it down on the table and say, do you hear this? Hear this? I mean, what are you doing to that table? You know, it's like, don't you realize that's somebody's property? And there he'd already, you know, case made, case complete.

[31:59]

You see, but you have all these, hey, nice stick. I wonder where he got this stick. I think I'd like to have a stick like that. Things would go better if I was like, had a stick like that. Or banging down on the table, you know, and this cascade of thoughts about like, doesn't he realize, you know, I mean... But that was the whole point, that we never just really see. Because this cascade of thoughts comes in. Liking, disliking, this opinion, that opinion, or hearing. Cascade of thoughts come in. Why did he make so much noise? Of course we can hear. But the fact of the matter is, we hardly ever just hear. We're hardly ever just here. And we are hardly ever just here. Most of the time we're kind of here and a little bit somewhere else.

[33:05]

And if you sum that up over a decade, you can miss a lot. You can actually miss what's most important. which was what I was trying to demonstrate last night in witting and unwitting ways, namely that you can see these things on these slides. They're right in front of our eyes, and it takes a while to see them, if ever. Once they're pointed out to you, you'll never not see it again in that picture, just you'll never not see. So we can actually use what is available to us to cultivate greater intimacy with the unfolding of our lives. And it turns out, as I said last night, there are only six things happening at any one moment from the point of view of Buddhism.

[34:09]

There are only six things ever happening. So that's not that many things to keep track of. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching. and then knowing. And the knowing is important, or you won't see, you won't hear, you won't smell, you won't taste. So the knowing has to meet, contact, be completely in touch with the gates through which perceptions happen, and both outwardly and inwardly. So you could call it the landscape, the soundscape, the airscape, the mindscape, the bodyscape. And a lot of times, we're not really home for that. Yeah? Yeah, right. Well, it sounds like you already understand.

[35:30]

So thank you for that observation. Yeah, I mean, lots of people rush to meditate. They've got to get to their meditation class. So they're rushing to get to be where they already are. So this is actually a hard one for us to learn because everything in our lives is really conditioned around getting someplace else. Yeah? Yeah. Yes, well, I mean, I will have a number of things to say about it. How many of you really want to practice in your lives, but it's just so hard to do or so annoying when you do it? Okay, so there's a strong motivation to sort of have it. And is this something that you have practiced from time to time? Mm-hmm. Right.

[36:40]

Right. It's like pretty soon you have like four or five hours of meditation practice to do before your 10-hour workday. Where's room for your life? Right. Yeah. So the short answer right now is it's all your life. You can be there for all of it. And that's the real practice. Real practice is not sitting on your butt like this for 20 minutes or an hour and 20 minutes. Although, as you're suggesting, there's something of value and you've tasted it. Exactly. That's why you want it, because you've already tasted that if you can arrange your world so that you plunk your body down for a period of time and just give yourself over to the present moment without anything else happening and without having to do anything or be anywhere, then that in some way is profoundly restorative and frames the whole rest of your days unfolding. but it's very, very difficult to do. That's why people live in monasteries.

[37:47]

Everything in the monastery is oriented around Mindfulness. Everything. Every sound, you know, when they hit the muktuk and they hit the clackers and the bells. And you don't need a watch here because, you know, the bells tell you what time it is. You know, it's time for sitting, time for walking, time for eating, time for cooking, time for working in the garden. Whatever it is, it's like the present moment is completely available and the real practice is, can you be here for it? So that when you're in the garden, you're not thinking, oh, God, I wish I were in the Zen, though. And then you're in the Zen, though, fantasizing about the garden. So, you know, you can always wind up being someplace else. It's always better someplace else. And that's why the formal practice is so important. First of all, when you're exercising, if you go to the gym and you're a regular exercise person, you can turn that entire thing into a meditation practice.

[38:55]

I mean, just be there for it. But it's very easy to go to the gym and be completely mindless. Not even in your body. I mean, just look at the number of people who exercise with something going on. And I'm going to put the body on the treadmill, but the mind is going to read Newsweek. And all you see, they have those plastic things that go over the treadmill so that you don't have to be there while your body is, you know, doing its aerobic thing. Uh-huh. Yeah, wonderful. Lens itself. Yeah, okay. Well, forget about the almost. You know, if you intend for it to be meditation, then it is. So it's more a question of are you willing to show up with that kind of spaciousness and attend to what's happening? And then, you know, I sometimes think that it's valuable to throw out the word meditation altogether.

[39:58]

Because when you're sitting like this and you think, I'm meditating, there's a little bit of a problem with that. Now I'm meditating. Oh yeah, what am I supposed to do? Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch the mind wander. Get on back to the breath there. And so you're giving yourself a continual stream of commentary and commands about what is actually unfolding. So you think that's meditating or is that just riding herd on yourself and giving yourself lots of instructions? Yet it's totally necessary to do that. And that's what I refer to as scaffolding. In other words, we need supports of various kinds in order to, and it's ironic, in order to be where we already are and be awake to it. So the practice has that element of kind of riding herd on ourselves as a kind of third person and giving ourselves advice about sit up a little straighter, get back to the breath, feel the breath deep in the body.

[41:10]

And when, you know, somebody is guiding the meditation, they're doing it for you. You know, leave the driving to us, like Greyhound. And that's all fine, well, and good, but at a certain point, it's important to just see, just hear. Just know. So sometimes I say to people in the mindfulness-based stress reduction classes or whatever, because this is often their first exposure to meditation. It's not like they spent six or ten years in a monastery and then they come for a stress reduction. That does happen too, but for the most part, they're very new to meditation practice. And I say, listen, the best thing is to just give up the thought that you are meditating altogether and just be it. That's why the Zen people like to call it just sitting, which is a translation of Shikantaza, just sitting, nothing more. It's hard to just sit.

[42:11]

It's as hard to just sit as it is to just see or to just hear. Because then you say, well, could you turn up the birds a little bit more and a little bit down on the walking on the platform? That would have been a great meditation if only the birds were more cooperative. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like if we were in an aviary, then why did he even choose hearing when there's hardly anything to hear? So the mind is always wanting to improve on things. If only I had this great situation, then I'd have a wonderful meditation. But the situation's never really great, so it's very hard then to meditate because it's always the wrong time. I've got something better to do. But when I get finished with all of that, then I'll meditate. Of course, by then I'll be exhausted. So in some way, it's good to throw out the thought, I'm meditating, and maybe even just think of it as another yoga posture.

[43:19]

It's just very slow. Three hours. of yoga posture. In the Tibetan tradition, I recently learned that there's a whole sort of vocabulary associated with Dzogchen practice, which is kind of what they call the great natural perfection. They have such colorful names for their meditation practice. It can't just be just sitting. It has to be the great natural perfection. which is great. But the characteristics of the great natural perfection are that it is, first of all, undistracted. So meditation is all about paying attention. But paying attention is something that when you start to pay attention, it turns out it's very hard to pay attention. Have you noticed? How many of you noticed just in that short sitting? And I didn't say anything about bringing the mind back. How many of you noticed that it was very hard to stay on hearing, that the mind went off into one thing or another?

[44:24]

Or very hard to stay on the breath or the touch with the air or the sense of the body? You notice that? Raise your hands again. Yeah, what was the mind doing? And, you know, speak. What was the mind doing? A little louder. Thinking of a dream the night before. So kind of reminiscing. Neck pain. Strategizing what? Oh, okay. uh-huh right okay so here you are sitting on the cushion it's saturday isn't it yeah you're not at work strategizing about work shameless the mind will just like it's just it'll just do this forever all of our minds yeah uh-huh okay right anybody else notice yeah

[45:32]

Oh yes, that would be serious. Anybody else? What did you notice about the mind? Or did it stay on the breath or the hearing? Yeah? Going over an earlier argument. Yeah, that's a favorite. That's a classic. So do you see that in a way we are continually distracting ourselves? It's like the idea is just stay with, say, hearing. I expanded a little bit, but let's say just stay with the hearing or the breath. Breath is great because you can't leave home without it. It's better than the American Express credit card. It's portable, goes everywhere. It's intimately related to emotional fluctuations in the heart and the mind.

[46:43]

You get agitated, the breath gets agitated. So we just give ourselves a task. I'm going to sit down, and I'm not going to call it meditation, but I'm going to just attend to the breath. And before you know it, you're strategizing, deciding there's something better than the breath. Some argument that came up and, you know, sort of. The mind is like that. And the next moment, it'll be something else. The next moment, it'll be something else. So we are continually distracting ourselves and interrupting ourselves from an intention that we ourselves formulated. I'm just going to sit here. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. That is just the nature of mind, the untrained mind. Minds are just like that. They tend to waive a lot, and they tend to get obsessed.

[47:50]

with this or that. Have you noticed that? It's either this or that. And it hardly matters what the this is or the that is. It's going to be something that's going to kind of trip you, catch you up, absorb you, and just like, oh, what about the breath? It's a good thing the breath is fairly automatic because if our lives depended on us actually being in touch with the breath, we'd have been dead a long time ago. No matter how important the breath is, it's just like, forget it. The mind is just like incorrigible. It just refuses to settle down. It refuses. It's always got someplace better to be. So in a sense, you know, when we talk about, say, the Army Corps of Engineers diverting a river, which they did with the Mississippi River, you know, at some point they diverted it in a particular kind of way so that there would be less flooding. You change the course of it.

[48:52]

You divert it. Well, that's what we're doing. We're diverting ourselves continually. We're distracting and diverting, also meaning entertaining ourselves, or numbing ourselves, or anesthetizing ourselves with this constant chatter. And it's just the nature of the untrained mind to do that. But at the same time, when you start to practice in this way, whether you've been doing it for 50 years or 50 seconds, There's also one very interesting thing that is immediately observable, and that is that sooner or later you know that you diverted yourself, just to put it that way. Somebody knows that the mind has gone off. That's interesting. Who knows? Who is that? You. Yeah, but you is just a pronoun. You start to look at that.

[49:52]

It's like, who's hearing? Who's seeing? First you can say, me. And you say, well, who are you? And then you say your name. What's that? The heart, yeah. But the heart isn't hearing. The heart is pumping, at least the physical heart. But you see, any name, any word is going to be inadequate. Because, you know, you can say, well, my heart. But who's saying that? So ultimately, you know, we don't know. It's a mystery. So, so much of our life is actually not knowing. But we have this capacity for awareness, which is just extraordinary. We can be aware of not knowing or aware of how easy it is to become unaware. And that's the door in, awareness itself.

[50:56]

So the challenge is, can we actually cultivate deep intimacy with what is already completely at our disposal at all times, except that we distract ourselves and divert ourselves. William James, who was the founder of American psychology, made a very interesting observation about this in 1890 in his book, Principles of Psychology. He said, the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention Over and over again is the very root of character, judgment, and will. No one is kampasui if you have it not. In other words, you're out of your mind if you can't bring, you know, if you can't bring back a wandering attention over and over again, then you're really out of your mind because it's always somewhere else. No one is if you have it not.

[52:00]

An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical instructions for bringing it about. This is like obvious that he never heard of like what the Buddhists were up to for 2,500 years. Because it's like it's all based on watching the wandering mind and then bringing awareness to it. And in the awareness, you're already back. You don't have to actually lasso the mind and bring it back to the breath because the breath isn't what's most important. It's the appending that's most important. It's the awareness. So we can easily get into the object of attention. And that's part of the scaffolding. We pick out objects and we say, I'm just going to stay on this object of attention for the next half hour or the next hour. And they say, OK, there's me watching the breath do itself or the mind come and go. But what is more accurate is perhaps is to say awareness is simply here.

[53:01]

And then it goes, and then it comes back, and it goes. And awareness could hold anything. It could be the breath. It could be the body. It could be sounds. It could be sights, smells, tastes, anything. But without awareness, none of that is available to us. And then when the mind kicks in and it starts creating stories of one kind or another, it's very hard to see what's actually happening because we far prefer the story of what's happening to what's actually happening. So we create these stories and we live in the story. How many of you have ever had the story flow through your mind? I'm inadequate. Has anyone ever had that? That's a story that you're telling yourself. And if you tell yourself that a lot, and you know, it's not just like I'm inadequate, then you marshal evidence for it. Right? And you can be like, yeah, all right. You can marshal evidence for it. Real evidence for it. Yeah, I gave a whole talk on a different subject. You can beat yourself up over the head.

[54:07]

You beat yourself up over and over and over again for things that happen and then create a big story around it. And none of it's actually accurate. It's only accurate to a degree, but it's not the whole story. The whole story really can't be told. The whole story can only be manifested. It's like your life. And do you realize how many people love you and accept you more than you do yourself? Have you been in that situation where there are other people on the planet that really love you and care about you, but that's just because they don't realize who you really are? If they realized who you really are, then they'd realize how inadequate you were. Have you ever had that experience? Like, you know, just sort of feeling? So there's so many different ways that we can get caught in the story of me. And coming to our senses would mean, literally and metaphorically, sort of getting simpler. Not creating all this story, but just being the knowing.

[55:13]

Being the knowing that you already are. When you see, you're already seen. Then before you have to fill in, oh, Zen stick, wonder where he got it, that's really nice. That's all thought. But in the moment of seeing is just the seeing. In the moment of hearing is just the hearing. And if you spend the rest of your life hearing, you will never be any better at it than right in this moment because your ears already do this. and your awareness already is perfect in this moment. In the next moment, nice bell. Or, I don't like that bell so much, or too loud. And thinking pours in, judging pours in, emotions arise, and then we get the story. Do you catch my drift?

[56:18]

Okay. So let me come back to the Tibetans for one moment just to complete that line of things. We were talking about non-meditation. They have a phrase, a technical term that's called non-meditation. That happens when you get through with all the meditating. The great natural perfection is giving up all the meditating and resting in non-meditation. You could call it just living. But it's a particular kind of non-meditation. It's undistracted. Undistracted. So that's easy to say. Okay, now I'll be undistracted. And then within five microseconds, you're distracting yourself. So that requires a certain kind of working out. the attention muscles. Practice, practice, practice. Mind goes off, bring it back. Mind goes off, bring it back. Mind goes off, bring it back.

[57:19]

And you can stabilize your attending and get much more familiar with it so that like any breath will carry you right into it in no time because it's never not available to us. It's not like, oh, if I get good at this and I come to the Zen Center for the next 25 years, then maybe before I die, I will wake up. If it's not about now, then it's not done. That doesn't mean that if you spend the next 25 years cultivating this intimacy that it doesn't deepen. And in many, many different forms and many, many different places that you might do that, but there's no one right way to do it. And if you choose somebody else's way, you'll be miserable. The challenge is in finding your way with a capital W. So undistracted, and then they have another term, unfabricated.

[58:29]

Unfabricated, what does that mean? I'm just looking at this audience and trying to judge like the average age. I grew up in New York City in the 50s and so I was like a young adolescent in New York City. It wasn't as crazy, I think, as it is now, but it was pretty tough. Like, you know, it was like everything was a challenge. And for teenage boys, the way they challenge each other is like kind of, they kind of just bang into each other like billiard balls or, you know, go chest to chest or whatever it is, you know. It's like verbally as well as physically on purpose. And then you challenge the other person, you want to make something of it. Usually followed by Another word. Do you want to make something of it? And I come to realize that this is a very advanced Zen training, actually, doing this kind of thing, that in fact, you know, this is like Dharma combat.

[59:44]

Because if you don't take it seriously, and it doesn't have to be banging chests or punching or something like that, you could just be saying something fairly uncomplimentary about your mother, which was a very big favorite. So you insult somebody's mother and then see if they want to make something of it. Now there's a way of being transparent enough in this teenage New York Dharma combat where it just goes right through you. They said something just dastardly about your mother and you just don't take the hook. You don't bite. And they see that and it's totally cool. You don't have to make anything of it. But if you have a seizure, how dare you say that about my mother? You've already made something of it in your mind. And then something else is gonna happen as a consequence. Usually fairly violent. And that's the way we grew up in New York City.

[60:46]

You wanna make something of it. Deep, deep insight into fabrication. Because fabrication means making. And we're fabricating all day long. You want to make something of it? You get it? I mean, what is it that we aren't making something of? The story of me. Why I'm here today. And I'm curious about why you're here today. I want to hear. But like, you know, we're continually fabricating this or that. the story of my trajectory towards self-improvement, enlightenment, well-being, health. And I'm not caricaturing any of it. I'm not putting any of it down. I'm simply saying that when we start to pay attention, we observe that a lot of the time we're creating this universe that's slightly inaccurate. I'm no good.

[61:49]

Fairly inaccurate statement. I'm inadequate. I'm in so much pain. You know, there's no hope. Can you feel those self-statements as kind of nails in a particular kind of coffin? And they are self-fulfilling prophecies if you believe them. So thoughts are unbelievably powerful because they make our reality. Make our reality. So undistracted, unfabricated, non-meditation would be just sitting. Don't make anything. You can all go home now. And awareness has that quality. Awareness itself, pristine awareness, is simply not fabricating anything, but it's knowing fabrication when it arises. It's not distracted or diverted, but it knows when the impulse to go off comes up.

[62:55]

And because it's been stabilized in some way, you can actually rest in the awareness itself. Only it's inaccurate to say you anymore because there's no point in making it personal because awareness is impersonal. It's just knowing. Hence the phrase, be the known that you already are. So you don't have to get anything, acquire anything, strive, or get rid of anything, because none of it is necessarily toxic or harmful, even very, very afflictive emotional states, because when they are recognized, when they are seen, when they are known, and you don't get caught or build on them, then you're already free. It's true that they have an emotional tone, and over time, the more you nourish the awareness rather than being caught in that emotional time, the more they will actually wither on the vine, and you just outgrow it.

[63:59]

You take things less personal. So it just blows my mind that we were doing that as teenagers in New York City. It's just high dharma combat with no awareness whatsoever of its relationship to dharma. but very much a kind of taunting around, and I guess teasing is in some way the same thing, that if you bite, you're dead. If you don't bite, you're already free. It's the other person's mind that's waving. Why should your mind wave as well? Can you feel that? Can you sense it? And it doesn't happen at some future moment. It happens right now. But the more there's an emotional edge to it and you have like a little seizure about you can't do that to me or I am horrified by what I did myself. And then you judge it and condemn it. All that's extra.

[65:00]

What happened, happened. And sometimes we have to really own it. Yeah, it was unwise. It was harmful. to myself or to other people. And then the awareness of it is already free of it. So here's an exercise. How many of you found that just that very short period of time that we sat and we're going to sit more, but we'll stand up first so that it's not total torture. How many of you found that pain arose in the body or discomfort arose in the body? Anybody? So the challenge for the rest of the day, as more pain arises in the body, just joking. The challenge for the rest of the day is bring awareness to what somebody is calling pain. Let it be just sensation. Awareness embracing sensation and see if the awareness is in pain or suffering.

[66:02]

So that's like homework for the rest of the day, and we'll talk about it. But see if the awareness itself is in pain or suffering. And that's just as true for an emotional whirlpool or eddy. If you can embrace it in awareness, just put the welcome mat out for anything. Awareness itself has the potential to be untouched by it. So, therefore, free now, already liberated, is the only thing that is imprisoning is our own aversion, not wanting it to be that way, or our own grasping after because we want more of or whatever. The Buddhists are very, very graphic and down to earth in their choice of terms for describing how the mind works.

[67:17]

And you could be on the lookout for what they call the three poisons, okay? The things that poison the well of the present moment. They are greed. And greed's a pretty heavy word, you know. But they just, it's very just plain. I mean, greed can be like just wanting something. But if there's a greedy element to it, like grasping element to it, just call it greed. So it could be little greed, big greed, medium-sized greed. But to recognize that basically it's greed. Hunger, how much of your hunger is greed? Probably 90%. We're so well-fed. But we get hungry. Start to look at that one. Very often it's the mind that gets hungry. and no amount of food is going to satisfy. And in this society in particular, we have huge issues around food and body and body image and eating disorders and all of that.

[68:26]

And a lot of it, of course, is due to trauma. because we live in an unbelievably violent and an unbelievably disregarding society. And so it's no wonder that we sometimes feel like we're inadequate, because we're carrying around enormous wounding. But the core, even in the face of huge wounds, is untouched. what carries the scars. But often we don't know that, so that's part of the discovery. So they talk about greed, clinging, grasping. They also talk about hatred, not wanting. They just call it hatred or anger, you know, sort of pushing away, like aversion. And the third poison, delusion, thinking you know when you don't. Thinking you know when you don't.

[69:27]

Or making it into black and white. So, you know, it's all one way. It's all the other. We're the good people. They're the evil people. You know what I'm talking about? It's like just whoever it is, they're the evil ones because it ain't us. We're good. But what about looking at our own shadow side? Because human beings are, for the most part, all wired up the same. It's true. There is severe pathology at the extreme. But for the most part, we're all wired up pretty much the same. But how we wind up creating mayhem, violence, harm, I mean, and it's not just, you know, those people at the extremes that are doing that. I mean, look at family life. Very often, we're not careful. We're winding up harming the people that we love the most and that love us the most. either by omission or commission. Why? Because a lot of the time we're deluded. We're living in our own world that we fabricate ourselves.

[70:31]

And you better conform to my view of how you should be, especially if you're one of my children. Get it? So we often don't even see our children because we're seeing our idea of them. What about your partner? Same thing. very easy to fall into the habit of like, oh, I know who you are because we've been living together for so long. But that's a form of violence, to make assumptions that a person has to be a certain way for you to be able to relate to them, because then who grows? Nobody can grow. So let's take a few moments and... Yes? In terms of... Can everybody hear at the back? No, let's agree that we'll speak as loud as possible, maybe even stand up, because the beauty of working in this kind of a way is that if everybody hears what everybody's saying, there's so much wisdom in what everybody's saying that it's much more distributive than if it just comes from me.

[71:39]

I get confused sometimes about how mindfulness works with feelings. There are a lot of feelings you just want to push under the rug. You just want to push under the rug. I just want to push under the rug. Sometimes it feels, if say anger comes up or craving comes up, that going back to the breath is like pushing it under the rug. Yes. Is there a way of making, for example, anger the object of study? Yes. Just being aware of how it is in my body and staying with it. Absolutely. Do you not know that? I do not know that. Oh, well, that's a wonderful question. So let me just say that you're right on target. And what you said, I mean, you could be up here teaching. Because, yes, the whole point is that the breath could be used as a kind of escape.

[72:44]

And if you get the meditation instructions wrong at the beginning or you have a very big stake in not wanting to go certain places because it's just too emotionally painful, you will use the breath as a nice little hangout, you know, so that you never have to actually go near your rage. because rage is pretty terrifying. And that's just one emotion, but there could be many. So the real practice is not about breathing. The real practice is about awareness of what is arising. And so if anger is arising, then it can be entertained as a welcome guest. Why? Because it's the things that we don't pay attention to that wind up circling back and grabbing us by the throat or the back of the neck. As Thich Nhat Hanh likes to say, the reason we have to practice or cultivate mindfulness is because all day long we're practicing the opposite.

[73:53]

And you get pretty good at it because practice makes perfect. So if we're continually getting angry, we can get really good at being angry. And if you are continually stuffing your anger, then you can get really good at stuffing your anger. So the real practice is to, when anger arises, to be with it, but don't go off with it. In other words, suppressing it is extremely unhealthy, physically and mentally. And just succumbing to it is also extremely unhealthy and usually never wise. But we never even think to just simply hold it. and embrace anger in the same way as we were embracing sounds. Remember I said you don't go out there hunting, scavenging for the sounds because they're already coming to your eardrum. So in the same way, when anger is arising, it's already here. So can we stop? and in some way put out the welcome mat and give ourselves over to it. And you even said, feel it in the body.

[74:55]

Well, that's exactly what the instruction is. Feel it in the body and let it actually observe the coursing of the sensations associated with anger, which will, of course, affect your breathing profoundly when it's arising. Okay? So that is applicable to any mind state. Anger, fear, irritability, sadness, grief, depression, or exhilaration, joy, gratitude, to actually let the emotions play in the field of awareness and be known, be met, be seen, be known. Okay. in the moment of their arising or as quickly as you can manage because you may not pick up on the moment of arising. One moment you're fine, the next moment you're just ready to kill somebody.

[75:56]

And it can happen like that. Very interesting how fast it can happen and how much we can get caught. I was in Berkeley yesterday, just to give you an example. I was in Berkeley yesterday, and I parked at a meter early in the morning. There were no other cars on the street. And then I took... five to 10 steps away from my car before remembering, oh yeah, I better put money in the mirror. I return, meanwhile this little mechanized cart comes up and the guy is computerized, so he's punching in the license plate number and giving me a $30 ticket when I had arrived like two seconds before. But because he's so fast and digitized and because he didn't believe anything I said to him anyway, he just gave me a $30 ticket. And it was like, oh, my timing was a little off.

[77:00]

I was like, I actually ran back to the car because I saw him coming, and he saw me running. Didn't give a shit, so to speak. And I saw the impulse to go apoplectic. After all, I was raised in New York City, you know. And I like to sort of believe that things can be negotiated with some sort of sense of reason, you know. So, you know, basically, so there's the impulse arising to just... Or to just get depressed or upset or whatever. And I just thought, wow, maybe he should have given me a $60 ticket. This is a fantastic teaching. Because it all happened in no time. I mean, I've never gotten a ticket that fast. It's almost as if he read my mind I wasn't going to put money in the meter. And he gave me the ticket for thinking that I wasn't going to put money in the meter. Meanwhile, I think that I'm going to put money in the meter.

[78:02]

I remember. And I get back there, but too late. These people in Berkeley, I think they've all been trained at Zen Center, and they're just very much on the money, should I say. So, of course, that happens all the time. Any circumstance, any situation, if it's not going your way, we resist. We want it to be different. Hold on one second. We want it to be different, so there's a distance between the way it should be for me to be happy and the way it is. Do you know that feeling? And there's a kind of contraction around it. Emotionally contracted, the body usually gets contracted. The heart gets involved. The jaw gets involved. So can you be aware of that? And then as Thich Nhat Hanh is saying, hey, another fantastic teaching of mindlessness in this moment. Practice makes perfect. Okay, what about bringing awareness to that very moment, that very seizure? And that's the meditation practice.

[79:03]

That's coming to your senses. Then anger is just like the hearing. It's just like sound. It's like, hello. You have a lot of choices in this moment, except if you collapse into not seeing, not knowing, not remembering. And then you'll create this story of how And it's endless, the stories of how, if only the world were different, I would be having a good Friday the 13th. Now, I know you want to ask a question, but you were asking earlier, so... Oh, thanks. Just listening to what... And a little louder, too. Just think about the people in the back. Just listening to what you were saying. And it has an important lack of love. It's meditation kind of... I'm not sure I understand your language, so you need to unpack it a little bit for me.

[80:14]

What does just processing mean? Yes. So the answer to that is yes. Yes. Are you relatively new to meditation? Yes. So the answer to that is yes. Okay. Okay. Experiencing without judgment is a very, very nice encapsulation. Now, what was the metacognition or the meta? Well, the meta was if I don't just focus on what is happening to me at once. Thinking about it later? Thinking about, instead of just feeling or thinking, I'm thinking about thinking. Yeah. Okay. So that is kind of a difference. Yes. Although that's going to happen too. I mean, we're not immune to that. We're continually thinking about our experience and thinking about the sort of relationship to experience. So it's also once removed. There's nothing wrong with that because awareness is infinitely expandable. Did you notice how in that earlier guided meditation we started with hearing and then we went to the air and then we went to the breath?

[81:17]

It's like awareness is like really amorphous, like it can be as big as you want or it can be as narrow and collimated as you want. So that's incredibly valuable to get comfortable with expanding and contracting awareness, you know. because at different times it's very appropriate to collimate it or to expand it. If you're going off a ski jump, for instance, which kind of awareness would you want to have? The collimated kind or the cosmic consciousness? What's that? Yeah, you're not kidding, right? Like, where are the tips of your skis? And what is the relationship of the tilt of your body to it? Because you've only got a second or two. I mean, it's even faster than the meter man, you know, in Berkeley. So be there for it, okay? You're not thinking, wow, I wonder how my mom is seeing me now, you know? Uh-huh.

[82:20]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there are many, many ways to be present in the world, many, many ways. And certainly, Formula One race car driving is one of them. There are also a lot of technical aspects of it that are very complicated, as opposed to just sitting without a steering wheel or wheels of any kind. Yeah. You've experienced that too? I'm not alone? Good question. Yeah, the question was, this person said that she's very familiar with the parking people in Berkeley and was interested in what I did in that moment that sort of the apoplectic impulse arose.

[83:33]

And basically what I did was try to stay in relationship with the guy. okay, and to stay in relationship with him means without anger, but just sort of seeing the lay of the land and how much chance I had to negotiate my way out. And basically, I saw very, very quickly that I had zero chance because once you put it in the computer, I mean, they don't have, as far as I know, they don't have another option like mistake, right? You know, cancel this ticket. Or the mayor, cancel the ticket, you know. Or they don't have that option. So I saw right away that this was kind of like, you know, something falls on you, it's already happened. So what's the point in getting angry about it? So then I watched what else my mind did because it didn't just go apoplectic. It began to sort of feel a little bit humiliated. It's like, I like to be in relationship and be able to negotiate, especially when I'm right.

[84:39]

I mean, that just felt like injustice to me. But I also saw it from his point of view that he saw the car there and then he saw somebody running to the car because he saw him. And so all he knows that car had been there for half an hour or three hours or overnight. So I just realized like, you know, I have a lot of options here from the extremely violent to just bowing and realizing that was a fabulous teaching. And so I chose that option and the rest of it dissolved. It's like when you don't take it personally, and that's a hard one to not take personally. It's like, you can't do this to me. I already did it to you. It's already done. Or as Sansanini used to say in koan practice, he used to say, if your response was a little slow, the arrow is already downtown. That's how he would talk. The arrow is already downtown.

[85:42]

Yell, scream, beat yourself up, whatever. But the arrow is already downtown. In other words, your timing is a little off. So, but any moment that presents, that's kind of an extreme, but I thought I'd mention it, but any moment is a moment to watch how those kinds of things can arise and then meet the arising impulse, emotion, thought, feeling, perception, right here in this moment. And in that recognizing, then you have degrees of freedom that you don't have when it becomes like a knee-jerk automatic reflex reaction. And since those opportunities come up endlessly, not just with the parking people, but just endlessly things will be not going, quote-unquote, your way, you have wonderful opportunities to practice. Oh, things are not going my way.

[86:43]

Wonderful. What is my way anyway? I mean, I can't even say that it was bad that that happened. It just happened. Do you see my point? So if we were to take things less personally, and how do we take things less personally? Start paying attention to how much we take things personally and how much we use the pronouns I, me, and mine without having the slightest idea what we're talking about. You know, before we go any further, I think we should stand up. And let's try to do that mindfully. And let's just take a few moments and be in touch with the body standing. And in touch with, you know, is it possible to open these doors now? It looks like the air may have... Oh, look at that. There's light and there's warm air.

[87:46]

Thank you. If the voices get lost, we can close it again. But let's just close our eyes and stand in the air. Because we're always standing at the bottom of an ocean. We're bottom feeders. We're living at the bottom of the ocean of air. And see if you can bring your awareness to those places where your skin is exposed and actually feel the caress of the air on your body. And the caress of the air moving into the body and out of the body. And noticing if you bring awareness to the whole of the body standing, including the feet rooted into the floor and through the floor by proxy into the earth.

[89:00]

And with the sort of sense of the body elevating itself vertebra by vertebra right through the spine and right out the top of the head. In the spirit of the Chinese ideogram for between heaven and earth. Human. Noticing how there's a certain kind of micro swaying of the body. that standing is an elaborate balancing act and that we know how to do it. But that at one point in our lives we didn't and we had to sort of cultivate it. And so noticing that our awareness can hold the whole of the body and that it has an intrinsic appreciation of exactly how the body is configured in space.

[90:04]

And where all of the different appendages and the entirety of the body actually is in space. And that's part of the sense of touch. It's a kind of way of interior touching and it's called proprioception. the direct perceiving of oneself inwardly. And let's begin to just move one arm now and take your hand and as if you were under water, just begin moving it and feeling the air streaming through the fingers as if it was water, but it is a fluid as we were saying. And just see if you can touch the air. You don't have to create a wind, but just caress the air with the hand so that you are really in touch with the air and noticing that as you touch the air, the air is, of course, touching you. You can't touch without being touched. And then maybe moving the other hand as well so that you're basically just feeling the air any way you like.

[91:16]

There's no right way to do this. But noticing how the arms, you have to watch out for traffic if you're squeezed into a row, but noticing how the arms have huge degrees of freedom and can move in many different ways. The arms, the shoulders joint has the biggest range of any joint in the body because the shoulder blade floats. And the only place the whole thing is anchored is right here in the sort of medial aspect of the clavicle, the collarbone. Everything else is moving. You put your hand on your collarbone and just notice how it just comes right off the ribcage. And so we can make very sort of spacious movements being in touch with the air around the body. And owning the space in the sense of not appropriating it, but being in touch with the space that the body is offered.

[92:18]

And then if you like, just moving the rest of your body as well so that it's kind of like a piece of kelp waving, undulating in the ocean. Okay? Any way you like. And staying in touch moment by moment by moment with the whole of the body, if you like even closing your eyes, although then the air traffic problem intensifies. But being in your body. moment by moment and breath by breath, being in touch with the inner landscape of the body and with the airscape. and just doing whatever you want to do with the body so that there's no part of it that isn't engaged, involved, stretching, right through the toes, right through the heels,

[93:21]

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