I love to taste the truth of the Tatagatha's words. Ah, the subject of tonight's class. Concentration, the hindrances, and a few other, and some other stuff. So I think I've talked to some about these things, but I think probably it's useful, especially with Sashin coming up, that you sort of have this sort of information perhaps in mind. So concentration, there's Zen practice in some ways emphasizes concentration.

[01:12]

Anyway, there's these five factors of concentration, which are known as applications. ease and concentration or one-pointedness. I think this is interesting to me because most of what I talk about is sort of what interests me, right? So I don't know whether it interests you or not, but here we are. seems to me it doesn't make much sense for me to talk about what doesn't interest me, just because it might interest you.

[02:19]

But the application and sustained application, you know, this is, as you know, we have And then we have organ, you know, sense organ, or mind organ. And then we have object. And so, actually concentration is present every moment. Right? There's a, in, it's considered, in the study of the Abhidharma, that concentration is present every moment. And, but it's not, necessarily so developed in any moment. So there's varying degrees of the strength or focus of the concentration. So in any particular moment, there's of course a, there's this kind of, these three things come together.

[03:26]

We have, if the object is sight, then the object is, you know, colors, and then the organ is the eye, and then the consciousness, then we have eye consciousness, and we have seeing. We call that seeing. And then we say, I see you. So those three are all together. When one does a concentration practice, so to speak, then one is making the effort, so to speak, to apply one's mind to a particular object. And this is called a concentration practice. And as opposed to allowing one's mind to have its way with you. You know, left to its own devices, of course, the mind, so to speak, is... Lately, this expression has come up.

[04:28]

Several of you have sort of mentioned, my mind is like wild horses. It's like monkeys. They seem to bounce around. And then some book I was reading, you know, it talks about monkey mind and in one door, out the other. Somebody was mentioning before about monkeys, the way you catch a monkey is you have a banana in this hole, and the monkey reaches in to grab it, and it grabs the banana, and then it won't let go of the banana, and the hole isn't big enough to get its fist out. Yeah, it's not going to let go of the banana. So that's how you catch it. So this is fit to be like our mind sometimes. The things that we get fixated on and don't want to let go of even though to let go of it we could get our hand out of the hole or we could get on with our life. So in a concentration practice one is rather than allowing this sort of monkey mind to go on, we're actually making the

[05:38]

you know, effort. There's actually, these two here are kind of effort. And in some sense, they're sort of basically just the same, but this is a kind of, you know, effort to apply one's mind to an object. Right? This is, so, it's sometimes said that one is lifting one's mind, or, you know, one is taking one's mind by the rope, or whatever, and bringing it to the object. In the case of You know, sitting meditation, it may be posture, it may be breathing. Other meditations are mantras or visualizations. But one is taking one's mind by the hand or by the neck or whatever and applying it. So this is some real effort. If one is working in the kitchen, one is making the effort to apply one's This consciousness applied consciousness to the lettuce, or the knife in the lettuce, the washing, the cutting, the slicing, the sweeping, and so on.

[06:48]

There's this application. Sustained application means that you continue it. But in a way, sustained application is just a more initial application over and over again. So they're fairly similar here. So you understand that this is a kind of effort, and it actually takes an effort, right? Because left to its own devices, mind wanders here and there. And not much lettuce gets washed, et cetera. And the mind, or consciousness, so to speak, seems to have, in fact, a kind of mind of its own. And so, you know, it's going after various, interested in various things. Now, if one thinks about concentration as just these two things, or, you know, this in a sense is one thing, applying oneself, one's awareness, applying consciousness to an object, this is not a very sustainable kind of concentration.

[07:53]

Because it's left out a few things. Anyway, basically, so to speak, this is not much fun. And it's not very absorbing. You know, to have good concentration, one actually has to be absorbed. So what makes it absorption, as opposed to just a kind of tedium, is that there's some joy. First of all, there's joy and there's ease. Joy, you know, this word is, we sort of, I mean, we have our own associations with language and so on, so, you know, we have to put up with that, but joy is, you know,

[08:57]

I think about joy in various ways, but it's not exactly what we think about. We think about joy somehow as... How do you think about it? It sounds sort of like... Yeah, that's it. We need something that's sort of like... I like to think about that. It's more like resonating. you actually resonate with something. Joy is also associated in Buddhism with, they say, rapture. But anyway, it has to do with the fact of being moved or being able to resonate with something. So it's not just like you apply your mind to the object, but the awareness or concentration, awareness or consciousness is going to resonate, in some sense, with the object. is resonating with the consciousness. Somehow they're on the sort of, there's the same frequency or something, so to speak.

[10:07]

So I use that expression from Dogen a lot, let your mind go out and abide in things, let things return and abide in the mind. There's a kind of give and take there, there's a kind of little resonance to that expression. It's also sometimes that same passage is, is translated, if you, or, I don't know, maybe it's right next to it, but if you want to move people and things, you have to be moved by people and things. So it's also, you could think about joy in this case is, does something move you or not? Can you be moved? So, there's a lot of things, and one of the basic kinds of mistakes that we tend to make in life Buddhism says is that we think something like joy is in the object. So we have consciousness and I, an object or organ, an object.

[11:17]

And when these three come together, and joy arises, Then we say, oh, that must be in the object. But Buddhism says, if you look at these objects, do colors have joy in them? When you look at things, what you actually see is colors. And perception makes the colors into a particular object, identifies a particular group of colors as a particular object. So that's perception. But your eye just sees colors. Is there any joy in the colors? Along with the colors and the perception, which is identifying an object, some joy may concurrently arise. But can you say then that's in the object, that's in the consciousness? Okay, so what that means is that, you know, rather than trying to manipulate the objects,

[12:25]

of one's experience, and get certain ones and not get other ones as a basic strategy in life, one ought to cultivate this joy in one's consciousness, whatever the object happens to be. Do you understand? It's a much more practical way of having joy in one's life, because these objects also seem to have a kind of mind of their own, and to be rather beyond one's control. So if one is sitting, one can cultivate joy in the object called breathing, or one could enjoy one's breath. One could be refreshed or resonate with one's breath. And likewise with various tasks and work, there's a certain joy in activity and movement and doing stuff and being there with things that, you know, in a certain sense, fairly naturally arises, but also if we start to think that there's no joy here, then pretty soon there isn't.

[13:35]

Because we say, oh, following the breath, this is tedious. There's no joy here. And then we make sure that there isn't, because we wouldn't want to be wrong about something like that. How would we? So we have to be a little bit careful and understand you know, remind ourselves that joy is not in the object. And we don't find joy by having some great object suddenly come into our life. Or by, you know, by arranging to have something to come along. But joy is, in fact, in our basic approach to things. And so, in that sense, then one can practice this kind of joy, this being moved by something, or resonating with something, or that there's some reciprocity there, that one allows one's awareness or consciousness, one's being actually to be moved. So this is also associated sometimes with, you know, sort of spontaneous movements of the body and that sort of thing.

[14:48]

You know, it's a kind of joy. Well, I think of two parts to that. One is a kind of basic understanding, which is to remind yourself in a sense that joy is not inherent in the object, and I can have joy. in being with my breath, being with my posture, raking the ground, etc. And in that sense, or along with that, then that means even if one is not feeling joyful, at least one should not be determined not to have joy. In other words, we say sometimes, you know, well, even if you don't have joy, at least don't get in the way of it.

[15:50]

It's a little bit like, at some point, Thich Nhat Hanh saying something like, you know, let compassion arise in your heart. And for those of you who don't seem to be able to allow compassion to arise in your heart, couldn't you have some compassion for somebody like that? Even a little? So joy is sort of like that. Even if you don't sort of, you know, it's not this big thing, but just in some quiet way, in some awkward way, in some clumsy way, you try it out. And to the extent that you're willing to try it out in an awkward and clumsy way means that you can develop it. So I think, you know, those things as much as anything. But to some extent also, you know, any of these kind of questions, of course, is Something that once you know it's possible, then you can sort of, for yourself, you sort of try various things.

[16:59]

Or you kind of, you just have it in mind. And sometimes all it means is just kind of reminding yourself, oh, I mean, I did meditation for years, and then it never occurred to me I could enjoy my breath. One day I thought, why don't I enjoy my breath while I'm sitting? for goodness sakes, took me a long time. And you know, three or four years ago when Thich Nhat Hanh was here, he introduced all of his talks, or maybe it was longer, six years ago or something. You know, first thing he would say is, good evening, please enjoy your breath while I'm talking. But we sort of forget, you know, so sometimes it's just a simple kind of reminder that I could be enjoying my breath enjoying the simple task that I'm doing. So in a similar way, so this is, that's what I want to say about joy for now, is these two together, you know, joy is the sort of thing that is, you know, it kind of, it's like

[18:17]

gives you some real relationship with the object now. Application is kind of like, you know, you actually sort of have to take your mind and apply it. You know, and you're holding it, you're holding your mind to this object, you know. It's work, and it's such a struggle, and your mind is struggling. But what about when your mind starts to actually relate to the object? Isn't it a little easier now? You know, and there's some So this is also, in a certain way, this joy is related to another factor, which isn't in this list, but which is called interest. How about taking an interest in something? Joy does that. Joy takes an interest in the object. Like, how are you? What's happening? Let's do something together. Ease is a sort of... Well, I'll come back to that.

[19:30]

Ease is a kind of sense of well-being. And as much as anything, I think about this as kind of a... There's a kind of feeling of at home. A feeling of being in place. and that in a certain sense of belonging where you are. There's not some feeling of, you know, what am I doing here? How did I get here? Oh, this is weird. Huh? You feel you fit. Yeah, you feel you fit. You feel at ease then. So again, in a certain sense, you know, we can pick out objects that we feel more at home with, or we feel more at ease with. It's not a threatening one. And then we can try to get those objects to come around. And when they come around, we can try to get them to stay around.

[20:31]

And then that's when we think, when we think that ease is in the object, then that's the kind of strategy that we adopt. Okay? When we understand that ease is in consciousness, then again, we see that there is the possibility of cultivating ease. And that means, you know, that in a situation where, at least initially, one goes, oh my God, what am I doing here? One has enough application and enough taking an interest in and enough sort of staying there to be able to, in a sense, make oneself at home here. You know, there's actual practice to making oneself at home. What you do, what you do to make yourself at home or to find, in that sense, be willing to find out how this realm or how this object works.

[21:35]

What goes, how does this all, how does it work? And in that sense, to find one's ease or at-homeness to be willing to have that in a much wider range of experiences rather than thinking that one has to have only certain experiences in order to get it. And you know from sitting that there are times when a little bit of pain or a little kind of disturbance is too much and it's upsetting. And other times, when you can be with a tremendous pain, or rather difficult experience, and it's okay, basically the difference is the level of concentration. When the concentration deepens, then something that would have been really overwhelming is now one can find one's ease.

[22:43]

Whereas when the concentration is shallow, the person coughs. Oh God, do they have to? And we go on. And other times your concentration is deep and you barely notice that the person has coughed. So the difference is in the level or the depth of concentration. So these two factors are rather pivotal for making concentration what it is. And that you appreciate the fact that these two factors are in consciousness and can be cultivated rather than they're in the object. And now I'm stuck with this object and it doesn't have any joy and it doesn't have any ease and it's so boring. Or whatever. Because at that time one can remind oneself, hey, now that's in consciousness, not in the object.

[23:51]

In other words, it's like I sometimes say about zazen, if you say zazen is boring, or zazen is interesting, or zazen is tiring, or tiresome, or whatever, you're talking about zazen as an object. Really what you're talking about is the way I'm doing zazen is boring, the way I have been doing zazen is tiresome, the way I've been doing this The way consciousness has been functioning is these things. It's not the object at all, called zazen, or kitchen work, or this person that happens to be in front of me. It's in consciousness. It's in my consciousness. These are also the factors that are said to Joy is sometimes said to be in a certain sense like soap. You lather up your hand and now the dirt gets all emulsified in the soap.

[24:55]

So the dirt is no longer, it's all just kind of, and then you can wash it. So joy is what sort of emulsifies, emulsifies the object. Blends it, you blend, awareness blends with the object. There's a blending going on here. Ease is also like, is said to be what, well as I said, makes you, where you feel like you're yourself. You know, rather than, I'm at the mercy of anger, or I'm overcome now with blah, blah, blah. You know, or you know, I've lost it. I'm upset. These things have overwhelmed me. They've overcome me. So ease is where you have the sense of being yourself, rather than being overcome. So in that sense, the afflictive emotions are said to be what overcome one.

[26:03]

I love that in Tarot Tokyo, the Tibetans have this whole thing about how when you meet people, you treat them as your mother. think of them as your mother, which apparently for the Tibetans works very well. Here in the West, whenever you say this, people go like, my mother? Are you kidding? This is not the specific mother. It's more the generic mother who bore you and carried you and fed you and clothed you and changed your diapers and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, for the Tibetans it seems to work. When you meet beings, you think of them as your mother. Part of that also is, of course, that among all beings, they could have been your mother in some previous life. You can't say for sure that they were never your mother in a previous life.

[27:08]

This is the whole Tibetan thing, right? Not of course, but interestingly enough, and wonderfully enough, somebody during the question says, well, Taratoku, why do we think of everybody as our mother? You know, they also could have been our murderer in a previous life. We can't say that they weren't our murderer in a previous life either. So why do we think about them as our mother rather than as our murderer? And it has to do with the fact that when beings murder, then they're overcome with afflictive emotions. They're not themselves. Whereas when they're the mother, or the mother mind, then they're themselves. You are yourself. You've settled, you're in your own being, in your own domain, and it's coming very naturally out of your inherent being, so to speak. So anyway, ease is what helps you resume this.

[28:09]

feeling at home in your body and your being. And again, you understand that it's not associated with the object and that in fact there's a much wider range of objects where ease is possible than we often tend to think. So again we need to remind And this has to do with, you know, that it's said to be, you know, as differentiated, one-pointedness is differentiated from being scattered. Since the consciousness is here and there and, you know, it's not staying with, it's not particularly on an object.

[29:12]

Of course, that scattered, you know, they're saying, well, that's a certain sense concentration, but more specifically, there is some, a kind of concentration there. You don't have any consciousness, but anyway, we say one-pointedness as opposed to scattered or divided. You know, so this is consciousness that is whole. It's a whole conscious, or as you could say, then it's a conscious where you've gathered pieces of consciousness together. Which, to some extent, you understand, you can see how this works because there's going to be more one-pointedness. In that sense, when one has more joy, more ease, when there's application of joy and ease, part of all this is that consciousness is no longer chasing around after objects. It's not scattered looking around for some better object, you know, to pay attention to.

[30:22]

This is one of the things that, you know, disperses consciousness. And disperses one point, and this is just looking around for a better object that would elicit more joy for me, and where I could feel more ease, and wouldn't that be great? So, when one is cultivating the joy and ease along with the application, the object that happens to be at hand, then there will be more one-pointedness. Mind will be collected. The consciousness will not be scouting about, while I'm paying attention to this, oh, why don't I look around for something else? Well, I promised you. I mean, I said I'd talk about hindrances, but we'll see. Let me talk about a couple other aspects about concentration first, and we'll see if we get to hindrances or not.

[31:25]

I'm not sure I want to talk about hindrances tonight, but we'll see. I mean, do we have to have hindrances? Let me just skip them. But they're awfully fun. They're fun to talk about because they're so juicy, and we know them so well. But I do want to talk about another sort of part about concentration. And this has to do with the thing about concentration, which is in Zen we have, don't we call it something like objectless concentration? Objectless concentration doesn't mean that there's no objects. It just means that It just means not the same object. In other words, in some kind of meditations, you have the visualization and you're supposed to stay with it, by golly. Or you have your mantra and you're supposed to stay with it.

[32:25]

Or you have an object to look at, and so on. In our kind of concentration, any object will do. So object, this doesn't mean that there's no object. It just means any object is OK. So here's the difference. The difference is also like, I read this wonderful, I thought it was wonderful because, you know, to me it's so Buddhist, right? Interview with Richard Jackson, who is a great baseball player. He's been retired, his house is just burned down in Oakland, all his baseball trophies got burned. But he used to be called Mr. October because when the World Series came around, his team was often in it, and he used to do quite well, usually, in the World Series. And his best World Series was when in the seventh and deciding game of the World Series, he had three home runs. This is all, you know, a little introduction to the fact that when somebody asked him about, how do you concentrate?

[33:28]

He said, a lot of baseball players say they try to concentrate on the ball and shut out everything else. He said, I try to concentrate on everything. And I thought, this is great. Because if you're concentrating on just the ball and shutting out everything, then you have like this. So here's the ball. And now, in consciousness, is on this, you know? And now, anything else is called a distraction. It might take my consciousness off of the ball. So, out here is the crowd, noise, coughing,

[34:31]

Yeah, booing. The sun. Somebody, you know, wiggling. You know, my armpit itches. So there's a lot of things that could take your consciousness off of the ball. Now, if one is trying to focus on the ball and not be aware of any of these other things, one has to work very hard. So some of one's energy, instead of going into the ball, is actually kind of going into setting up a barrier, to kind of walling off. everything else and in a sense then what is taking what it consciousness a consciousness which is essentially unlimited you know basic nature of consciousness is it has no shape or form it's unlimited it's you know so we say it's vast but then you know vast doesn't quite get it you know and even to call it fast whatever that thing is and it appears on my you know even to call it big is you know hey i'm getting is there some other kind of mind

[36:06]

Hakun says that about the great, the great Prajnaparamita, you know, we always say Maha Prajnaparamita Sutra, the great perfection of wisdom sutra. And Hakun says, is there some other kind of perfection of wisdom? But anyway, consciousness, consciousness is, And now we're going to say, oh no, let's just have consciousness be on the ball. And let's not let consciousness be aware of any of those other things. So in effect, we set up a kind of wall in our own consciousness, in our consciousness. We set up a wall in our consciousness, a boundary. And we say, here are the things that I'm going to have in, and these other things I'm going to have out. If this is your strategy, folks, do you understand what happens here? As soon as this is your strategy to have some things in and have other things out, now you have anxiety.

[37:14]

Anxiety is going to be over on this side, because what's going to happen when you can't do that anymore? Aren't you a little bit worried? Aren't you a little nervous that some of these things may get into your mind, into your consciousness? I'd be a little anxious if I were you. So you might be, you might also be worried, you know? And you might be, and you know, probably at some point you would experience some fear. Oh God, that stuff out there, that is, I wouldn't have to deal with that. I've got the ball to pay attention to. If I don't just pay attention to the ball, how am I going to start paying attention to that? I'm never going to get a hit. And then you have, you know, probably, you know, some of these things get in sometimes, you know?

[38:18]

I mean, you're trying really hard. And then isn't that upsetting? Isn't that disturbing and upsetting when you can't do this and this other stuff gets in there? That's called disturbing. Upset. Then you have anger. Damn it, I was trying so hard. Now look what happened. So that's it folks. That's what happens, you see. With concentration, when you pick a particular object of concentration and you say, all these other things that can happen are disturbances and to be kept out. So, what we try to, you know, cultivate in a certain sense. Yeah, and you could be a failure. Yeah, you could blow it. So, you know, so the solution, the solution is,

[39:24]

Whatever object comes, pay attention to it. Whatever object comes. And in a certain sense, OK, what do you call it? Provisionally, fine. Pay attention to the ball. Come back to the ball for your breath. you know, the activity. But as other things come up, if you start fighting them, God, I wish the crowd wasn't so noisy. Are you paying attention to the ball now or not? You know, so somehow all these other things have to be able to arise in what is this unlimited consciousness. They have to be able to come up. And the question is, does one then get thrown off by that because one had set up this whole kind of thing? Or can one have these various things come through one's consciousness and not get thrown off, and not make a big deal out of it?

[40:33]

You know, like, why can't I follow my breath, and what's wrong with me, and how come I can't count to 10, you know, et cetera, or whatever it is, okay? So these things are also, and you know, and curiously enough, these are all some of the things that one was trying to keep out. Where did they end up on the basis of this strategy? You see, the anxiety, the worry, the fear, the disturbance, the upset, the anger, they all ended up in consciousness because, because you set up. Because when we set this up as our agenda, then inherently these things end up in consciousness. That's just part of the way it works, right? Part of the dynamic. There are these two kinds of concentrations. One is this kind of limited concentration. You're trying to concentrate on one thing, exclude others. And there's the other kind of concentration where everything, in a certain sense, is part of the concentration.

[41:36]

And don't blow your concentration because you know stuff comes up. So we also, another Tibetan teacher that I was at some talks, he said, the meditation hall is the most auspicious place for spiritual practice. These kind of things really bug me. I was at Karma Choling, this Trungpa Rinpoche Center in Vermont, and they're trying to get me, you know, they invited me to come for three weeks and would you help us, you know, our food, our cooking, you know. And boy, after about two days you could understand why they're cooking is the way they're cooking is, and what am I supposed to do about it? Well, part of it is they have this whole agenda of spiritual practices. None of them are called working in the kitchen. And everybody is there for their spiritual advancement. So you start by sitting sort of like Sasen, but it's on this sort of square or rectangular yellow and red sofas.

[42:44]

And you have your knees way up in the air, et cetera, et cetera, which you don't need to know about exactly. After you've done that for whatever it is, two or three years or six months or something, you get to starting on your Nindra practices and do your 100,000 frustrations and your 100,000 chantings, and there's 500,000 altogether. By the end of the three weeks, I'm saying, look, can't you have a cutting 100,000 carrots practice? I've cut my 100,000 vegetables. Come on. Doesn't that count? So, you know, that's not spiritual, right? It's spiritual if you're bowing, and you see these people walking down the hall, and they have on these sort of gym shirts and knee pads, you know, like they've been out rollerskating, and they've got on elbow pads. And they're on their way to lunch. And they've been down in the prostration room, you know? Because this isn't just like the prostration we do. This is flat out.

[43:47]

You know, we aren't doing it half prostration. It's the way we do. This is, you go down on your knees and then you go flat out on your belly and your arms are out over your head. And they have this great room with all these, you know, Buddhas or, you know, teachers up on the wall and all that. So anyway, like, wouldn't, I mean, if you're interested in spiritual practice and advancing in the Dharma, I mean, who wouldn't be, right? Then you should get going on your bowing practice and If you have to work in the kitchen, that is taking time away from when you could be prostrating. Because after you get through all of those practices, there's a bunch more practices. And then you can start doing chakra. You can get chakra from samvara initiation and vajrayogini initiation. And then there's the practices that go on. And it's years. And you never finish. And then there's other ones. And you see these people. They're on to those other ones. And oh, wow. And you could go on to them too, right?

[44:50]

So who cares about cooking? Or food? Anyway. So here's the teaching. He says, all of the meditation hall is the most auspicious place for your spiritual practice. You know what I say? the questions coming in and I say, excuse me, but doesn't somebody have to cook? I mean, everybody can't be in the meditation hall. They're going to starve. What about the person who's cooking? Do they have no chance for spiritual advancement? And somebody's been fixing the plumbing around here and painting the place. They put up the walls and the windows and they built the meditation hall. What about those people? Don't they get to do any kind of spiritual practice or have any advancement in the Dharma?

[45:54]

And he said, well, the meditation hall is the most auspicious place. But when you do work or do whatever you're doing willingly, it can be the same thing. So that's what we're talking about here. When you willingly turn your attention to, and you're not going like, why do I have to turn my attention to that? When you willingly, in a sense it's like saving all beings or something. When you willingly give your attention to something, you're willingly participating in something, then it's the same thing. It's the same, it's now a spiritual practice, you're giving yourself to it. Now you have a chance for joy because you give yourself to it. You have a chance to find your ease because you're giving yourself to it. You have a chance to be absorbed in it because you're bringing your consciousness and your being to it willingly.

[46:56]

So you have a chance for absorption. You have a chance to be collected. You have a chance to deepen. If I set up this idea that I'm I'm here to just pay attention to this thing and not, you know, to have those other distractions get in my way, and to get rid of those other distractions. Then every time a distraction comes up, I go, oh no, not again! You see? So, it's more practical for our practice not to try to set up those kinds of games. And that kind of, you know, success and failure. and have that kind of definition of success and failure. Oh, I was so concentrated. No, I stayed with that object the whole time. Well, it might just mean, you know, you're uptight and you happen to be kind of a rigid personality and you can really apply yourself to something. So what? I mean, you know, there's more to it.

[48:00]

This is also the same thing is said in Zen. Don't try to set up a little nest within consciousness. Here's a little nest. It's a nice little place. It's cozy. And it's sweet. And not much is going on in here. It's quiet. And it's really spiritual. And there's nice music. No music. Okay, no music. There's no music. And, again, there's none of those nasty things that are out there. You know, like, they might be hard to deal with. You know, rage. Embarrassment. Conflict.

[49:11]

You know, conflicting emotions. Any emotions. So this is the way, this is another, this is in, you know, applied to Zen practice, or spiritual practice, as if rather than baseball. It's the same, it's the same thing, you see. To try to set up. A little cozy place. Let me have some peace and quiet. I'm going to do a meditation now. It will be so nice. The guests are gone. No more Tokubetsu Sushi and skip all this other stuff. Don't make me deal with that. So this is some tendency in meditation and in spiritual practice to try to establish this nest nice cozy place so again it's taking consciousness and setting up this kind of wall and sometimes this wall is you know literally in the body right because when you're sitting

[50:25]

When you're sitting then this is the nest is here This is where we're sitting at the nest and this other stuff is here No, I mean in your you know the rest of your body So there tends to be a separation. This wall, this barrier, is not just something in the mind. It's also the fact that my neck hurts. Why is my neck hurting? Well, my neck is hurting because I don't want to have any of that stuff. That stuff is unpleasant. That stuff that actually happens in the body, it's just tasteful. It's sniffy. And it doesn't seem to want to just be quiet and cozy.

[51:49]

It seems to bark. It barks and it growls and it gets frightened. And all that stuff is below the neck. It's the stuff that's below the neck. So literally you can have this boundary. This boundary can actually be in the body. It can be in the neck. You know, the neck and shoulders are a good place to keep this stuff down and out. And then this is a nice cozy place. This is also the analogy then sometimes of, you know, the penthouse that I talked to you about, you know. The penthouse and the dog in the basement, right? The dog is in the basement. And you put the dog, this is what we do, you know, growing up. And sometimes mom and dad say, Can't you sit still? You know, various things. And so after a while, you know, the dog just likes to bounce around and it's, you know, and it's just having a good time and just playing.

[52:50]

But after a while you go like, I guess I better put that dog in the basement because it's more serious than that now. And especially now that I'm here at Telsahara, I better be really careful about that dog because you have to watch out for those things. We have to be very careful about how we behavior. So, the dog goes down in the basement, and then you can still hear it barking now and again, so you move up to the second floor, and the third floor, and finally up to the penthouse, so you can't hear that dog barking. But unfortunately, when you go to do... that would all work very nicely until you go to do meditation. And part of meditation is then, you know, You put your breath in your abdomen. I mean, if you put your awareness in your abdomen, mind in the abdomen, and follow the breath in the abdomen, you are, now you're starting to integrate, and you're starting to take consciousness, and not just keep the consciousness in this cozy little nest, but you're actually taking consciousness and putting it down in your abdomen, and you find out what's going on down here in the basement.

[53:57]

And Kadagiri Rishi used to say, you know, for years, settle the self on the self. Self on the self. You know, settle the self on the self. And stop trying to, you know, keep some nice self separate. You know, a nest of a self separate up in your head somewhere. And settle that self on the, you know, the big self. Big self, which in Zen is, you know, understood, you know, this is big self. Here, this is where all this messy stuff is going on. So you can have, so this tension or this boundary can be here at the neck, it can be, you know, in the chest, it can be between the chest and the abdomen, it can be far away down the abdomen. There's various places where we end up having a kind of pain or a kind of, you know, not letting, not having our awareness go past that because we know that once we get past that boundary, we're going to encounter stuff we don't know about.

[55:04]

It's unknown if nothing else. It might just be fine, but it's unknown anyway. And why don't we just deal with the stuff that we know how to deal with? Okay, so that's another kind of, you know, tendency is to, we'll try to just deal with the stuff we know how to deal with. And if we don't know how to deal with it, we keep it out. We try to keep it out. So when you're trying to keep something else that you don't know how to deal with, then you're starting to get this kind of tension. The dog in the basement, by the way, you see, so after that dog has been in the basement for a while, do you think it's gonna be friendly when you put your mind there? No, it's not gonna be friendly. And so when you first put your mind there, instead it goes like, And then you try to say, excuse me, but I'm doing my practice.

[56:06]

And anyway, the dog would tend to be kind of snarly. And it will take a while for you to get on harmonious good terms and to develop some relationship of rapport. This in Zen is the ox. And eventually, you ride the ox home backwards, playing the upside-down flute with no holes. And then the ox and the rider disappear. You don't so much have any more of the sense of, this is separate from this, this is different, this is the rider, this is the beast. There's no more of the... Because the self is so well settled, They're not different anymore. It's not you against this stuff out there. It's not like you have it together, or you're trying to have it together, and this other stuff out there is bugging you, or hindering you, or a problem for you.

[57:17]

There's some way in which they're the same. There's no more separation. Yeah, yeah, I don't know if you say exactly mental boundaries, but And I wouldn't go to so far as to say, you know, all of it or something. I would say probably most of it There's a wonderful little book about back pain called mind over back pain And it's just a little book. And basically he says in there, somebody who's been working as an MD, who's been working with people on their backs for 20, 30 years now. And he says, by a certain age, everybody has stuff wrong with their backs. Everybody's got bone spurs and this and that, and bones pressing against nerves.

[58:21]

But some people have back pain and some people don't. What's the difference? Anyway, what he's noticed is most back pain is a substitute for emotion. In other words, it's more socially acceptable to feel, to have back pain, rather than to have a strong conflicting emotion. So, in a certain way, it, you know, and all these things I think have their limitations, but it's worth, you know, sort of looking at, and obviously, Once you say that, it still doesn't mean that you shouldn't do something physical to work with your back pain. But anyway, that's his point. And he's seen enough people over enough years to correlate that some people, they have back pain, and then the day they decide to leave their bad marriage,

[59:27]

Or the day they start experiencing the pain of their life, or the conflicts in their life, or they acknowledge, gee, my marriage is a mess, or this or that, then their back pain goes away. What has been severe chronic back pain. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute, as far as that goes. Anyway, I would be a little careful about all these things, because we all have to work out our own analogies and our own understandings. And just because we say something like that, I do, again, I just want to say, just because

[60:30]

you know, back pain, a lot of back pain or most back pain is substitute emotional, you know, something. Doesn't mean that, you know, I found sometimes I have back pain and if I do shoulder stand and headstand, the back pain goes away. You know, so, you know, maybe there is something emotional there, but also, you know, sometimes some stretching or various things are helpful. So, I mean, you know, we have to be, we sort of have to be practical. I don't want to set up something sort of doctrinaire. You know, when I say that, you know, a lot of it is emotional. But there's a whole sort of, you know, school of thinking also that sort of like you have pain in your back, it's, you know, some part of you saying, I can't stand it. What? What is it you can't stand? Well, then that's something, you know, that if you don't want to have back pain, you should probably look at what it is you say, you know, you can't stand. But I do want to talk a little bit more about pain because Something very similar happens with pain that happens is the same kind of thing and that is that again if You know if we have so to speak a body sitting Okay, so

[61:48]

Let's say that there's pain here. This is called pain. So it should go like this, you know. So once there's pain anywhere, whether it's the knee or the back, and, you know, what happens? Part of the pain in sitting, you know, is not necessarily particularly emotional. by the way, because it's just that, you know, we just said, got through saying, but this is what I meant, right? We just got through saying, you know, I was, when we're talking about, you know, sort of chronic long-term back pain is most often associated with something emotional that someone is not experiencing. But this, this pain is associated basically with the fact that you're doing this, you know, weird posture for endless hours, you know, in cold weather or hot weather, et cetera. Right? And especially during Sashin. Now what does that have to do with emotion? It's just like wear and tear on the body. It's physical. Okay?

[63:04]

But, you know, the consciousness involved with it is going to make a difference. Okay? So the tendency as soon as there's pain is, you know, one is adopting this strategy. And so, but it's so in that sense, it's a little bit the reverse though. And so what one does is make a little wall around this. And my awareness is going to just come down to here now. And I'm going to wall that off. And I'm not going to relate to that. It hurts too much. But unfortunately, now that I have this wall around here, somehow this hurts a little bit more. So I think I better have another wall. And so now, you know, whereas the initial pain, you know, pretty soon you've got quite a wall here. In fact, the whole thigh here, the whole thigh is moving in this direction.

[64:10]

Like, let me out of here. And literally, you know, your thigh will, to various, you know, either in a very obvious fashion or in a very subtle way, your thigh will be trying to move away. Move away from the hurt. Okay? Move away. And let's, you know, wall that off. Okay? Now, is your knee going to be hurting more or less at this point? You see? It's going to be hurting more. And that's again, that's the same principle as this. Because this very effort to escape from it, is actually, you know, altering the energy here. And then, now what originally, you know, the energy is sort of flowing, you know, through your leg, through your knee. And now because there's some pain here, you know, this energy that was flowing through is now having to flow around.

[65:13]

You know, let me have my energy go around that now. This is the wall around the pain now, see? And now my energy has to go around, and pretty soon it has to go around bigger obstacles. Pretty soon the energy can't go through the knee anymore. The whole knee is hurting. So now the energy is just going down to the knee and back. Down to the knee and back. And the energy that's all the time circulating in the body. And this energy is trying to not go even that far. Like my example here. So your leg is pulling away. So it actually takes a kind of It actually takes a kind of effort and a kind of concentration to say, you know, why don't I see if I can include this in my concentration instead of this excluding it from my concentration. Why don't I try to have it be in a sense an object or at least part of the concentration rather than I'm going to keep it outside the concentration.

[66:16]

come and go and go back to our breath or our counting. That doesn't mean you have to dwell on it, but I just mean like don't, but coming back to your breath is different than excluding the pain from the breath. So, you know, another way is it actually is fairly useful to come back to the breath. That's one of the kind of strategies because one of the tendencies with the pain is either your mind goes to the pain and it's so painful that, you know, you react. There's a reaction. And there's a kind of a tightness that sets in. Wow, this is too much. This is overwhelming. And so at that time, it's often useful actually to go to the breath and the breath wherever you're following the breath. But the breath is actually includes the whole body. And so you're even though the sort of center of the focus is here, this is at the, you know, this is sort of at the edge of, so if the breath is going in and out, you know, there's a little, there's a little pain, you know, out there somewhere, which is on the, you know, it's sort of on the periphery of awareness, but you're not trying to shove it completely out of awareness, not have anything to do with it.

[67:49]

God, I don't want anything, you know, So, this happens with pain. Wherever the pain is in the body, this is a tendency. So, as a basic kind of strategy, in terms of concentration and so on, and in terms of relieving the pain, the basic strategy is to bring your breathing and to notice the little subtle sensations of breath in this area. Or, so to speak, we say soften. Let that area soften. Because you want to in some way soften this, you know, this little, this sort of wall that almost immediately, without your sort of having anything to do with it, the walling off of, you know, the difficult thing is building up. And so you have, it's actually some work to soften that, to bring your awareness into that area and see if you can, with some concentration and with some actual joy and ease, and be with that. And then you're, you actually can relax now.

[68:52]

As long as one's practice is involved in only relating to the nice things in the nest, and not relating to the painful things out here, one has this inherent tension, wherever it is in the body, whether it's at the neck, or across the ribs, or here, or it's around the pain, and that tension is all the time building up, building up, when one is trying to maintain you know, a private place. It's a place that's separate from the pain. A place that doesn't have, where there is no pain. All this, by the way, you know, this is all within some, you know, let's be practical folks, right? I'm not trying to say you should sit through anything, etc. You know, we all have our limits. And I also don't think that, you know, Lee has got a bit of a headache tonight and is going to rest. But he asked me what I was talking about.

[69:54]

We started talking about concentration a little bit, and he told me this story about the Buddha. Before, you know, he was doing the Bodhi tree, and one of the things he did was he thought, well, I should meet my fear. So he thought, well, I'll go out into the forest, you know, to some scary place. And, you know, he heard twigs snap and different things. And anyway, the fear never came. And then he thought, this is stupid. You know, why don't I just meet fear when it comes? But, you know, in a similar way, I mean, you know, we don't have to sort of like force yourself to sit in some weird posture just because it's good for us and because we'll be forced to experience all these far out, you know, painful things. Let's do it at some, you know, some level where it works for us, you know? I mean, you know, let's be practical about it. One of the practical things about zazen is you can change your posture and you can, you know, you want to work on this basic dynamic and changing this basic dynamic within a level of things where you can actually work on it.

[71:05]

We did this little yoga class today and if in fact the pain of a stretch is so overwhelming you can't breathe, what the heck good does that do? You want to have a stretch where you can actually breathe and release you know, and release and breathe into the pain and soften there, and you know, you can actually work with that. So it's a level of tension or stress that you can actually work with and relate to, and the point at which it's just all overwhelming, well, skip it, you should start over again. You know, you move, you rest, you cross your legs again, you start over, it'll hurt soon enough, you know. Jack Cornfield said before he left India that he met some old Englishman who'd been there for about 30 years in India and said, do you have any advice for me? I'm going back to America. Jack was at that time a Theravadan monk. And the guy said, thought about it for a long time, and then he said, you know, if you're coming to the bus stop and you see the bus pulling out, don't run. There'll be another bus. Anyway, it applies to things like pain in your legs and other things.

[72:13]

And sometimes you should just rest and don't worry about it. And then when you rest, you actually have now the energy and some stamina, whatever, to make a good effort to be with the difficulty. Whereas once you're just completely undone by it all, you never get through that. There's no end to that once you're just overwhelmed. You need to have This is similar like the Buddha, finally he had to eat, right? So he said, I need some strength in order to be with things. Anyway, you know, this afternoon when I was sort of thinking about this class, I realized too that, you know, there's that wonderful picture, I don't know if you've ever seen that picture where, you know, Buddha is sitting, and Mara and his armies attack, you know, and they're throwing all kinds of spears and barbs out of him. And what happens is, when they get within a certain range of the Buddha, they all turn into flowers. And, you know, so that's the Buddha's concentration.

[73:16]

You know, that somehow his concentration is that powerful. So that these objects which start out being, you know, barbs and spears, he's able to meet them in such a way that they're flowers. When they take their pain and bring it in and look at it up close, it's more likely to not return back to its original state. Yes. Yeah, that's like when the dog's no longer down in the basement. When you're, you and the dog are together, but when the dog's at a distance, that's right, and when these things are at this distance out here, yeah, so when you're not at a distance any longer, then they're not throwing stuff at you. Well, there's more to all this, but you know, it's about five to nine, so, you know, it's another class coming up on the eighth.

[74:22]

We might talk a little bit more about this, and we might even get to the hindrances. So, but anyway, one last thing about concentration. So again, you see, in a certain sense, you know, to make something, you know, in line with what you're just saying about things being, you know, close, It's also making things whole. You know, you have a whole body, a whole mind, rather than a body-mind where either the body or the mind you're separating. And you're saying, I'm going to have, this is all going to be nice, I'm going to keep the other stuff, you know, keep the pain in my knee, or keep, you know, the anger in my stomach, or whatever. And this kind of thing, by the way, you know, it's the same. Let me just talk about this one last thing here. One of the things that happens with sitting, too, is that because, you know, because it's this container called Sazen, we're actually generating a fair amount of energy in sitting, which would otherwise be going into, you know, chasing after stuff.

[75:38]

You know, normally we're out in the world, we have a chance to chase after things. Well, let's go and have some tea now. There goes the energy, right? You know, so we go and do various things. Anyway, in sitting we're generating energy. And what happens then is that, you know, it starts to, you know, the energy is moving in our body and our body is starting to move. And so, you know, we have within our body, just the way we get pain here, you know, we have emotion in our body. And so we have, you know, usually, you know, this difference is cool, but, you know, often anger is down here, and, you know, fear is often up here, and so on. But anyway, what happens is, as you sit, of course, the energy is coming up, and then what happens is that it And what we've done is, we've organized our energy so that it goes around these things.

[76:48]

You know, where there's anger, we've arranged our body so that the energy goes around it. In the same way as this. Right? Because I wouldn't want to have it. Or you wall it, in the same way as you walled up pain. Okay, so within our body we have anger and fear, and we've arranged our body so the energy goes around. But what happens in sitting, because we've gotten more energy now, some of the energy is not going around anymore. It's sort of literally like it's come up and it's knocking. And that energy coming up here, and it starts working at this. And this has not had any energy. We've taken the energy away from that. If you take the energy away from it enough, you get depression. You know, and all the energy is going into keeping the lid on.

[77:54]

So after a while, though, this energy is building up and so it, this energy is kind of like, and this area which has been sort of immobilized or encased and kind of shut away, is now with this energy that's coming up, it's starting to move. And then we say, oh my goodness, I'm angry. Or we don't say, oh my goodness, we say, oh God. Or whatever we say. So this is called anger. And then we pick out various objects. But this is what spiritual practice is about, is releasing this stuff that is actually within our body. It's actually where our energy has been going around that stuff. What that's been doing is limiting our energy and taking consciousness, which is unlimited, and putting it in a neat little package and taking our energy, which is large and big and creative and lots of things, and taking that energy and saying, now be careful what you do, now don't go over there, watch where you step, don't walk on the grass.

[79:06]

We have all these little directives for our energy so that it won't get into these places. you know, which is otherwise known in the vernacular of fairy tales as the woods. The wilderness. This stuff is wild. And so, but this very naturally happens, you know, as you sit. Because the energy, the energy, you're building up energy, and so it won't neatly go around these places anymore. And it starts to actually shake them. Those parts of the body that have been tucked away start to vibrate. And then you have consciousness of these things. And that's just the way it works. It doesn't have anything to do with it. What does it have to do with? You never say, oh, well, I'm angry at you, or I'm angry at this, or I'm angry at that.

[80:07]

It's just the stuff in your body that's getting Tickled. The fear, it's just another part of your body. It's coming awake. This is what waking up is. Your body is literally waking up. All this stuff is waking up. It's been asleep for a long time. And now, and then, after it wakes up and you learn how to integrate it into your being, Now you're a bigger person for it. And this is why we call it growth, spiritual growth.

[80:47]

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