Today, just to be all organized and everything, we'll finish the Eightfold Path by considering the Eightfold, which is called Sama Samadhi, or Samyak Samadhi, right concentration. And, you know, this is kind of like, this is our song, right? Samadhi. That's the practice of concentration, and Zen monks are, you know, famous for being completely one-pointed and single-minded, right? You're famous for So, you know, live up to it.

[01:05]

So, samādhi means, you know, samādhi, samādhā means to be fixed. Firmly fixed onto a point. The Chinese character that they use for Samadhi is like this. Fixed. Ding. In Chinese. And this goes with... This goes with wisdom. So this is a Chinese character for samadhi.

[02:11]

And then sometimes they transliterate it. It's a character for three, with a character which is pronounced may. So san, that's why you say it's san may. for Samadhi. Like a Hokkyo Zammai. Zammai. Ding means, is a Chinese character for Samadhi. It's the, like a, it's a, it's a, what do you call it? Semantic translation of Samadhi. Because this character means to be fixed, decided, settled. So this is the character they use to translate samadhi. When they transliterate it to make it sound like samadhi, they say, some may.

[03:15]

In Japanese, some might. Mind to be one-pointed. That's what samadhi means. It's a state of the mind being one-pointed. The one-pointedness of mind is a quality in terms of the mental factors that are associated with the state of consciousness. All the Abhidharma traditions say that all states of consciousness have this mental factor called samadhi. We never have an experience where the mind is not one-pointed. The mind is always one-pointed. Every state of consciousness is always one-pointed. Which means the mind is on the point which is on the point of the object of awareness.

[04:19]

So there are various mental factors which accompany all states of consciousness and samadhi is one of them. a universal phenomenon. We never are without it. However, it is often, to a great extent, in the background of our life, and sometimes quite weak. It's just strong enough to have an experience. So it's not always full-strength samadhi, but we always have samadhi. Now, right samadhi, samyak samadhi, or sama samadhi, is, first of all, is the samadhi of a wholesome state of consciousness. So all states of consciousness, wholesome and unwholesome, and also indeterminate states of consciousness, have samadhi.

[05:30]

But right samadhi is associated with a wholesome state of consciousness. it is possible to be quite one-pointed about doing . So there is sometimes a fairly intense level of concentration while doing something harmful. That's not right samadhi. However, I would say also that there is a limit to how when you're doing something unwholesome. You can get quite concentrated doing something unwholesome, but there's a limit. There's no limit. to the level of concentration when you're doing wholesome things. Concentration doesn't have a limit, then, if you get completely, fully developed. There's all in unwholesomeness.

[06:34]

Make basis so I know that you're doing that. Now, that's a kind of a generous way to talk about right samadhi, right concentration. A more stricter definition would be that right concentration means not only the concentration associated with wholesome minds, but concentration which intensified to the point of being an absorption so that there's a feeling that our total being is absorbed in our experience, that we really feel collected. So samadhi means a mental factor associated with all states of mind, but it also means a developed state of absorption. And the classical depiction, almost like a lawful depiction,

[07:39]

of absorption is that absorption comes in these four stages, well, for starters, four stages in the world. They're called the four jhanas. That's Pali, and Sanskrit is jhana. Now, this then is the root of the name of the school, which is the Chinese way of transliterating this. Which is . na, chana.

[08:42]

So they transliterated jana and dhyana as chana. This is chana. And Japanese people pronounce this as zin. Pardon? This character? Yeah, same Chinese character. They don't usually say the na, though, because after a long time, In China, they stopped saying chan school. They just said chan school. So then this is the character that Japanese use. So we got this name. Our lineage got this name because the early practitioners of our lineage, our lineage was not called They were just disciples of Buddha, but people observed they did a lot of sitting meditation, starting with Bodhidharma, facing the wall.

[09:51]

And they said, oh, they must be doing that samadhi practice. Since he's sitting there so long in the snow, he must be in it. So they named the school, they named our school by what they thought we were doing. our ancestors did not name themselves K'chon School. They got named by the press. And as you know, sometimes once you get named by the press, it's all over. You keep saying, well, that's not my name. They say, yeah, sure, sure. Like when I went to New York, when I was president of Zentson, I went to New York to do fundraising. And Richard Baker thought that I should change my name when I went to meet these, you know, these My name's Reb Anderson. Sounds a little unofficial. So we went back to the name I had when I was a kid. When I was a kid, the same thing happened. When I went to school, on the way to school, my mother said, you know, Reb, I want to teach you how to spell your name.

[10:56]

My name's Harold, right? H-A-R-O-L-D. I practiced on the way to school, and then I told the teacher, it isn't your name, Harold. The teacher called me Harold, and all the other kids called me Red. So the teacher, most of the teachers graduated with Swedish. But some teachers kept to it, and some of them were Swedish. But then the same thing happened. I went to meet these foundation people, you know, and I hear this myself. It's Harold Anderson. President of Zen Center. And then we'd sit down and have a conversation. And some other people would come in, you know. Some of our donors would come in to help me meet these foundation people. And the donors would sit down next to me and say, Hi, Rev. So, you know, you can't necessarily change it to make your own name. So we're called the Zen School. We're called the Jhana School. So we're actually supposed to be jhana monks.

[11:59]

We're supposed to be one-pointed, not just in the sense that everybody's one-pointed, but in the developed way. I think you've all heard that concentration and wisdom go together. It's possible to have concentration without wisdom, and it's possible to have wisdom without concentration. Concentration without wisdom is considered to be a dull state. And wisdom without concentration is insanity. It's crazy. But the two together is the wheels of awakening. Looks like you had trouble with wisdom without concentration. Some people have tremendous insight.

[13:07]

You can meet them if you want to. They're often found in bars. I mean, they know more about Zen than any of us. But without concentration, it's just... It's worse than people who don't know anything, to have that kind of wisdom, if not grounded in the present bodily experience and one-pointedness with what's happening. They just jump from one insight to the other, you know, and they have to take a lot of prozac to deal with that. So, samadhi is the context in which we are transformed and our wisdom develops. intense, deeply developed samadhi. So it's kind of a circle. Samadhi gives rise to wisdom. Once you have wisdom, then you take that wisdom into samadhi. So one kind of samadhi is a kind of one-pointedness that clarifies your mind so you can see clearly.

[14:12]

For example, you can see clearly the five aggregates as they appear. You can experience them and be settled with them very clearly and stably. And you can see if there's any self which is supposed to be separate from that. And you can see the pain associated with that and so on. And in that stability, you can see very clearly, you can study the nature of any belief in self. You can study the nature of any idea that there's five aggregates in self. This is an excellent situation. This is the excellent situation to study. Once wisdom arises and you see, actually it doesn't make sense to separate self from experience. You see through, you have insight. Then, that insight into selflessness is taken back into the samadhi. Now the samadhi is not so much for the purpose of seeing clearly.

[15:13]

The samadhi is now a situation in which you kind of like cook your insight. like bake your inside into your bones, so to speak. Steep yourself in your wisdom, in the wisdom of selflessness. So selflessness gets kind of baked into your body, so your body becomes transformed by immersing yourself in selflessness. And it starts to actually transform your actual, your bodily habits. It transforms. So it's a circle. Going into the wisdom, samadhi supports it. Coming out of the wisdom, wisdom is then like samadhi. Going into it, it's like samadhi sets up the wisdom. Coming out of it, samadhi embodies the wisdom. And then, again, out of that wisdom, which is then again embodied around those endless wisdoms.

[16:25]

And in one sense, some people say that samadhi, the four jhanas that over all the years of studying, those four jhanas, they haven't gone up to five. Remember the five jhanas? Actually, there's eight jhanas. This is the five or four jhanas in the material world. There's four more in the material world. But anyway, they never say six or five or 19 or whatever. So the way the mind gets concentrated seems to be fairly standard. But insights are infinite. So in Mahayana Buddhism, you hear in the Mahayana texts about billions of samadhis. But the reason why there's billions of samadhis is is because those are billions of samadhis connected to billions of wisdoms. So every time there's a new insight, then go back into samadhi, and that samadhi is named by that insight. So insight is always up to date and new off the press about what's happening.

[17:31]

And then you take that insight into your body, and that's the name of the samadhi. But really, basically, samadhi simple and hasn't evolved in a sense. It's very much the same as it was back in the time of Shakyamuni Buddha. But since Shakyamuni Buddha, there have been untold insights of the practitioners, and therefore there have been untold samadhis named after those who went beyond Buddha's teaching, things he hadn't actually articulated, even though he taught a lot. His disciples have unfolded more aspects of the nature of the way things work than he had time to do in 45 years. Yeah, I like that, right. Dharmagate's a bonus. Every Dharmagate is an occasion of learning, insight.

[18:35]

Samadhi is basically the same as Samatha practice. It's basically equivalent to Samatha. The Pali is shamatha, and Sanskrit has a little slash over it, shamatha. So it's basically the same as shamatha. Shamatha practice, shamatha means resting or tranquilizing. And the Chinese character that they use for that is the Chinese character for shamatha, because you can see it all over Japan. This character here.

[19:48]

They may stop. And it's on almost every corner in the city. You see this Chinese character for Shaman. Cars drive up to it, and they go, they stop, and they're going to Shaman. They also turn their lights off at this time. At the stop sign. They do that. But you don't have the Chinese character. You just have the... What does it say on a German sign? Stop. So, shamatha is to stop or rest or tranquilize the mind. And shamatha is presented often in nine stages. In the ninth stage of shamatha, you're completely settled but it's not the same as a jhana.

[20:52]

Ninth stage of shamatha is like just on the verge of a trance. When you reach the ninth stage of shamatha practice, you could enter a trance if you wanted to. You have a level of concentration which could be turned into a jhana. Although the Zen school is named after the jhanas, in the history of Zen practice, if you look at the descriptions of the way they practiced, Zen people in China and Japan and Korea and so on did not practice the jhanas so much. Although they seem to reach the level of liberation, which is full tranquilization, They seem to more meditate up to the point of what's called the access to the jhana. So there's a state of concentration just prior to the attainment of the access or neighborhood concentration.

[22:02]

It looks to me as though most Zen people, in a sense, stop there. Don't get more into the concentration at that point. stabilized and pacified and settled in their mind, they then go right into what's called vipassana, or insight work. That's the common thing. Now, it's not against the rules, and some Zen people do go into the trances, but strictly speaking, in trance work, in the trance, there's some problems because the trances is no... So there's a certain kind of linguistic study that you can't do when you're in a trance. There's no language in the trance state. So in order to work with your language habits, talk about yourself and others, in some ways it's better to be in an access state just prior to entering full trance.

[23:08]

Well, in the four absorptions, what you do is you don't go into the second absorption just flat out. You go through the first to the second. So there's not an access between each one. There's an access before the first one. And once you enter the first one, you go directly from the first one to the second one. You don't go into a certain level. for the second one, for the third one and the fourth one. But there is a kind of like waiting area or sort of staging area for the jhanas, which is basically the same as fully developed shamatha. It's a samadhi where you can stay concentrated on whatever object you can stay on as long as you want. But in order to go into the trances, you have to sort of like want to. You have to sort of like... have that intention. And that intention, the momentum of wanting to go into a trance state, once you get fully concentrated, you can go right in.

[24:19]

But if you're not trying to get into a trance state, and you get fully concentrated, you very likely won't go into a trance. However, you can sometimes accidentally fall into a trance, and people, I think, sometimes do. I've talked to people who have done that. Shakyamuni Buddha himself fell into a trance when he was 16, just sitting on an apple tree. Apple didn't fall on him. Maybe it was a mango tree. But anyway, he was just sitting out under a tree one day when he was 60, and he just dropped into the first jhana spontaneously. And so I think other people have just fallen into the jhana, so they just get concentrated and just drop in. But you won't necessarily fall into it, especially if you're intending to or even already starting to do insight work, which will make the inquiry involved there usually stop you from dropping into a trance.

[25:24]

But it is nice to have that level of concentration. Any questions so far? Yeah, it does. In every state of consciousness, in other words, in every experience that you're having, not all that's comprising that experience is what you're thinking is happening. So you could look at a color blue, and as you keep looking at that color blue, you notice that you feel differently every moment you look at the color blue.

[26:27]

Even when you're angry, you notice that every anger is different. If you look carefully, anger is always a different anger. Or lust is always a different lust. Or confusion is always a different confusion. That's because what you can be aware of are many other mental factors, but those are actually conscious mental factors. It's just that they're not the object of awareness. And also, within your field of awareness, within the circle of your awareness, there are factors of organization within the field due to your past karma. So, if you've lied about certain things, As we talked about before, you actually spoke a lie or wrote a lie. That structure is a certain way. That puts us kind of like... Obviously, you have to group it into your conscious field, so to speak. It's like this manifold in your mind, then, which makes certain areas of consciousness less likely to get surfaced into consciousness, into objects of the world.

[27:40]

Similarly, if you do wholesome things, that makes a shape which tends to surface things. One of the effects of doing wholesome things is it tends to create shapes that tend to surface information. Doing unwholesome things tends to make shapes in your consciousness which tend to push things into, make them unavailable to you. All this is consciousness. So I guess what they would call the unconscious are those areas which have been structured bypass karma as sort of difficult to surface into getting a chance to be an object of conscious awareness. Yeah, usually the things that ought to reach are the result of unwholesome karma. Because wholesome karma tends to aerate the system. and bring things up to be known, because that's helpful to understand the nature of the mind, to see how it all works together.

[28:58]

That's a short course on that. So in Buddhism, we don't have an unconscious, we have a consciousness. The consciousness has structures. But I think Freud also drew some pictures of consciousness, and he made these compartments, you know, ego, superego, and id, and these lines between them. So for us, these lines are like dispositions, which make us incline not to turn attention into certain areas, and to turn them towards others. So by karma, our mind becomes biased and sentimental about what's going on. And therefore, our view of what's going on is disturbed by karma and by our delusions. But for us, we call it all part of consciousness. And all those things that influence the way we feel about everything that's happening. Carrie? Carrie? Yeah, but you can still, Buddha, in the fourth jhana, coming out of the fourth jhana, he sees the Four Noble Truths.

[30:21]

Based on the fourth jhana, he then, he developed this divine eye, divine ear, retro-cognition, super-magical powers, and then he saw the outflows. And then he saw the outflows wang, and then he saw the four mental truths. So all this happened coming right out of the jhanas. In the actual trance state, you may not be able to do it, but coming out of it, you can go into insight work. It depends on your motivation. with his motivation, the concentration of those johns. But he wasn't like that. He was in that state of absorption. And there was no language in the state of absorption. But you can still see the form of the truths. So it is possible to do this while in full absorption, even though there's no language.

[31:25]

Some people go into the jaundice and they just have a really nice, basically, it's very happy, nice, wholesome environment. It's like, you know, the most, what do you call it, non-polluting, most ecologically correct kind of vacation to take. The problem is that you can't take your spouse with you. The Buddha learned them prior to non-Buddhism, from non-Buddhism, from unenlightened yogis, and he learned them very well. He also practiced these self-mortification things, but you don't have to do these self-mortification things with the jhanas, but he did them too, by himself, and also becoming a really good jhana practitioner.

[32:44]

So he checked both of those. He checked out the yogic trance thing, and he checked out the self-mortification thing. Neither one of them himself was sufficient. However, he did practice his jhanas the night of his work, but after having a good meal. Enlightenment's based on blood sugar. We eat before we're enlightened and after. So, let's see. I agree that there is this intention. That's what I said before, is that you probably wouldn't get into the jhanas unless you had that intention to get into them. There's a strong... There is a strong compulsion and obsession involved in attaining these states. Okay? Hello? Yeah, it does.

[34:01]

And I'm just telling you, you're not speaking English to yourself or Pali. They're not talking to themselves at this point. But there is this momentum coming from the world of whatever your native language is. At that point, you're talking to yourself. I don't want this stuff. I do not want this stuff. I do not want to deal with these gross material events anymore. I don't want to deal with life. Mozart and Grateful Dead. I don't want to deal with ice cream cones and Cadillacs. I don't want to deal with people and frogs. You eschew those categories of physical experience and conception. Okay? That's that will to eschew that. And then, as you get more and more concentrated, that momentum throws you into the trance if you want to go into the trance. To move into the next trance, however, you can't talk to yourself. My understanding is Because the mental factors which are involved in forming speech have just been totally engaged in... They've been taken away from speech and applied to the meditation objects.

[35:10]

They're no longer available for talking. So the momentum into the next trance does not come from talking to yourself. But, you know, tell me that that's not... If you come out of the trance... If you come out of the trance... you're not in a trance, then you can talk to yourself again and get yourself more concentrated and tell yourself to put aside, for example, in the first two trances, the predominant get you in the first trance are what's called vicharka and vichara, application of the mind and discursive, direct application and indirect or discursive application of the mind to the meditation object. And to move from there, you lighten up on those and intensify rapture. Then you lighten up on the rapture and intensify that. Pleasant. Then you lighten up on that and emphasize equanimity. I think free instruction.

[36:14]

If you've studied this stuff, you get into the trance and you realize, okay, now I've used it to intensify my concentration on the object. of the Tarka and the Michara, the application and the discursive treatment of the object. I've done them. They've got me in the trance. Okay, now when I go into this, when I'm going to go in again, I'm going to go in again. When I get in, I'm going to let go of those and emphasize rapture. Just sort of like embracing, applying myself to it. And once you get into it, by the first time, you can drop them more easily because you know how to get in by using them and then you can let go of them and get more into it. And you get into that, you let go even of the rapture and just lighten up in terms of you're not even embracing it anymore. You just sort of experience the sweet quality. Lighten up on that and just enter into the equanimity of it. So it's by pre-instruction and discussion with your teacher about how to do that. But in the trance, you're not messing around with that stuff. It's subtle, yeah.

[37:25]

Pardon? No, I don't think it does other... You have to train yourself. You have to discuss these things and understand these mental factors. They are mental factors. But the application of them, I think, at that level of concentration, if you bring words in, you rough it up again. But you can say, now I just read... It's like that, yeah. Or even something, imagine the old dog learning a new trick up in the high wire. If he says a word to himself, he'll fall off the wire. Another way to put it is, sometimes people are following their breathing, right? They're counting their breath. They're using the words to help them ...words of the numbers to help them tune into this breath process. At a certain point, they feel those words are roughing it up. At first, their mind's rough, and then they use the words, and then by using the words, their mind becomes more disciplined and soft and cooperative.

[38:36]

But then as it becomes softer, the words, those numbers, it seems more apropos to drop the number and just follow. And then after a while, following the breath is also great. Even the intention to push your mind towards it is too much. So you drop that. And then you're just a breath. And the breath, in a sense, stops. You're no longer even in and out. These levels, you have this instruction about what to let go of, but to be talking to yourself about it would rile you up again and put you back down. No, perhaps for you. I'm just telling you this. In certain states, any kind of talk like that is antithetical to the quality of the smoothness of the state. If you get in there and try to manipulate it at all, you'll ruffle, you'll ruffle. That's what I'm suggesting to you. So you disagree.

[39:39]

You disagree. Don't do this thing like, okay, I don't, you know. You disagree. Yeah, that's better. You disagree. You disagree. Stand up for yourself. So you check it out, and you go talk to some, they say they're talking to themselves in English or something, or Pali, in those jhanas. That's what I'm talking about. I'm saying you don't talk to yourself. I'm saying you're not speaking English anymore. That's what I'm saying. That's all I said. No language at the level of forming words that you're saying to yourself to give yourself instruction. You're going into that from a level where you did train yourself. Just like gymnasts. They get these teachings from their coach a million times. you know, about, you know, tuck, tighten, straighten, all this stuff, you know, all those words. But when they go into the thing, there's no... They're doing these things which were pre-programmed into the system, but they're not talking themselves anymore.

[40:48]

But they did when they first did. They were saying, they were talking themselves when they first did. Straighten, tuck. But after a while, you don't say it. That's what I'm saying. Is there something else? Oh, Scott. Well, after attaining the... These are called the four rupa jhanas. In other words, you go into the state of fine material experience. And then the formless ones, where you actually eschew form. You turn away from even looking at colors and smells and things like that in their most refined form. You turn your mind towards the vastness of space, the infinity of space, the infinity of consciousness, and things like that. Can that only be achieved through waking activity and stuff like that? I don't think so. I think it would be dangerous if you're walking around in that state.

[41:54]

Even these, I don't think you can be driving your car and doing these things. you wouldn't see the stop sign. You would just see red everywhere. Just like the whole universe would be red. And then suddenly, if you looked at the letters on the sign, part of the whole, the whole world would be white. The whole would be white, and the whole would be red. But you wouldn't know what that meant. You're supposed to stop the car. And the car, you put your foot on the... you put touching the pedal, the whole world would be like pressure. So these things are supposed to be practiced sitting. And hopefully, having told someone, people know you're doing that practice. You don't do it in public usually either. When do you recommend a person to drop off all sorts of pieces in public to achieve that?

[42:59]

At this point, until further notice, I just recommend that you attain full access concentration, the full level, the full shamatha. No. You asked me when I would recommend you go into the . No, no, no. This is Pali and Sanskrit. This is the same word, jana-jana. They don't have this D-H here. D-H is the same as J-H. So when you write the four rupajanas here, there's also four arupajanas also. Usually when they say right concentration in relationship to the eight-fold path, they mean these four rather than the next four. Or the next four. That's what they're talking about. So what's your question?

[44:04]

I thought you were saying that there's no technique involved in that. Oh yeah, there are. There are techniques. And I sometimes have discussed them with people. There's nine stages of how to do it. And they're quite straightforward. And sometimes I have, during some sessions, I've gone through those nine stages of shamatha with people. And people like that. Bodhidharma's teaching about this is to do this Samatha practice without any contrivance, to pacify and tranquilize the mind without any contrivance. To do that without any contrivance, without any nine stages or focusing the mind on the Of course, you can do that if you want to, but you don't have to think of it as a contrivance.

[45:10]

Like Ana was saying, she feels like you have to do that. It's just something you feel like you have to do. But if you do it as a kind of like, do that in order to get this, you're gaining idea. Which we kind of like tried to put that aside as soon as possible in Zen practice. So if you can practice the Ninth Stage of the Shamatha without gaining idea about it, It's the same as, as I often say, playing nine holes of golf. It's basically about keeping your eye on the ball. It's not a problem. But if you go play golf in order to gain something, then it's a problem. If you practice shamatha to gain something, it's antithetical to the basic situation because the basic situation is you're already Buddha's kid. Don't lose track of that. And if you want to do these Buddhist practices, do them, but realize it's not like you're doing these practices in order to be a Buddhist, or doing these practices in order to be Buddhist children.

[46:12]

You do these things because you're Buddhist children. It isn't that you flex your muscles because you are a man. It isn't that you go take care of little babies in order to be a mother. You take care of babies because you are a mother. You practice Buddhism because you're a Buddhist child. So, these fancy Buddhist practices, no problem. You can play golf, no problem. You can play golf from the point of view of, hey, I'm a golfer, leave me alone. Let me play golf. Would you move forward? That's the spirit of non-gaining. That's the kind of guy you are. But that's not what makes you a Buddhist. It's your nature that makes you a Buddhist. And not all Buddhists want to do concentration practice. Like this. That reminds me.

[47:13]

Before I forget, I told you about how Dogen says, you think you can attain the way without renunciation? Well, forget it. He said, but even a bad monk can attain the way. Even a monk who has precepts and doesn't practice can still attain the way. Renunciation is that important. And I just heard this story about some monk who went to a pool hall with a friend of hers. And her friend calls her the monk. So anyway, she went to the pool hall. And then later, after she left, some of her friend's friends, co-poolers, what are pool people called? Pool players? Sharks, yeah. Some of the sharks said to him, who was she? And he said, ah, she's a monk. He says, well, how come she's in a pool hall drinking beer?

[48:26]

She says, well, she's a bad monk. So it is possible to be a bad monk. But still, it's possible to be a little Buddha, too. You take a long walk and forget all about your heritage and think that you're really whatever. And then you need to do all the shit shoveling in order to have confidence again. It's better to just do the shit shoveling because you like it rather than think you have to do the shit shoveling to be back in the family. It's not really required. The father didn't feel that way. He was ready to take the kid back right away. But the kid couldn't accept that, couldn't accept. But still, Soto Zen says, don't do those practices. As much as possible, don't do them in order to get yourself to be a better person. Don't do that. Don't do them because... with some confidence that you're practicing already.

[49:27]

But if you refuse, go ahead. Think that you're not in the family and that you need to do something to get in. I don't know if there's anything. Go ahead, David. If you want to present more, then. If you want to present more, then. Then I can do something with that. I didn't say there wasn't any discriminating function. I just said there wasn't a language, like English and stuff. If you finish, you have to have some sense of what happened. Even though you weren't talking yourself through the process, it has perhaps something to do with how you land. That might be feedback.

[50:33]

If you land on your feet, you say, what's And then you look up in the screen and see what the judges thought you did. But going through the process, maybe you can't actually be judging yourself. It's too fast and too intense, like any conscious monitoring of certain processes. Well, again, is the learning about the learning just to learn about the learning? It's another kind of manifestation of thinking. Well, what I just learned, that kind of makes me OK. And now I'd like to go back and learn more about that because then I'd even be more solidly based in being OK. And then I'd even have more assurance that I'm really OK by knowing even more that I was OK. If that's the reason for going back, I would say, move on, girl. And so when you're sitting and some great insight happens, The most confident thing to do is to move forward, rather than, oh, got to write that one down.

[51:39]

They're so beautiful, so wonderful, you want to remember them, right? But it's antithetical to try to remember them. There's more a confirmation of them to say, move forward. Our practice is about, you name it, whatever the best thing, whatever that is. And go beyond that. Go beyond, go beyond, go beyond. Go beyond Buddha. Not to mention go beyond all of our problems. But not go beyond doesn't mean, renunciation doesn't renounce. It isn't that you renounce the things you have a problem with. You renounce your attachments. Go beyond your attachments. It's easy to renounce what you don't want. It's the same as holding onto your attachments. When you renounce, you realize Buddhahood, and then you renounce the Buddhahood. Go beyond it, go beyond it, go beyond it. And there's this tendency to want to cash in or remember it. This is wonderful stuff, you know. If I'm teaching, you know, I think of various things.

[52:42]

I think, oh, that would be a good talk, you know. But that undermines my talk. I told you about it. I bring these things along with me. They don't trust the present situation. So how do you get done something at the same time not holding onto it? This is a trick. Exactly. Yeah, move on to the next one. It's a heartrending business. It's forward progress. Yeah, it could be. Definitely. When the Buddha was practicing those jhanas for years, jhana practice, He did.

[53:51]

It was on the Night of Enlightenment that he stopped having outflows. When he stopped having outflows, then he saw the Four Noble Truths. Many people practice with outflows and do not see the Four Noble Truths because the outflows create such a disturbance that even though you're concentrated, you're in such a field that you cannot see the Four Noble Truths. First of all, you have to end the outflows, which means you have to face the outflows. Even in your state of concentration, if you did that, the outflows waned, you saw the After that, his shamatha practice, his jhana practice, had outbursts. He said that. He had not ended the outburst prior to that night. So yes, it is possible for us or anybody else who has outbursts to practice these jhanas with an outburst and they have been there impure. Wholesome, very wholesome, but still not a purified outburst. It's different when there's gaining idea.

[54:58]

It's different when there's no outflows. And in fact, it's pretty hard not to have outflows. It's pretty hard when you don't have outflows, you're naturally, you're naturally tranquil. That saying, tranquilize, pacify the mind with no contrivance. If you have a mind with no outflows, the mind is naturally pacified. The mind is naturally pacified when you do not fall for the duality of self and others. That's the most important factor in my life, the subject-object, internal-external. As soon as there's an external object, the mind is agitated. When you see through that and don't fall for it, the mind is naturally That's the most direct, immediate, and non-meddling way to realize a tranquil, imperturbable mind.

[56:04]

Simultaneously realizing the end of all things. Yes? No, I didn't quite say that. I said, if it comes from, you have to see where it's coming from. Is it coming from just, I mean, it's okay to be interested in things. It isn't necessarily grasping to be interested in things. Interest in things is not grasping. You have to look to see, is your interest in this coming from your sense of inferiority and lack of confidence in your good nature? If so, then you're trying to gain something from it. Then you think, oh, I need to gain something from this interaction. But you can be interested in people and other things and yourself without any... It's not grasping. It's just the enjoyment of life. That's what I said, Sarah, didn't I? another time hearing you say that in order to understand something, you need to do it.

[57:22]

And that, I don't know. That was for you. But it feels to me as if the effort to create something already distorts it at certain times. Yeah. So that once I start fitting it into language, I'm fitting it into not only the language that I can understand, but that somebody else could understand. Right. It's just farther away from its origin. Right. That's right. I got that right. OK. Okay, did you hear what she said? So that's what it means. The literary form is to relegate it to defilement.

[58:23]

That's what she said, right? To put it by it, you know, what we're talking about is suchness. Suchness in the word defiles it. Anything you say about it, or any way you say it is now in this form, that defiles it. I can say it over several more times and see if you can follow it. Is that okay? Now, so I told her that in order to understand something, you have to be able to articulate it. So I'm saying in order to understand something, you have to articulate it. But then she said, but then don't you defile it when you articulate it? If you defile it when you articulate it, you think what you said was it. That would defile it. But if you realize that what you're doing is that when you talk, you're expressing your suchness. Want to see me articulate suchness?

[59:23]

What? This is articulating suchness. See it? But to relegate suchness to this would defile it. But this articulates suchness. This is how you understand suchness, by articulating it. You articulate it. You talk. You talk. You wave your arms. You smile. You interact with people. This is articulating suchness. This is how you really understand it. You keep it all to yourself. You don't understand it as fully as when you dance with people. But to say that dance is a suchness is a defilement. So although it's not fabricated, And you can't put it into any fabrication. It's not without speech. It talks. And if it doesn't talk, it's not fully realized. It should be able to talk and walk and interact. That's how you make it into full realization. You can get it moving, get it out quickly. But it expresses itself through the form.

[60:24]

And if you don't get it out there, you don't know it as fully as you do when you get it out. And part of what you learn when you get it out there is when you first start putting it up, you think, oh, this is it. That's part of what teaches you what it is. You get this, and somebody says, oh, no, it isn't. Oh. Oh, I get it. Well, here. Ha! You know, and you start getting it out there without making it into that. And then somebody says, now we're talking. You understand better. That's why you have to express it first, but you It's something to express. And as you get down there and feel something and experience something, it shouldn't be just like expressing before you feel grounded. When you feel grounded, then express yourself and it helps you unfold and understand more deeply what it is. But none of the expressions are here. And you can understand it pretty well prior to expression too. So how are you doing?

[61:28]

Is that good? So you need to express it and articulate it in order to understand it. And any forms that you say are it would defile it and limit it. It would be an insult. And that's Zen stories, you know. Don't say that. That insults the teacher's teaching. Don't make it into that. Don't make it into that. You can't do that. It can be anything, but as soon as you box it, it's really a sad thing and it's an insult. Yes? Yes? That's a nice try. Try that. So while you're expressing it, say it to yourself. This is not it. That's what he said, right? He said, everywhere I go, I meet her alone, but everywhere I go, I meet her She is not me and I am exactly her. The dynamic. So, this correct samadhi, this right meditation, is that we go beyond Buddhas and ancestors.

[63:06]

That's what correct meditation is. To go beyond Buddhas and ancestors. To drop off Buddha ancestors and to drop off body and mind. That's correct. Prick meditation, you pull off the heads of innumerable Buddha's ancestors and make them into your nose. It's to pick up the flower like Shakyamuni Buddha did and turn it. You see a hundred mahakasyapa smiling at you. Muni Buddha, after six years of sitting, attained awakening at dawn.

[64:26]

At that time, the fierce fire of right concentration was realized, and the whole universe burned down. We have to throw ourselves in. That's right concentration. which of course we're ready to do, right? Because we practice Zen. That's our game. ...based in the concentration patch. So that's the Eightfold Path, right? We did it, folks!

[65:10]

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