It's nice to see everyone. It's nice to see everyone. I've noticed, if you've been following along with the Aspects Talks, we're about halfway through. We have two more Saturdays and two more classes. The speakers have all confessed at the beginning about where they were in relationship to the planning meeting. And so I felt like I needed to fall into the protocol. I was there, I was at the planning meeting and there were some who weren't and there were some who were and there were some who chose the Paramita they wanted to talk about and some who were given the Paramita. And I admit that I had an intuitive draw to this Paramita and I'm very glad that I've spent the last couple of weeks with it.

[01:00]

For those of you who haven't been dialed in, the paramitas are these six perfections, and let me see if I can do them. Dana, patience, ethics, morality, that's one, right effort, which is what I'm going to be talking about today, meditation or concentration, and wisdom. And I want to just say one or two things about this whole business of studying the Paramitas which has this obvious implication that we are here and we're going there and there's a boat that can take us from one place to the other. So here is our flawed, unenlightened, karmic-bound, unworthy folks going to the enlightenment place. And yeah, there's a line in the Sandokai that has always struck me as having personal relevance and personal relevance for me about right effort or joyful effort.

[02:14]

Progress is not a matter of far or near. but a fewer confused mountains and rivers block your path." And we have a lot of understanding and teaching about non-gaining mind, non-achievement. Suzuki Roshi says, our effort and our practice should be directed from achievement to non-achievement. Try not to achieve anything special. You already have everything in your own pure quality. There is nothing to lose. There is only the constant pure quality of right practice. So how do we reconcile this idea that, I mean, the Paramitas have this, it's kind of one vast self-improvement project, right? On the one hand. And yet, and yet, there's no gaining. And so how do, there's a paradox that I'd like to circle back to, and maybe we can have time to talk about it.

[03:19]

I think there is a way that transformation is explicitly implied in the study of the Paramitas. And the right effort, joyful effort, actually is directly involved in that. So let me talk about that for a minute. Virya is a Sanskrit term commonly used to translate it as energy or diligence, enthusiasm, effort. But the way I enjoy thinking about it is it is what supports our happiness, our well-being, and dissolves that which causes our suffering. It's what motivates us to start the path and supports the sustainability of staying on the path over the long haul.

[04:27]

Oops. The near enemy of virya is a sort of relentless effort, dogged persistence, a joyless kind of pushing forward. I know a lot about this from my own personal experience. was given the feedback when I was a young woman by a friend, my same age, who said, she didn't, I don't think she started the sentence this way, but I think it was effectively, you know what your problem is. You try too hard. And I knew she was right. But it was kind of the only tool in my wheelhouse at the time. And I didn't know how to try hard to not try hard. How do you apply that to... So I will say that practice has been incredibly helpful for me in this way.

[05:32]

Because this near enemy is the thing that can take the liveliness and the joy out of out of anything, you can turn anything into a chore by putting it on a to-do list and having to get it done by, you know, and I'm really good at that actually. The far enemy is described by Shantideva are laziness, discouragement, and lack of self-worth. Now I found this a really interesting list and Shantideva is going to... Very interesting. If he were alive today, I think he would be texting everybody in all caps, like, wake up. So let me show you what I mean. The absence of apathy. The array of abilities such as prudence, self-control, equality between oneself and others,

[06:35]

and exchange of oneself for others should be practiced without discouragement of thinking, how could I possibly attain awakening? For the truth speaking Tathagata proclaimed this truth, even those who are gadflies, mosquitoes, bees, and worms attained supreme awakening, which is difficult to attain through the power of their own effort. human by birth and capable of knowing what is beneficial and what is not, why could I not attain awakening as long as I do not forsake the guidance of the Buddha, the Omniscient One? Well, there's several ideas that are implicit here that are worth highlighting. One is that I was very interested to see how these qualities of feelings of unworthiness and discouragement and despair are seen here not as indelible personality characteristics but as a focus of a spiritual path, as a hindrance actually, an active hindrance in a stepping away from the truth of who we are.

[07:51]

I don't think he actually says it, but he comes close to saying it's heretical to feel unworthy if you know the truth of who you are, right? And that feelings of confidence and self-worth are essential qualities of a bodhisattva to be cultivated. And that cultivating joy is a practice, not something that comes as a result of other activities or as a result of a temperament. Modern psychiatry notwithstanding. Yes, the cultivating joy. Cultivating joy is a practice. not an inherent temperamental quality. It's something that can be cultivated. I mean, before coming to practice, first of all, I hadn't thought of effort as joyful.

[09:02]

And I also hadn't thought about it as a joy as something to set my mind to. I mean, it's, you know, the Lincoln, the famous Lincoln phrase that we are as happy as we set our minds to be. And I certainly have gotten the advice from several people under the circumstances of doing something I dreaded or was fearful of to enjoy myself, which was a radical piece of advice for me. And when I set my mind to do that, it changed the experience. I may not have made it easier, but it changed how I experienced the difficulty. And the last implication in all of this is that isn't it interesting that we don't automatically have the behaviors that support our well-being, that we actually have to work on that.

[10:06]

What's that about? Well, here's my take on that, here's my go at that. that it's directly related to habit energy, to one could say karma conditioning. The habits of mind like how we see ourselves, what our abilities are, how we assess our abilities, how we see the world, whether it's safe, trustworthy, reliable. And I've been thinking about conditioning, we talk a lot about conditioning, as a particular form of learning, actually. Learning that leads to habits of mind that are restrictive or static, kind of grooved in once and for all decisions about how things are, kind of reactions that are on autopilot, maybe not even conscious all the time, maybe conscious.

[11:15]

And in contrasting that too, a kind of learning that leads to flexibility, multiple diverse responses, and maybe even could be seen as being a learning that increases wisdom. So it's in the nature of our minds to learn, that's what we are, we're learning creatures and we learn from experience. And it's not surprising that many of these conditions that we struggle with we learned in childhood when we were dependent and out of control of our circumstance and didn't have the mind capacity to deal with big emotions unless somebody helped us. And... And we can be quite unaware of these habits of mind.

[12:17]

One example I'll give. For a long time in my life, in my younger life, I had this kind of quirky, perverse pleasure in standing about ten feet back from the wall and yanking the electrical cord out of the wall. And it kind of went with an inner, like, yank that sucker, you know. And I wasn't aware of it. It never occurred to me that it was something to be aware of until I heard my older brother give one of his rants about our father. And he detailed how fanatic our father was about going up to the wall and putting your hands on the plug and pulling out the plug. It's worth noting that my father was an electrical engineer, so. But that's not what I learned from him, right?

[13:23]

What I learned from him was defiance, and when I heard my brother say that, I went, oh, that's where that came from. That's what that pleasure is like. Can't make me do that, right? I don't think he intended to teach me that, our father. I think that was, you know, quite not at all And knowing that did not change my behavior. This is why sometimes therapy doesn't change behavior. Understanding doesn't always get you there. Experience gets you there. So what changed my behavior was one day I was pulling one of those, you know, big heavy duty electrical cords out, you know, one of those audio visual cards in a big room. So I'm standing now, now I'm standing 15 feet back. And I yank that sucker and time froze because what I see is a three-pronged plug coming at me and it clocked me right here in the forehead. That's why you don't do it that way.

[14:28]

You know, I didn't realize he had actually my well-being in mind. So undoing this conditioning, what is that? That's the nitty-gritty and granular work of our practice, the day-to-day, moment-by-moment, what is this thought coming in my mind, and all of that. And there are outlined, in a number of places, you know, a process for that, you know, like first mindfulness noticing. Noticing that that habit is there. And the second is pausing, not reacting, but allowing space around this. And the third is based on that exploration and space and maybe meditation,

[15:33]

to choose an alternative, fresh alternative, that is not the old way, right? To undo the conditioning. And because habits don't change easily, and those grooves are well-worn, doing that a thousand times, and doing it, actually, the encouragement is for the rest of your life. And what else do you need to do something for the rest of your life? than some kind of joyful effort that sustains, that gives juice to this process, that gives energy to this process. I mean, maybe an example is an easier way of describing this. I had a conversation with a friend who I trust and love recently who was talking about feeling hurt about some dynamic that was going on.

[16:38]

And I wondered if I was implicated in this dynamic and asked. And the answer was no. And I went away from that conversation, went home, and I was quite bothered by it, quite unsettled by it. I felt this sort of range of feelings that I'm actually familiar with, feeling of alienation from myself, from the other person, separation, all that kind of yucky stuff. And in order to proceed with my day, I did what Pema Chodron advises you to do at moments like that is to give yourself a Dharma talk. So I thought about it and I thought, you know, this situation, is so complicated that it's actually not possible for this to be about me. And this is not about me. So I was sort of trying to step away from it in that way. And then I did what we do when we have Sangha, or we can do,

[17:44]

is go to a trusted Sangha buddy, a Dharma buddy, and have practice discussion to kind of check my work, because you don't want to step away from responsibility of something, and you know, that's dicey. So I did that, and I found myself not done, and the next inquiry was What is my hook here? Why was I drawn or hooked into this conversation in this particular way? And the inquiry that helps me answer that question is to say, what's familiar about this? When have I felt this before? And that often gets me right into my condition, karmic, you know, childhood training. And the answer was instant. When I get going and get to that point, for me, the hook was I grew up in a situation where the words here, no matter how skillful they were, did not necessarily match the underlying feelings here.

[18:58]

And children are like sponges for the feelings down here. They just mop them up, especially when they're not claimed or owned. And in my family's situation, that led to a lot of painful circumstance. In the situation I was in, in this new situation, this is a way more benign situation. And I don't expect to have that kind of consequence in this situation as in that, but I could see how that parallel evoked the painful feelings I was having and allowed me to kind of really understand my part in getting hooked. So I took that a series of thoughts to Dogosan, and we're usually not encouraged to talk about Dogosan, but I will tell you where I was directed, which was important to me, anyway.

[20:07]

How to become recognizing that this is an young being inside of myself that was evoked, how to bring compassion to that being internally. And just having been directed that way, I realized how much I am critical of those beings inside and how much I count, I diagnose them or count them as my problem. It doesn't ever, it doesn't ever, mostly doesn't occur to me to bring compassion and often compassion feels like too big of a project. So what I have substituted for compassion in those moments is friendliness. Can I make friends with this part of myself? Can I warm it up? Can I soften the feeling about this part of myself? the better to go forward, the better to, well, to be able to tolerate what it feels like to look at all that ancient tangled karma.

[21:34]

It's not easy and that's why it's hard. That's why we don't do it. And so an essential part of this whole project is courage. And courage has to be not the absence of fear, but the willingness to be afraid and to not have the fear direct one's actions or what one does, but to sit with the fear and just stay there. Just stay there. I was offered this sentence which I'm gonna I don't know, paste on my mirror or something. Transformation takes place in the heat of the cauldron of what is difficult to bear. It doesn't have to be tangled ancient karma, right?

[22:35]

It can also be profound grief or justifiable rage or feelings about injustice, you name it, you know, all the things that we want to feel. So this practice is about turning toward our suffering, embracing all of our life. Yeah. Transformation takes place in the heat of the cauldron of what is difficult to bear. So there isn't a self-improvement project, there's transformation, which is different, so circling back to that. Along those same lines, as many people know, and the details are not important, I recently had some

[23:40]

experiences facing some physical challenges, particularly the last six months, and I'm fine now, better. And I have been buoyed a lot by the support of Sangha in many, many ways. And it's been a struggle. And one of the struggles for me has been that my body is not behaving the way I expect my body to behave. I have certain expectations. And I thought I was in charge. One of the things that somebody said to me is the body always wins. But I didn't like it. And my not liking it felt to me like not a Zen thing to do. It felt like not having equanimity and I felt like I was falling away. And so I took that to Dogosan where I was given permission to not like my circumstances. And that put me into this whole place of discerning between what's the difference between not liking and living out adversity and picking and choosing, right?

[24:54]

This paradox. It turns out, that accepting something doesn't mean you have to like it. And accepting something isn't resignation, it isn't that you're not going to do something about it. You know, I was doing plenty of things to try and make myself feel better. It's not passive. I think it is figuring out how not to add something extra. I had this cartoon that I framed and put in my office for a long time and I couldn't find it, but I know it's somewhere. It's probably in New York, a cartoon. And in the first panel, there's this sphere shooting upwards, you know, with two little beings on it going, this is never gonna end, this is never gonna end. And then the next frame, it's shooting down going, this is never gonna end, this is never gonna end.

[25:59]

And in the third one, there's a guy with a yo-yo Um... It reminds me, I mean, I... Of those moments in Sashin, whether the second day or maybe the third day, you know, your resistance is up, you're fighting the schedule, and then you just surrender. And it doesn't mean you're not tired, but you're not adding to the dilemma, and you actually get held then by the schedule. It's similar, you know, traveling to a foreign country or, in my case, going into the wilderness where around about the third day you just give up being clean, you know, and it stops bothering you in a certain way, although that doesn't mean that when you're off, when you're out of the wilderness, the very first thing you want to do is take a shower. But living in the dirt is what you do and it's okay.

[27:01]

So, I want to leave plenty of time for discussion here. So I talked about this business of picking and choosing and liking and not liking and embracing life to sojourn not long ago. And he said, that's why they call it prajna paramita. That prajna is the wisdom that allows you to embrace everything, that leaves nothing out, which means you have to include the not liking, what's going on, as part of it. Some readings of the ancient sutras suggest that we should develop a craving for enlightenment.

[28:13]

Shantideva again adds that we should be addicted to enlightenment, all capital letters, I'm sure. It's seen as an essential part of establishing practice to want something, right? to develop an insatiable desire for enlightenment. And that is the motivation that propels us forward. You know, desire is the basis of motivation. It's our energy. And that's another translation of joyful effort, virya, energy. Now this could be... seen and could become very self-serving, it could fall into the self-improvement project side of things. And I really appreciated the book, one of the books that we've been reading, Dale Wright, The Six Perfections, this guy.

[29:18]

And he talks about this dilemma of it starting as a self-centered project. And then he says, midway along the path, however, something happens that begins to transform the character of this desire. The Bodhisattva begins to practice what we have seen earlier in the earlier perfections as turning over the merit of his or her practice, dedicating the roots of good that would normally be his or hers alone to a larger goal. The transformation implied in this is enormous and endless movement from restricted boundaries of the self outward toward larger and larger matrices of interconnection. Initially, however, it entails a movement from one form of self-understanding to a significantly enlarged self-conception.

[30:26]

And that happens as a bodhisattva practices with all six of these paramitas combined. That transformation from self-understanding to a significantly enlarged self-conception. This is the way that prajna transforms the self-improvement project, I think, into transformation of the self. I came across this kind of remarkable sentence in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I don't think I fastened on it before. Everything is just a flashing into the vast phenomenal world. Everything is just a flashing into the vast phenomenal world.

[31:36]

This is Dale Wright again. The culminating image is of a bodhisattva overflowing with energy from sources beyond themselves, buoyant and radiant to the point that this energy passes through them and on to others who receive it energetically as the outflow of grace. It is this image in mind that traditional Buddhist writers claimed. Where there is energy, there is enlightenment. I mean, I see it's not, but that's interesting, isn't it? I mean, and then we add our own current idea of the universe, that it's all energy. It's all energies flashing in and out of matter. Right? And that's what we are.

[32:43]

Energy. Pure energy. Flashing. for a moment. So I think I'll stop there. It's good because I have nothing else to say. And hear what you have to say. Welcome back. One successful activity can be anything.

[33:49]

But we pick and choose because of our experience. We pick and choose certain things that give us happiness and give us the release of joy. So, as you said, joy is My happiness and joy is in this life. And so, in this life, the life that's always been, needs to be reused. That might be because you didn't have a habit of mind to begin with that I did.

[35:28]

Originally, when I was young. that I had to be, that I was unhappy until proved otherwise. And it occurred to me to get that into a more neutral position, right? And that took some work. That was a habit, that was habit energy on my part. So some of us have work to do. Kelsey? Jose? Oh yeah, yeah, that's true. I was a whole That's certainly been important to me in the last period of time is being accepting and patient of not having energy.

[36:46]

That's certainly been part of the journey and accepting that. And that is absolutely part of the discernment process is resting and not doing more than you are able to do, not uncomfortably pushing your limit in that way, but figuring that out. And that's a discernment I think that is constant, because it's changing all the time, right? It's for me anyway. So this business of energy doesn't mean that you're not. that you're doing. This is not about doing, right? This is about persistence and staying with the path and coming back and coming back and coming back. And that muscle that gets exercised in meditation

[37:48]

of your thoughts going away and then you come back, and your thoughts go away and you come back, that coming back, the noticing and coming back, that muscle is the muscle that is being exercised here, I think. That hand belongs, is that Peter? I like that. Yeah. Oh, Charlie. Sure. I mean, sorry.

[39:31]

I was thinking about what Peter was saying, but my question is on the other end. Talking about going toward a joyful behavior, do you think that we understand or need to understand where we're coming from in terms of the lack of joy That's an interesting question. I realize I left one thing out, which is not doing the work, not sitting with that ancient tangled karma, if you will, and jumping over it leads to spiritual bypass.

[40:34]

And so I don't know if that's where you're going with that, but there is, it is, this is my opinion, I think understanding is important. I did sort of dismiss it as if that's not fundamental to change necessarily, but I actually think it is actually the precursor. to change, at least in my experience. I've changed a lot in therapy but I've changed more in Sangha. And the reason I've changed more in Sangha probably is because I had therapy. A lot of it. But also because in Sangha your stuff is evoked right there with someone else. And you can't, well, you can't ignore it, but it's not a good idea to ignore your stuff when it gets evoked with someone else. And to sort out and to have this petri dish, this, you know, experiential place where you bump up against people and things go awry, and then you unpack it and figure out what happened over and over again.

[41:54]

It's like, my mother was a big rock hound. And all through my childhood there was this tumbling rock polisher in the basement, you know, this cylinder thing that just went round and round and round, day and night, 24-7. And you put in a heavy grit, you put in your rocks that you gathered at the beach, and then you did that for a week. And then you put in a finer grit and did that for a week until you got down to a really fine grit. And then you take out the rocks and all the edges are worn off. And that's what, this is a rock polisher. And sometimes the grid is dense and sometimes it's fine, but it's been here in my bumping up against myself and other people that I really unpacked in a really more deliberate way what I also learned in therapy. But I think both are important. I think understanding is, it's important not to bypass, actually. It's worth it.

[42:54]

So there's a couple things you mentioned. You talked about choosing an alternative. And then you also talked about that there's a hook. And so my questions are sort of about those together. It's how to focus and how to practice is so much on sitting in with things. point that wasn't going to help. I'm willing to sit with it, or when it's just not the thing, the alternative that's best chosen.

[44:44]

Say that last, what is the choice between sitting with something and... Well, the choice is I don't know when it's something that I just need to Or, you also said something about making a choice and picking and choosing and not liking and liking. There's such a challenge for me. Is this something that I don't like and I don't want? Right. Well, I think that is exactly the discernment.

[45:46]

When to continue to sit with something, sometimes you don't have a choice, actually. You're sitting with something that you can't change, right? That's often. But if it is something you could change, when is it worth waiting it out? And when is it worth leaving the scene, basically? And that is a discernment that is based, I think, it has to be based on an assessment of what nurtures your well-being. and what undoes the roots of suffering. And that might not be a short, easy process, that discernment. And I think it's a good idea to not do it alone, but to find, you know, a buddy on the path or someone

[46:51]

to reflect back and to be, I mean, I think that's one of the things that we, because we are all co-creating each other all the time, it's useful when you find someone who gives you a mirror that you can trust, that feels resonant, to use those people in those moments. And to not sit alone with that. Okay, go. The therapy part or the understanding part of it?

[48:24]

Partly that way. I think that understanding one's story and really hearing it and having it fed back to one is really significant because you hear something you didn't know about yourself and that's a very valuable process. Another way that therapy changes one is that the relationship itself is different from the relationships one's had in other times of life. And so there is something experiential about that encounter beyond the story. And that, however, doesn't necessarily mean that all the various subtle ways in which I can be provoked or evoked, if you will, are going to pop up in therapy. It kind of requires, I think, a broader palette of opportunity for that.

[49:33]

And I don't find them contradictory and I find them supportive of one another. I mean, I still consult on a fairly regular basis and I consult about things that get evoked here. and get help. And so there's a constant conversation between, in my experience, a constant conversation between understanding and then doing something different. And that understanding, what I was trying to say is, understanding doesn't always lead to doing something different. You actually have to do the thing differently at some point, right? Right, it happens, yeah, the next time one's evoked, one has to go, oh, I'm being evoked. I'm going to do something different now. I think we're out of time. Thank you.

[50:25]

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