We have planned for this morning a three-way discussion about the spiritual path, which will also include the group. And I'd like to welcome our guests. You already know Brett Anderson who spent a few days with us. He worked with the San Francisco Zen Center and also the Zen Center in Tassajara, Tassajara Hot Springs. I just found out that... I hope I can... be indiscreet that he is in the process of writing a book which will be on Sashin. Our two remaining guests are Francis Vaughan and Roger Walsh. Both of whom have been real pioneers in the field of Transpersonal Psychology and have been really in Transpersonal Psychology from the very beginning. They have written, as you can see, a number of books. Some of them they co-authored, that's particularly Leon Eagle, which is a compendium of papers, articles on the transversal dimensions in psychology.

[01:14]

They've also both been interested in the Course of Miracles for psychology and psychotherapy, and they've written two books. related to the Course of Miracles. The first one is called Accept This Gift, and the last one is called A Gift of Peace. Some books that they have written separately. Frances has been interested particularly in intuition. Her book is called Awakening Intuition. And the last book is called The Inward Arc, which was inspired by Ken Wilkerson's work. And then we have some books by Roger. There's a major book on meditation, classic and contemporary perspectives, which he wrote together with Dean Shapiro.

[02:16]

And another book with Dean Shapiro is called Beyond. explorations of exceptional psychological well-being. One that I think is particularly important is his book, Staying Alive, which is the application of trans-person psychology to the global crisis and to politics and the development of trans-person politics. Thank you. Well, when we talked last night about coordinating this morning's discussion, we thought we would ask Reb to lead off since he knows what you've been covering during the week. And so perhaps you'd like to start with just a little bit of what we talked about last night, Reb.

[03:19]

I thought a topic which I think is relevant to all spiritual traditions might be a way for us to and that topic is the topic of ascending and descending or going beyond and coming back. This is a major aspect of Buddhism and I think is found in other traditions, but maybe not as much emphasis in some other religions on the coming back part. But in Mahayana Buddhism, the descending of the spiritual being back into the world is equally or maybe even more strongly emphasized than leaving sometimes.

[04:39]

I haven't been talking too much about nothing this week. I didn't think I have. Maybe you do. But nothing or emptiness is the key of this whole process, or it's the driving suchness of the whole process. It's what makes possible the realization of the emptiness of all phenomenon, all experience, is what makes possible the ascension. And the ascension is done through various practices like generosity, ethical conduct, patience, courageous effort, concentration and insight. These are the processes or the practices which lead to the realization of emptiness and freedom from the pains of existence.

[05:53]

But this emptiness, this fact that we lack inherent existence, is what makes possible complete freedom. In other words, the very fact that everything is, that all conditioned phenomena, or rather the very fact of phenomena being conditioned, makes them completely free. Because things don't exist independently of other things, because they're conditioned by other things, they have no inherent existence of their own. They have no inherent existence of their own. They're empty. And because of that, they're completely unlimited. So this realization of emptiness is the ascending mode. But also because of emptiness, the bodhisattva is perfectly willing, the enlightening being, back into the world.

[07:01]

Because they see the world as a place where everything's empty, and that's their playground. But again, this is a paradoxical thing, because why... is that all beings lack inherent existence. Why would they want or even care to come back and save these beings who don't even exist? And there's two processes here, one in relationship to the enlightening being's attitude towards what's called nirvana, or the place where realization of extinction or non-existence. And one is that the bodhisattva attains a kind of nirvana, which is called, I won't say the Sanskrit word, but anyway, in English it can be translated as not clinging to

[08:15]

nirvana or not abiding nirvana. In other words, when they go into transcendence, they don't stay there. They don't cling to it. And as I said in the story about the dog and Buddha nature, once they enter into this non-clinging nirvana, they willingly and knowingly go back into, descend down into the world again. And the reason why they do this is because of emptiness is driving them to transcendence and emptiness is bringing them back into the world. So we say, you know, a bodhisattva, an enlightening being, does not hang around where there's Buddha, and also passes quickly by where there's not Buddha.

[09:41]

They transcend that situation, and if there is Buddha, they transcend that situation. They keep going beyond. And the practices they do are called paramitas, or sometimes translated as perfections, but the literal meaning is that each of these practices is a way to go beyond themselves. So the bodhisattvas do spiritual practices to transcend the world, but then they do spiritual practices to transcend spiritual practice. ...is the transcendence of spiritual practice. Bodhisattvas don't get stuck in spiritual practice. They go beyond spiritual practice, back into ordinary life, where they have absolutely no advantage over anybody else. The fact that they realize the emptiness of all existence, they throw that away, go completely beyond it, forget all about it and are completely a normal person.

[10:49]

except that they are knowingly and willingly a normal person. They do it with their whole heart. They come into the world with their... just like everybody else does. But they know it and they will it. So this process, again, all religions have this, but what I've been emphasizing this week is the coming back part. And there's something here, there's something I want to say about beauty and emptiness. And that is that I think also in many traditions, like Keats, truth is beauty and beauty is truth. And I think, doesn't Rilke say, beauty is the beginning of a terror that we can just barely stand?

[11:52]

Something like that. And this whole process is very closely related to each of us being ourselves. And what I would define as beauty in this case is congruence. that we come into congruence and contact with our inner splendor, that we really become one with what we really are, and that that's beauty. And that beauty is not a pretty thing. Because it's a beauty that is terrible because that beauty also, being exactly what we are, also brings forth what we aren't, or not beauty. And therefore death, and not us.

[13:06]

So when beauty becomes very clear and sharp, it naturally outlines not beauty. And when our life settles on itself, it naturally outlines and implicates. And that beauty is also sending this process around and around. Referring back to the thing I mentioned about this thing. I saw about Carl Rogers working with a patient That what I saw in his reflective behavior was a way for the patient to come into congruence with herself She didn't improve her life situation at all more and more into congruence with what she was and became more and more beautiful without changing a thing and

[14:27]

And at the culmination of this process of becoming beautiful through being in congruence with who we are in a given moment, there is also something frightening about that. So sometimes we hesitate to enter into this, the beauty, because of what it implies. But anyway, that's the guiding principle that I'm trying to point to. These are just some words, not to refer to it, but to do it. That's a kind of a start, anyway. There are several things that I would like to pick up on from what you've said.

[15:39]

I really appreciate so much the Mahayana perspective on that cyclical nature of our striving, or our hopes and fears. And it occurs to me that there's a parallel to that in... evolution and involution and that it appears as involution in Sri Aurobindo's teaching and then when he talks about the descent of spirit into matter or the transformation of matter through the infusion of spirit and there the language is different because Buddhism is the language of emptiness and when so that when we talk about spirit It's as though we're talking about some thing or it's easy to conceptualize it as some thing rather than no thing However, I think that there's a convergence Speaking of absolute spirit and no as no thing so

[16:46]

In order not to get caught up too much in the language, I think that I'd like to focus in rather on the process that we go through as we see ourselves or the experience that we have as we see ourselves either ascending or descending. And that in some way that cycle that Rev was describing seems to take place in little ways along the way. It's not as though it's some great thing that is out of reach for us. It's something that really exists in our experience in a very basic way. It seems to me that any of us who have had an experience of self-transcendence, whatever form that may take, have in some way tasted that. We know that we can... of self-transcendence of illumination and yet we return to our ordinary normal waking state and it's that connection that seems to be the

[17:55]

what we want to solidify through spiritual practice. And one of the traps along the way, of course, is becoming attached to the experience of transcendence or clinging to that experience. As you were saying, we need to remember that that too is a passing thing and We have to be willing to let go of it in order to move back into our ordinary daily life. I remember meeting Claire Myers Owens when she was 83 and it was a wonderful sense of someone who had had a very profound spiritual awakening. She said, This was in Boston at the Transpersonal Conference, and she stood up there and she said, well, you know, I had this tremendous spiritual awakening when I was in my 50s. She said, but like all such experiences, and she had written several books after that, she said, like all such experiences, it was temporary.

[18:58]

It only lasted 12 years. And at the end of that 12 years, she took up meditation and became a practitioner over then. She actually said, then I had to resort to artificial means, so I took up Zen. And really, at 83, she was an inspiration. One of the most sparkling and alive people. But I think it's true for all of us. Whether you've had some experience of transcendence in a spontaneous way or as a result of spiritual practice or as a result of psychedelics or whatever the door... If you've had an experience of really letting go of your ordinary sense of self, then you know that there's another way, another possible way of being in the world. You've had a glimpse of big mind or consciousness that transcends our individual self.

[20:00]

And I think that as we do practice, that we get sometimes caught up in thinking that that's all there is, that most spiritual disciplines emphasize the way up and not the return. Most of the The stages along the way are different stages of practice along the way, and I think I'd like to hope that we can talk something about that, particularly in psychological terms, which is my way of looking at it. There basically, you might say, there's the beginning, the intermediate, and the advanced stages of practice in all different forms of spiritual discipline. I think that the emphasis tends to be on attaining something, in our culture particularly, because we tend to be very goal-oriented, and we don't see the point in doing something unless we get some results.

[21:01]

We tend to be very practical. It's like, what are they going to do for me? So much of the meditation research in this culture has been on the physiological effects of meditation. It's as though we're just scratching the surface in terms of looking at what meditation, in fact, for you if you look at it from the point of view of psychological change. And the emphasis, of course, in Zen is that it doesn't do anything for you, that it's not a path of attainment. And it is true that the very striving, the very trying, the harder you try, the more you get in your own way. ...are able to allow the dropping of that separate self-sense or that identity, which is essentially what we need to transcend. As long as I think that there's somebody there doing something to get something, that in effect is solidifying the problem. Keeping in mind the larger view, which Reb has outlined, I think is really important whenever we look at any of the different paths and whenever we look at choosing a path or choosing a practice to be aware of how it fits into the larger view.

[22:20]

And I think for many of us who have had glimpses or who have had some taste of a transcendental experience, we all know about the return. We all know how easy it is to forget what that experience meant to us. that those experiences fade and the task seems to be again to bring it back in such a way that it really does transform our lives. It's that process of integration that seems to be the challenge of the return. And it's that process of integrating those experiences One of the important things that we can do as a part of psychotherapy, for example, many times we see psychotherapy as being only problem-oriented, only solving problems. But in my view, it's also growth-oriented, that you can learn a lot about and works and about yourself and about the possibilities for transcendence and the possibilities for return and being in the world out of the kind of self-exploration and self-awareness that can develop through at least through a transpersonal orientation in psychotherapy.

[23:36]

So I think that there are certainly universal kinds of pitfalls that we encounter both on ascending and on descending. And I hope we can get into examining some of those a little more closely as we go along. But I just wanted to, in general, say that I feel... can relate to both the ascent and the descent out of our own experience and use it as a way of recognizing where we are and also what we have yet to do. I've always liked the phrase that Houston Smith uses to describe integration. And he says the challenge is to change those flashes of illumination into an abiding light. And it's that abiding light of consciousness that allowing what is always perhaps in the background of our awareness to come.

[24:39]

so that the experiences don't disappear or fade, or we don't totally divorce our daily life from those experiences of transcendence, but we truly integrate them in such a way that our perception of the world is changed, so that we really see things. ...a way that holds them in a different perspective, whether it's remembering the inherent emptiness or whether it's being aware of the presence of spirit. It doesn't, as I see it from a psychological perspective, it doesn't matter what language is that you use. that we need to be aware that the language we use does tend to shape our perceptions and influence how we see things. But nevertheless, the process is a universal one, and the experience is a universal experience. So I think that that's the main thing that I wanted to point out this morning, is say that the different traditions offer different ways of talking about a universal process and a universal experience.

[25:49]

So perhaps Roger would like to have a go at it. It seems that there have been two extremes mentioned, and one, Reb, was talking of the Bodhisattva, which in which from one perspective is all beings of good will. One way of looking at it, there are only two types of people, those who know their bodhisattvas and those who don't yet know their bodhisattvas. But from one perspective, the bodhisattva is perhaps the greatest ideal the human mind has conceived. What greater ideal could there be to live not just one's lifetime, but unlimited lifetimes for the welfare and liberation of all sentient beings. So that's one extreme, the extraordinary ideal that has been presented by Mahayana Buddhism.

[26:57]

And Francis has presented the complement of that, the point that all of us go through this cycle in various ways and perhaps repeatedly, perhaps in a day, reaching out to some new level of being, and then bring it back to contribute in various ways. So here we have two extremes of magnitude, which actually overlap and may be the same. And it points, I think, perhaps to the universality of this theme, an archetypal theme. Great journey of awakening and return. It's one form of the hero's journey. Those of you who have read Joseph Campbell's wonderful book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, will know well the description of this archetypal voyage which all...

[27:59]

heirs to. And that voyage comprises a number of stages, which again can be seen both on the vast universal cosmic scale of the Bodhisattva or within our own day-to-day lives. The stage is The growing up in a culture which is by nature a samsaric culture enmeshed in the illusions that we share in our culture. Being faced with a challenge ...adventure in which we face some existential confrontation which calls into question the presuppositions and beliefs on which our lives have been unquestioningly based until this time. And at that point of confrontation, there are two choices.

[29:02]

The easy choice is to repress the discomfort or the technically cognitive dissonance that is aroused by recognition of the inadequacies and distortions of the cultural illusions. and to repress that distance from awareness and to go back into the cultural games, playing them with whatever amount of unconsciousness is necessary to try to reap the benefits from the social milieu. And all of us do that repeatedly. On the other hand, there is also the option of acknowledging the limitations of what we thought was true about ourselves and about our culture and about our world. And then being willing to confront as deeply as we can the implications of those shortcomings. And it's in the confrontation of those illusions and the recognitions of the

[30:09]

state of enmeshment within which we have lived that comes the motivation to a great journey and this would be another way of saying what Reb was saying the call to congruence to be congruent in one's self and one's nature, one's recognition of what is true. So out of this pull then comes the call to adventure and the quest, and then the which many of you know, the seeking for a teacher or a path or a tradition. Then a stage of practice or training in some tradition. The stage of discipline, this is, Then the stage of temptation. With discipline, with practice, come various temptations of one sort or another. They're archetypally described in the story of the Buddhas in the final enlightenment, or Christ's temptation in the wilderness, or Carlos Castaneda's traps of clarity.

[31:21]

And then coming to some realization, coming to some, finally, the culmination of the work, the path of ascent, some insight, some recognition, and from that, then having plumbed one's own depths for wisdom, then the final stage of return, to bring that wisdom back to the world. And then to find a way to communicate that wisdom to the world in some form which can be acceptable to a world which fundamentally doesn't want to hear it. because it is at that stage you are threatening to the belief systems of the culture and the people in the world. And it's absolutely crucial to remember that when you don't share a belief system, you... And since everyone's belief system centers on what they think they are, then the weakening, the non-sharing of and weakening of that belief system is perceived as a fundamental threat to one's being.

[32:33]

Hence what we have traditionally done with the Great Awakened Ones by or burn or poison them or attack in various ways. These people are literally perceived as threats to our survival, to everything that we hold most dear, because we hold our illusions very dear. So the task then is how to the world and live in the world in a way which combines a couple of things, one which enables one to live in the world and be indistinguishable from it, both for one's own safety and well-being, and also the going beyond the dualism of needing to react against the conventions. So this is not an anti-conventional stage, but a trans-conventional stage, which includes and incorporates the conventions of the culture as appropriate, but also recognizes their limitations.

[33:39]

beyond them. In psychological terms, this is called detribalization. It's the stepping back from the limiting and distorting beliefs of the culture so one no longer now looks through them, but hence now can look at them and therefore can work on them to transform them. So those are two of the tasks. And the third task, of course, is to communicate this wisdom. And here one is effectively becoming a communicator of what has been called the perennial wisdom at the core of the great religious traditions of all throughout human history. As such, one becomes what Carl Jung called a Gnostic intermediary, which is a wonderful concept. which refers to a person who has imbibed a wisdom so deeply into themselves that they can now communicate it directly from their own experience. And the task is to bring that wisdom into the linguistic and cultural systems of that culture.

[34:49]

And the task is threefold. First, it requires a becoming wise. a literal embodying of the wisdom of the wisdom tradition. Learning of the language and belief systems and concepts of the culture to which one wishes to communicate. And thirdly, the capacity to translate the wisdom into that language and concept system so as to create a kind of aha experience. And all the time living... Ordinary person, as Reb said, no distinction. What Carlos Castaneda called living the life of controlled folly, that is perhaps doing all the stupid, from the outside being totally indistinguishable, but living with one's folly under control to some extent. course, is the ideal. And there's always a danger in presenting ideals in that they then become expectations and attachments and things we measure ourselves up against.

[35:51]

But if we use ideals skillfully as perhaps guides and arrows pointing us rather than as to beat ourselves over the head with, if we don't measure up or to push ourselves, then perhaps it can serve a useful function. Yeah. Okay. Well, that completes that cycle. I'll try going slow. Sorry. Perhaps I would like to comment on one thing that you said about the problems with the ideals and the idealism. That it seems to me that the challenge for each of us is to really connect with that part of ourselves that is already wise. And in a sense I feel that that's accessible to all of us.

[36:54]

That's partly what I was talking about in the intuition book. to that deeper part of us that knows. And that the more we're willing to acknowledge that wisdom that is within each one of us, and the more we're willing to risk following that and speaking from there, the more accessible it becomes. And one of the things that The Course in Miracles says that I like is that there's no difference between teaching and learning. and that we teach what we want to learn and that we learn what we teach, so we might as well begin to teach what we want to learn. And it's a different view from saying, well, you first have to be perfect and then you can teach. The fact is that we can, in my experience, we learn a lot from sharing our experiences and that we learn from each other's experience. Some of my...

[37:55]

Greatest teachers have been my clients, my students, the people that I have the opportunity to work with closely because I feel that they've enriched my life so much by the experiences that they have shared with me, that I truly have learned a lot from other people's experiences as well as from my own experience, and that ultimately that is a source of wisdom in our lives. If we pay attention, if we are well-informed, I think that's the key, and I think that that's where spiritual practice can be so complementary to our ordinary experience in daily life. It's in a sense a training of attention, that when we do some type of meditation that enhances concentration, perhaps an emptying practice, whatever it is that essentially trains the mind, we can pay attention in a different way. And in my own experience as a therapist, I found that there's a quality of attention that we bring to our experience which allows healing.

[39:01]

And that has been called by different names in different psychotherapeutic practices. Freud talked about free-floating attention. Rogers talks about unconditional positive regard. And Fritz Perls talked about awareness per se as curative. That training of awareness, that giving ourselves that kind of unconditional positive regard that we want to extend to others, this has an interesting effect because it brings about healing. I think of healing as making whole, to become whole. To be healed is to become, to be whole. And that this happens, we grow into our wholeness as we learn to pay attention to our experience in a new way. And so this is where I feel that... be so important along with personal work in the terms that we usually think about it in psychotherapy.

[40:08]

I don't see a split at all. I think it's very unfortunate that many traditional spiritual teachers take a rather dim view of psychology and many conventional psychologists take a dim view of spirituality. And most of them, they tend to think the other is irrelevant or perhaps an escape or a distraction. And I think on the contrary, I feel that they're both important and that they're both valuable and that our wholeness calls for paying attention to both sides. So I assume that with all of you who are here, you've already acknowledged that in your life, because it seems to me that this is the one place where the two are really integrated in terms of a lot of that work that is done on a personal level also opens up to the spiritual dimension. You just used the term

[41:10]

dim view. And I thought, in a way, that's good because whenever you're working on something, in a sense, you take a dim view of everything else. And so I think maybe we could take a positive, we should have a positive attitude towards our dim view. So if If someone's being a spiritual teacher and they have a dim view of psychological work, then they should say, okay, now I should take care of my dim view. And vice versa. Dim view is good in a way. There's a light view of what you're aware of now, and there's a dim view of what you're not working with. That kind of thing. And a Buddhist should not be caught by that. I mean, they should know, okay, I'm working on this, so I have a light view here, but there's everything else I'm not doing. So of course I have a dim view of that. But Dim view is not a negative thing.

[42:13]

I like your interpretation of the term. How often dim views are taken as enlightened views, though. I wanted to weave another little thread through this theme, and that is that, as I said, this whole process of the life of the awakened being is based on on the fact that nothing has an inherent existence of its own. But the whole story of this emptiness has sort of two aspects. The one aspect is that emptiness is not non-existence, but non-existence is a definition of emptiness, is one of the definitions of it. So one aspect of emptiness is non-existence, namely, nothing really has an inherent existence. But the other aspect of emptiness is the existence of that which doesn't exist.

[43:16]

Okay? That the whole concept of emptiness is nonexistence and the existence of that which doesn't exist. That there is nonexistence, that really is so, and there really is the existence of something that doesn't exist. ...existence, for example, of illusion. But illusion doesn't exist, but there is the production of illusion. That really is true. It's really true that things that aren't true are produced. Okay? So in Buddhist history, there first was the study of, in some sense, the philosophy and psychology of experience... where people actually, by coming in contact and aware of their experience, they saw that there was no... that's all there was, and any self of the person was actually just some kind of thing in this field of experience.

[44:24]

It didn't stand out in addition to that. It was just one of the elements of the thing, and you could never really get a hold of this self of the person. The next phase of Buddhism was to say that all the elements out of which we dream up a self, each of those elements also has no inherent existence. And the next phase was to say there is the existence of the non-existence of these things. And the going up, in terms of ascending, the going up and attaining side is the side of the non-existence of all things. And again, non-existence does not mean they don't exist. It means that they're free of any category of existence. It means they don't exist, they don't not exist, they don't both exist and not exist, and they don't neither exist nor not exist. That's what we mean by not existing. Okay? Completely free of any idea you have about things. Actually, everything's completely free of anything you can do with it.

[45:29]

Totally ungraspable. Everything is extremely profound. So, the realization of the profound aspect is the going up. You go up, you ascend, and you realize how profound everything is, so profound that you can never grasp it. It's like, I don't know what was funny about that. The coming down, the return, to the world, the not clinging to nirvana, the return to the world which you also don't cling to, but the plunging back in, totally, thoroughly plunging back into conventional reality, that's due to that which doesn't exist. Okay? So the non-existence drives you up and the existence of non-existence drives you down.

[46:33]

because non-existence exists through illusion. So, in order to play the whole story of emptiness, you have to go all the way around. And in Buddhist history, they first realized the emptiness of the person, and then they realized that the elements which the person really was And then the next stage was to complete that process, the return. And in terms of schools of Buddhism, just for your information, the Majjamaka school, the school of emptiness, is going up, and the Yogacara school is coming back down. Which is totally... Just thought I'd get that on tape. Well, I'd like to ask also for a little clarification of the different stages. I think it's the ascending stages, and there's the nirmanakaya and the sambhogakaya and the dharmakaya, the svabhavikakaya.

[47:42]

And I have a certain psychological way of making those distinctions, but I would really appreciate it if you could comment on what they mean from your perspective. So the Buddha, the enlightened being, has these three bodies, so to speak, or four. Can I talk about just three today? Sure. If I talk about the fourth one, I think everyone will go to sleep, because it's interesting. Yeah. The Dharmakaya I've been talking about all week, actually.

[48:51]

The real aspect of what Buddha is, is that Buddha is the non-duality of the existence of the non-existent. In other words, karmic life, straight out without any leverage on it, without any advantage, just straight on karmic life as karmic life. is non-dual with non-karmic life. That's the real body of Buddha. That the fundamental affliction of ignorance is, itself, is the immutable knowledge of the Buddhas. That's the Dharma. And that's the basic thing which, when it interacts with a living being, produces experiences. Some of the experiences are felt by the individual consciousness and those experiences in relationship, this reality body in relationship to an individual life, the experiences they have at that time are called the sambhogakaya or the bliss body or the reward body.

[50:13]

In other words, it's the reward of letting the real aspect of Buddha interface with your life and then see, watch what happens. And what happens is called, it's the reward of your meditation practice on what you experience, or it's bliss. If someone was here yesterday, oh, she's still here, she said, when I was talking, she was reminded of an earlier stage in her path when she had what she called simple-minded bliss. In other words, to have such a simple view or have such a huge view, to have such a no view or such an immense view, that you can actually see that your experience right now is the reward of your meditation. That this right now is bliss. This is bliss right now. This is what bliss is. And it's just your preconceptions that bliss should be some other way that makes it not bliss.

[51:19]

But if you work at the meditation called, this is the only place bliss can be, and you work at that meditation, your reward will be bliss. You actually will agree it's bliss. In other words, if you just drop your preconceptions, then you realize that your experience now is the interaction of this real aspect of Buddha, this dharmakaya, which is this Sambhogakaya, the bliss body. And when you can let yourself join into that bliss body, you can also see other people as glorious too. You can see other people with light coming out of their forehead and things like that. And the third body is the nirmanakaya, which means that this dharmakaya, it's very similar to the other ones. When the dharmakaya comes up and interacts with the human life, it produces innumerable transformations.

[52:22]

Nirmana means illusions or transformations. And it means that it interacts with life and produces all these transformations, all these illusions. So it looks like like these people here. Or it looks like trees or plants or animals or cockroaches or rats. It goes into these forms so that everything, of course, can be a teacher. Everything is actually showing this non-duality of the karmically created and everything's showing that perfectly. Even inanimate things. The fact that a cockroach can only practice meditation to a certain extent is, you know, the way things really are. That the reality body or that the non-duality of that karma and non-karma interacts with that life.

[53:32]

That's the way it's working there. And inanimate things are also the result of activity, according to Buddhism. The entire world is due to karmic consciousness. What makes the world? Karma. And karma is produced by living being. Did you want to say something? I have a question about the all of life and the karma in terms of how it relates to our concepts of time. Because it seems to me that karma only has meaning within a linear view of time. so that in another way perhaps of opening the doorway to the recognition of illusion, it would be to recognize that the past and the future only exist in our minds as memory or fantasy, and that in fact the only time there is is right now.

[54:38]

But karma also exists only in the mind that imagines it, that extends into the past and future. That's right. So that's a way of... So karma, the definition of karma, or action, is the overall pattern, I would sometimes say the watershed of an individual moment of consciousness. If you look at a moment of consciousness, and in a moment of consciousness there's no movement, it's a static event. And if you look at it, it has some tendency in it, which you can see or not see. If you can see it, then you say it's going that way or that way, and it basically goes in unwholesome directions or directions you can't discern. Anyway, there's some pattern in an individual experience. That pattern, that direction, is the action. That's what karma is. That's the definition of karma is that shape of an individual static moment. But that indication or that direction never happens.

[55:43]

It never really happens. It just looks like it's going in a certain direction and that whole thing goes away and you get a new experience which has another direction which also never happens and that goes away. dependent on the idea of a future and a past. But those ideas exist in that present moment and they are what make possible the view or the illusory shape that looks like it's going someplace. But it never goes there. However, that pattern can tend to be because there's an effect of making that pattern so that in another moment a similar pattern can occur. And then in another moment you can look back and say, you can create another image which is a story about that that moment occurred and that moment occurred. And that way you make history. But there is no such thing as time. Time is constructed in the present. So this whole karmic thing is an illusion. That's why the world of karma, the world of action, is non-dual with the world of no action and no time, where there's no movement.

[56:58]

So in reality, no karma, no time. But there is the illusion of movement in the present. Those two worlds are clearly the same thing. One is when you see what the other one is. But seeing what the other one is, you can't separate that from the one at the other. So they're non-dual. You can't have one without the other. So you use the impure to articulate the pure. But the impure and the pure, of course, are non-dual. So the Nirmanakaya is just simply the transformations of the Buddha body. So going up is the Dharmakaya. And then you could say right there at the top is the Sambhogakaya. And then coming back down into the world is the Nirmanakaya. is the various transformations of this same process.

[58:03]

So actually sometimes they say going up and attaining, coming down and transforming. And the Buddha, sometimes they say the Buddha comes down and transforms beings, or converts beings. That's a normal way to talk about it. But another way that the coming down of the Buddha is the transformation of the beings. But there's no Buddha before the beings are transformed. If Buddha came down and the people weren't transformed yet, that wouldn't be Buddha yet. Buddha is actually the transformation of the beings. You're all transformation bodies of Buddha, but actually you're not transformation bodies of Buddha until either you are transformed or someone else is transformed. When other beings are transformed, then you're the transformation body of Buddha. So Shakyamuni Buddha actually wasn't Buddha until he started teaching Shakyamuni Buddha. His enlightenment wasn't real until he transformed beings.

[59:07]

It wasn't really what it is. The transformation of beings is part and parcel of the whole awakening. There is the idea of a solitary enlightened being. In other words, some beings can solitarily, all by themselves, be enlightened and not transform beings, but these beings do not have the awakening of the Buddha. They have all knowledge, but it's not the knowledge of the Buddha. The knowledge of the Buddha is realized through the transformation of being. We were saying the other night about there's no teachers prior to the student learning. The teacher and the student, the teacher comes alive when the student learns, but the aha is simultaneous.

[60:13]

How about that? Faster. Roger, did you have something you wanted to bring in? I'd love to raise some questions. It's a little bit esoteric, so I wonder if maybe we should open it up. Well, I have a question. Uh-huh. One of the universals, I think, that has to be addressed in every tradition is the role of fear and desire. And that we aspire... to what we desire. In other words, we have all the higher desires that tend to get activated on spiritual practice. But they're still desires. And we also have fears. One of the problems that we see in the beginning stages of practice and intermediate stages maybe all the way along is the fear of the loss of contact with that awareness or that transcendent bliss.

[61:38]

Night of the Soul, for example, is a process that happens in every tradition in one way or another. It's not just Christian or just Buddhist, but there are periods of depression, say, that come along, or periods of disillusionment, disappointment. I think the term disillusionment is useful. ...times people come to an interest in the spiritual path out of disappointment in life. And as Bernard Shaw said, I think there are two ways of arriving at disappointment in life. One is by not getting what you want, and the other is by getting it. So that this can be... Disappointment, and I think it was Chögyam Trungpa that said, disappointment is a great teacher, that we really learn through our disillusionments. When we see through an illusion, then we wake up or we let go of a dream. Many times in our ordinary experience, particularly I see in people, with who say are going through a divorce or the breakup of a relationship.

[62:44]

The sadness and the pain and the difficulty of that process of letting go is not so much letting go of the reality, which was generally pretty awful, but it's letting go of the dream. It's letting go of the dream. or shared, the dream of the happy family, the dream of all those wonderful romantic illusions which have crashed, that's very hard to let go of. That's where the real attachment is. It's not to the dailiness of interaction, because by that time, if people are getting a divorce, the dailiness is usually ...bearable in one way or another. So it's that letting go of the dream, that disappointment, that disillusionment, that is part of the motivation for continuing the work, or at least initiating the work. But then once you get going on doing the work, at first there may be a honeymoon phase of, oh, I'm doing spiritual work. I'm special and I'm feeling better because I'm more calm and I can see through things and so forth so that we get problems of inflation.

[63:48]

The term spiritual specialness I think is a useful one because we see a lot of that around, particularly in California I guess. Tradition, I don't think. I think you see it everywhere. I think you have a term, the stink of enlightenment or the smell of Zen or something like that. This is one of those pitfalls that we get to. But along with that then comes the fear of the loss, that as soon as you get into something that you think is special, then along with that comes the fear of loss. And so fear and desire seem to go with us all the way along. Perhaps even, certainly again, perhaps on the descent, I don't know, perhaps desire for integration, for... contributing to the well-being of the welfare of the world or something. You say something about fear and desire and their roles in this process.

[64:56]

Well, I'm in the process of writing a paper which is about Buddhists, many Buddhists, and Wittgenstein and Shakespeare. And the connection between them, there are many connections, but the connection in particular that I want to point to is that I feel Shakespeare and Wittgenstein and many practitioners of Zen, unusually profound disillusionment. And they experienced an unusually profound disillusionment and yet they did not succumb to nihilism. and therefore bitterness, resentment, and not maybe fear, but bitterness and resentment.

[66:33]

They overcame the nihilism by entering the heart of the nihilism, and they were able to stay in there until they overcame it. And there were speakers, the Zen people are speakers, and Wittgenstein was a speaker too, and Shakespeare was a speaker too. So we can see how they sort of worked up through this disappointment to produce what we see is they're working with this disillusionment and at the same time not becoming bitter about it. And that process, when we look at that, this is a tremendous encouragement. to look at our disillusionment without saying, you know, well, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters because there isn't anything. There's no truths, so who cares, you know? And whoever said there was anyway, let's go get them.

[67:39]

But really facing that there are no truths because truths are also empty. And so that... That's very close to me right now, that kind of thinking, that issue. See, Wittgenstein, in terms of what I was saying yesterday, Wittgenstein realized that stories are not about anything but itself, and stories are just about stories. And that he realized very deeply, and he was tremendously shocked by that, and he barely survived. And for ten years, he just... in the mountains to overcome the unusual disillusionment that he experienced about what language and human beings are. And yet he came back from that to write more, and his writing is a testimony to his transcendence of that nihilism. He realizes that all these stories are baseless, but he also knows, and he also says, after he takes your stories away, he says, but go ahead now and make a story.

[68:52]

You need to make a story. You have to make a story as a human being. You can't live without them. But after you make them, then look at them and find out again that they're baseless. And when you hit the bottom, then make another one. So then... So then... The challenge is what kind of a story are you going to create in your life? What kind of a story? And then also after you make that story, then don't just let it sit there. Then dive down and go through the bottom. And then naturally let another one come. Don't try to starve yourself from the other side of reality. Don't block the existence of the non-existent. Let the next story come. But don't just let it sit there. Then realize, oh, this story is empty too. And I think if you look at Shakespeare, like that, and so does Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein just, especially in the philosophical investigations, he just scans back and forth over the landscape of stories and just sort of empties them and then comes back and finds a new set of them.

[69:56]

Back and forth across stories, emptying them and finding new ones. Cropping up all the time because there is the constant production of that which doesn't exist. There is a constant production of stories and just keep going back over them and letting them empty and let them come back. And there's a lot of, the stories are about desire. And Shakespeare, of course, gives us the two masks, the truth wears of comedy and tragedy. And they're resolved. Someone pointed this out to me just the other day, that his later comedies, particularly, all resolved in love and forgiveness, that this is the resolution. Or perhaps that's the key to not getting caught in despair with the ultimate disillusionment. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm back.

[70:56]

I keep being reminded of Carlos Castaneda's because it's such a nice, seems such a nice description of that seeking a path with heart yet realizing that all paths lead nowhere. At the end of one of our daily chants, we say, practice secrecy as though a fool, like an idiot. You didn't like that, huh? I'm not talking about anything. A lot of times when you're reading Zen material and you don't get it, remember the guy's talking to himself. That could be true of any of our books, by the way. It's certainly true in most psychologists.

[72:01]

They really reflect the psychologist's personality. And if that person's talking to themselves, guess who else is talking to themselves? Another example of this is one of the main scriptures that is chanted in Zen monasteries, but also throughout Mahayana Buddhism, is something called the Heart Sutra. It's actually called the heart of wisdom that has gone beyond wisdom. The essence of a wisdom which has even gone beyond wisdom. Or it's the essence of spiritual practices going beyond spiritual practices. And it starts out by saying, This Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, which is the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, maybe you've seen. Common probably Buddhist deity throughout China and Japan and Korea and so on.

[73:08]

Not so much in Southeast Asia. But anyway, it's the being of infinite compassion. And sometimes she or he, because it can be a he or a she depending on the statue. The point is it can transform what help beings. Sometimes it's pictured as having a thousand arms and eleven heads. And there's one story about its eleven-headedness. There's a girl, a young Chinese girl. His father was sick and he needed the herbologist or what said he had to have human flesh. So she cut off her arm for her father. And then... And then her head blew up, exploded, and had 11 heads. Anyway, this being of infinite compassion, it starts out, the Heart Sutra says, that this being was the wisdom which goes beyond wisdom, and realized that all the five aggregates of existence are empty of inherent existence.

[74:10]

And then it goes on to say all this stuff, no eyes, no ears. But the point is, again, this enlightening being did not get bitter about this. And her compassion or his compassion is simultaneous with this realization of emptiness, without bitterness. I think some small degree the experience of transcendence that we may taste from time to time can give us some insight into that sense of how much unnecessary suffering there is in the world. Because a lot of times we tend to think that suffering is, well, inherent in a sense in our state of separateness or our experience of identifying with the body and so forth. but that in fact we create additional suffering by our fears and desires.

[75:18]

And I don't know if this is in Buddhism so much, but in the Christian tradition, there's the cultivation of love as the antidote to fear, that if to the extent that we are able to love ourselves, each other, that that allows us to let go of fear. That is, it's a means for refocusing attention in such a way that we become aware of our natural state of beingness as love, that we really, truly want to give and receive love. deepest desire our hearts desire in some way and we're afraid to do that because as many of you undoubtedly know it's we sometimes have fear of intense emotions and we have fear of expressing anger but the deepest fear seems to be of expressing really expressing our And that in order to come more fully into that experience of love, we usually have to find some way of dealing with fear.

[76:32]

And this is a lot of what we do in psychotherapy, is deal with fears. You find a safe place in which you can tell the truth about your experience. It allows you to let go of some of the fear that you may have of being in the world as who you are, as the loving being that you would like to be. So I think that that's something that is an important quality to be aware of in terms of Because you can do spiritual practice in a loving way or you can do it in a striving way or in a punitive way. There are many different modes of doing spiritual practice as there are different modes of relating. And so that seems, I just wanted to bring that up as well, because I think that although love is talked about in different terminology, it nevertheless is a universal experience that comes into anybody's awareness by virtue of being born, I suppose.

[77:34]

It's also the one point of real departure among tradition. You mentioned the Christian tradition where the path is the path of love, and love supposedly cultivated sufficiently will bring grace and release. And yet in the Buddhist tradition, love and or compassion are insufficient by themselves. Well, I think compassion is a little different from love. There's a different flavor there. Do you have any comments? Why is compassion insufficient? Well, my understanding is that it's usually stated to be insufficient for release. Oh. There's two understandings of compassion. One is that compassion is an expression of release. The other one would be that you attempt to practice compassion as a way to work towards release.

[78:37]

So... Experience or love and or compassion by themselves, the cultivation of those qualities is usually not described as sufficient for release, wouldn't you say? Well, I guess there's two kinds of compassion. One kind of compassion is sentimental compassion. The other kind is just let's call it compassion. So compassion of the enlightening being is based on realization of emptiness. But if you mean sentimental compassion, then actually that's not recommended. even, it's not just insufficient, it's not even recommended. Right. Except in states of maybe anger, you can do it. If you're really angry at someone, then it's good to sort of meditate on how it is that what they're doing is not because they're not doing what they want to do, they're just doing what sort of, they're crazy, you know? Yeah. So they're just doing the only thing they can do, and it looks maybe irritating to you.

[79:39]

Actually, they're just acting according to what they think is right, according to what they can see, and they just don't see. The way they see produces this reaction. That kind of compassion. But this other kind of compassion, kind of what's called sentimental compassion or loving view compassion, actually wears you out. Or it gets hooked up with sacrifice. Sacrifice, yeah, like I'm helping them and all that stuff. And all that's based on self-clinging. You know, I love you. This is not only not sufficient, you've got to be careful of it. It can really wear you out and scare you away from spiritual practice. If you go to people's point of view, you get burned out fast. And that seems very important because that distinction between compassion, the strengths and the near traps is not something that's clearly made in Western therapy. We don't have that distinction. Well, I think that sometimes it's the reaction against the sentimental compassion as you describe it that psychology pushes.

[80:58]

In other words, One of the issues I wanted to at least mention this morning was the issue of women in spiritual practice. And I think that the sentimental compassion is a trap for many women who have been in the conventional way brought up with the expectation that life should be about service. burnout and they do it does come sometimes from a place of self-sacrifice and so forth and that this is something that in terms of psychological health it has to be let go of it and therefore in psychology is often viewed from a conventional religious perspective self-indulgent or self-serving or selfish that it talks about self-love that really we learn to love ourselves better and yet it seems essential to In order to make the shift to outgrow the traps of sentimental compassion, it's important to really turn that around so that one is really counting oneself as equal, not better or worse, but as equal to everyone else.

[82:11]

So that there isn't that sense of, I love you, and I'm good, and I'm serving you while you're going. But really, we're in this together, and that it's our... interaction or a relationship that grows out of our both participating fully that is a very different kind of relationship that comes out of that sense of being in it as equals rather than as one up, one down. And that's another big subject, though, we could go on for a long time. Particularly, I think it requires a kind of warrior spirit to overcome that sentimental compassion. And women are told that they can't be warriors. It requires the kind of thing like slapping yourself in the face and say, come on, get serious. You're not really these people. You also don't need to tell yourself that you're doing good things. You're a big girl now. You don't have to go around and pat yourself on the back all the time saying you're a good person. You can actually get on to what you really are rather than sort of trying to be something you think you're supposed to be.

[83:16]

That's it. And that's pretty tough. And women sometimes are told you shouldn't be that tough and strict with yourself. That's the conventional expectation, role expectation, which women seem to have to break out of in order to, both for their own self-actualization as well as for a different kind of... And part of it's very sweet, you know, that they are empathetic for them not to be warriors. That's very nice of them to give up their journey for other people. It's part of the people-pleasing part. The other part is, of course, maybe it's based on fear of what would happen to them if they became warriors. Yeah. Because people might not like that. Yeah. And, in fact, women are like that are pretty scary. Can be. Can be. Even scary because they not only are that way, which is scary in itself, but they've just broken out of a cultural, you know, vessel. Yes. So, you know, what? Who am I talking about? I'm not talking about anything.

[84:17]

I'm talking about language. I asked her. I can't stop my timbre calling. Well, it really is time for us to really talk to each other more fully. I think that my teachers on this issue were a group of... The students from Yale Divinity School, a group of women who came to a seminar I did on psychotherapy for women, and I was talking about the value of service from a transpersonal perspective because the whole idea of service in the world is central to the return part of the journey. And what they told me was that in traditional churches, this is what has kept women in positions of subservience.

[85:26]

And this is not only true in Christianity, it's also true in Buddhism. It's true in all of the world religions, which are all patriarchal systems, and all of the spiritual practices which are essentially designed by... So that in order to find their way, women have a more difficult task, you might say, or from the way I see it, I think it's a challenge for women to be more honest with themselves and to find their true way, the path of the heart, which is outstanding. role expectations that the women will fulfill, you know, taking care of fixing the meals and the church bazaars and things while the priests officiate. So I think that these are challenges that we need to be aware of when we talk about spiritual practice, and particularly for women in this culture, because many of us have No, I've done a lot of work to get out of some of the more conventional constrictions and expectations and certainly in terms of psychological health it's very important.

[86:30]

So I guess I feel like I'm talking about a lot of women that I've had the opportunity to be with as well as my own experience. In Zen, I often experience that women who come to practice are very good at helping other people have the opportunity to be able to take care of themselves. Women are very helpful often to help other people get themselves and go down in their own dirt. and get to the bottom of that. But they often feel like that they themselves are not allowed to do that same work. They don't take care of themselves as well as they take care of other people. Which is... Yeah. And another thing, you know, this is kind of just throwing these interesting little tidbits in. I know this woman. Her name's Einstein.

[87:31]

She's a German woman. who has now come to America, and she's a big business lady. She's in five big computer companies on the peninsula. And so she was married to another friend of ours, of my wife's and mine, and then she divorced this guy, and she got together with kind of like a, excuse the expression, what's called some guy, a little bit redneck kind of guy. She comes from Sophisticated German family, right? And well-educated and very cosmopolitan, sophisticated woman. She's not married, but she's going with this guy now who's kind of a redneck. He's a probation officer. And, you know, she says that he's a real man. And she goes out to dinner with him, you know, and then he does stuff like he uses his regular knife, you know, to get the butter or something like that.

[88:38]

And she says, well, you know, usually to her, you know, I'm never going to be able to learn this stuff. You know, I'm not going to be able to be like you. I'm never going to be able to do it. And... That story conveyed a lot to me. Number one, that people like that are somewhat attractive sometimes. But also that if I was at the dinner table with some sophisticated woman and I didn't follow the ritual and she corrected me, I would not say, look, I'm never going to be able to learn this. I wouldn't say that. I would appreciate it. And what's the difference between me and that guy? The difference is that I'm a priest. And who designed that etiquette in the first place? That woman was training this man of this etiquette. But men are the ones who usually design etiquette.

[89:41]

And women are the ones who teach the generations how to do them. Women are the civilizers. They generally take the role of being the civilizers. They get the kids to bow at the right places and put the... They're the ones who actually get the thing to happen. The men are more setting up the design. So, for me, I don't mind women training me because I'm also a designer. So I don't feel like some other man's design is being plunked on me. To me, it's an education in design. And the woman often understands the minute details of the design better than men. If a man doesn't feel like he's in on the designing, then he feels like these women are training him. And he feels like, get away, don't suffocate me. But actually... If he would participate in the design more, he would see them as facilitating it. So as long as we don't get stuck in these roles, so you think somebody else's process, somebody else's through women, or that you women don't understand that you're executing a design which you can share in, then I think it's okay.

[90:48]

But anyway, women are really the civilizers. In Japanese Buddhism, if you go to a temple where there's all women, The way that this level of civilization there is much more, it's just so endearing. The way they take care of the physical world at their temples usually is really impressive. But the sad part is that they don't seem to take credit. They don't seem to say, yes, and we also do this thing. Whereas the men, the extreme of the man is, you know, we designed it. We're done now. You take care of the details. That's the... But the men should... If they're really going to be fully a person, they have to be aware of both sides, and women also have to take credit for the design. It shouldn't be something that you're just carrying out for the men. And if you... You know, you should either make a new design or realize that this design is actually yours.

[91:52]

And the men also shouldn't... either feel like this civilizing thing and therefore take credit for the design or design their own thing and see if they can get people to help them implement it. That's a question I have about Buddhism in America. Zen, of course, brings us a Japanese design, and it certainly has a degree of refinement and aesthetic appeal that is quite extraordinary. And yet, on the other hand, my feeling is that in some way, Probably it will be adapted to whatever American Buddhism turns out to be. But there is a change process going on. And that's true for the other forms of Buddhism too.

[92:55]

Theravada Buddhism coming from Southeast Asia or Vajrayana Buddhism. They all have their cultural overlay. They all have their cultural trappings. So I think it'll be very interesting to see what emerges as a more indigenous American form of Buddhism. And I suspect that one of the major changes will be the equality of participation of men and women. What's happening, beginning to happen here, which is truly a new form, in a sense, because there are as many women as men interested in practice. But the issues that have to be overcome by women are sometimes different from the issues that have to be overcome because of the cultural conditioning with which we've all grown up in one form or another. I was just about to say that. I'm glad you said it instead of me. I thought that this thing of designing the ritual or designing the form is very much on our minds as American Buddhists now.

[94:04]

And that's why if I go to your house and you teach me how to use the utensils, I don't mind because you're actually giving me hints about what American Buddhism would be. Because we have to make another form eventually. But I don't than the form we inherited. So I'm going to hold on to the old form until I get another one which is equally beautiful. And again, beautiful means it's so beautiful that it's almost frightening because that beauty implies vastness. And the Japanese have given us some forms which are so simple so elegant that you can see the rest of the universe just sort of hovering right at the edge there, you know, and just you can barely stand it sometimes. It's so, it's so beautiful. And it's that, it was the aesthetic dimension that attracted me to it. You're talking about your task as a Gnostic in your metering in our time.

[95:09]

It's a task which anyone who really goes on the upward part of the path is faced with in our time, because really it says that our time and our culture are so different from anything that has been faced by Buddhism before that anyone who does any real degree of work in the tradition is going to be faced with how to bring it into the appropriate form of this culture. It's very exciting. We've never had a psychology, such as we have now, or such philosophic power, or, well, that's not quite, let me amend that slightly. We have a lot of information and technology and capacities for operating in the world which have never existed before. How to bring this wisdom into those forms and technologies and capacities so as to optimize the return of the contribution is really an extraordinary, exciting challenge.

[96:13]

Whenever Buddhism exists in a culture, it always interacts with those things. When Buddhism moved to China, it interacted, it met Confucianism and Daoism, and it adapted and adopted and change in relationship to that. And now Buddhism is coming to America and America is a very psychological society. So Buddhism is going to be affected by and the psychology is going to be affected by Buddhism. There's going to be some change there according to that and it's going to be more psychological sophistication is going to have to be, you know, just imbued to Buddhism and vice versa. The Buddhists are doing better than the Buddhists so far, in the sense of the colleges seem to be, a lot of them anyway, seem to be really good at absorbing the teachings of Buddha into their work. And the Buddhists, I think, are being a little bit, some of them anyway, a little bit proud still, these mundane practices.

[97:22]

There are a lot of psychologists that haven't opened the door to Buddhism yet. Maybe it's the same, actually. Since there's more psychologists, maybe percentage-wise it's the same. It's interesting. You pointed out that Buddhism has gleaned from... but it's gone into, and yet you also pointed briefly at the other side of John L. Toynbee, the great historian, pointed out so well that every culture in which Buddhism has taken root has been dramatically changed in the process. So we're looking at this dual evolution of Buddhism being changed as it comes into American culture, being changed by Buddhism. It's quite exciting. In terms of this theme of ascent and descent, I also thought I might tie it in with male and female a little bit. One time I was visiting, I was in Austria, visiting a friend there. That's where Brother David's from, by the way.

[98:25]

And a close friend of his is also a close friend of mine who's coming from Austria to be head monk at Tassajara this winter. And I was visiting him in his house in Austria, and he took me for a hike up the mountain one day. It was spring, but there was still lots of snow up there. And in not very long, we were up in the snow, and we were also... And I had never gone really mountain climbing like that before. And they gave me no instruction. But they did come with me. And we had, you know, the actual... They didn't give me... I had the mountain equipment, you know, ropes and picks and stuff. But the higher we got, the more instruction they started to give me. And the instructions, and particularly on one ridge that was going kind of like, and we were sort of walking up the center of it. As we got higher, he said, my friend said two things to me.

[99:27]

One is he said, don't look around, you'll get dizzy. That's one instruction. And in fact, if I do look around up there, especially if you're a beginner, you feel like you're going to fall this way or these. So that was a good instruction. And the other one he said was, I think he said, stick your pick in and take a step. Stick your pick in and take a step. Don't take a step and then stick your pick in. Does that make sense? Then a step. So I sort of stuck to those two. And I got up there, and that was nice. And once I got up there, going down, I sort of ran down, though, which also has to do with what I'm talking about. And Zen, generally, you might go down. Well, I want to bring that in. But anyway, when I got up there, or halfway up anyway, I thought of my wife, who was down at the bottom of the mountain,

[100:29]

And what was she doing? She was washing clothes, taking care of my daughter, talking to the wife of the man I was with, looking for train tickets, making telephone calls, changing money. So the thing I'm kind of emphasizing here is that what came over me as I was climbing up this mountain was that this is boys' activity. Not that women can't do it. The idea of transcendence, or the idea of don't look around, you'll get dizzy, this very narrow thing oriented towards an accomplishment is kind of like a boy-like adventure. But that's not enough. I don't remember this thing down here, my wife doing all this work. Somebody's going to get mad. Somebody's going to get angry. So for a man, just to do this thing, even if women are supporting him to do that so that he doesn't have to worry about airplane tickets while he's climbing a mountain, and isn't grateful to that at the same time, some great disharmony starts to occur.

[101:45]

So when men are doing this, they should remember this. But also women should do this too and not forget this. And men should actually do this. They should remember when they're able to do this, but they should also do it. Not just in theory remember it, but actually do it. And women have to do this very narrow thing sometimes too, I think. Do a practice which is don't look around, you'll get dizzy. I know a lot of women, again, you know, they look around and they run around trying to help. It's very nice of them. but they get too dizzy. They need to spend part of their life not looking around and putting their stick in and taking a step, and putting their stick in and taking a step. And somebody should help them, maybe their husbands, so they don't have to worry about the kids. Which maybe is impossible when the kids are little, you know. Another story is, one time I was doing tea ceremony Japanese tea ceremony and I was doing the tea and I was my teacher was watching me and while I was doing it she said when you're doing tea don't think about your girlfriend and she was right but she had the wrong sex I was thinking not about my girlfriend but about my another teacher who was in the next room talking about me and I was distracted from my tea by listening to him and she said

[103:17]

Don't listen, you know, concentrate on what you're doing. Forget about your girlfriend or anything else when you're doing tea. But again, that's kind of like a boy-like narrowness. But then she said, and then she said, Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, left his family. And then she said, but of course when you have an Akachan, you can't, you can't, it's hopeless. As a baby, Japanese baby, right? When you're a woman and you have a little baby, at that time, You can't do it. That's one sort of law of nature. At that time, anyway, you cannot forget about your baby. You cannot forget about your baby when you're doing tea. That's sort of... So one side of us can forget about it. Another part of us can't forget about it. That's sort of the whole story. And that's, again, the going up is the forgetting about it. being very narrow and transcending and forgetting, the other side is you can't forget about it. Because in fact, there is the existence of these babies, which are non-existent, exist.

[104:28]

And they really exist, not just sort of theoretically, they really exist and that really affects your life. So these two sides, again, you know, male and female, The male's transcended, the female's coming down into the... thoroughly, thoroughly down into it. I'd like to ask a question about coming down into it. What were you talking about? We had a week left, and as we... share our last week and the experiences we've had and will have as we prepare them to go home, to go back to our worlds. To integrate what we've had this experience with how it balances and ideas that opens to... Should we try to share this with many people?

[105:31]

Should we hold on to it so... I may speak to everybody, but in a general way, Going up and coming down, but also you can reverse it and say going down and coming up. Zen actually is a little bit more like going down and coming up. In other words, you start here and you go down to the bottom of existence and then you come back up into the world. So either way. Anyway, he is very narrow and cutting through all illusions to the bottom and being completely free of all illusions. The other part is being free from liberation from illusion, coming back up in the world and going beyond liberation.

[106:36]

Okay? And I want to feel like the work you're doing here, the breathing work, to me it seems a little bit more like going down. You're going down. And some people are going down like this and coming back up. Other people are going down like this and coming back up. And some people might even go all the way to the bottom and come back up. So there's, you know, some people might get to the actual bottom, which is birth and death itself. you know, which is samsara. Samsara means birth and death. So, you can go... That's what Francis is saying, too. All of us know something like this. Some of us know this, some of us know this, some of us know this, some of us know this. These cycles, and the depth varies according to circumstances. And so, when you do a breathing session or a meditation session here, you go down, and then the breathing session ends, and you come up. So while you're here, you're actually going through this process too.

[107:41]

Every time you do a breathing session, afterwards you come back into the world. And then you have your sharing thing. You see, this is part of the cycle. And you should willingly either go back up or come back down, whichever way you want. You should willingly... And... You know, this is very personal. I'm sorry to say this to you, but I overheard you having a conversation on the telephone. And that's an example of coming back into the world. You should see that as part of it. It really is part of it. And I'd like to give you a little focus. That is that they say that the difference between a fool and a mystic is that a mystic knows who not to talk to. Return to what you were saying about beauty.

[108:50]

and that non-beauty is implied when there's beauty or inherent in beauty or terror. And we've seen a lot in the breathing that people have difficult going into beautiful experiences or ecstatic experiences. So you say, well, maybe it's because a lot of us grew up with the feeling that we don't deserve something like that. But one thing I know for myself is a terrific pain will be when something is so beautiful it hurts. And that may have been behind your question the other night on the bus. What do I do with it? How do I express it when I feel it? And so I'd be curious in all of your reactions to that. A friend of mine just got back from Japan. And so he was there during the autumn. And Japan has been constructed in order to take advantage of spring and autumn.

[109:56]

So he was up in the hills. And they put these trees up there that make it very clear to you when it's spring and when it's autumn. They have cherry trees to let you know when it's spring, and they have maple trees to let you know it's fall. And when maples, you know the colors that maples can turn? He said, if you don't focus your eyes on, if you don't focus, it's nice, but if you focus your eyes, your body starts to hurt. What he means, his body hurt if he looked, actually focused his eye on the maples. It's, again, I think that's a good, that Rilke's statement that beauty is a terror that you can just barely stand. that beauty is entry into reality itself and implies not ugliness exactly, but just, you know, not beauty. And when beauty gets very clear, it's that tension, that dynamic between beauty and everything else at that time, or that being itself and everything else being itself, that dynamic is just almost, you can barely stand it.

[111:07]

That's why it's good to practice some kind of calming meditation so you can stand the beauty. It's fascinating what barriers we have to... For me, it was astounding to realize that I had at least as many defenses against the positive as I did against negative experiences and pain. But we keep ourselves in such a narrow range and won't allow ourselves to... to push above that. It seems like there are all sorts. One is, I think, as Rob was talking about, a fear, a fear of ecstasies and going beyond ourselves. Well, in terms of what you just said, experiencing the positive exactly, you know, in focus, what is implied? The negative. So we don't want to experience the positive very clearly and sharply. So our fear of the negative says, well, you can't have the positive. Yes, there is that sense that if I'm enjoying myself too much, then I'm going to get my comeuppance.

[112:15]

I'm going to have to pay for this in some way. And there is that... Carry that with us. We're afraid to experience too much joy, too much bliss, because we're afraid that we're going to crash afterwards and... It's an interesting assumption, which I've noticed, is that we're afraid of too much joy or too much love because we might have to pay in terms of pain. But we never assume that if we have too much pain... Joy. There's no limit to the amount of pain we're willing to endure. And we never worry about, oh dear, we have to put up with a lot of ecstasy in this conversation. But we really make that assumption in terms of the positive experience. And I think there's another way in which fear here, which is a sense of dissolution of ego boundaries, that when we really are overcome are overwhelmed by beauty, light, or such experiences that take us out of ourselves, as Roger said, the ecstasis, standing outside oneself, that there is a sense of self, or perhaps it's like one is such an infinite speck in the midst of all this beauty and light, or there is a dissolution of the sense of self altogether, and that that can be very threatening.

[113:33]

That can either be ecstatic or scary depending on how you hold it or where you're looking, who and what you think you are. There are a lot of assumptions that go into, I think, creating the emotional response here in terms of whether it's fear or a sense of liberation or ecstasy. For me, one of the interesting and useful ways of working uncovering some of the beliefs underlying. And you mentioned unworthiness, which is certainly there. I don't deserve it. And another one is I find coming up all the time is if I'm in some very positive state, this can't continue. And another is it's too much. You know, there's the fear of being torn apart by it. And I find it very useful to, as my mantra, it's not too much, it's just enough. And it seems like it's one aspect of Maslow's Jonah Complex, the fear of our own potential positivity and greatness.

[114:38]

It really is. It's just a big force. And then, of course, there are all the distractions, too, which is to have a moment of appreciation of beauty and then this is my way out of avoidance is that I remember all the things I'm supposed to be doing or, well, I have to get on with this or that or I'm going somewhere. There's always a million distractions that come along to take the attention away from that moment of experiencing the intensity of it just at that moment. How are we doing on time? There are issues that people would like to bring up. One of the things that Roger and I were thinking about was wanting to ask you for input in terms of what kinds of things you would like to get into in our next two sessions. We have some ideas, but we would like to welcome your input, too. If you have any questions that have come out of our discussion this morning or any particular questions you would like us to address, please give us your input.

[115:44]

Well, I did hear one thing, is how do we make that transition back into the world? That's an important one. I'd just like to share that I experience extreme beauty, and I find myself running to that barrier, creeping myself from the positive experience. And also I find it extremely painful as the maple tree, it only has a certain amount of time before it loses the burning color. And I compare that to the death and going up and down. And also the cherry tree, depending on what the conditions, how long it will last. And I just... I can't allow myself fully to go right into the beauty of it because I feel that terror at the same time of it being non-existent. That's why you have to work on your state, so to speak. You need to develop composure so that your body can stand.

[116:49]

that that pain or that that exquisite tension there otherwise you have to look away from it or or i don't know what you know how to stay there so by concentrating on something you open yourself to that experience safely and it is We're afraid to love because of the fear of loss. And that happens whether it's in terms of any relationship, really, because even if you're with someone for a lifetime, it's still going to be temporary. One of you is going to die. I think that that often can be an obstacle to opening the heart and really entering fully into relationship is the fear of loss and temporary nature of that experience. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. You're right. One thing that I'd like to hear about, and I've heard other people mentioning this, is that you talk a little bit about yourselves and your own experiences as you come along the path.

[118:05]

It's kind of like maybe a source of inspiration, I think, for all of us. Inspiration? Or disillusionment. In the past year, I'd also be interested in hearing 10-day experiences about a retreat. Let me suggest maybe some possibility of what you're doing, and I know what this group has been doing. In terms of Francis, what is the other area where I think Francis has really special contributions to make is about transpersonal psychology, how transpersonal psychotherapy relates to spiritual path. psychotherapy, the relationship with those two.

[119:13]

In terms of Raja, Raja has Buddhism and meditation, so somehow the interface of Buddhism and Western psychology and French Buddhism and technology would be probably one very interesting area. The other one, as I mentioned before, would be transpersonal politics. How would political strategy be different if you have a transpersonal perspective? Particularly, how can the spiritual path be integrated with social responsibility? Does it mean if you're spiritual that you lose interest in the problem? Are you going to be still interested in the world, and how will your approach differ if you are on the spiritual path, right? We are transgressors as well. You have a whole new conference here.

[120:16]

Another four weeks. Thank you. Well, this is fine. It's just another story. He was hit over the head. Red did a really good one. Humiliate our guests before he enters the service.

[121:37]

I just want to mention that Plato was a wrestler. Well, the longer I mention this, the longer I... practice, the farther back I see the beginning of it. The longer I practice meditation, when I first started practicing meditation, I thought I started right at that point that I started. But then when I practiced, I saw that I actually started before I thought I started. So the farther I practice into the future, the farther back I see the origins of the practice. I see the practice going back as much as it goes forward. So you see in your childhood your Buddha nature coming forward as you practice many years, until you finally, of course, see your Buddha nature coming from even previous lives.

[122:42]

So where to start is hard to say. Where I should say the story starts is kind of arbitrary. And since there's not much time, I don't know I'm particularly interested in the extreme change of energy state that you must come from, like pure physical energy. No. In other words, there's two schools of Buddhism that I would talk about. One school is called mind-only school. which is to say, which is emphasizing that the mind is, you know, everything is mind. Okay, the mind is really everything. But it splits so that it can be aware of itself. Okay, everything is mind.

[123:45]

The trees are mind, the stars are mind, your mind, everything is mind. But also you can saw there's a body only school. In other words, everything is body. Or, for example, this is mind. But this is, in some sense, a deeper mind than ordinary mind. Do you understand? Do you see how deep this mind is? This is mind which has transcended the idea of mind. So body is, in some sense, the mind transcending itself. So me being an athlete when I was young is... is almost the same thing as being an abbot. The Japanese term for abbot is juji, which means to abide. In other words, to be physically present is what the abbot is.

[124:46]

It's actually the abbot's body. So working with your body and being a spiritual practitioner or being an abbot are very similar. Again, I was attracted to Zen because it was very physical, you know? I found out that these wonderful Zen people, they would go like this. So I went like that. And I found this to be quite physical. You'll have strong physical sensations. Even in the process of crossing them, you'll have some strong physical sensations.

[125:52]

And if you don't have them immediately, then after 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, eventually the physicality of the situation will become so strong that you'll probably say, I want to go someplace else. So I was attracted to Buddhism or sitting practice over athletics because it was a physical practice that I felt the most uninhibited. The physicality in this situation had no limit. So it's like the ultimate sport, the ultimate athletic or physical exercise. Now it's true that maybe people don't see. I mean, they think I'm not doing anything physical, but try it. There's nothing more physical. So it's actually that I... If I look at my path, it's that I was always heading in the same direction, but it was kind of like... And I saw that this path was actually going to go over like that, off to the side, and I took another one.

[127:05]

And I saw that was going off to the side, so I took another one. I kept going for, in some sense, the way of greatest heart or intensity or involvement. And I found this sitting practice the most involving thing I've ever done. And I also thought before I sat that my mind was able to control my body. And I realized that I didn't have so much self-discipline as I thought. That just sitting like this, somehow I couldn't do it. The Zen people that I read about and whose lives I thought were so beautiful, they did this practice, and they did a lot of it. And when I did it, I thought, I can see why this kind of practice would lead to a real development, because it really throws you into the intense center of your physical and mental existence. And again, body and mind are one. So you need to do a physical practice in order to realize that, usually.

[128:09]

Most people, if they do a mental practice, they don't necessarily realize body and mind are one. But if you do a physical practice, you do realize it. Some people think some people who have great sickness or something. Like in Western tradition, I noticed most of the thinkers I like are thinkers who had great physical illness. Because in the West, many of our thinkers did not have a physical practice. They didn't have yoga to work with. So the only way thinkers were able to ground their thinking was through physical sickness and through physical pain. Somehow in the Christian tradition, at some point, the physical yoga was lost to many of the great minds and great beings of the West. So the only way they could... The physical side of the practice was through the good luck of having a physical affliction. So Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy.

[129:16]

I don't know what sickness Shakespeare had. I think his sickness was utterly, you know, excruciating disillusionment that hit his body too, I think. Otherwise I don't think you would be able to sing like that. So I see the physical side as being really my entry into Buddhism. And mentally Buddhism wasn't that interesting to me, except in terms of stories. But once I got to this posture, then I felt like, after sitting once, I felt like this is it, this is what I want to do with my life. fun or not fun. The only thing I could say about it when my friends asked me why I thought it was so important, I just said, I feel like it's real. I couldn't exactly explain why, but it seemed real. It seemed like this is what life for me is about.

[130:19]

From then on, I went forward in that practice, and also from then on I saw how the origins of that went back. Our last moment was read. Thank you very much for your time and your very busy schedule. Thank you for inviting me. Well, you beat me to the punch. I want to say how grateful I am to you two for inviting me and and what wonderful hosts you are.

[131:18]

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