like the pain and the reaction and all that was like one thing one kind of suffering but
when we kind of and slow things down we can separate out a little bit so what i can see now is that there's the physical pain and then there's the reaction to it that the that which is very natural it's what we all do we don't
want to be uncomfortable and we don't want to suffer and so we can find try to find ways to put push it away or cover it up or hide from it just many many different strategies that we have and those are all more like what the buddha is getting out with suffering he rolls out
just actual pain because of course
once you clear up that second kind of suffering year in a better position to deal with the physical suffering that might be the source or the even the emotional suffering whatever it is so we've got this kind of ball of reaction when something happens that affects us and
the suffering that the buddha is addressing is a lot about the reaction to what happened
i am
and so he taught suffering and the end of suffering by studying ourselves or our mind body hearts or hurt my bodies and to see that they're not quite as they appear so our japanese ancestry dogan says
when you write in a boat and watch the shore you might assume that the shore moving but when you keep your eyes closely on the boat you can see that the boat moves similarly if you examine myriad things with the confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent but when you
practice intimately and returned to where you are it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self
so the buddhist teachings were various ways to look at ourself to turn the light around
he taught when and most seminal once of these scriptures is called the four foundations of mindfulness and so he taught for you know to look at our physical experience our bodies our breath and our posture and also to turn our attention to our feelings
i'm all different kinds of feelings and then to also be able to turn our attention to our mind states our state a mind or kinds of thoughts were having and then the fourth foundation is mindfulness of dharmas which you could sort of say now do all that again looking through the law
lens of dharmas of of of his of the buddhist different chaotic systems of categories so looking at your experience from and in in terms of these different categories of experience that that are what the buddha taught so we have the five scandal
this form form feeling perception impulses consciousness and then there's you know the eighteen died so he has all these different systems and seventy five diamond so
but the point of it is to see that yourself is really made up of these ephemeral kind of moments in time and it's and the most important thing about that is that it doesn't look at like it's that way it it looks more solid than it is and so this difference between
how it looks and how it is is is kind of constantly throwing us off in some way and that that's kind of the suffering actually that peace
ah so than the second turning is what we call we call them mahayana that which means great vehicle so this supposedly happened around the first century common era
and it was you can we start to see it as a kind of reformation or
expansion
and and it's hard to know because nothing was written down so the the actual scriptures that we have from the first turning and the second turning aren't that far apart in time and so right now i don't a king they don't know enough about it but scholars are really questioning
you know kind of almost like which came first or whether one was beef was after the other but we think about the second turning as the mahayana the great vehicle and in the second turning you have to start to engage well ha oh i forgot one thing i wanted to say about the first turning
is that am
the emphasis is on yourself saving you could say saving yourself and kind of i think ideally in the spirit of like put your own oxygen mask on first before you help others so it's not like completely self centered but but the emphasis is definitely on
what each person has to do for themselves with their own suffering so then the mahayana kind of has starts to engage the idea that well if there is no south than how do you save yourself and and that's a paradox that has to be engaged at some point in our practice
i'm
so there's a bunch of more scriptures lots more scriptures that her part of the mahayana and they're kind of amazing and long and more
cosmic in some way and and but the core issue for the mahayana you could still say is suffering and the end of suffering by studying our mind hearts are heart mine bodies
to see that
everything is you know that things are not as their they appear
and in particular even these categories of ah be dharma that we studied in the first one are not as solid as we thought they were
and so it's more about
exploding the categories are throwing it open to a wider deeper view and and on and so in the process of this study of studying our body heart minds and reality
we we we we get to more interconnectedness naturally there's more of a turning towards how connected we all are and how are connected with everything and we're not separate so it's the same thing about the self not being as it appears but with an emphasis on the interconnectedness of all things and aspie
in connected to each other
and am
there's an image is kind of like a
the image of the raft so you can say the first turning teachings are like a raft and you don't when you when you use a raft to go to the other side of a river you don't take the raft along with you you leave the ref there and you go on so the feeling is to not
sort of cling to these earlier teachings so much so and we don't know exactly what conditions were
giving rise to that but we can sort of imagine that there may have been some
just like with anything a settling down or a rigidity around what had been taught and received five hundred years before and then there's the than movement of reformation to to sort of not know to open up some of that rigidity may be under as
and more concerned with saving all beings so the but we have the bodhisattva vow which will say the end of our talk sentient beings are numberless i vow to save them and that's kind of the mahayana expression of our practice
then so what apis food was teaching as the so-called third turning of the wheel
is something that's also called the yoga chara teaching which was around the fourth or fifth century so you sort of thing like these are all five hundred around four five hundred years apart is these movements and apparently that's not what everybody considers the third turning i found out down there but
i'm going to talk about that way cause that's the way we learned it there and then it seems like different schools and it makes sense kind of the things will turn a branch out after the mahayana and each person would each school not each person body school would kind of have their thing that felt like the next turning of the wheel
because really the we'll just keeps turning we hope and we're trying to turn the wheel here too so
i happened to be very fond of that are chinese ancestors so i think i could make a case for that being the third turning so i can understand how it is that
we don't all agree on the so-called third turning however i'm gonna tell you about the yogurt chara teachings which is what we were learning about that it a horror and they are basically about suffering and the end of suffering by studying our mind heart
bodies
to see the basic essential boundlessness and groundless of everything
i'm especially ourselves because the
our sense of self as gonna keep coming in you know and you might have some penetrating insight into impermanent sorry that there isn't a fix self but then it's just gonna keep creeping and because yeah you gotta get through the day and in a protect yourself and feed yourself so there's always gonna be this a kind of
a conversation you know between the so-called reality which is hard to get at an impermanent and then art are feeling about ourself or experience of ourself
i am
and so the yogurt so and i think that when we first these these yoga charged teaching sort of first surfaced in western groups quite a while ago like may be ten or twenty years ago some some large amount of time and they seem to be extremely esoteric and difficult
to understand i think like what i remember as it seemed like that was like going further into something esoteric like the mahayana more esoteric than the earlier teachings and this is like even more esoteric and difficult to understand but actually after studying this with food if i have a different sense of it which is
maybe you already do to that this is actually more returning to actual things we can do so the early teachings of buddha gave us many many things we can practice and do and then the mahayana kind of explodes everything and says none of this is real and the yogurt chars like kind of circling back to
actual practices that we can do every day to address are suffering and other people's suffering our mutual our collective suffering and our individual suffering
and hopefully so there's a whole new set of categories of experience he ate consciousnesses and various things like that
and i'm so one of the most accessible of these teachings is something you you may have heard about its
kind of out there i think in the ia
general teaching a button which is this thing about watering the seeds so the idea that we have this
storehouse consciousness which is actually very much like the western psychological idea of the unconscious and in the storehouse consciousness or store the seeds of everything that we've ever experienced and you know genetics and you know the human race in the
a human or animal and our childhood and our parents child everything that has anything to do with influencing our experience is stored in the storehouse consciousness as seeds and then things that happen and or things that we do water the seeds or don't water them
the so certain seeds are getting watered all the time other seeds aren't getting watered depending on what's happening and as you can imagine it's a really complicated and it's not a thing you can ever get a hold of
i'm
but and but somehow we can influence it for benefit at which is mysterious you know because again we're not saying there's a self who has any control over anything nothing's permanent but as we learn about how the seeds are and how they work we can
how seem to have influence on what's happening and we go again we never get any control but
oh it matters what we do all the time
so you know if you're wondering how to water seeds you know i think
we all know that you know just adding some respect and friendliness into a situation is is gonna bring benefit most of the time so there's some simple things we can always do to you know and then you know as situation the more you know a
about a situation you might know more suddenly what's gonna contribute benefit
but the idea is that that you sort of stop trying to control anything and just jump on the bandwagon of watering seeds all the time whenever you think of it whenever you remember our practice and to do something water seeds of benefit friendliness respect
ease for yourself you know non anxiety for ourselves and others and you know the more we know we can more effectively water seeds but we're not gonna ever be controlling what's happening and so we need to just take our money out of at completely
and invested in the seed watering project
and then so than another really basic yoga tried teaching which you've probably heard as a little bit harder to wrap our minds around is this idea that
everything we experience is being
process through our cognitive apparatus always so everything we know is known through our cognitive cod cognition process and there's a lot of neurosciences corroborates this you know and the the the undependable city and a sense of
that of our cognate cognitive process you know like now they they understand that eyewitness testimony is is flawed and such but it's really hard to go around you're still going around looking at things and face and you're seeing what you're seeing and it seems to be what's happening so it's
it's not easy to
to know how to incorporate this knowledge even if even if we all understand for a moment here that
we're all having a different experience based on how we're cognizant what's happening based on what happened before the way we think and what we know about the world
another example that i really that i like from neurosciences so we all have this negativity bias probably he made many of you may have heard about this so they've shown in western union own neuroscience that when we
can our environment or when we view our world when we experience our world through our five senses our attention is gonna be drawn to threats and danger danger more and then it'll be drawn you know maybe like let's say sixty percent to threats and thirty percent to
it's possible good things that are available to us and then a little bit to something that has no observable valence one way or the other so

and so am this and this negativity bias is brought to us by natural selection i mean it is the evolutionary advantage so it's always gonna be a factor and how can we
somehow incorporate that into what we know of what we know you know it's really hard to to or
see ourselves doing that i guess is what's hard it's hard to see that your mind is averting already before you're even aware of things the mind is sorting a bunch of stuff out that's happening and fixating on certain things that it has learned through its experience are important
either mostly as threats but partly as rewards
so you know or just even our meditation practice to be in the present moment is try to
mitigate that somehow like you know and you know take note hannah was talks about the you know do you can you enjoy your non toothache so you know if tomorrow you have a toothache you're gonna look back at today and think how great today was because you didn't have a toothache
ik so can you have that can you have that greatness neck can you experienced that greatness now can we sort of you know without we're never gonna be able to stop this process because it because of the evolutionary advantage i think but can we find ways to mitigate it and and i think it seems to me that every wisdom tradition
and every spiritual teaching offers antidotes to the negativity bias leno
um positivity granted having gratitude practices and this has seen all over facebook and everything gratitude practices positivity having faith turning things over to a higher power many many different ways to phrase something that would bring in water seeds again so
this is getting back to the seized the negativity bias is always wanting watering seeds of anxiety right
so how can we water other seeds we need to bring in the watering consciously and intentionally of other seeds to balance it out and you know i'm just we should all do daily we should do daily practices the water seeds of positivity and gratitude
and otherwise you're really getting of a skewed take on what's happening
i'm
so the yogurt shara
i'm
and so the way to phrase so the sixth ancestor of zen waning in china
had his way of raising the the bodhisattva vow which i said before as sentient beings are numberless i vowed to save them his wording was sentient beings are numberless
i'm sorry sentient beings of my mind are numberless i vowed to save them so that's a kind of yoga charles spin and then there's a there's a teacher at tassajara who's been there long time she's the abiding teacher of tassajara leslie james
and she's an amazing teacher at one point through for to me and said genuine leslie's hear it changes the ph
and she had her own more great wording of the for vows which was sentient beings are numberless i vowed to save them from my ideas about them i vow to save all sentient beings from my ideas about them
and that's a very yoga chart informed kind of way of talking about it
ah see
gotta which pages here
so life at tulsa horror you know
well we started sitting at four twenty and one of the jobs of the she's so was touring the wake of bells so my alarm was set for three forty
which is not even you know like five o'clock his early three forty eight is not even you can't even talk about who had three party as you know it's ridiculously early enough so but i'm a kind of a morning person so i was okay with the wake up bell and then we sat up
about six periods of zazen and day and my experience was like we were just always back in there you know things would happen and then we'd be back in there
turn around and we'd be back in there and then you know we do services and the meals were also in the zendo and they were you know and then there wasn't any much coming and going of people and you weren't you weren't really interacting so much so you know when you met people on the path you weren't
really supposed to make eye contact but there was this thing he bowed to each other and that is really deep practice because there's so many different ways that bowing can happen you know you can both stop and bow if both people in a hurry you can just sort of pass by and bow in motion
one and then you so you're always kind of trying to read the person for which one they are gonna do and and meet and you know so the ideas that you're kind of meeting with the bow at some point in the value of mere moving together and it's really it's nice but it sort of it also ten turns you back on
yourself in a way so many many things
about life their turn you have me back on myself and it really reminded me of this yoga charged teaching because you know things would happen i have some train of thought going and then you know back in the zendo and it's going like check check check check check check
and then disappear in a puff of smoke you know and and then it would happen again
and and it started so i mean i really started to realize that i was my whole world was this thing i was thinking about and feeling about you know because i think what happens is
underneath the thoughts are often feelings that seem to be kind of driving driving it right
and you know as with the negativity bias to often uncomfortable feelings often
i had
and feelings are sort of like physical thoughts in a way when you know what mean feelings for in your body but they have a thought component or something
and you know i wasn't that turned up by really strong emotions while i was there but i hadn't kind of an underlying anxiety about you know about fitting in and whether people like me and whether i was doing a good job as you so and just sort of basic underlying anxiety
he and that kind of trove
thoughts of son of critical thought i would say so i would notice like i was constantly critiquing the food there compared to bcc food and the chance there compared to bcc chance and and you know is anxious to all the stuff that we do what was that look does the person like me and
what what was that what did that mean
but it's constant right it is constant
and like i said underneath those kind of streaming thoughts you if you can sort of get underneath them there's often a feeling under there
i had this experience that i noticed
that i had this wave of homesickness that you know maybe about a month and or something maybe even earlier but but ways and it wasn't right at the beginning but but and it was more to it there was more to it and home homesickness there was no things happening there but that was somehow they thought bubble that went with it and it had various thoughts
with it but you know i thought well i should do when i'm i should practice what i'm preaching
so i thought well what is what we mean by homesickness so then what is the feeling
and the feeling was just some sensation in this part of my body
and i just kept trying to return to it and just feel it is what is this feeling
what is this feeling
not so much what is the meaning but what is it feeling like what is the feeling of the feeling and and m
a kind of just kept returning to it because again you're back in there right your bed effect in there and there's that feeling again even if your mind was going somewhere else are you were doing your job or whatever
and so at some point i realized that the feeling had that dissipated in some it was over the course of a day i think
i i almost literally heard a voice say thank you that is all i wanted that's all i wanted
and you know it does really feel like the feeling is driving something else it feels like the feeling wants something else mind do anyway they want a solution or something they want something but this feeling it really felt like that's all i wanted just to be
be just be present with me you know

so it's easy to think
we all have an affair i think we we can some of us not all of us we have an idealized feeling about it a monastery a zen monastery like they would be peace and quiet there and
there's a i ot and there isn't because i'm you know you just end up the so you've gotten rid of all the things you believe are causing your problems but actually the things that are causing your problems are not those actually it turns out
not that we're not exonerating them there's bad things happening but still the the the problems that stay with us and so i have always had this kind of oh yeah when you go to test horror you start being upset with the person next to you for how they pass the commercial and i have to say i witnessed that exact thing which
stand me across the zendo i start to people they were literally struggling over how they were passing who you know how they were passing the commercial and it went on in the day like i heard stories about
so it's really true i would have told you that before but now i can verify that it's really true and so i think that i really think doing a practice pretty is an awesome thing to do for almost anybody and i think we should approach it like
kind of like a walk about or a vision quest or an expedition you know something that you would have to really muster some inner resolve and strength to do
because it's it's amazing to have this to connect with yourself in this way he just really have this deep deep connection with your body heart mind
and it's it's wonderful
and you know terrible
but more wonderful than terrible

so i'm at one some point know in the middle of there somewhere i was sitting zazen again back in there and
the sort of sentence just floated into my mind which was what about letting yourself off the hook and letting everybody else off the hook to
and i was surprised you know
and i betrayed to as some trying to sort of here that dharma and i don't think that it's about sort of like oh so i was going to read you some stuff about the hook hook is a great word
it's an evocative words so the nouns or something curved or bent back at an angle for catching hold of her hanging things on a thing designed to catch people's attention a stroke that makes the ball deviate and flight and the nouns or attach his hitch fasten fix
secure clasp or captivate and some of the phrases or by hook or by crook get one's hooks into get the hook and then might let off the hook which means free of a difficult situation or lead off from blame or trouble and so i don't really want to go in them one a
about
letting go of accountability i mean i think responsibility and accountability are really important issues for a practice so it's not like letting hitler off the hooker letting me off the hook for my white privilege or something i don't think that's the point here
i think that it has something to do with this the hook of the south the hook of the misperceived
i'm
you know
to paraphrase so that kind of been paraphrasing leslie james you know to let myself off the hook of my ideas about myself
and to let you off the hook of my ideas about you
you know to let thousand off the hook of our ideas about thousand
ah you know to let this moment in a way off the hook of my ideas about this moment
so that's kind of what i've been
in returning to since i've been back and you know but life is so different here that
if if everything is conditionality you know my mind is complete is is so completely different here than it was there because of conditions are so different but
you know we're still just even if it's once a day or once a week were back in here and i'm taking it taking another look
listen touch
so that's what i had and i'm happy to answer any questions people may have practical or philosophical
brass

yeah well
hey
yeah and i mean i think this gets to some of the conversation about the teaching would be because it's not it's not like all ah
whatever happens is fine when you're raising kids it's not like
while they don't have a self so it doesn't matter anyway or something you know i mean there's very specific things babies and children need and so
those are kind of like the laws of gravity yeah know
which are may be different from from just the everyday world of armor of our consciousness only and also i mean i think it's it's interesting too
look at how we come together around our beliefs if if it's all just consciousness only you know so that's where i went with with your question
yeah
anybody else questions john

mosley
a
i really wanted to say
because
say
i say
right
ah
oh yeah ha
right i think it still does raise questions about the accountability you know so i think that's always
and with there's no self when you know how does the accountability plan i mean he and others that there's a kind of spectrum from accountability to blame and we know that blame is going too far
but what is what is responsibility know what our responsibilities to each other
jake

hum
home
the new people so they have this thing called the tongue areas what they call the tongue guys to where the people who are just there for the first time
yes
attraction
see
yeah i mean i think almost like economics practically you know because you can go to touch the horror than be supported financially and so you don't have to have a lot of money
to go now of amid a complicating factor for a lot of people is now unlike my time i didn't have any student loans but people have student alone so than they still even if tassajara supports them for their time there they still can't necessarily go so i mean there's complications but i think a lot of more economic i think there's a lot of young
sorts of different things but here if you live in berkeley you're gonna have your livelihood is gonna be a really important consideration so
i think that's kind of one of the main differences honestly there is sort of a for a full
menu of things you know you got the work for zazen and the teaching her all together you know and we have that here too we have little but i mean it's almost like card to ask young person who's even getting to zendo and then could you do a little job which is actually the way we manifest our practice you know so i think
the you know it'll it happen it'll happen if we could figure out a way to support people more there were a way to support people more somehow than it would happen more i think
hi

yeah
yeah
oh thanks here makes it easy sometimes to let go of your ideas about somebody the love flowing right

the love can flow yeah yes yeah yeah yeah
his ideas get in the way higher duty

well there's you know there's always a lot to learn especially for people with the white skin privilege about what that is
there's a lot of good books out there and everything out there so it's good to
avail ourselves i mean i kind of with the repin ceremony i'm kind of waiting for someone to get as excited about as i was which i didn't experience and
i think there's a lot we can do to bring the tools of our practice to that to the effort took the hasten the end of racism
you know maybe it's getting closer maybe the tools are getting closer to the problem but maybe they haven't quite
a always met maybe we're still working on getting them to meet that i think you know let people have any skin color off the hook of your ideas about what skin color means
that mean there's the there's no end to the way to apply our practice to this but
yeah
i wish i had a piano which had a more vigorous answer
to that
but thanks for bringing it up i am a higher

yeah

yeah yeah
i can't speak for anybody else i think i was hardly ever tired
i think i once during class i fell asleep during a class once during an evening event i fell asleep and i took a try to take naps almost every day but i didn't know as fall asleep so i think one element was that a better had under i might have had some nervous energy so men have been completely grounded but
i would say that that life was very salubrious very healthy and and thousand itself can can be arrest a different kind of rest and being away from the internet and being away from news and being away being in nature like all those things
are factors that make us tired
so
i'm worried about it too because you know bad memories and they're saying memory loss you know and i worried about that you know i had many many worries about the aging issues that i might run into being there and so you know i hope i didn't do any damage but i have to say that it i did not feel i did not ever feel
pushed in that way and a lot of people did i have other people dead people and they let you you know it was acceptable to write on the because they keep try they keep a tendency to that there was acceptable to write in their need to sleep then oh that was an acceptable excuse which i don't think it was back when i was there
there were many there a little the few little ways they had softened it
and it made up it was it seem more sane i would say it you know compared to how it was before it seem like they'd introduce some some basic sanity elements more
it was still an extreme experience but it was more more doable i think
and ah but yeah i had i was never hardly i never that was not a prevailing feeling i had of being exhausted
so that was nice
are we how are we doing jack
couple minutes one more question okay charlie

a
that's nice
cruz dentists who was address various issues more than a lot of people have so listen to her talks to
ah ok thanks everybody