Bonus Track And Welcome

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Lectures, whether it be from retreats, or the two pieces of meditation class talk. What have you? I hope you enjoy it. Without further ado, the bonus track.

Awe As An Antidote

Seeing A New Day

Habit Furnishes The Mind

SPEAKER_03 1:31

Alright, well, good evening everyone, officially on Seyamosa. Welcome back and welcome if it's your first time. Actually, you know, come to think of on the topic of driving, and on the topic of welcome back. Just so you know how the gears are working in Mikawaza. Um I started driving late in life, and my first car was given to me by my Unsanim, by my spiritual father. So every mon every monk has a uh Unsanim, that's their vocational father. And uh the car came with a with a lesson. And the lesson was every time from now on until you no longer are occupying this meat puppet. You didn't say it like that, but you know, might as well. Um every time you get in, you think it is your first day driving. Um that was it. And it's like, all right, off you go. I think fantastic advice. And uh so as I said, welcome back or welcome for the first time ought to be welcome for the first time. For the magnitude reasons why that is the case. For one, and this is something we have to do actually, this is an effortful conjuring in the mind. Um the first thing it does is it creates a sort of it it airs out complacency, it airs out familiarity, um, and it begets a sort of a virgin mindset to say um the way that a child is ravenous of the world around them. Ah everything is awesome. Man, and um we go around the sun a couple of times and uh you know just uh Wednesday. No longer awesome Wednesday. Um and and that it robs us of an attitude towards life. Um and like I said, it begets a sort of complacency of things. I've already been here, I've already done that, I did I know, I know it through it through. Which is such a grandeurist declaration to say, I know the thing through and through. Um typically assigned to people close to us. I know my uh friend through and through, I know my spouse through and through, I know my X, Y, and Z through and through. Of course, the Zen would say, Well, do you uh do I know myself? Not even through and through, anywhere near my true self. Just the one through, maybe. Not a through and through, but just a one through. And the way that a child, as I said, is is in awe of everything, there's a new freshness in their mind. And partially, to a large extent, I would say maybe even, the the ability to learn is hinges on that, and that sense of newness, and that sense of awe, and that sense of infatuation with the world around them. And uh when we get jaded, um that thing goes away and everything becomes such a chore, and everything becomes so difficult and so hard and so oh I'm tired. Always tired. There's always a tired something. Um let me uh strike out of the record uh welcome back and welcome for the first time. Let me say welcome for the first time, hopefully. May that same sense of awe and infatuations with what is and and and and and uh this ravenous want and hunger um take over. It isn't that the world offers any a shiny thing. It is all inside the job. So not that long ago we had our Founders' Day, and uh Zanim had given a talk, and uh the question he asked, when you first wake up, what do you see? And so the answers varied from the back of my eyelids to the ceiling to my husband to the X, Y, and Z. Right. Um what he was looking for, and eventually made the point of it, is what when you first wake up, what do you see? You ought to see a new day. You ought to see a beginning, you ought to see some freshness. Even more so, perhaps you ought to see a good day. It is a very, very powerful practice. Um in juxtaposition to if you wake up and you look at the phone and you look at the weather and the weather is uh that the rest of the day potentially has gotten washed out. Right? Or you happen to look at the news. Um and we know what makes the news all the joyous effects, right? Of of day-to-day going ons. And so this preset. Um initially, at least, uh well, initially in our early childhood, uh it's an automatic preset. Re recall, if you will, the days where you had to be dragged out of bed to go to school. I know. But recall then the morning of the field trip. You wake up like nosfaratu, just trr. Right. Seventeen hours before you're ready with the backpack, stand at the front door. The excitement, the thing you don't even have an alarm clock at that age, right? The parents wake you. But somehow, your ariashik, your unconscious mind just said ding ding ding rang the bell with the great, you know, wake up call and and ready to go. Never have you woken up at this ungodly hour of seven. But now it's five thirty and you're ready, not only are you awakened, not only are you not hungry or not sleepy or not anything, you don't even have to go to the bathroom. You slept through the whole night, you didn't go to the bathroom, but you're just ready to go. This ability to furnish the inner world of your mind.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

It is magical. Magical.

The Lost Cat Lesson

Flowers In The Sky

Why We Believe Our Worries

SPEAKER_03 10:36

Uh unless it's perpetuated by habit. When it's a habitual thing, um we become the resident of our own mind that's been furnished by somebody else. If you have your own room, if you have your own house, or if you have your own apartment, chances are you went and bought that couch or or whatever, got it. I uh in in my youth I found a lot of furniture, not couch, granted, but a lot of furniture in a uh being thrown out. And having no car, as you know, so there's logging, all sorts of furniture to my to my apartments at the time. But they were mine chosen ones. Oh, that's cool. I want that nightstand. Um and so I did the furnishing as we all do. Your furnish and your tapestry and your carpets and your chairs and your discs and everything for the by and large in your space is furnished by you as the interior designer. Like I said, unless the furnishings and the interior designer is called a habit. And habit comes in, kicks in the door, and decides it's going to retapestry your wall because some pattern of behavior had been created. And in this case, um the example would be a negative pattern of behavior. You want to look out the window, perhaps. You want to have a great view, but your depressive, anxiety, worried states come in and just wallpaper the window shop. And then we're cooked up in there. This is not poetry. Okay? This is not um pumpkin. This is real for the inhabitant of the space. When I was a wee lad, I had a black cat. And we had m uh already moved from the countryside to the city, and we lived on the second floor. And on my way back from school, on the balcony, there was a red flower pot. Whatever used to grow in there has been dead on the account of the ass of the cat always being planted in there. That is to say, the cat always said there was a red flower pot and a black cat sticking out of it. Every time on the way back from school, I would look up at the balcony and there it was. Of course, I'd like to think to myself that it was waiting for me to greet me. One day I had come back and it wasn't there in its planter. And mom said that it disappeared, potentially fallen off or the balcony, what have you. I went looking for the guy. If I tell you that as I see you now before me in your form, material manifested here, tangible, every shadow, every rock, every branch, every root, everything I saw when I was looking for this cat was the cat. I don't mean it looked like a cat. This would be a severe understatement. It was the cat. It wasn't like, oh wait, is that it? No. I reached out for every one of them. I went to grab every one of them, every shadow, every rock, every cat, every I mean every cat looking thing, right? But it wasn't a cat looking thing. It was the cat looking mind, or the mind looking for a cat. It was the thing I wanted so badly to find that I my mind had shaped shadows into cats and roots and rocks and branches. And the darker the dust was coming, and of course the darker it was getting, the more difficult. Now the more difficult also became more so difficult when the impending realization that perhaps I won't find the cat added prisms to my eyes. That is to say, tears that warped the thing I was looking at. Now the cats, if you ever recall when the tears well up in your eye, and you look at a thing, the thing that is still moves on the account of the tears. So now every shadow that was a cat became alive. Because through the prism of my of my tears, it moved. Every rock moved, everything and so I went to get it even more so, even more so, even more so. These aren't uh This is not a I don't know what the language uh similes uh what are they called, whatever they're called. This is a real thing. I'm talking about I saw real cats. I reached out to the real cats. If someone at that moment would stop me and say, Is that your cat? I would say yes. Would you give me all your Lego blocks? Absolutely, because I see it right there, that's my cat. I would have sold sold my you know, my collection of Lego blocks on the account that that thing that I saw was absolutely unequivocally the cat. Now consider the furnishings of our mind or consider that same uh the Buddha calls uh flowers in the sky. And it's a reference to a you know when you look up at the blue sky or the thing and you see the the things on the surface of your eye and they're just kind of looks like bugs, they're moving and or they're just you can never catch it because they're always escaping. You try to look at it but it runs away. Right? Those things. Those are called the flowers in the sky. Right? A mirage, a phantasm, not a real thing, and yet seen. And so we we know that this is on the surface of the eye, but if you don't know that it's on the surface of the eye, you're perhaps likely to reach up and want to grab the thing on the account that you're seeing it there. And of course you would grab nothing the way I couldn't grab the cat. Why? Because it isn't. Our minds produce flowers in the sky, our minds produce cats, our minds produce certainties. And and we have to understand I'm not talking about some ideas and thoughts that we have. I'm not um suggesting that whatever mind conjures up you ought to get rid of. What I'm talking about is the things that make us suffer. Worries and anxieties those things. All of the bundle we call, all of the suffering, any flavor of it. They are like the cats in our minds and we are ever so convinced of them being real that we suffer that. So how are we to um free ourselves of these goals of these um hauntings? Um Freud, I believe, said uh something to the fact of that the unconscious is not a uh fixed thing, that it's a living thing. And I frequently have talked about the kind of wafting of um things from the through the baseboard of our unconscious mind wafting like the oracles of Delphi and us getting, you know, stoned on the on the thing and just dancing the mirage, crazy phantoms and phantasms and fictions and it is the things that come up that shackle and torment that we know consciously. Nobody wants to suffer their worries and their anxieties and their uh you know depressive ideations or or their ruminations or whatever. Nobody wants to suffer those things, but they come up. And how is it that every single time You know, I frequently say it's g I don't know if perhaps you had the same experiences as I did, but um having been rather inebriated, one perhaps wakes up wrapped around like a iguana around the cool, loving coldness of the toilet bowl. And uh you know and then one whispers sweet nuttings to its cold bosom as it lulls you the speech and say, Oh never again. I will never again get so wasted until the next never again comes for us only to repeat the mantra of never again. And so when we are lashed by our suffering and we say we feel the the whip of it. And once the lashing is over and we've licked your wounds, and sometime later you realize in retrospect, in retrospect only, this is the problematic element. In retrospect only, we realize why do I do that to myself? Why do I torment myself so? I recognize that these things aren't the way that the mind trained in such things. Catastrophizes whatever it may be, imagines any and all possible terrible scenarios unfolding, strangely, doesn't imagine one single good one. It's all darkness and hellfire and brimstone and you know alien abductions and you know how is it that it doesn't truly if it's going to say that considering all things, why doesn't it in fact consider all things? And why are we so easily duped into the manufacturing of the imagined scenarios and we buy the ticket every single time? Because we are asleep. That's the answer. The way that a nightmare is nightmarish until you wake up.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

What do you mean we are asleep?

SPEAKER_03 23:20

As the thing is welling up we don't call it to question. We don't question its validity. Any account that if it's in my head it must be so. If it's my experience, it must absolutely be a reality. But we cross-reference and and fact check five hundred billion things about shoelaces. But why not fact check, cross-check our own regurgitations of habits, our karmas from maybe seventeen lifetimes ago? Because we are not awake. Not awake means we are not self aware of the experience as it's coming up. We kind of come to consciousness amidst of the already unfolding story and say, Oh, it is. And then we perpetuate the results of the phantoms because we act out the thing, therefore pumping into the world further seeds of karma that then beget and then enter what the Buddhists call samsara, sabha say, the cyclical again and again and again and again and again and again, the nauseating uh thing.

Meditation Breaks The Machine

SPEAKER_02 25:03

So meditation. This is a meditation class, I have to say the word at some point in time. Meditation. Okay, got it. Excellent. I said it. Satisfied. Check that off my list.

SPEAKER_03 25:25

Um it is really meditation is the way to uh throw a wrench into these gears of these machines. Because if you consider and and the mechanism is just splendidly uh simple. You know, masters when they reach enlightenment frequently will throw their head back and go fall of how ridiculously absurd our sufferings are, or how ironically easy enlightenment is, or realization, or so you know, and they'll say things is as easy as grabbing your nose.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

And so the mechanism of a meditation, too, it's a straightforward thing.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

The problem with straightforward is we are clever. If you recall from your high school reading, perhaps, Herman Hesse Siddharth. I think we're have you that was a school reading at some point in time. Siddhahartha.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Siddharth.

Counting Breath Over Cleverness

SPEAKER_03 26:42

Yeah, Herman Hesse Siddhartha, the famous, you know. Uh he meets the Buddha at one point in time, and the Buddha says, You are clever, young sadhu, beware of your cleverness. It is. It is. You do the thing. I'm doing the thing. Then the cleverness comes. Yeah, but and just obliterates everything. Why is a meditation good for you, as grandma said? Because it makes you familiar to yourself. Not in the way that we're like, oh, I'm going to observe myself. Not even that. That's a um it's a tool, there's a time and place for it. However, it's problematic at the same time. Why is that kind of a self-observation problematic? Because it's the same clever self-observing, the same clever self, what the clever self is doing to the clever self-self. Right? It'll screw with itself. So we we take a more clever still approach. Actually, we don't take it. The Buddhas and the Masters have devised these. That is to say, we circumvent the clever. We get around the clever. You get around it, you jump over it, you dig under it, whatever it is. Various meditation techniques for various purposes. In this case, we circumvent, we you don't go through the clever. You go around the clever. That is to say, you hold on to the object of your meditation for dear life. Because it is life. You hold on to the object of meditation. Do not listen to the voice of clever. In your meditation practice, you're doing meditation. You're not trying to solve the Pythagorean theorem. You're doing meditation. Pythagoreas, he'll be fine. He's been there for some time. He'll still be there for some time. Don't you worry about him. You just do the thing. And you avoid the trappings of anything other than holding on to the object of meditation. In your meditation, you have one and single task is to hold on to the thing. You hear the there's the chihuahua of your of your mind, just barking, and mosquitoes of the mind buzzing, and snakes and palumpas come out, and you know, schnazwanglers and wengdurals, they're all there coming out, but you just hold on for the life to the object of your meditation. Impervious, unaffected by the cacophony of all of these goals of the mind that set out for one and single purpose, to steal your attention. And to steal the attention means to steal you from you. It is an abduction. If I am deciding to breathe, or as we uh usually start off our practice, count. You count in your mind. This is our method, by the way. I don't get to it because you know. You count from one to whatever number you could get to within the allotted time. If you lose count, you go back to one. That's it. That's it. It's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's disappointingly simple. Because I've read many books and it's like, oh I want to fly or levitate, or I want to know the minds of others, or whatever. You just count. Just count. Right? And you hold on to the count and you count, and that's all you do, and you are impervious and completely ignoring ignoring all else that arises in your mind. And if you practice that, you can ignore the ghosts when they come to haunt you. You could ignore the goals when they come to haunt you, you could ignore the echoes, echoes of traumas, echoes of things. They are merely echoes because right now, here, nothing's happening to you. That's why there are echoes of the thing past, or there are echoes of the thing that we've imagined would be. So either the catastrophized outcome of everything, you throw the mind against the wall of the future, and the wall of the future rings back, and the sound comes into here and disturbs and vibrates the mind and unsettles. Or the same thing in the past. There are no cats. The only cats are the ones that you could pet right this moment. Only right this moment. If you can touch a thing, it is. And if you cannot touch a thing, it isn't. The the absurdness of this is absurd. I haven't the words, I haven't the language. I've lost the language so long ago for this. And yet we suffer it. The delusional state of this and and and the the the the horrible state of this that we do is sad. Sad, sad, sad that we suffer the cats that aren't. But we don't have to. But we have to work.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Not difficult work, not hard work. Like a new toy.

Spaciousness And Freedom

SPEAKER_03 33:17

You think of your meditation practice, you think of your suhang or your application of these philosophies into your daily life as a new toy when you were a child and you got it. There's a little gasp, there's a what is this doing? How does this work? And what you kind of you just all in it, time and space fall away and and everything else. We say, Oh, when I was a child, the time moved slowly. What time moved slowly? Oh, my day was like a week. Really? By by means of some sorcery? Yes, the sorcery of the mind, the sorcery of how we are enthralled with the thing. But when we get jade, it's just another Monday. So you you you take up your meditation practice with a certain sense of awe and inspired by it of what it could potentially open up to be. Because what it could open up to be is the spaciousness of the mind that likely you have never ever beheld. Not dark basements, not cluttered storage home, storage uh units of the mind. Spaciousness. Unbridled spaciousness. Freedom with no obstacle or shackle.