Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: For more information on Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, please visit our website at www.ancientdragon.org. our teachings are offered to the community through the generosity of our supporters. To make a donation online, please visit our website.
So good morning, great Dragon Bodhisattva assembly.
So I apologize to my Dharma Brother Neo's on because I said I'm going to say a little more than normally I would at the beginning of this. But first I just want to welcome new people here in the room. I think Izzy, Emily, and we haven't seen Blake for a while. Tom, you've been here though.
But it's great to see everyone and online I think it's the usual suspects.
Sean, maybe I haven't seen very much, but I think Joe is Josaurus dinosaurus.
When I was sitting this morning, I felt kind of a shudder of anger and sadness and joy.
And beneath that, something that we don't talk about a lot in Zen arose called love and a desire to protect.
We have three names on the altar of people who have been killed by our own government.
One in Chicago, Silvero Gonzalez.
And two in Minneapolis recently, Renee and Alex, as they're known in Minneapolis.
I apologize if I offend anyone by bringing up this difficulty, this pain, this injustice.
But let's name it, it's with us no matter how we feel.
And I've been contemplating how to respond.
I felt regret that I did not join some of my other Suzuki Roshi lineage friends and Katagiri lineage friends in Minneapolis. Apparently some of them gathered after the killing of Renee Goode, other priests, but I didn't know about it because I'm not on social media.
And so if anybody hears of such things, tell me. And I've contacted people and say, if you need to send your priest out, I would do my best.
Our Sangha member, Kevin Iverson's son is in college at the University of Minnesota and is in the swirl of this. And so parents of college students are worried about the well being of their children under these situations of danger and oppression.
And still how do we act and respond?
I think that what would happen for me this morning was of love and a true desire to protect all beings, including those who out of anger and fear, create great harm.
And still we all have to act in a way that is congruent with our conditions, our situations, our limitations, and our superpowers.
So I'm just bringing this up because I would imagine that this is in everyone's hearts in some way, whether you agree or not with the government policies that appear from my view, which I acknowledge can be limited, of trying to undermine the great work for civil rights and democracy so many have worked for over generations in our land.
I don't think anyone comes in this room or any real mammal feels good about the harm of another being, whether it's the great earth or a mother driving a vehicle.
So I just wanted to bring this forward and acknowledge that this is in the room with us. And it is my great wish and prayer that our practice will be centered in what really arises in the deepest of zazen, in this bright circle of awareness, is love. And when we act from that place, I think it's giving it our best shot.
And that can be how we treat each other in community and how we go out and connect to our larger community.
So I wanted to thank you for listening to my words and supporting my experience with this. And I sincerely hope that our practice together nourishes this great true nature that we all have, which is bright, all inclusive and loving. So thank you all very much.
So I apologize for stealing some of the beginning to Neo Zahn's talk, but I have no doubt it will support our practice. So take it away, Neo.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Thank you and no need to apologize.
[00:05:46] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Thank you very much.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: No need at all to apologize. I welcome those remarks. And it actually, first of all, good morning, everybody. Good morning.
It gives me an opportunity to sort of frame my talk a little bit. You know, Suzuki Roshi once said characterized Zen practice as hinayana discipline with Mahayana spirit.
And my talk today, you know, I don't like this word, but it's more addressing the hinayana discipline part of it.
It's the. And I'm going to specifically talk about the discipline of non abiding.
And it's.
And I welcome the remarks in part because this talk is like more a general Buddhism talk, Dharma talk, not so much a Zen talk and not so much a Mahayana talk in the sense that of all of this in our practice is always framed in the love we were just hearing about and compassion. But you won't hear that part of it in my talk. And I that always has to be acknowledged that it's, you know, it's foundational. It's what our practice is about.
So these last months have been very interesting for me.
I actually have notes that I'm going to have to refer to my. I've sort of been through a process, I would say, of disassembly and reassembly, let's put it that way. It's been pretty intense and, but very interesting.
Gosh, I thought I was so prepared.
There we go.
You know, so I've been in this process, I've been thinking a lot about my own practice and becoming aware, reviewing all these decades of kind of at every step I've experienced certain degrees of rigidity in my practice and certain degrees of self deception. And these are things that you know, can work in parallel or in conjunction in a variety of ways. And so this is kind of a sub theme of my talk. But it's also.
These reflections were taking place against the, I don't know what word I would use. The inspiration I drew from a fellow Sangha member who gave a lot of consideration to how, how should this person's practice look? What does it mean? What will the form be? What would the how, how will practice be manifested?
And as is so often the case, and I see it in myself reviewing these years, you know, there are countervailing poles, right? And so one, you know, you, you get the clarity you can about your life and as part of that there's the do that in the face of deep and long standing pulls in other directions. And this person like faced this really squarely and I found it really helpful.
So I want to talk about non abiding and karma.
So you know, we have this expression from the Diamond Sutra, abiding nowhere, let original mind come forth.
Now, you know, when you look at the different ways this has been translated by different traditions and so on, you know, sometimes this is brought forward in a way that it's a statement about the nature of original mind. It abides nowhere but in other forms. And the way that I'd like to respond to today is it's a practice instruction, you know, abide nowhere, let original mind manifest.
What does that look like? And as I was saying, you know, the process of finding that sometimes involves a lot of kind of rigidity trying to grasp. They're both ways of grasping onto things. Rigidity and self delusion and self defeating ways of trying to grab onto things.
And then we have the repentance verse that we do here. All my ancient twisted karma going through, I now fully avow.
So how does this, how do the abiding and karma and avowal relate to one another? You know, the idea to abide is to like there's a sense of staying someplace, staying with something to stick, to be stuck. And conceptually, you know, this is really close to the idea of samsara. Right?
You know, so there's an irony, you know, in the sense that the etymology of samsara means something like passing through or wandering through successive states. So there's this notion of fluidity, right? But the fundamental issue with samsara is within that, you know, range of, you know, think of the wheel of life, the six realms of beings. You know, you move there and you're stuck there.
You know, the Buddhas in these often Tibetan images, you know, are represented as outside that wheel of samsara.
So that's in a way abiding, you know, and in Samsara, this flowing, this movement, the stuck movement, this ironically static, repetitive, compulsive stuck kind of movement is.
I mean, the question is like, so how do we get from there, you know, moving through these states to the non abiding of the non stuckness of the Buddha represented in the center of these mandalas or off to the side sometimes, you know, so there's some kind of relationship of karma.
Well, okay, you know, so karma in this sense, it's like personal, you know, and this is expressed against the background or involves, like, social and, you know, interpersonal broader systems and stuff. But there's some essential sense in which karma is related to us specifically.
It's unique to us. Our karmas are all different, even though they're overlapping parts of it.
You know, so there's a question of bodhicitta. We get this idea like. Of like stepping out of the circle, like finding something different, like an intuition, you know, and there's a question, where does this come from? And in a sense, it's ultimately from exactly our karma.
It's the, you know, there's a sense in which, if we can live out our karma correctly or wholesomely, that the poison itself will produce the cure, if we want to use that language, you know, so it doesn't arise from outside our lives. It arises directly from within it.
You know, we get the sense of our stuckness and the sense, you know, Dale brought forward, Dale Kaufman brought forward in Rohatsu, this really wonderful thing from Bill Fronsdale about the four noble truths. One expression, it's not completely adequate, but it's very helpful, which is, I think it was, shit happens, we make it worse. It doesn't have to be this way. Don't be a jerk, right? So all of this, like, don't be a jerk. This is like, this is directly, you know, obviously it touches on path, but it also points directly to our karma because, you know, what keeps us stuck in all this is precisely our own stuff. Our own, you know, is very general. People have their own versions, but it's our own reactions of greed, hatred and delusion. It's a reaction rather than response. We can put it that way.
So what does it mean to avow our karma?
You know, avow itself has some internal tension, right. The context is a repentance verse, right? That's what we call it. So there's definitely a sense of confession, kind of a base of maybe contrition, regret for unwholesome actions, wanting to do better, all this kind of thing, you know, so it's like, oh God, I'm already getting mixed up here.
Yeah. Anyway, I spoke about those. We'll come back to those four truths.
But part of the actual definition, I mean actually as with this sense of confession or whatever, in the same kind of primary definition, is to acknowledge openly and boldly and without shame something. It's to, you know, in our context, it's to acknowledge our karma, not pretend it's something else, pretend it's something different.
So, you know, to return to this practice instruction, we started with abiding nowhere let original mind come forth. It's, it's easy to see this reflected, you know, throughout the literature, right. We have Shto talking about not being stuck inside or outside. And in between we have Rinzai talking about the true person of no rank, no fixed position, you say, almost no identity, coming and going through the orifices of our face, our ears, eyes and nose, our senses.
And we could, I'm sure we could generate another dozen of these in a minute, you know, and it's interesting that there's a striking similarity or echo in this very thing with this notion of samsara in each there's this flowing through spaces, locations, modes of being.
So why is one sort of being stuck in one liberatory?
Perhaps, you know, there's a link in this idea of chettina or intention, volition, intent. You know, this is a, this is always the, you know, when you look at Buddhist karma theory, karma thinking, you know, this is ultimately, it's the intention, it's what lies behind our actions and our reactions and a response that determines the character of an act, you know, and intention, again, there's a dual sense in, in the sense that karma is, you know, the, the quality of an action is, is to sort of ultimately characterize by its wholesomeness or lack thereof. It's, it's sort of self orientation, you know, the sort of putative, you can say, like adventitious idea of who we think we are against the openness of the kind of love and compassion that hogetsu started us with today, you know, but it's a little awkward to talk about intentionality sometimes while we are living in a samsaric way. But speak of it we must.
There's always a.
The intention in our non dharmic modes is there's a sense of connotation, of compulsion, blindness, drivenness, all these things.
So, you know, so how. How does this intentionality play out against this other sort of broader intentionality we have? Because it's clear that it's like it comes. This intentionality is suspect, right? Because it turns out when we examine it, we do. This is what we do in practice. In part, we see that it's always driven by our own sort of personalized expressions of the three poisons of greed, hate and delusion.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Right?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: But this is quite different than what happens after this sort of small b. Bochechita that I was talking about arising out of our lives, hopefully to blossom further when you've clocked, you know, it's when we have clocked into sort of the fourth of these noble truths. And again, I'll revert to this expression from Gil Fransdale, you know, don't be a jerk. You know, this is path. This is, you know, the Eightfold spokes that underlie and support the rolling of the wheel of our lives. You know, when this is established, we come more clear that as I said before, it doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to be this way. We don't. We're inspired by our teachers, by the beauty of other people's practices that we're practice that we're exposed to.
You know, we realize that while we have to inhabit our karma, it doesn't have to be compulsive and driven in quite the same way. There's a different way to work with it than we habitually do. You know, the habitual thing is like just. It's like water, like wearing a groove in stone, gets deeper and deeper and deeper through lifetime and lifetime and lifetime. And it gets very hard to get out, you know, but then there's this moment that's like, yes, doesn't have to be this way.
And that's when we start to commit to practice. Things can be different.
And this of course is true at the broader sort of level of social or cultural karma, et cetera, et cetera. But we can extrapolate to that sphere. But that's not really what I'm talking about here.
So a number of times, without being too explicit, there's this idea of betweenness Right. There's this idea of how our life is being expressed and, you know, this tension, you know, this sort of expanse between that and how we want to live our lives. We have a sense of this and a sense of gap. And there can be a sense of trying to anyway, and there's just a betweenness. It's a dynamic situation. It's never set. This is also true, for example, in.
In our relationships with our teachers and fellow practitioners. We can never, you know, as much as we want to be, you know. You know, I want to be like that guy. I want to be like Hougetsu. You know, I want to be like Taigen. You know, I want to be like these amazing practitioners I met at Tassahara.
But we know we're not, you know, we're not or not completely.
You know, this is expressed really well, I think, in Genjo Kwan, where he says, the way is neither yours nor others. It is not carried over from past and is not merely arising now. Again, the sense of, like, where to settle, where to settle, and what happens if you try to settle, you know, this t. This line from Tokin is. I think it's pretty intense. It says there's actually, you know, even in practice, especially in practice, there's no place to abide. I mean, we never were abiding, right? But we pretend that we are. You know, this is part of the definition of samsara itself, that we are a component of it, that we have this kind of identity.
And so what happens in this kind of situation, I can speak for myself. I'm only talking about it, of course, because I suspect that other people might have sort of their own versions of it. Right.
You know, so there's one.
One response. Do you think you can run away from your karma? Right.
I'm. And I. Just, to use an example, my thinking has become more refined and more sophisticated about this. But there was a point in which, you know, I thought, okay, I'm going to be done with being Eric Schutt, because there's this new guy in Dodge. His name is Nyozan, and he's got a robe, you know, and there's something to grab onto there. You know, it's like, I don't have to be that jerk anymore. I'm going to be somebody else. And, you know, of course, the subtext, he's like, God, I hope that guy's not a jerk, too.
But it turns out, of course, that it is, right? Because, you know, so, yeah, Dharma name, you can aspire to that. But, you know, and That's, I think, part of the function. You. It's something to. It's a con. Something to grow into something you practice with. But what it can't be is saying I'm going to plug into the program and by doing so, I am going to evade my karma, right? I'm going to. I'm going to evade this Joe Schmo named Eric Schutt.
And, you know, I found myself over the years in different periods. I mean, I. Looking back, I can see this is precisely what happened. So. So this is a kind of rigidity, right? This is. This is like grabbing on to an image we have of somebody else, our teachers, very frequently, in my case, Tayan and B.
You know, it's like, I want to be like that.
There's a bar I used to go into in Seattle. It was called the Blue Moon. No, no, the Comet.
And there was this sort of bartender, this mythological bartender, and it was like. And the motto was like, be like him. You know, and so we find ourselves doing that. It's like, be like him, be like her.
You know, so that's a kind of a seizing. It's a rigidity. It's like it's doing precisely the kind of stuck flowing that I was talking about before. It's samsaric, right? It's. It's. You know, and another way to look at it is also, you know, or in different situations, it's also kind of self delusion, right? Self conf. You know, you're kidding yourself. You're. You're trying to sort of like, okay, I'm getting this reflection over here and that's what I'm going to look at and not attend to this in quite the way one might, you know. But the point is, you know, we enter into practice with a kind of set of karmic circumstances that is entirely unique, entirely our own.
And, you know, we're enjoined to avow it, you know.
And this means, in part, we kid ourselves. We think our practice will look like someone else's, hopefully someone we admire, right? As we do our teachers.
But, you know, this is kind of self defeating to make. To try to make it so. To try and force ourselves into that kind of a mode, in short, you know, and as this gets back to my expressed discomfort previously about discomfort in this robe, how do I express this?
And I had helpful remarks from Tigen, I had helpful remarks from Hougetsu and others in the Sangha, you know, And I mean, it turns out, as you would expect, it shouldn't be a Surprise to anybody that the only way I can do it is to simply, you know, be myself, right? Duh. You know, I might be a crappy priest, you know, I, I may not, you know, this talk may be entirely heretical. You know, I'm still a jerk, right? All this kind of stuff, but, but you can't do otherwise. And you know, so my situation is maybe different than yours. I'm wearing this robe. Other people here are wearing this robe. Some people are wearing rakasu, some people are not. But for all of us in whatever our situation, there's this rejection of flowingness, of non abiding.
It's as if we wanted to take that swinging door that Suzuki Roshi talks about and nail it in place.
You know, you've probably had the experience or you probably will have the experience in practice, that you'll get a glimpse of that non localizable rank sort of coming and going through your experience and watching that person like evaporate, evacuate the universe, totally disappear. When you try to ask this being to stay, when you try to get a grip, when you try to settle down.
We all do this in our various ways. And you know, and the instruction is as I, as I said, you know, the way I hear the Diamond Sutra line is like, don't abide, don't abide, don't abide.
You don't know, you know, you have to give up the pictures, you know, these ideas of what the meaning of your life sitting on this cushion is and in order precisely to just let it express itself on the cushion in your practice, right? And you know, if it's to finish off, this has gone on really long, you know, I think this is kind of also what it is to avow our karma, you know, it's not just to live it, but to live our life in practice, to live out our karma in practice, engaged in this process, ongoing process, internally generated and supported by our dharmic friends and our teachers of to live it in practice, whatever your life as a practice looks like and whether you have other ideas of what you would prefer it to be or like it to be, you know. You know, so there's always a kind of aware, kind of ironically or paradoxically and just abiding nowhere, you know, and that's precisely the place that we wind up when we avow karma in our practice and work with it in that way, you know, in other words, non abiding. Where do you wind up when you don't abide? Turns out precisely in your life, you know, just your life as it is, you know, may be shorn of some of your self deceptions and confusions. So anyway, that's kind of how I see it. And like I said, I don't think it's probably doctrinally sound, but I think that there's a way in which, you know, we have a responsibility, right, to hear the Dharma and take in the Dharma on its own terms.
It does not arise precisely now, but neither is given over to the past.
Given directly from the past. Right. We can't rely on that. It's got to be, it's got to be non abiding in, in our practice itself. And that's what practice is. That's what, that's what stepping out of samsara is.
Anyway, I've kind of gone on long enough, so I have a request. Yes, please.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: Before we take some questions, I would like you to hold up that papyrus that you've been reading for the cloud people. Because you might have been.
It's really kind of.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Well, this is not papyrus. This is. This is paper that some balama strings came wrapped in the other day. And I was gonna, yeah, I will here when I get it in order, you know. So I started, started writing down some notes and I was gonna transfer it over, but I kind of got carried away and, and didn't have time to, to do any editing, which is partly why my talks are so unsmooth. But anyway, there you go.
[00:31:33] Speaker A: I like it. No, it's like super analog.
I'm an analog guy, totally environmentally style. So thank you very much.
[00:31:46] Speaker B: The text abides.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: It's a phenomenal world.
[00:31:50] Speaker B: And you know, going back to what you said at the beginning and speaking about being analog, I've had this conversation with Margaret and others, and it's a way in which we are, you know, very much forced onto social media. I do zero social media. Hougetsu doesn't do social media. And there's an issue here because, you know, there are things happening and it's very hard for us to find out about it. For example, but I found last week, and I will take some questions. There's a site called Chicago Activism Hub. And you know, it's online, but you can look it up and you don't have to be on Facebook. You can find out what's going on. I went down last minute to a code Pink rally on Friday and I met Jonathan there and I met Leo there, and that was great. So keep it in mind. And now. Okay, I'm shutting up. Questions please, if you have any.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: So if you have any questions in the room you can place your hands in. Gosho and Howard will pass a mic and online, you know, you're pretty good with that reaction button. So any. Anything you offer will. You could just unmute.
[00:32:59] Speaker C: And since I already have the mic. Nielsan.
One, I love a good heresy. Two, that paper is so you. Like, thank you.
Like, I wouldn't do that, but I'm really glad Niozon is doing that.
Like, I don't. I can only picture you doing that.
[00:33:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:21] Speaker C: And I think that, well, is amelable in a like, particular kind of way in the way you were talking about and not talking about.
So, you know, I'm still, I think in the, in the big picture of things, pretty young to the practice. Even though I've been doing this for 15ish years or something, I still am like, oh God. I still see myself, how subtle it gets of like, I want to be like Hougetsu. I wanna be like Nyozan. I wanna be like any of these other people in the room who's clear, who are clearly doing better practice than I am. I'm still stuck with this.
But it, and it gets so subtle. Cause it's not at first, it's so blatant. Like that voice, that pull. And then it gets even subtler and subtler of like, oh, maybe if I do this thing, I'll be a different person, different than the one I am now with the karma that I have. I'll. I'll make a different karma stream that feels better or something.
And yet, and maybe, I mean, I think this is in the, you know, Hinayana Theravada stuff, but I think it's especially in the Mahayana tradition. I'm curious, sort of your take and approach. I mean, what about emulation? What about inspiration? Because we do aspire, right? We take these vows. We look to the bodhisattvas in this tradition as archetypes to model ourselves toward. And yet don't try to be like that, right? And clearly there's, there's a, there's a gap there. There's a limitable kind of like play space or something. But I'm curious, especially since you've been practicing for a long time, how that's sort of shifted around for you, how you kind of approach that now, this emulation, inspiration thing.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Thank you for the question. I mean, I'm still working with that a lot. And you know, this idea of how long one's been practicing this stuff, I mean, that part of the subtext of my Talk is actually that it doesn't change, you know, you. You know, or for me, it hasn't, you know, I mean, these, you know, the forces of grasping continue. Right. But you're absolutely right. There is. It's very hard to talk about. You know, I've never found a way to articulate it, but there is, you know, this is. I was trying to say, you know, there's a difference between just living out your life and living out your life in practice. And part of that is precisely this idea of, you know, this acknowledgement that there's transformation and there's transformation through practice, and there is aspiration, there is emulation.
But there's this always this danger of thinking like, maybe I'll just pretend to be like a 13th century monk. You know. I'm not a 13th century monk, right? I'm just not. And I'm not even like a particularly. I'm not even all that sort of keyed in to Soto world other than this, you know, 10 foot small hut, which is plenty big enough for me, challenging enough, you know, But I think the key there is that you don't get caught in the idea that you can leave.
You know, the transformation will happen by leaving, by disavowing karma, you know, and recognizing that these people you admire cannot, you know, whatever their love and compassion, they cannot simply hand it to you, right? You have to generate it out of the, you know, Chogyam Prankpa used to use this expression. He said something like, you know, the manure field of Bodhi. In other words, like awakening comes out of the, you know, the compost out of the shit you put in the garden, you know, and that you.
To try to evade, that will not get you where you go. But if you draw where you want to go, but if you take that inspiration that you see from other people, which is a difficult process, I mean, God knows I. Tigwan was always very really patient with me, you know, because I was like mostly kicking and screaming the whole way, right? Do exactly. In this process, I wanted it to look. I wanted my life to look different, I wanted my practice to look different, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, if you.
If you acknowledge that, it will not, you know, you have to use the materials of your life. It's not gonna be given to you. It will be something that you generate out of yourself.
Because I guess one way to say it is just. You're just paying attention to all this mess that is your life in a different kind of way.
Does that help any.
[00:37:58] Speaker C: Nicholas and David are also have their hands up. I'm not sure who was first though.
[00:38:02] Speaker D: So I. I can go.
Good morning all.
Yeah, it was an interesting topic, abiding. And I have some. I have a couple of questions and some comments. They're kind of all combined but it's, you know, when I stopped trying to control things, when I stop trying to manipulate reality to fit my desires, my mind naturally starts to quiet settle.
I abide more easily.
[00:38:38] Speaker B: Excuse me.
[00:38:39] Speaker D: More easily. So I guess how does picking and choosing tie into this notion of abiding and also the beginner's mind and, and like or don't know, mind. How do I focus on direct experience and bypass the filtered mind that relies more on memory and routine and open myself to the 10,000 possibilities that exist instead of the one or two that I think I know about.
So the question is picking and choosing beginner's mind. Do they relate to abiding in your idea or whatever? Your idea? Yeah, that's it.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: I'm sorry, have you finished your question?
[00:39:31] Speaker D: Yes, I'm finished.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Thank you.
I didn't mean to jump in on you there. Bad habits.
You know, this picking and choosing business is really tricky as so many things are. We want to again, we want to abide. We want to like, oh, we're going to stop picking and choosing. Well, good luck with that.
You know, but clearly picking and choosing is exactly, you know, in one way of framing things. This is exactly our problem.
This is the, you know, passion, aggression, where do these things rest?
They rest in a confused response or reaction to wanting things to be different. We want to pick this, we don't want to pick that. You know, so I mean, so it's like constitutive of our very problem. And this gets back to Howard, the answer I gave to Howard, you know, it's like, Well, I've lost that thought.
You know, it is the problem. Picking and choosing is the problem. We want to pick like not, not having our lives as they are. Right. But part of that there's. There's obviously there is a sort of a picking involved. We choose.
We. We make a commitment. We. We make a vow.
And it's like. And that, that in itself of course is like, you know, yes, this instead of that.
The difference being is that it's like been processed through practice. And so what was the second part of that question?
[00:41:11] Speaker D: The how beginner's mind don't, don't, don't know mind relate to. To abiding this.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the. Okay. Yeah. So there's a way here, here. Maybe I'm going to get all heretical again here in a playful way. You know, maybe forget about original mind.
You know, just set that aside and instead in practice, just do the moment to moment thing of letting go.
Letting go, not seizing, not trying to construct an experience of open mind. I mean, what could be, or of original mind, what could be more self contradictory than that? You know, but if, if there can be this like. And that's, in a way, this is what practice is, you know, it's just, it's like letting go. Letting go, it's relinquishing. And when you do that, then, you know, have faith that original mind will appear and then it will disappear just like this little guy coming in and out of our faces. Right? And you know, you can't, you know, just give it up. Don't, don't try to, don't try to grab onto it. And you know, and that's, it's when you can, to the degree that you can master that and not abide in that, wanting to seize things that then in fact it can flow.
You know, it's just a matter of getting out of its way. Just, I hate that word. It's a matter of getting out of its way. And that's a huge deal. That's our life practice. So does that help at all?
[00:42:58] Speaker D: Yes, thank you.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: So, Nia Zahn, I want to thank you very much for your offering and unfortunately we don't have more time for any comments and questions at this point. But we'll have tea after we clean the temple briefly and there'll be time to connect. I know, David Weiner, your hand was up, but you know how to get a hold of Neo Zahn to carry on this discussion. This is non abiding in the endless question answer period.
And thank you very much for sharing this deep practice of a lifetime, of many lifetimes. And I believe what happens next is we do the four vows and then our Ina will make some very brief announcements and then we will, if you wish to hang around, do a little temple cleaning led by Jake, our work leader and then get tea and treats and chat together some more. So when you're ready.
Yeah, I know you have to return the papyrus to its beautiful cover, this.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: Little beautiful cover that Hogetsu made for me many, many years ago, which I didn't even recognize.
[00:44:20] Speaker A: So yeah, okay, at least. Dark House Deep.
[00:44:32] Speaker E: Vows to free the.
Vow to come through them against our.
We bow to accumulate.
We are to realize that things are powerless.
We vow to free them Illusions are inexhaustible we vow to give us our love bliss.
To realize that these are numberless See how to free them to the chance are inexhaustible Me out. You cut through them.
[00:45:53] Speaker B: With.
[00:45:59] Speaker E: My bound to realize.
