Words and only words :
Language is a wonderful thing. You know, we can say "hello", we can introduce ourselves and say "What a beautiful day." But, of course, we are not our names and none of the things that we experience are the names that we have for them.
It is wonderful to be able to talk because then we can communicate with each other. However, sometimes we can be so clever with our words that we become confused by our own double-talk. What I mean by double-talk is that we have words that refer mainly only to other words.
We have symbols that refer to other symbols. Symbols can be very useful because they can instruct us in something, they can tell us how to do something, in which case the symbol refers to something that we actually experience, but when symbols only lead to other symbols, then it seems to become a closed system.
Now, we are so good at talking (and so good at double-talk) that most of you spent a lot of time, this morning, right now,while reading this,evaluating accepting or rejecting things based on past personal biases.Isn't it true ? While going to attend any discourse,thinking about what was going to happen when you got here.You were rehearsing it in your head despite the fact that you really had no idea what was going to happen. In the same kind of way, whenever we meet anyone we usually rehearse what we are going to say beforehand and when we get there, nothing ever happens the way we thought it was going to happen.
Sometimes we might notice that and feel upset; sometimes we might not notice that because we are already rehearsing the next thing in our head. So we are continually talking to ourselves about what we are doing. We have a kind of monologue or a story-line in which we talk to ourselves about what we have been doing, what we are going to be doing and, from time to time, we even comment on what we are doing right now.
We become so good at language, at words, at names, that we really do begin to confuse our experiences with our names for our experience.
I repeat,"We become so good at language, at words, at names, that we really do begin to confuse our experiences with our names for our experience"
So that is one of things that we want to take a look at this afternoon. We want to find out what happens if we begin to see that our thoughts are not what our experiences really are and that, in fact, the thoughts are just a very small part of our experience. It is not a matter of attempting to get rid of our ability to name things or to think. But because we have invested so much energy into our thoughts, we often do not have any room for what our experience actually is. Everything gets filled up by the separations that we create between things.
We name a thing and we think that because we have named it, we know what it is. We name something and as soon as we name something, we start to think that it is a noun. For example, we say "mind" and many of us think that is a noun, that mind is a kind of a thing, that it is one thing, a kind of a substance, it is always the same.
Mind :
But what is it that we are calling "mind"? We are calling thoughts and feelings, sights and sounds, experiences which are always coming and going, always shifting and changing radically, "mind". And we act as if that is always one thing. We act towards the mind, then, and towards our experience, as if it should always be one way and when it is not, we become frustrated. And because it never really is one way, we are almost always frustrated. And because we become frustrated, we wind up telling ourselves more and more stories about how things should be.
So, what we want to do, then, is just begin to work with our experience as it really is, because none of our names, none of our words for our experience is what our experience really is.
Reality :
Of course, that is why we are trying to explore it here. We all have some idea that there is a reality which is outside of our thoughts and feelings. But as soon as we say "reality", we might have a little bit of a problem because reality, to us, almost always means something final, something real. But, of course, there are many different realities, each reality based on what you think it is going to be, what parameters you set out for it, what you expect.
So perhaps we could put aside the search for reality and instead work with our experience, because regardless of what we think reality is or is not, regardless of what we have named things, regardless of how confused we might be about things, one thing that we know for sure is that right now we are right here. Right now we are listening to something and we are seeing different colours and we are feeling the temperature of the room. We are aware, right now. We are experiencing right now. We know that to be true. Regardless of anything else, we know that to be true.
True :
Now, what does true mean? Just simply that it is going on, that there are these colours and forms and sounds. There is this experience. We know that this is true. It is the only thing that we know is true, for sure. Anything else might be a story. So, what we do here is we work with experience, we play with experience. We experience experience, because experience stands outside of all of our names, all of our thoughts, all of our story-lines, all of our categories and yet, at the same time, all of our names and story-lines and categories arise within experience.
So what we want to do is actually just put everything in its right place. What I mean by its right place is right here.
Although we might be thinking about what we are going to be doing later, we are right here. Although we might have a memory about what we have been doing, we are right here.
Right here stands outside of our storylines and our storylines only arise within it. Unfortunately, our experience of right here often only happens for us in the context of a storyline. Something has meaning because of our associations with it -- a colour, a form, a sound, a person, an event, a place -- all is meaningful for us because it reminds us of something else, but it is not something else, it is this. Because, of course, that is the thing about names and categories and storylines, is that they are all about the past. But our life does not happen in the past, it only happens right here. And our life is not a story, it is the real thing. What do I mean by the real thing? I mean: you are hearing these sounds.
Experience Reality...really?
Now, the other really interesting thing about experience and about right here, right now, this time, is that although we can know all kinds of things and name all kinds of things, although we can say that is black and that is blue, this is a candle -- we have all kinds of names for things and we can describe things -- we can say whether we like it or whether we do not like it, what is it, really? What is it?
When we see a colour, what is that, really? Now we could talk about light vibrating, we could talk about waves and particles, but that seems to miss the point. It is much like talking about love.
If we want to know what love is, we have to be in love, right? That is the only way that we can find out what love is, is to be in love. We could talk about glands, we could talk about breeding cycles, we could talk about all kinds of things, but that is not exactly what love is. That might be part of how love happens, but that is not what love is.
If we want to find out what love is, we have to be in love and as we love, we may find that we get confused about love when we are telling ourselves stories about love -- you know, when we are telling ourselves stories about the person that we love -- we tell ourselves stories about what will happen for us because we love this person. We confuse ourselves when our love is a storyline. In the same kind of way, if we want to know what experiencing in itself is, or reality is, or what the mind is, or who we are, we have to experience experience.
Experience The Experience
Now, experience is colours and forms and sounds, thoughts, feelings, smells, myriad things, numberless things. How many colours are you seeing right now? Now, as you are listening, do you feel your feet, do you feel the hands? Are you aware of the breath? Do you hear the traffic sounds, do you hear the sound of your own breath? You do when I mention it, but perhaps you were not until I did mention it.
Now, that again is very interesting. How is it that we can experience something and not experience it? How is it that we can be noticing something and yet not notice it? When our attention becomes invested in only a part of our experience, whether it is a thought, a name, a story, or whether we are paying more attention to a sound than to a sight, then we are not really experiencing all of our experience.
One way of working with experience can be called the path of meditation. And this recognizes that we get very confused because we identify a lot with our names and stories and words and our attention is always scattering. And so we want to take this scattering and bring it to a kind of settled state so that instead of the mind flipping around to the past, the present, the future, and all of these different things that we are aware of, we want to find one thing that we are aware of and pay attention to it. And so we narrow our attention down and just pay attention to one thing instead of letting our attention scatter.
Now, if we catch any of you doing that here, you will be thrown out because that is not what we do. Zen is not about meditation. You cannot compare it to meditation. The problem is not the scattering. The scattering occurs because of focusing, because our attention contracts on something and then excludes everything else. So, simply focusing our attention on something else, say [counting] the breath or [focusing on] a mantra or a visualized image is exactly the same thing that we have been doing that has been confusing us in the first place, except that we are just going to learn how to do it better so that we can become even more thoroughly confused. Because all that we will have done is focus on one fragment of our experience. We will not understand what our experience in itself is, what our life in itself is, or who we are because the most fundamental question, of course, is what is it that is experiencing experience? What is it that is aware?
There are all kinds of things that we are aware of: Colours and forms and sounds, different ways of being aware, waking, sleeping, dreaming, all kinds of subtle states, yogic states and so on, which are possible. But those are all things that we are aware of. What is the awareness? Regardless of what we are aware of -- a colour, a person, a building, anger, fear -- what do all of those things have in common? They all have in common the fact that we are aware of them. Regardless of what we are experiencing, the basic fact is that there is this experiencing presenting itself as these experiences. And if we want to understand what that is, we have to work with the whole of our experience and we have to work with the process of how experience presents itself.
If we find that we are confused, rather than trying to avoid our confusion, in Zen we want to see how we become confused so that we can learn how we do that, so we can learn how to stop it.
So in Zen, we practise experiencing experience itself. If we want to know what Awareness in itself is, the only way to do that is to be aware, fully, thoroughly and completely. So what we do, is we work with different aspects of our experience and begin to bring them together.
There are different techniques that we use in Zen. There is zazen, sitting practice. We will not call it "meditation", we will call it "sitting practice", sitting. There are many different ways in which we sit. Usually, when we begin our practice, we begin by working with the breath, but if we continue our practice and our practice deepens, then our teacher will give us different techniques to use until we can burn through the techniques, until we do not need any technique at all, which is called shikan taza, just sitting. And that is really what we practise here.
But, there are different things that we might use: Koan, the breath, sometimes a mantra, sometimes feeling the body, all kinds of different things. As well as sitting, we have walking practices called kinhin; we have movement practices called kata; for eating we have something called oryoki practice. There are also sleeping practices, dreaming practices, because in Zen we want to work with each aspect of our experience, completely.
So then, none of these things are themselves Zen. Sitting is not Zen, kinhin is not Zen, oryoki is not Zen. The entire continuum of the training is Zen.
So what we are going to do this afternoon is introduce you to some basic elements of Zen practice. You are not going to learn Zen this afternoon. You are not going to learn Zen in a week or a year or fifteen years. But what we will do is introduce you to some basic elements of Zen, which I hope you will find useful. I am sure that you will find them useful because they are based on your experience, working with your own experience. And then, if you find that you like working with your own experience, then you might want to take up Zen training as such, but that is not the purpose of this workshop.
The purpose here, is just to introduce you to these elements of practice so that you can use them on your own, so that you can adapt them to whatever your purposes are. But we do want to make sure that you know what the real fundamental purpose of Zen is. The real fundamental purpose of Zen is to be Awareness in itself, to realize who and what you are, to stand free of all states by being the context in which the states arise.
Zen is not about cultivating any particular state of mind. It is not about any particular kind of experience. It is being the nature of experiencing itself. So that whether one is waking, sleeping or dreaming, one is the context in which these states are coming and going.
With that out of the way, now we can get to something that you might find a little more useful and interesting. We will talk about what we are going to do this afternoon more specifically. What we are going to do is to try to bring together body, breath, speech and mind, so that the mind and the body are in the same place and at the same time.
Now, of course, they are always in the same place and at the same time. They are always right here. But unfortunately, we do not always experience it that way. Often, we are so caught in wanting something else to be happening that we do not allow ourselves to experience fully our own experience, as if there is something wrong with our experience, as if there is something wrong with us, as if we need something outside of us to make us happy. And so we are continually running around trying to find something that will make us feel richer, stronger, more open, more loving, more loved, because we are so distanced from our own experience that we do not experience its richness and so we continually act out a sense of poverty.
So the purpose of mindfulness practice, to begin with, is to show you the richness and wealth of your own experience so that you can allow yourself to have fun. You can allow yourself to enjoy tasting an orange, peeling the orange, smelling the skin and the flesh of the fruit, seeing how the juice sprays, seeing the light shining on the juice as it dribbles down your hand, actually tasting it. And driving your car, feeling the steering wheel, feeling where your feet are, being right where you are instead of trying to be where you are going, being right where you are, having enough time for yourself to experience your experience as it really is. To see the sunlight, to feel the rain, to take a step, to breathe a breath and know that you have enough time to breathe this breath, you have enough time to take this step. You have enough time for your own life. That is what we want to begin to work with, mindfulness.
And so the first thing that we are going to do is something called kinhin, which is walking practice. In walking practice, we walk. We are not going anywhere, we are just going to walk around and around in this room for a little while. And in fact, although we call it walking practice, it is not really walking practice because what we are actually going to do, is we are going to pay attention to each step. And so we are not really worried about walking any place and we are not even worried about walking. We are not worried at all. We are just feeling this step, heel, sole and toe and feeling how the posture is, noticing what the breath is like, noticing when we get lost in a thought, bringing ourselves back and just feeling the step. After we do kinhin, then we will do some sitting practice, some zazen, and we will work a little bit with postures, find a posture that will be suitable for you. And then you will continue doing this for a while. And then there will be a little bit of a free period, a little bit of a break, but I hope that during the break, what you will do, is you will actually pay attention to what you were experiencing right then. That is to say, tasting the coffee, feeling the sunlight, noticing whether your knees ache, noticing if your knees ache, whether you can still feel your feet, whether you can feel your shoulders, whether you can feel the whole body. Noticing whether, if something is unpleasant, you focus on it and exclude everything else, right?
So I hope that you use the free period as sort of a free form of practice and then when we come back, we will do some bowing and chanting practices to show you what those things are like. You see, because we can sit, we use that in our practice, we sit. Because we can walk, we use that in our practice. Because we can make sounds, we use that in our practice and so on. So we want to give you a glimpse of basic elements of the continuum of Zen practice and then after the chanting and so on, there will be some more sitting and some more walking.
So right now, we are going to stand up and we are going to do some kinhin. Now, the thing is that our practice has already started. It does not start when we start walking, it starts when we come in here. So when we stand up, this is part of our practice. So we begin by taking care of our zafu. This round cushion is called a zafu and it is made specifically for sitting practice and so we want to take good care of this because if we take care of the cushion, it will take care of us. It will be more comfortable for us to sit on. Instead of continually cluttering our lives with our thoughts and feelings and cluttering other people's lives, we want to begin to have some quality of actually taking care of things. So we begin with taking care of the cushion. . The other thing is that we never know what is going to happen. As we breathe in and breathe out, each breath might be our last breath. So we might die during kinhin and then we might leave some flat cushion for somebody else to sit on and that would not be very nice. We want to take care of the cushion. If we take care of it, it will take care of us and that helps us to take care of others. Then as we stand, we want to feel what that is like.
So as you can see, I guess we could say that kinhin is the practice of walking with the whole bodymind. And in that practice, one of the first things that we notice is that we are not often experiencing the whole bodymind, but just little bits and pieces of it. And we can notice this because we are slowing it down and paying attention to it. Just how those fragments of experience can begin to gouge into and rip and tear other things, so that when we get lost in thought, we almost feel like we are going to fall over. We do not even know how to walk. It is amazing.
Although you might find that you become lost in thought or sleepy or fall into some kind of feeling tone or state, some memory, some planning, or you might begin to find that all kinds of feelings might begin to well up, buried feelings or feelings that we tend to get into almost out of rote, this is not an obstacle to your practice. Your practice is to pay attention to how your experience is right now and feeling the step in kinhin is the medium that you are using in order to do that. So, the practice is not really feeling the step; the practice is paying attention and using the step as a touchstone so that you know what the quality of your attention is. If you cannot feel the step, it is because you are lost in something. So in the same kind of way, in our sitting practice, the practice is to experience our experience and to bring the thoughts and feelings into the context of the body, the room, this moment right now.
So if you get lost in thought -- and you will get lost in thought, you will get lost in thought a lot -- that is fine. The question is: what is it like when you get lost in thought? What is it actually like? When you bring yourself back, how do you do that? What we want to actually do is to work with the movement of attention. We are not trying to manipulate it, we are simply allowing contraction, allowing moments of fixation to open so that we can begin to attend more and more completely to the whole of our experiencing.
