Below are videos and text by our teachers who will help you understand how Zen can improve your life!
“Are You Ready” Dharma Talk by Sensei John Mitsudo Mancuso
We’ve been traveling together through this Ango exploration, taking a look at what I think is a very lovely metaphor: the Great Conversation.
And if you recall, last week we turned to Bodhidharma and his good buddy, David Bohm, and we were talking about dialogue — this experience of conversation that is true dialogue — where the conversation has us rather than we having it. We get out of the way, and there is this process that unfolds because the conditions are exactly right for this experience of the Great Conversation.
I want to talk a little bit more about that today, particularly as it unfolds and connects to us in practice. At the core of what David Bohm is talking about is this sense that we don’t have the conversation — the conversation has us. We are kind of flowing in the power of it. And, as you know, we could get caught in the beauty of the image and the specialness of the flow of the Great Conversation. There is something very seductive about that image.
As you can imagine, there’s some fine print here, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today. Bohm says that for this experience of the Great Conversation to happen, there are two things necessary. First, there needs to be a suspension of all our biases, our preconceptions, the way we put things into categories. You all know what that is — our dear friend, the discriminatory mind. But the other thing he adds is that we need trust — trust in the process.
So, this image, this metaphor, asks us to move into a very different relationship with the discriminatory mind. There is this constant releasing of the way we move through the world, where we categorize things, where we let go of our biases, where we let go of what we think about ourselves and what we think other people think about us. You know this space. We talk about it all the time Ultimately — ultimately! — we have to let go of this notion of self that we have spent most of our lives trying to protect, enhance, somehow get comfortable with, and secure. All our defenses, all our ways of controlling the life around us, are wrapped up in one way or another with that part of our way of being.
Bohm — and our Zen practice — asks us to really enter a space where, yes, we suspend all of this, while realizing that we cannot suspend it unless we have a certain amount of trust. And this suspension and this trust, by the way, is not wimpy trust. It’s not “la-la land” trust. It is wrenching trust.
So, there’s a koan for this. It’s the next-to-last koan in The Gateless Gate. The great master Sekisō said:
“How will you step forward from the top of a hundred-foot pole?”
Another eminent master of old said:
“Even though one sitting on the top of a hundred-foot pole has entered realization, it is not yet real. One must step forward from the top of the pole and manifest one’s whole being throughout the world in the ten directions.”
Not wimpy trust at all.
The reality is — and we all know this — by the time we get out of childhood, one way or another, we find ourselves on top of a hundred-foot pole. We’ve constructed this very lovely life. Perhaps we’ve done our best to make it secure. We’re trying to get into the swing of what the culture wants for us. We have friends, and by and large, if we’re somewhat lucky, the best we can say is: “Okay. It’s good. It’s okay… while it lasts.”
And it doesn’t last. Those moments when we feel like our life is in control — it’s fine until it isn’t.
Our Zen practice asks us to give up defining ourselves from the perspective of the discriminatory mind, but also to give up this sense of control and comfort that we’ve built around ourselves. To really be willing to risk. To really step off into spaces of our lives that perhaps we haven’t touched.
When we’re able to glimpse this awakened life, we begin to see ourselves as participating in the flow of life — in the stream of life unfolding. And we get this sense that we are connected to all creation, and that this is a glimpse of our own nature, our Buddha nature. I think we all get glimpses of this here and there: That we are more alive, safer, more grounded, more fully ourselves when we can touch into this. But it takes belief. It takes trust. And it’s not the trust of a creed where there is some deity out there who is going to take care of you. It’s not that kind of trust. It’s not found there. It’s found in surrender.
It’s found primarily, initially, in our zazen — where we slowly begin to let go and open ourselves, and where we encounter, not so easily, our discriminatory mind and all that it reveals to us about ourselves. This is not easy! But in practice we begin to surrender to it, and something different opens. We encounter ourselves without the control, without the need to live inside a false self. We confront ourselves honestly. The defenses go. The protections go. We move beyond defining ourselves in terms of good or bad.
And so, the initial thing we place faith in is simply this: We haven’t died from dropping the controls. We’re okay. We survived. And in fact, it starts to feel a little better. The world doesn’t end. Instead, we begin to glimpse something deeper. So, the initial thing we place our faith in is simply this: We haven’t died from surrendering, from letting go of our controls. We know — we’re okay. We survived. And in fact, it’s beginning to feel a little bit better.
We have our zazen to help. But it is also easier to step off the top of the pole when you are not doing it alone. And so, we have our Sangha.
Yet beyond that, we also have a long, long, three-thousand-year-old tradition of sky walking ancestors. That makes it a little easier when we begin to glimpse something in our zazen — when we realize we are not alone. And that not-being-alone stretches back generation after generation after generation.
So how do you step off the top of the pole?
Well… carefully.
But also trusting in your experience. Trusting in our tradition. Trusting in our Sangha. And trusting, most deeply, in this Self that is beginning to emerge.
So…
Are you ready?
One…
two…
three…
Wheeeeeee!
