Class notes
September 29, 2009
 

Announcements:

·        Thursday, Doen will not be at sitting, he will be in San Francisco for more book signings.
·        His book is the top selling new Zen book on Amazon. It is currently number 5 in this category.
·        Next Tuesday, October 6th, there will be a meeting to discuss the Blog.  Anyone is welcome to join.  The meeting will be held as Doen’s house at 4:00pm.

Talk

D had a sad and interesting day.  Jeff made a copy of one of William Nyland improvisational piano pieces, digitally.  When D studied The Fourth Way, it was expected that teachers and students play improvisational music.

Additionally, D found out that John Daido Loori, Roshi will be stepping down as head monk of Zen Mountain Monastery.  He is too sick to continue.  Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Sensi and Konrad Ryushin Marchaj, Sensei, will take over.   This will be the second generation at the Zen Mountain Monastery.  They are members of the Mountains and Rivers Order.  Lost Coin will maintain a relationship with them. 

D was there when the Monastery was new and when Daido stepped up.  It is sad.  He will die soon.  He is just passing through; we are all just passing through.  You are passing through too.

At the Wonderland Retreat held at Solitude, we talked about Lost Coin, its development and the overall approach.  D wants to combine Zen training with Gurdjieff.

When D studied Gurdjieff,  he was a young, rich, musician.  Sometimes illegal and immoral things came with this life style.  D did not feel solid in himself, in his I, during this time.  He didn’t have a solid I but his teachers did and that attracted D to the group, to his teachers.  D got stronger at the Gurdjieff  meetings because he was being taught by people with strong I’s. 

He learned to think about others for real, rather than forgoing self to think about others. 

As he learned more and became a teacher he mixes and sorts out what he learned as a student for his students.  D still feels like he needs a stronger I still.  Strengthening the I is a strange idea if you practice Buddhism.   It is not a strange idea if you look at our conditioning.  We are taught from the beginning not to do what comes naturally.  Usually we want to feel better about ourselves; we do not want to feel worse.  When we do not do what comes naturally we often feel worse.  We are also told from day one that we are bad, we are told we are not supposed to have a strong I.  We are basically taught to subjugate ourselves to someone else’s will; perhaps our mother’s or our Governments.   We are basically slaves or as Gurdjieff  said we are taught to be sheep.

When D was a student he was divided between practice and life.  The teachers wanted him in the monastery; they did not really want him in his life.  One day, when Andy Cooper was student at the Zen Center of Las Angles he was very excited because he was given front row tickets to see a LA Lakers basketball game.  Maesumi Roshi’s response to Andy’s excitement was “So you are going to miss sitting?” 

D tries to offer his teaching in a way that is modern.  He does not want his students to be at one with 12th Century China but at one with this life today.

What is the I we are building?  We do have to get rid of the I to see the absolute or Big Mind as Genpo Roshi calls it.  But we also have to integrate with having an I.  What is that I? What do you align with naturally?  To build on our I, we have to be conscious, we must not have fear.  If one really has no I then they have fear.  If you watch yourself you will see you are scared most of the time.  The job of teacher, if D can do it, is to take away our fear.  The role of the teacher is not to teach enlightenment because each student is already enlightened.  The students must help each other not be afraid.  The students must be nice.  Daido said that too – Be Nice.

If it wasn’t so hard to be nice, we would be nice all the time.  Instead of thinking about unlimited compassion, think about being nice.  It is hard to be nice if one doesn’t like people. 

In Zen, in the Ox Herding Pictures, after Enlightenment comes the 5th picture, Taming the Bull.  This picture depicts the development of the ego, becoming conscious, the integration of the self and no self.  This picture got lost.  We know it got lost because there are Zen students who have practiced for 20 years and they are still not nice.  There are Zen Schmucks. 

Try it on?  Try on the idea that you want to be conscious of self.  It is not a choice between I or non-I but a choice between being afraid or not afraid; a choice between I verses being angry. 

In Zen practice we say we atone for Greed, Anger and Ignorance.  We do not mention fear especially in Japan.  In Japan if you mention fear you might be called a sissy.  In America we can face our inner sissy.

D read from Voice in the Dark by William Patrick Patterson.  The book is a series of Gurdjieffs’ talks to his students in Paris.   Gurdjieff talks about how a class is the reflection of the teacher.  It is true and D is happy with his class, his students. D is happy because we do things.  In a passage on page 145, Gurdjieff says something like “Today I am a good egoist so I am well on my feet so I can be a good altruist later.”  D thinks this is very true.

There is a story about thousands of turtles dying on the beach.  They are big and heavy and one man is trying to throw turtles, one at a time, back in the sea.  A guy says to the man, “Why are you doing that?  It does not matter”.  The man who is trying to throw the turtles replies “It mattered to that one” the one he had just thrown back into the sea.   

Save sentient beings one at a time.  We can’t save them all today – but we can work one at a time.  We can start by making the group wholesome, by not fighting, not having a hierarchy, by being happy with everyone and loving everyone.

Don’t be scared of developing an I.  It is not a bad thing to do; it will not make you a bad person.  It is good.

EXERCISE:

Sit and close your eyes.  Say the mantra “I”   “ AM”.  Locate it physically, think about it on your forehead and feel it in your body. Synchronize your breathing so you say “I” on the in breathe and “AM” on the out breath.  When you breathe in, fill yourself with positive energy.  Sit and do this for a couple of minutes.   Next - banish any fear.  Do this for a few moments.  Next - maintain that feeling, don’t be afraid and scan the room and look at others.  It is OK, do not let this make you afraid.  If you do it right, you can sense lightness in the room that grows from the I AM state.  Now compare this feeling to being afraid or worried. 

This state, the I AM state, is more conscious. In this state you are more able to help others because it makes you nicer.  Those who are afraid are not really nice, just pretending to be nice. 

QUESTIONS:

Student: “I am afraid people will not like me”. 

D says to flip it – assume no one really likes you.  Start from there. Liking you is not on the table.  It is more important that you like them.  Worry about that side of it, liking them will allow them to like you.   This is inner considering – being so needy that you need people to like you to feel good about yourself.  If you like them, they will like you and it will be easier and happier. 

Student: I am observing my fear, but I do not fear consciously.  Will the feeling eventually subside, the tightness in my stomach, if I observe it?

D: yes, if you observe it, fear will subside and then you can drop it. As you become more conscious then you will fear less because you are more conscious.  For now just notice it and be more conscious of it and it will go away.  Don’t try to make it go away.   A student came to the Wonderland Retreat and she was a bit nervous about being in conservative Utah.  She was nervous about the Mormons, and then she met the student in Lost Coin who is Mormon.  Fear can cause us to discriminate, to hate for no reason.

Student: In college was part of an experiment where they demonstrated, through an exercise, that one felt better about themselves if one did a favor for someone else … they felt better about themselves because they thought, wrongly, that the other person liked them because he/she was in their debt. 

D: Dave Daniels used to say “Reality is often better than what is in your head”.  There was an experiment with overweight people – People who were overweight were asked to take off their clothes and stand in front of a mirror for 8 minutes a day for three weeks.  These people lost about 8 pounds each, no diet, by just looking at themselves. 

Student:  Often people who diet hate their own body – if you look at it in the mirror then you are forced to connect with your body.  Just like with fear – people want to run away from their fear.  They do not want to face it. 

D:  It is true.  At AA meetings, people stand up and say I am Sally and I am an Alcoholic.  Maybe at Lost Coin we should stand up and say, I am Daniel and I am terrified. I am nervous when I am not terrified.  Move toward your fear, don’t run away from it.

Student:  I think sometimes I am too nice and therefore people see me as weak.

D: Look at how much your niceness is tied to what you want back?  Why are you being nice?  There is a prior stage to being nice – must like the people being nice too.  You can’t be afraid of them.  You can’t be nice if you are afraid. Don’t be nice because you want love and affection back.  If everyone where nice and not afraid it would be a statistical miracle.  Also there are different ways of being nice, in NYC sometimes honking your horn and giving someone the finger is part of the game, is being nice.  

Being nice is its own reward. 

Daniel went to a large all boys school and they used to have dances with the girls.  All the boys would stand on one side of the gym and the girls on the other.  The boys would have to walk across the gym, with everyone watching, to ask a girl to dance.  What would make the girl say yes?  How do you make the girl think you like her?  Don’t look terrified.  You have to be conscious and choose not to be afraid.  Nice can be manipulative.  Don’t be nice by lying and don’t be afraid. 

Students talked about how hard it is to have a strong I and be conscious and nice when with family.  Students could see themselves repeating patterns.  One student said that after five years the patterns went away.  The old fights stopped. There are new things to fight about but it is different. 

D: don’t be right, be conscious.  Get what you want, don’t be right.  Don’t make your beloved wrong. 

Student:  When I was young I always fought with my mom. The student is about to go see her mom and realized now that when I go to visit my mom I don’t interact, I am just numb. 

D: Play with this.  Learn from this.  Try to act one thing.  Do one thing that is out of character that is acting.  Walk down the street and lie face down on the sidewalk or break a pattern.  If you always say good night see what happens when you don’t say good night. 

Student: Has an uncle that does not respect or like much.  She tried to change her attitude toward him because she realized her bad feelings where only hurting her.  It has helped. 

Closing:

In Soto School Dogen Zenji was out of favor in Japan until about 200 years ago.  Now he is, in some eyes, more important than the historical Buddha.  Some think he was the illegitimate son of the emperor at the time.  D thinks he was gay.  He was a remarkable man, very sensitive and he was not allowed to be himself. 

As a teacher in Japan Dogen was not satisfied with self so he went to China.  This was a very scary thing to do at the time because these two countries and the people hated each other.  Dogen sought out an excellent Chinese teacher – Tendo Nyojo.  Tendo Nyojo made Dogen a room entering student, which means Dogen was able to talk to Tendo Nyojo when he wanted rather than once a year like most other students. 

Tendo was old and could not weld a stick so he hit the students with his slipper.  One day he hit the student next to Dogen with his slipper and said “Drop off body and mind”.  At this moment Dogen lost his localized sense of I and became what he perceived, he droped off body, identity and mind.  Later Dogen went into Tendo’s room.  Tendo asks “Body and mind fallen away”?  Dogen replies “Body, mind dropped off”.  Tendo repeats the statement “Body and mind fallen away”.  This means Tendo sees it, he recognizes that Dogen had a Kensho experience.  Dogen replies “Don’t approve me so easily”.  Tendo says “I am not approving you too easily”.  Then Tendo’s assistant comes into the room and more or less asks what is going on.  Tendo says “Body, Mind fallen away”.  The assistant asks how it is possible that a foreigner has had this experience.  Tendo replies, before this happened Dogen suffered through many blows and hardships. 

Dogen saw the conscious self, he saw the true self, he saw that they were intimately related but not the same.  In Zen it is called the relative and the absolute. 

Don’t forget one element of this story, you have to try.  Don’t just hear that you should be conscious of your fears, try with effort and spirit to be conscious of your fears. 

