I'd like to introduce and welcome a good friend. Gil Franzdahl is a long time Zen student and was ordained as a priest by Zen Tatsu Baker Roshi. and more recently has been a doctoral student of Buddhist studies at Stanford University and a student of Vipassana. So we're happy to have him here today. Good morning everyone. Nice to be here. The Zen master Dogen wrote a fascicle, wrote an essay called Fukan Zazengi, which is known as the, or translated sometimes as the universal recommendation for sitting Zen, for Zazen.

[01:12]

And it says instructions for how to sit Zazen. I think many of you are familiar with it. And in that essay, he says very explicitly that Zazen has nothing to do with learning meditation. He says, Zazen has nothing to do with learning meditation. It is the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. And the word, which is usually translated as meditation, is the word Zen. And you could almost say that that sitting in Zazen has nothing to do with learning Zen. You could also say that the word Zen also means concentration, and has nothing to do with becoming concentrated. It is simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. If you go to Japan, to a monastery in Japan, and want to get instructions in Zazen, you go there and you show up at the gate.

[02:16]

ask to be taught how to sit, they won't say anything to you most likely, and rather they'll take you and just put you on one of these cushions here facing the wall and leave you there for a few years. And they might kind of correct your posture a little bit, but you get very little instructions. And there's a certain kind of purity to that because the understanding is that zazen is not something that we're trying to do as an activity that we're learning or developing or cultivating, but it's simply unconditional presence for whatever's happening in the moment. And you can't learn how to do that, you can't build up, you can't progressively get closer and closer to what's happening right now. Either you're here or you're not. And to tell you, give you instructions on how to sit zazen only takes you away. So there's a certain purity to the kind of non-instructions you get in Japan. When I was in the monastery in Japan, I went around and surveyed or asked the different monks, you know, what they did when they said Zazen.

[03:23]

And I asked them if they counted their breath or followed their breath. And some of them looked at me in complete amazement. They said, what does that have to do with Zazen? And they had never been told to count their breath or follow their breath. For them, Zazen was just sitting, which means, the translation for Shikantaza, just being present unconditionally for what's happening now. So some people, after sitting in the monastery for two, three, five, ten years, kind of get the point. Here in America, and more recently in Japan, we tend to give all kinds of instructions to be more compassionate, to be more gentle to us. So we don't have to kind of figure it out on our own, but are given some kind of initial guidelines to go by. And often, probably in this center too, I don't know what kind of instructions you give here, but my guess is you probably say something about counting the breath, following the breath. You do. I wanted to tell you about three stages that I went through in my own practice.

[04:46]

And usually, as you maybe can guess or already know, we often don't talk about stages of practice because the idea of stages brings up the idea of some kind of attainment or some kind of change. And it isn't that there's no change in our practice as we sit, but we don't sit with the intention of change. We sit just to be present unconditionally. I'll talk about three stages, or one pre-stage and two stages my practice went through. The pre-stage was when I was about 20. I knew a little bit about Buddhist meditation and my initial contacts with it, but not much. It wasn't very important for me at that time. The summer of when I was 20, I sailed across the Atlantic. and in a small sailboat. And it was many years ago before they had automatic pilots on boats.

[05:50]

It meant that everybody on deck, everybody on the boat, had to share with piloting the boat. There were four of us. We'd each be on watch six hours a day. And it was quite a beautiful experience to sail across the Atlantic. It was very harmonious. We didn't really run into any storms. There were just beautiful, constant trade winds that were blowing west. The currents were flowing west. The wind was going west. The clouds were going west. There were all these low, beautiful, kind of gray clouds that kind of dotted the sky. The waves were going west. We were going west. The jellyfish were going west. Everything you could see was kind of flowing evenly together, kind of going west. And at that time, that summer, the beginning of that summer, I decided that it was fine to have fantasies.

[06:54]

It was fine to give freedom to my mind. That there was nothing inherently wrong with fantasizing about just about anything. Just fantasies. Just kind of what the mind does. And so here I was in this boat with all these hours at the helm. willing to give my mind its freedom to fantasize and do whatever it wanted to do. And at the same time, being on watch, you had to constantly, every maybe 30 seconds or so, turn back and look at the compass. Every 10 seconds you look at the compass and you make a small adjustment because the boat's constantly going off course slightly. You look at the compass, you make little adjustments, look at the compass. So I decided to give my mind its freedom, but constantly, every little while, I had to kind of come grounded back in the present to what was happening in the present. And probably that's what kept me sane, because if you give your fantasy life kind of unconditional freedom without any kind of checks, it tends to spin out more and more and more.

[08:01]

But I was constantly grounding myself in the present. So by the end of the summer, by the time we came across the Atlantic, I was extremely happy and almost ecstatic. I had given myself all this freedom to be who I was without any kind of attempt to curb it or stop it. At the same time, I was constantly being grounded in the present. So when I started doing Zen practice, some years later, I remembered that experience of sailing. And I said, well, maybe Zazen is the same thing. I'll just give freedom to my mind and my emotions and feelings, my body, to speak in whatever way they need to speak or just be the way they are. But I'm constantly going to come back and ground myself in my breath and my posture. So there was this freedom in sitting, And constantly coming back, more often than I came back to the compass, just staying with the breath, returning to the breath and the posture.

[09:05]

It was grounding. It wasn't a matter of coercion, or avoiding, or forcing the mind on the breath, or stopping it from thinking what it was thinking, or fantasizing, or stopping having any kind of emotions or feelings when I sat. It was allowing all those things to be there, but constantly grounding myself in the present. So that was the second stage of my practice. And I realized how important it was to be in the present in a very precise and full way. And the third stage of my practice was when I realized or when I understood that I didn't have to use my breath or my posture to be the grounding in the present. That whatever was occurring in my sitting, that itself could be the grounding.

[10:08]

That I didn't have to kind of turn towards the breath to enter into a healthy relationship with the present and stop being kind of carried away in my fantasies and my thoughts, which can be quite fantastic if left alone. But there's a way in which everything that occurs to us when we sit, occurs in the present moment, is a phenomenon, is an expression of the present moment, the complete expression of the present moment. being present for it as an event in the present moment, we ground ourselves in it in such a way that the pull and the power of our emotions and thoughts and feelings don't carry us away. And I believe this is closer to the instructions for Shikantaza, for just sitting we have in Soto Zen. It's been described as objectless awareness or choiceless awareness.

[11:22]

To sit with awareness doesn't have choice. In other words, be attentive, be present for whatever comes to awareness without directing the awareness to any particular place, without directing it particularly to the breath or to the body. Just being present for whatever is here. And I propose that to do that is a very radical thing to do. Because the common experience for most of us, maybe most of the time, involves some kind of lack of acceptance of what our present condition is. Either some kind of aversion or some kind of desire or clinging to what's going on. And that to simply be present for what's called in Buddhism the thusness or the suchness, just things as they are,

[12:25]

without getting hooked onto them, getting involved in them, without judging them or condemning them. Just simply being present for whatever appears as it is, is a very unusual thing for us, for our mind, for our body, for our being to do. When I was sitting, I sat for a while in a monastery in Thailand, I sat a long retreat. I sat for about 10 weeks, kind of like a 10-week session. And I went and had interviews with the teacher every day. And there was... At some point, as you can imagine, my legs started hurting a lot, my knees. And I'd come in to the teacher, and I'd say, you know, the main thing I'm struggling with is this pain in my knees. And he would give me some advice or say some nice things.

[13:26]

I'd go back and spend another day with painful knees. It would get worse, and I'd come in again and talk about my painful knees. And this went on for maybe four or five days. And after the fourth or fifth day, the teacher said something wonderful again about pain. And I walked out of his cabin. And the person, the American who was translating, the monk who was translating, said to me as we were walking out, Boy, are you ever attached to your pain? And that kind of floored me. It never occurred to me that you can be attached to your pain. I thought, you know, pain is something I want to get rid of, not hold on to. So that caught my attention. So I went back to my own little cabin and continued my practice and thought and reflected a little bit about this idea of attachment to pain. And I realized that there was a tremendous attachment. There was attachment to getting rid of it. That aversion is kind of attachment. And when I saw that, when I could see clearly my attachment and my aversion to the pain, then it was easier just to allow the pain to be there in its dustness, in its suchness, as it is, without getting involved in it in any way.

[14:42]

And my sitting became a lot easier. And later, when I talked to other monks about my pain, they used to say, they just kind of congratulate me. and say, great, because when you have pain, you're really in touch with the Dharma, with Dhamma, with suchness, with things the way they are. And nothing can be more precious and more valuable than being present for things as they are. So one of the implications of this is that there's no such thing as a distraction when you sit zazen.

[16:00]

I don't know if any of you, maybe some of you have thoughts that you can be distracted, someone rustling and moving near you, or hearing a sound, or having a certain kind of thought, or having an itch. But strictly, there's no such thing as a distraction when you sit zazen. There's just something else which appears in the dustness, in the fullness of the moment that we can be present for. That's all there is. Dogen wrote a farcical, wrote another essay, called The Flowers of Emptiness, where he discusses, elaborates in some ways, on this idea of being unconditionally present for things the way they are, without our judgment, without our elaborations of what that is. And he says that everything that appears, all phenomena that appear are simply flowers in the sky, flowers of emptiness. And the beauty or the pun in which the essay works on is that the character, the Chinese character for emptiness is the same character for sky.

[17:09]

So he talks about flowers of emptiness, or flowers in the sky. That everything that appears is just like flowers in the sky. Wonderful, magical, special creations that appear and disappear, rise and bloom and pass. And that we don't need to have any judgment that anything is not these wonderful flowers in the sky, or flowers of emptiness. So he writes, ordinary scholars today think that where the sun, moon, planets, and stars hang is the sky. And due to that, they think that saying flowers in the sky means the appearance of forms like floating clouds in this clear air, flying flowers blown hither and thither in the wind rising and falling. They are far from knowing that the creating and created four gross elements, all the phenomena of the material world, as well as fundamental enlightenment, fundamental nature, and so on, are all called flowers in the sky.

[18:27]

They only realize that they are flowers in the sky due to cataracted eyes. They do not realize the principle that cataract eyes are caused to exist by flowers in the sky. Sometimes in Buddhism, there's discussion of cataracts, or often, more often, dust. That there's dust, which kind of gets in front of our clear seeing. And then what Zen practice is about is clearing away the dust, clearing away our vision, so we can see clearly what's actually present. And Dogen wants to criticize this kind of practice, that we're not trying to get rid of anything when we sit Zazen. We're not trying to get rid of the dust, or our emotions, or our anger, or anything. But we're supposed to see that there are no things, there are no cataracts or dust apart from flowers in the sky, apart from the flowers of emptiness. That the dust, the things that we think get in our way, that distract us from presence, they themselves are present, are presence.

[19:30]

One example of this is the idea of thinking about the past or thinking about the future, fantasizing. which, for people who meditate, is considered to be kind of unfortunate. The idea that you're supposed to be present here, now, and thinking about the past, thinking about the future, takes you away from the present. For Dogen, you don't have to stop thinking about the present, stop thinking about the past, or thinking about the future when you sit Zazen. You only need to realize that thinking about the past and thinking about the future occur in the present moment. They're activities that occur in the present. They're expressions of... They're the flowering of emptiness. They're flowers in the sky. They are the expression of ultimate reality in that particular moment. The problem is we get fooled by these kind of activities. We're fooled by our thoughts. We get caught up in them so that we end up forgetting that they occur in the present moment.

[20:32]

And that's when we get into trouble. So rather than getting rid of the thoughts that we have, we're supposed to realize them as events, as experiences, as processes happening here and now. So in that way, you're grounding yourself in the present without being caught by the power which those kind of thoughts have. Know that the person with cataracts, spoken of by the Buddha, is the originally enlightened person, the ineffably enlightened person, the person of the Buddhas, the person beyond Buddha. Do not ignorantly consider cataracts to be delusive factors, and thus study as if they were something else which is real. That would be a small view. So don't think there's something real beyond are cataracts beyond the dust. The dust is real, is the dustness of the present.

[21:35]

And we bring ourselves to be present for it, as it is. There's a... Some couple of years ago I was reading in the Pali scriptures, the Pali Suttas, Sutras, some of the oldest scriptures in Buddhism. And they contain the teachings and life story of the Buddha. And as many of you know in the story of the Buddha's life, the night of his enlightenment, he was visited by Mara. And Mara is the personification of temptations and all the forces that try to take us away from the presence. And to our wonderful benefit, the Buddha didn't succumb to the temptations of Mara and awoke up and became enlightened.

[22:37]

So I thought, you know, that was it. You know, the Buddha is someone who's pretty far out, and is very pure, doesn't have any defilements. But then I was reading in these Pali suttas, and I was surprised to see that over and over again, in the 40 years that the Buddha lived after his enlightenment, he constantly was revisited by Mara. And I said, I wonder why is Mara still visiting the Buddha? If Mara is understood, and was understood by the early tradition, the early Buddhist tradition didn't understand Mara as being something outside of a person. They understood it as being personifications of real psychological forces within one. So if that's the way they understood it, what was Mara doing visiting the Buddha, someone who was completely and fully enlightened? What was going on? But what was instructive to me was how the Buddha responded to the visits of Mara. The Buddha didn't try to do anything.

[23:41]

He didn't try to get rid of Mara, and he didn't try to encourage or invite Mara in. He simply said, Mara, I see you. And when he said that, Mara would run away. So even someone who's a Buddha, has all the elements of our life, of our psychology, of our mental states that we have in our daily life. And rather than running away from them or trying to get rid of them, we're asked when we sit zazen or when we practice to be present for them without getting involved with them. Simply, in the old language, simply seeing them for what they are and saying, anger, I see you. You can see very clearly your anger, your fear. Be present for the thusness of it, without getting caught by its power. If you see there's anger, there's fear. And sit in the middle of it.

[24:43]

Be present for it in the full way. The power, the pull, which these kind of strong emotions can have, won't be so strong. You realize the thusness, the fullness, the suchness of fear, The fear is not a problem, it's just simply another flower in the sky. And Darwin goes on to say, insofar as enlightenment itself is a cataract, the myriad elements of enlightenment are all elements of a magnificent array of cataracts. The myriad elements of delusion are all elements of a grandiose array of cataracts. If we're going to talk about dust, then enlightenment itself is dust. Delusion itself is dust. And it isn't that by seeing the dustness of our experience,

[25:53]

that we don't recognize differences. The study of flowers in the sky certainly has many grades. There is that which is seen by eyes with cataracts. There is that which is seen by clear eyes. There is that which is seen by the eyes of the Buddhas. There is that which is seen by the eyes of Zen adepts. There is that which is seen by the eye of the way. And there is that which is seen by blind eyes. Though these are all seeing flowers in the sky, since sky is of various kinds, flowers too are multifold." Then he goes on to say, turning away from thusness is wrong. Aiming for thusness is also wrong.

[26:57]

So thusness is kind of the point of the practice, to be present for the thusness of experience. But if you think that thusness is something which you're going to turn to, aim towards, you're going to miss it. Thusness itself is aiming for and returning away. In the individuality of each, aiming for and turning away, this is thusness. Who should have known that this wrong is also thusness? So he says it's wrong to aim towards or turn away from thusness. But even to be wrong is thusness. Isn't that great? You can't get away from it. You can't make a mistake at all. Isn't that great to have something you can do every day that you can't do wrong? How many of you have realized you can't do zazen wrong? How many of you have kind of criticized yourself? Oh, I'm not doing it right. I'm not staying well with my breath.

[27:59]

Everybody else is doing it right, but I'm kind of bumbling forward. You know, if only I could be more concentrated, then I could really get it. You can't do it wrong. When you're not concentrated and you're full of thoughts, Then you can be present for the dustness of non-concentration. The dustness of proliferating thoughts. Dustness is always here. And part of the difficulty in being present for dustness is we're looking for something special. There's nothing special about it. When we're totally confused, You know, we try to look for thusness in the midst of the confusion. You've missed the thusness. The thusness at that moment is confusion. So we're just confused. There's a thusness of confusion. So there's no problem. There's a recognition right there of presence.

[29:04]

That's the grounding in the present is just recognizing confusion itself as presence. When I sat my first three or four sesshins, longer sittings, seven day sittings that we do here in Zen Center, I went through kind of the same pattern. And that was the first day of the sitting, I would go kind of well, kind of settling in, getting a little bit calmer than my busy life would usually be. It was kind of okay to stay with the breath. And then, by the end of the first day, or beginning of the next day, I started getting difficult to stay with my breath, because I was trying to stay on my breath, and stay concentrated on my breath. Because in some ways, even though it's not exactly Shikantaza, it's what the foundation of the practice is, it started to get difficult.

[30:06]

And I had a harder and harder time staying with the breath. And I started getting frustrated. And by the end of the second day, I'd be very frustrated. And then, beginning of the third day, I would just go and try my best and really try to concentrate on my breath and focus on it and stay. And the more I tried, the more frustrated I get. And one of my problems, I guess, was that, you know, I'm one of those people who's not supposed to get angry. So, meaning that I couldn't, I didn't give myself permission to recognize my own anger. So here I was getting by the end of the third day, I was full of anger, and I couldn't see it, I couldn't recognize it. And from what was happening, for me, the dustness of the moment really was anger. And here I was trying to stay with something else, the breath. So in my case, by the morning of the fourth morning, it was so hopeless that I'd give up hope.

[31:10]

I'd say, it's hopeless, I'm really angry. And I just kind of, this is it, there's nothing I can do, I've kind of reached bottom. And somehow, miraculously, that was kind of the turning point of the cis genes. When I finally recognized what was actually happening, then I started becoming present. When I recognized, just simply, I was angry. So if we don't recognize what's going on, we can't become free, we can't become awake. So in awakening to thusness, we have to be careful not to miss. Nirvana is unexcelled, complete, perfect enlightenment. The resting place of the Buddhas and Zen adepts, as well as the disciples of Buddhas and Zen adepts, is this. Life and death is the real human body. Though nirvana and life and death are these things.

[32:12]

They are flowers in the sky. The roots and stems, branches and leaves, blossoms and fruits, luster and color of the flower in the skies are all the blooming of the flowers in the sky." There's nothing, he insists, which is not blooming of these beautiful flowers in the sky or flowers in emptiness. Zen master Raikun, when he first called Zen master Kiso, asked, what is Buddha? Kiso said, if I tell you, will you believe? And Raikun said, how dare I not believe the words of the teacher? And Kiso said, you are it. And Raikun said, How can I preserve it? If I'm Buddha, how can I preserve it?

[33:13]

And the teacher said, when there's a single cataract in the eye, flowers in the sky shower in every way. So the way to be a Buddha is to recognize the cataracts as the explosion of flowers in the sky, these great fireworks. When I sit Zazen, there are times when I feel like I can be very present with whatever is going on. and I'm kind of flowing in the present. And I recognize at that time that there's a very deep sense of satisfaction, kind of a pleasure in just simply being present.

[34:17]

But then as often happens to us, I'll start my mind to start drifting away, thinking about something else. And I find myself leaving my groundedness in the present. And one of the things I've noticed is that There's also a kind of pleasure in drifting away from the presence. Often I drift away because there's some kind of pleasure in my discursive thinking or in my emotions or feelings. And so it's kind of very seductive to kind of drift away. And sometimes I have to remind myself that I know of a more satisfying place, which is to be present. but more kind of to the point, is to the degree, at least for me, to the degree in which I don't recognize the pleasure, the pleasantness of my thoughts, to that degree I tend to be caught by them.

[35:24]

The pleasure, if I can be sensitive to the pleasure which seductive thoughts have, and realize the thusness is just simply the presence of pleasure. I tend not to be seduced and caught by the pleasure, and I'm present again. So again, it's not a matter of avoiding thinking about all kinds of thoughts, but it's realizing the thinking as something happening in the present. And one way to do that, for me at least, is to realize that there's pleasantness involved. I notice a pleasure, I notice a pleasure, I'm present for the pleasure, then I'm back in the present. So, I'll end with a quote from Susan Griffin in her book, Woman and Nature.

[36:29]

We know ourselves to be made of this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves and we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping, nature speaking of nature to nature. Whatever occurs is nature, is thusness. We don't have to deny anything. We don't have to attain anything. We don't have to become anything. We simply become present to nature as it is. So you can't learn to sit zazen.

[37:43]

The zazen that Dogen speaks about is not learning meditation. And there's not an ounce of difference between the zazen of a beginner and the zazen of someone who's practiced for 20 years. Do you agree? Do you agree that Zazen is not about learning anything? Now it's your chance to respond or ask questions. Yes? The learning process, I feel, is critical around Zazen or around anything that is not statistical. And it seems to me, though, that what perhaps you learn is that kind of mysterious awareness that you can't learn.

[38:51]

A mysterious awareness that you can't learn, but that there's an awful lot of learning that needs to take place before you arrive at that. It's not a gift. For example, what do you learn? Deep, mysterious, elusive, fundamentally basic and important to understand. I would say you might disagree. Partly I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think that's maybe half the picture. But the other half is even learning something like that will stand in your way. Even learning something like that will get in the way of being present. You have to remind yourself of that when you're sitting. You've lost your chance to be present. You agree that's the other half?

[39:57]

We'd have to sit down and struggle with that. Yes? You talked about recognizing. Do you need words to recognize Yeah, naming or labels or thinking happens in many different levels. And there are times when we feel that there is no thoughts of recognition or labels. There certainly aren't

[41:01]

But it's necessary to be present for things. You have to be present for the anger. If you're not present... And I don't know, I mean, this is something I'm not so sure about. In the very, very subtle levels of the mind, where there isn't some kind of word, some kind of thought process going on regardless. Just to be able to distinguish between, in some kind of rudimentary way, between the sounds of the bird and the sounds of the traffic. might involve some level of very, very subtle kind of thoughts. And this might be so subtle that we would say there's no thoughts, no labelling going on. I don't know if that answers your question or not. Do you think it does? There has to be some kind of recognition.

[42:16]

And if you want to say that recognition is wordless, you're welcome. From my point of view, that'd be fine. But there has to be some recognition. Otherwise, because zazen is alive. It's about the vitality of things happening in the present. And you have to be recognized and be present for it in some kind of full way. And one of the reasons I'm emphasizing this is it's very easy in zazen to zone out or to have some idea of emptiness or have some idea of concentration. which isn't present for our humanity. And this is a trap that I think all Zen students fall into, because one of the things that maybe unfortunately happens when we sit sazen is we tend to get concentrated and calm. And when we do that, it's very easy to use the concentration as a way of avoiding our life, rather than feeling it fully. And it's possible to use the concentration to enter more fully in dustness also. So concentration is not inherently a problem.

[43:18]

But I think all Zen students tend to fall into the trap of using calm to kind of get away from our life in some kind of way. So I'm suggesting that we have to, in the fullness, the active fullness of our life, there has to be some recognition, ah, this is what's happening. Or presence in it, you have to be present in the midst of it. And that's another way of saying it. You have to be present in the midst of it. So when you feel anger or fear, you have to put yourself in the middle of it. So that's less dualistic than talking about recognition. You have to find some way to be the anger without being attached to the anger, without fueling the anger, simply being present. How are we doing now? I think you were going to be next. I'm just going to say it seems like when a person, to perceive, is to label and someone is to recognize.

[44:20]

To perceive seems to be some form of labeling or recognition, whether it's And if one says thoughts, or anger, or whatever, it doesn't seem that that would be There's no good, no bad, it's such. Yeah, but one of the dangers is that because thoughts are so seductive, that it's very easy to start thinking and being thoughtful about your experience, and the words can actually get in the way of being fully present, either for what's happening, you know, the birds, or for the dustness of the labeling itself.

[45:28]

So you'll find in Buddhist literature a lot of mistrust for thoughts and words. Without thoughts and words though, there would have been no Buddha. So it's the balance, right? It's the middle way. To not get caught in them, but then also not to... Because it seems like without some basic guidelines, without some sort of... If there was no knowledge, I wouldn't know how to go to Zazen. I mean, how would I find the way? You know, there has to be some kind of... There has to be thinking there. It's just not too much there. I think that Dogen wouldn't disagree with that. But he wants to say that the motivation to sit, the knowledge to sit, the thoughts themselves, can be recognized as flowers in the sky, can be recognized as dustness as they are, without making anything more of them.

[46:34]

And that's a valuable thing to do. So rather than dividing a reality up between desirable and undesirable, everything is just the way it is. So there's no rejection. So how does that come into saying? I'm curious about that because one of the things that I've been working with very much is violins. Because I have a lot of violins. And there's this thing that just came in about Walnut Creek called Virtual World. And you go, they link eight computers together, okay? And you sit in these cockpits. You each have your own little cockpit. And you drive these humanoid tanks, okay? And you're all in the same virtual environment. It's a fantastic day. And it's also, it's been great because it's really shown me how much this is in my mind.

[47:38]

I think about it, planning a Bible scheme, but how am I going to do better next time? But still there's the violence. And I want to understand the violence. And hopefully, I don't know, resolve it or I see this because there's a sort of an aversion there too, or aversion or attachment to it. There's a few things to be said about ethics. One is that this Zen practice, this Shikantaz, this being present with dustness just the way it is, is never taught. I just did it, and now you gave me the opportunity to. to say this, is never taught, shouldn't be taught, without the understanding that it's taught within the container of the precepts. That the container for all this is the basic precepts, not to kill, not to steal, not to lie. If that's a container, then it's safe to be present for who you are, because it's very easy to be fooled if you're present for your anger or your violence.

[48:46]

It's very easy to take that as almost permission to be violent. And there's a difference between acting and being present for our motivations and our emotions. And many things can be said in response to you, but from the point of view of what I'm saying today, if you can recognize and be present fully for your violent tendencies, see them as the dustness, just as they are. There's no need to act on them. There's no need to be pulled up by the force or the power by them. I'd like in the body to be angry. Feel the tightening of the shoulders and the tenseness and the concentration of the eyes and the restlessness, whatever you feel. Just simply feel it as it is, without adding anything to it, without participating in it, not feeding it. That's enough. You'll learn more about yourself. And one of the things you'll learn, if I can use those words, is you don't have to buy into anything if you don't want to.

[49:49]

So you can give freedom to your violent tendencies, but you don't have to buy into them. It doesn't mean you go out and are violent. Then you can choose wisely what to do about it. You can redirect it, you could be wise about it, but you have to fully recognize that there's violence there, and see it as thusness, and then there's a lot of choice. Do you hear the fire engine? It was an act of will to hear it? That's the dustness. So there's a way in which being present for our life is very light.

[50:53]

All this about dustness and being present is very light and easy. It's a Dharma gate of repose and bliss. It's simply being present for what And if you do that fully, if you fully allow yourself to be alive and awake, you'll become aware of your violent tendencies. And there's so much in our culture about repression, or expression, or catharsis, that doesn't allow us to simply be present for things as they are. And it's easy. This practice is very easy. It's simply allowing what's happening to be there, and recognize and be present for it. when there's complete, like I said earlier, when there's complete confusion. We don't look for a breath or look for something, you know. Confusion itself is the dustness. What about actions? I don't like... Okay, I'm sorry. I would like... I need some further clarification later.

[51:56]

Okay. Thank you all.

[52:32]

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