last night or early this morning I had a dream that it was my turn to clean the zendo floor and we were waxing it, which actually we don't wax this floor. We used to wax the floor at Tsukoji years ago. But I was waxing and waxing and I couldn't get the wax spread evenly and then the room just kept enlarging. There just kept being more and more and more of it. And pretty soon it was a cement floor and there was sand and just all kinds of just stuff everywhere. And I kept trying to calmly, you know, just mop and mop and looking back and looking out there and there was just more and more floor and more and more dirt. Couldn't figure out how this had happened. I don't know if that has anything to do with what I'm lecturing about today or not, but perhaps it does.

[01:01]

Last week Mel lectured about the five hindrances, the five hindrances to seeing things clearly as they are. And you may remember, if you were here, the five hindrances are sensual desire and ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and skeptical doubt. I'd like to talk a little bit more about them and today talk about them from the point of view of posture. So if the hindrances are obstacles to seeing things clearly as they are, they're obstacles because they cause us to see things from an odd slant, from a distorted point of view, as if our vision was somehow impaired by something.

[02:21]

or as if we were seeing through some prism. You know how if you're driving along a mountain road and you're the passenger, your view is not the same as the driver's. It may be a very scary view. Don't get so close to it. Or if you're in the back seat. So to see things clearly as they are, we need to be in a stable and upright position to view them clearly at the right angle. So I'd like to talk a little bit about how we can do that in zazen and how the hindrances manifest in our posture in our physical posture and in our mental posture, and how we can use them to bring energy, how we can transform them into practice.

[03:36]

So let's just start with paying a little attention to posture. In Soto Zen, particularly, we pay enormous attention to physical posture, both in sitting, our Zazen posture, and whatever we're doing around the Zendo, you know, there's always the right thing to do with your body, there's a way to hold your hand, always stand straight. We don't just swoop around the Zendo. if we bring this awareness of how our body is moving through the world and experiencing the world outside of the zendo, we don't kind of slump around the world in quite the same way either. Take a stable and upright posture.

[04:44]

You don't have to have your legs folded in any fancy way to take a perfectly stable, immobile, upright posture. We revere the position of full lotus, but the importance of it is its stability any stable posture that your body can be stable in is just right. So please don't get hung up on trying to look like him. Please look like you and be as stable and as vertical in your vertical dimensions and as horizontal in your horizontal dimensions as you are.

[05:49]

And notice where your body meets whatever it is that you're sitting on, your chair or your cushion. And really experience that support and allow allow gravity to support you. Dealing with the hindrances is very physical and often we experience it almost as a physical battle sensual desire certainly brings up images of the fight against desire.

[07:01]

It's especially important to remember though that that doesn't mean that we shouldn't not getting caught in physical, in sensual desire doesn't mean there's anything wrong with experiencing and appreciating sense pleasures, whether it's taste or touch, beautiful sounds or smells, the coolness of water, nothing wrong with pleasure. It's grasping that gets us into trouble. So that is a physical thing. If the mind starts wandering off into desire, we experience discomfort in the body.

[08:15]

Oh, it's cold in here. Why don't they turn on the heat?" Pretty soon we're wrapped up in that and either craving warmth or beyond craving warmth and creating warmth by the heat of our anger. Why don't they turn on the heat? Why do they think this is warm? See if you can notice desire arising and see if you can notice where it comes from. Does it come from the body first or is it a thought first? Usually we notice the thought and usually we're way on into the thought of

[09:22]

whatever it is that we desire, whether we're sitting Zazen or getting lost in desire in some other context. Return to the body. What does it feel like? Where do you experience it? Where has it dragged you? if you're sitting or working, what's it done to your stable upright posture? Can you bring it, bring your body back into alignment? So of course, desire and aversion or ill will or anger are just like front and back.

[10:31]

We want something, we don't want the other thing. Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're grasping at pleasure or pushing away pain. But the grasping is always the grasping of this moment, whatever it is, as if it were the only moment. Well, it is the only moment we have, but we identify with it. Oh, I'm uncomfortable. Oh, can't stand it. We're fighting. It's the fight. It's the clinging. When we're angry or We don't like whatever it is that's happening. The tendency, it's not that we, we don't even push it away, you know, with an open hand.

[11:34]

It's more like there's this that we don't want and we're gonna, we're gonna beat reality into submission. We're gonna try and get it to be the way we want it. So what we have to do is to come back from this posture, this fighting posture, which is not a stable and upright view of things, to a clear angle. Now it doesn't mean that we don't have any opinion about things. It doesn't mean that somehow we're this totally

[12:37]

dead thing that has no experience, good, bad or indifferent. What is most essential is that each person return to the reality of his or her own life and sit within that reality. So it doesn't, we don't have to be in some bliss realm. As a matter of fact, I think one of the biggest traps in meditation practice is getting caught in pleasant experience, whether it's physical experience or mental experience or some transcendent state, and trying to stay in that place. That's, no matter how wonderful it may seem, generally not an impartial view, but some kind of a golden view.

[13:47]

Then there's sloth and torpor. Most of us who have sat any length of time know about sloth and torpor and sleepiness. This is the posture of sloth and torpor. We're often told to, you know, straighten the back and take a deep breath, all that, open our eyes. Very hard to see things as they are with your eyes closed. And so that's a big part of the posture of sleepiness. And as Mel talked about a little bit last week, Sleepiness and sloth sometimes come from just being tired. And it's important to know the difference, whether you're experiencing this in your life because you're not getting enough rest, in which case you need to take it easy.

[14:56]

Or is it some resistance? And that can be real hard to tell. sometimes we really need to look for clues. What might we be resisting? Sometimes sleepiness and lack of energy in meditation and even in other things is just this side of some new insight or a protection our minds and body's way of protecting us from some insight that we're not quite ready for yet. Some piece of reality that might be a little bit scary. And one of the unadvertised

[16:00]

problems or part of the downside of enlightenment that they don't advertise is that you have to, it involves a lot of loss, a lot of loss of many cherished ideas about self and reality and the mind very naturally resists letting go. And so Jack Kornfield's teacher had him sit at the edge of a well when he was having a lot of difficulty with sleepiness. It kept him very alert. And I would think very mindful of impermanence, of life and death, of the importance of paying attention right now because this actually is our life.

[17:16]

Restlessness and worry are also familiar companions, particularly during long sittings. Restlessness, of course, manifests as a lot of wiggling, wiggling in the body and trying to get comfortable. In Zazen, many of us worry about whether we're ever going to be able to walk again, will we be able to get up? When we're worried, the mind flops around like a fish out of water. It's helpful to stop fighting, to stop fighting the worry, to stop fighting whatever it is in the body that's restless.

[18:26]

You can't stop your wiggly twitchy mind by just, you know, holding on to it tight. It just never works. It wiggles even more. Like the monkey who got his hand caught in a gourd. Somebody gave the monkey a gourd and there was candy in it. He reached in to get the candy, got it with his fist, and he couldn't get it out. So we have to let go if we can. And again, it's a question of aversion. Very hard to pay attention. Very hard to bring our attention to any piece of the worry and flurry, any piece of the restlessness, because it moves so fast.

[19:37]

So all we can do is follow it. And I think the worst of the hindrances can be skeptical doubt. And I think this is also very hard to understand. It's a very different form of being dragged around by your thoughts. It can take the form of doubt about, you know, can I really do this? Should I be doing this? Is the teacher any good? Why did I come here? All the way to, you know, maybe Buddha just had it wrong. Skeptical doubt can keep us from practicing.

[20:44]

It can keep us from experiencing any stability in our life. But the extreme of doubt, if you can penetrate to the bottom of it, is a fundamental questioning of, who am I? And what is reality? That's not skeptical doubt. That's a doubt that is often called great doubt, and that can help us in our practice. But the small doubts, the nagging doubts, the whining doubts, can be very difficult to deal with.

[21:47]

The fundamental posture in Buddhism is to settle upon our undeniable, our true immovable self without being dragged about by such thoughts. It doesn't mean that, again, we don't have such thoughts. In the old days, this is, I'm reading from Uchiyama Roshi's Opening the Hand of Thought. I don't know if you've read this. Uchiyama Roshi's more popular book is his commentary on Dogen's Instructions to the Tenzo And this one, Opening the Hand of Thought, is very practical in Zazen instruction, but also really his, a lot of it's his commentary on basic, Dogen's basic teaching.

[23:12]

He talks about the Hinayana attitude, or the old-style attitude practice, where monks thought that by extinguishing outwardly directed desires they could arrive at nirvana. Their samadhi of self-settling came to mean an escape, a seclusion, a life devoid of activity other than that of waiting for death. And that's not what we're talking about. Suzuki Roshi used to talk about practicing Hinayana practice or very strict practice with very strict attention to form and detail with the Mahayana mind. A Mahayana mind meaning the very broadest understanding of what this means and the very broadest kind of acceptance of whatever

[24:22]

our experience actually is, and a very great appreciation of each moment's effort. Settling doubt is settling on the self, settling on this moment as it is. It means not being dragged around by desirous thoughts, nor does it mean to become lifeless with vital life function wasting away. Life must function as activity that manifests life as life. When we sit this way and when we go about our life this way we see things as Buddha saw them.

[25:45]

Truly seeing the aggregation of the world the view of non-existence does not arise. Truly seeing the annihilation of the world the view of existence does not arise. The view that all things exist is one extreme. The view that nothing exists is the other extreme. Being apart from these two extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dharma of the Middle Way, which is, because this exists, that exists. Because this arises, that arises. Buddhism does not mean taking some in-between position that has been conjured up in our heads, nor acting in a compromising way. Rather, despite the fact that we latch on to our ideas of being or non-being, taking the middle way means to demolish all concepts set up in our minds, and without fixing on reality as any particular thing, to open the hand of thought.

[26:56]

allowing life to be life. The view that all things exist is one extreme, that nothing exists is the other extreme. So the view that our anger is who we are, or our discomfort, or our worry, or our doubt, is one extreme. The view that that's nothing and it doesn't matter is another extreme. Our experience is what it is, and that includes how we feel about it. The middle way is including both sides, including our pain and our aversion to pain within our willingness to be in the present moment even if it's painful.

[28:26]

When we just settle, or as Uchiyama Roshi says, sometimes you just have to tell people to sit down and shut up. When we just settle, we can become who we are. and not be just our joy or just our sorrow. So whether we're sitting Zazen or walking around the street

[29:54]

talking to somebody working on something we can practice taking in each moment letting it be as it is and letting the next moment come. The worst days are the days when, you know, things start going wrong and they start going wrong the minute you get up and then your car won't start and you're late to where you're going and, you know, it just goes like that all day. And how do we deal with that kind of day? carrying, usually, by carrying around, oh, and now my coffee spilled, and the carpets, and all these other things happened, and so pretty soon we're just bent over with this bag of stuff that's gone wrong.

[31:18]

So in Zazen, we get a chance, without having to do anything, without having anything to spill or much that can go wrong, to just pay attention to the body and the breath, and to just notice, as much as we can, and to allow each moment to enter our awareness on the inhalation. And let it leave with the exhalation. And then take a moment there at the bottom of the breath and see if the next breath moment arises or not. What if it doesn't?

[32:33]

That's okay. Just let the universe hold you and your experience as you were held in your mother's womb. Hold your own subjective experience lightly. as the sky holds the clouds. Let it go by. Have a few minutes if you have some questions or something you want to talk about. I wonder if skeptical doubt is related to clinical depression.

[33:45]

What are you thinking? The tendency of a person to be negative about everything might be a pathological state of illness. Well, it could be. I think that skeptical doubt, as we're talking about it, is not that. It's part of 100%. I think the traditional descriptions of practice assume what we would call sort of clinical normalcy or neutrality. But certainly any of these places that you get caught, and skeptical doubt is one of them, could lead to depression.

[34:52]

And there are other teachings about spiritual illnesses. There's not much in Zen about what we call in the West mental illnesses. There are in some of the Tibetan teachings and they identify what we call clinical depression and some of the psychoses very, very clearly. And it's my own tendency to see the glass always as half empty. Certainly that's one of the manifestations of skeptical death. Yeah. My question is related. You were talking about having those kinds of days where from the moment you wake up it goes wrong. And I've had those days in a couple of ways.

[35:58]

One is when everything on the outside seems to go wrong and that it slowly eats away at me until I'm in some kind of state, but I really see it as like circumstances affecting me. And some days I have better skill than others with sort of holding that or letting it wash through. So that doesn't concern me as much as waking up and having the internal stuff already going wrong, like bumping into myself or you know, psychologically stubbing my toe every time I turn around, and feeling like my skill at holding that, because I've started out on the wrong foot, I don't know how to regain it. Even sitting still with it, or even practicing with it, it seems to compound in a way that Well, it's the nature of the beast. There seems to be no way out, so there's no way out type of thing.

[37:00]

And I was wondering if you could talk a little more about holding it lightly or how to work with that. It's hard to think about holding heavy stuff lightly. Right. That's what it feels like. You return to the present moment and it's like, And it feels like you're gonna drown because the present moment is so heavy and leaden. Yeah. like weight on the shoulders. Well, but I think, yeah, I think what Karen's talking about is when one gets stuck in that reality.

[38:09]

How does one get out? And it's, when the glass is very dark, it can be very hard to see the light and to hang out there in that darkness. And I think that part of that mind spiral is that it convinces us that this is all there is. And, you know, if you get, then there's some feeling about that, oh my God. That's it, that moment right there. That's the turning point. Yeah, there's a feeling about it. and catching that or knowing that being in a certain state is being in a certain state and having a reaction to that is having ... All these things are actually quite discreet and, you know, individual, but they, you know, experience it as ... Yeah, and that, I think, that is the turning point.

[39:19]

The turning point is somewhere, is right there where experience meets judgment. to practice untangling it so that we can... so you can separate the bad, you know, whatever the feelings and the physical sensations are from the judgment and also the kind of projecting it into the future and uh... remembering all the pastimes and will it be as bad as the last time and how long will it last and how will it screw me up actually when i had the experience of feeling bad and not judging it actually feels pretty good like a relief to just feel bad and that's it well it's kind of like having the flu and having it so bad that you just have to be in bed and you can't and you know uh...

[40:19]

It can be okay. And it does go away. It does go away. And that's the tricky things about some of the heavier mind states, is that they're really good at convincing us that that's the way it is, it's always been that way, it's always going to be that way, and this is who we are, in capital letters. I don't like that. So it's causes and conditions. Anybody else? I saw another hand. Gotcha. Yeah. My experience of, you know, having days that go bad or even projects that go bad is often very fearful. Mm-hmm.

[41:23]

And I don't know, it takes on a life of its own. On the one hand, it's almost like this isn't going well, therefore nothing will ever go well. And where does your particular mind go with that? What does it mean to you? Well, it's pretty much a judgment. I'm a sports fan, and in sports you often see people dealing with failure or difficulty, and when a short stop makes an error or a couple of errors, you can really see the human condition there.

[42:25]

those who are able to let it go are available for the next play. And those who aren't are so caught up in it that it's practically a guarantee that whatever happens next, they won't be available. Well, I think it's a really good example and it's also a very good reminder of how how much our culture, the culture that we're living in here, promotes causes and conditions that don't help us let go. Think about the instant replay. Think about... And those commentators, you know, who just beat it into the ground. Oh, she slipped, you know, and missed that ball. You know, how's he ever going to make it up?

[43:31]

You know, they just go on and on. I don't know if you watched any of the Olympics, but this was the worst I can... remember not only in terms of just the hysteria about mistakes that clearly began to affect some of the players, but suddenly there was a theme of you don't win silver, you lose gold. Where did that come from? In terms of Buddha's way of thinking of things is as the product of causes and conditions. I think it's very important to recognize, not in a way that makes excuses for what we ourselves, or the effort we ourselves are not making, or whatever, but just to recognize that we live in a context here.

[44:38]

there are lots of causes and conditions that are influencing us that we can be aware of, but we may not be able to change. And the more we're kind of aware, the more we can choose our own path, and we don't have to be swept along in the stream of belief that, you know, if you make a mistake it's the end of the world. But we certainly are swimming in a stream, upstream, in a stream that's full of that. It's also learning to give yourself incompletes instead of Fs. I like that. I find with all of is to focus on someone else's mind state.

[45:50]

Either just a call for help or offering help. Yeah, I think that can work. It may have its perils as well. But we should stop for now. Thank you very much. He is our helpless...

[46:21]

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