Good morning. I'd like to introduce and welcome our good friend Gil Fronsdal, who is a longtime practitioner of Zen, a student of Sojin Sensei's, and also a teacher of Vipassana. And he lives in Woodside, teaches retreats and Palo Alto and Spirit Rock and other places. And he is also working on his doctorate in Buddhist studies. So we're very happy to have him here this morning. Thank you. It's actually very, I feel very happy to be here. And I was actually even happy driving here. Sometimes I'm a little bit nervous when I give talks, but that was kind of not very prominent, coming here. I was mostly just feeling very happy. Artsville to come here to the Berkeley Zen Center. And so I'm very happy sitting here with you all.

[01:09]

Can you hear me okay in the back? Okay, I'll try to speak louder. And if my voice has a tendency of being soft, so if it does it again, just raise your hands or speak up or give a Zen shout or something. Well, I thought of starting by telling you about the one and only hallucination I had as a Zen student. They're often called makyo in Zen, which I think it literally means something like devilish phenomena, and usually told to kind of ignore them when they come up. But I had this wonderful hallucination when I first started my zazen practice. And I sat down in this small zendo to meditate, to sit zazen, and it was kind of like here where you're sitting very close up against the wall. And I don't know where the hallucinations began and where it ended, but I'll just tell you what my experience was.

[02:13]

So I sat down to sit, and I sat there in zazen posture. And as soon as I sat down and established myself in zazen, this huge majestic Roman column rose up in front of me. And then written down in bold letters down the front of this Roman column was written in black engraved Roman kind of letters. It was written Z-E-N. At which point I leaned, I kind of went to embrace this wonderful column. At which point the wonderful column vanished and I fell forward and hit my head against the wall. So, you know, sometimes it's kind of slow to learn, but that caught my attention. And I thought about it for some time, you know, what had happened there and what was going on and it seemed pretty symbolic. And what I concluded for myself was that I was searching for Zen outside of myself.

[03:19]

Zen was this other thing, this great, majestic, charismatic, wonderful institution that comes from the great, majestic Asia. And I was going to study this thing and embrace it. And it just disappeared. It didn't exist. And so I took it to be... So I thought, well, if Zen is not outside of myself, where is it? And I said, well, in a sense, it's inside of me, perhaps, you could say, or the study of the self. And as some of you know, my favorite Dogen expression is to study Buddhism is to study the self, and to study the self is to be awakened by all things, or some people translate it as to be intimate with all things. And so, you know, so what does that mean, to awaken with all things or to be intimate with all things? And I'm sitting here in this wonderful zendo, and I sat here with Zazen earlier, and I sit here now, and I see the light on Karen's shoulder, and the nice windows open, and the wonderful wood that kind of makes up the beams and pillars.

[04:29]

And there's a wonderful feeling, kind of a stillness that I find in a place like this, particularly here in the Berkeley Zen Center. And to be present for that, the simplicity of it, is to be awakened by all things, to sit here with our body, to feel the saliva in your mouth as you're sitting here, to be aware of your thoughts, our thoughts as we sit here. What are you thinking as you sit here listening to this? How do you hear these words? How do you hear what's going on? One of the definitions for Dharma is reality as it is when it's unobstructed by our greed, hate and delusion. unobstructed by the way we interfere with it perhaps when there's attachment or pushing away or denial. And so what is it like to sit in zazen, to sit in a room like this without turning away or without grasping at anything, just simply be aware and present? And I'm kind of fond of saying that a lot of the wisdom that can come from a dharma talk doesn't necessarily come from the speaker.

[05:37]

but comes from the way in which we sit present for what's actually happening as we listen, as we hear. What's going on within us? What's our reactions? What is our experience? Are we remaining open to this wonderful, pristine situation we find ourselves in? Or do we get lost in our thoughts and our concerns? You're sitting at the edge of your Zafa saying, this is the best talk ever and I can't wait to get a tape of it and give it to all my friends. You're lost in those kinds of thoughts. Or maybe you think this is the worst possible talk ever and I can't wait to get out of here. And then as a good Zen student you can say, well, I'm just going to sit Zazen. And so you sit Zazen. It's wonderful. We're sitting kind of so still and upright and looking down and you're doing the right thing, right? Sitting Zazen. But that kind of Zazen is turning away from something and it's turning away from anything sitting Zazen. So to sit here as we are together. One of the teachings, Buddhist teachings that's found in almost all Buddhist traditions, Theravada tradition, Mahayana traditions, is a single sentence that says, the mind is luminous.

[06:59]

but it is tainted or colored by the attachments that visit it. The mind's fundamental nature is to be luminous, but it is colored or tainted by the attachments that visit it. That attachments and greed, hate, and delusion, things that obscure the dharma, the suchness of things, is not in the nature of suchness in a sense, a little tricky, but it's not in the nature of this luminous awareness. And you find in Buddhism over and over again, wonderful expressions, wonderful adjectives to describe awareness. You find words like luminous mind, the pristine awareness. And the adjectives go on and on. In some tradition, like in Tibetan tradition, they have these huge poems and songs that they write about the wonderful qualities of awareness itself. And it seems like perhaps it's this fantastic, phenomenal thing, awareness, but it's one of the most simplest things around. It's so simple that sometimes it's invisible to us.

[08:05]

We don't see the awareness that we live in, that we swim in. We often get lost in the objects of awareness, and we set up kind of an object-subject distinction between ourselves and the world. But the awareness is kind of what is the, I was going to say glue, but the awareness I guess the ocean that somehow holds it all together in our experience. The simplicity of seeing the light in this room, hearing the sounds of my voice, it's pretty simple just to be present, to experience that in our awareness. I noticed as I was coming in, walking around, all these shoes there. you know, outside here in the shoe rack and all this. And when it's time for all of us to leave, and if we all leave and left with different shoes that we came with, our shoes wouldn't care, one bit, right?

[09:16]

But where's the caring, where's the concern, where's the ideas about possession and me and mine, and where does that abide, that kind of thing? in a sense it abides in our concepts and our thoughts and our mind. And what will happen often is that we'll turn our awareness back onto those concepts and those ideas of me and mine possession and we'll start losing the wonderful pristine awareness of what's happening moment by moment in the world around us. I don't know how many of us, if we went out here and just changed shoes, if you went out and didn't find your shoes there, Would you be able to go out and notice the wonderful trees and the lawn, the wonderful, you know, compound where you live in here? Or you could kind of be obsessing about finding your shoes and what's going on with my shoes, and my shoes this and my shoes that. And maybe you should be obsessing about it, but what's happened is the mind has turned away from the world itself and is in this world of concepts, of ideas. A friend of mine at San Francisco Zen Center,

[10:21]

has two cars, he has a Lexus and he has an old kind of Toyota Tercel, something like that. And he says when he drives, when he comes to intersection with his Lexus, he's always given the right of way. And when he comes to intersection with his Tercel, he's almost never given the right of way. And it's not in the nature of the cars and of the intersections about how that happens. It happens in concepts and ideas that we live in and that we buy into and get caught up in, lose our awareness. There's a teaching, a traditional teaching in Buddhism called the five hindrances. And the five hindrances are those things which tend to suck up our awareness, where the awareness kind of pulls back on itself or gets lost. as we get caught up in certain kinds of concerns. And anybody who sits in zazen or in meditation or just pays attention to their life for normal will notice how often the mind loses touch with the present, lost in fantasies or lost in the past or the future.

[11:38]

And the teaching is that these five things are particular things which are very significant to notice because they have the strongest gravitational pull. on our mind and our awareness, to lose ourselves from the presence. And these five things are sensual desire, ill will, aversion, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt. And the way I understand these is that they're kind of like black holes of the mind. You know, a black hole in stars is a star, I guess a collapsed star, where the gravitational force is so strong that any light that goes into it can't leave. It's kind of trapped there by the gravitational force. And these black holes of the mind, the hindrances, can work the same way, that the light of awareness goes into this and it gets lost in there, and we don't pull ourselves out.

[12:41]

It's very hard to pull ourselves out when we're lost or fixated on these things called the five hindrances. And the teaching is that it's not that the hindrances are themselves our problem, it's the hindering quality, the way in which they hinder our presence, hinder our awareness, the way in which they create a very strong subject-object duality in the world around us. This is the way we lose our intimacy with the world. is by being lost in the hindrances, creating very strong subject-object distinctions, relationships. So I thought I might talk a little bit about these five hindrances because they're such useful things to become connoisseurs of, to become experts at recognizing. Because if you don't recognize them, one of the tenets of Buddhism is that if you don't recognize something which exists, you can't be free of it. And one of the hindrances is ill-will or aversion. And I remember how when I first started sitting my saschins, my early saschins would have the same pattern.

[13:48]

The first day I would get there from my busy life and the first day was such a relief to be in saschin. I'd get kind of settled in and get calm and it was kind of nice. Mostly it was nice because it was a relief. Second day, you know, it's, you know, it's decided, you know, I really have to, you know, basically it's settled in and it was time to get to work and just try to stay present a little bit with my breath. And the more I try to stay present with my breath, the more impossible it seemed and the more frustrated I would get. And so the second day, I said, she, you know, go by pretty frustrated way and I would get frustrated, more and more frustrated. And the third day, it continued, the frustration, because it just seemed like I couldn't get present. My mind was just all over the place. And the frustration would grow to kind of anchor. But maybe because, you know, I'm Norwegian, or who knows why, but I'm kind of a person who's not supposed to be angry. So if you're that kind of person, then it's kind of hard to see your anger.

[14:51]

So here I was, you know, sitting there in Sushi in the third day, kind of fuming. And I wouldn't be, I was fine, everything was fine. And it wasn't until usually the fourth morning of sasheen where it was just so obvious that I was so angry and frustrated. It was so hopeless that I would just give up. I would just give up and say, well, I'm really angry. That's what's going on. And the magic thing that happens is the moment I recognized that I was angry and kind of gave up all my struggle and tried to be different than who I was and tried to taint something in my zazen or whatever, just simply acknowledged what was there fully. It's like this great weight was lifted from my mind or from my shoulders or my heart. And that was in some ways the beginning of the sashi. And then it became much easier to be present and to be at ease in the rest of the sashi. So as an example of how if you don't recognize... So it took me four days or three days to recognize my frustration. If I had been a connoisseur of the hindrances I would have caught on a little bit earlier.

[15:57]

Maybe the second day. and I would have found my freedom earlier. So the first one is sensual desire. And it isn't that sensuality and sensual pleasure is a problem, but it's the way in which we can obsess and get fixated by these kinds of concerns. And I've sat many periods of zazen. I've been in Tassajara, I remember, you know, I would sit zazen in the cold winter of Tassajara Zendo. And I started fantasizing about Tahiti, because certainly there had to be better sensual pleasures around it, sitting there in the cold. And it was very alluring and tempting to get lost in the enchantment of these sensual fantasies. And there's sexual fantasies, which are kind of a sensual pleasure. And it's fairly common at some point or other. And if you have a lifetime career of sitting in Zazen,

[16:58]

Probably once or twice in that lifetime you'll have sexual fantasies. You're kidding. And it's very enchanting and alluring. And in the enchantment of the imagination we get pulled into that black hole. And it might take a long time to find ourselves out again. You can spend five minutes, ten minutes, an hour kind of lost in that kind of fantasy. And you're not awake to this wonderful pristine sense of awareness. Here we are in this room in the light. with this body that's breathing. And part of the reason why it's so enchanting, so easy to get lost in sensual desires, is that it's often fairly pleasant, and the pleasure seduces us. Sensual desire. I like very much this word in English called the expression in English called, something is wanting, so-and-so is wanting.

[18:03]

And how I understand the word, that expression is that you might say the soup is wanting salt, if there's not enough salt in it. Sometimes wanting represents a kind of lack that's there. And sometimes sensual desire arises when there's a sense of lack or void or boredom. or something in our attempt to be present. And to wake up to the present moment is to wake up to that wanting, to that lack, to that gap, to that boredom, to that restlessness that might be a trigger for getting lost in something which is much more pleasant, the sensual desire. So then sitting and bringing our presence and bringing our sitting practice to the present moment, we have to bring it to that sense of lack, that sense of wanting. Can we simply wake up and be present without preference, without pushing anything away for that also? The second hindrance is called usually ill-will or aversion.

[19:18]

It takes many, many different forms. It takes all these wonderful kind of close synonyms, anger, and aversion, and resentment, and wrath, and ire, and indignation, and what are some other ones? I like it. Complaining, irritation. All these movements in the mind, it wants to push things away, to avoid things. And so my anger, you know, in my early saschinas was I was angry with myself trying to push away my own inability to do what I thought I was supposed to do in the saschinas. I thought I was supposed to get pristinely concentrated and so I was getting angry with myself. to have aversion to our experience as we sit zazen.

[20:26]

There's a friend of mine at Zen Center, when he used to have knee pain in zazen, he used to hurt his knee back by pushing down on it. So that's one form of this hindrance. You get kind of lost in your aversion, in your reactivity to the situation. Then the third one is this wonderful expression, sloth and torpor. And sloth and torpor has both a physical and mental aspect to it. And that's kind of when your body and mind are kind of dull and there's no energy, kind of clouded. And it can arise for many reasons. I mean, it could be because you're sleepy and you need more sleep. But it often arises sometimes for other reasons in sitting. And sometimes it arises as a way of avoiding what's going on. It's a kind of subtle avoidance or denial mechanism. It arises sometimes when there's unprocessed emotions or feelings which are not being acknowledged or allowed to be processed or hold things down.

[21:29]

It can be exhausting to hold things down rather than to stay open. Sometimes dullness in practice can arise out of complacency in practice. situation for me for a number of years in my Zen practice, because part of what Zen practice was for me was an acceptance practice, was to simply sit here awake and present, accepting what this life and this experience was right now, without either trying to make it different or rejecting it, to sit without preferences and allow things to unfold and be as they are. But sometimes I think the shadow side of that kind of acceptance practice is complacency. And that was certainly my case. And so I simply wasn't making any kind of healthy effort in my practice. And so I spent a long time, some of you probably remember, being the yo-yo.

[22:30]

Have you seen that before? And there's other reasons. to be aware of when the mind is full of sloth and torpor, to know that you need to reinvigorate your sitting, your life, with a little bit more energy, a little bit more attention, to wake up, to be more fully present, to acknowledge what's going on. One of the traps with sloth and torpor is to feel that something's wrong with having sloth and torpor, and so you try to get rid of it, and you try all you can to steal yourself and get yourself kind of alert and present. And it just gets in the way, it can be another form of aversion. And I spent a lot of time in my city with tremendous aversion to my sloth and torpor. And that's not being free of it either. So what is it to be free of sloth and torpor? What kind of freedom can we have with sloth and torpor that doesn't require us to get rid of it?

[23:33]

Certainly you have to be quite aware of it. Can you be aware of it in your body, the feelings, sensations? to live in the body, to live in the sensations alertly. And then there is restlessness and worry. And here also it's the physical and mental side. Restlessness is more physical and worry is more mental. And the restlessness is You feel energetically in your body, it's very difficult to sit still. You feel like you want to bolt through the door and there's all this strong cursing energy in your legs or in your arms. And worry is a mental agitation, anxiety. And one of the classic teachings in Theravadan Buddhism about worry and anxiety is that it's very important to live a moral life. And if you don't live it, and life is basically moral where you take care of how you speak and your actions, then when you try to quiet the mind or sit and be present, act like present in the present moment, that your anxiety, your remorse, your regret, your worry about what's going to happen in the future will visit you.

[24:54]

And it's very hard to be present if you kind of get lost in worry and concern. Restlessness and worry. both with restlessness and worry and with sloth and torpor, one of the kind of koan-type questions you can ask yourself as you sit, one of the koan-like questions you can ask yourself as you sit is, what wants to be expressed in this situation? Because zazen, as I understand it, is not really mindfulness, it's not really concentration practice. It's really allowing yourself to sit in the midst of life as it's happening. without any kind of real idea in a sense that you're the agent for this life that's happening. So we ask ourselves, what wants to be expressed here in our life right now? As you sit here, how do you want to express life, presence, in this sitting posture? How does life come alive in you right now?

[25:58]

What are the voices, what are the emotions, what are the feelings that want to be expressed as you sit in this kind of posture? And it's a little bit dangerous to ask that question because it can set up a subject-object distinction, like that's the object on the subject and you notice what wants to be expressed and so you're going to be the agent and get behind the expression, as if you're different from the expression. I think in zazen we don't want to have that kind of distinction, we want to just notice what the expression is and find a way to rest within it, not act on it, not be the agent for it. We simply wake up and rest, kind of rest in our body, rest in what's going on, rest in the expression, rest in the alertness. Anyway, it's important to notice these things. The last thing is doubt, and doubt is often said to be the most dangerous of the hindrances, because doubt is a hindrance which will convince you to stop practicing. And doubt takes many different forms.

[27:01]

You doubt your ability. It's a classic one. I'm not capable of this. I'm not adequate for this. All this kind of self-doubt. And then you can always project the doubt outwards. And you can say, you doubt the Zen practice. Zen, maybe I should try Sufi dancing. Or there can be doubt about the teacher or the Sangha. And all this kind of concern, indecisiveness of the mind, kind of an agitation of the mind where it can't commit to anything. One of the symptoms of doubt is an unwillingness. And you'd feel that if you're sitting in zazen, you're full of doubt. You can sense a kind of unwillingness to really enter into the world of the body, to enter into the world of the breath, enter into the world of the present in this practice of zazen. You're holding yourself back. To notice when you're really fully present and when you're holding yourself back or retreated is a very useful thing to notice. And then, is it interesting, is it possible to then re-enter into the world in a full way?

[28:08]

part of the power that these hindrances have over us is our tendency to not wanting to be confused or not wanting to be present for things that we don't like. And so you see these five hindrances as five different strategies for how to deal with what we don't like happening. One is escape through sensual desire, and that's really common in our society. The other is to lash out, to strike out, to try to push things away. And that can be in all kinds of directions. The third is to go to sleep. The fourth is to get restless and kind of just be filled with worry. And the fifth is to be full of doubt. Five kind of ways of kind of pulling away, in a sense avoiding what we don't like. And I think it's very important to try to find some way of establishing Zen practice or Zazen practice outside of our preferences.

[29:44]

So it's not a matter of whether we like it or don't like it. Today is a good day to go sit Zazen because the sun's out. So I think I'll go down to the local Zen center. When light comes in, I kind of like it when light comes in. But if it's raining, forget it. It's kind of musty and dark, and I don't like it. or for all the different likes and dislikes we might have, is it possible to establish a practice outside of preferences? Even if it's just an exercise. And I think our freedom is found when we're able to do that. We can find this kind of presence that's not controlled or enslaved by our likes and dislikes. Awareness is very simple, and it's invisible.

[30:51]

You can't really point to awareness, but it's one of the most precious things that we have, and it's useful to become aware of how it gets lost. These hindrances are part of that teaching. And I'll end with a story. from the early Buddhist suttas. Many of you know that the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, he was visited by Mara. And it was understood by the early Buddhist tradition that Mara was the personification of inner psychic forces, of temptations, of desire, of aversion, of doubt, of restlessness, of all these things. And the Buddha was able then to as the tradition says itself, conquered Mara, vanquished Mara, and then move on to become awakened. And the beautiful story that his awakening occurred when he saw the morning star.

[31:53]

Something as simple as the morning star, nothing special about the morning star, it's just always there. Nothing special about what we see in our awareness, but can we wake up to it? So then he got enlightened, which is kind of, you think it's a happy ending of the story. And what surprised me when I started reading the Buddha's suttas is how often, after the Buddha was enlightened, Mara keeps visiting him. And if Mara's personification of internal psychic forces, what are these inner psychic forces doing visiting the Buddha after he's enlightened? When you get enlightened like a Buddha, it kind of clears the slate, right, of all the hindrances and all the mucky stuff. You just walk around with a big smile on your face all the time. You're kind of happy and peaceful. So maybe not. Maybe a Buddha is just like us. Maybe a Buddha is visited by the same visitors that visit us all the time.

[32:55]

But what's interesting about what the Buddha did was every time Mara visited him, he didn't say, you know, get lost or scram. and he didn't run away, and he didn't invite Mara for tea. All he did was he very calmly, he said, Mara, I see you. And each time then, Mara would run away. Mara, I see you. So I think the task is simply to be present for what's actually here, to recognize what's here, be present for it in a full embodied way. And then the hindering quality, of Mara, of these hindrances, will no longer be hindrance. Do you have any questions or comments?

[33:58]

Yes? Can you say some things about what in Zen we call great doubt? Can you say some things about the valuable side of doubt? Probably not a lot. It's probably not adequate to satisfy you. One of the things that you can do with doubt is, when you're besieged by the hindrance of doubt, part of the problem there is that we believe our doubts. We might doubt everything, but not the doubting. So, one of the things you can do, if you're going to go into the trouble of doubting a lot, do it really thoroughly. It's a Zen thing to do anyway, you do it thoroughly. So you really doubt thoroughly, so you doubt your doubts too. So that's one thing. But that's not exactly a great doubt. Great doubt, I don't know exactly what to say.

[35:02]

Great doubt is sometimes called this great burning iron ball that you hold in your chest and put in your stomach. And it's used in different ways in different Zen traditions. In some Zen traditions, in Rinzai Zen for example, The great doubt is really prodded and fed and fueled and encouraged in some traditions of Rinzai Zen until it becomes just, is there with tremendous tension. And then that tension at some point gets released or you see through or the doubt is satisfied. What do you say what it is? The doubt? I've never heard of great doubt. Great doubt, what it is? I don't know what it is. But great doubt is doubting... What occurs to me right now is you're doubting that anything is a reliable place to rest your attention. You doubt that anything is adequate for your freedom, for your awakening, for your enlightenment.

[36:10]

So you doubt this. Not this. Not this. What is it? Not this. Is it this? Is it this? You're kind of questioning or asking or doubting. Is this a place? Is this a place? The Rinzai school where they emphasize doubting, they have the koan Mu. And Mu kind of means no. And sometimes one of the ways that the Mu koan is used is you kind of say no, it's like via negativa, not this, not this. You're not going to let your mind rest anywhere. You're not going to latch on to anything or take a stand anywhere. And if you do it thoroughly enough, don't take a stand anywhere with your awareness. Well, that's pretty good in itself. It's a good thing. It's not a bad doubt. It's a really good doubt. Oh, this is a good doubt. Oh yeah. The great doubt is supposed to be a good doubt. Yes? I was feeling increasingly comfortable at the words as you labeled the experience.

[37:15]

And then I began to worry about them. I'm thinking that if you didn't know the labels, and you didn't have the code, which might make you feel comfortable, how would I know that I was doing the moral life or the good thing? And I feel a little bit suspicious of all the words right now, which are so helpful and so soothing in a certain way, now that I have indication of what they mean. So I'm wondering how to continue to practice in a way that gives me the freedom to really experience these states without getting married to the labels, so that I know that I'm checking them off and I'm doing the right thing and da-da-da-da-da-da. And it feels quite treacherous, actually. It's like somebody knowing

[38:18]

the right buzzwords to say, and not being any more present. So, there's a whole lot of different... I think it's a lot of interesting things that can be said about that subject. So when I mentioned the second hindrance of aversion, I kind of went through all these different words I could think of. So it's more like just general tendencies. And so each of us has to find what does it mean in our own life, rather than always use the same fixed word. What is it for us? Is it lust? Is it sensual desire? Is it addiction? What is it for us in our own life? But there's often a tendency, general tendency, to either push things away or to grab hold of things. And that's just a general pattern that's hard to deny. And what form does that take in our life? But the question of words is an interesting one.

[39:23]

There's often a certain amount of suspicion in Zen circles and Buddhist circles with words and the adequacy of words to label experience. And part of that I think arises out of a tendency we have to be lost too much in our cognitive mind, to be thinking about things rather than experiencing them in an embodied way. Even so, it's very hard to have even intuitive experiences without reference to language. And words actually have a great power. Things don't necessarily arise independent of language either, even though we can get lost in language. So part of Zen practice is to know how to use language, not to reject it, but to know how to use it so that you use it to know exactly, kind of find exactly word to describe your experience, a particular word, and then use that to become free and not trapped by it. We don't want to reject language, we want to find how to use it that makes us free.

[40:30]

Does that make sense to you or does it respond to you adequately? Maybe? Yeah, well, it's certainly a good part of the dialogue. Okay, we can continue. Yes? You spoke about restlessness and you described it really well about energy coursing in your arms and legs and wanting to bolt through the door. Can you say something more about working with it? I think it's... patience is a good one. Working with it... I'm a little bit suspicious of the word working with. Because working implies you do something with it. And the point, I think, is simply to be present for it. And with restlessness, it could be that when you're very restless, it's like riding a wild bronco. And the fact that you're able to sit to the end of the zazen period when the bell rings, and not actually bolt through the door, that was a 100% successful zazen period.

[41:36]

Forget about any other criteria you have for what zazen is. Because sometimes it's really like a volcano in there, and simply to stay present for the volcano, that's what's happening, so that's enough. So kind of patience is a good one, but I think feeling it in your body. What happens often is we get lost again in the stories and the ideas around these phenomena, and so the restlessness takes huge significance. It's not necessarily there if you simply rest yourself in the physicality of what it's like in your body. So the restlessness, you might interpret that as saying, you know, I'm embarrassed because I seem to be fidgeting a little bit, or I'm so restless. And a good Zen student, a good Zen priest is not supposed to be restless. And I failed, and I've really failed. I have to kind of hide it. I can't admit it to anyone. And so we get lost in these kinds of stories, and those stories get very painful. But if we can kind of drop the commentary,

[42:40]

then simply be in the midst, sit in the midst of that experience as a physical experience. You can actually find some kind of rest. So not so much working with it as finding some way of maybe not working with it. Leaving yourself alone in the midst of that experience. Of course, there's pragmatic things you can say, you can do. You can try to calm yourself. And following your breath is a great way to calm yourself. But that's a more pragmatic answer. The striker went up. I think that's a signal. Are you getting impatient or restless? One more question. I saw these hands go up. Yeah. We had a beginner's session just the other weekend, and I had a discussion in which the label boredom came up quite a bit.

[43:46]

Oh, I get bored. And I wondered, you haven't used the word yet, but does it fall in the sloth and torpor area, where the yo-yo effect, oh, I'm so, things are so dull and gray, I'm just falling off to sleep. Or is boredom more active, is it more like a resisting thing, a part of restlessness maybe? Well this is where I sympathize very much with what you said, because if I answer your question one way or the other, I'm putting it in a category. And boredom is actually maybe a wide range of phenomena, and the important thing there is for you to notice for yourself, what is it in your case? In particular, what is it? Sometimes it might be avoidance, sometimes it might be the aversion hindrance, but sometimes it might be more sloth and torpor. Who knows what it is? So the point is to try to notice for yourself. But having said that, if I can venture a little bit more, boredom is often a sign or symptom of holding yourself separate from our experience.

[44:54]

And so rather than trying to figure out boredom, Can you notice separation? Sometimes it's very strong, the subject-object separation. Can you notice separation and then use that noticing to enter more fully into what's actually happening? Thank you all very much.

[45:33]

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