Good morning. Last week our shuso, Ron, talked about responsibility and we went on to have a work day here and we oiled the outside of the zendo and did other things as well, accomplished a lot. So the A major theme of his talk was responsibility for what we do in the world. And he read two quite wonderful poems which caught our attention, I think. And I'd like to read those poems again and continue talking about responsibility. today talking more about our response, our inwardly directed responsibility.

[01:16]

So the two poems that he read to us are two death poems, this tradition in which when you know you're about to die, you write a little poem and then sit on the lotus position and accomplish your end. So one poem is by Ru Jing, who was Dogen's teacher, and the second is by Dogen. And Ru Jing's death poem is, the sins I have committed in the 66 years of my life fill the universe. As I beat myself, I drop into hell alive. And then Belgin's death poem is, for 55 years I illuminated the first heaven. I beat myself as I abandoned all clingings. Ah, there is no self to be sought as I now drop into hell alive.

[02:30]

So it's a very memorable last line. And as Ron suggested, the alive, that last beat, is what makes it. So my first response hearing these poems last week was to suddenly remember dropping lobsters into boiling water. my parents both came from Maine and as a child every summer we would drive up from New York to Maine and amongst other things eat many lobsters and so I was used to seeing my father usually drop lobsters into a boiling pot and really didn't think much of it until I returned as an adult and

[03:33]

acquired a little more sensitivity and began to worry about it. And then when it came my turn to produce lobster dinners, when after my father died and I began to visit my mother in Maine, I preferred to buy my lobsters already cooked. But then, the last time, and I knew it would be the last time because my mother was going to come out here and live with me and not be in Maine anymore. Lobster dinners have never been my thing here. I decided that I would cook them myself. And so, dropped them into boiling water and I heard that little hiss and a very faint kind of squeal and watched the kind of brown, green bodies gradually turn into that coral pink that contains that wonderful flesh that we eat with so much pleasure.

[04:42]

And that was the last time, but that dropping into hell alive somehow took me back to that. And as somebody observed during Ron's talk, Ron also mentioned the phrase, just this person. I never can quite remember how it comes up. It's the student asking the teacher, Who shall I say you are when you're dead? How shall I describe your teachings or how shall I describe your understanding? Uh-huh. And the teacher says, just this person. And in the Chinese there's a little extra flavor because when a criminal would be called up in front of the court and would be asked who he was, he would say, just, she would say, just this person. there's a little, there's an aspect of I am culpable.

[05:52]

Which we are. In this world of interdependence, interbeing, there is much beauty and much cruelty as well. And dropping lobsters into a pot of boiling water is a blatant act. but we do many such acts in less blatant ways all the time. None of us have clean hands. We're all responsible. So these two poems are quite nicely balanced. The first one, the teacher's ones, the sins I have committed in the 65 years of my life fill the universe. As I beat myself, I drop into hell alive. So it is talking about, it's referring to all the aversive experiences of one's life.

[07:09]

All the things that one has done that haven't been right And then Dogen's poem, for 55 years I illuminated the first heaven. I beat myself as I abandoned all clingings. Ah, there is no self to be sought as I now drop into hell alive. So this poem is more about effort and non-attachment But it doesn't matter, one is culpable and one makes effort and one still drops into hell alive. That's our condition. That's the condition of our situation. But the aliveness, if one, when one is alive, one is connected, no matter what

[08:18]

the circumstance is one is connected. And that's the hope. How do we maintain, whatever the circumstance is, how do we maintain our connectedness? So I brought a prop today to illustrate our situation. And this thangka was brought to us 20 years ago by our Ino, who had been traveling, Dali, Tutsi, who had been traveling in India and bought it from Tibetan students who were making thangkas, who were living in northern India. And it hung for a long time without the quite handsome gold frame. It just hung on the door, I think, of Mel and Liz's bedroom in Dwight Way. And then it was transferred here and Rebecca, my anal, made the frame for it.

[09:24]

And now it hangs in a community room in front of the earthquake crack. And that seems a very good place for it. I hope most of you can see it. So it's a very, It's quite a wonderful pictorial display of our situation. I like this one particularly because the god, Yama, who's holding the whole thing up, is quite big. Some of these thangkas, the wheel of life takes up almost the whole frame. But this is nicely situated with Yama. Yama is the god of the underworld, the god of death, the god of impermanence. So he's holding the whole thing up. which keeps reminding us that our situation is always unfixed, always changing, always churning around.

[10:39]

And the elements inside of it, although they're fixed in the Tanka, are never fixed. So in the inside, there's that little circle in the middle on which the whole wheel turns, which is greed, hate and delusion, the cock, the pig and the snake. And then there are the wedges that come out of that. And the wedges are the six realms of our experience. And those are what I want to talk about. And then there is a rim around the whole thing, which are the 12 links of dependent origination, which represent our karma. our karma from moment to moment, our karma from lifetime to lifetime. So all of these elements are intermingled in our moment to moment experience.

[11:42]

And our experience of this Tanka is, of course, very real. These six realms of existence are what we are always fluctuating in. Now each realm, you can't see it unless you're very close, each realm has a tiny little bodhisattva in a circle in it. So that's something to remember. A condition is that we're moving and we're always trying not to move. We're trying to find some sense of me, sense of self, who I am, where I am, and that's how we have experience of these six realms. These six realms are our styles of self-absorption.

[12:51]

the way we try to cultivate some kind of fixity. Chögyam Trungpa calls them our styles of confusion. And he talks about them in quite a nice way in the myth of freedom. And as I go, as I'm about to describe them, I get much of that from this myth of freedom. So the first of the six realms is the realm of the gods. And it's a very seductive realm. It feels good. And there's always a little bit of self-consciousness in it. We're aware that we're feeling good or doing good or in a happy condition.

[13:53]

Now this kind of happy condition is not the same thing, it's not the same kind of experience as when we just let go. When we just let go and just are. There is some kind of ease aspect to that, but it doesn't have the slightly self-conscious happiness or feeling of goodness or contentment. So it's a sort of a seductive realm and it can be when we are in just a terrific semi-blissed out or wholly blissed out ego state or when we really think that we're doing the right thing. In some way we feel as if, ha, now I've got it, now I've arrived. And it feels good, so it's a little hard.

[14:59]

When we're in hell, we know we're in hell. But when we're in the God's realm, we can mistake it for where we just ought to be. And fortunately, we have very sharp antenna about watching when other people are in the realm of the gods. We're more able to tell when someone else has arrived there than when we are visiting. often. So then we go down, but one can't exactly say these are up and down, and they truly are fluctuating to the realm of the jealous gods, and that is the realm of competition, and some amount of fear, of paranoia, of contest, of getting things better and better and better. Sort of you've got, you know where you want to move.

[16:02]

And you're watching. And you're watching other people. And most of all, you're wanting to move to some place that's greater or higher. and you're continually looking for landmarks, your progress. Our society supports this realm of the jealous gods quite heartily. If you're doing well, you get promotion, you climb up in business. If you're doing well in the university, you publish, publish or perish. we're always getting subtle instructions about how we can be doing better and better. And there's also some kind of fundamental lack of trust in the basic situation of how things are and how we are.

[17:09]

A kind of underlying, gnawing, erosive kind of anxiety. And then we have the human realm, which the passion in the human realm is much more wide angled. And the human realm is about grasping and wanting things, but kind of mindfully and intelligently wanting things. Developing our vision of the world and our vision of ourselves. and making the constructs that seem necessary to our lives. It's a kind of desire for admirable qualities. It's a high-minded aspect of the human realm. And it involves constant thinking and churning things over

[18:18]

and consideration. And then there's the animal realm. And this is the mentality that stubbornly, it's kind of blinkers, it has blinkers, and it stubbornly pushes ahead. And it's much less, the jealous gods, there's a pushing ahead But the animal realm is much less intelligent. It's when we doggedly want something and without any sense of humor or any wider awareness just kind of go after and after it. Now this is not meant to slander animals. But often one sees very old people in this realm that get fixated on what they eat, how they eliminate, whether it's warm or cold.

[19:34]

And truth is not altogether important here. It's what you want. And if you have to lie or conceal or evade to get it, that's okay. I can certainly remember myself as a teenager and even probably older when getting into innumerable scrapes and thinking, well, I can tell this lie or that lie, no big deal. We all have our own versions of these realms. And then there's the hungry ghosts, you know, the big bellies and the thin necks, the poverty, essential poverty, the realm of addiction. We all have some addiction to thing or place or person or mood, where we are just

[20:39]

can't, can't get enough. So you're just this big, big belly and this thin little mouth, work, [...] and it's never enough. And then finally, there's the realm of hell itself, the anger realm, where there's just pervasive aggression. and no space. And when one gets into a fundamentally angry state of mind, it's suffocating. Everything is contained and just goes on and on and on. So, these are the realms that we are continually rotating through in our moment-to-moment lives.

[21:49]

And how, then, the practice question is, how do we drop into these ego states continually and also stay alive? How do we take responsibility for moment by moment where we are? That's what our practice is about. How do we recognize the Bodhisattva that is in the little circle wherever we happen to be? When we recognize the Bodhisattva, we're alive. When we forget the Bodhisattva, we're dead. And the really comforting thing about this practice is that from moment to moment to moment we have another chance. So how do we drop out of the realm of, I'm here, but I'd rather be there?

[23:09]

How do we get out of that into the space that says, I am manifesting here, that this is where I am, and what is it? I was talking to a friend the other day who is a woman who is coming into her strong own in her 50s. She's a nurse practitioner and a midwife. And she's always been aware of having a strong intuitive facility. And just sort of knowing this and that. And for a while when she was in college, she got involved with some Puerto Rican witchery. I can't remember the name of it. But they were really, you know, there's a branch of witchcraft that does seek for power over people.

[24:19]

And she She feels that that kind of black magic is real, that there are these powerful threads and one can hook up with a nasty kind of power mentality and do bad things. But she says that's not what power is about for her. that power for her is about manifesting who she is. And she said that what she has to do, the work that she has to do, is to understand, to find clarity, to find what it is that she really wants. And that when she's clear about what she really wants, it manifests and it comes and I said well for instance and she said well I got to a point where I was earning quite a lot of money and I knew I really needed to buy a house and buying stuff isn't my

[25:35]

thing but I knew I needed to buy a house and one day I saw a picture of a pink stucco house with blue trim and it was in the south of France and I really liked the picture so I put it up in the wall and two weeks later someone called and said hey on Gilman Street, there's a house, there's a pink, there's a house. Why don't you go look at it?" And sure enough, it was a pink stucco house with blue trim. And it's the house she lives in. Well, you know, we may or we may not find our pink stucco houses, but we do need to clarify our intention. That is the work of our practice. And our intention may be to be a good wife, be a good mother, find the right kind of job, save the world,

[26:50]

take on the bodhisattva vows whatever it is if our intention is firm and established and clear we begin to manifest we begin to manifest our intention and manifest our vow and I guess you don't call that power anymore, you call that something else. I think you call that responsibility. It's our responsibility to ourselves and to the world. So how do we manifest our lives in this way? Dogen writes in a fascicle about body-mind just three sentences that really talk in a very specific way about our fluctuating condition that we see in the Tantra.

[28:20]

the mind that sees into the flux of arising and decaying and recognizes the transient nature of the world is also known as Bodhi mind. Why then is temporary dependence on this mind called Bodhi mind? When the transient nature of the world is recognized The ordinary selfish mind does not arise, neither does the mind that seeks for fame or profit. So, read that again. The mind that sees into the flux of arising and decaying and recognizes the transient nature of the world is also known as the Bodhi mind. Why then is temporary dependence on this mind called the Bodhi mind? When the transient nature of the world is recognized, the ordinary selfish mind does not arise.

[29:28]

Neither does the mind that seeks for fame or profit. So once again, there's the Bodhisattva in each of the six realms. The mind that recognizes the temporary dependence on that eco-state, again and again and again, but temporary. And that seems so ordinary, you know, that moment after moment this stuff is arising, and moment after moment in our practice way we identify it as an eco-state, and it's such kind of humble repetitive work that often we don't think of it as the Bodhi mind and we're not grateful perhaps we're not grateful enough for that Bodhisattva who stands very small and very much in the context of the moment and not terribly recognizable but very constant

[30:43]

That's really what our gratitude is about. And so, being alive in hell. We have all kinds of techniques, you know, of keeping this awareness, maintaining this awareness. And during the second period of Zazen today, our Shuso, sometimes Shuso makes remarks as we sit Sazen, and he said, let thinking mind hang out with breath. Let thinking mind hang out with your body. As you sit, all the thoughts come So that was a very nice instruction for recognizing the Bodhisattva.

[31:51]

Just letting thinking mind rest in the breath, in the body. The whole story is how do we keep in the present all this business going on How still do we keep in the present? And our particular teaching tells us over and over and over, stay in the body, stay in the breath. What is the background, body, mind, mood? All this stuff going on. When you turn off all this stuff in the head, Where is the body-mind mood now in the present? You know, if you're really, really suffering, it gives you a very good chance, if you're really close to hell, if you're really in hell and notice the Bodhisattva, you're in a very good chance to practice.

[33:07]

Because you're really suffering and then you notice. Suffer. And you have a chance to turn off the head and just feel. No thoughts, just be in the present, suffering. The heart will not really break. Just be there. And then the attention begins to wobble a little. And you know that hell is just, it's close by, like the offshore fog. It's not far away. And then you just, You know, one little thought comes in and you're in hell again. So you can really watch that. You know, it's very subtle. Very pervasive. When we're in a good mood, it doesn't matter so much what we're thinking. But when we're suffering hard, it matters. So, dropping into hell alive.

[34:12]

That's a place that we're really practicing. And we're really in the mood then to be responsible. So, I think that's enough. And you can have reflections, comments. Is that a hand up? Disembodied hand? Right, that was Nichiren's practice. He stood under a waterfall for, I don't know, three or four days in the middle of winter.

[35:18]

And then by gum, he had quite an experience. Yeah, that's putting yourself in this situation and just amplifying it up. tend to focus on? I think I did, I did talk about it, yeah, yeah, that it has, it's passionate but it's more wide-angle and it's thinking and thinking and envisioning and usually making up good reasons for doing things.

[36:31]

Yeah, yeah. The top three realms are in their own way quite seductive. So they're less easy to notice. Because the God realm feels so good, and the jealous God realm, you're working so hard, and the human realm just feels so natural. But then when we drop, they're less seductive. Yes, could you talk more about the bodhisattva in the circle? It seems to be sort of the way out of the realm. I'd like you to talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, yeah. Well, how is it that we can be thinking, be in any kind of self-absorbed state,

[37:42]

and suddenly recognize that we're in it. You know, that's quite miraculous, actually. That we're just going along, dum-da-dum-da-dum, and then some news comes from where? That says, oh, you know, you're thinking dum-da-dum-da-dum, and that's sort of, is that where you want to be? That's what I think, that's my experience, I think, of this bodhisattva, that we do have a larger, we have a very fundamental, wider awareness that we often neglect, but we can always come home to. No matter where we are, we can come home to it. And actually this thangka, I think, there's this yama holding up the wheel, but then there's also space, right?

[38:51]

The whole scene is kind of just there in space. So our situation, while it's very in flux and very crowded, and very absorbing also is just manifesting itself in space. And I think the Bodhisattva has some relationship to that, reminds us. I have sort of this reflex about being in lower realms to kind of want to and being in the realm, I'd rather look for transition or how do I get out of here? And I suppose that's not really focusing on being where I'm at.

[39:56]

Right. Right. I mean, that's our most natural response is, ouch, let me be somewhere else, please. Yeah, and that's not the Bodhisattva way. The Bodhisattva way is that you're in this place because of your karma, you know, this outside wheel. That you're in this place that you don't like for a reason. It hasn't just happened. There's a reason for it. The first noble truth is that you're suffering. The second noble truth is there is a reason for why you are suffering in this way right now. And the third noble truth is there is a way out. Or the third noble truth is you don't need to suffer. And the fourth is there's a way out. But it's not by grasping something that's a little better. It's by really knowing where you are and accepting that, that you're being taught something.

[41:04]

The Bodhisattva is looking at you and saying, Debbie, this is what you've got to learn. Michael? I was interested in your account of that person who felt that if they could become clear being ourselves. And you said, and having the clarity and actually manifesting yourself, you ended up by saying, well, I guess we don't call that power, we call it something else. But you didn't say what we call it. Responsibility. You didn't hear it. What did she call it? Responsibility. Oh, well. Not hearing what you said.

[42:10]

enable me to think about, gee, what would you call that? And what I thought of, what you call when you are clear about your intention and it manifests, is freedom. Because freedom is And so, because I think in my life I've had difficulty I think of, like Debbie said, was saying, oh I don't want to be here, I want to be somewhere else, and struggling to be somewhere else, but never getting there. And I think that that possibly was a function of not being clear.

[43:19]

And so, I think that, I don't know, I just resonated to that, the idea of actually knowing your intention, actually actualizing your intention in one step. That's right, actualizing the fundamental point, right. Yeah, yeah, thank you, that was clear. Suzanne? I have some thoughts and questions rolling about the God realm. And when you were speaking about it, I wanted to know, I wanted to ask, is there some kind of value judgment in there about it not being acceptable somehow to take pleasure in that realm and to really appreciate the satisfaction of being there.

[44:25]

And I think my question comes from my response to being in this culture, maybe even being in this gender and being in this culture, feeling like I'm never supposed to feel strong and powerful and clear. And so I guess I want to say that I feel like it's really important for us in this culture to really be able to say, wow, you know, I'm doing well, and this is great. And not necessarily to attach to it, but there's all this kind of, there's all this interest in staying with the hell realm. You know, it's good to stay with the hell realm. Well, I think it's also good to really stay in the God realm, and I think we tend to want to get out of that, too. Do you have anything to say about that? Yeah, yeah. Well, joy is essential to our practice. You know, joy is. See, actually, for me, dropping into hell alive also contains joy.

[45:33]

You know, it's what is happiness. It's the jewel in the shit pile. There's something that's really there that is enjoyable, even though it's horrible. So, yes, joy is really important, and recognizing joy. But the God realm implies attachment. So when you feel good, that's great to feel good, and that's a gift. Joy comes as a gift, and certainly one needs to appreciate that, and one does appreciate that. But then when you begin taking a little teaspoonful of it and just wanting to keep it, then you're in the God's realm. But it's all mixed, you know? Our nature is to be in these realms, and that's where our practice is.

[46:36]

Our practice is in the realms, so... It's sort of tricky to talk about. Do you also see being in the hell realm as a gift? Well, you know, if you're really practicing and accepting everything that comes, then everything that comes is gift. And that's the way you live. You really appreciate what comes. And whether you like it or not is not so important. And it really is an aspect of practice that, you know, the hard conditions never stop, but as one goes on year after year, one becomes more appreciative of all of them. your experience from the catalog, and when you get it in the mail, you don't remember that you ordered this.

[47:50]

But you sent in your request, maybe last lifetime, but you sent it in. That's correct. That's very good. That's very good. That's right, that's right, that's what I wanted back then. You think you've just ordered the God realm, or the human realm. Yeah, yeah, [...] that's a nice way to put it. Okay, it's, okay, one more question. That's right. That's right. Thank you.

[48:41]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ