Good morning. It's nice to see all of you here this morning, mid-summer, late, late summer perhaps. I think you might title the talk that I'm going to give today, Notes Towards the Practicals in Psychology. We'll see, and I would apologize to all of the psychologists who are in here, this may not be quite the orthodoxy. So I'll begin with a verse from It's a very famous verse which you probably heard. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. I concentrate towards them that are nigh.

[01:10]

I wait on the door slab. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. So I am large, I contain multitudes. I concentrate towards them that are nigh, and I wait on the door slab. Okay, so now we go back about five or six hundred years and several continents away to consider verses from Zen Master Wineng, who is the sixth ancestor of Zen as we reckon it, who taught in Tang Dynasty China. at the Nanwa Temple, some of you may have been there perhaps, and in the Platform Sutra, the work that we know him by, he has his own version of the Bodhisattva

[02:15]

these are the vows that we chant. We'll chant the bodhisattva vows at the end of this lecture and we chant them in all of our ceremonies and weddings and bodhisattva full moon ceremony, but winnings verses I think are very interesting. Usually we say sentient beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them or save them. That's the version that we use. normally. Wineng wrote, the sentient beings of our minds are limitless and we vow to save them all. The afflictions of our minds are limitless and we vow to eradicate them all. The teachings of our own minds are inexhaustible and we vow to learn them all. the Buddhahood of our minds is unsurpassable and we vow to achieve it.

[03:19]

So this notion of the sentient beings of our own mind are limitless, we vow to save them all. To me it is echoed by the line from Whitman where he says, So, as I said, I don't pretend to be a psychologist. I have not been known to play one on television, but I think that as a 20th, 21st century Buddhist practitioner, what we tend to do is find a way to translate the teachings of the ancient Buddhas and ancestors to get through our day and get through the life. So again, moving a little forward in time from winning, we study the teachings here often of Zen Master Dogen in Japan.

[04:31]

This is him sitting in his chair here. And in Genjo Koan he writes, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. So it seems to me this is to some extent both a religious statement and you might consider it a psychological statement. If you consider psychology the study of the self, of the spirit. So this last hundred years since Freud and many creative men and women after him threw a light of awareness into some hidden corners of consciousness, we could call this the age of psychology.

[05:35]

And by strange development, although we might imagine Freud spinning in his grave, psychology has become kind of a pillar of religion in the West. So Western Buddhism whether we like it or not has always been impacted by psychology or has become impacted by psychology so that sometimes we're not always clear where religious praxis ends and therapy begins. I think it was last week or the week before, in a Monday morning talk, Sogen Roshi was saying, well, what we do is therapy, but it's not psychotherapy. But still this line is not easily drawn.

[06:43]

So as a teacher, I listened to students suffering. And much of that suffering is rooted in old wounds and habits and patterns. And, you know, depending on what lens you want to look at life through, you could call that karma, or, and, or you could call it neurosis. There's different ways to look at it. And the focus maybe keeps shifting. So Buddhism itself is a, you could see it, it is a religious practice, it is a practice of faith and devotion. But you could also see it as a collection of psychological systems. These wisdoms and practices evolving variously across ages and the different nations and cultures that Buddhism evolved in.

[07:49]

But right from the beginning, the Buddha's discovery of dependent origination, what he called Aditya Samuppada, is about the system and workings of mind in the largest sense. And he was talking about this from the moment of his first awakening. Sometimes this, actually this is going to be the subject of our study retreat at the end of this month that Sojan Roshi is going to teach on dependent origination, which you could say in the simplest form, you could express it as, because this arises, that arises, because this doesn't arise, that doesn't

[08:53]

but it's also about the way that things arise in our minds and over our life or lives. There's an orthodoxy in early Buddhism, or at least in the commentaries, that has this wheel of dependent origination spinning through past life, present life, future life, and it gets really confusing. to me. My mind doesn't like to go towards those systems quite as theoretically, I don't have a very theoretical mind really. But Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, who is an important Thai teacher of the 20th century, writes about dependent origination and rebirth moment by moment, which I think is very close to our Zen understanding. I mean it is our Zen understanding.

[09:56]

And he writes, grasping and attachment So I think that in that moment of becoming and birth, which takes place in our mind, what is born is what the sixth ancestor we named called a sentient being of our mind. Someone very close to us that we have to take care of. How can we save the suffering beings of our mind? How can I study myself so that when I meet others and meet myself, my own suffering and my own traumas do not stand square in the way of liberation? I think this is a challenge of our practice. So here's a story.

[10:59]

In another town, which I was visiting, I met a man of about 50 who practices Zen regularly. He sits down across from me, we're having an interview or discussion, upright, almost knee to knee. And what he says is that after numerous attempts at reconciliation and accommodation, He's left his marriage and the home that he and his wife have shared for 20 years. And as we talk, he weeps. He's the father of two young children. And for the last several weeks, his wife has not allowed him to see them. So they're in conflict about money, about child visitation, about ownership of their house, about how to move towards the inevitability of divorce.

[12:12]

So this man tells me, I didn't think it would ever come to this. I'm angry all the time. How can she keep me from seeing my own kids? And I'm really angry and frightened about what she's telling them about me. So the tears are streaming down his face. And he says, every conversation or note leaves me furious. I never knew I had such anger in me. So how do we see that? According to a traditional Buddhist understanding or Buddhist cosmology, beings are born and come to live in six realms.

[13:19]

There's three lower realms and three upper realms. In the lower realms we have embody kind of insatiable hunger and greed. Often they're depicted with swollen bellies and impossibly thin, long, narrow necks. So they're incredibly hungry, but they can never get enough food through those very thin necks. Another realm is animals, and I really would apologize to everybody who loves animals, because I don't think this is our modern understanding, but the animal realm is supposed to be characterized by stupidity and prejudice. We might say, well, maybe that's the human view of the animal realm. I'm not so sure. The early Buddhists, I don't think, were paying such close attention to animals.

[14:23]

a description of reality. This is a map of where our afflictions are, okay? So you don't have to call it animal, you can call it whatever you want, but we know we have encountered beings who are marked by prejudice and stupidity. In fact, each of us comes to life that way sooner or later in moments. Okay, so the third realm is a hell realm which is marked by hatred and aggression and it's a place of endless conflict where beings theoretically live until they've burned up all of their past negative karma. Three higher realms. The demigods, or Ashuras, who are sometimes known as fighting demons. They're fiercely competitive and envious, and they love war and chaos. This is not so unfamiliar, right? And actually, the way this is described in past human lives, these beings have had good intentions.

[15:34]

But nonetheless, through their activities, they've harmed others. The Deva realm, which is what we really all want to live in, is the heavenly realm, home to powerful beings who enjoy great, but sadly, transient pleasures. The inhabitants are complacent, self-centered, addicted to their pleasures. And finally we have the human realm which is here our temporary home and in this realm lo and behold where we experience doubt, desire, passions, all of the emotions that we consider human but it is also the realm within which one can wake up to Buddha's wisdom and it's in this realm that we're living now that we have this great opportunity to be free.

[16:44]

So there are really countless realms within this world that we live in. So this is just a sketch, it's a general map the world that we live in by the way sometimes you see this in the text is called the Saha world and I never knew what that was and when I looked it up a number of years ago I found Saha world which is this is a Buddha realm which is kind of watched over by Shakyamuni Buddha. Saha world means essentially the world to be maybe the world where the going is tough and we have to have patience and skill and effort but this is our world which is pretty good. So as I said this is just a general map.

[17:52]

When certain emotions come up say the anger or resentment of that man that I spoke of In that very moment, the way I see it, a sentient being of my mind is born or reborn in one of these realms of suffering. In the anger that this man feels about his crumbling marriage and the separation from his children, perhaps he's born or reborn, a sentient being is born in a hell realm. This is common hell realm that some of us have experienced, a broken marriage where one sees no daylight of peace or harmony between partners who actually once loved each other and maybe still do.

[18:55]

If this man gives free reign to this being, for sure it'll make an even bigger mess. There's a Buddhist teacher, Ken MacLeod, who teaches in a Tibetan tradition down in LA, and he's reframed the Four Noble Truths in terms that really fit our modern sensibility. So, he describes the Second Noble Truth, which we often, it's the truth of the cause of suffering.

[19:59]

which is usually framed as the cause of suffering is attachment, desire, also aversion. What Ken says is that the cause of suffering is emotional reactivity. That covers, if I look at the Buddha's teaching, that covers a lot of it, not the entirety of what he describes as the cause of suffering, but a lot of ground. So the cause is emotional reactivity. It's not the emotion itself, right? Emotions are always bubbling up. If we suppress them or deny them, this leads to what psychologists call the return of the repressed. It's a great phrase, the return of the repressed. It sounds like, then there's, it's a movie, right?

[21:03]

Then there's return of the repressed two, bride of return of the repressed, son of return of the repressed. But what that means is it's an almost inevitable and unpredictable experience of suffering that gets moved into a future time and place. So repression, the repression of an emotion itself, is a kind of emotional reactivity. Reactivity is what we do after a feeling or emotion arises. We blame others for it. Very common, right? We blame ourselves. We want to reject it, push it away, or we want to cling to it. desperately holding on because in some really strange way we understand our suffering itself to be our identity.

[22:16]

It's very painful when we see ourselves doing this but it's not so unusual. And in the thrall of emotional reactivity, we're apt to assert, whether we do this silently or out loud, that this emotional reactivity, this is my truth, underscore the word my. This is my truth. And we hold onto it. We cling to it as if it were the rock on which Moses stood instead of this really flimsy raft out in the middle of a stormy sea. But if you can simply accept emotion as it comes up and shine a light of mindful awareness on it, then these emotions, thoughts, sensations are free to fall away as they rose, sometimes easily, sometimes not, but they will subside and they will not have this hard, brittle edge

[23:41]

But if we see our reactivity as the truth, then a sentient being is born in my mind. So seen through the lens, through the Buddha's law of dependent origination, this is one turning of the wheel of birth and death. The wonderful quotation from, again from Buddhadasa, He says that dependent origination is a momentary and sudden matter, not an eternal matter. Therefore, the word jati, to be born, must refer to birth in the moment of one revolution of dependent origination. in the daily life of ordinary people. Therefore, the word jati, to be born, must refer to birth in the moment of one revolution of dependent origination in the daily life of ordinary people, which is to say, when mindfulness is absent.

[24:51]

It's easy to know, when greed, anger, or delusion arise, then the self is born in one life already. That's what Buddhadasa wrote. So, sentient beings of my own mind are limitless. I vow to save them. I am large, I contain multitudes. Once a being is born in my mind, then what? If it has come to this point, then saving this being means turning towards it. using what Dogen called parental mind or Roshin. Dogen writes, Roshin is the mind or attitude of a parent. A parent, irrespective of poverty or difficult circumstances, loves and raises a child with care.

[25:59]

How deep is love like this? only a parent can understand it. A parent protects the children from the cold and shades them from the hot sun with no concern for his or her own personal welfare. Only a person in whom this mind has arisen can understand it. And only one in whom this attitude has become second nature can fully realize it. So this is how we can take care of our suffering selves. It's a way of reparenting ourselves. When a sentient being arises in my mind, I have to take care of it for its whole life. Sometimes that life may be just a few minutes. Sometimes it is a span of hours or days.

[27:07]

If the wound is very deep, a traumatized being may stay around for years, lurking in the corner of my mind, leaping painfully to life when conditions are just in place. But however long a sentient being dwells in my mind, I have a vow that I apply to it. And this is something that came up in conversation some years ago between Laurie and myself in dealing with just a person who was really suffering in her lives. And I think this was her insight where she said, well, my vow, all I can do, I can't fix the situation that this person is in.

[28:20]

I can't rescue them. I can't change it. All I can say is I will not abandon you. That's the vow. That's the vow I think that we use to take care of the sentient beings of our own mind. The vow is not to abandon those beings but to stay with them side by side, very close. Parents don't abandon children, right? Well, sometimes they do but generally not. Neither does a mother or father allow a child to do anything it wants to do. For the sake of safety, there is boundary setting and limits, but the underlying quality, even within this boundary setting, is unconditional love.

[29:28]

Just love. and full acceptance. It has nothing to do with domination. It just means seeing each being, seeing your child, seeing the sentient beings of my mind, each being that arises, seeing it as Buddha and treating it with this unconditional love. It's not always easy. So another story. Last week, my employment has changed. So I'm now on COBRA. You know what that is? Everybody knows what that is? So last week, I had a series of very unpleasant telephone conversations trying to deal with a glitch in my health insurance coverage. So each one of these conversations involved transfer to another faceless person on the telephone with long intervals of insipid music.

[30:40]

The music was intended to soothe me. I'm afraid it had the opposite effect. It's like it was driving me crazy and I got angrier and angrier. But what I noticed as I was sitting there because I had time to watch, I noticed the tendency or the impulse to globalize. my sense of personal injustice. It wasn't just that I was suffering right then, it was like this entire system is fucked and it's just supposed to screw over people, all of which may be true. That's a whole other discussion. But what I was doing with that disturbance is what was immediately of concern right then.

[31:42]

That's what I had to deal with. So as I waited and talked and waited and argued, I noticed that a sentient being was born in my mind. In this case, it was a fighting demon, caught by this feeling of just, I felt so aggressive and so self-righteous in my anger. And in the end, actually we've straightened it out now, but the end of that telephone call was not satisfactory. And I just wanted to slam down the phone as loudly as I could on this person who I know was herself suffering in the job that she had, but I didn't feel a hell of a lot of compassion for her. But before I slammed it down, I stopped to breathe and to notice what was going on in my body.

[32:46]

My chest was tight. My hands were actually shaking. And there was an unsettled and suddenly nauseated feeling in my stomach. So it was like this newborn demon was struggling for control. At that moment, fighting back was really pointless. Yelling at an insurance company employee was not going to help, and pretending that there was no fighting demon in my mind was impossible because it is not just mind over matter. When a being is born out of stress or emotion or sickness, psychological or physiological imbalance, our nervous system generates neurotransmitters, hormones, and so on, that flow extensively through the body. And you might say that the lifespan of a sentient being, of my mind, is directly linked to the presence of these neurochemicals.

[34:00]

There's a psychologist here in the Bay Area, Paul Ekman. People know him. Very interesting guy, he reads facial expressions, but he describes this state where these neurotransmitters are zooming around your body. He calls it the refractory state, and he says, for a while we are in a refractory state, during which time our thinking cannot incorporate information that does not fit, maintain, or justify the emotion we are feeling. This refractory state may be of more benefit than harm if it is brief, lasting only a second. Difficulties arise or inappropriate emotional behavior may occur when the refractory period lasts much longer, for minutes or perhaps even hours. A too long refractory period biases the way we see the world and ourselves. So whether I see this phenomenon in Buddhist terms or in psychological terms, after getting off the phone and I was shaking and angry, I really had to just try to take care of myself.

[35:18]

Using tools of mindfulness and compassion and patience, As I sat looking, I could feel the fear and grief that was underneath my reaction. I acknowledged them and experienced some softening, but this demon was still there, very insistent. This is not going to be so simple. I had to do something to meet this being on a physical level. So, I took a hot shower. That was good. And then I sat Zazen. Just a short period, like 15 minutes. And I released my hold on this demon. And I felt a great relief.

[36:23]

And I knew also that the seed of this demon being was still there inside me and with proper stimulus it would re-arise, but perhaps I was learning something about how to take care of it. There are countless ways to save sentient beings. Zazen itself includes the full experience of body and mind. It includes what we might call unconditional love but it's actually the act, the doing of Zazen and it's all about doing is can't even be limited by this notion of love or friendship. I can't get my mind around it no matter how much I try to analyze.

[37:28]

So in contact with suffering one thing I feel is that Zazen has a kind of alchemical function. Alchemy It's appeared across all of the cultures of the world. It's very interesting, I've been reading about it. And you see it in Asia, you see it in Europe, you see it in Africa and South America. It's really this study, the mystical study of transformation. Transformation of the material world, what we know about it from from high school is the attempt to transmute lead into gold, but that's sort of on the grossest level. Among its goals were a kind of universal life free from illness, and the search for this substance that was called the alkahest, which is a universal solvent,

[38:43]

which would dissolve all compounded things and free up just this energy of transformation. So in the vast circle of Zazen, one meets each being of our mind, each being of the world, just as it is, accepts it, lets it go freely on its way. Zazen often rests on the breath, breathing in, meeting and accepting, breathing out, setting free. This is how one practices at the bedside of a friend or of someone who is sick or dying. Just breathing in alignment with that person.

[39:46]

If that kind of attention is sufficient and the moment of suffering passes, that's good. Sometimes that happens. If that kind of attention, if the suffering is more persistent, one intensifies one's effort. One gets in. that suffering being of my mind will actually become the object of my attention. So in that moment when there's a suffering being and you're aware of it, can you look at what is this suffering like? Where does it live in my body? What's the specific quality of pain that it brings? And then what does this being need to be at peace?

[40:52]

Not what does it say it needs or what is it trying to convince you that it needs or what it cries out for or against, but what does it truly need? What do I truly need in order to be free? This is not always so obvious, but if I keep turning, If I keep turning towards this being, not abandoning it, rather than turning away, then if I do this in the setting of Zazen, then the Zazen itself will have an alchemical power. In the pure spirit of asking, of asking how, of inquiring, will sooner or later loosen and dissolve this suffering, which allows for the mystery of change to take place.

[42:01]

So in the religion of the ancients, which is also what we're doing here because we are ancient, mystery and miracle being born and reborn, living, dying, are part of one reality. This is what we're trying to not so much understand as just do, just live, of our mind and recognizing that the conventional way that we see our own mind is not limited by the container of this skull, but it actually fills the room, fills the town, and fills the world.

[43:13]

So I think I'm gonna stop there and we have some time for some questions and we'll leave, we can also continue some conversation outside. So if anyone has any questions or thoughts, Judy? Yeah, essentially, well I could read it again but Let me just see. The refractory state is when these neurotransmitters are zooming about. He says, for a while, this is the critical sentence, for a while we are in a refractory state during which time our thinking cannot incorporate information that does not fit, maintain, or justify the emotion we are feeling. Does that make sense? So basically, as he goes on in this book, he says, this is not the time to make decisions about your life.

[44:16]

you know, not while you're in the middle or in the grip of, physiologically in the grip of Emotion which is marked by these neurotransmitters. So that's what he calls refractory state He says wait till it softens and lessens and then you know, you can think more clearly. This has been very helpful advice to me Because of course when we're in that state, that's when we feel the greatest urgency, right? so I got it to say now and I will tell you I've done that quite enough in my life and it's almost always a mistake. So I think that's his point. Yeah. That's not what I'm implying.

[45:36]

I wouldn't say you're on the wrong road, but two points. One is doing zazen and taking a shower are both physical acts. Zazen is a physical act. It's something we do with our body. Even though it's something we think we do with our mind, it's because we separate. We have this way of separating mind and body, but they're not separate. So, that's point one. Point two is And this is where maybe we need the neuropsychologists here in the room. I don't know, I don't think necessarily you're substituting one neurotransmitter for another neurotransmitter. Maybe you are, and I'm sure in certain states there are neurotransmitters that are generated, but mostly what I'm talking about is letting the toxicity of these really harsh emotions flow through.

[46:38]

And so to give yourself a space of acceptance by just loosening your body and mind by breathing, by sitting upright, by letting your energy, your chi, flow, then you I think that's generally right. Would you agree with that? Okay, good. Verification from the right here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can do that afterwards. What I'm curious about is when you're still on the phone with that agent and you're really mad,

[47:40]

It seems to me like, from my own experience, I do have to pull away from whatever the stimulus is that's triggering me, and then I can recollect, I can gather myself, and things can flow through. But is there a way to stay engaged in whatever difficult, say it's an interaction with someone, and still shift? Take care of the sentient being. I think there's a way, and you may not succeed. But the more you do it and the more you ask, is there a way? The more space you will have in that conversation, this is called training. The more you encounter, you know, the more familiar you are with what happens, this is related to Doug's talk last week. I was thinking afterwards, Katagiri Roshi always used to talk, often talked about what he called emergency case.

[48:48]

It's like, what do you do in an emergency? And what I would suggest is, you do what you're trained to do. And if your training is to get incredibly pissed off and hostile every time you're in that situation, well, gee, what a surprise. That's what you're going to do. But if you try to create some space because you recognize, oh, this is a pattern that replicates, then you can begin to find some freedom. There are no guarantees. This is just our work as we go on. the acknowledgment of what was actually going on for you that was under the heater. I think that's right, but you can't, I can't do that unless I sit still.

[50:16]

Unless I have, whether it's sit still or go for a walk or just have some space apart from the immediate prod of the irritant to reflect on, well, what is this? Well, underneath the anger, I'm really scared. I'm scared about what's gonna happen with my medical coverage. I'm not, actually. I am, I'm not. I am, I'm not. There you go. Case in point. Two more and then we really need to end. Peter. I think really we do the same thing in practice as we do sometimes in psychotherapeutic settings.

[51:38]

We might enter it thinking there's something to be got rid of, and the deeper you go in any true human the more you find what the nature is and it's not about getting rid of something. And what I know from my own therapy process that I was in for many years and talking with other people, psychologists, this is the real heart of it. It's not like, oh, you have to get rid of this. So I don't think in that sense there's a vast difference, but it's also about seeking freedom. Now, it looks at different realms and different areas of our life. There are differences between psychotherapy and practice, but the methodology is different, but I think the goal of freedom is the same.

[52:46]

So one more question back there, yeah. Right, stop your tongue. There's a wonderful book I have by a rabbi Plissken. It's called Guard Your Tongue. You know, there was another, what did Kennedy Lewis say? Zip up your mouth? Is that right? Which sounds kind of fierce. It sounds kind of dominant in our language, but I don't think that's what he meant. Yes, you have to take care of yourself and make sure that you're not wreaking further damage in your circles. Anyway, I think it's time to end. Thank you very much. Enjoy the day. Jai Gurudev!

[53:52]

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