couple of good ones there. So, as we've been doing for the last couple of weeks, I just want to review last week. First, I want to say, looking at the Three Joys of Liberation, as I was thinking about it this week, I realized that Zazen itself incorporates all three doors. So Zazen is the practice of emptiness or boundlessness, as someone suggested last week. And though we have different names for For our practice, zazen, shikantaza, just sitting and so forth, zazen itself has no particular sign, no sign, no mark or characteristic that we can hold on to.

[01:23]

And as we will see next week, And as we understand from having been instructed so well over so many years, zazen is aimless or wishless. If we keep to the principle of no gaining idea, that's synonymous with that third door. So just that's a way to hold it all together in mind. So last week we spoke, we investigated emptiness. And so in my review, what I want to say is a couple of points that we covered last week. And again, the practice of emptiness is settling into zazen. It's allowing ourself to see the non-self

[02:29]

and impermanent nature of all of our thoughts and perceptions. Not just seeing the reality of interdependence intellectually, but actually experiencing it, experiencing ourselves as part of a oneness, a whole. Even if we don't feel ourselves to be living in that state of mind, we actually are. And we have glimpses of it. Some of us for a moment, some of us a larger experience that actually pervades our life and opens us up. So I'm going to read something from Thich Nhat Hanh, because Thich Nhat Hanh has been very much on my mind this week with his passing, says the first door of liberation is emptiness, shunyata.

[03:39]

Emptiness means empty of something. A cup is empty of water. A bowl is empty of soup. We are empty of an independent, separate self. We cannot be by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be with everything else in the cosmos. Wherever we go, we touch the nature of emptiness in everything that we contact. We look deeply at a table, the blue sky, our friend, the mountain, the river, our anger, and our happiness And we see that these are all empty of a separate self. That means all of these things come together out of non-self elements.

[04:45]

So he says emptiness does not mean non-existence. It means interdependent co-arising. When we first hear about emptiness, we feel a little frightened. And some of you may have had this experience, I did, in zazen, of a sense of the self dropping away. And that can be frightening. That can be that can bring up a feeling of that one is falling into the unknown. And there's some fear that comes up. Thich Nhat Hanh says, but after practicing for a while, we see that things do exist, only a different way than we thought.

[05:54]

Emptiness is the middle way between existent and non-existent. Looking deeply, we see that the flower is made of non-flower elements. Light, space, clouds, earth. It is empty of a separate independent self. When we maintain awareness that we are all linked to each other, this is the concentration on emptiness. If we only study emptiness as a philosophy, it will not be a door of liberation. Emptiness is a door of liberation when we penetrate it deeply and when we realize the interbeing nature of everything it is. I would say that emptiness is a door of liberation when we just settle into it. So as in meditation, we're feeling...

[07:00]

the grip of self loosening, if we just, I like to imagine, and I had this as a meditational experience, when that sense arises, just falling back into the arms of the Buddha. Just letting yourself go and fall back and have the confidence and the faith that you will be caught, you'll be safe, just as you would trust falling back into the arms of your parents. So, emptiness is like that. Emptiness can hold us in that web of interdependence. Before we go on, I just want to know if there are any thoughts or comments or questions that come up in relation to what I've just shared or what we've reviewed about emptiness.

[08:16]

You could please raise your digital hand if you have something to share. This experience that I mentioned of feeling the self loosen, is there someone who can speak to that experience? During a three-day Ruhatsu on the third day, what I noticed was I saw a bunch of these layers and layers of, you know, and I just kept asking why, why am I holding on to all these layers in the work?

[09:22]

And, and I wanted to get rid of them. I wanted to, you know, and about a week later we went to Muir Woods and they had these gigantic trees and they showed the inside all these, for every so many years is a ring. And I sort of saw that in relation to that. And instead of trying to get rid of them, they're all part of us and part of me. Not getting caught in those rings of our experiences over the years, that is sort of getting closer to having some idea of what emptiness might feel like. if there's such a thing to feel emptiness. So that was just a little moment and then it was gone. Yeah. Well, it's really interesting because there's a way that a tree grows, which might resemble the way in which we grow.

[10:35]

A tree grows, it grows from its outer edges. The rings, it has a ring, and then it has a ring around the ring, and then a ring around the ring. So it expands from the center outward. And I think that as we practice, we expand from the center outward. And that ring, that outer ring, it's also our interface with... What is boundless around us? Someone else? Thank you, Ozon. NL?

[11:41]

quiet today oh hey hi uh yeah uh i just uh wanted to share one i had when i was still in high school which was a long time ago and uh there's in the late 1960s and i didn't drink i never used any drugs it hadn't got to my high school yet and um i've been walking to school in the morning and um you know the sun was coming up and it was a little crisp in early autumn And I got to school and I stopped and looked and I could see all the classrooms. It was a high school. Once I'd had the long, low modern look and I could see all the rooms with people doing things busily in these rooms. And then I could see the library and I can see every little thing that was happening in the library and the very frightening ogre librarian. And like all of a sudden it just became, everything was happening all at once. It wasn't each little thing that I was thinking about in terms of how to go to social studies or I'm avoiding the library.

[12:45]

Everything just happened at once and it was super clear. And I was like, whoa, what's going on, you know? And years later, I told somebody who studied stuff like that, and he said, that was the eternal now. So, you know, I knew it was a little different, you know, but it does resemble things that have happened since I started meditating later on. So, yeah. Thank you. That's a wonderful story, which gives... put some light on the fact that the language of emptiness, the meaning of emptiness in our language, which sort of carries this implication of voidness or absence, it's also really, sometimes that might be the experience, but it's also fullness.

[13:46]

It's feeling the... the completeness of everything which includes you in a non-differentiated or non-separate state. So that was a, you know, you had a glimpse of this, which is a, you know, it's really, I don't think it's that uncommon a human experience, but sometimes it happens so quickly we don't even really catch it. And we don't have any words for what it is. So we can't, we can't remember it. In a sense, it implies we're going to talk about today, there's a signlessness to it. So thank you. Anyone else? Yoni? every once in a while, can you hear me? Okay. Every once in a while, I don't know if this is the same, but I'll wake up in the middle of the night and just not know who I am or where I am.

[14:56]

And it's fairly terrifying. All I feel is fear when that happens. And then I sort of like swim back into myself and everything sort of material art becomes concrete again. Yeah. And finding out how to be with that fear when that happens is a koan for me. My suggestion is just to see if you can recognize that the fear is there and just lie back and breathe. Lie back and breathe with it. So, I mean, that's something you can try to do. And, you know, as you become more familiar with it, it can be less frightening and more something that you just relax into.

[15:59]

This is part of the mechanism of the self is that we clutch for this idea of the self. So that's not so unusual. But yeah, so anyone else? Sue. Sue both have their hands raised. I see Sue Osher. Yeah, okay. I know Gary has his, or at least it looked like he was waving his real hand. Started to remember that of various experiences, one of which was beyond the categories. The categories go away. It's just a sense of not grasping at trying to understand, one of which was being caught in an undertow at the black sand beach in Hawaii.

[17:03]

There was nothing I could do except Just accept. And another time when Sojin had been talking about Shikantaza, I carried that phrase. Something stuck with me, I guess. Some sense. And I was in a communication workshop and I was overtaken by just this. that phrase. I had no idea, but I burst into the chanting of the Heart Sutra. It was very moving to do that. So it's not a usual experience, but I think that I do have a question about intuition and maybe some of the philosophy I've been looking at lately, the idea of

[18:09]

getting beyond the intellectual to the non-verbal. It seems to me that's a deep connection when that happens. It can be. I mean, I think we're going to talk about that more in the course of the evening, and also I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been thinking about, this is perhaps extraneous, Daniel Conahan spoke fast and slow thinking. And so thinking about fast thinking, slow thinking, and non-thinking. But that's another time. But we can talk about, there's a nonverbal dimension to sign. There's a nonverbal element about signlessness that I want to speak about. So I don't know if anyone else, Gary, were you waving your hand? Oh, Barbara is.

[19:12]

Is that Barbara? I did have my hand up. I just wanted to say two things that once at Twilight in Boston, I was listening to music on my headset and I had very powerful like a oneness type feeling. That was one time. And then another time, These are times that aren't on the cushion that I think are interesting. I was swimming and I could really let go of myself and everybody else in the pool at the same time. And I just felt like completely like at one with the water and all the people there. It was a beautiful feeling. I can't get it back, though. I keep going swimming. They're not allowed to get it back. No gaining idea. No gaining idea.

[20:14]

But just to point out that if you think about all of the koans, very few of those stories are about things that happen in Zazen itself. But as Aiken Roshi used to say, awakening or enlightenment to realization is an accident, and zazen makes you accident-prone. He's great. I'm rereading his book. It's like a beginner's book. I just find some of the things he says so fascinating and great. Yeah, he was a great teacher. Barbara, and then we'll move on. I just would like to relate a story from, I went to see the Dalai Lama in Southern California at the, I'm trying to remember, it's a giant stadium down there near the Queen Mary, my brain's sort of shorting it.

[21:26]

At any rate, hundreds and hundreds of people came to it. And at the end of the, near the end, the Dalai Lama, offered to read some notes that people had sent to him. And he had a translator standing by and this translator read this letter that said, Dear Dalai Lama. And he said, Oh, I like very much to hear this word dear. And then he continued to read and he said, If God loves us so much, then why is emptiness so hard to understand? And he had a split second before he answered on the jumbotron and said, oh, I see from this letter that the person believes in God. And that's very, very, very good. That's wonderful. But emptiness is Buddhist business. So forget about it. And I just thought that was hilarious that he would subdivide.

[22:31]

the concept of emptiness into something that sort of conflicted with a deity-based understanding of life. But anyway, maybe only I thought it was funny. At any rate, I really loved it. And he was spectacular. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'd like to move on to signlessness. And I found these lines in something that Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, and I'm going to come back to Thich Nhat Hanh. He said, when a well-known Vietnamese teacher, meditation teacher passed away, his disciple wrote this poem. Dharma brothers, do not be attached to the sign. The mountains and rivers around us are our teacher.

[23:31]

Dharma brothers do not be attached to the sign. The mountains and rivers around us are our teacher. This is in the Soto tradition. There's a line, I think from Tozon. It's a teaching about that insentient beings speak the Dharma. So I wanted to start by reading something from the lecture that Sojourn gave on the three doors of liberation. He said, most of the time we see indirectly. When I say see, I mean we see through signs. We see by way of signs. We invent words to stand for something. So then we name something. I'm on Russell Street.

[24:36]

That's not untrue, but it limits my understanding. We have to limit our understanding in order to do something. You know, if we don't have signs, if we don't have representations, it's really hard to move around with each other. Sure, yeah. We're on Russell Street. Oh, yeah. I know where that is. But signs are representations and our thinking is representational. It's important, but it's still a veil. Because we design our life to conform to the signs. And then we live in a life of signs instead of breaking through to direct understanding. and direct touching. Nirvana is reached when we're no longer fooled by signs.

[25:41]

But we keep making more and more signs and keep struggling to make life more complex. We think that we're doing a great job making life more complex. I guess this was given sometime in 2020, he said, do you remember when the pandemic first started? Everybody had been rushing around, previous to the pandemic, everybody had been rushing around without realizing that's what we were doing. And then the pandemic came, and then everybody drew a big breath. It was wonderful. The first month was great because you couldn't do anything. I remember that those first, his, Sojin's advice to us was, okay, this is what's happening.

[26:47]

Let's stop. Let's just take this pause and not try to fill it, not scurry around. in desperation trying to figure out what to do now, but like, let's just enjoy this moment. So then he says, in trying to make things work better, we have to be more, we have to be careful that we don't keep making things, making ourselves more complicated and our life more and more complicated. This was the great treasure, this pause in our life. The skies cleared up. The waters became less poisonous. And we realized that. But everyone was still worrying.

[27:49]

It's true. And now we're acclimated to the pandemic in many ways. And I don't know about you all, but I don't feel nearly as much of the breathing room as I felt in the first month or two. The main thing is that there is something called a lifespan, but it's not a true lifespan. It's just a lifespan for this particular world and this particular time. This is very much in line with what I was reading from Thich Nhat Hanh at the memorial about thinking of the lifespan of a cloud, which takes shape as moisture condensing and then forming this cloud.

[28:57]

Some of it rising, some of it falling. And then the cloud is constantly metamorphosing. So what we call the lifespan, our own lifespan is like that. So it says it's just a lifespan for this particular world at this particular time. Everybody goes through this and nobody escapes. So the Sanskrit word. that we translate as signlessness is animita. A is a negation. So it's the negation of nimita, which means mark or sign. In Sanskrit, nimita is a sign

[29:58]

that identifies the experience of a deep concentration. It's the sign of the various jhanic states, the concentrations that are outlined in the story of the Buddha's awakening, where he moves through these meditational absorptions. And that you have to develop these these concentrations and that each of the concentration has a particular nimitta or sign. In Mahayana, the sign tends to mean a mental concept by which one understands an object or a thing. saying that it has a particular color or size or characteristic.

[31:04]

So it could be a mental object. And it also can be, well, related as a mental object. It's a sense object. Each of the six senses, the way our senses function in terms of Buddhist analysis as we have, a sense organ, like the eye. We have a sense object, the thing that we're looking at. And then we have a sense consciousness in the mind, which relates the functioning organism or organ to the sense object and begins to categorize it. So these are nimittas. So the practice of signlessness is the practice of deconstructing and disconnecting from these signs or these sense objects.

[32:22]

And this is very challenging. In the Theravada, early Buddhist tradition, the signless concentration is a very high meditative state. It's the last of the jhanas, which is described as neither perception nor non-perception. So it's the place where, I think in line with what Sue was describing, it's a place where these words are no longer attached to our perceptions. It's very close to... It's closely related to emptiness.

[33:33]

But my feeling is that... It's a more difficult place for us to arrive at. Like, as we were talking before... A number of people had experiences which you could classify as experiences of emptiness, and I'm sure that many more of you had. But for me, I find it really difficult to come to this place of signlessness. So I'd like you to try something for a moment. Wherever you are, find your breath and ground yourself.

[34:39]

And what I'd like you to do with your mind in this meditative state is just Listen. Just attend to what you are hearing wherever you are, whatever environment you're in, and that might even include hearing my voice. Just take a moment to do that. Okay.

[36:06]

So come back. And let's have a couple people just really quickly tell me what you were hearing. You can just blurt it out. Breathing. Static. My cat is snoring. A motorcycle outside. I was hearing your heater. Of course, your voice. My central heating. My tinnitus. Good. So let me ask you another question. Could you hear anything without putting a name to it? Could anyone do that?

[37:10]

Anyone? Yes, no, you can say no. Yes. At the beginning, just sound, but very quickly, I identify the heater, the upstairs neighbor. And your voice. Yeah, I heard a shush through my headphones, and I don't know what the shush came from. So I was wondering, where does that come from? Anyone else? I was hearing the heater spinning back and forth, and it makes this weird noise, so I couldn't really name it. And I was sort of trying to figure out what should I call that sound. It was a dilemma. Because I don't know what that sound is like. You know, it's just weird. I mean, there's a name, weird.

[38:23]

Okay, Dan? I had a really interesting experience. So I first, all I heard was static. through my headphones. So at first I could, I said to myself, that's static. I identified what it was. And then I, well, I'm not supposed to be naming it. So then I could actually just breathe and just hear it. And then my mind began doing something nonverbal, but active in terms of almost like music in a musical way. I said, well, it wasn't music. It was static, but... Sort of knowing what was coming next and joining in with it and participating in it in my mind, which I sometimes is a verbal activity. But this was nonverbal, but it wasn't signlessness, but it wasn't it was a verbal sign, nonverbal sign.

[39:24]

But the second state, I think I was actually for a few seconds just listening. without adding anything to it. The third part, I think, was adding something to it, but it wasn't verbal. That's neat. Thank you. Clay? Yeah, I'm sitting in a room in my house, and there is no noise at all. I had this down jacket on as I was just walking outside. So I started scratching it with my hand. So I'm making the noise, but I'm not identifying it as the scratchy-down jacket sound. And it's very confusing. It's a disconnect. I'm not labeling it. It's there, but I don't know what it is. But at the same time, I was making the noise. So that was kind of strange. Well, I think that what I was getting at...

[40:26]

is that how quickly we go to labeling. How quickly we place a sign with a perception. And this is what Thich Nhat Hanh says. The second door of liberation sign means the appearance or the object of our perception. And I would say this process is incredibly quick. Now, some of you also had a hint of the, I think a hint of signlessness in what you were communicating. But I just noticed for myself, it's, It's really hard to find that moment of perception.

[41:29]

I believe that it's always there. A moment of perception before the mind very quickly, almost instantaneously categorizes it. And if it can't categorize it, it starts operating a rapid search mechanism to try to find what the elements are. So even if you're hearing static, you identify that, say, as static. But the wonderful thing about the mind is then we can make other things of these things. That's a whole other process. But when we see something or we hear something, or we smell something, et cetera, an image and a sign appear to us.

[42:30]

So Thich Nhat Hanh talks about this. He says, if water is in the square container, its sign is squareness. That's maybe not its own, its whole sign, but that's one sign. If it's in a round container, its sign is roundness. When we open the freezer and take out some ice, that sign is solid. That water is solid. The sign of that water is solid. Chemists call water H2O. The snow on the mountain and the steam rising from the kettle are also H2O. I just want to get something up here. I wanted to find something in Dogen that you're all familiar with, actually.

[43:34]

Where is it? Here it is. Right. So speaking of signlessness in Genjo Koan, Dogen says, when you sail out in a boat to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. So this is This is him, Dogen, speaking of the signless.

[44:37]

But then he says, it is like a palace, it is like a jewel. It only looks like, it looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like that. In another place, he says, you know, for a fish, it's one thing. For a fish, For a human, it's another thing. For a dragon, it's a palace and so forth. That the signs that we assign to our perceptions are functions of our consciousness. And its true nature is signless. So Thich Nairn says, whether H2O is round or square, liquid, gaseous, Or sala depends on circumstances. Signs are instruments for our use, but they are not absolute truth.

[45:39]

And they can mislead us. The Diamond Sutra says, wherever there is a sign, there is deception, illusion. Perceptions often tell us as much about the perceiver as the object of perception. Appearances can deceive. Practicing the concentration on signlessness and the meditation on signlessness is necessary for us to free ourselves. And that's what you just just to say what you just did in that moment of listening is taking up the practice of signlessness. And you can do this. You can do that in in your meditation. It's a wonderful practice. And it's completely in line with Shikantaza because what you are doing is just allowing the flow of thought after thought.

[46:46]

And you may notice the name or you may come to places where it moves very quickly and you don't attach the sign. And gradually... you can release from the signs. But until we, Thich Nhat Hanh says, until we break through the signs, we cannot touch reality. As long as we are caught by signs, round, square, solid, gas, liquid, we will suffer. Nothing can be described just in terms of one sign. And here, to touch on something we spoke of a moment back, a few moments back, but without signs, we feel anxious. You know, without a sign, if you're driving somewhere and you don't have the signs, you don't know where you are and you're likely to experience anxiety.

[47:52]

But our fear and attachment come from our... being caught in signs. Until we touch the signless nature of things, we will continue to be afraid and to suffer. When we free ourselves from signs, we can enter the heart of reality. But until we can see the ocean in the sky, we are still caught by signs. The greatest relief is when we break through the barriers of sign and touch the world of signlessness, nirvana, which is exactly what Sojin said was, nirvana is reached when we're no longer fooled by signs. So, as I said, I think this is a difficult practice.

[48:56]

This signlessness and emptiness are very closely related. Gary, you have your hand up? Yeah. Can you say something about the fear and the attachment? Like, elaborate on that a little bit. Okay. I missed the first part of what you said. Go ahead. Say it again. Can you say something about being caught by fear if you're still attached? to signs? I think from my own experience, fundamentally, the fear that I experience is because I'm attached to myself. And the... the most, this is just for me, the deepest, most visceral fear is that myself will go away, which is very much, it's the fear of death, but it's also the fear and sort of an existential fear of not,

[50:30]

not existing, not being real. Does that make sense? And so we clutch. And even though the clutching is extremely, it's not fun. It's very uncomfortable. But still, we're clutching for existence. And that's the way... That's on a very deep level. That's the function of signs. The functions of signs, and that's what I was about to say, the function of signs is for the reification of self. So, as I say, signlessness and emptiness are very closely related. Yeah, that's helpful. When we see something as empty, then we know that the sign or the name we commonly use to refer to it is empty.

[51:41]

It's an abstraction. Sue? Yeah, thank you. When you were saying signs, the term label came to my mind in labeling people. And I noticed... I remembered today earlier a woman who was gardening for a neighbor at the other end of the block was sort of a difficult person for me to deal with or I wasn't in the mood and I had a lot of labels for her and I found her a little scary so you know I just thought how labels create fear. Right. And to the extent that I could step back and recognize that I could just think, oh, there were other options to that conversation that, um, I didn't see at the time.

[52:43]

Yeah. Let me come back to that. Cause that's, that's kind of where I was headed, but I haven't gotten there yet. Raghav. Um, um, I'm not sure if this is the right time. Maybe you can tell me. I don't know if you're going to go into this. But what I was thinking is when you were talking about it being a difficult practice, what came to my mind is, you know, the line in the Heart Sutra, right? All dharmas are marked with emptiness. And... what I was, Sojan said something in one of his classes about the 100 dharmas, that we create the dharmas. So all dharmas are, it's not that they don't exist outside our mind. There is a reality. There is a physical reality outside our mind. But in our mind, we create a label for it, a name for it, and a meaning to it.

[53:50]

So it is all self-created. And going back to all dharmas are marked with emptiness, what came to my mind is basically everything is of one essence. So it exists, but we create different labels and create the emotions that go with that. But all of that is energy at the end of the day. Everything is energy in our mind. And we look at certain energy as wholesome or certain energy as unwholesome, but it's just energy. We do have to live by labels, but I think the problem is we get caught in them. We think that's the reality rather than the underlying understanding that we create those meanings to it. Right. Thank you.

[54:51]

I completely agree. And that is where I was headed. And I'll say more. We'll come back to that, to what you and Sue said. Jim? If we're able to, I don't know, pierce this veil and touch the world beyond signs, is that what we refer to as suchness? what we're given a glimpse of? You could call that, yes, you could call that suchness. I think part of the complication is that I was talking with somebody today about line from Dogen, leaping beyond the one and the many. So the part of the difficulty that we encounter is a reification that somehow signlessness is, well, signlessness can be a gaining idea.

[56:15]

And we have glimpses of what Raghav was talking about, of recognizing that all of the names and the labels and the signs that we recognize are our own imputations and mental constructions. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. But we have to be cautious and capable of seeing through them at the same time. So when you reify suchness, you can turn it into a goal. Okay, now we've spurred discussion here. So let's hear from people. I'll get to this. We have time. Jan, Dan? Thank you.

[57:18]

When you read the quote from Dogen about the ocean and how when there's no land visible, it looks like a circle. But reality, it has all possible shapes. The ocean is infinite possible shapes. So that just seemed to me like the same thing about the fullness of emptiness. That is true nature is the boundlessness and the amount of activity actually going on. It's the same thing. The ocean is all possible shapes. When we say, oh, it's a circle, we're limiting in our minds and limiting, and that's what causes problems. Right. And the same thing is to, but if we speak about the ocean, we're also speaking about zazen. That zazen has no particular shape. It may feel a certain way at a certain moment. depending on my causes and conditions. But the wonderful thing about it is that it's oceanic.

[58:22]

It takes whatever shape the container is presenting at that moment. So I think the same thing with when we see something and attach a sign to it, we're limiting it. And suffering can come from that, just as if we see a person and label them. This person is making coffee for me. They're a barista. I labeled them. But there are 50,000 other things at the same time. And by acting on my labels, I could be rude or cause suffering in some way. So that's another way it relates. Yeah. I mean, there are... We're talking about... In the way that the tradition speaks of signlessness, early Buddhism speaks of it as this very advanced jhanic concentration and meditation.

[59:26]

But what I'd like to suggest is that there's a practical dimension of it. So it exists in the context of, you could call... if you're talking about the relative and the absolute, in the context of the absolute, but on a relative basis, it's something that we need to be aware of in the context of our relationships with other people. And people are much more complicated to relate to than things, because things don't talk back. But people say things that we may not expect them to say. And how do we account for that? And so each person has his or her own perspective that's not governed by what we think. But let's go on. I think Genpo was next. I guess what I keep circling back to is kind of the way you described the original definition of signs.

[60:39]

being the signs of these higher concentrational states, and then having the negative prefix beforehand, that just really makes me think of Sojin. And the way that as a Zen teacher, he didn't demonstrate the kind of signs that we associate with spiritual teachers. If you think about like... or they didn't have this kind of bearing that people who are established spiritual teachers usually carry. And so for me, when we talk about signlessness as kind of a realm you break into, I guess I'm feeling more like signlessness was just a byproduct of, for him, for Sojin, it was a byproduct of him just being immersed in his normal day-to-day life.

[61:42]

Right. So that's interesting. That was your perception. And other people really saw him differently. And, you know, from my own experience, I think of, well, I think of when we went to, I was part of this delegation that did a Zen Catholic dialogue in Rome, and we had an audience with the Pope. And, you know, for, I mean, the Catholics in this delegation were really blown away. They saw all the bells and whistles of holiness. And were really knocked out by the holy dimension of him. For me, not having that frame of reference, what I was struck by was his ordinariness.

[62:50]

I don't mean that as any kind of derogation. To me, ordinariness, and I agree with you, that's what I see in Sojin. And that's what I saw in Sojin. That's what I saw in the Pope. And that's a very high – that ordinariness is a very – that's a very rarefied value for me. Someone who is just himself and comfortable in their body and comfortable with their minds. And so, yeah, it doesn't have any special sign. But still we have to pay attention because every person, each being, every being is a Buddha. Every being has, you know, we can provisionally give each person that sign and treat them that way. Yeah, I guess my point was that like, I don't feel like Sojin had a special mental power that allowed him to see beyond.

[64:00]

beyond the world of signs in some sci-fi way. I think for him, he was just really present with what was happening and paying attention and not holding on. And that produced this effect of signlessness. Yeah, I think that, you know, Sojin often talked about intuition. And we had some... We had some arguments about it. He seemed to talk about it as if intuition were some special power, some power from beyond. And my feeling was intuition is the integration of your experience so that you can act in a quick way. He was tremendously intuitive.

[65:03]

It's not like he had supernatural vision, but his experience was integral enough so that he could identify with people. And he was looking for the Buddha in them, generally. Not always, but generally. Lynn? Lynn? It's hearkening back a bit. You talked about this reification several times in different ways. That signs were a reification of the self or other things. But, I mean, we can't be speaking without signs. We can't have this plan without signs. We're symbolic beings. So this seems very natural.

[66:03]

And it just seems when you're talking about it in this function of science, it seems like that's the misuse of science, right? When we become, when we mistake the sign for the reality. And I had a teacher, he always said me, it was very simple, but very profound. And he says, never mistake the map for the territory. Yeah. It's this. And I think Sojan, he just didn't get stuck. That's, you know, when he says the emptiness and the signlessness and the wishlessness all together, this is bare bones from Buddhism, whatever term he used, it was so. Well, he embodied, you know, he had absorbed his teacher's teaching. And And ancestors. Yeah, and the ancestors were that. But very clearly, Suzuki Roshi and Sojin, and it's passed on to our traditions, don't be caught by anything.

[67:12]

And Thich Nhat Hanh as well. It's like, don't get caught by what you don't believe, everything you think, if you will, to reduce it to a bumper sticker that's on my car. Don't get caught by anything. And that was really... Sojin's and Suzuki Roshi's watchword. And what there's, to me, what they're implying in there is they're talking about how easy it is to get caught by words. You know, because we can't do anything once we know language. We can't eradicate it. unless we have some kind of brain damage or make some really extraordinary effort to do away with language. But we have to be able to see through language. We have to see what's valuable in it, but not be caught by it at the same time.

[68:19]

That's also the practical practice of signlessness in our day-to-day life. Gary? I want to add one other thought to share. Okay. Which was when you talk about the ocean taking whatever shape, I think we do the same thing. You know, we come into this world and we take that shape that's available. And Sojin, in these last Doka songs, and he said something so beautiful about, well, we... He didn't say love our body, appreciate our body. He says, we can be happy in our body even if we're not well. And he says, we can do that. There's a grounding in the body. Right. But you can ground, I mean, in order to be grounded in your body, it's important not to be afraid of your body.

[69:24]

And in a way, not to be afraid for your life. But just to accept the body is a core practice for us. Thank you. Gary? I just wanted to say that maybe I was around Sojin too much, but I saw him like hundreds of different ways. Like... I saw him as a little child sometimes. I saw Suzuki Roshi's face and his face in Doka-san. You know, when you're leaving the... Just the other day, I was thinking about bowing to him when we left the temple or left the meditation hall. Every day we bowed to him. But, you know, the main thing I wanted to say is that I think we impose... things on people when we are not looking at them signlessly. Like, it's an imposition.

[70:28]

I impose things on everybody I see. That's my feeling. That one day when I was swimming, I wasn't imposing anything. In fact, women weren't women and men weren't men and water wasn't water. It was You know, weird. That's good. I think the challenge for us is to be able to recognize the complete potential fluidity of every person in every encounter that you have. Not just in bowing to Sojourn at the door, but in everyone. And that's not easy. We really trusted him, and he was a trustworthy person.

[71:33]

So we allowed ourselves to fall back into the arms of his Buddha nature. The challenge is actually to find a way to do that with everyone, to really allow everyone to be a Buddha. Dave? Hi, Hozan. This is really great. I really appreciate this teaching on signlessness. And I have a thought that's a little bit complicated to try to put into words. I want to try to do it. I don't know if it's a little bit too idiosyncratic, but I make my... my livelihood is as a therapist and the kind of therapy I do mainly is something called focusing, which is a sort of body-based exploration.

[72:34]

But one of the things, this is really helpful for me. I've never thought this before, but one of the things that happens in focusing is you stay with what something is like in your body that you don't quite have words or images for. And then a word or an image kind of develops. And I've never thought this before, but in a way, it's like playing right at that border of signlessness and signs. It's like letting go of the signs and then letting a new sign emerge and then letting go of signs and letting a new sign emerge. And I'll say in my own life and in work with people, that's actually really helpful. And it's it's actually a pretty simple practice. Like when we're having an experience, it is possible, especially if we hold our body still. to actually for a moment be free of words about it and just be with what it is and then new words will come. But I've never articulated this in this way. It feels really integrating for me to have this language, but that little gap is an experience of the practice of signlessness.

[73:37]

So like I said, I don't know if that's too idiosyncratic of a response, but it's really helpful for me. So thank you. Thank you. That's really interesting. Because of what we're talking about, what you're talking about, and what I've been going towards is signlessness as ordinariness, not signlessness as the eighth jhana. And signlessness as ordinariness, kind of in light of what you were saying and what Gary and Lynn were saying, is a quality that we can bring to our encounters with people, with others, and with ourselves in order to allow that spaciousness.

[74:44]

that doesn't immediately narrow things down into categories and labels, but to recognize there's something beyond the label. Go on, Dave. Yeah, that's really helpful. And I think some of it is I associate the jhana version of this with like trying to stay there in a really concentrated way for a long time. Yeah. Whereas this feels more to me like it's fluid. It's like letting go of the sign for... just a second and then letting the new sign come and letting go of it for just a second and letting the new sign come rather than letting go of it and then like really concentrating on like staying there for 12 hours or something which is sort of what I associate with the um that sort of exerting um jhana style I don't know if that's fair or accurate you know but as opposed to what you're talking about is much more fluid actually sort of freely being with people Yeah, I think it's in the spirit of Soto Zen.

[75:47]

And, you know, as we talked about in the first class, you know, I read you that what I found amusing passage from Ayya Kema, where she talked about when you experience nirvana or liberation, or when you come to this eighth jhana, which is a formless jhana, then you never have an unpleasant thought again. That's what she said, which I find just doesn't bring true for me. And it's such a gaining idea. But anyway, let's leave it there. Mark? The body does all its functions without apprehending any signs.

[76:50]

We turn food into energy without a single symbol. And so there are dimensions of our life and experience that are effortlessly signless. And while there may be one dimension of thinking ever more spacious and refined thoughts, there's certainly another dimension of thinking not identifying with a thinking mind so that you can find balance between the body and the thinking. Yeah. That isn't attached to the signs. I don't know if that's the same as signlessness, but... Well, I think it's an expression of signlessness, and I think that really is a manifestation of our Zen tradition as apart from other schools and earlier schools, which are, you know, it's basically, if you look at the five skandhas, it's like this form, and then there's four skandhas of cognition.

[78:03]

And unless you have this cognition, you're not animating the form, but really what the cognition is is Cognition is just about the mechanism of how you create the idea of a self, whereas meanwhile, all of your organs, as you were saying, all the somatic activity is just going on. It's just interacting, and it's completely miraculous and beyond our understanding, but it's also beyond our labeling. I mean, we can put labels on after the fact, but we don't have to put labels on it to make it happen. It's just happening. We breathe, our hearts beat, our bowels move, and so forth. All of that is beyond science, right? That's somatic activity. So to include that, that's the thing. What I love about Soto Zen is... the all-inclusive nature of it.

[79:07]

So to be honest with you, I think that the all-inclusive nature of it includes the signless, but also includes the science. That we shouldn't derogate the fact that we have, like language is wonderful, just so long as we're not attached to them. We're able to see through them when we need to. not be caught, basically, fundamentally, not be caught by the things that are characteristic of creating the self, even though we accept the provisionality of what we're calling the self. So, thank you. I saw one other hand which went up and went down. Was it Kabir? When you think about why we need signs, it's like the idea of is it a snake or a rope when you see something in the path?

[80:41]

And you want to know because it's for survival reasons. Right. Snake, you have to leap back. If it's a rope, you go forward. So there's a lot of reasons for needing signs in our lives to function. I actually studied for a month with Aya Kama's successor, Lee Brasington, a couple of years back. Yeah. So I was with him and he at the very end of the month retreat got into discussing signlessness and how he was practicing that, trying to practice it in his life. And he was talking about every day walking down his driveway and just letting his eyes softly, you know, a soft eye look at things. and trying not to label what those things were. That's how he was trying to practice with it. And I realized like the activity you did today with the sound, I could do that.

[81:48]

And I practiced with that because sometimes we really don't know what sounds are. And we don't have to label them necessarily for our survival. So we could just hear a sound and not... need to label. But when he was talking about the sight thing and trying to not label things we saw, I didn't really think that was possible. Sometimes it is, you're not sure what you're looking at. And I found some examples, but I didn't really understand why that was so important because it's form, feeling, perceptions, mental formations. And it seemed to me that if you could stop your mind at the mental formations. That was more of a problem than the perception of, oh, that's a rock rather than a dog or something. I didn't really get that. And at the time I was very disturbed because my mother had recently died of Alzheimer's.

[82:56]

And in the last six months of her life, when I spent time with her, so like this is the example that upset me so much she was a librarian and I put this book in her hand and she looked at it and she didn't know what the book she didn't know was a book she didn't know that so here he was kind of talking about how this was this high state of consciousness and to me it was like well when your mind has Alzheimer's that's your consciousness and that's That really isn't something we want to be happening. So it's just in the jhana state, really, that we can have that type of experience in the eighth jhana. And in our life, going about the world, the best we could do is... not limit people. Like the things you were saying tonight make a lot of sense to me, not limiting people or things by naming.

[84:01]

And just one other thing, I think the reason that trans people disturb some people is they look at a trans person and they can't label them. We want to label them. And being in that state of, oh, I don't know. I actually really enjoy that when I see someone I think I don't know, but it makes most people very uncomfortable. So if we can expand ourselves to be more in that not knowing state, that's good. In some instances, that's really good for those trans people and that we can allow ourselves to... Be so open and comfortable with not knowing can be a wonderful experience. I completely agree. And I also think that to the extent that we have, we create safe spaces, then we can move beyond the not knowing to actually asking, inquiring.

[85:08]

What is your life like? What is your mind like? How do you express yourself? what we'd like to know about each other. But I know we're running out of time, but just to say, yes, to valorize signlessness, you know, because it approaches the absolute is not suitable for our everyday life. We need these signs. And that's what Sojin said. We need them. The problem is that we generate them mostly or often in order to create ourselves, in order to verify our own selfness. And that's where we need to be careful and just cautious about the creation of signs or our belief in them. But, yeah, thank you.

[86:12]

It's 745. If it's okay, maybe this is the time to end. And next week, we get to aimlessness, which is my favorite of the three doors. And so we'll talk about that. I think there are many wonderful ways that we can examine the life of aimlessness. a practice of aimlessness for ourselves. So let's chant the Bodhisattva vows and say good night. I vow to awaken with them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. but as when

[87:13]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.37