The Way between Yoga & Religion

*transcript generated by AI

Good morning, everybody.

So we are here in the first practice of 2026, which is exciting and wonderful, and also just another practice, because that’s how it is, actually.

Does anyone have anything they’d like to bring forward for discussion, or to set the tone of a riff, or whatever?

First of all, I want to say hi.

Long time no see.

It’s been a while.

A whole year.

Last time when I joined Open Door Zen was 2024, and the whole 2025 without me.

And it’s really interesting, because you know some of my things are going on in my life, so how can I say?

I have sometimes the feeling that the last year was more like a dream, wasn’t like an extra box, something separated.

Because now it’s interesting, I come back to stuff.

I’m sitting here, back in my shared flat room, where I didn’t start my life really last year.

So now I’m back, I’m back here, and different other things.

So I’m wondering about this time, especially time, what is it?

Why do I feel some moments like they’re not connected to the rest of the life?

Why do I feel moments sometimes very disconnected, and at the same time very attached, dreamlike, and so on and so on.

So probably you have a lot of answers to this, but first of all, thank you for practicing together.

First off, thanks for coming and joining us to practice again, that fits into your schedule.

Being aware of some of your journey, I encourage you to take a sabbatical from practice, quite assertively actually.

So this is the natural arc of things, and so it’s good to have you back.

And it’s also good that you went on sabbatical.

And now we get to look at what does that mean?

Why do we do that?

How does that work?

And then to your point, how can it feel like already such a different lifetime, different distant memory, dreamlike quality, when in fact, the biggest changes happened only just a week ago, 10 days ago, something like that.

I think there’s a lot going on there that can help us understand ourselves and the way we work, right?

You both have been here enough to know that my primary focus is on understanding the mechanisms by which we experience reality, so that we could see through those mechanisms, release us from their control, and instead leverage those same mechanisms to live our lives in a way that allows us to manifest our Buddha nature, right?

So this way of participating in our ultimate reality is kind of what it’s all about.

And so when we have experiences like this, it’s great to just stop and reflect.

So what happens when we have an experience that ends up feeling dreamlike?

What’s going on there?

Any ideas?

First idea that I have is comparing it to lucid dreams.

So you know that you dream, but you have no handle on it, you have no ability to do something in it.

So there is a part of me that has some consciousness about what’s going on, but another part that seems to be the sovereign guy, so to say, the one who really can do something, is still asleep.

So autopilot comes into my mind, and other useful words that might fit here.

Yeah, so that can be a big part of it.

I mean, depending on the quality of our experience, we can be looking at a period in time where we are conscious, but we’re no longer necessarily consciously engaged.

And so we can have whole stretches of our life that are like that, you know, a fugue state almost that we live on autopilot that we wake up, we go to work, we come home, we participate in the same cycles in relationship, right?

And we’ll have moments of awakening in there, of moments of truly coming online.

And then this will go on for a while, it’ll be like a whole chapter in a book.

And a lot of times for me, when I’ve noticed that in my life, those are periods of time where when I reflect on them, there were times where I didn’t engage intentionally in spiritual discipline, I let my anchor go, right?

Or I kind of build up a direction, and I lashed the udder, or not the udder, the rudder, lashing udders is a different fun time.

But I lashed the rudder in place, and then just kind of forgot that I was sailing, because I liked the direction that the boat was going, and it was all good, right?

And then after a while, we kind of forget that we’re the ones steering the ship.

And this is another way of saying talking about how we go back to sleep, and how awakening is a choice, awakening is a process, awakening is momentary, meaning that we have to choose awakening over and over and over and over again.

And so when I look at the periods in my life that have the quality like what you’re describing, they almost always are points where I realized that I stopped doing my things.

I stopped my martial arts practice, I stopped my meditation, I stopped my prayer, I stopped all my stuff.

And for a while, it usually goes really, really well.

And then it eventually doesn’t, right?

And that’s that process, then wakes us back up.

And then when we come back, we look at it, and we see ourselves having done all sorts of things that we were conscious of doing, but not conscious of choosing.

And so it feels dreamlike.

Just like you described, it feels like, when we look back on it, we were there.

We were participating, we had lots of great times, we had lots of hard times, some days were nightmares, some days were euphoric, right?

But there wasn’t that quality of awake awareness in our experience to allow us to feel as though we were truly engaged.

So this is one way that we can feel the difference between being asleep and being awake.

And one mechanism by which that might happen.

There are other mechanisms too, maybe less spiritually significant, but equally important in terms of understanding the Dharma.

When we have a period of time that has radically different causes and conditions, it can feel like that, because we have a set of continuity.

So our seventh consciousness is about continuity, right?

This is our meaning-making self-being consciousness that creates a subject that has an experience, switches moments together, and says, okay, this is my life, this is my reality.

But when we have something very abrupt happen that shifts us into totally different causes and conditions, then that creates enough space and moments that it feels like we’re living in a different life, right?

So that happened to me in China, that every time I would go to China and come back to the States, when I was in the other country, it felt like the other place didn’t really exist.

Because the causes and conditions of my self-making experience were so radically different.

A lot of people experienced this in COVID and found it very disorienting, where their COVID year, their lockdown year, feels like it didn’t really happen.

It’s like a black hole.

We forgot what year it was, because I was like, no, it’s still 2020.

And they’re like, no, it’s 2021 now.

Because the causes and conditions of our life change so dramatically.

And then we come back to something that’s more normal, or more typical, and it feels like life picks up from where that typical was, because those other causes and conditions are no longer present for our meaning-making, right?

And so that can create a really strong disassociation or fragmentary consciousness, but really it’s just a fact of that meaning-making eye structure, that stitching moments together for a period of time had, as its basis, a totally different set of perfumes and seeds, right?

So that’s another way that we can have this dream-like quality, which is how we can sometimes have these experiences where we don’t lose our awake awareness.

We’re not going awake asleep, right?

Because you can have that happen and be awake the whole time, or have that happen and be asleep the whole time.

But like I said, so that’s two different mechanisms by which we experience the type of phenomenon that you just brought to the inquiry.

Thank you.

I like both.

And yeah, I mean, it’s true, I wanted the sabbatical, and you also pointed me to it.

And it was really, so the beginning of it was really interesting because I had, like the first time after I started with my intense Zen practice, to really experience what’s happening without the practice.

So what’s going on here?

What is it that I really have trained myself for?

What is it that really has integrated?

Where did all those flashes of, oh, yeah, this is it, came just naturally.

So this was really great and really fun.

But there was this time, especially this, why am I the whole time, like, well, what you said, you’re consciously aware, but not consciously choosing.

So I could see everything most of the time.

But I was like, what’s that?

Where are my hands?

Where’s my mind?

What’s gap?

It’s behind a wall, behind a screen, behind glasses, like, I could see it, but there was no influence as I wanted to have influence.

But I’m with that.

I’m not even sure if I really wanted to have that influence.

Mitra, maybe you have something to say about it.

Oh, I just can relate to that very well.

Yeah, and this whole conversation, it all comes back to intentionality, right?

Like, it’s observing how the mind works and dreamlike or engaged.

It’s all the same.

It’s all the continual ebb and flow of the structure that we live in.

And they had to consciously choose, what am I doing here right now?

Without practice, I very easily fall into, I don’t give a shit about what I’m doing right now.

I just want it to be fine.

That’s all I care.

And then the dreamlike state becomes normal.

So I very, very greatly appreciate how you articulated this question.

And also, Zenshin, well, again, wonderful to see you.

And also bringing this forward, at this point, I almost can’t even imagine what it would be to have that experience for a year after some month of holiday crazy and disengaging from a lot of my regular practices is so disorienting.

And I feel like you need a little helmet to protect yourself.

Anyway, great question, great discussion.

Yeah, and I think, in a way, we’re touching right into the core of what’s the point, right?

Because it’s like, every different spiritual structure, religion, however you want to say it, I think that’s important to just pause for a minute.

In my worldview, there’s two kinds of training that I’m doing, okay?

There’s a yoga, which is a union with, right?

There’s a training that’s non-dual.

There’s a training that brings me into direct contact with the process, with reality, right?

And then there’s also like a religious training, which is a binding to, right?

Which is, you know, so these terms have different meanings, yoga, union with, religion, binding to, right?

And so for a long time, I was really emphasizing this yogic practice, this union with practice, this release into the flow of the cosmos and the dissolution of self into the reality.

And as you know, in that, I discovered sovereignty.

I discovered that we are active agents.

It’s a participatory belief structure, right?

And anyway, the point of that I’m trying to get at is that each discipline has at its core, a specific purpose.

And this was the reason for your turn.

Some people are looking like Robin said, I just want it to be fine, right?

We’re just looking for like a fundamental okayness, fundamental wellbeing, the end of suffering, right?

Which is a great purpose.

And the spiritual training that is for that is a lot of these East Asian wisdom traditions, right?

And then they create in that sense of detachment, the ability to witness from a non-dual perspective or to mindfully create distance from our experience.

They actually decrease our intentionality.

They decrease our sovereignty because we can experience okayness without engagement and we become morally and ethically ambiguous.

We become less concerned about who we are because we trick ourselves into thinking that we have no self, because that’s what the teaching says, right?

And we use all of these things, not necessarily as bypassing, because a lot of times we’re directly in the experience we’re having when we’re well trained in this method.

But what it results in is a lack of, or it can result in something that’s morally ambiguous or disengaged and detached.

And through that, we obtain the fruit of the practice, which is okayness.

It’s okay.

Oh, well, that sucks.

This person’s being a real dick, but you know, there is no them to be a dick.

And I’m not somebody who’s offended by that because I don’t have a me to be offended.

Who’s really worried about this?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right.

Um, then there’s other systems that have a totally different attitude and they’re looking at, um, you know, fear of eternal damnation to produce a sense of moral obligation.

And in a lot of those systems, you outsource your virtue, you outsource your morality to something that you think is higher than you, that then dictates what you should do to you.

Right.

And in that you have something different.

You have like a relational wholeness where, uh, you get to sin against something and you get to be afraid of that sin.

And then you get to receive grace and you get to repair that relationship.

And now your whole motivation is different.

And what you actually get is something that’s very sweet because when you align with those virtues and when you live your life, according to that, you have a feeling of being in love with something divine and that divineness taking care of you and loving you back.

And it’s beautiful.

And then when you fracture that relationship, you feel so awful.

You have to do something to make up for it.

So you go to confession or you fast or you engage in what other, what other form of reparation, verbal contrition, renunciation.

Right.

And you try and live your life a little bit differently, but it’s all externalized.

And so again, we’re abdicating a certain amount of authority and sovereignty to something else.

And so a lot of us chafe against that because it’s like, Oh, how do you know what my virtues are?

Right.

What do you mean?

You’re going to damn me forever.

That doesn’t make any sense.

I just like, I fibbed a little bit right here and now I’m in eternal damnation as you know, right.

And like, what’s going on here.

And so, um, those structures can be really difficult.

Okay.

But when we combine them, we get something really beautiful.

Right.

And when we step into sovereignty and what we have at our core is integrity, right?

So you hear me talk about being, becoming tapestry.

There is an unfolding of life.

There is an unfolding of the divine, which is happening through us that we are a part of.

And when we are aligned with that and integrity with that, we feel so skillful, we feel clean, we feel clear, and we naturally produce a moral uprightness that is appropriate to the circumstances because we’re really consciously engaged.

Right.

And when we mess up and we find out that what we did was not skillful, then we can’t not come back and do what we need to do to make it skillful, which sometimes means going, I missed that one.

And we have, you know, cause sometimes there is no penance that can be done.

Right.

So then we get into a different thing, which is actually just an ongoing sense of integrity and a deepening internal compass that allows us to align with this being becoming process.

And now we are bound to that through integrity.

And we are also in union with that through presence.

Right.

And now we have a self, not self reality that is closer, I think, to the bone of what we actually realized when we, when we get engaged in practice.

But if you don’t want that, if you don’t want a strong sense of inner integrity that allows you to live your life as a sovereign, then, you know, this practice will get really annoying for you.

Oh, very, very interesting to listen.

I’m currently working myself through some stuff about detachment theory and, and just the, the two ways of like being totally detached because there is no self and being in a way attached to someone who tells us what’s right or wrong.

And made in my mind, at least some resonance to attachment styles.

So if you miss that one, if you sort of say, then, then you really can go down the rabbit hole.

So does it like, oh my gosh.

And so, um, as you also both know, I’m, I’m over and over in this, what is awareness practice mindfulness practice?

What is Zen practice?

Where’s the difference?

What’s the, what’s the benefits of it?

And where are the, where are the traps?

Where can you like blindfold yourself and go just stupid ways.

And I think I will, I will just, yeah, let it, let it sink and, and see what happens.

Yeah.

Let it, let it sink and, and see what happens.

But it has made some, some interesting connections in my mind.

Um, because yes, you, you, you really, or I can, I can really think about this.

Is it, is this a tendency to give myself up in a relationship?

Is this trained by some of my Zen ideologies or is this because of my attachment style?

Or was one and the other just combining yourself and pushing it?

Or what is it?

Where’s my consciousness and all that.

And where is my own understanding of me in this moment?

So you need a stable and healthy ego to deconstruct it.

All those things combine here.

And yeah, I’ve goes on delightful inquiry.

The, over the last year to change my relationship with the annoying parts, lean into them.

That’s where the growth is.

That’s where, where the, where the changes.

It finally took me to recently having a conversation with somebody else to recognize that it’s the things, even though you hear it, right.

If here, here, here, here, it really is the things that piss you off.

It is the things that you absolutely hate and want to flail against that you learn from.

God damn it.

And so to be able to admit it, right.

Get out of the way and see what’s there.

Um, so yeah.

Gratitude for, for this practice, gratitude for having spiritual friends that can piss you off.

And just so much gratitude to see you sitting there essentially laughing and you have no idea, no idea.

Thank you tangential, but I’m excited to, uh, welcome Mitra back to the show.

Back with the exclamation point, right.

A reclaiming, a reclaiming and recognizing this morning that I was going to, to use it.

And I did, you know, I forgot to put it in and like, it didn’t matter.

That’s where the exclamation point comes in.

It didn’t matter.

How did it not matter?

Because I dropped the story.

It was wrapped up in it and then creating, I don’t want to say a new story.

Letting it unfold and claiming my seat.

This is my practice.

This is my name.

Not somebody else’s ideas.

Beautiful.

Oh, yes.

This naming is quite good.

And as you see, I don’t wear my rock shoe right now because I don’t have any idea where it is.

So, however, also for me, I think also with the sabbatical, the more mindfulness practice, the more different things, some of those things have detached really beautifully.

And now it’s, this reclaiming is from the inside, from the, oh, yes, this is it.

And it’s beautiful.

So, I mean, Zen Chin and also the other name I got, Ji Zen, they are just born whenever.

I guess not when I got the name, but they are here.

They are here.

And so, whenever I need a good friend who is telling me good things, when I’m lost, this part of me, then I can count on them to get a little bit more clarity in my mind.

So, it’s more not an automatic use, but use it wisely.

Remember and choose wisely.

This is what I take because of the naming stuff.

Yeah, yeah, of silly names.

The thing that’s sticking with me is the process that you’re going through.

You both, Mitra, you just said it too.

You went and you had the holidays and the holidays intentionally or not disrupted a lot of regular practice.

And so, you got to feel a period without regular practice, right?

And Zen Chin, you very deliberately dropped most of your practices, right?

I remember at one point, I don’t think it was this time, but at one point we had a conversation.

I was like, and you had like 13 things you were trying to do every day because they were all good for you and all these practices.

And it ended up causing a huge amount of stress and some of them didn’t fit anymore because they were really old and some of them were really aspirational and you weren’t actually ready for them.

And it was like really messing you up because you had all these practices.

And so, it’s like, I think that’s one of the reasons why I love it when we get breaks, when life takes us away from what we’re used to doing because then we get called back to something.

The Kolkatan, in my internal language, I adopted a Hebrew phrase.

It’s called Kolkatan, which is like the little voice.

And that’s how we hear God.

We hear God in the little voice, right?

And it’s like the most silent of silent whispers.

And that’s one of the things I love about Zen because Zen cuts out everything that prevents us from hearing the silence, right?

And it’s so direct and it’s so exquisite.

And that cutting away other things are cut out too.

But anyway, we don’t have to go into that.

When we are living a life without regular practice and things happen in our lives, then we end up getting called back, right?

And that’s when we find out which practices are the ones that are really essential to us.

And they change over time.

At different parts in our life, we need different practices.

But we get in the habit, we get disciplined, and we get structured, and we do them this way.

And then we stop listening to the voice.

The practices get too loud to hear that inner guidance and that inspiration, right?

And so it’s my hope that in the way that we’re practicing here and the different combination of things that we do and the different ways that we have dialogue, that we always remember that it’s that integrity with that alignment starts with the pure being.

And it says stop and come back to being, come back to union, and listen.

And when you listen deeply, you will know.

A lot of traditions say that, but a lot of times they stop there.

And this one we say, and then you must do, right?

You must enact it.

It must manifest through you.

If you listen to a voice and you say, oh, that’s great, thank you very much, but you don’t act on what the voice says to you, then you just ignored it, right?

And if we do that with each other, we get really upset.

So why do we do it with our own inner wisdom, with our own heart, with the guidance that’s coming through our heart?

Whatever metaphysical belief we want to have about it, that’s the phenomenological reality.

When we get really silent, we hear our heart’s wisdom.

So we get to come into integrity with that.

And that might mean a return to deep Sazen practice.

That might mean something else entirely.

And we get to support each other in whatever that is.

And I think that’s something that’s really precious.

So I’m excited to hear as you go what practices you get called to that are really, truly supportive for you.

And you brought it full back circle to life feels dreamlike when you’re not listening to that voice.

Way to close the loop.

Thank you for making that connection.

And just like that, it’s time to close this loop.

We have arrived at the noon Eastern time mark is the end of our practice period.

So let’s go ahead and have our closing check-in.

We’ll start with our returning guest of honor.

Ascension, we are closing check-in, please.

Ascension, checking in.

It’s beautiful to feel and see and experience the smile on my face.

I’m in.

Checking in.

Just so happy to be here with both of you this morning.

And I look forward to carrying this joy into the rest of my day.

And I wish you all a beautiful day as well.

Only checking in with a great deal of joy and gratitude.

So wonderful.

So wonderful to practice with you and to and to be in the space and container and on this way with you.

And also knowing that right about now, you’re going to be getting an email for Jonica Depps asking you to go dig into the orientation material and get ready because next Sunday, we kick off on our meditation intensive.

And I find myself deeply energized to re-engage the jhana practice specifically.

So looking forward to that as well.

Look forward to seeing you next Sunday.

Have a wonderful week.

And I think I’ll see both of you actually in between now and then.

In any case, much love.

Have a great day.