Absolute Commitment, Radical Acceptance, Willful Surrender.

*transcript generated by AI

Good morning, I’m delighted to practice with everyone today on a fall day that’s sunny and rainy at the same time.

One thing that struck me today was, you know, I do something a little bit unique and different with brocades, and the last brocade is Surrender, and we do it three times, and that in itself is not necessarily standard, although some people do it three times, some people do it more, some people do it less, right?

But we add these phrases, or I add these phrases, Absolute Commitment, Radical Acceptance, Woeful Surrender, okay?

These are mantras, in a way, instructions that I received from Dung Po, and for me there are three components to Surrender, there are three parts of Surrender, and we see it in the process of a no-shout as well, but really what it boils down to is, what does it take to live this life in the world, as householders, as people who have bills to pay, and families to have relationships with, and houses to take care of, and X, Y, Z, and all the things, right?

Well, we get in our own way all the time, we find all sorts of excuses on how we can separate our spiritual life from our daily life, and we convince ourselves that it’s gotta be hard, and it has to be an extra thing, and there’s stuff that we gotta do, and if we’re not doing these things, then we’re not practicing, and we’re not being spiritual, and we get ourselves all worked up in this cycle of recrimination and dualism, instead of understanding that life is practice, and what we train in the Zendo is really just training for life, putting things back just so, that’s a practice we do in the Zendo that when we take it to our home, makes our whole home a Zendo, right?

Chanting, chanting with our whole body, well that’s the skillful use of language to create a reality that we can abide in, right?

So then every word that we say is a magical spell, doesn’t have to be some foreign mumbo-jumbo to be a magical spell, your everyday English is a magic spell, right?

And so we have these teachings, or where I heard them from, and the first is absolute commitment.

And what does that, so what does that mean?

How does absolute commitment come into a no-shout, how does absolute commitment come into living a Zen life as a householder?

Most people think that it means like, a really rigid sense of discipline, and that like, I’m going to set a practice schedule, and I’m going to do these things on these days, and I’m not going to waver from it, and if I waver from it, then I’m a dirtbag who can’t practice and I should just give up forever, and we get into these really messed up cycles.

That’s not what absolute commitment is.

Absolute commitment is just saying that I’m absolutely committed to leading this life.

I’m absolutely committed to practicing Zen, okay?

And if we take the jargon out, Zen’s a jargon word, practicing Zen, what does practicing Zen mean?

Practicing aliveness.

I’m absolutely committed to living my fucking life.

That’s what I’m doing, and I’m not going to let anything get in the way of living my life.

There is no childhood trauma.

There is no current financial stress.

There is no ongoing political issue.

There is no ongoing social drama that will stop me from living my life.

I’m committed to being alive, goddammit, right?

Absolute commitment to being alive.

That’s not so hard, is it?

You’re already trying not to die every day.

It’s basically the same thing, but instead of focusing on not dying, you focus on being alive, and that makes a world of difference.

Okay, so we’ve got the absolute commitment part.

I absolutely commit to living my life, and I’m living my life to the fullest, living my life with gusto and passion and, all right, life.

Life is delicious, and life sucks ass, right?

It does.

There are parts of life that just suck, and this is where we get radical acceptance, okay?

It’s easy for us to accept all sorts of wonderful things in our lives.

We love accepting bright, sunny days.

We love accepting sweet, connecting conversations and delicious meals.

We love accepting when our bank account has more money in it than we need to spend.

These are the easy things to accept, but what is radical acceptance?

Radical acceptance is accepting the fact that sometimes life is not so rosy, but it’s still aliveness.

There’s a quality to aliveness that includes everything.

It does.

It includes difficult conversations.

It includes hard choices.

It includes all that we are, all that we ever have been, and all that we ever will be, right?

So absolute commitment to being alive demands a radical acceptance of what aliveness is, and aliveness is all the stuff.

It’s all the things.

It’s dreary, cold, rainy days when your body aches and the last thing you want to do is go to work.

It’s feeling that moment of, and churning it into, oh, right?

And I say this in a ridiculous way because if we can’t get the fact that it’s just us making choices about how we relate to our world, then we’re stuck forever.

There are no external circumstances that dictate how you live your life.

It is just you having a relationship to your life, and this is what radical acceptance does for us.

We receive all of the gifts of life.

We take them all in.

All of the gifts of life, right?

Some gifts are bad gifts.

People have given us bad gifts in our lives.

As a recipient of those gifts, we get to choose by radically accepting everything, oh, I thank you, right?

We get to say, hmm, what shall I do with this gift?

We get to re-gift it.

We get to put it in the trash.

We get to recycle it.

We get to recognize it as a valuable contribution to our life and put it on a shelf and praise it and gladly embrace it.

So many options, but it’s really just a choice about how you will relate to your life, and you can’t relate to your life if you’re rejecting it.

And as a little trick, as a script flip, we’ve got to remember that you can’t reject anything you haven’t received.

So if you’ve already got it, life already gave it to you, so your denial and rejection of it is just kind of hilarious because it’s already in your field of experience.

You already have it.

So stop doing that and just start being like, oh, this is my life, what am I going to do with it?

And then we have willful surrender, willful surrender.

This is probably the trickiest one, okay?

Willful surrender is an invitation to recognize that no is yes.

Our aesthetic practice, our denial, our form, our absolute commitment and radical acceptance basically demand that we say no to all of our superficial egocentric perspectives, okay?

We have to choose to give up the rigidity of a specific self so that we can live through life with wisdom and compassion and skillful means.

I’m going to take a minute to talk about those three terms in a second.

But this willful surrender, this notion, this understanding that it is my own, my own egg that gets in the way of the first two things, right?

It is my own contraction.

It is my own resistance to life.

That creates the problems, okay?

Now that doesn’t mean that when we stop resisting life, there aren’t problems we have to deal with.

It just means that we aren’t creating problems where there is no suffering, right?

So it’s like when you try and force something into a space that’s not big enough for it, the container has to get destroyed.

So when we are contracted in a rigid ego identity, we are creating a small container.

And life is a vast phenomenon that is trying to fill us up, okay?

And so the stronger we clench, we’re basically just creating a pipe bomb.

And eventually the pressure will explode us, okay?

And our willful surrender is the key by which we can expand that container.

And now life flows through us, and we are life flowing.

And now we’re practicing Zen, we’re practicing aliveness, because there is nothing that we’re resisting.

There’s nothing we’re refusing to accept.

And once we accept things, we can have relationships to it, okay?

And this is where I just want to briefly mention the three terms that we hear so much, wisdom, compassion, and skopel means, because they’re woefully misunderstood.

Wisdom is a transcendent perspective, okay?

What that means is that you’re not identified with whatever you’re experiencing.

Wisdom sees things in terms of cause and effect and change, and it’s a very impersonal look at, well, this is the cosmic web of life.

I don’t need to be a person to have any opinion about what’s going on.

That’s irrelevant.

The cosmic web of life is.

Wisdom is the capacity to see that.

That’s it.

That’s it.

It’s all wisdom is.

It’s a transcendent perspective of non-identified awareness of the cause and effect that is ruling existence.

Okay.

Compassion.

Compassion is a spiritual longing for all beings to experience harmony with the divine and to live lives of well-being.

That’s what compassion is.

Compassion is not being nice.

If I hear another Zen practitioner tell me that to be compassionate means that you have to like work in a fucking soup kitchen, I’m going to go insane.

That’s not what compassion is.

Compassion is a spiritual longing for every being, sentient or insentient, in the cosmos to realize its own divine nature and to live a life of well-being.

That’s what compassion is.

And that is why skillful means sometimes is, no, you’re not allowed to do that.

I will not accept that.

Okay.

Because if compassion means the other thing, then there’s no room in skillful means to do things that are not nice.

But sometimes what skillful is exactly something that wouldn’t be considered nice.

And so skillful means is looking at a situation with transcendent perspective and with a sincere desire for every being to attain their own divinity and their own well-being.

And then within that equation being like, okay, how do I wiggle this web?

Whatever I am bringing into existence has an opportunity to tweak things a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit.

We get to make choices.

We get to put karmic effects in motion through the causes we generate by our thoughts, words, and deeds.

We get to take responsibility for that.

And if we have a transcendent perspective on this cosmic web of cause and effect, and we have a sincere desire for all beings to experience their divinity and the wellness of oneness with their essential nature and the flux and flow of all that is, then our skillful means takes on infinite variety because every being needs supported in some other way.

Right?

And we don’t care anymore.

It’s not about me.

There’s no me involved.

Just cause and effect.

Right?

And we go back to absolute commitment.

Right?

Because to say there’s no me involved is just cause and effect is a really committed way of being, which requires a lot of radical acceptance about what the machine is doing, which requires a lot of willful surrender about what we wish the machine was doing or what we think the machine should be doing or how we would like the machine to be sometime in the future.

Got to give all that up.

Otherwise we’re not really seeing what’s here and we’re not really truly for the well-being of all or for the well-being of me and the well-being of me almost always necessitates some less well-being for something else.

But when everything is ourselves, when we really live in a place of oneness, then what’s good for everybody becomes eminently clear.

The win-win scenario is always playing out when we stop thinking that we have to get something out of life.

Anyway, I’ve talked for a long time, but that’s what came up today.

So thank you very much for your attention and your listening.

We appreciate you all.

There was about 13-ish minutes for discussion to speak to whatever’s arising.

Floor is open.

My first question would be, you talked about the explosion and the expansion.

What do you think, if we can change that?

So was your explanation really that when we change our attitude to the life that we’re not anymore need to explode because we just can’t expand?

Or is there always a kind of destruction needed?

So what’s the difference here?

So anything that is brittle will be destroyed.

So when water freezes, it becomes ice.

Ice can be broken up.

So when we create our sense of identities, our freezing water, we’re frozen.

And as long as we are not frozen, then we flow.

And that flow is just an ongoing expression of life.

And in this case, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a dramatic, destructive moment.

But there’s a constant transformation.

So nothing is ever around long enough to have solidified enough to have to become destroyed because it’s constantly evolving.

Great picture.

It’s like ice and water.

And I mean, it’s just perfect that you brought up this topic today.

Because I’m so happy to join the Dharma Talk, but I wasn’t here for the training period.

And it was interesting because I usually don’t like to not be here for the training period, for practice period.

But then my decision was, no, something like what you just said, no, I’m practicing all the time.

And when I decide, I prioritize to be a little longer with my friends here in Germany.

And this is what I choose to do for my commitment.

I still felt this, oh, shit, I want to sit with you guys.

But then I go, no, you know, yeah.

And then the happy flow came, like, oh, wow, I can make it.

I can make it come here.

I’m not saying it gets less over time, this attachment to what it should be or whatever.

That’s just beautiful.

And I give the other 10 minutes to the other participants.

Glad you were able to join us.

How do we remind ourselves?

I’m sorry.

That’s all right.

We’ll just make sure we come back.

I’m sorry I didn’t see you.

Go ahead, Cindy.

I was just wondering how we remind ourselves to stay in this space.

Remind ourselves to stay in what space?

Alive.

So it’s the pain.

When we become sensitive to it, when we’ve had periods of aliveness and we start to shut down, we start to contract, we start to freeze, things don’t feel good.

And the faster we notice that, the faster we’re getting the message, hey, you’re not flowing with life anymore.

You’re resisting, you’re fighting, you’re refusing to look, you’re not paying attention.

You’re no longer living on purpose.

You’re denying, you’re suppressing.

You’re not being authentic.

You’re not living in integrity.

That hurts.

It sucks.

We notice an increase in anxiety, an increase in depression, an increase in lethargy, an increase in procrastination, an increase in distracted behaviors, right?

An increase in addictions to our phones or substances or whatever.

Like, it feels bad.

We’re eating more.

We’re not exercising.

And so the sooner we get the message, ugh, I don’t feel very good.

That’s the divine’s way of slapping you upside the head and saying, like, do you want to start, like, enjoying the pool that you’re floating in?

Yeah.

So for me, that’s the big key is when things feel bad, it’s because I’ve contracted.

And then we go, okay, well, what is that?

Where am I contracting?

Why am I contracting?

What do I need to do about this scenario?

I don’t know what to do.

Thank you.

Recognizing that my own ignorance in radical acceptance of what my understanding of what radical acceptance means or what I thought it meant, not recognizing for way too long that I would have a choice of what to do with the gift.

It didn’t mean having to hold on to it and take it in and keep it there, whether I wanted to or not.

So learning that I can rip, that one goes.

That’s been huge.

Then less of a need to explode.

Yeah.

Yeah, setting down, letting go of rigidity.

It’s been huge.

Thank you for the reminder.

I would like to add something here, because I saw you, Robin, how you moved your hand like throwing something away that was gifted to you.

I don’t know if that’s applicable here, but I learned something from constellation processes, that when we have, for example, there is this, we carry something that’s not ours, then there is a method to say, wait a moment, maybe that’s yours, and you turn to this character and give it to this character.

You would never throw this gift before their feet.

You would never tip those, but you would give it always with respect and care.

And just seeing this gesture of, ah, give it away, feels for me that, yes, there is this choice of I can decide if I take it or give it away, but there is also, for me at least, there is a feeling of it’s not like, in a way, integrated, that I really know why I’m giving it, where I give it.

So, I would say, even though we don’t like it, there is also practice in the way we not take it on or give it to some other place.

And that’s still our part.

And so, I don’t know, maybe it’s very specific, but I just felt that and felt it important to share this.

Maybe, Ubi, you have something to add to that.

Oh, I do.

So, what you’re saying is totally beautiful, right?

Because our actions are our karma.

We’re the cause of the next effect, right?

So, when we live in a container, when we live in this container, we recognize that we are incredibly powerful beings who are creating our world with each moment of our thought, word, or deed, okay?

And so, we must take incredible accountability for what we think, say, and do, okay?

But the trick, or not the trick, but the deep, deep, deep teaching, one of the reasons why I’m so iconoclastic and irreverent is to help break down the idea that things should be a certain way.

That you need to always give this gift back to the person with love and respect.

Creates a confining structure that denies, sometimes you just go, ah, fuck you!

That energy is alive, and it is fine.

It is fine sometimes to receive a gift from somebody that’s a steaming pile of shit and just chuck it on the fucking wall.

Now, that will have karma.

Of course it will.

It might mean that you have to scrape that off the wall.

That’s why I don’t like doing the spaghetti test where you chuck it against the wall to see if it sticks.

I don’t like that because I’ve got to clean it up and it’s annoying.

But, if we put ourselves in a belief structure where that’s not an option, then we’re denying part of life.

So yes, we must take radical accountability for what we think, say, and do because that is the world we are creating.

Sometimes what we think, say, or do needs to be that.

We need to create the karma of a violent reaction.

That person needs to see us so thoroughly reject their gifts so that they can get the wake-up call.

So that we can leave the steaming pile of poo on the floor for them to step in.

How do you like that, bitch?

It’s all okay.

And it’s not okay in the sense of vindictive vengefulness.

It’s that life includes all of these energies.

And to deny or to repress by some sort of preconceived notion of what it means to be sweet and gentle and respectful.

That’s the freaking patriarchy shoving us into a box so that other people can maintain power over us.

No.

No.

Your teaching is absolutely beautiful.

But this point, I think, is very, very essential for us to take in as Zen practitioners embracing all of life.

Good times.

Good times.

All right.

Yeah.

Juicy.

Juicy.

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