Openness and Discipline

*transcript generated by AI

Good morning.

So I’ve been talking a little bit about the Facebook world has become imbued with me spouting off about what hollow bone Zen is.

And I think this is a really interesting exercise because what Jun Po transmitted to me was not vague at all.

It’s not uncertain, unclear in any way, shape or form.

And that we see because of a very strong belief in openness that allowing people to follow their own path and their own exploration has created a sense of vagueness and confusion.

And so today I’d like to talk a little bit about the interplay between actually having a very clear and specific practice structure.

Hollow bone Zen is a very clear and specific way of spiritual training.

Part of what it includes is a radical acceptance and non doctrinal attitude toward each individual’s journey of spiritual training.

And part of that is a confidence that borders on arrogance.

And that like, we know how it works.

We know how training happens.

And you can go dance all over the place and zig and zag all you want.

But when it comes time to actually realizing the promise of Zen, you’ll come back and you’ll do the things that we say.

But in the meantime, have all the fun that you want.

Doing all of the different things that catch your whimsical attention as it dances from this to that.

And one day you’ll realize, hmm, maybe if I just focus on Zen training the way Zen training is meant to be trained, I’ll actually start to realize the benefits of Zen training.

And I’m intentionally being a little bit like, a little bit of a jerk about it and a little bit funny about it.

Because I think, at least for me anyway, I need to hear it that way.

Because when I hear the extremely permissive message of like, it really doesn’t matter.

Do what you want.

Right?

We fully embrace the idea that you have to test this for yourself.

And if you are not ready for this, then you’re not ready for this.

And no matter what we do, it’s not going to help you.

Right?

Until you’re ready to take your seat, Zen cannot work.

So why try and pin you to your cushion if you want to go dance off into some other realm?

Right?

And so that’s part of the attitude of the structure of our whole system and organization is that we allow you with open arms to come and go.

To bring this in, to bring that in, to explore this teaching, to explore that teaching.

And so many of them are extremely beautiful and helpful and do amazing and wonderful things for us, for our community, for the way people show up, for enhancing our emotional literacy, to supporting what we end up doing in Zen practice.

Right?

And so there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of it and most of it is a massive contribution to our understanding of practice.

And yet… And yet…

So many of them are not this.

While this shines light on all of those things, the huge majority of those things will not arrive at this.

And understanding this and being okay with this is a really powerful experience.

To come to the realization that yes, everything is Zen.

Because Zen shines the truth on everything.

It shows us how everything fits together.

But so many of the zigs and zags that are part of the landscape of the mountain which is Dhyana, will never arrive at the top.

Because they zig and zag so much.

And that’s fine.

You’ve got lifetimes.

But if you’re here, it probably means that at least some part of you is ready to go straight up the mountain.

And so I’d just like to invite us to contemplate the relationship we have between the absolute openness of our practice and the total willingness we have to support coming and going and engaging in various traditions and the truth of the matter, which is we have a very specific training regimen that when we just stick to it, it really works.

It’s not very exciting.

It’s actually quite boring in a certain way.

But that’s part of what makes it work so well.

Because it takes away everything that is superfluous.

Everything that’s extra.

All the bells, the whistles, the tassels, the fancy clothes.

These are kind of fancy clothes for us, but they’re not really fancy clothes from where the tradition came from.

All that stuff just gets dropped as unessential.

And we just do the thing.

And so I got that message out pretty quickly.

And so I’m going to take a minute to talk a little bit about my own personal eclectic spirituality.

Because I don’t hide it.

And I think it’s important because it’s, to me, a great example or a great way of demonstrating the way that I understand this.

So a big part of my life is the Western alchemical spiritual tradition, esoteric spirituality, as it arrived in Renaissance Europe.

So I’m a Freemason.

I participate in the ancient mysterious order Rosicrucian.

So I’m a Rosicrucian.

Rosicrucian and Freemasonry kind of mix together.

I also practice ceremonial magic, read tarot, do all sorts of stuff in that world as part of the spiritual practice.

And what I’ve discovered is that those practices are like exploring the landscape of the mountain.

That’s what they do.

They allow us to really spend time hiking through the various streams and forests and valleys and paths of the mountain, which is the human experience.

That’s why they’re so beautiful.

But that also takes us all over the place.

And so for me, what I found very effective is to really intensely practice Zen training to get the vista from the top of the mountain.

And in a way, what this is doing is this is deconstructing the self so completely that we merge with the sublime.

That’s what we’re doing.

That’s what Zen practice is for, is to become so transparent that you see no separation between you and the divinity of within.

Genuine insight.

And that’s beautiful.

It really is.

But one thing that makes our tradition quite special as well is that we recognize that that doesn’t make our relative ego structure disappear.

We may have experiences where it has disappeared.

And in a less mature philosophical context, we may believe that we now have no ego.

But really, we do, because that’s the only thing that has language and meaning associated with experience and can have relationships and those to feed itself.

In deep mystical states, you lose track of needing to eat, pee, poop, sleep, whatever.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

Those things don’t have meaning.

Which is quite delightful to not have to worry about being an individual.

But especially for us as householders, we have to take responsibility for stewarding our ego structure.

And so reconditioning the ego into something that spontaneously manifests wisdom and compassion and skillful means is quite the journey.

Our buddha nature is that which immediately does something.

I had a delightful experience this morning, sitting, and a mosquito came and ran into my cheek.

And buddha nature immediately went, what?

Is it like a little hump?

What?

Like flinched, you know?

That is buddha nature.

Buddha nature is the thing that has a mosquito land on your face and you go, what the fuck?

That is buddha nature.

It’s that immediate visceral intelligence of being embodied.

And that has the capacity to navigate life.

It becomes conditioned.

It is the house, it is the storehouse of our sankaras.

So a baby doesn’t necessarily flinch when a mosquito lands on its face.

That’s a conditioned reaction.

So our buddha nature is the capacity for our body to learn instinctual reactions.

And we have the capacity, through arriving at buddha consciousness, to recondition, to take responsibility for those spontaneous reactions and align them with a deeper truth of what’s really going on.

And then to spontaneously manifest wisdom, compassion, and skillful means.

And so I find these western traditions actually far more adept at undoing the reconditioning process.

Because they intentionally demand that we cultivate various aspects of our experience to understand what’s going on.

Zen is highly effective at reconditioning our experience in the context where things are generally going pretty stably, in my opinion.

So it’s like the little things, or the new things, preventing future conditioning, Zen is very good at.

But in terms of unpacking deep-seated conditioning that happened when you were zero to seven, Zen kind of has a hard time getting that.

Because it’s so deep in our system that the training demanded to see that is extreme.

It’s very extreme.

We can’t see the grammar that constructs the language of our experience.

And so we need to have that reflected to us, and we need to want to work with it.

And a lot of Zen doesn’t do that, in part because compassion is mistaken as being really nice all the time.

And so we don’t quite rub up against each other in the way that demands us to really look at our stuff because everyone’s being so nice and considerate and supportive and helpful.

And that’s kind of a different piece of work.

So anyway, now I’m kind of rambling a little bit.

The whole point of this personal expression of how western alchemy has provided me a more robust means of engaging with reconditioning myself was to point out how the openness to explore allows diversity in our practice that can enrich what we’re doing.

Which is very different than thinking that our practice needs those other things to accomplish its own objective.

Okay, so kind of a mouthful there.

But this is really important because I see a lot of people not understand our practice and then go seek out other modalities to fill the gaps.

Either because they have a different objective than the objective of our practice, or they don’t understand how what we’re doing is going to support its objective.

And this gets into a broader and more complex subject.

I want to leave the rest of the time for discussion.

So hopefully what emerges in the next 20 minutes will shine light on all of the places that were not quite well illuminated in my talk.

Thank you all for listening, for being here this morning, and for exploring this with me.

Thank you.

Just before this I cleaned something, however.

And by doing this I had this thought of how beautiful it is that you, with your turn, bringing tarot into my life in more detail as it was ever before.

Because what was my saying when I had this thought was like, wow, now I can start to live.

And finally, living in this life, in this manifested life, I can find the path to my Zen training, which is not so manifested sometimes.

So this idea of it’s something completely different or separated, in a way yes, and in a way no.

Because as sometimes we have this from the Mondo with the clenched fist and the open hand and having both together.

So as one thing that is not separated, that both exist and you need both and you need to establish both views.

However.

I’m glad you brought up kindness and compassion.

And the potential gaps where we may not see Zen practice is helping certain aspects of our life.

Because I’m greatly struggling with that this morning.

The concept of maintaining boundaries.

And breaking through the conditioning of kindness without wanting it to go into the realm of cruelty.

That’s, that’s very challenging for me.

And of course, when I sit, you know, different insights pop up of how to handle a particular problem.

And recognizing that that’s, that is a problem in my practice, that, that I, I don’t know, that I need to be focusing more on concentration and not paying any attention to the things that come up when I’m sitting.

Then when I resume real life, the answer comes more readily available if I am able to maintain that concentration.

It’s all very new and like, like a toddler, like, Is this gonna work?

Maybe not.

I’ll deal with it.

I don’t know.

You got the wheels turning.

Thank you.

Yeah, beautiful.

There’s a lot in there.

You know, one thing to learn from toddlers is that when they’re learning to walk and they’re on steady on their feet, they really don’t get bothered when they fall down.

They just get back up and try again.

And that’s something that as adults, we stop doing or we start to get so afraid of falling down that we stop walking.

And so I love watching toddlers for that very reason, because they remind me that it’s okay to fall down and sometimes it hurts.

But if our memories are short enough and our conditioning is weak enough, then we realize that, man, we just really want to walk.

And so we’re going to keep trying.

You know, that’s very beautiful.

Especially in the beginning, when it is new, taking it more directly, when this process is new and we’re coming out of a phase of so valuing kindness and compassion, that we actually practice idiot compassion, enabling another’s unconscious behavior, enabling another’s unskillful behavior through a reluctance to establish boundaries.

And this type of compassion, when all of a sudden we stop doing that, we refuse to do that anymore.

It feels like cruelty, even when we’re not being cruel.

And sometimes we have to allow ourselves to err on the side of cruelty, to shift our balance enough so that we can start to see what real what is cruelty and what is compassion.

Right.

If our spectrum is this big, it’s very hard to know what’s going on.

Now, I’m not saying that we should ever be intentionally cruel, but I’m saying that when we first separate from idiot compassion, it feels like what we’re doing is vicious, even if it is still the most gentlest rebuttals.

Right.

And we have to allow ourselves to feel how feel into that so that we can start to really expand the spectrum between idiot compassion and cruelty and recognize all of the skillfulness in between.

Like Marie always says, well, not always says, because she says other things, too, but frequently says there’s a lot of space between no and fuck you.

But I kind of like to fuck you.

Well, sometimes we have to.

We have to.

We can go through periods of our life where without that energy, bad things happen to us.

Right.

And so knowing that we have the capacity to stay in the middle ground without resorting to that energy is is a process.

I do the same thing with my kids in martial training, not even kids with anyone that I train in martial arts.

I always train the hard stuff first before I change the soft stuff and the nonviolence, because for me, if you don’t have the capacity to tear somebody apart, then you can’t have the capacity to be confident in your nonviolence.

And so they feed off of each other and they they become part of a cohesive whole that allows us to step into life in a truly nonviolent way.

No, no.

You know, if we if we keep our middle way so tight and so narrow, right, then the slightest divergence is the difference between heaven and hell.

So there’s another part of the practice where we make our middle way so broad that caravans of camels can pass by.

The direct line to insight is the narrow middle way.

It’s a very rigid, rigorous, strict path to actually punch through to realize unity, consciousness and the divinity of within.

And then once we do that, now we get to wave and wander all over the place.

That’s the way it’s been set up, which is different.

A lot of paths kind of like wave and wander all over the place to slowly bring us into.

Then in the meantime, those big swings can take years and years and years and years, which is why it’s known as the direct path.

And the other paths are known as the gradual.

I have a question.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

This invitation today to think of the candle flame and the light and especially with the breathing, which you compared with the flame.

Interesting for me to like in my imagination, how the flame like moved during the breath.

For me, it was as if with the inhalation, the flame got bigger.

And with the exhalation, it was not not the flame anymore, but it was the shining that got brighter.

I don’t know.

That was just what came to me.

And I’m not quite sure about the candle itself, how and when and how this has changed or not.

If you’d like to share some experiences from your side or others, I would be interested in.

It’s your question for us to share our experiences of.

What we visualize or is your question for me to articulate how this training changes our system over time?

So can you clarify what your question is?

My first idea was, what have you experienced when you brought this visualization into practice?

Your second question or your second idea is also not bad, but I was not thinking about it.

OK, well, what do you what do you want to talk about?

And you have any of your visual experiences and want to share them.

So you’re inviting us to share whether or not we have any particular visual experience during.

OK.

So it’s a question.

So you’re inviting us to share whether or not we have any particular visual experience during, you know.

OK. Or.

Going on your brighter inhale.

Theme screen just went crazy.

For me, inhale.

I can see the candle flame enlarging.

But in my experience on the exhale, it gets.

Darker for me, it’s the contrast between light and dark.

Light and dark.

For me, the flame got.

Larger.

On the inhale and on the exhale, it’s a softness.

It’s.

The light is not.

And have all the red in it as more of the white and it’s just softer.

And this is where it just gets crazy.

So for me, the exhale is when the flame grows and gets hotter.

It’s like a bellows.

When I’m inhaling, I’m like charging the bellows.

And then I’m adding fuel to the flame.

This is actually quite opposite from the way the breath tends to work in.

For me, in meditation, where the inhale is enlivening and the exhale is.

Not really deadening, but like going deeper into trance.

Yeah.

So.

That’s interesting.

What just came to me when you described that, though, was.

When I used to have a fire in the fireplace every night, which has been a long time.

Blowing on the fire.

The inhale.

I’m not doing anything to the fire.

The exhale.

I’m expanding the flame.

So if you.

If I.

If that had been anywhere in my thought.

I may likely have gone that way with it.

I was using.

Apparently, no frame of reference came to me.

I was just in the moment, answering the feeling that answering the question.

And it went the other way.

Yeah.

That’s all you’re supposed to do.

Right.

I get that.

I get that.

I was just saying that I could see, though, how.

I was still putting fires in the fireplace every night on.

During cold times, I would be probably.

I probably have the opposite.

Experience.

I do want to address the no, no.

Or no.

Fuck you.

To Robin.

But only.

When there’s a moment available to do that.

Well, this is your moment.

Oh, this is my moment.

All right.

Well, let me put my crown on and shine.

Choking.

That.

I’m.

I’m.

That.

That was 1978 when somebody, a very.

Kind and wise person said that to me.

That there was a lot of space between no and fuck you.

And underneath that.

What I know from that.

And I know that she was trying to convey to me was that.

The no, the quiet, no.

Which is something I worked with a lot of with my daughter last year when she was coming out of a.

Very difficult relationship with some domestic violence in it.

When, when she was able to get to the place to just stand there within herself and just say no.

Just no.

The quiet.

No.

No.

No.

No.

The quiet.

No.

That’s huge.

Because.

When you go, when, what ends up coming out of you is fuck you.

There is so much anger.

So much.

Pain.

So much held in.

And it’s just like, you can’t, you can’t handle this.

Can’t handle this.

Can’t handle this.

Can’t stand it.

Can’t stand it.

And so you just blow the whole thing up.

When you’re in the place where.

You’ve learned that there is some safety at least in being vulnerable.

Which sounds like a horribly, terribly awful thing to be where you are before.

Then you can.

Get comfortable with saying no.

I just wanted to share that with you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

That’s good, Tom.

Right.

And so we are.

Complete for today.

Go ahead and do a closing check in.