Reality, Consciousness, and Zen Training

*transcript generated by AI

Good morning.

Good morning.

Glad to be here with you all on this delightful, whatever it is.

We’ve got some perfect Ohio fall weather here.

It’s about 32 degrees Fahrenheit with lovely frost on the ground and golden leaves, drifting in a pretty steady rain onto the bright green grass against the backdrop of perfectly blue Azure sky.

It’s pretty remarkable.

I remember a time in my life where even on days li ke this, it seemed like the worst day in the universe.

I’m glad that that’s not today.

But it can be, right?

Because we create our own reality.

The lens that we view the world through is so much more powerful than whatever stimulation is being received by our sense organs.

So this idea that there is a sense organ, a sense object, and a sense consciousness is critical to the insight that our practice aims to cultivate.

This isn’t really the main point of my talk today, but it seems like a good place to start.

And so this model of consciousness, I think, is critical to understand.

Sense organ is capable of perceiving some subset of information from the world around us.

Sense object is that perceived information.

It’s not actually saying that there’s an object out there because we don’t really know.

No human actually knows what a tree really is.

But we’re perceiving something from the tree.

Our eyes perceive the light that bounces off of the tree in all of its different ways.

The bark, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and the whatever.

But that’s not the tree.

So the sense object that our eyes perceive as the sense organ is just the subset of light that can bounce off the tree into our eyes and be perceived by whatever our eyes are capable of receiving.

And so a dog, as far as we understand, primarily sees in hues of yellow and green.

So the way that the light hits their eyes is going to be completely different than the way that the light hits our eyes.

So what our sense organ is capable of receiving dramatically impacts the sense object that we perceive already.

So there’s already this going on.

And then there’s a sense consciousness.

So our sense organ perceives a set of light waves, if we stay with the eye consciousness.

So our eyes are capable of receiving a subset of light frequencies bouncing off of the tree, to continue the example.

And then there’s a sense consciousness that has ancestral memory, that has learned memory, that has all of the conscious impressions that have ever been.

This is our sense consciousness.

And it is our consciousness that gives this particular pattern of information received by the organ meaning.

And so in our consciousness studies and in our insight, we come to understand that there is an eye, an ear, a nose, a tongue, a body and a mind.

There are six sense organs.

And that means that each of those organs has a corresponding set of information it can receive, which is its sense objects.

And further, it has a corresponding set of consciousnesses.

So in our model, each organ has its own consciousness.

And we can think of that like filing cabinets, where like our ears can go to filing cabinets and be like, what does this sound mean?

And our consciousnesses have to have answers.

So if we see a pattern, we will make sense of it.

We will make sense of it.

We will take our best guess at whatever that thing is.

So our consciousnesses hate to serve up, I have no idea what that is.

They feel like they failed in their job when they just go, no idea.

And so what can happen is an unknown sound will get tagged with whatever approximates that sound based on that consciousnesses best guess.

An unknown site will get tagged with the best guess.

And as we mature, we become better at understanding when we’re guessing and when we’re not.

But a lot of times we’re guessing and we don’t think we are.

And this is very important to understand.

So this gives us 18 sense consciousnesses.

And the Heart Sutra tells us that they’re all bullshit.

So from an awakened mind, from the awakened perspective, from the perfection of wisdom, these consciousnesses don’t exist.

These sense organs don’t exist.

These sense objects don’t exist.

In a wisdom perspective, there actually is just pure potentiality.

And so wisdom is this capacity to be aware of a state of consciousness before any of this activates.

So that’s what wisdom really is.

And the Heart Sutra is trying to point us past all of these distinctions, past all these relative modes of knowing, and to something that’s fundamentally unknowable.

But it’s purely experiential as a blissful state of pure consciousness, which is wisdom.

And in that wisdom, we gain all this insight.

To round out our consciousness model in Zen and what we’re gaining insight in, there’s also the Manas and there’s the Alaya-Vijnana.

And so basically what happens is all of this 15 organ-object-consciousness things that are happening as realms of experience get stitched together.

Let me be more precise.

Because if I’m going to do this, I might as well do it in a precise manner.

That all drops into what’s called the Storehouse Consciousness.

And the Storehouse Consciousness pulls on all of our collective memory, whatever we know about anything.

And sometimes that’s ancestral, sometimes that’s personal, it doesn’t really matter.

That’s all in the Storehouse.

And whatever’s in the Storehouse really perfumes those individual consciousnesses.

That’s what gives them their flavor.

So for example, if our storehouse is full of depressed perfume, then all of our consciousnesses are going to see things in kind of a grayer, pessimistic way.

Because they’re all being perfumed with depression.

If our storehouse is fundamentally anxious, and it’s pulling on a whole bunch of anxious memories, then it’s going to perceive all of these things through a lens of anxiety.

If our storehouse is perfuming with happy juju, then we can step in a pile of dog dookie and be like, Wow!

What are the odds that in this giant yard I stepped in a pile of dog dookie?

And so that’s the function of the storehouse, is to provide the perfume and the overall context by which each of our consciousnesses are interpreting the meaning that they had with their particular interaction with a sense of object.

So there’s this subtle seventh layer of consciousness that kind of exists in the space between all of this interaction.

And that’s where we develop an ego structure.

And this ego structure is basically stitching together all of this independent information into a whole, into a whole cloth experience that’s served up as an object to an I structure that says, I am experiencing this.

And that this is this whole vast web that was put together.

So the seventh layer of consciousness produces a really miraculous thing, where all of these independent layers of sense experience are getting stitched together into one big picture.

And this is happening thousands and thousands of times a second.

Our eyes believe images to be a continuous picture at about 60 frames per second.

Our mind is producing its reality at something like 4,600 times per second.

So the resolution and the amount of information that’s being stitched together is truly phenomenal.

It’s totally staggering.

And so then we get this really delightful series of discrete moments that we experience as an I, that we say, this is my experience.

And the relationship we take to that goes into the storehouse consciousness to perfume the future.

So our Zazen practice is inviting us to take a seat in Prasanna Paramita, into the womb of wisdom, to drop all of this relative activity so that you can examine it.

Shanta Vipassana, I talked about this, I think, last week, maybe the week before.

But it’s the synthesis of stilling the mind to a point of pure awareness, and then investigating this process that provides the insight of our Zazen practice that allows us to eradicate suffering from our lives, because we recognize that there is no such thing as suffering.

There fundamentally is no such thing as suffering when we see that all that is happening is this cosmic web of cause and effect according to the perfuming that we give a certain moment.

And that’s where Jhumpa would say that we finally get the joke, that we are creating our own reality.

And if we’re creating a reality that sucks, well then just stop it.

If you don’t like your script, fire your script writer and hire another one, because all of it is available to you.

And you don’t actually have to take the stitching together process that we call ego so seriously, because you understand what it is.

He calls it the divine figment of imagination, which I think is appropriate.

It’s a really useful divine figment of imagination though, so I think it’s important to give it its due.

And so I’m talking about all of this stuff, because if we don’t understand this, then the Zen training becomes ineffective, because we don’t really know what the insight we’re trying to get is.

How does this produce an end of suffering?

It produces an end of suffering because we become familiar with the mechanics of consciousness, and we become capable of manipulating those mechanisms.

And that’s how we reconstruct our ego identity, and that’s how we reconstruct the world that we live in, and that’s how we end up being able to live as Buddha, as awakened ones, and consequently develop skillful beings, and then become bodhisattvas, reincarnated to do good in the world.

So in hollow bones, in this system of Zen, our training is multifaceted.

And one of the things I want to bring into our Open Door Zen Container is a regular naming of a practice focus for the week.

I think it’s very important that we don’t isolate practice to the two hours on Sunday.

This is a specific container that does a lot of beautiful things for us.

So in hollow bones, we have the Mando Zen Koan practices, we have the five training elements, we have our ritual form.

These are the basic components of our life, of our Zen practice and training.

And so what I’d like everyone to consider for this week is the five training elements, specifically, in the sense that they exist, and you can use them to moderate your life.

So I think everyone here has a Sutra book and a Mando manual.

They are written very differently in the two texts.

So what we have handed down from Ajahn Po is not consistent, although it is coherent.

And we have to read them together and put them together in order to truly understand what each mirror is.

And I wrote rather extensively around the five practice mirrors on the Open Door Zen Facebook page, so you can check that out as well.

But I’d like to invite everyone to spend a week just re-familiarizing yourself with these training elements.

Because when we have a very mature Zen practice, these mirrors, these elements are active all the time, and they’re active in an inner component and in an outer component.

And this is the last thing I’m going to say before I open it up.

The inner component is a way for us to work from a mind over matter perspective.

It’s saying that when I transform something within the way I view the world, the world out there changes in a discernible way.

So we work towards wisdom, compassion, and skillful means from the inside out.

But then we can also work from wisdom, compassion, and skillful means from the outside in.

So if we look at our mission statement and our purification, we see these two ways.

Our mission statement is very much an inside-out way of being.

And our purification is an outside-in way of being.

All the unskillful actions that we produce, we are going to recondition through meditation and action.

So we’re going to honestly name where we’re unskillful, and then we’re going to commit to doing something more skillful next time, and we’re going to stay on that until we actually do the skillful thing.

And that will change the interior of our world.

That will change how we see.

That will change the way that the storehouse is perfumed, which will change the way that our consciousnesses are making sense of their experience, which will change the way that we behave, which will change the way that our consciousnesses are experiencing things, which will change the way they perfume the storehouse consciousness.

So we have to see how it comes in.

So this seeding and perfuming, cause and effect, is simultaneously and mutually interactive.

That’s what it means to be in a non-dual tradition.

We don’t take one perspective over the other.

Matter over matter and matter over mind are mutually informing each other.

This is a little bit different than a lot of traditions that say causation only happens one way.

We believe that causation flows in both directions.

So anyway, this is a longer thing than I originally intended.

So hopefully it was useful.

I do like to invite Asanka to look at the five training elements in the Manda Manual, the Sutra book, and on the Open Doors Facebook page if you have Facebook.

If you don’t, let me know and I’ll send them to you.

And then we’ll talk next week about what we get out of that.

So next week is going to be much more discussive.

It’s going to start with, what did you all discover by examining the five training elements?

I’m telling you ahead of time.

Also hold me accountable if I start to talk about something else.

I’ll say, Dan, stop, we’ve got to talk about five training elements.

So thank you all very much for your attention and for your willingness to engage in this Zen training.

I’m grateful to be on the path with you.

And I believe I left us about 13 minutes for discussion.

I just realized I committed a faux pas and I pointed my pointing sticks at the Buddha.

Don’t want to do that.

Well, if no one else is talking.

I think that’s the key point there is it goes both directions.

So it’s not just an inside-out thing.

It could very much be an outside-in thing.

And I personally think that outside-in can be a bit more effective in changing that storehouse container.

You can get so wrapped up in your own head and you’re like, oh, well, everything is, this is hard and that’s hard.

And like, oh, I’m just going to slug through it.

And then you get that kind of depressive mentality that’s hard to get out of.

And sometimes you need external stimulus in order to get out of that.

And so if you take that like, oh, hey, I had this interaction with X person that sucked.

All right, let’s do better next time.

And then maybe you do a little better next time.

And then it sucks a little less.

Then maybe you do a little bit better the next time.

And it sucks a little less.

And that’s the evidence of realizing that you’re on a positive path in whatever little minuscule area that might be.

That then becomes the positive impetus to change the way that you view everything else from an internal standpoint.

You’re like, oh, hey, this thing happened and it’s getting better.

And that means it can get better.

And so if that can get better, then this can get better.

And then this can get better.

And then this can get better.

And that’s how everything starts.

Because if you just go, okay, well, yeah, like I’m super down or I’m super anxious or I’m super fearful or I’m super depressed or I’m super whatever, like, oh, no, no, now I’m not.

If it was that easy, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

And so I think that’s the key is that recognizing all of those little actions that we take in a positive direction, regardless of how small that action is.

Thousands of small actions or hundreds of small actions or dozens or tens are still made up of one small action after another.

And as long as you’re in a positive direction, you can make a positive change.

That’s a thing.

Recognizing that is what then goes the other direction internally and makes you go, yep, nope, it’s getting better.

We’re good.

So it’s good.

That’s a great way to look at it, personally, I think.

Early on in Zen Jin’s training, we had a day where I think the result of the conversation, I won’t share the contents of the conversation, but the result of the conversation was I had her write a post-it note that said, pick a fucking tree.

And she just put it right there in front of her desk, and that was her call to action.

Just start.

Just start doing something.

Just start.

Right?

Because once we’re walking, we can change direction.

But as long as we’re standing still, we’re always in the same place.

And that can be revolutionary.

True.

Sometimes that first step’s the hardest one to take.

Almost always.

Yeah.

Inertia’s a bitch.

The first step is the hardest one to take, whatever direction it happens to be.

It changes.

Not what our organism prefers.

Actually, ironically enough, I think that the step in the positive direction is significantly harder than the step in the negative direction.

Totally.

One is uphill and the other is definitely downhill.

Downhill, unfortunately, tends to be easier.

That’s why we have self-assured self-discipline, which we’re going to talk about later today.

I would like to add to that is the experience of plateaus or, like, brick walls, and we feel like we’re not progressing.

And there are often moments when we think about quitting, whatever we’re going to do, because we’re thinking it’s not working.

And having also the experience of, no, wait a moment, just keep going.

Because life isn’t linear.

Life isn’t exponential in that way.

So it is, but on minor scales, it might be sometimes a turnaround and sometimes just somewhere else.

But overall, yes, it goes in one direction.

Yeah, so for that, I pretty much love just the concentration meditation practice, where there are times when it’s easy to stay at the breath.

And then there are times when you’re lucky when you’re still at the breath while you breathe out.

Because you were with your breath by the inhalation.

And creating that space of acceptance and of knowing that the intention to come back over and over to do what you want to do, to act in alignment with your highest values and with what you know so far.

Because you always will actualize what you know.

Just keep going.

That’s such a great point.

Who’s the little fish?

Finding Nemo.

Just keep swimming.

Yeah, Tori.

Swimming, swimming.

You’re a parent when everything turns into a Disney movie.

Did I see Robin want to unmute?

Not particularly, but I can ramble about something.

No, I’m just feeling appreciative for this talk.

So, yeah, sometimes there’s just that external change perspective.

Because I’m all into the little minutia of wildlife around here.

Last week it was turkeys.

And this week it was bees.

My bees did not make it.

The wasps, you know.

And it broke my heart.

Absolutely broke my heart.

And this morning I was shocked by how deeply that kept coming back.

Because I learned so much from these beautiful little creatures.

And this talk helped me remember that that’s a gift.

And to have that experience and have a greater depth of understanding of my fellow life.

That comes with beauty and sadness and death.

And it’s all one.

Can’t escape that.

So we might as well embrace it.

Enjoy stepping in the dookie.

Thank you.

Marie from Columbus, Ohio.

It’s a beautiful day here.

I just want to say thank you to each one of you.

For me.

And then, oh, my goodness.

Ryan.

For your perspective on it.

Perfect.

Robin, absolutely.

Thank you all.

I’m in.

Check in.

So, presentation.

Okay.