Taking Care of Business

*transcript generated by AI

Good morning.

So has anyone ever heard of the idea of Vajra Samadhi, Diamond Samadhi, Adamantine Samadhi, any of these terms?

No?

Fantastic.

Has anyone ever heard the term Anutara Samyak Sambodhi, Complete Unexcelled Perfect Enlightenment?

No?

Okay.

So everyone remember the part in the Heart Sutra where it says something along the lines of, All awakened ones, all compassionate ones rely upon this transcendent wisdom of meditative awareness and therefore experience the most supreme awakening enlightenment.

Hopefully you’ve heard that one.

These are all the same thing.

So these are all different ways of pointing to the same capacity.

And this capacity is Buddha, this awakened one.

It’s not anything other than the capacity to rest in what is.

And in Zen we say that shit all the time, so much so that it’s almost become meaningless.

Because for the huge majority of us, we want to change something about what is.

And so we keep getting reminded, no, our practice is to actually just be with what is.

So what does that mean?

It means that you be with your body, you be with your mind, you be with your emotions, you be with your heart, you be with your circumstances.

You also be with the calm voidness at the center of your being.

You also be with the truth of the interconnected phenomenon that is life.

All of these things simultaneously.

Sometimes your attention flits to pure silence and void and stillness.

Great, absolutely.

Sometimes your attention gets trapped by neurotic obsessive compulsive thought patterns around life issues.

Great, fantastic.

Both are what is.

And so we come to this practice seeking escape from this samsara stuff, which gives us a taste of the nirvana stuff.

And then we just want to stay there, right?

We want to go, man, that calm, peaceful, blissful state of mind is just, that’s what’s real.

The rest of this stuff is just not what is.

That’s just not it.

And this is a trap.

It’s a trap that we all fall into.

It’s a trap that’s actually promoted by a huge percentage of people who talk on the topic of Zen.

And even if they do say, what is, no, be with what is, then implicit in the rest of their dialogue is a not okayness with what is.

They may so heavily emphasize compassion that they refuse to acknowledge that sometimes compassion isn’t what is.

And so then they force compassion into the moment by saying that, oh, what is, is compassionate.

It’s like, if what is, is compassionate, then that doesn’t make any fucking sense to me.

I’m going to swear a lot in this dialogue.

And why is that?

Because the idea of compassion being a certain mode of behavior is by definition, not permanent.

Okay.

So that can’t be it.

Because what we’re talking about is the thing which is beyond everything that changes.

What’s left when everything that’s changes is gone.

That’s our practice.

That’s where we take our seat.

We sit in that permanent, ever present truth within which everything else changes.

Compassion comes and goes.

Especially the idealized notion of how our behavior should or shouldn’t be.

Because the idea that our behavior should be this way or should be that way is completely insane.

If you actually want to take a truth of every moment is different, every moment requires different things.

So what is the compassion that is actually being talked about?

The compassion that’s actually being talked about is to be able to be fundamentally okay to be radically accepting of everything that is, including stuff we don’t like, including people we don’t like.

Because we get to be fundamentally compassionate with they don’t like things either.

I don’t like them.

They don’t like me.

Now we can have compassion because we both don’t like each other.

We can suffer with the dislike.

And it’s okay.

It’s perfectly fine.

I don’t have to like anybody.

Nothing in the Buddha Dharma says you have to like people.

I don’t recall a single line in all of my studies that says you have to like people.

Fuck people.

People are stupid.

Fuck people.

People are stupid.

So then what does that mean?

Well, it means we just show up and we take care of bitterness and we don’t got to worry so much about whether or not we like it.

It doesn’t have to feel a certain way.

It doesn’t have to be a certain way.

And we don’t have to think a certain way.

We don’t have to act a certain way.

We show up, we take care of business.

And what does that mean to take care of business?

You don’t know until your business is in front of you.

If anyone tells you right here in a Dharma talk what it means on how you should show up in your life and how you find this and how you do that and how you navigate these situations, they’re insane.

They don’t get it.

You can only live your life one moment at a time because it’s only real one moment at a time.

All of our practices return to this.

Like we say in the Song of Zazen, all of our practices return to this.

We do lots of good stuff.

We recondition ourselves to be lots of very specific ways because we find them to be generally helpful.

But that doesn’t mean that those ways of being are this.

They all return to this.

It is a huge distinction to make.

All of our precepts, all of our ideals, all of our values, everything that we hold sacred in the world is arbitrary bullshit.

What is real is what’s happening right now.

And how do you take care of it?

Now, in the context of that, it’s really helpful to have a guiding values, a guiding principle, a destination in mind, because we live in time and space and time and space is governed by these things.

So it’s very helpful.

But it’s not the truth that Zen is pointing to.

So anyway, in this Vajrasamadhi, this Prajnaparamita, which I’ve been talking about the whole time, whether you connected the two or not, now I’m connecting them for you.

Everything that I just said is an expression of what it means to view the world from Vajrasamadhi, Prajnaparamita, the Great Wisdom Heart Sutra, all of these things.

So in the Vajrasamadhi Sutra, which I’m reading for the first time and finding completely delightful, I have a lot left to go and chew on, but he talks about Paramitas.

I’m going to do this fairly quickly, because I want to get to discussion.

But I’m also think that it’s really critical that you all hear this.

Who thinks of Dhanaparamita as charity in a sense of like, giving things freely and not being selfish and wanting to have open energetic flows of exchange and all that kind of stuff.

Then generally in Dhanaparamita.

Okay, so that’s one way we practice it.

But actually, this is what it is from Vajrasamadhi.

A Buddha practices Dhanaparamita like this.

If a person forsakes desires, their mind will be always pure.

Through their purity and speech and skillful means, they benefit themselves and others.

This is Dhanaparamita.

This is a perfection charity.

So what does that mean?

It means that through a pure consciousness, a consciousness that is no longer attached to material gain, status, fame, shame, any of those things that drive our regular forms of behavior, we can actually be fully present to what is and show up according to what is needed.

That is dana.

Dana is being so void of self interest that in the moment, which includes your own self interest, you show up.

It has nothing to do with giving somebody a bell because they don’t have one.

It has nothing to do with volunteering at your local pantry.

That’s not Buddha Dhanaparamita.

Okay, then we have the next one.

With firm determination and constant non-abiding, their mind is pure, untainted.

They do not cling to the three realms of existence.

This is Silaparamita, the perfection of morality.

There’s a few technical terms in here.

All right, so firm determination is like a radical commitment, right?

Absolute commitment to radical acceptance.

Constant non-abiding, that’s like the radical acceptance part.

And what that means is that wherever state we’re in, that’s okay.

We’re not trying to be in a state, getting pushed into some other state, and then trying to abide in the original state or convince ourselves that we should be this way when we’re actually that way or doing any of that stuff.

So a non-abiding mind is just what it is in the moment that it is it, so that the appropriate action can be taken to deal with what is.

Okay, so that’s non-abiding.

In this non-abiding, we are pure and untainted.

What does that mean?

It doesn’t mean that some states are pure and some states are not pure.

It means that if you’re going to be angry, be angry.

Be purely angry.

Don’t taint your anger with shame, violence, greed, ignorance, etc.

Don’t taint your anger.

Just be angry, and you’ll realize a remarkable clarity, and then you show up.

When you’re sad, be freaking sad.

Don’t taint your sadness with a desire to not be sad because then you miss the point of all of the sadness, which is trying to tell you, hey, you need to change this thing in your life.

And you’re like, no, I don’t want to because I should feel happy right now.

I should be okay.

What the fuck?

That doesn’t make any sense.

That’s a corrupted sadness, and then you get confused, and you don’t know what your sadness means, and then you can’t show up and take care of your business.

This is the perfection of morality.

Because we are no longer seeking after some particular state of being, we are capable of showing up objectively in the state that we are.

And therefore, we remain moral, okay?

Taken into sex, which is often untalked about.

If I’m super horny, and I really want to get laid, and I start acting manipulatively because I’m clinging after the resolution of my arousal, well, then guess what?

I’m going to do things that are not moral.

I’m going to manipulate.

I’m going to lie.

I’m going to schmooze.

I’m going to use cheesy pickup lines, right?

If I’m really lost, I might actually use some more coercive means.

But if I’m not actually concerned about whether or not my arousal gets satisfied, then when it doesn’t, that’s fine.

And when it does, that’s great.

And I can do so with mutual love and respect and clarity and representation of two beings coming together in a sacred union.

And that is infinitely more fulfilling than just a release.

Cultivating the practices relating to the various aspects of the void and extricating themselves from all the fetters, they are not attached to anything.

They calm and silence the three karmic formations, which are body, speech, and mind, and do not abide in either body or mind.

This is the perfection of patience, samti parmita.

So this is where it gets really critical.

We have to cultivate practices that show us the other side of reality that is nirvanic, blissful, pure, still consciousness, in order to have the space we need to cut off sloth and torpor, conceit, anger, restlessness, and doubt, right?

We cannot cut off those fetters from within the mind, which creates those fetters.

So we have to train ourselves to be able to move into a different state of mind so we can unpack all of those sankharas, those deep unconscious conditioning patterns, from outside of them.

It’s like trying to fix your roof while you’re on the inside of the house.

You can’t do it.

You’ve got to get out of the house to fix your roof, right?

Or the basement is probably a better metaphor, whatever, okay?

But this is the perfection of patience, because we abide in neither body nor mind.

Abiding in neither body or mind means that when our body is freaking out, we don’t let it take over our consciousness.

When our mind is freaking out, we don’t let it take over our consciousness.

We’re not addicted to a body state.

We’re not addicted to a mind state.

When our mind is running rampant, we retreat into our body.

When our body is running rampant, we retreat into our mind.

When both are going crazy, we retreat into pure, blissful consciousness.

And this non-attachment, yes, thank you, thumbs up, this non-attachment to these different states and this capacity to be non-abiding and this disciplined practice of moving into the void is what allows us to seamlessly move throughout the three worlds and not be attached to being in any of the three worlds, but to engage from any of the three worlds as necessary to take care of our business.

Okay, everyone tracking me so far?

I missed, what are the three worlds again?

Oh, the three worlds are desire, form, and formless.

That’s their traditional names, which is really kind of like body, thought, and emotion, and transcendent consciousness.

Good question.

All right, so we’re almost, we’re almost done here.

We got two, oh, we have, we have three left.

We’re halfway there.

Okay.

By leaving all sense objects, forms, these are the things that you perceive through your regular five senses, classifications, and all ego-generating activities, that’s basically all of your thought and self-referential narrative, they overcome views of both non-existence, transcendent, blissful, pure consciousness, and existence, the relative world, and delve deeply into the void of the aggregates and the related ramifications.

Okay, so that’s another technical phrase, which basically means, remember at the beginning of the Heart Sutra, oh my gosh, thoughts, feelings, volitional concepts, and whatever our void of any personal self-nature, blah, blah, blah, whatever the intro is, right?

Okay, so basically what we’re pointing to here is that everything that constitutes your regular mental functioning and your regular experience of reality is a codependent arising phenomenon.

It is a void of its own self-nature, right?

So consciousness arises through the interplay of whatever and physical experience.

Volition arises from the consciousness of self-referential experience and a need to move throughout the world, right?

All these things arise in conjunction.

They’re all made up of different parts.

You aren’t any of the things that constitute a you.

They’re just different aspects of how a you actually functions in the world, which is terrifying.

That’s why it’s often called the Heart Attack Sutra, because it basically says that everything that you think you are is not, in essence, anything at all, right?

And this is why this is called the Perfection of Courage, because you basically examine all of your experience, realize that you don’t actually exist, and in that realization, you blow yourself open to the non-abiding state, to the capacity to flip back and forth between formless form, desire worlds.

All of these things become totally okay, because there’s no you that you have to persist, right?

There’s no you that has to persist throughout time and space when you realize that you don’t actually exist at all, and that takes a great deal of courage, right?

But it’s only when you realize this that you’re capable of showing up to take care of your business, because you’re not going to be motivated by personal desires because you don’t exist.

You can just look at the situation and be like, man, this organism would really benefit if it was that way, but you’d be told it’s better for everyone else if it’s that way, and I should support them in doing that, and if I can’t tolerate it, I’ll just leave.

Okay, well, that’s courageous.

That’s a very courageous thing to do, to not sublimate our needs to the needs of a group, and to not try and force a group to meet our needs.

That takes a lot of courage.

Okay, so this is what Buddha is, right?

Now we get into Dhyana Parmita, the perfection of meditation, which is what our whole school was founded on, completely abandoning attachment to both the void and calmness, yet not lingering in any void.

The mind is without abode, nor does it dwell in the great void itself.

This is Dhyana Parmita, and like, it’s like, he did these great expositions on all the other Parmitas, and for Dhyana Parmita, that’s all you had to say, like, come on, people, slackers.

So really, all they’re talking about here is your regular form of consciousness that’s existing right now, and if you’ve ever had a moment of pure, unified, bliss consciousness in your meditation, right?

They’re the same thing.

And so, yeah, for those of you who are listening to the audio, I’m getting the reactions on the thing that are perfect.

So right now, a bunch of balloons just popped up.

Earlier, it was a thumbs-up bubble.

So anyway, so the idea is that Dhyana, the perfection of meditative mind, is not to be able to freely enter into a state of nirvanic consciousness where thoughts cease, where you unzip and become one with the cosmos, okay?

If you’re a master of meditation, you can do that whenever you want, including simultaneous to, just like the saying, The Awakened One’s Vow, if each moment’s a rising flash of our normal feelings and thoughts, we will simultaneously recognize within us a field of pure awareness, what is a professional skillful means.

That simultaneously recognize a field of pure awareness is nirvanic consciousness underneath or simultaneous to everything else that’s happening in the world, everything else that’s happening in our objects, emotions, and thoughts, okay?

That’s what the perfection of Dhyana is, and that’s why our Zen meditation at its highest level is just sit down, shut up, be there, okay?

But earlier we said that we had to train ourselves to go into bliss consciousness, into nirvana at will, so that we have that as a tool to see through all the other things.

So you don’t get to just sit here before you’ve trained yourself to enter into nirvana conscious at will, okay?

They’re different times, they’re different modes of practice.

So the deep shamatha, it’s called shamatha, of cutting off all thoughts, cutting off all mind-wandering, being perfectly present, unzipping, going into cosmic consciousness.

This is a prerequisite for Dhyana, okay?

And then in Dhyana, you feel that substratum of nirvana consciousness as your mind does its normal thing, and now you’re sitting zen.

That’s what that’s what it’s all about, okay?

Which is not very easy, but extremely easy to describe.

So people who can’t do either, be wary of, okay?

And here we go.

Free of all projections and being void in nature, the mind does not even cling to the void itself, okay?

So being free of all projections is, so projection consciousness is when we impute our interpretation of reality onto reality, okay?

It’s the function of mind to make sense of the sensory experience.

Recognizing that all of those projections are illusions, fundamentally illusions, right?

Which is not hard, right?

Like you see a bell here, but we all know that because we have some education that this is made up of molecules and atoms.

We don’t perceive molecules and atoms.

We even less so perceive the underlying vibratory experience of the quarks and whatever sub-particles make up molecules and atoms and neurons and whatever, whatever, right?

I’m not a scientist, okay?

But we know that our sense world is not accurate because all that really exists is vibration and the force of energy going like this, and then having sex with each other.

Okay, so when you realize that, then you don’t need to attach to anything, nor do you need, including the experience of pure blissful consciousness, where you actually touch into that pure vibratory field, right?

Because it’s all the same.

There’s different forms of energy, and therefore the mind does not seek calmness.

This is one of the big things.

When you actually see through it, you no longer need your mind to be in a certain state, just like we talked about in the other Paramitas, because you radically accept that whatever mind state is happening is the manifestation of the cosmos as it is, and it’s there for a reason, doing its job according to the codependent arising of phenomena.

So you don’t need to seek calm realization.

You don’t need to seek happiness or bliss or whatever.

You don’t need to, because it’s all just like, this is what’s happening.

Its nature is perpetual equanimity.

So when nothing needs to be different than what it is, because everything is exactly as it should be, even if we don’t like how it is, part of exactly how it should be is the fact that we don’t like it, because it’s not cool, according to our time and space moral perspective.

Okay, well, fine.

Well, then we’re still in equanimity.

You can be in totally pissed off.

You can be a total neurotic mess and still be equanimous.

Why?

Because you feel like, yeah, I’m pissed off.

There’s no disturbance in being angry.

There’s disturbance in thinking that your anger is misplaced or a problem.

So the reality of all dharmas has this absolute nature.

It does not rely on any of the regular stages of spiritual progression or any particular transcendent state.

In this text, they call it wisdom, and this is the perfection of wisdom.

So I’ve ended up needing more time than I had originally thought it would, but that’s okay, because I’ve had a lot of fun, and hopefully you did too.

And I’ve got about 10 minutes left for discussion, which can take up some part of this or be completely tangential.

Thanks for listening.

So first of all, awesome job.

Thank you, Umi.

Delightful to listen to.

And I love the timing.

I always love the timing.

Because, yes, I was exactly dealing with that this morning.

And it’s nice, then, to see that some of that whole practice here does something with my consciousness and with my structures of thinking and my beliefs and my reactions and answers to the world.

So I noticed moments this morning when I was fighting against modes of my existence.

And I asked myself, like, really?

Is that really what I do?

How about just accepting that this is now?

Come on.

And that was uncomfortable in one way, but on the other way, really liberating and just makes life so much easier and so much more truthful and so much more in alignment.

And so, like, ah, this is how I show up.

Ah, look at this.

So there’s less hiding, less lying, less of everything that I want to get rid of, which I thought I need to get rid of with pressing myself into a certain structure.

So, ooh, yeah, this is intense, crazy, brave, blissful, horrible, terrifying, everything at all.

Everything it was.

So, and one thing came to my mind because of that, what we think about sometimes, especially when fresh people come into practice, that this stilling the mind, bring it to one point at a certain time.

For me, it looks more like the one point is an infinite big point.

So maybe you like to talk about that or just we listen to others who have other thoughts.

Thank you.

Let’s put a pin in that for a future Dharma talk because that’s more than we have time for now.

That’s a good point.

I’m delightful.

I think I saw Robin was unmuted and before I talk more, I want to make sure we hear from everybody.

I’m wondering if there’s, when you have total acceptance of what is, then what’s stopped one from becoming neglectful of life?

Hmm.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I really want to answer that because it’s a really important question, but let’s just check in with Marie first.

I’ll go and answer that question because I didn’t hear the vast majority of what you were saying, the Dharma talk, because company came in and I had to get things settled.

And then Zhenshen’s response was really piqued my interest.

So I’ll look forward to recording and listening to you respond, Robin.

This kind of has to do with the whole big dot, little dot thing, actually.

So in a way, these are kind of tied together.

We are both.

We are both a zero point.

Just can you repeat the question again?

I think I missed something because of audio.

So the question was when we accept everything, what stops us from becoming neglectful of life?

So if we radically accept life as it is, then where does the motivation come from to show up in life a certain way?

So this is part of that whole dot circle thing in the sense that we come into practice as a dot, as a very self-referential figure, and we have to explode into the big all-encompassing nirvanic consciousness that includes everything.

And what a lot of people do is they, in Zen practice in particular, demands people deconstruct their ego identity in order to achieve that oneness, which makes perfect sense, because how else can you explode into the infinite if you’re still a dot?

You can’t, right?

So zero has to become infinite.

The trick is the infinite has to become zero again.

And so it’s a partial realization to accept everything completely and to abdicate the fact that we’re still a zero point in time and space.

And that’s the black hole of Zen disease, is to get so big and to be so accepting and to be so blown out by the fact that time is infinite and we’re all immortal and things will take place over millions of generations and there’s an infinite cosmic web of karmic interactions and I’m just this puny insignificant time-bound human, right?

Everything’s perfect exactly as it is.

All that stuff is true, but it’s only halfway around the circle of Zen practice.

The other half is, so after we return to the divine, we have to recognize that the divine manifests itself through us.

We are the divine’s fingers and toes.

All of the cosmos is the divine’s brain, right?

So we are individual neurons in the consciousness of the cosmos.

And if we shut ourselves off because we’re all blissed out because we just made love to God, well, then we’re like, we stopped showing up, you know, and to continue the sexual metaphors because I’m on it today, it’s like in the afterglow.

If there’s no snuggling, no eye gazing, you don’t necessarily have to talk, but if there’s no connection in the afterglow and somebody just rolls over and falls asleep, it’s like, fuck you, man.

Like we just shared our soul together and you’re just going to roll over and fall asleep, you arrogant prick, right?

No, we’re still here.

We’re still two.

Two became one, one becomes two in a never-ending cycle of creation, right?

And so to forget that we are also one who has to show up to meet the other half, to recreate the one, is to just completely lose ourselves and abdicate reality as it is.

Because what is that we are also a time-bound, space-bound organism that has a relative function in a relative cosmos.

No amount of unity consciousness makes that not true.

I just thought if you would hit me with a hammer, I would feel it.

There’s no way I’m not feeling that.

As much as I meditate, I will feel that.

If you don’t while you’re meditating, you’ll feel it when you come back, right?

My thought related to my children, my grandchildren, that you can’t look at that and just think that the universe will take care of this.

You got a job to do.

Yeah, exactly.

So there’s zero point and there’s infinite.

In terms of meditation technique and meditation philosophy, whether or not we hold ourselves accountable to the zero point process or whether or not we just try and go straight into expansion, we can talk about that in our next Dharma talk.

That’s more of a technical procedural spiritual practice type of question and less of a philosophical question.

Today, the focus was more on philosophical restructuring than it was about practice methodology.

The next Dharma talk will stay with practice methodology more.

Let’s go ahead and do our closing check-in.

Umi checking in from Columbiana, Ohio, feeling impassioned and delightful to be alive.

Let’s go with Marie Robin and Benji.

Marie checking in from Columbus, Ohio.

Good to be with you all this morning.

Robin checking in from Sunnybrook Farm in Wisconsin.

This past week, I’ve made friends with COVID and I’m very much looking forward to reading the transcript because that was so much.

Right now, I’m feeling all the things very intensely, so I got to unpack that a little more.

Thank you.

That was intense.

Jen from Germany, Cologne checking in.

I love it when I trust this unfolding of life.

I’m mostly here to witness and less to forcefully do something about it.

Do what needs to be done, but without the idea of I need to do something about it.

Great delight to be with you all.

See you soon.

I’m in.

Yeah.

For those of you who are around at 1 p.m. Eastern, since you’re all in the Ureturn community,