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Dharma Assembly: Not Fade Away
Presented by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho Dainen-ji, April 25th, 2009
The world arises all around you in the ten
directions, as the ten directions. Close your eyes, squeeze them
tight, it's still there. Look around, it's all around. It is your
looking, your hearing, your breathing. It is this breath. It is the
inbreath, the outbreath. It is the pause between breathing in and
out.
You can seem to cut yourself off from the world by
inverting attention, by sinking deeper and deeper into a state, but
there is nowhere that you can go inside of yourself that leaves you
anywhere else but here. Right here. All sunken and shrunken and
pretty funny looking to all of us out here. However, the habit of
withdrawing into an internalized world of considerations and opinions
and stances and strategies is so strong that people often don't
realize that they are doing this. But the more that you allow
attention to invert and withdraw from reality, the more you fade
away.
You could ask why, but asking why won't help. Why is not
the point. That's like asking why it rains when the real question is
'how does it rain'? How do you fade? What is actually taking place
when you hang back? How do you go from being awake and alert to
sinking so much that you have no idea why you are sitting there, or
even that you ARE sitting there? How does that happen? What do you
notice about it? Don't fade away. Look at the question.
How
about when you are in the midst of doing a form? Bowing in the
doorway of the Hatto is an opportunity to open to whole-bodily
sensation, to release any quality of rushing or distraction by fully
paying attention to the details of the form. But half-way through the
bow you've already faded from the form, blurring the motions together
without noticing; closing the door without feeling into its weight,
how it moves; stepping into the room without feeling the step.
Or
when you are taking your seat? Are you paying attention to each
detail of the form? Stepping onto the zabuton, lowering yourself into
seiza, are you feeling the weight and balance of the bodymind? Are
you feeling the body sitting in a kneeling posture? Are you feeling
into the sensations as you make the transition from kneeling to
taking your seat on the zafu? Or is it comfy cushion time as you
reach behind you, pick up the zafu like it's a pillow and give it an
affectionate pat to flatten it, ready to receive your backside? In
doing that, you've faded from the form. You've made it into something
familiar and comfortable instead of using it as an opportunity to
practise whole-bodily.
You may begin a chant with good volume
and careful attention to timing, but not long into practising the
chant, perhaps after the first line or the first few words, you're
fading. [fake chant:] "Aaaaaaalll beeeeings (mumble) widout
numner." You may start internalizing attention, thinking about
something else while simultaneously making sounds with your mouth;
your volume will drop and you are no longer paying attention to the
timing. Or you may be shouting, completely oblivious to the fact that
you are just shouting over the chanting leader and oblivious to
everyone else but yourself. You have faded from reality and while you
may not be noticing this, it is very noticeable to those around you,
particularly to your Teachers.
Exertion
in practice is releasing -- releasing habitual knots of attention
that present themselves as contacted, self-absorbed states. But
exerting oneself does not mean to push either. Releasing is much
simpler than pushing or falling into states of glazed apathy. It is
actively releasing attention into sensations and colours and forms
and sounds. It is not manipulating attention by suppressing thoughts
or feelings; it is not attempting to cultivate a state of mindfulness
or quiet or some other state that you think makes you a better
student, nor is it giving up. It is choosing to open to reality
BY opening to reality -- these colours and forms and sounds and
sensations and the space of the room you are sitting in.
How
many times in your life have you made mistakes, small, medium, huge
mistakes, because you had allowed yourself to fade from reality,
because you were not really present to the whole of your life with
the whole of the bodymind, with the whole of your intelligence? So
many bad life decisions are made because attention is bound within
feelingtones, superstitious thinking, broken belief systems. What can
you do about the traps you fall into? Practise opening to the
freshness of intelligence by staying with what is most true of your
experiencing in this moment. As Anzan Hoshin roshii once said, "There
are ten thousand ways of interpreting experience. Don't buy into any
of them".
In daisan and practice interviews, you
need to exert yourself to make use of the opportunity to receive
instruction. When asked, "How is your practice?", you need
to communicate your experience as clearly as possible. Don't fade
away, step up.
"But I don't know what the question
means."
It means, "how is your practice?". You
know, practice? The thing you are here to do, what you practice while
sitting on the zafu. You've been given clear instructions about this:
Feel the breath, the tanden, the sensations of the whole body,
opening to seeing and hearing. Release habitual patterns of
attention, the states and storylines and feelingtones that you
usually indulge in. That practice. The same practice you should be
doing while sitting in front of the Dharma Teacher or practice
advisor who is asking you the question. The practice you should be
speaking FROM during daisan and practice interviews. As far as
content goes, you could talk about your experience of practising in
that moment, which is of the greatest importance, but you could also
talk about your experience of sitting before you were called, or you
could talk about how you practised with something you noticed while
practising a week ago. But as you speak about whatever it is you are
speaking about, practise. Feel the breath, the tanden, the whole
bodymind, feel the tongue against the teeth, feel and hear the breath
becoming sound, open to peripheral vision and hearing.
Don't
sink back, retracting attention away from the reality of this moment.
When students do that, it can be seen as well as felt. It is like
seeing someone fall into a swoon, and yet they are still sitting
upright, looking at you. But glazed, so glazed. Sunk into a state of
dullness and apathy and refusing to lift themselves out of it,
refusing to exert themselves. Too taxed to sit on a zafu? Too faint
to have a conversation? And yet, after a sitting I see the same
students stride out the door, full of energy. You give yourself away
in so many ways.
In other situations, instead of speaking
plainly, honestly, there may be an agenda running in the background.
In this instance a student might answer the question "how is
your practice" with something like "It's fine". That
might be code for "I don't want to talk about it" or "I
can't be bothered to talk about it" or "I have no idea what
to say", but it isn't "fine". Whether this is
commented on or not, it is clearly seen and felt. As are other forms
of reactivity that come up, such as "you're not the boss of me";
"you really don't understand me", and "you're invading
my privacy". Feh. Your "privacy" is your prison. When
you have a practice interview or daisan, you are speaking with
monastics who have dedicated their lives to this practice. Open to
context. There is no "his" and "hers" and "my
things" and "your things" in this context. The only
context is practice so don't create opposition where there is
none.
I've been waging my finger enough at you, so here's a
little story.
A long long time ago, in a Zendo not far away in
distance but in time, a cascade of dead leaves fell about my head and
shoulders, falling on my black robes and zabuton. I had just long
enough to wonder where they were coming from when the Roshi's voice
cut through my confusion. Standing directly behind me, he said "When
you let the ikebana wither, you let your life wither."
OHHH...
The
ikebana!
I'll rewind a little to explain why the Roshi was
dropping dead leaves on my head. A task I was given many years ago as
a postulant monk was to clean a small black laquered offering table
that stood in a front corner of the Zendo at Zazen-ji. On this table
stood an ikebana and three small white stones he placed in a very
precise pattern. Every morning my task was to dust the table. That
sounds simple enough, but this involved taking the ikebana and the
stones off the table, dusting it, and then putting everything back as
he had arranged them. And I was also to remove any dead leaves from
the ikebana. And one day I didn't really look at what I was doing.
And so I sat with dead leaves on my head.
When you commit
yourself to doing something every day, it means every day. It means
doing it whether you feel like it or not; it means being interested
despite disinterest; it means opening around reluctance and recoil
and refusal by paying attention to detail.
When you are
sitting zazen, all of the same states that you fall into when you are
doing anything else will present themselves. The ways in which you
retract attention from reality, how you distract yourself with
storylines about hope and fear, how you sink and ignore, glaze and
make yourself stupid, roil about in contraction and confusion -- all
of these will come up. And these are all the ways in which you wither
and fade away.
This is spring, there is a haze of green buds,
leaves unfurling before we have noticeed. After a long, cold winter,
spring is so beautiful and yet so brief, and we want spring to last,
but it doesn't. Nothing lasts. Everything eventually fades away.
Everything we think important, all of the people we love, our pets,
our favourite hat and shoes, our favourite song and the contraption
we used to play it on, the streets and buildings around us,
everything we have known, will eventually decay and fade away. It all
changes because all that is, is coming and going. A branch buds and
at the same time a star is forming in a molecular cloud being
compressed by the tidal forces of other molecular clouds orbiting the
galaxy. You breathe this breath and at the same time, countless
beings breathe their last breath. You breathe again and again and now
it's time for your last breath. Oh. Too late. Better luck next
time.
In the midst of all of this coming and going within vast
space, here you are in the space of this room, in the space of your
experiencing. Reality's fading is part of how it presences. As Roshi
often says, "It's coming is its going, its going is its coming."
Reality itself never fades, never tires, never exhausts itself. Its
richness is always presencing as our lives, for as long as our little
lives last. As long as your life lasts, please don't fade away from
your life.
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