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The
Point of Wisdom:
Minding
Your Own Bodymind

Dharma
Talk Presented by Ven. Shikai Zuiko osho
Dainen-ji,
September 27, 2003
The
Point of Wisdom: Minding your Own Bodymind. This is what has been talked
about for nearly 2600 hundred years, since Gautama Siddartha sat down
after having tried all sorts of crazy…perhaps; dubious…perhaps, practices,
to find out what's really going on here. What is this? What is this thing
we call a human being? What is this bodymind? What's going on?
That
same question is still being asked and it does seem to be being asked
more and more often. Each one of you asked that question at some point
in your lives and look where you ended up – on a Saturday morning, nice
warm autumn day and here you are indoors, sitting, facing a white wall
with your eyes open. What is the point of this? The point of this is to
afford yourselves the opportunity to look into the actual process of the
bodymind, the actual process of perception and cognition in your own bodymind,
not someone else's, your own.
We
do live at a time when the spoken word and the written word seem to have
taken precedence over any other form of experience or expression. We fall
for those written or spoken explanations and we believe the limitations
that are often expressed by them. No word is the experience of which it
is speaking. Experience can only be experience-ed. At this point let me
say I am not saying that words are not useful. I'm certainly not saying
that they are not valuable and I am not saying that they are not fun.
In fact, they are all of those things especially when we look into what
is actually being spoken of; especially when we question into what's meant
when we are asked questions. Words are a small part of our experience
in each moment, actually, but we consider them to be so important that
we will ignore 97 percent of the other things that we are experiencing
and feed all of our attention into a word or a phrase or a thought expressed
in words and phrases, or in colours and sounds, images.
This
practice teaches us to notice what's going on right [Osho strikes shippei
on the floor] now. There were a myriad of dharmas or moments of experience
that expressed themselves for you as the knowing, to notice when that
sound occurred. All you, as knowing, need do is learn to notice them.
So this practice is looking into that process of perception and cognition
and you do that by feeling the breath moving the bones in and out. That
means you are alive and you still have a chance to Wake Up from the dream
that we often call our life, because when we believe only the stories
we tell ourselves about our life, we are robbing ourselves. And this does
get expressed all over the place all the time. People will seek out help
from almost anything because they feel something's missing in their life.
They feel there is a hole and often if we are looking at someone who is
saying there's a hole in their life they will actually point to their
abdomen or have their hands on their abdomen or around the area of the
heart. They say, “I feel so empty. There's no meaning. I want to have
meaning, I want things to be meaningful. I want this void to be filled.”
So of course we get very busy running after many, many, many things to
try to fill that void.
We
run after dresses and cars and land and guns and drugs and alcohol and
cross-word puzzles. We run after television programs and movies and friends
that we gobble up like some strange cannibal, to try and fill something
that really doesn't exist. This void does not exist. It simply is caused
by our obsessive feeding of attention into one or two areas of our life
in each moment and that tends to be thoughts and feelings which it would
seem – almost a consensus – are the most important things.
When
we use the noticing of thoughts and feelings to notice the rest of what's
going on: the heart beating; blood coursing through the bodymind; hair
growing on our head; random signals from various locations which we often
will tend to interpret as something wrong. So we do have this tendency
to pay attention to the flesh and the bones only when we think there's
something wrong with it. We do what we do with everything else and objectify
the bodymind rather than simply learning to experience it fully in this
moment.
Because
of the nature of the material that I'm presenting, that you are noticing
and working with today, we know that actually we have established a certain
maturity in our practice. Because if we were to talk at an Introductory
Workshop about the skeleton, about feeling the sitz bones and recognizing
we can know them and with a thought make them press down into the cushion
so that as we breathe, the lungs inflate and the spine lifts up and the
head rebalances and the eyes open so that peripheral vision is present.
If we were to present that and only that at an Introductory Workshop it
wouldn't be long before this would be understood to be another bodymind
practice, another way of “working with the body”. This is, of course,
not what it is. It is a way of helping us know more clearly the actual
nature of our experiencing in each moment.
The
point of wisdom is balance point. Balance point is the fine, delicate
balance of the spine, the skull, the ribcage, the pelvis, on your cushion.
If we were to take that instruction about how to establish and recognize
balance point and make rules out of it then people would tend to sit rigidly,
forcing themselves, using muscles to sit upright. And that is a stance
and we wouldn't recognize it as such. We would think that we were doing
“the right thing”. In our practice we mature and we start to understand
that when we talk about this moment – it's already the past moment – but
this moment is experienced before any words about it. So we start to understand
through our own experience that we need not label things for them to be
happening. In fact, the experience comes first and then the label about
it. And this has been the case since the beginning of human beings. Experience
always comes first. Language was developed to talk about experience.
The
bodymind is such a nested systems of knowings and causes and effects that
when we even think about a word, it produces an effect in the bodymind.
Thinking about something over and over again embeds that particular response,
whatever it may be, in the bodymind. We all have had innumerable experiences
of that. It can be called obsession or it could just be called “having
a bad day”, but the bodymind itself does not have the capacity to discriminate
and decide whether something that it is doing is useful or not. You do.
You, as the knowing, as experiencing, as Awareness Itself, have that capacity.
And you are developing it each time you remember to feel the breath, feel
those sitz bones, feel the spine, balance the skull so that the chin is
moving a bit towards the neck so that the back of the head is rising up,
so that the top of the head is flat and parallel to the ceiling.
Each
moment of practising anapanasatti, mindfulness of breath and body is helping
the bodymind release old patterns of attention. In the “Satipatthana sutta”,
the “Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness”, people who had listened
to Gautama Siddartha speak or who knew people who had, wrote down – some
say maybe 200 to 300 years after it was actually spoken – what was said
to have been said by the Buddha. This is wonderful that we have such things
in existence that we can use because just as the Lineage is there as an
active reminder that we have not popped this practice out of nowhere,
that in fact men and women just like we have done this very practice of
mindful sitting for 2600 years, so the written words can be useful. However,
when you are listening to them, when you are reading those written words,
feel the breath, sit up straight, open the eye gaze, actually practice
what is being spoken of and recognize that people who wrote down these
things were human beings just like you and I; they will do things exactly
like you and I and they did things exactly like we do, which means that
they will take things out of context; they'll believe them rather than
actually doing them. So, often distortion occurs. And in the sutta it
begins, of course, with the “Evam Me Suttam, Thus Have I Heard: Once the
Generous One was dwelling”… So immediately we have a problem – “the Generous
One” – those of us who have a predilection for deifying things will do
it immediately. “The Generous One is up there, somewhere, looking at me,
looking out for me so I'll just have to listen to what's being said, memorize
it, believe it, and everything will be okay”. Not true.
They
are saying something to the effect that “You know I heard this guy. Or
I actually didn't hear him but my great-grandfather knew someone who'd
heard this guy and he said something like, ‘You know you can Wake Up.
There'll be an end to all of this suffering'”.
And
so you say, “Well, yeah? How?”
“Well
you come with me and we'll listen to someone who'll tell us all about
it.”
And
then we get told things like,
“Breathing
in, one is mindful; breathing out, one is mindful. Breathing out a long
breath, one understands, “I breathe out a long breath.” Breathing in a
long breath, one understands, “I breathe in a long breath.” Breathing
out a short breath, one understands, “I breathe out a short breath.” Breathing
in a short breath, one understands, “I breathe in a short breath.”
So
before we know it, there are groups of people who are going [Osho makes
the sound of someone inhaling heavily] “I am breathing in a long breath”.
[Osho makes the sound of someone exhaling heavily] “I am breathing out
a long breath”. And it's not long before we have counting the breath,
because if something can be misunderstood, we will misunderstand it.
So,
rather than just saying “So this is what's going on: Yes, we are breathing
and we can know it” we human beings want to nail it down.
We
say “Yes, but what am I supposed to do ?” We
say “Well, just notice the breath. That's all, just notice it.
“Yeah,
but how many times a minute am I supposed to notice it?”
We
want prescriptions for everything.
Just
notice it and feel your bones, open your eyes, notice the peripheral vision.
And now you notice the next thing. So let's say the next thing is a thought
about how what these people really need to do is come up with better directions
as to how to do this and we feed attention into it; then something happens,
perhaps someone comes along and adjusts our posture and we go “Oh!”, the
bodymind itself releases the breath at that point. We sit up straight
and we open the eye gaze and that thought is gone. Because in order to
maintain thoughts, we need to compromise the integrity of balance point;
we need to compromise the integrity of the bodymind in this moment. By
minding the bodymind, by noticing what's going on, what has happened,
that we have woken up from that thought to the larger space and we remember
to notice the breath [Osho makes the sound of someone inhaling strongly]
to allow the bodymind to breathe and to balance the head, we have practised
mindfulness of the bodymind in that moment. We've released the capacities
of the bodymind that were caught up in propagating a thought that could
be poisonous because if we've been in the habit of propagating critical
thoughts, say, about ourselves, or about others and so on and so on, they
literally do result in – and nobody knows how – into the byproducts of
metabolism to lots of atoms being released that set into motion all sorts
of previous patterns which contract the bodymind down and we become a
“self” with these certain habits and patterns and tendencies that obstruct
us. And we had demonstrations of that during the “Daishin Dharani”. Obstructions
are not useful. They're not necessary and they are not inherent to the
bodymind.
An
obstruction is a Dharma Gate, it's a moment of experience that we notice
and when we notice it and practise it, it ceases to be an obstruction.
It opens. And our language may be that we “open around it” because language
can be useful, but language will be understood in different ways by different
people at different times, so it is important for us to keep things fresh
and to have as many different ways of talking about something as is possible.
Back
to the sutta. In the sutta there is discussion of images of the body.
“And
moreover, monks, upward from the soles of their feet and downwards from
the hair on the crown of the head, one observes the body covered with
skin and filled with impurities.”
Gag.
[Osho laughs]. It's not that they're impurities really. We just have what
the bodymind does. That's it. As the Roshi has said in “Flowers and Worms
”, we are this 25 foot worm coiled up within a bony structure with teeth
at one end and an aperture at the other end for letting out the only thing
that we produce as human beings.
“Within
the body there are hairs on the head, hair on the body, nails, skin, teeth,
flesh, muscle, bone, marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs,
bowels, intestines, stomach, excrement, bile, phlegm, mucous, sinovic
fluid, and urine. If a double-mouthed sack filled with various grains
like paddy, hill rice, kidney beans, masa beans, sesame and husked rice
were to be opened by somebody, with his eyes, he would discern: this is
paddy, this is hill rice, these are kidney beans, these are masa beans,
this is sesame and these are grains of husked rice.”
And
that's quite colourful but again, can just fall into legend, something
that we just memorize and go “Oh yeah” [Osho makes several “tsk” sounds].
Something incredibly interesting, to me, was I realized that we do have
very little knowledge of the reality of the bodymind. In fact, these people
who were practicing, these monks, these home leavers who were practising
with Gautama Siddartha, had more actual knowledge of what's “inside” than
we do. Why would that be? Because they practised in charnal grounds. They
practised where the bodies were. They did that in order to mature their
practice. This presents a very interesting point of divergence because
we could look at it and judge it one way as being just something really
awful that you have to push yourself, your way through, or we could recognize
that this probably meant that these people had a much better sense of
the skeleton than we do. If we ever see a skeleton today it will most
likely will be because we are in a medical practitioner's office or we
are in a museum and somehow or other we have the capacity to divorce ourselves
from that reality entirely. This is something else. It has nothing whatsoever
to do with us. If we break a bone, that is a different matter. We'll run
to the bone setter who can fix that for us. But actually integrating the
information that this is what we are; we are this bony structure that
the old guys observed as bodies rotted.
When
I was a little girl we went to get a new pair of shoes once a year, about
this time of year. We would go to a shoe store where they had a “fluoroscope”.
I think that's what they called it. One got to stand in it, put the feet
into two little openings and look down and there were your bones, the
bones of your feet, and you could see the outline of the shoe that you
were buying to see whether it fit. So we are not allowed to have those
anymore in shoe stores because those X-rays were deemed to be dangerous,
but it was pretty interesting. We'd think, “Gee, bones. I've got these
bones; there are 26 of them in each foot”.
So
we will ignore the reality of that skeleton entirely.
“And
monks, see the body, abandoned in the burning ground, a skeleton bloody
and fleshless, tied together with tendon and sinews, and remember that,
“This body is also of that nature; it will come to this, it cannot avoid
this.”
And
monks, see the body abandoned in the charnel ground, its bones not bound
together but scattered in all directions, here the bones of the hand,
there the bones of the foot, here the shin bone, the thigh bone, the hip
bone, the spine and the skull, and recollect that, “This body is also
of that nature; it will come to this, it cannot avoid this.”
Well,
inside each and every one of us there is a skeleton just waiting to get
out. Early on in my practice when I was sitting in the middle of this
bloody hell called practice with everything hurting and not able to pay
much attention to anything else other than how much I hated this, I was
called up for dokusan and I dragged myself in a foul, foul, foul state,
into the dokusan room. After doing the bows and so on, the Roshi says
to me, “What is it that drags this corpse upstairs?” Damn.
As
long as you are breathing you are not a corpse. As long as you are noticing
the breath you have an opportunity to practise the bones just as people
in this Lineage have been doing since the beginning. The Hakukaze Soto
Lineage recognized that practice was the practice of this body in this
moment. This is what Dogen zenji taught. In “Shinjin Gakudo” he speaks
of practising the whole bodymind in this whole moment. And that's all
there is to it. It does sound incredibly simple, but we do become obstructed
because of forgetting that the patterns and habits and tendencies are
not who we are. We are the knowing of the bones, the marrow, the thoughts,
the feelings. By using the structure of the skeleton to return again and
again to balance point when we have gone away from it by feeding attention
into our thoughts about what's going on, we are allowing the bodymind
to be itself, to do what it does best, which is be the bodymind and take
care of business.
The
bones are not dry things. They're very flexible. The living bones are
very flexible, very active, very strong; as strong as steel but as flexible
as aluminum. There're about 206 bones in each one of us. The precise number
may vary from person to person. Our main concern when we are sitting zazen
is what's called the “axial column”, which is the central bones: the pelvis,
the vertebrae, the ribs and skull. The other bits, when we are sitting,
the arms and legs, can be put into position with the mudra, the hands
resting in the Dharmadhatu mudra allows us the opportunity to feel the
breath moving the body in and out and each time we feel that – breathe
in, breathe the body up, allow the lungs to expand like balloons, allowing
the spine to stretch out and the knees to drop down and open – over time
this will happen. When you move the bodymind at the end of the sitting
round, forget about the soft tissue; forget about the thoughts you are
having about the soft tissue. Use them to feel the breath and the bones
and to allow experiencing to open, to allow knowing to open to what it
really is. Move slowly with as much intelligence as you can, allow yourself
to notice that the bones have a lot of information. They're very busy
even as we are sitting here with me talking on and on. They're busy. They're
producing red blood cells and white blood cells. They are flowing with
information. They can be reshaped, realigned while they are alive.
During
this Dharma Assembly there will be more postural alignment, and with this
practice, anything raises opportunities for practice. Postural alignment
is not criticism of how you were. None of the instruction in practice
is criticism, but hot-damn, boy, we certainly will take it to be that,
often, and again I am speaking only from my own experience. When that
comes up, say a tendency to be reactive, that's the bodymind being reactive;
that's the bodymind doing what it thinks it's supposed to do because it's
done it before. It is not you. You are the knowing. So when you notice
anything like that, feel the breath [Osho audibly inhales], feel the bones.
Use it to open up beyond that obstruction.
The
point of wisdom, this moment, is available to you all of the time. All
you need to do is notice it. And so far you are doing everything right.
You are here. You have that opportunity. You've overcome all sorts of
obstructions since you began to practise.
During
Dharma Assemblies, part of the form is that there is only functional talking,
which means that only if something needs to be communicated about something
that needs to be done or where something may be, do we talk. There's no
reading. But during this Dharma Assembly, please have a look at Bob. Bob
is standing on top of the refrigerator in the Dining Hall. Bob is that
little plastic skeleton. Please don't flock there, but just if you have
a moment and you are in the vicinity, have a look at Bob. And after the
Dharma Assembly, spend some time with bones, wherever you can find them.
It's a really interesting thing – other than your own of course, but to
get a sense of what they're really like, what the alignment is like. And
during the course of the rest of the day, in every moment you will have
opportunity to practise point of wisdom with the whole bodymind by minding
your own bodymind, returning to balance point as it becomes clearer and
clearer as you notice that point where the torso basically does become
weightless for a moment as things are aligned. In order to get into anything,
any state, any feeling bad, any feeling good, any pain, you have to compromise
the integrity of that balance point.
"The
Great Matter is birth and death.
Life
slips past and time is gone.
Right
now, Wake Up! Wake Up!
Do
not waste time."
Thank
you for listening.
©
2004 White Wind Zen Community. All rights reserved.
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