Happy 15th Anniversary, dear friends and family, I bow to you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I bow to you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I bow to you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

[01:28]

Tonight I wanted to talk about fear, and in particular, fear that goes along with true practice. For some unknown reason, practice has gotten all mixed up with ideas about religion, and beliefs, and ideals. But actually, practice is a lot more like all those people that used to get in very small boats and set out on the ocean to look for new worlds.

[02:30]

And for all they knew, when they got to the edge, they were going to drop right off. I remember one of the very first talks I ever heard about meditation, compared meditation to being an explorer. And I was told right then at the beginning that it was going to take a lot of courage, but of course I didn't listen. That kind of discouragement obviously encourages us more. You may not realize it in your own practice, but I think you probably have an awful lot of ideals.

[03:55]

And you probably have an awful lot of assumptions that you've come along with. And that's probably true whether you just started practicing very recently or whether you've been at it for a long time. Where I come from, whether we're greenhorns or the old comers, the old timers, we still have a lot in common. And as Suzuki Rushi said, you know, beginner's mind, that's the best. And it's the best because we imprison ourselves in the most curious ways. And one of the ways in which we're bound to get imprisoned is with the beliefs that go along with our practice. In the Theravada tradition we talk about mindfulness, and in Zen we talk about emptiness, and in Vajrayana we talk about energy.

[05:14]

And we're all just traps because whether we just have begun or whether we've been at it for a long time, we somehow feel that we never quite measure up to these words that we keep hearing about. And what a shame, but because of human nature the teachings become just another thing that we're trying to measure ourselves against. Therefore it's so common with practitioners that when we find ourselves once again very humanly angry or jealous or miserable in one form or another, that we feel we have somehow misunderstood practice, that we don't measure up, and we do this whole guilt number on ourselves.

[06:24]

Of course mindfulness is a lot more than a word, and emptiness is a lot more than a word, and energy is a lot more than a word. But what do these words mean? In Vajrayana we talk a lot about nowness. I've given many talks on nowness, but what does nowness really mean? What does even the truth of suffering mean? What does even happiness mean? When we talk about peace, what does that mean? My own experience of practice is that continually I'm finding out that I didn't understand what any of this meant.

[07:46]

And I think one of the things that happens as you've been practicing longer is that when you once again realize that you didn't understand, you begin to get the hang of the fact that that's what it's all about. That continual not knowing. But all minds certainly play these tricks again and again. These tricks of turning the Dharma into a security blanket. And one can become quite arrogant, and if one has been around for even quite a short time, at least longer than someone who's just arrived, one can find oneself using the Dharma, using the teachings, using the practice, as a way to build oneself up. And feel like one has some kind of authority or knows something or other.

[08:55]

The truth is that when you really want to begin exploring, you're going to be very lonely, and you're also going to be continually humbled. And there's not going to be much room for arrogance. And the arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by your own courage to once again step out a little further. Because really, the kind of discoveries that are made have nothing to do with belonging to anything or being part of anything. It has much more to do with having the courage to die, I suppose, is maybe the best way to say it. The courage to die continually.

[10:00]

In fact, I once heard a quote from Suzuki Roshi which said that one should be willing to die again and again and again. And that was his definition in this particular quote of what it meant to practice. But what does that mean? I think as long as you're satisfied with any answer, you're in trouble. Because this kind of satisfaction feels good, but it feels good in a very old, habitual way. The kind of satisfaction that comes from finding answers to the questions, that gives you this kind of warm feeling inside, tends to be supporting blindness of some kind, or supporting some kind of old way of maintaining the same old view.

[11:09]

And I've always been so curious about the fact that even the smallest little sea anemone or little insect doesn't like to feel pain. You notice those ones that, you know, when you go to the ocean, you just put your finger near them and they close down? And everything does that. So it doesn't seem like such a terrible thing that we feel fear when there's a threat of pain. And it seems to be part of being alive, being a living being, is that there's going to be a reaction against discomfort. That's very curious to me, why it's all set up like this. But it's also part of the specialness of the whole thing, that it makes no sense whatsoever.

[12:17]

And rather than that senselessness or meaninglessness being a depressing thing, the meaninglessness, if you put a whole different connotation on that word of meaninglessness, that word actually is a discovery that you might make. And that discovery would be that the world is, the human experience is very vast. And it's all this meaning that we give to everything that keeps it so small. Well, I'm sure you've all heard this kind of teaching a lot. This is what they call Buddhist teaching. But what so seldom gets talked about is the fact that it does mean that if you really want to explore, if you really want to keep questioning, if there's a genuine investigation of whatever is happening,

[13:21]

rather than this kind of pleasant assumptions about everything, if there's really a kind of daring investigation, which I think is required, you're going to experience fear. And you can only explore, you can only really continue to explore to the degree that you've befriended fear, to the degree that you can communicate with fear, to the degree that when fear comes up, you can somehow agree with it. Usually a lot of self-help type ways of thinking talk about conquering fear. That would be the equivalent to keeping a big baseball bat by your bed and hitting yourself over the head with it every time you felt any discomfort.

[14:24]

Which in some sense is what people do with alcohol and drugs and everything you can imagine. They keep hitting themselves over the head and knocking themselves out so that they don't actually have to experience what Trungpa Rinpoche used to call the vividness of experience. Personally, my own experience of practice over the last years is that if there's a commitment to really wanting to not rest anywhere but keep going, if there's this commitment to exploring or investigating or big open question, then things get very vivid. They get so close that you don't any longer feel that it's out there.

[15:28]

Visually things get vivid and emotionally things get vivid. And with all your senses, things get very vivid. Sometimes you read about that. It sounds pretty good. Sounds like it would be actually quite enjoyable. Well... Hmm. Buddhist euphemisms. I think nowness, openness, even emptiness, even energy, even mindfulness, euphemisms. For what? I remember when I first started to practice, my son was 14,

[16:38]

and I began to tell him proudly about Buddhism. He said it sounded like something for sour old men. And... stopped me in my tracks with that statement. Is it really grim to talk about suffering? Is it grim to talk about that fear accompanies exploration? It often sounds pretty grim. Hmm. Is it grim to talk about these things? Or is it brave to talk about them? Or is it just sensible? Or is it stupid? You know, it could be. I'm frequently haunted by this now that I've adapted this whole get up and I have quite a strong identity going.

[17:41]

Maybe it's all wrong. The whole thing. If it is all wrong, I would have no one to thank, but my teacher who continually told me something like that was the case. I think maybe it is all wrong in some sense, that the way we think about it anyway is all wrong. I'm always being told by new people who come in how the Dharma has been explained to them by other people. And I always want to say, Oh, no. Because so often what you believe, what you preconceive, what you want to be true, comes out of your mouth as the teachings of the Buddha. So let's just talk about real stuff,

[18:48]

the kind of stuff that stops us in our tracks, whether we're in this building or never even heard of meditation. And let's talk about what maybe is the little precious tidbit that we've been given that might be useful to us. It might distinguish us from everybody else who also feels all these things. But curiously enough, we get stuck in exactly the same places as everybody. And that is, we get stuck when all the stuff that is on top of fear comes up. All the conflicting emotions, rage, bitterness, resentment, jealousy, self-pity, depression, feeling left out. You name it. I'm sure each of us has this character that we wish was someone else.

[19:56]

But unfortunately or fortunately, just when we thought we had it all together, some innocent remark on the part of somebody or some occurrence in our life completely throws us for a loop. And I think the definition of maybe how you progress along the path is in the beginning you might feel like you're swimming in some kind of mess of being thrown for a loop at every second of your life. And then it's like this sort of vague, overwhelming, continuous noise. And then as you progress, and it's 20 years later, then there's more space around these real humdingers that come up and just flatten you.

[20:58]

But actually something else changes too. And that is that vividness of that humdinger that flattens you, that out of nowhere you just find yourself... You are so embarrassed because you've been practicing for a long time and so you see very clearly what you're doing. There's nowhere to hide. You can see it. You see it as well as everyone else. Better than everyone else. It's completely humiliating. You're supposed to be someone that people look up to. And basically you're having a tantrum. And we're astounded. But it comes to your realization that even though you're having your tantrum

[22:07]

in a way that there's no way to make it look pretty, nevertheless it's some kind of gateway to really understanding everything that you've ever heard spoken by any teacher, anywhere, in any book, in any chanting you've ever done, anywhere. If you want to understand emptiness, you will probably find it when you fly off the handle and you're in a rage but you're not able to blame it on anyone. And you're also not able to repress it. And you're also not able to act it out. And you find yourself in the middle of a flame. And you find yourself on the edge of a pin. Maybe that's that... How high is that flagpole that when you get to the top of it you ask the question, where do I go from here? 100 feet.

[23:09]

100 feet. Flagpoles even get higher than that, you know. But when you find yourself there, sometimes, sure, sometimes it's in Sashin. And sometimes it's in the times of solitude. But that's the easy part. Even if it was a tough Sashin. Even if you were very alone in solitude. That's the easy part. But you can also find it right in the middle of crisis. Whether it's major crisis like death or serious illness or being betrayed or something like that where the ground really falls out in a major way. Or whether it's just this crisis of identity when this persona of yours is completely shattered by your own upheavals, by your own childishness,

[24:11]

by your own temper tantrum. I feel in the Vajrayana, you know, where we talk about energy that actually these words mindfulness, emptiness, energy, it's all getting at the same thing which is how your experience, and I think particularly the really vivid ones like these strong emotions under which is this very, very pointed fear that these things are what show us the real meaning of these words because they nail us. They nail us right to the point of time and space that we are in.

[25:14]

And when you stop there and don't act out and don't repress it, don't blame it on anyone else but also don't blame it on yourself when there's some sense of ultimate koan. That's when there's just no place else but that place. You're actually like one of those poor bugs on a pin. Just there. Trungpa Rinpoche used to talk a lot about this and he used to assure us that this made for very soft, decent people. And I had to remember those assuring words many times because what we're talking about is going into fear

[26:17]

and not as a way to solve problems and not as a therapy but actually as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting, thinking. More frontiers seem to be right here all the time. And we all know that. People have all kinds of experiences of this and in fact the whole New Age nauseatingly plays on this. In a way that I say nauseating because it's like people beginning to be on to something and then just making it into another belief system. But on the other hand I can't feel too critical of that knowing myself as I do because this knowing ourselves is knowing humanness.

[27:22]

And when you really know yourself then you know everybody and you know everything and you realize that no one ever tells us that when it gets really sharp and really vivid that we should communicate with that, we should agree with that, we should somehow befriend that. Everyone encourages us to split, soften it up, smooth it over. And we shouldn't be encouraged that way because that's what we do naturally. We've been doing that. If we have any sense of past lives we've been doing that for billions of years. And if we don't have any feeling about past lives we've been doing it for every second since we came out of the womb. For as long as the mind can remember

[28:24]

we've been doing this. From before the time we can remember anything we've been doing this. We've been doing this escaping. So naturally when you're on to something there's always going to be that tendency and it's good to know that. Not as a way of beating yourself up but of... it's like... that's real compassion is when you see how you imprison yourself with everything. How everything is a way to not really stay with the pointedness, the vividness. So next time you have a tantrum in your own particular style which can be as cold as ice or as hot as the sun it can create chaos like a hurricane or it can create a kind of deadly stillness

[29:27]

like the stillness of the desert. There's all kinds of ways to say no to your experience. And the next time you find yourself there which will probably be this evening consider yourself lucky. Everyone else will be very irritated with you particularly people who know you well because there you go, doing it again and it's very unpleasant for the others. But this is where the courage comes in because one of the expressions that I've been nurtured on in the Dharma is not afraid to be a fool. And the reason that this is a powerful one is because you don't want to make a mess

[30:32]

but on the other hand you don't know what to do. The only way you know how not to make a mess is to repress. Or to just say who cares and just make a mess. And those are usually the only two options that we know about. I think the essence of our practice is something in the middle of those two extremes. The famous middle way. No one ever told us how hot it was there. They always said it was cool. It hasn't been my experience. Or if it is cool it's unsettlingly cool. But the degree to which you can continue

[31:34]

with the exploration is the degree to which you've befriended or communicated or said yes to that fear. Which is to say that actually real well-being the kind of well-being that we all get into this for the reason that we we ever even start this whole thing is because Buddha sits there with this lovely smile and there's some kind of promise that we're going to feel good. Is that a lie? It might be. You just have to ask those kind of questions.

[32:37]

You have to just ask and ask. And the trick is though that you have to really keep asking and not bail out. Even when you find out that something is not what you thought. That's what you're going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what you thought. I think I could say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what you thought. Neither is mindfulness. Mindfulness or suffering even for that matter. Compassion, not what you thought. Love.

[33:40]

Buddha nature. Meditation. Those are code words for something you don't know in your mind. Something that anyone could experience. Those are golden keys for what life really is when you're not believing in it all the time and thinking it's something. So, how's that for a talk? So, I'd like to open it up for questions.

[34:44]

Then, is it true that there isn't any place to be comfortable? Well, I could tell you what I've found out. Maybe I could tell you that there's nothing more comfortable than this kind of exploration. But you don't know what I mean when I say that. Because we have this idea of comfort, you know, which means feeling good, the opposite of pain, so forth, so on. But maybe words are better, like your appetite grows.

[36:03]

Your sense of smell gets better. You begin to notice people's faces and you can tell what's going on in their hearts. That is very satisfying. But you couldn't call it comfortable exactly. But it makes you glad to be alive, very grateful to your teachers and to the lineage of teachings that you ever stumbled on this whole thing. You feel like you got on the right train and you have no idea where it's going. But it seems like you don't feel that you're in a small, dark

[37:05]

prison anymore. So... The tricky thing is the question of fear, that it's part of the waking up process. And usually everybody feels that you've just made some major mistake because of fears frequently covered over by a lot of other things, like anger or jealousy or all kinds of things. So it gets very hard to talk about it in ordinary language. But on the other hand, we're not really talking about anything mystical at all. Temper tantrums.

[38:07]

If you recognize that whatever you're saying is based on fear, you think, but you're still afraid. So, and you can see where it's tightening down your world, your fear. But how do you open that up without being cruel to yourself in the way of pushing yourself to knock you down? Well, what is your experience of how... What do you actually do when you push yourself? What actually happens? Your question sounds like you know how to do it that way. So could you describe that? Like, what's the... in your interpretation, the wrong way to do it? I become very tired. And it becomes... it's like slogging along and it demands a faster way. That's how it feels to me.

[39:13]

I think that's why I feel that way. Maybe it's something totally different. So what came before that feeling? Are you asking me to say the same question? No, no, no. I mean, in your actual experience what came before that feeling for me? I don't think... I don't think I really have a concern of what came before that feeling. What came after that feeling. And it's a sense of relief, it seems like, in some ways, if you just... Me, anyway, sometimes I just accept the fact that this is fear, this is how I deal with it, this is how it manifests itself. And these are the consequences of that kind of manifestation. And you just sort of sit with that. And that will shift you somehow. But don't repress it? That's harder.

[40:29]

But on the other hand, you know what repression is, so... So then what? Well, that's what you don't know. That's the whole process. That's the whole processing. That's why I say I think it's the... That's where you discover emptiness and all these words, the true meaning of them, including patience. But it's... You actually do not know what to do. And then, you know, you remember all the teachings on not knowing as being this great virtue. But it doesn't feel very good. Maybe it feels like cement, as you describe it. I always describe it as feeling like a fire. And basically, when I'm in it, it feels like a no-win, no-lose situation. Or at least a no-win situation. Because my mind continues to come up with the same arguments. You know, it's like...

[41:31]

What I do, actually, if I have the luxury to do this, is I actually get in the meditation posture and I just sit with it. And usually there does come the time, you know, when it's night time and this feeling is still with you and normally you would go to sleep, but instead I just sit with it. And because there's something about the way it processes you. It processes you in a major way because basically it's intense non-ego gratification. So then I say, well, what should I actually do? What words should come out of my mouth? What would be right action? What would be right speech? Or even right thought at this time? That's what you do not know. You don't know. And how do you find out? You find out by this... by this...

[42:34]

koan. That won't... You can't answer it. But it's like a really important one. And as you know, you get plenty of opportunities because we're talking about our major stuff, our major vividness where the thing that got us into the Dharma in the beginning and we thought it would go away tends to be like... sometimes I've heard this analogy like a dog that puts its teeth in your arms and will not let go because basically it's teaching you how to die properly. And it's teaching you it's teaching you about where you build up this whole false persona and think it's separate from the rest of the world. It's kind of all encapsulated in that way that we get stuck whether it's anger or depression or whatever it is. That's like this beautiful, vivid, clear picture

[43:40]

of how we refuse to melt. So I guess it's some kind of bravery that's required there but it's so worth it because then you really understand what's being said and why you're practicing. I think this may be a continuation of the same question but I'm a little confused by this not knowing. It seems like the process of improvement or whatever or meditation could be described it seems like an actual described path. I have this what seems like a perfectly reliable picture of the way I should be I should be sweet I should be compassionate I should be helping other people and I know that I'm not doing that right now. So I sort of think

[44:41]

that well, if I keep meditating somehow I'll get like that I'll get all sweet and soft no matter how long the day is. But I know that's a good way to be and I think that's a very intuitive. And it's like you're suggesting something else I'm not. I'm not quite sure that you have to give up the idea that's quite right like you're saying to give up the idea of what you would be like if you were there you were like, you know maybe you wouldn't be all sweet and all helpful and all nice That's the best question I ever heard. It's like I could have paid you to ask that question. Well everyone

[45:43]

even the people who have been around for twenty years or something secretly think that they are going to get nice. But the fact is you don't know how you're going to get because it actually is outside of the usual value systems. I think it's fair enough to say that what you're going to get is not imprisoned anymore. But you see the trick is that what imprisons you is these preconceptions of what it means to be nice. You see so we have our own

[46:44]

measuring sticks. All these different styles benefited others. That's the main thing It benefits. It's like pulls the rug out when people need the rug pulled out. You know what I mean? So Yes Ha Oh yes indeed. That's one of the embarrassing things about becoming so much more aware.

[47:44]

You think becoming more aware is well becoming more aware is very very beneficial but you do see you see very clearly what you do and but the interesting thing about it it helps you to understand other people. I do find that everything is okay in the sense of all these unpleasant discoveries seem to be necessary information in terms of just being more whole in terms of being more less apart from the rest of the whole thing. To tell you the truth I don't care anymore

[48:47]

that all this stuff comes up. It just seems like that's part of being human. It just comes up. And when I look at teachers I see that they still have lots of stuff. It doesn't seem to be that doesn't seem to be what it's all about is particularly getting rid of this stuff. But this whole identity that goes along with this stuff usually feeling righteous feeling guilty and all that spin-off stuff this kind of real strong awareness and this real willing to keep questioning makes a definite dent in all that spinning off, that's for sure. But in terms of just stuff arising I think it doesn't matter at all. I think it doesn't matter at all. Just as in dreams

[49:57]

you know in dreams lots happens and you go through all kinds of things. Maybe you've been really kind of in this state of well-being for a long time and then in dreams there's all this peculiar anxiety and fear and screaming at people or whatever goes on. And in a dream you know that the one who's screaming and the one who's being screamed at and the abuser and the abused and everything that's going on in the dreams is all you. And so after a while in the waking state, so-called waking state whether the person that's yelling is out there or over here and whether the one that's feeling well-being is over there or over here, why does it matter? You know, it's something to do with humanity and the communication between the whole thing.

[50:58]

It's not us separating ourselves so much. So maybe we stop. In our inception In our In our inception In our inception

[51:21]

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