This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So good evening everyone and welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis and this evening I'm going to talk about the spiritual path, which will include mention of meditation, which is the perfection we're on right now. So this past Saturday, Mushim Aikida spoke about meditation and its role in her spiritual path. And she quoted one of her Korean teachers, and this really struck me. You'll have many experiences along the way, but ignore all of them until the final explosion.

[01:03]

So I thought, well, what does that mean, you know, for those of us who are just like getting along here, doing our meditation practice and our community practice, our work practice? So what her teacher, though, seems to be indicating is is that there is a way, a path, along which we practice, and that it has an implied goal, you know, this final explosion. And this is actually very traditional understanding of a spiritual path, and it comes from deep, long experience and investigation. So we're kind of There's not steps and stages, and yet we're talking about the six perfections, which is one comes after the other. So it's both, and they kind of wash between each other. Same as with the six perfection is the pattern of the spiritual path, where it goes along in one direction, but it also spirals, and you kind of move between the different levels.

[02:16]

So one... really excellent book about this is Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart, A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life. And I would recommend that to anyone who is practicing. Not so much because it will tell you what to do or explain things, but if you have that sense of the spiritual path, you're not so thrown off by some of its qualities and aspects. And so you say, oh, you know, and often that's how it works. You read about it and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you actually experience it and you're like, oh, that's what they meant. And so I think it's very helpful to know that there is some pattern in there. So he explains that these teachings and experiences that support us and hinder us, which it turns out they're actually doing both.

[03:24]

They seem to be doing one, and they might be doing the other, or they seem to be doing the other, and they're doing the other one. But anyway, he says that these are the things we face as we go through this deconstructive activity of transformation that arises through both our ethical and our meditative effort But another source for descriptions of what this path requires and what we encounter along it is mysticism, a study in the nature and development of man's spiritual consciousness by Evelyn Underhill. And this book was first published in 1955. It's pretty famous for anyone who's read a lot about spirituality and stuff like that. And, um, So it's outdated in terms of some psychological advances and, what do you call it, like neurological research.

[04:31]

But I think what I love about it, it's so unapologetic about examining spiritual experiences and states and fantasies and anxieties. She quotes all these mystics, and it's very wonderful. So the way she describes it, it begins with what she calls the awakening of the self, and then moves to purification of the self, illumination of the self, and in this arena, it includes voices and visions, and what she calls introversion, what we call meditation, which is she has two types, recollection and quiet, and contemplation, ecstasy and rapture, the dark night of the soul, and completion as the unitive life. So in my experience and sort of study and examination of this process, it's not linear.

[05:40]

It's this spiraling kind of or process, and it goes through effort, ease, exhaustion, opening, anxiety about dissolution of the self, which can be very disorienting, the intimations of emptiness, interdependence. It can be a little wonderful and odd. Ecstasy, grief, and I would say physical, psychological, and emotional pain and joy. And this wish to stop that kind of alternates and at the same time is this excitement or wish to go on no matter what happens. So it's... It's not like you're sort of always enthusiastic.

[06:42]

And nor are you always discouraged. And getting used to that kind of swing in the spiritual path is very useful. And there's this TV show that I really like called Joan of Arcadia. And in one of the episodes, her father says... think of all the saints you know, and which one would you like to emulate? And you think about how almost all of them are martyrs, right? That's how you get to be a saint. And so, when you think about the spiritual path, it's difficult, and it's not really, doesn't really get that much respect. The clothes do, the outfits do, the kind of enlightened teachers wandering around, but the actual path itself isn't really considered such a respectable thing. So Zen masters will often say this is useless, give up hope, and things like that.

[07:52]

And yet, you know, this is an effort towards, you know, once you start on it, or even if you read about it, it moves towards this attainment of self-understanding and acceptance of reality as it is, which is very unusual. And this sort of understanding happens and has to happen in the midst of all the ambiguities of our ordinary life and the suffering of the world. So what is the final stage on this path, Underhill describes as unity and diversity, stillness and strife. So that sounds very familiar to some of our Zen teachings.

[09:01]

But before that, there's this very strange and difficult, and as I said, it's not highly regarded as or respected process that unfolds. A lot of it, during a lot of it, it's kind of embarrassing because it brings things up and you struggle with things that come up from your past or wishes that you have for your future and all those kinds of things. And sometimes you can look a little silly or other things. But in a certain way, its success relies on on that contempt and disregard. Why that is, I'm not sure. But it's certainly not a path to success. I mean, there's a few spiritual teachers who make a lot of money, but most of us are not gonna do that, right? We're gonna kind of live in community or have just ordinary lives in the world.

[10:07]

So that isn't the focus. And as I was thinking about this way that this process is disregarded in general in a certain way, I was thinking about our ancestor Shantideva. And he lived in a monastic community and he was held in contempt and reviled by all the other monks. They laughed at him and they mocked him. And they finally mocked him. into teaching in front of the assembly, because they thought, now this is really going to be hilarious. And he got up in front of the assembly, and without resentment, he gave his discourse on the way of the bodhisattva. And what's interesting is, because there was no resentment, they all listened, and they were all affected by what he said. So, this...

[11:11]

You know, we don't have perfect circumstances, and it's not easy, and it's complex what we're doing when we're on a spiritual path. And I think there are aspects to this story that are sort of applicable to our experiences of the spiritual path and living in a spiritual community. Because the monks thought it was okay to treat Chantideva this way. Even though, you know, we have these Buddhist teachings, you know, not to pray at the expense of others, not to harbor ill will, and, you know, hatred is not ended by hatred but only by love and that sort of thing. So what this sort of implies is that those teachings are very simple and they're very difficult. And I think that because the spiritual path is difficult, it often brings up some things about ourselves just as normal human beings that are things like our self-justifications, some defensiveness, some conscious and unconscious sort of passive aggressive behavior.

[12:37]

And these are often not acknowledged because it's just so painful. particularly if you live in a spiritual community, to kind of address these things and come to terms with both what is true about them and what is not true about them. And also I think negative emotions often seem very powerful, more powerful than other emotions. So when we think about why do we set aside these negative emotions? And rather, should we be developing them and acknowledging them so that we can integrate them into our spiritual life and find some balance? So... So they, you know, as we look at these teachings and consider our experiences as we try to engage with them and practice them, we start to recognize the effort and endurance that they require and also the promise that they offer becomes clearer and more daunting and more inspiring.

[14:07]

All those things together. And I think we have to constantly renew our intention and reflect on our failure to meet it. And this is not to do this with some sort of self-contempt or judgment or despair, but with this deep and wide sense of our humanity and our fragility and our potential in the midst of this world that we'll never fully comprehend. So the first level that Underhill proposes on this path is the awakening of the self. And this often takes the form of a kind of conversion experience. This sense that our life kind of turns and we see that there's something possible or missing or ignored.

[15:15]

that we wish to develop and examine and to have some sense of seeking towards its fulfillment. And this is usually very joyful. You know, we first step into thinking about spirituality and... meditation or prayer and what that brings into our lives, often a certain kind of focus or calmness. And it also is often very hopeful. Like when I first came to practice, it was from the kind of conversion experience I'd had through doing 12-step work. And the way the world sparkled for a while was quite wonderful and hopeful for me. So one of the things that can happen then is that we get attached to that.

[16:20]

Oh, this is wonderful. This is the beginning. This is, oh, it's going to be like this forever. And so we can sort of hang out there and cling to it, but it usually shifts on its own. That's one of the things about it. doing this work. So the next level is a little more challenging and that's the second level which she calls the purification of the self. And Underhill describes this as realizing the manifold illusions in which one is immersed and realizing the discipline and mortification required to address it. So this is... This is when some of the spiritual effort and sense of pain that comes with it can start to surface. You know, here we spend a lot of time studying the precepts, where they're sort of central, and we sow a rakasu and receive the precepts.

[17:30]

We receive the precepts as priests and so on, and we chant them once a month in the full moon ceremony. So we go over them and over them and over them. And there is a certain kind of sense of self-examination as you study the precepts. And it can be a little bit painful, can also be sort of fulfilling. But the pain is important. It's not like ouch pain. It's like... healing pain in a certain way, seeing more clearly. And we don't often want to see more clearly. Don't always, I should say. And so once again, we can get sort of stuck with that process and cling to this idea of the precepts and attaining them or fulfilling them and that sort of thing. So these first two levels, awakening of the self and purification of the self, comprise this foundational work of the first three perfections, which were our generosity, and it has these qualities of forgiveness and spaciousness, you know, openness, and then ethical conduct with its development of self-understanding, and tolerance or patience with knowing that you're on a path

[18:58]

and just kind of having this patience and just to keep doing the work. So the third level is the, she calls it the illumination of the self. And she says that this is the extent that most spiritual seekers reach and don't go beyond that, but it's also a significant achievement. So it's the level of deepening meditation, and contemplation, as well as the experience of its side effects. So meditation, as we're studying it in the perfection, there's two types, shamatha or calming and vipassana or insight. And they provide stability and a sense of having arrived at something or touched upon a new way of being. So this spiritual effort and these meditation practices, particularly if you even sit a one-day sitting and then longer sittings and then practice periods at Tassajara, there's these side effects that arise.

[20:18]

the voices and visions and the ecstasy and the rapture, you know, they're kind of delightful and distracting and annoying and we can once again get attached to them like, ooh, isn't this exciting? I just sit here and meditate and all these, you know, visions appear on the wall, which really does happen. And sound has a way of sort of reforming itself and that sort of thing. But some of these sounds and voices and visions can be a little uncomfortable and even terrifying. And we can also get attached to that. Like, oh, you know, this horrible vision I had or something. And, you know, it's part of the process, so yes, we will feel kind of attached and sort of think what does it mean and that sort of thing. But this also may be an indication of moving into the next phase, which I'll talk about in a minute.

[21:21]

So we can sort of rest in meditation, which I think is actually very reasonable and in many ways appropriate. And I think some of the visions and the sort of terrifying aspects of it it requires very careful discernment to know whether these are spiritual or whether they're psychological and how to address them. And I think it's, you know, there's a certain way you can endure these in a spiritual path, but if they're not in that realm, it's very useful to do something else or both. I've found both really help, psychotherapy and sort of working with them at the same time through meditation.

[22:26]

So this third level has moved the journey on to the perfections of energy and its qualities of endurance, courage, and faith, and meditation with its qualities of calming, focus, insight, awareness, and the experience of the deconstructive view of the self, and then those side effects that this examination entails. So the next phase is kind of this... You know, if you do meditation, it will have some expected and unexpected effects. And so this phase is called the dark night of the soul. And Underhill also calls it the mystic death and mystic pain. So it has usually come up a few times intermittently in our practice.

[23:32]

And you can't tell how long it's going to take to get to this stage. You may never get there. And it's nothing to worry about, but it's something to be aware of because it's a deeply transformative place along the spiritual path. Underhill describes it. Now the purifying process is extended to the very center of I-hood, as in me, I. I-hood, the will. So it follows on very intense spiritual practice, and it naturally has qualities of fatigue and a kind of lassitude and disequilibrium. And why wouldn't it? This incredible effort that it actually takes to sit meditation.

[24:37]

I think we forget about that sometimes, particularly long periods, one-day sittings, sishins. practice periods at Tassajara. But one of the oddest effects about this stage is that it's not discouraging in the way that some of our psychological experiences of things like depression or grief can be. It's not discouraging, and I don't know why that's it. There's almost an experience of having earned it. Like, oh, now I get to let go. What is this gonna be like? Scary, yes, but wow. So I wouldn't recommend it, but my phrase for it was loss of faith in the midst of faith. And Underhill says that it is the sorting house of the spiritual life.

[25:42]

where those very reasonably contented with the illuminated vision of reality settle there and don't continue through this dark, dry period. So, as I said, you know, you can misstate some of these states of mind like sort of psychological disequilibrium for the dark night. And so it's kind of a tricky phase in our spiritual development. But what happens is that those psychological states can be romanticized into an assertion of spiritual progress. And then you get stuck, And these mental states of grief and trauma and addiction need to be addressed in systems that can address those states and their symptoms.

[26:55]

And if this doesn't happen, then you sort of get bogged down and your spiritual life can stagnate in a way that's uncomfortable for you and repetitive and uncomfortable for those around you. So it's not like you're doing something wrong, but to developing this discernment about really what you're doing when these states arise and how they need to be addressed, it becomes very practical. You're not, you know, it's not like, oh, I'm doing it wrong. Just go and talk to somebody, you know, figure it out. It's really important because this, the, the, What do you call it? The potential for deepening your spiritual experiences there. But the spiritual level of this is also destabilizing. One thing that happened to me for a while is I kept thinking of myself as just being such a phony.

[28:05]

Like phony, phony, phony. Who do I think I am? And Underhill actually talks about this. And so there's this kind of spiritual question we ask all the time, you know, who am I? Who am I? And instead I was saying, who do I think I am? And this was painful, but it was also kind of funny, you know? Who do I think I am? And so sometimes I would laugh. So I think that... In this dark place, this sort of dry, the spiritual excitement has kind of flattened in a certain way. I think humor helps. We see that we're trying to attach to something and it relieves us from that attachment. So Underhill writes, the dark night then is really a deeply human process in which the self, which thought itself so spiritual, so firmly established upon the supersensual plane, is forced to turn back, to leave the light, and pick up those qualities which it had left behind.

[29:28]

Which is actually kind of exciting. And I think this is the period that you can remember from Mushom's quoting her teacher. You will have many experiences along the way, but ignore all of them until the final explosion. So this is what's happening in the dark night. You're coming to this point where you're going to ignore. And so this final explosion is the deeper conversion experience, the initial one that sort of inspired one to do all this, deepens into a different kind of conversion. And in a sense, it's the mature humility of seeing things just as they are. And I think, you know, some of us have this experience. You know, we hear descriptions of this, and it can sound kind of anticlimactic.

[30:36]

And she says... What does she... Right. So this explosion of release from attachment turns out to be peace of heart, tranquility, and quietness. And not quite what we thought enlightenment or nirvana was going to be. In a sense, we want it to be quiet, but we want ourselves to be importantly quiet. And it's not like that. So the quote-unquote final stage which comes after the final explosion of this deep humility.

[31:39]

The unitive life is marked by the person on this journey becoming something like what Underhill calls a sharply intuitive and painfully practical person. So I was thinking about, well, how... ah, what kind of images and impressions do we have of the Buddha? And I don't have impressions of him as being kind of a warm, friendly person, inviting people over for tea or that kind of thing. It's not my impression of him. But he's inspiring and he supports people's practice and he meets them where they are, so he's wise. He's a teacher first. And in a sense, what this means is he hasn't really lost his personality or his history.

[32:41]

He can only be the kind of Buddha that he is from his history, from his experience of being a person. And that's why he recommends that we take the teachings as our teacher. so that we do the same thing. We become the Buddha that we'll become, not the Buddha that he was. Not imitating in the sense of being like him, but imitating the path that he took. So Underhill describes the result of the final explosion. Supreme achievement and complete humility are one. And this isn't like a final state of being because it isn't an escape, but it becomes this kind of full immersion in one's humanity and in compassion for others' humanness.

[33:45]

The transcendent life is revealed and our living within it, not on some remote and arid plane of being, but in the normal acts of our diurnal experience, suddenly made significant for us. And so this is the realization of wisdom, the understanding of emptiness, which is the next perfection. So it turns out the spiritual path is a kind of return. And it has a foundation, this return... depends on the foundation of ethics and meditation, but we return through this kind of wondrous, disorienting, and arduous journey to our ordinariness. This dailiness that becomes imbued with a kind of transcendent hope in the midst of our human experience and the human condition

[34:56]

with all its struggles and its uncertainties. And I don't know why that is. But it seems consistent in the spiritual path. So thank you very much. And do we have time for questions? A couple of questions, okay. Yes. and also different.

[36:06]

That was kind of one. And the other one was that you spoke about warmth and him not being like this person that would invite you to tea. That's something that I find it really difficult in this practice. The music comes out to me as a lack of warmth and kind of human touch that I'm struggling with, and I was wondering if you could say maybe something on that, and how can I find maybe that warmth and that fire that I feel is lacking? So you asked a lot of questions. I think that what the path I just described is actually from mysticism, Evelyn Underhill's book, and there's also descriptions of the path As I said, Jack Kornfield has a book on descriptions of the path. So the spiritual path is not just the Buddhist teaching.

[37:09]

But the Buddhist teaching is a way to follow a spiritual path. And it has pretty consistent qualities to it. What it doesn't have are certain types of spiritual images that some of us are familiar with. It does, I mean... incorporated into it, which was not so much in the original teaching, is figures like bodhisattvas and the Buddha himself that we kind of put outside ourselves. And other traditions have God or Jesus or, you know, some sort of God-like images to relate to and to include in the spiritual path. But it's pretty directly, you don't have to so much worry about the specifics, and I can't go so much into that right now.

[38:12]

And then the warmth part, I think that that's always been a question about people who are on a spiritual path. We forget the effort that's required. And we often don't even notice it. And we don't notice that it's making it difficult for people to be warm. Because it's just pulling so much. And I also think that there's certain type of personalities that are attracted to different practices. And so there are sort of warmer Buddhist practices that are And you might find out that maybe you didn't like those either. Maybe it's too much. So you just have to experiment and see, oh, maybe this isn't so bad or maybe this is better or something like that.

[39:13]

Does that answer your question well enough? Well, I want to practice here. Well, good. It's here. Don't worry. Yes? Well, there's 12-step work, which is really helpful. And then there's different types of psychotherapy. And, you know, you can... It's not so hard to find them. And David does a program called Transforming Depression and Anxiety. That's very wonderful. Yeah.

[40:14]

Okay. One more. If we don't need another question. Yes, Miguel. Well, one thing I think that's really important to remember when you have a tendency, a habitual tendency, is to work with calming meditation. It really does shift those things.

[41:17]

And it takes a lot of effort to do it because you're easily distracted. And in a certain sense, we have to admit that that we kind of enjoy our suffering. It's familiar. It sort of reminds us that we're us and that we've had these experiences and that brought this up. So that's what it means to go back, to say, oh, I left that behind because I didn't want to deal with it. I didn't want to say, oh, I actually kind of feel like this is me. I don't really want to let go of it. So, is that your question? Yes, it's not going back and picking it up, it's realizing it still happened. Right, that you need to go back sort of and leave it. It's more like that. Okay, thank you very much.

[42:19]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:46]

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