Sunday Lecture

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good morning

every time i find myself sitting in the seat are ready to give a talk and we do this verse which we chant on the occasion of opening a sutra or text or before lecture i always feel like car on my goodness
i certainly hope that whatever i have to say this morning while they have some use or help but i also want to encourage you to not worry about about it if it isn't

one of the things that i love about the tradition of buddhism
stemming from the words of shakyamuni buddha
is the encouragement to listen and pay attention to teachings
to find a way to integrate them into our daily life and into our actions moment by moment
but also not to accept anything blindly
that's the part that i find most attractive the encouragement that each one of us must investigate and examined whatever we hear or read
and check check it out for ourselves so it is a kind of encouragement that we not turn away from our own experience and what is true for us moment by moment but to check in and listen and trust ourselves as deeply as we can
can all be it with the tentative
attitude that we could be wrong
but to not give up our experience in the face of what someone else tells us is true
so i want to encourage you to remember that part of listening to a talk or a lecture
so here we are in the zendo at green gulch on the twentieth of august which i always thought was summer
i was thought that was when everyone went on vacation
i thought that was when we would go swimming because it would be hot
on the seventh of august i was trying to figure out where we were in the moon cycle and i picked up a calendar that i have which is a
kind of taoists confusion calendar but it has lots of moon material on it
and i noticed on that particular calendar that august seventh was announced as first day of autumn
and i thought who pretty interesting
so since then i've been paying attention to what's going on with the bushes and trees
and it sure looks like autumn to me
and this morning when we were blessed with heavy fog or light rain
i depending on your information and point of view it feels particularly like autumn this morning

in listening to various teachers and studying various texts i am struck repeatedly by the description in this great tradition stemming from shakyamuni buddha's teachings and before him even
by the description that what we are doing has to do with mind training or transformation
developing the mind
so i find myself thinking about what does this mean what does it mean to develop my mind
and i think that there are some implications
essentially there is some basic assumption that there are different kinds of minds or a states of mind
and maybe we're talking about developing some and transforming others
that's certainly what i imagine is going on
that there is in fact some notion that there are virtuous or wholesome states of mind and there are non virtuous or harmful states of mind
so what we are attending to is paying attention to the quality of the state of mind which is arising in this moment
and making some effort i'll be an effort that involves energy but also allowing a curious kind of effort to pay attention to what is in fact my condition in this moment
my textual references this morning come from two sources one is a tisha a great
meditator and yogi who lived in india in the tenth century the late tenth century
another one of these
inspiring practitioners who started out in life having everything from some point of view a prince and wealth and living in a beautiful part of the world and all of that
he was a great disappointment to his family because from the time he was very young he had no interest in worldly affairs and by the time he was in his early teens he was deeply immersed in an inner life or spiritual practices
and lived a long and beneficial life as a practitioner and great teacher
my other reference is mel torme know some of you may know i was asking myself last night is this another instance of dating myself
a particularly i thought of that when my husband who is somewhat younger than i am didn't know the song
we can make whatever conclusion from that we learnt to
after sitting quietly sitting and walking quietly for the day yesterday i went to see a friend who has been diagnosed with quite a serious cancer
and i want actually to talk about to her life and her situation this morning
as i drove into the driveway after visiting with her last night mel torme was singing this song that goes love and the weather can't be depended upon
i thought i yes
and impermanence song
i'm all about those things we can't count on
they want it to be sunny and it's rainy you want him or her to love you and he or she is fickle and so it goes
it's a great song if you don't know it and mel torme does a superb rendition
i as some of you know i'm looking for a german texts anywhere and the newspaper in the radio bring up some great to great versions

my friend
is someone that i've known for quite a while we were roommates in the early part of july during some dharma teachings
and during that time my friend was commenting to me about the difficulty she was having with periodic blindness brief episodes of blindness or
blocked vision in her left eye
and she thought oh well i've been doing a lot of yoga and i've been doing headstands and i probably pinched something
so we both disgusted and she said i guess maybe i should start doing headstands and go check in what's going on
so she came back home and she went to the doctor and there was some possibility that she had a breast cancer
she was pretty upset she said oh no not that i love my breasts i want them no cutting
was pretty difficult
and then subsequent tests showed that she was clear
and then further tests showed that she has cancer in her lungs her right lung and in the bronchial tube that goes into that long
and she has a tumor in her brain
which is of course what was causing this series of episodes with some blindness

so we've been hanging out together in the last to
couple of weeks since she got this news
i am once again struck by
what a great teacher
a terminal illness can be
and i once again struck by what a great teacher someone in this phase of living
called dying but a great teacher such a person can be both for that person we become our own teachers and our lives become our own teachers in that situation but we also have some possibility of being a teacher for those around
around us and my friend is certainly were doing that for me
she said a week or so ago isn't it interesting i would take that early diagnosis in a minute
how different it looks to me this week
then it looked to me two or three weeks ago
i was really struck by that
made me think of tick that hands admonition about enjoying the toothache you don't have
i almost never enjoy the toothache i don't have i don't even think about my teeth until they don't work
until there's some problem
and then i think ah
boy did i ever used to have good teeth
or gums
or back
do i think about the teacup that i enjoy drinking tea from
before it's broken or only when it's broken and what comes up his regret or anger
that i dropped it or someone else dropped my favorite teacup etc
so i said to my friend last night if you don't mind i'd like to use some of our conversations in lecture tomorrow morning she said no that's fine so we were talking again about
how she still is noticing how many different possible versions of cancer here and there she could happily live with take my breast take my are just let me have my life
and yet what strikes me in her situation
is how i see blooming before me
the fullness of her life
and the fullness of her capacity to be present
how much she is on the path
meant intent fiercely to cultivate her capacity to become and to be happy in each moment
because she very much wants to become and happy at the moment of time
and this is of course a great inspiration to practice
over and over again in teachings and in texts we read an admonition about practicing daily to remind ourselves that we know we will die we do not know when or how
sometimes i hear people say oh but that so gloomy that soma cop
but in fact my experience is quite the opposite
to the degree that i can let the world around me and within me the world of human life and the life of all beings
of plants and animals have rocks in the hills of the clouds in the sky the weather
provide
constant opportunities for meditating on the impermanent nature of all things
and that i can keep that attending
very particular so that i do not forget at least for not too long that i know i will die and i do not know when or how
yesterday my friend had another friend visiting her in the afternoon who took her through a kind of meditation practice where she would place her hands on different parts of her body and let her hands stay in that
that area for about five minutes
and just breathe quietly and attend to that part of her body with as much presence and attention and gentleness as possible
she said she did that with twelve particular areas of the body
that would take a while
and my friend said that she had just finished doing that when she heard my car drive up and she heard the car door slam and immediately
she thought oh yvonne is coming
and she noticed how quickly she moved away from the moment to anticipating my being in the room sitting next to her
and she realized she had an opportunity to go back to attending to the detail of physical body and breath
my ringing the doorbell or her standing by the door waiting expectantly so she could open the door the minute she heard a there which is what had occurred to her she said i just went back to breathing
until you in fact rang the doorbell and came into the house had walked into the room
in much to her surprise she was actually able to stay present with each breath
she was quite surprised she said to i did it
i had the sense that she surprised herself
and that what she is learning is how to stay present more and more a few moments at a time
as an alternative to living in the past longing for what is gone
for her dear husband of many many years who is no longer alive
and also as an antidote to fleeing into the future which is filled with
fear and anxiousness
she had another er impermanence experience
which i thought was particularly lovely
she's rather slender person and she's been eating a lot of vegetables fresh vegetables in a few grains and seaweed
she's and i am drinking so much carrot juice i'm going to turn orange
and now i've been taking her stinging nettles and she said i'm either going to be orange or green
but on a diet like that she's also getting thin she was already thin
she said to me last night you know i looked in the mirror a little while ago and i noticed that my ass had fallen off
it was my one curve
and it was so cute
i loved that little bit of curve and it's gone
it's just not there
she said i sort of waved good bye
and thought maybe i won't have that curve again but then again maybe i will
but for the time being anyway that curve is gone
she told me that and we both laughed
my ass has fallen on
there are of course some of us who would love to have that experience
but maybe this is also like the weather
i want want what i don't have
and i want what i have to go away

so the encouragement is that we use every immediate circumstance as an opportunity to meditate
to meditate on impermanence
to meditate on the cultivation of generosity
to meditate on the cultivation of virtue or of prac of patience
the possible objects of meditation are limitless

the other thing my friend said that she noticed was that while she and her visitor yesterday afternoon we're talking
her sense of
emotional since the way she felt was very different than when they sat together
quietly not talking breathing
and guiding her hands on twelve different parts of her body
while she and her visitor we're talking
there was some difficulty some upset some focusing attending to this big trouble she has her life
what she said during that hour or so when we did this hands on the different parts of the body and attending to each of those areas in a breath she said suddenly things became very light
she saw her hands like the wings of angels because she placed her hands in this gesture which reminded her of angel wings
she said there was a kind of sweetness and gentleness
in simplicity as we sat together not talking
she has been describing a to a taste of that quality intimacy and connectedness with oneself and with another person
that arises so surprisingly when we stop talking
when we attend to breath and simply being in the moment
so my friend had a taste of that space which for those of us who practice meditation understand as
the deep space the deep stillness which is like some vast container for compassion and wisdom
so my friend has the quality in her
of wanting to practice as if her head is on fire
and i'm reminded again
of the admonition
on the wooden board that we hit with a hammer
the han which sounds to mark the call to come to practice him
practice as if your head is on fire
meditate on the great matters of birth and death because of course our head is on fire
and when we can be inspired and fueled by that sense of no time to waste
but also paradoxical paradoxically not being in a hurry
cultivating the state of mind called having nothing to do and nowhere to go
there is a kind of vividness and joy which arises in our lives
and so my friend described to me this hour or to visit with her dear friend
as a great joy
a great occasion
and a glimpse into a way she can me for however long she lives

she's learning how to practice generosity in every moment generosity with whatever arises
it's pretty easy to do when water arises is a calm mind but what about generosity with oneself when
when we do something silly or stupid or mindless
early yesterday morning i was up in the attic of the house pulling down cushions from the back of the attic
for sitting together for the day
and i was moving quickly
and of course i whacked myself in the head on the eve
and i still have that lump i woke up this morning and i could feel it
and i started to
do a kind of cranky conversation with myself about my mindlessness and in the midst of a remembered
this is an occasion for generosity for kind lena's
for paying attention to what was going on in that moment what was i thinking about what was feeding the speed with which i was moving is there a way and which try can learn something from that moment
is there a way and which i can accept the causes and conditions of my life that lead me to be attentive in one moment and inattentive in another
how do we practice meditating on impermanence
how do we practice daily reminding ourselves about are dying and in fact how do we practice styling itself
at the end of some breasts
there is a space
and if you pay attention let your attention follow your breathing as it comes in and goes out you can attend to that space at the end of the exhalation as a kind of mine are dying
j that wasn't so bad that wasn't so scary
who that was rather interesting
i can also practice dying when i go to sleep at night
because when i go to sleep at night it is a kind of dying at the end of the day
shakespeare in one of his sonnets says it so beautifully
sleep has deaths second self
that seals up all in rest
how could i not be welcoming to that guy of sleep
which sails up all in rest
and then at the end of that song on he says this thou perceive ist
which makes thy love more strong to love that well which thou must leave air long
this is of course the joyful side of a meditation on impermanence
there is that delicious
enjoyment and touching
of that which we know we will have
get our lives briefly
we tell ourselves stories about that which we want to hold on to
and we rob ourselves of a particular kind of lightness and joy in that clinging that holding that possessing

i keep being struck by how much this way of practicing with ourselves letting every circumstance provide an opportunity for meditating on impermanence or whatever it is we're cultivating in our lives in our
minds
i'm struck by how much it is like what i remember as a child learning to ride a horse and which i know for some of us came up when we wanted to learn to ride a two-wheeler
in both cases i know for a fact there is a certain part of learning to ride a horse or a bicycle that's called falling off
but if you really want to learn to ride the bike badly enough you get back on again
he probably didn't even think about the falling off as being anything other than part of learning to ride the bike it's just what happens it goes with the territory
this way of practicing of every time we are not doing what we intend to do and we return to our intention
practice includes all of it
the first step on the path called practicing generosity is noticing
that moment in which what arises in me is not generous
how else will i know what i'm looking into
so there is a kind of attitude about mistakes as being part of a path called doing doing it right knowing it wrong is part of the path of doing it right
so much for my friend she is learning everything about living
as she considers the detail of die
we both noticed yesterday
we've both been dying since the day we were born we just hadn't noticed it
oh that i can live with that that's not different from what all of us are going through
but it is different when a doctor says you have cancer in your lung and in your brain and you won't live for more than six months
there is a difference
for one thing you tend to believe this person
like here she knows knows something
we forget maybe this is an educated guess
and then lo and behold we find out that there's someone living instance and beach with exactly the same cancer showing up in exactly the same sites who was diagnosed in march of nineteen eighty eight
and is still very much alive
so what's going on

so my friend wants to live
and wants to die calmly and happily
so she can say i want to practice i want a spiritual practice i want to live long enough so that i have time to die the way i've heard i could
i find great inspiration
in hearing her say that
i think that's the message that's on the hon which we hit to announce the beginning of meditation
may we each live for whatever length of time
we need to to get our act together
and the only way we can do it according to the ancient wise ancestors
his moment by moment
using each moment
each circumstance no matter what it is as the occasion to be awake and alive in the moment

yesterday as i was driving over to see my friend
these words came up in my mind
i know i will die i do not know when or how
oh today is a good day to die
thank you very much