This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. It's nice to see you all here. Lovely new lectern we have. It feels a little shield-like. I feel very protected from you all. I hope you all brought your own shield. Don't leave home without it. So I know some of you.

[01:08]

My name is Jiryu. I live here at Green Gulch Farm. And I always start talks with that information. And the way I put it in my notes is intro self. So is myself now intro'd. You have my name, Jiryu, and a place, Green Gulch. I could give you some more facts about myself too, and maybe that would help you know me. I could tell you what I think about some things, some of my opinions, some of my history. And then maybe you would know Who I am? If I could call all that up.

[02:09]

Wait, who am I exactly? Okay, right. My name is Chiryu. What do I think about that exactly? Oh, yes, right. Here's my opinion on that. Nice to see you again. Remind me who you are. Oh, right. Now I know. This information, you know, this idea that the information about me would somehow help you know me. Or maybe even worse, that I think the information about me will help me know myself. So if I were to forget who I was for a moment, the eventuality of which I'm constantly on guard against, if I were to forget who I am for a moment, Well, fortunately, I am involved in Zen practice.

[03:19]

So in Zen practice, it's okay to forget who you are for a minute, even if you're sort of like introducing yourself to someone or giving a Dharma talk, you know. It's hard to think of other professions, you know, where you can just forget everything you know, and that's okay. Okay. They talk about, you know, before you go on stage, you blank out or something. You know, your mind is just completely wiped of what it is that you're supposed to be. If I remember just a tiny bit, I remember, right, that's okay in the thing I do. Whatever it is. I don't have to panic. I think we're used to thinking and relating to each other as though this information about ourselves, this so-called who I am, is somehow intrinsic to who I actually am.

[04:29]

You know, that the more I tell you, the more you'll know, and the more I can call to mind, the more I'll know myself. But really, I think more basically, None of us have any idea at all what is going on here, who we are, how we got here, what it is to have hands and stuff. It's a very strange experience to be alive. I remember a friend of mine saying the whole existence thing is sort of statistically impossible. we're in some kind of impossible situation already that we have no idea what it is. And that's a hard... There's something painful about that for us.

[05:35]

There's something that makes us nervous about that. I think babies are okay having no idea who they are. But, you know, as we're taught that we're supposed to have the answers to these questions, We start to feel some anxiety about not having them, maybe even some disorientation and kind of not remembering. You know, how am I going to get through the day if I don't remember who I am? So it's as though we fear, or it is that we fear, and sort of push away this basic wonder, really, and awe and strangeness of being... a human being, of existing at all. You know, coming and sort of tolerating this strangeness and coming closer to that strangeness, I think for me, lately, is a big part of how I understand Zen practice and meditation practice.

[06:40]

I feel that when I'm actually letting myself... feel the strangeness or the wonder or the awe, it feels truer than my various other approaches to life. It also feels warmer and more humble. I think you all know the feeling that I mean of strangeness beauty I think it's also called it's hard to talk about exactly what that feeling is but I think it is easy to see or talk about how it is that we cover it over that we paper it we paper over the basic strangeness of being alive the basic wonder of being alive there's a great Zen ancestor Hongzhi says

[07:59]

of meditation, he says, with thoughts still sitting silently, wander into the center of the circle of wonder. My favorite Zen teachings. Wander into this mystery. Wander into the dark. It's hard to talk about this dark, this place, but we can talk about how we protect ourselves from it. how we keep that basic freshness and curiosity and wonder at a distance. So that's, I think, what I want to talk mostly about today, since that's the one that has words. Because it is words, basically, that do this remarkable task of pushing away the basic fact that it's very... incredible, inconceivable to be anything.

[09:00]

So we forget our strangeness by covering reality, by covering our experience of ourselves and our experience of reality over with various thoughts and ideas and views and opinions about what's happening. They're very... useful because we can then disconnect from what's actually happening and know what's happening by means of our opinions and thoughts, the stories we tell about what's going on. So we have, you know, views like that's a person, that's a tree, here's some water. spent a few years here managing the water system and got very realized that I have no idea what water is.

[10:16]

You know, before we really look at water, we think we just assume we know what water is. Water is, who knows? So, but that's water. You know, I've got it. That's a light. Light. And so that's something, right? Yeah. That's my friend. That's my enemy. That's me. That's you. That's life. That's death. All of these views or ideas serve to cover over something more basic to who we are, which is sort of before any of these views. It's not that these views don't have a purpose. They have a pretty real purpose, which is... they make the world. They make the world and they make a world we share. In Buddhism, our collection of these views and opinions that have more or less, mostly less to do with reality, those taken together are called the relative world.

[11:28]

It's the world we sort of move around in and talk to each other in. So they have a function, but they also kind of blot out this wonder and this awe and this mystery. And then we wonder why it is that we're bored or annoyed or anxious. So I think a lot of Buddhism and Buddhist meditation is about kind of creating some crack, a little crack in those in those views, punching a little hole in the paper, cracking a little crack in the views that I put between myself and the actuality of my life. And to meditate, I feel, is to drive a kind of, we may find a crack already, and it may be a kind of secret suspicion. Secret suspicion that everything I think is not really true.

[12:31]

Secret suspicion that none of my views really correspond to reality. And then meditation is like to take a wedge, you know, and kind of drive it in there a little bit. See, we can hold that space, you know, open it kind of a degree at a time. People often ask, people who find themselves stuck in Zen training, often ask why we wake up so early to meditate. And it's an interesting question to ask a Zen teacher because there's not really any plausible answer to the question. But here goes. One of the many reasons for the unjustifiable, basically unjustifiable practice of waking up very early to meditate, I think has to do with, and especially maybe of going right from sleeping to meditating.

[13:33]

And then back from meditating to sleeping often. Ideally, it's what happens at the end of the day. Sometimes happens sooner. You know, right when we wake up, I find this especially true of a nap. Right when you wake up, there's a crack. There's a sliver of reality, I would call it. You might call it fear or disorientation or something. for the word reality, something happens there before the views have set in, you know? Before I know quite who I am or where I am or that I am and that I am and might not be, before any of that is activated, there's a kind of sliver of presence, you could say, something. You may relate to this. And we can sometimes feel the kind of flood of our stories about ourselves come rushing back, you know.

[14:39]

So I think part of the idea is if you can get to meditation really quickly before, you know, before you're under the snow of that, you have a little leg up, you know. It's like the wedge is actually not just bouncing off the steel of our views, but it's actually like found a little crack. In Japanese Zen practice, actually monastically, the practice is to, and it's part of why I think these, part of why these cushions here, or rather these platforms that we sit on are so wide, at least in a Japanese Zen monastery, is because that's also the sleeping spot. So you have a mat and you roll it out and you go to sleep right where you sit. And then when you wake up, you sit up. It's about, it takes very little time to go.

[15:42]

And then you sit for a while until you need to, until you really need to get up. And then you get up and get dressed and wash and all that. It's quite a beautiful practice of really sitting and tolerating opening to that space and before we know who we are. I did notice, I have noticed in my practice, and I think of it as a kind of fearlessness or courage, you know, to let that linger, you know? if we forget who we are, to let ourselves stay there and actually continue to function without, you know, reaching for our phone or something.

[16:49]

Sort of like, as soon as the awe, you know, we kind of see the awe at life itself coming towards us and reach for the phone, you know? Quick. So, you know, the question is, how... how we clear away these views in our life, how we sort of suspend this construction of this world in terms that we know, how we turn this beautiful river of being, you know, into something we know and can manage and are like on top of or behind or whatever, and just enter the world that we don't know at all. newly born, really, in each moment. How do we do that? How do we clear away some of these views? And I have a word that I've been appreciating to express that, and it's a word that I think expresses a deep Buddhist meditative principle, but it isn't exactly a Buddhist word, and it's also sort of a mouthful.

[17:56]

The word is dereification. Dereification. I don't think there is a Sanskrit. I may be wrong. The word as it's coming to mind now comes from this paper about Buddhist meditation that has me really excited. And I'd like to share just a tiny bit about it and then come back to this teaching, really, of dereification and how we can untangle our reality from our views. Some of you have heard me talk about this paper. I will avoid the rabbit hole. Just very briefly, there's a group of, you know, a lot of people studying Buddhist meditation.

[19:04]

Maybe you know about this. A lot of kind of psychologists and neuroscientists studying meditation and what it does and what the effects of meditation are. And it's a very interesting field of study and research and they've come to varying interesting conclusions about how a wonderful meditation is and precisely how it works, you know, in terms of psychology and neurology. But they have this sort of problem which is that they don't really know what meditation is. Or they don't have a way in these studies to account for all the different kinds of meditation that there are. So they say, you know, meditation... My summary is, you know, meditation makes your brain great. So the kind of meditation makes your brain great sort of discourse... It isn't so precise on either side, really.

[20:05]

There was this one article that was, meditation makes your brain great because it increases gamma phase synchrony, which also is present in people with Alzheimer's. But sounds like it must make your brain great. Anyway, there's some problems in the whole field. But there's also very exciting exciting things happening, you know, bringing these tools to the study and kind of bringing some precision for us as meditators also into how it is that we're working with our attention and our bodies. Anyway, the other side of that equation is the meditation part. And so to say that meditation does anything, it would be helpful to be a little more precise because there's a lot of kinds of meditation. You know, if you've ever gone one day to Spirit Rock and the next day to Green Gulch for meditation instruction, you might feel like, you might feel that, well, that really was the same teaching. But it's just as likely that you'd feel like, hmm, that's nothing to do with what it got.

[21:11]

One of these two got it wrong. So it's not about that somebody got it wrong. It's that there's a whole rich field of kinds of meditation instruction. And so these scholars, these Buddhist scholars and psychologists and neuroscientists wanted to kind of add some precision to what not only what the meditation instructions are, but also to what is actually happening in a person when we're meditating, right? So you can give meditation instructions to a room full of people, and then you could measure what's going on in their brains, but also it would be good to know, to ask them, what are you doing with that instruction you just got? Does that make sense? So not only do the instructions differ, but as those of us who have received instructions know, there's a lot of ways you could go with any given instruction. So how do you get more precise about what meditation is? So anyway, they made a beautiful chart of a kind of system of understanding or a kind of map of different instructions for meditation and different states of meditation.

[22:21]

And these include aspects like... You know, how strongly are you being taught to direct your mind on an object? Are you being taught to really concentrate or are you being taught that actually concentrating isn't so important? Are you being taught to really narrow the field of attention or to really widen the field of attention? Are you being taught to make an incredible effort or are you taught to release all the effort? There's all these distinctions that characterize and it's not that one is correct and more Buddhist or something. All of these characterize different feelings, different styles, different moments in meditation. And part of what's so beautiful for me about seeing them all in place is that each kind of meditation is a kind of mixture, a combination of different elements. So it's not just that being concentrated is what meditation is. Their model is sort of three-dimensional, multi-dimensional. It's not just being concentrated. It's being concentrated and a bunch of other stuff, you know, like dereification.

[23:26]

Because to just be concentrated may seem like a great goal, but as they point out in this paper and on this map, you know, an addict is very concentrated. They don't have a lot of space around their views, but they're very concentrated, you know. So understanding meditation not as a kind of on-off, one-line thing, but as a kind of balancing or juggling or mixing of various elements. And one of the elements that they emphasize as central to any Buddhist meditative project is this aspect of dereification. What they mean by that is the degree to which... So the word dereification for them is the degree to which thoughts, feelings, and perceptions... are seen, interpreted, as mental processes rather than as accurate depictions of reality. I like you.

[24:33]

That is blue. That is a cat. All of these are... mental process rather than an accurate depiction of reality. You know, I don't know where it is, why it is, we think anyway, that what happens to be in our brain would be an accurate depiction of reality. Like, where did that come from anyway? You know? Like, I woke up this morning thinking... that that's good and that's bad. I don't know how I got that thought. I didn't make that thought. Remember the trouble that Obama got in a few years back when he said that people didn't make, when he said they didn't build

[25:46]

Didn't build it. Remember this? It was maybe speaking of business people and said, you know, you didn't build that. You think you made something. You think it's yours. But actually, you didn't build that. You didn't make that. It was, you know, his example was, you know, you needed roads to get your truck to deliver your good that you made. You know, you're not by yourself, you know. And this was coming to mind as I was reflecting on this idea that I didn't make... Which, by the way, is, you know, the Buddhist understanding is that we never do anything alone. Because there's no such thing as alone. Because you'd have to be separate to be alone and we're not separate. So, anyway, I have this idea somehow that I made my thoughts. Like, they must, they're mine, you know.

[26:46]

Anyway, how it is, so our practice, you know, we have thoughts that we believe in. We have a bunch of thoughts and views that we believe in. I think it's interesting, I mean, useful to ask ourselves the question, if I don't even know who I am, basically, or how I got here, why do I have this faith that, like, the stuff that happens to be in my head is accurate depiction of reality? It's somehow part of the human package, but it's definitely a kind of weak link in the kind of story we tell ourselves about what's going on. It's kind of an unexamined little piece there that has the capacity to maybe undermine the whole enterprise of knowing what's going on. So I'll read a little more from this article. This is an example of high reification, which is the opposite of dereification, obviously.

[27:55]

So they say, for example, during depressive rumination, which is a certain kind of state that they're also mapping, a script including thoughts such as, I am a failure, may arise. And when it does, it can appear to be an accurate description of oneself such that a depressed mood is enhanced or sustained. So we have the thought, I am a failure. And since we automatically believe that the stuff that's in our head is true is an accurate depiction of reality, that's a huge downer because it's true. So I reify the thought. I think the thought is an accurate depiction of reality, and I have a problem. You can maybe see where the solution is. I am a failure is a mental process. I am a failure is a thought and not an accurate description of reality. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that I'm not a failure or that I am a failure.

[29:02]

And this is a point that's very easy to misunderstand, I think. You know, it's not that everything I think is incorrect and so therefore it's like the opposite. I'm not wrong or right in thinking I'm a failure. It's just the thought I'm a failure has zero correlation with reality. The reality that's the actual existence of our life that we can experience in the present moment and do every moment does not have any of those words or concepts or views attached to it, intrinsic in it. It's totally free of those views. So, or another example, when thinking about a stressful conversation that occurred yesterday, the series of thoughts that represent the event in one's mind may present themselves as a replaying of the memory of the conversation to the point that a physiological stress response is induced.

[30:06]

So if I'm thinking about something stressful that happened, and then like my body is back in it, I'm back in it, the power of my kind of imagination of what this was, Part of me, and more or less of me, but some part of me thinks that this is accurate, thinks that this is real, that this really is what's happening. And so then I have the response as though I really was there. Likewise, when thinking about one's favorite food, the thoughts that represent the food can be taken to be real in such a way that one salivates. really an ice cream cone. So these are all instances of high reification in that the thoughts present themselves as if the objects or situations they represent are occurring in the present moment.

[31:10]

So at the other extreme in this analysis is At the highest end of this dimension of dereification, thoughts lose their representational integrity and are experienced simply as mental events. Thoughts lose their representational integrity. I really like that phrase, the idea that thoughts are representing something rather than thoughts are just thoughts. I am... You know, I hear a bird sing. It's easy to open to, and it's easy to let go of, because I don't think it's representing anything. It's just a bird singing, you know? It doesn't mean something. I mean, maybe it does to the bird, if the bird is reifying. But it doesn't... I don't usually think, not being a bird, I don't tend to think that it means something.

[32:17]

So I... I can just appreciate an arising. But with my thoughts, it's somehow different. But it doesn't have to be. And that's the key. That's the pivot of our practice, I think. One of the ideas they mention that people have, that they take as accurate descriptions of reality, is the idea that I am... that idea, the idea that I am a self, that I'm a permanent, that I'm a self that kind of lasts over time, that I'm a static self in their terms. The idea that I've been here before, like a minute ago, you know, and that I'm going to be here in a minute, that idea is

[33:25]

is a deep view, a deep and deeply held view we have of ourselves that is also not an accurate depiction of reality. It's a mental event that says, I was here and I will be here. It's just a bird chirping in the present moment. That's one of these views, you know, that we don't even usually see. Makes it, we've got to sort of dig down a ways sometimes to even notice that we have these views. So another thing I appreciate in this study, in this article, which, by the way, is by a group of researchers headed up by Clifford Serin, who's a researcher over at...

[34:32]

UC Davis is really kind of at the forefront of a lot of this research. They note that this is something that dereification can happen naturally or it can be trained. And their example of it happening naturally is that the moment of becoming aware that one is daydreaming includes the recognition that although the daydream may seem real, it is actually just a series of thoughts or impressions in experience. So while we're in the daydream, We're just there. That's kind of what's happening, you know? And then there's some shift where we notice that, wait, that's not really what's happening. And that's when we wake up. We come back. Losing the capacity to represent reality, the internal train of thought in the daydream dissipates. As soon as we notice that it's actually not correlating with reality, like me and that ice cream cone I mentioned a while back, you know, we're still... involved over there.

[35:36]

But when I notice that that is not actually representing reality, then it stops. The ice cream cone is gone. So there's this teaching, maybe you've heard it, the Zen teaching of not thinking, or sometimes controversially called non-thinking, to be distinguished from not thinking in some sort of critical way that no one can quite explain to you what it is. But that must not be misunderstood. In a daydream, we can understand this in a daydream, that when the daydream loses the capacity to represent reality, when we withdraw from it, the kind of token, you know, when we take back the power that says you get to represent reality, then it just goes away. because it wasn't, it's been seen through, it's not an accurate description.

[36:43]

So the train just sort of stops, you know. So this idea of seeing the thoughts, it's not about, so we sit, you know, those of us trying to not think, sit thinking that we still think our thoughts are accurate descriptions of reality. And they're like dangerous, accurate descriptions of reality that we have to keep out of our brain, right? So we sit pushing away the thoughts because the thoughts are going to confuse us in some deep way. If we let the thoughts in, then we'll be really confused. So we sit trying to keep the thoughts out. And the more we do that, the more we're reinforcing this idea that thoughts are really something, you know? If you've got to work this hard to keep them out, they must be really something. So the Zen way, the so-called non-thinking, I think, I think it's what we call non-thinking, is that the thoughts are mental events that don't represent reality. So you can have a bunch, you can have a few, who cares?

[37:55]

It's like the quiet bird, I wish we had quiet birds around here, you know? The bird song doesn't correlate. It doesn't relate to anything. We just enjoy that it's sometimes present, sometimes absent, sometimes a cacophony, and sometimes silence. But there's no fundamental difference there. There's no distraction or sort of loss of equanimity in that. Sitting here thinking, thinking, thinking doesn't necessarily knock us off of our center or our seat. if we understand that thoughts are empty. We understand that they don't correlate with reality, that they're not accurate depictions. So we let them go. We let them come and let them go. And they kind of go, just as the daydream goes, when we see that it's a dream. So, you know, they also note that we can train this capacity for de-reifying and that all forms of Buddhist meditation

[38:58]

have as their goal this dereification. And you may say that Zen has no goal. So when I say the goal of even Zen meditation is dereification, and then some Zen students like myself get nervous because we're not allowed to have goals in our practice. But I think the reason we're not allowed to have goals in our practice is because we are so committed to dereification as a goal that we don't even let ourselves have a goal, right? Because that's an idea. That's going to be a reification. But it is our goal, you know? If that... for me, our insistence that we have no goal is just further evidence of how deeply committed we are to cutting off, to stepping beyond all of our views of reality.

[40:13]

So I'll say a couple quick more things about other ways this is talked about and then wrap up. A way that there's a great Thai forest teacher, Ajahn Sumedho, is said to have stopped a talk by his disciple, Ajahn Amaro, a great local teacher in the Thai forest tradition. His teacher, Ajahn Sumedho, stopped in mid-Lava Dharma talk. and paused and said, all your thoughts are garbage. This is a lovely teaching, you know. With garbage, we're happy to get rid of garbage. That's the point, you know. We don't cherish garbage. So it's not that, you know, all your thoughts...

[41:26]

That's a thought, right? All your thoughts are garbage. So now we're ready, those of us who like to build nests in views, have a new view. I have a new, I got a new view today and it's a really good one. It's that all my thoughts are garbage. So that one's garbage too. This is, you know, we call this the emptiness of emptiness. It's not that there is a right view of how things are. It's that views don't touch how things are. So emptiness isn't the right, isn't the truth about things. Emptiness is that our views never touch the truth of things. But we hear that and we say, oh, that means there's nothing. Or, oh, that means everything I think is garbage and I need to destroy it or something. It's a middle path. where we just watch the views land and keep on trucking, you know.

[42:32]

Hi, view. I see you, and you want me to believe you. This bumper sticker, you know, don't believe what you think. Have you seen that one? Excellent bumper sticker. Another... Don't believe everything. Oh, never mind. It's not such a good bumper sticker. Don't believe anything you think. don't believe this bumper sticker. Don't believe, you know. And then again, so then we say disbelieve. So now I'm a cynic, right? And now, someone once told me, Buddhism means knowing that everything is shit. You know, this is a kind of cynical view. This is attachment to a view, a negative view, which hears these teachings that these things aren't and misunderstands them, you know. So now I disbelieve everything. That's equally a view, you know. So let the views come and go. The views as comings and goings have total integrity, by the way, you know.

[43:39]

These views, a view, a position I have in this moment is the unfolding of all of existence since beginningless time and has the weight and ground and presence and integrity of all of that. history of universal co-arising coming together in me with this view it's not something to take lightly or dismiss or just call garbage it's it's the gift that I have right now of being this person who sees things this way and so we need to be true to that that is actually being a non-self is being true to the gift of myself in this moment but then letting it change not being stuck not thinking it's true, just knowing that it's pressing.

[44:41]

I should end. For me, you know, just this idea of having space around my views. Any view I have, if I can find a view the feeling of space around it, to me, seems like the difference between heaven and hell, really. The claustrophobia of the agony, really, of being in a view that we actually thought, that we actually believe depicts reality. What agony, you know? Once we've seen even just a crack of daylight in there, how can we go back, you know? to just being totally committed to this view. We can be committed to a view, but to have some space around it, to know that that view doesn't really reach, that most basically we don't know who we are, and that if we want to help and heal and love one another, now that's the direction to go.

[45:54]

So that's my hope in our practice and in sharing these teachings with you today is that forgetting who we are and that our views are true is a gate for us to enter together and join and bring benefit to one another. So may our practice of the Buddha way benefit not only us but really all beings widely. Thank you very much. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:01]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.74