And welcome to the Wednesday night talk at the San Francisco Zen Center. Tonight's talk will be given by Shorin Heather Iaruso. Heather, originally from New York, Heather arrived at our sister monastery in Big Sur in 2008. And since then has lived mostly at that monastery, Tazahara and the Brooklyn Zen Center. She ordained with Tia Strozer in Brooklyn. Tia is also a guiding teacher here in San Francisco. And after spending several years at Tassajara, Heather recently moved back to the San Francisco Zen Center, where she is currently the director and practice leader of our online temple. So I will chant the opening verse, female chant with me. Heather, we'll begin.

[04:11]

An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Hello, everyone, and welcome. Thank you, Brian, for your sweet introduction. And I'd like to thank Nancy, the head of practice at City Center for inviting me to offer this talk. And also my wonderful teacher, Tia Strozer. And also my other wonderful teacher, Paul Haller.

[05:23]

So thank you to both of you for all of your guidance and wisdom and boundless patience with me over these years. So I'd like to start with a quote from Suzuki Roshi. I would say it's one of my favorite quotes, but I have a lot of favorite quotes of Suzuki Roshi's. So he says that what we call I is just a swinging door, which moves when we inhale and exhale. It just moves. That is all. So who am I? These three little words have been contemplated for millennia by prominent psychologists and philosophers and, of course, spiritual seekers like ourselves. It's a perennial question with innumerable responses.

[06:23]

So Siddhartha's spiritual quest to investigate and end human suffering resulted in his awakening to the profoundly liberating experience of not self. The prevailing Hindu belief at the time, in the actual age when Buddha was alive, was that there is an Atman, A-T-M-A-N, that exists within each person. This is a Sanskrit word that's akin to, say, like a Christian belief in a soul. So Atman's a substratum of being that's eternal and is the agent of of actions, the possessor of mind and body, and it passes from lifetime to lifetime. So I guess there would be the Atman who is the who that's pondering this existential question of who am I? So in my humble opinion and in my experience for myself, the Buddhist teaching of the not self characteristic,

[07:34]

is one of the most radical and transformative of his teachings, maybe then and now, certainly was diametrically opposed to the prevailing belief that there is this eternal being that possesses the body and mind. This is a rebellious attitude of the Buddhas, if you will, against the prevailing Hindu belief. As some of you might know, not-self or the not-self characteristic is one of three characteristics of existence or three marks of existence. The other two are suffering and impermanence. This doctrine of anatta or anatman in Sanskrit is not such an easy teaching to understand, so bear with me as I do my best to explain it. So of course we exist. There's an I who is giving this talk and there's you, the group of you who are listening to it.

[08:42]

So it's not that there's no self as in there's no person making the speech, giving this talk and that there's no people listening to it. It's just that we don't exist in the way that we usually perceive ourselves. And that is as a separate and unchanging, independent individual, right? As Suzuki Roshi so poetically puts it, in each moment, we are just a swinging door, right? That moves with each inhalation and each exhalation. I think it's a beautiful way to encapsulate the sense of I, right? Constantly, constantly moving. So one way it was helpful for me to more fully understand the swinging door that I refer to as heather is to replace the noun of self with the verb of selfing, right?

[09:43]

So I guess I could refer to myself as heathering instead of heather from now on. Although words and phrases often miss the mark, perhaps using the verb form of self, selfing, can remind us that we are each one of us flashing into existence moment after moment. And of course, this is true for all of life, right? Whether we're able to perceive this flashings, these flashings through our ever-changing sense organs or not. So while we're switching things up grammatically, let's replace the interrogative pronoun who in the sentence with its less personal cousin, what? So who implies that there's a substantive person asking the question, right? That there's an Atman, if you will. When I looked up not self or Atman, the absence of Atman, Atman in the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, one of the one line that stood out in this lengthy definition was the Buddha was rigorously against any analysis.

[10:55]

of phenomena that imputes the reality of a person. So when a questioner asked him who senses, for example, the Buddha rejected this question as wrongly conceived and reframed it in terms of conditionality. So that is with what as condition does sensation occur, right? So with what as condition does sensation occur? The answer is, by the way, sensory contact. So if we were to take this question then, what am I? And we can look at how the Buddha explains this teaching of the not-self. So the not-self characteristic was the Buddha's second discourse. And he gave this discourse to the five ascetic monks whom he had been practicing with before, these yogic practices of self-mortification. And he decided that that wasn't the path to liberation.

[11:58]

So it's instructive to me that the Buddha, after attaining supreme enlightenment, chose the teaching of not-self as the topic of his second discourse. His first discourse, as many of you probably know, was the Four Noble Truths. So the Buddha leads these monks through a series of questions about their body-mind experiences. And he does this by introducing another profound teaching, that of the five skandhas or aggregates or heaps. So this framework of the five aggregates breaks down our human experience into the following parts. And anybody who chants the heart suture will be familiar with these parts. So form, this is the physical body. or the physical component of experience. Sensations, this doesn't really necessarily refer to emotions, because sometimes we say feelings instead of sensations.

[13:03]

Sensations is more of an effective tone of an experience. Is that a pleasant experience? Is it an unpleasant experience? Or is it a neutral experience? Usually the neutral ones we don't notice so much. And perceptions. So this refers to the continuous process of perception. Right. So the perceptual process is continuous and also the identification or naming of things. Right. So conceptualization. And then mental fabrications. This refers to thoughts and images. And there, if you want to delve a little deeper, there are 52 mental factors that involve Volition, choice, and intention. And this aggregate is largely responsible for our psycho-emotional personalities, where our preferences, our likes and dislikes reside, if you will. And then mind consciousness.

[14:05]

This aggregate of mind consciousness can't function, actually, without the other aggregates, especially form, because it needs a sensate body. So consciousness needs... a sensate body in order to arise. And I just wanna clarify that although I use the phrase constituent parts to refer to the aggregates, I think it's sometimes helpful to refer to them more as processes, right? So, cause constituent parts maybe makes them sound like they're discrete, definite, solid things when these aggregates are actually processes. So in the not self characteristic discourse, the Buddha begins this way. He says, form monks is not self. If form were the self, this form would not lend itself to dis-ease.

[15:10]

It would be possible to say with regard to form, let this form be thus, let this form not be thus. But precisely because form is not self, form lends itself to disease. And it is not possible to say with regard to form, let form be thus, let this form not be thus. And then he continues using form and he keeps questioning the monks. He says to the monks, Is form constant or inconstant? So is form permanent or impermanent? Impermanent or inconstant, Lord. And is that which is inconstant, inconstant, easeful or stressful? Well, it's stressful. And is it fitting to regard what is inconstant, stressful and subject to change as this is mine? This is myself. This is what I am. And the monks conclude, no, it is not. So he brings them through this line of questioning for each one of the aggregates.

[16:20]

The Buddha ends the teaching summarizing the not self-characteristic. He says, thus monks, any form, feeling, perception, fabrications, consciousness whatsoever that is past, future or present, internal or external, blatant or subtle, common or sublime, far or near, I think he's being very exhaustive here, is to be seen as it actually is with right discernment. This is not mine. This is not myself. This is not what I am. So this last sentence refers to the right or beneficial view that the Buddha instructs us to take toward the five aggregates. These aggregates are not mine. I'm not the possessor of these aggregates. So this view can help us cultivate a dispassion and non-identification with what's arising in the sense doors.

[17:22]

And when I first read the sutra, what occurred to me was that the Buddha was also pointing to the lack of control of the five aggregates. So one of the connotations of this phrase not self is the lack of control. So we are not in control of what arises, when it arises, or how it arises. Of course, we are responsible for our speech and our actions based on what's arising. But phenomena arise based on these unfathomable, innumerable causes and conditions. So although these aggregates are sometimes referred to as self-clinging in the poly canon, they are inherently free from clinging. So the Buddhist scholar and monk Bhikkhu Bodhi says that clinging happens as either an appropriation of or an identification with the five aggregates. So Bhikkhu Bodhi says either one grasps onto the aggregates and takes possession of them.

[18:28]

So this is an appropriation and says this is mine. Or one identifies with them and uses them as a basis for views. about oneself or for conceit, like I am better than or I'm as good as this other person or I'm inferior to other persons. Right. So this is a basic sense of conceit. So the poison of ignorance deceives us into believing that these aggregates are permanent and that they're a source of happiness and that they are self. So taking the five aggregates. as the object of meditation, as the Buddha suggests in many of his discourses. I wouldn't say many, but a number of them. And focusing on their impermanence is one practice that can help us have an embodied and liberating insight into the three marks of existence. Impermanence, of course, being one of those marks, as I mentioned earlier.

[19:29]

I just want to circle back to the Four Noble Truths. where the Buddha explains suffering, or to use the other common word, I don't know how common it is, dukkha, D-U-K-K-H-A. So this is what the Buddha says about the first noble truth. Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering. To be conjoined with what one dislikes, so being with one with something you dislike or somebody you dislike is suffering. And then being separated from what you like or who you love is also suffering, right? So not getting what you want is suffering. So, and I remember reading this last sentence when we read the shortened versions of the Four Noble Truth, but the last sentence in this description of suffering is, in short,

[20:31]

Grasping at the five aggregates is suffering. So grasping at the five aggregates is suffering. So since grasping seems to be the main culprit and also not intrinsic to the aggregates, let's just hover for a moment on this word grasping. So according to Biku Analayo, grasping can be defined as lust and desire. relation to the five aggregates, right? So we desire the sense of self, we desire and crave, right? The other word craving or tanha is this craving for usually central pleasures, right? So we have this lust and desire that arises when we identify with and grasp onto sense pleasures. The other way that this word grasping can be defined is in a more passive way, which is like the substrata that is grasped onto or the supply or fuel that feeds this grasping, right?

[21:46]

So it's the act of grasping and it's also what's being clung to, right? So the fuel that feeds this grasping is none other than the erroneous belief in an independent and abiding self. So when we impute a sense of self, a solid sense of I onto transient, impersonal, psychophysical functions, otherwise known as the five aggregates, suffering arises. And my experience is that the more intense the experience of suffering is, And I'm using the word suffering to encompass any type of lack of ease, stress, unsatisfactoriness, a sense of lack. So the more intense the suffering, usually the deeper the identification or story of me is.

[22:46]

Some of those old patterns of thought that we sometimes carry with us. and they keep popping up, we overlay them onto the present situation, and we're not able to see the reality of what's happening because we have these thick filters, sometimes they're thick, sometimes they're thin, that we're imposing, if you will, onto the world, right? So we're seeing the world through the story of me, the story of self. And for me, it's a helpful reminder to say that selfing is suffering. So there's an equal sign there, okay? There's not like there's some Heather over there. She's in the closet. She's causing me to suffer, right? So selfing equals suffering, right? So it's just a selfing suffering process, right?

[23:48]

And that for, I think many of us, this suffering selfing process can, express itself, manifest itself in the body and mind as a constriction of consciousness. And in fact, that is what one of my Dharma sisters, Gita, who is an Indian woman, she lives at Green Gulch. She mentioned this to me that the word dukkha can be translated or understood as a constriction, right? So this is like a constriction of consciousness, the suffering that closing in body and mind where we feel like we're separate from what's arising. And because it takes a tremendously stable, concentrated body-mind to perceive these discrete flashes of consciousness, most of us are unable to experience this process of selfing and interrupt it.

[24:49]

However, I think we can get a taste of some spaciousness when we're meditating if we just allow the mental activity, right, to just fall away instead of engaging it. As Suzuki Roshi says, another one of his popular quotes is, you know, don't invite those thoughts for tea, right? So we acknowledge the thoughts. We don't push them away. We also don't grasp onto them. We just allow the thoughts just to arise. And we notice them and then watch them or feel them. Sometimes we can feel them falling away, fading away. And the same with emotion sensation. Of course, sometimes emotions, if they're really heavy or thick, they're not so easy to let go because we can become so identified with emotion sensation that we get very caught up in it and very affected by it.

[25:59]

And one of Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan meditation master, he says, I love his definition of emotions. He says they're heavy-handed thoughts, right? So emotions are heavy-handed thoughts. They're often thoughts that come with a lot of thick, unsettling, uncomfortable, physical sensations and arising thoughts. Again, some of those old harmful thought patterns that we might have inherited from our biological family, often the unfinished karma of our parents being passed through to us unintentionally. So there might be these old stories there and those old stories get entwined somehow with our bodies as we're developing as little beings. So if we can start to practice with these five aggregates and allow them to arise and then just allow them to fall away, I know easier said than done, then we might be able to start to experience some spaciousness, some less reactivity to what's arising.

[27:18]

And I feel for me with the three marks of existence, impermanence seems to be very much a key, right? The impermanence of suffering, which is, yay, I'm not suffering anymore. This is going to pass. We often have this, maybe sometimes we dislike change or we have an idea that change is not welcome or change is bad when some of us resist change. And I feel that by really noticing impermanence when we're meditating, we can see how sometimes impermanence and experience the positive, if you will, side of impermanence, right? So suffering is passing, right? All is passing, okay? And then this impermanence of self, right? Everything is changing. Who Heather was as a child is different from who Heather is now, right? And now. and now, and now. And who Heather or Heathering is in relation to each person, right, is a co-arising, right?

[28:26]

The dependent co-arising of all of us together. So I think it's very powerful to meditate on the aggregates and to specifically focus on their impermanence. And by focusing on the impermanence, that I feel like kind of that unraveling, if you will, that relaxing is then slowly it can be an experience of not self. And also I feel it can be helpful to experiment with grasping onto what's arising. Right. And feeling if that causes suffering or not suffering. So when we're on the cushion, allowing everything to arise and experimenting with what's arising, you know, as Tia would always say to me, how do you feel when you hold that thought?

[29:27]

If suffering, if you're feeling some lack of ease or distress, drop the thought. OK, I think she said to me for 15 years before I kind of sort of understood. So. This under this framework of the aggregates, I think, is a very powerful one to keep in mind when we're when we're meditating. A while back in 2009, I had read this passage in Not Always So, another compilation of Suzuki Roshi's talks, not necessarily as well known as Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. And I remember reading this during one of the summer's Tassahara. And it's another one of my favorite quotes of his. And also it's been, I feel, one of my main koans, right? Something like a paradoxical story or a paradoxical saying that I've been contemplating over the years.

[30:30]

So this is what he says about the not-self characteristic. As long as we have an idea of self, Karma has an object to work on. So the best way is to make karma work on the voidness of space. So I'll say that part again. As long as we have an idea of self, right, this is Heather. Karma has the solid object of Heather to work on. So the best way is to make karma work on the voidness of space. If we have no idea of self, Suzuki Roshi continues, karma doesn't know what to do. And then he says, oh, where is my partner? Where is my friend? That's what karma will say. I wish I could find that talk where he actually says that because it's very funny to me. So the less, the more porous the sense of Heather is, the more that karma, if you will, flows through me.

[31:40]

Right. There's not this constriction where it's hitting up against an object. Right. It's like water through your hand. OK. Or walking through a shadow. Of course, when I first read this passage in 2009, I didn't really understand it. And I had never heard of the not self characteristic. So I didn't that didn't come to mind until I started to study more of the three marks of existence. So the more that we continue to undermine this root sense of a solid independent I, the less reactive we are and the more spaciousness we can feel in the middle of a rising karmic conditioning. So a while back, after being at Tassajara for about a year, I went back to Austin on vacation and I purposely sought out my former boyfriend. to, as I told the tanto at the time, Kokyo Henkel, to test my practice of Zazen for the last year at the monastery.

[32:48]

My former boyfriend and I had a very tumultuous relationship, and it was the proximate cause of my quitting my life in Austin in 2008 and heading to Tassajara. I think part of me was probably part of trying to flee my karma. But of course, we all know that you can't outrun yourself. So there I was for a whole year with myself staring at the wall. So I went to see him and we had agreed that we'd get together in a few days for a movie. The day comes for the movie. We're supposed to be meeting up that evening and true to form. He doesn't call me. to arrange any time to meet or get in touch with me at all. So I call him that day and he doesn't respond. And then I was driving my friend's car. So I drove to his apartment and called him from the parking lot.

[33:51]

No answer. I knocked on his door. No answer. And I started to feel this old, familiar constellation of emotion sensation. which I call the dread. So it's like this, I think I described it in a journal entry, like there's all these bat wings, these bats fluttering up from my solar plexus, just this kind of overwhelming adrenaline storm surge, if you will, of shame and anger and anxiety, just you name it, the whole ganglia of emotion sensation. And as I was walking back to the car, I was like, don't freak out. Don't freak out. I could feel the dread rising even more. And I was going to go back to his apartment and knock on the door, but I didn't. I sat in the car. And I just said to myself, start breathing.

[34:56]

Just follow your breath. So I put my hands on my thighs. And I closed my eyes and I just started finding my breath and just following it. Right. Where is the breath in the deepest part of my body? Noticing the length of the inhale, noticing the length of the exhale, just as close as I possibly could till that body breath. this is very attenuated and what i started to feel was a settledness an arising settledness in the middle of all this commotion and it started to feel less and less like overwhelming emotion and more just like energetic vibrations and yes of course emotion is energy everything is energy energy is everything but when there's all that uh

[36:07]

Heather identified with that emotion commotion. It's not so easy to stay with. And so there was this for me, it was like a mini miracle that I was able to stay upright and attentive in the middle of this kind of crazy, overwhelming panic attack or the dread, as I like to refer to it. So I stayed in the car, I would say, probably for a good five, six minutes. And everything just felt like I just felt all this. I felt kind of a little pixelated, right? Like all this energy was kind of pixelating my body in some way. And I just stayed with it and just kept breathing. And then it just settled. And then I just sort of felt like I was high. You know, like there was the sense of.

[37:09]

Maybe elation is too much, but I felt really buoyant after this experience. And I was able to finally drive away from the parking lot and return to my friend's house. And there wasn't this like emotional hangover, if you will. It just there was no trace in some ways of what happened. And I think about seven months or six months after that, I had the good fortune of going to a retreat, the Yarnay retreat or the range retreat at Gambo Abbey with the venerable Pema children. This was in 2009, December 2009. And I related this story to her. It was really wonderful. Each person in the retreat had the opportunity to have Dokusan with her.

[38:12]

And I have to say, I was quite, I felt a little starstruck, if you will, when I was walking, crunching through the snow toward her cabin, just wondering what I was going to say and hoping that I would sound intelligible in her presence, if you will. And it was sitting with her in this small cabin. I felt like I was sitting in the middle of a calm ocean. She has this very deep, expansive, boundless presence. And when I mentioned this story to her, she said, there's a view that's helpful when working with emotional energy. It is mirror-like wisdom, right? So it's prajna itself. But what happens is that stories get attached to this mirror-like wisdom, to this prajna.

[39:19]

And we identify with these stories. And then these stories become a me. And she said that most people can't get past the panic when they feel a strong emotion arise. So when anger or jealousy, fear, even elation, right? When strong emotions arise, we often panic just like what's happening with me and we're not able to stay present, right? So we move away. Sometimes we don't even feel the panic, right? Sometimes we just move away from that, right? And Pema Chodron, not at this time, but during the Yarnay retreat, she did mention this other, this Tibetan word, shenpa, S-H-E-N-P-A. And shenpa is the hook, if you will. It's something that has a lot of gravitas for us that triggers us into a harmful behavioral or speech pattern, right?

[40:28]

So sometimes we don't even feel the panic because it's such a subtle moving away. from that arising panic that we don't even feel it. So when things have a lot of shenpa, like obviously with my former boyfriend, which as Pema Chodron said to me, it sounds like that goes back 30 lifetimes, that shenpa grabs hold of us and we move away from it. We act out of it. So that's that reactivity to karmic conditioning, which leads to more reactivity. And it also strengthens the karmic conditioning because we're not staying present with it. So Pema Chodron said, stay present and change nothing. So staying present or be present and change nothing. This is how emotional energy or karmic energy is transformed. It transforms itself when we pay attention to it.

[41:31]

with this non-judgmental, non-dual awareness. And then she said to me, energy free of labels is wisdom. Energy free of labels is wisdom. And when I recounted the story to Tia, she said, you know what you call that? And I said, no. And she said, You call that freedom, not being compelled by emotion sensation. That's freedom. And I'll add a couple of my own to that. So energy free of labels is the voidness of space. And energy free of labels is the no idea of self. Thank you very much for your attention.

[42:38]

I think we're going to chant now, Brian, right? Yes. May our intention equally extend to every being in place with the true merit us way beings are numberless I vow to save them delusions are inexhaustible I vow to end them Dharma gates are boundless I vow to enter them Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it.

[43:42]

Thank you very much, Heather. We have, I think, five minutes. If there is a question or comment somebody would like to offer, you may raise your Zoom hand. Joe, please. Yes, some of our techno people will help unmute you. Okay. Can you hear me now? Okay. Thank you, Heather. Thank you very much. I'd like to ask you about something, one of the many paradoxes in Zen, which is the Buddha taught no self. And at the same time, Zen, especially throughout the koans and the stories emphasizes finding your true self and i was wondering how you think of that paradox well um thank you joe for that question i would say no self in some ways is true self because true self in my understanding is

[45:07]

the wisdom that runs through all things as Dogen phrases it. So when there's an experience of no self, that helps us, that is an expression of true self. And true self in a big way, and I think true self in a small heather way. I don't know if that's helpful or not. Yes, it is. uh once i was well i live in bangkok and i was leading a zen group and i was asked to lead a discussion about true self so i was back in the states for a few weeks before returning to lead the discussion group and i asked six different zen teachers what true self is and i got six different answers so i think it's you know similar to no no self you know it's a it's a mystery In some ways, undefinable.

[46:07]

Well, I think that true self is also Buddha nature. Yes. Right. So that's that's also my understanding. So that's the practice realization of Zazen is as an expression of our non duality. It's the expression of Buddha nature when we take that posture. And don't each of us have to find in some way our own Buddha nature. Well, it's not our Buddha nature. It's just Buddha nature. So we don't own it. We're not the possessors of it. It's a falling away to reveal what's already there, right? So that's where there's no attainment in the Heart Sutra because it's more of a sloughing off rather than an attainment. Okay, that helps a lot. Thank you, Heather. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you all for being here.

[47:09]

And I think at this point, you may be able to unmute yourselves and say good night and offer thanks to our speaker. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye. Take care. Thanks. Thank you, Heather. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thanks, Heather. Good. Bye. Thank you, Heather. Bye, Susan, Shozen, Keith, Mike, Mary. Thank you, Heather. Thanks, Nosa. Joe, Kojo-san, Terry. Thank you. Maria, Elena, Ida, Jonathan.

[47:53]

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