Full Transcript

It's been a while since I've been on Zoom. I've been in a real monastery where there are no Zooms. Good morning everyone. I want to tell you, Kenko and Jo-A, that it's raining here. The sun is shining right this moment, but the leaves are letting go of the ginkgo tree. As we walk into the zendo today outside the ground is covered with these beautiful golden ginkgo leaves. And the wind was really blowing while we were sitting. So that's our time and place right here, right now. I hope that you experienced the wind kind of letting you go of your branches today as we sat. I felt the wind moving through my... So I think we're very blessed, really. I hate to use that word because it's so abused, but we're very lucky.

I've just come back from a big trip, six weeks, which is in my life a big deal. The last three weeks were in Switzerland practicing with Vanya Palmers, who is Kobun Chino Otagawa Roshi's heir, the founder of the Phoenix Cloud lineage. He is the senior Dharma teacher. I was fortunate enough to go and visit Kobun's stupa, where he died, and also his memorial site deep in the woods at Felsentor monastery. It's really very important in my life to pay homage to him. But for him, none of us, for me, at least. And I want to say that I fell in love with Switzerland, not just the chocolate, but also that. Not just the cheese, but also that. Not just the bread, but also that. And not just the people I encountered, but also that. I just had this experience there of complete openness. It was really a remarkable thing.

I gave a little talk at Zendo O Fluss in Lucerne, right on the lake. And what I talked about was falling in love with Switzerland. And Vanya, the night before dinner, had said to me, in his very gentle, subtle way, "Well, you know, when you're looking through the eyes with love, everything looks like love." And so I really talked about looking through the eyes of love, that we are creating reality with these eyes all the time. Nobody else is really doing that for us. Nobody can. And I was looking through love's eyes, so I saw love. And, you know, that's a profound awareness, because it makes you realize, hard as it is to accept, that we have a choice. We have a choice.

So today, I hope we can have a conversation about choice. I'll tell you a little bit about what the Buddha said about choice, and you'll learn a new Sanskrit term, maybe not new to some of you. William James put this awareness about how we see things like this: "My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I choose to attend to, shape my mind." Only the items which I pay attention to, create my reality. My entire coexistence with you, and with everything, is shaped by what I pay attention to. To me, this is about choice. What are we choosing to pay attention to?

The fact is that most of us operate with this kind of forgetful, I guess, dimness of our own. Dismissed about our responsibilities and our choices, not the responsibilities to pay the bills, and get up, and eat, take care of things. But our responsibility to take care of this one, and therefore take care of everyone, that our eyes create our reality. That is, when we pay attention to what makes us happy, that's a choice. When we pay attention to what brings fear and suffering, we're making a choice.

For me, when I pay attention to fear and suffering or anxiety, it always physically feels like a contraction. I am being diminished. This body is being diminished. I'm just shrinking. I am shrinking, by the way. That'll happen to everybody. But I have a sense that I'm really shrinking, and that my world is that I am the center of my world in a way that does not feel healthy and happy. On the other hand, when I pay attention to what makes me happy, it's quite the opposite. This is just my experience. Your mileage may vary. But my experience is that the edges of this person kind of soften. Sometimes they go away, but they definitely soften. I am expanded to allow in everything when I pay attention to what is happiness. That's not to say that you shouldn't pay attention to your fears or your anxiety, but you have a choice about how you respond.

Our eyes tell us what Mary Oliver calls that wild, silky part of ourselves. And through it, we can experience, again, quoting Mary Oliver, "part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem." I'm adding your poem, our poem. And then she says, "a heart of the star, as opposed to the shape of the star, which exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone, not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious." For me, this sounds like a description of not knowing that is concomitant with paying attention to choice. So when she says cautious, pay attention to what that word means to you, how you respond to cautious. Maybe it just means not knowing and proceeding with attention carefully.

So back to the road trip, because I have to tell you a little bit about my incredible adventure. The first three weeks of the road trip were spent driving from Los Olivos to Chicago. This is a trip I wanted to take for my whole life. And all the parts that people told me I was going to be bored by and I'd find tedious, I really found marvelous. There is all this flat land and then there are all these incredible rocks. Maybe everybody has seen these national parks. I have not. I've never been through this terrain that way. Just over. And I wept at the rocks in Idaho. Unabashedly wept. They felt like my ancestors. I don't know what that was about. Nothing magical going on. No drugs, by the way, were involved in this experience. I just had this profound appreciation for these rocks. And then the same thing, of course, happened in Switzerland with those Alps.

But the thing that was most impressive to me was not the exterior landscape, although I was completely in awe over and over again. The corn, the sky, the machinery that's out in those fields, the farms, all those four square colonials. I mean, it was just a feast for me. But what really got me was how all of that was feeding my interior landscape, what was going on here. And what was going on here is this complete surrender to not knowing how the hell I got here, how the hell any of us got here, this mystery. You know, we're just really not in charge. And yet we have choices to make.

So for those of you who are hanging on to the idea of free will, I'm sorry to blow your bubble. I don't know if there's any free will, but there is responsibility and you have choices to make. So it was very profound to me. And I really had a deep appreciation for what's here right now all the time. Like it was just another moment, another moment, another moment arising. So I thought about, again, this combination of looking at life through my eyes, only my eyes, it's the only way I can see things and smell and taste and touch in here, and making choices that will be helpful, hopefully.

So it was about choice. It's still about choice. I might be for the rest of my life. It's one of the features of our practice that I find really wonderful. There's nothing magical going on. The Buddhist teachings are not about magic. They were very practical. And he taught us how to choose, how to choose this right now. And because I was traveling and thinking about choice, I thought about it in terms of baggage, because I was schlepping a lot of baggage. I had to bring robes. I had to bring a lot of robes. And I was carrying them around. And of course, it became a metaphor for everything we're all carrying around.

So I'll tell you the Buddhist teaching about choosing. He has many. This is one that many people who aren't even familiar with Buddhism know this one about the stream crosser. And it goes like this. A man traveling along a path comes to this huge expanse of water, and it's really dangerous where he is. Maybe he's being followed by the bad guys. I don't know. But it's not safe. It's not good. And the grass is really truly greener on the other side. He wants to get across. It looks good. It looks safe. And he has nothing. He starts looking for a raft, a boat. He starts looking for a bridge, and there's nothing there. What does he have with him? Right, he has himself. That's it. Only through his own empowerment, self-empowerment, and creativity, and resourcefulness does he decide I'll make a raft. You can imagine there's some pressure. So he pulls stuff together and he makes a raft. And sure enough, paddling with his hands and his feet, he gets to the other side.

Then he's on the other side. And the Buddhist teaching is, what should he do with the raft? Should he put it down? Even though, you know, he just needed it desperately. Got out in the nick of time, that raft is going to come in handy. We all know it, right? Should he put it down or should he just bring it along? And just strap it to his back. It'll slow him down, but it's handy. You can guess what the Buddha taught. Anyone? Let it go. Just like the ginkgo leaves are letting go of those branches. Let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go. And I gotta say, it's an easy thing to ask of us, to let it go. And it's not so easy to let go of this raft that we've each got.

Another way of looking at this is to think of it as a backpack. Since most of us aren't busy making rafts to cross rivers, most of us have had an experience with a backpack. And into that backpack go all the tools that we have used that have been habitually really helpful to us, right? All of our opinions, all of our constructs, all of our idealism. Basically, all of our baggage goes into our baggage. All of our unresolved stuff is all in there. And we rely upon it. We've relied upon it. And it's done us really well, served us really well.

So, you know, you don't really wanna put that backpack down. I don't wanna put it down at the Buddha. We're here saying, let it go. I'd be going, what? Do I really have to? I love this bag. It's got nice padded shoulders. It's mine. I'm familiar with it, just like you're familiar with yours. And it has worked for me. But of course, you know, it doesn't keep working. Those tools actually are impediments in so many ways. First of all, they're heavy. Second of all, some of us put things in Ziploc bags and forget to seal the Ziploc bags. And so whatever's in that backpack makes a mess on everything, including all of our loved ones and our lives. And third of all, most of our habitual responses don't work most of the time.

The Buddha says, put it down so that you can actually deal with what's in front of you, as opposed to what you think is right in front of you. What looks like the thing that you've done and seen and felt and heard and reacted to a thousand million billion countless times. So he says, put it down. And I think we can all understand that life is constantly giving us new situations and we're pulling out a tool that's an old tool, as opposed to saying this is a new situation. It does not have the flavor, taste, smell, touch of that old situation unless I look at it that way. I have a choice. Instead I can say, well, here we are with this situation. Not good, not bad. It might feel harmful. It might feel skillful. I don't know how you're gonna experience it. All of the above, all together, all the time. Then the Buddha says, put it down and deal with it like that. It's just another situation. This is the most skillful way that you can deal with every moment of your life.

So in a nutshell, the Buddha is saying, be skillful, cultivate skillfulness and try to avoid unskillfulness. It's not rocket science and it's not easy either, right? So how to put it down. Most of us really feel we need the backpack. We need the identity that is associated with all those tools in that backpack. Like I'm good at this, I'm good at that. And I suck at this and I suck at that. We really believe these things about ourselves and we know it because when we act, when we respond to a situation unskillfully, there we go. We know it. There it is right in front of us. Our little identity associated with that tool has made the situation worse. And you know it because you feel smaller and you feel hampered and you feel shrunken.

So how do we put it down? Is this a passive thing? It's not, it's an active thing. The Sanskrit word for choice, it has a few other meanings is cetana. Say it. Cetana, cetana. C-E-T-A-N-A is one spelling. Cetana also gets translated as volition, direction, intention, attention. And I like this expression. Somebody translated as the mind in process. Cetana or choice is the mind in process, moving towards and settling on a manifestation. That's you and everything else, that manifestation. The function of cetana is, I think it's fair to say, is a willingness to be with this that's happening now as opposed to projecting, oh, that happened. I know, all that. Just a willingness to be with what's happening and directing your choice towards manifesting something, as skillful as you can.

And by the way, I wanna go on record as saying, there's not a perfect answer. There's not a perfect response. You're gonna do your best. Sometimes your skillful most response, it's not gonna meet what's there and you'll try another skillful most response. There's no world in which you can predict that what you're going to do is going to be the best. But we have our vows and we have our paramitas. So we have a clue and we can try. We can really try to make healthy choices.

So cetana is making a choice about the backpack, what you really need to carry. Because I was in Switzerland, by the way, I did the typical thing and I bought a Swiss army knife. And I bought some for my kids too. But I had one for many years. I had since I was in college, a wilderness ranger in college and it was stolen a long time ago. So I finally got myself a new Swiss army knife. And the story about the raft maker kind of reminds me of the Swiss army knife, because what did he do? He made himself the Swiss army knife, right? He decided it's me. I'm the only one who can save me. So out comes my scissors or my tweezers or my toothpick or whatever it is that was his creative act in making that raft and getting himself across. Only you can do that. You are your own Swiss army knife, so am I.

In our Western culture, most of the ways we make decisions about how to make choices, it's kind of narrow, I guess is the way I would describe it. It might be diminishing to our abilities. One way is forcing it, right? This is what I'm doing. Paying no attention to maybe what, how that will have an impact on doing it. Another way is delegating, like you go ahead and do that and then you'll have to deal with what happens. Another way, which a lot of people really love is avoidance. Just like, I don't see it. I don't even see it. This is like passivity on steroids, right? It's right in front of you. Everybody knows it's there. Everybody knows, as Leonard Cohen would say, but you're gonna try to avoid it. That's one way we deal with things. Another way is making an assumption, which we do a lot of, right? And another way is collaboration, which we also do a lot of.

I think that the mind states our mechanics, our mental mechanics of making all of those decisions are sometimes very rational, sometimes not so much. Sometimes they're very intuitive. You feel like you're listening to the entire world of the situation and you let it inform you. Sometimes it's recognition-based, like how will I look if I do it this way? Will I look good? And sometimes it's a combination of all of these things, and they're all at play. Probably most of the time they're all at play.

So here we are back in our lives, sitting on our sweet little cushions of enlightenment, and we're trying to figure out how to steer our lives towards skillful conduct and away from unskilled conduct. This seat we're sitting on in our lives all the time, not just when we're sitting here quietly, deliciously together. This is the seat of all potentiality. Everything flows from this moment, constantly. It's relentless, your power. It's always here. The entire future rests on your decisions in any given moment.

Don't get too heavy about it. It's gonna be okay. But the fact is everything depends upon your choices. This is where we choose the rest of our lives, because how you behave, what tool, old tool, or new tool you choose, makes a difference. You make a difference. Whether you want to accept that responsibility or not, you do make a difference.

So the parable, the stream-crosser, takes everything he has at hand. He uses his tools. No one's there to help him. He has to figure it out for himself with his imagination and his resources. And that's all we have too. Our imagination, our resources. It's only you who can steer your choices. It's only you. You're your own Swiss Army knife. You really are. Only you can choose the path of your life.

I mean, you've chosen to sit. Personally, I think that's a good choice. That's a big choice, that commitment to sit. It has something to do with the rest of your life. But only you can decide what expands your interconnections, what expands your sense of connection, and what diminishes your sense of connection. I can't tell you what that is. I wish I could, but I can't. I'm listening too for those same clues.

So please remember as you make your choices that we're all crossing that river. There's nobody who is exempt. Nobody. We're crossing that river for all beings. We're reaching the other side to support and nourish everybody everywhere. All at once. And we do that. We cross that river to help the potentiality manifest itself in this world.

So let's pay close attention to our choices. Pay attention to what kind of eyes you're looking out of. It would really help me if you did that. And it would really help you if I did that. And I'm trying to do that. And it will really help everyone everywhere all the time if we all do this together.

So thank you for listening.