Suññata and the Four Elements - Water

This is a talk given by Lloyd to the Insight Community of Denver, Colorado on one of the Brahma Viharas - Metta (loving kindness). Recorded live with some background noise.

Transcript

And these two teachings, Shri Nātā, Usually translated in the Theravāda tradition as boldness or absence of, Absence of self, The very thing that Karen is talking about, Investigating the nature of self and identity and what not, And the more deeply the investigation proceeds, The more it begins to become inherent that maybe this thing we think of as a solid, Permanent and abiding self may not be the case. It's a little bit like on Star Trek when they start to beam somebody up and first they look solid and then they're on these always pointed legs. The Buddha invites us to consider the possibility that we are in some ways the thing we think of itself as more sort of a temporary apparition, You know, That we bring into being on an as-needed basis and then with some practice after a while you might be able to learn to let it go and relax it a little bit and kind of ease into the notion of self being a sometimes thing, Right? There's that old folk song, You know, The water is wide, You know, And one of the verses in is there is a ship and it sails the sea, It's loaded deep as deep can be, But not as deep as the love I'm in, I know an audio fight sinkers when it's a kind of in between place, You know. Sookie Rinpoche talks about these sort of stages of being, He talks about the belief in or the notion of or the adherence to an idea of self being like ice, You know, And then letting go of that being like the ice melting into water, Right, And becoming fluid and without form and actually for the most part most of us spend our lives in a state of slush, Right? He's talking about Dharma students, I mean, We start to kind of let go, You know, Give up a little bit on this hard, Hard fast notion of self, But not quite ready to let it melt away, So we tend to lead slushy lives. And then on occasion when we feel threatened or upset or something then suddenly we can freeze up, Get very solid, Right, Okay, And then other times when the mind becomes capable of really deep relaxation and we get that sense of fluidity once again of being able to sort of meld with whatever is rather than feeling the need to establish inter rigid boundaries around ourselves. The Buddha actually used images, Similes and metaphors having to do with water a great deal in his teaching. Probably the most famous one is his parable of the raft, Right, And one of the reasons that he talked about a strong kind of raging river, His part of the northeastern India, You know, They had monsoons every year, They had a lot of flooding, And so the image of a strong, Fast moving river is very much on everyone's mind because they'd seen them frequently. And in this parable of course he says, You know, Suppose you wish to cross over the river, But you have no means, You know, There's no boat, There's no ferry or anything. And so he said if you really need to get across, Then you can kind of fashion your own raft, You know, Lashing together some branches and whatnot and then climbing on board and just sort of in that image it's possible that you get this image, Oh, A raft across the river is kind of like a fucking gem on the Mississippi River. That's not really what he's describing at all. He says, He talks about lying on the raft and pedaling with her hands and feet, So it's kind of like a homemade surfboard instead, Kind of a dodgier apparatus actually, For seeking to get across this swiftly moving river. And then he says once you attain the other side, Do you then hoist the raft on your back and carry it off with you along the trail? And he says, Well, No, Of course what you do is you leave it on the bank because it has fulfilled its function. So, In using that metaphor, He's of course saying, Really introducing an element of provisionality in our relationship with the Dharma. He's saying it's there for a reason, It's a tool, It's a means for crossing over, It's a means for freeing oneself from self, It's a means for the realization of freedom. And that once it has performed that function, It's to be like Oa. And so, For me that's really a really meaningful message because I think that it's possible to get kind of precious about our practice or our understanding relative to somebody else's presence. And rather than, Like Panjaf says, The stepwise evolution of spiritual maturity when we're first starting out, And we said, Okay, Well, The false suffering comes from clinging and I just got some not clinging, Right? Okay, Good luck with that. He said, Step one basically is a matter of us simply trying to get more strategic in our clinging. So, Step one, Clinging to material things, Find ourselves clinging to spiritual things. Trunkar Rinpoche wrote a whole book about this, Spiritual Materialism. And then eventually we kind of copped to the Buddha's message here, Saying, You know, Eventually you need to let go of that as well. That being said, There's sometimes in Dharma practice when it's getting really rough, You know, When your little raft is headed into some pretty, You know, Chubby white water when you're hanging on for dear life, You know. And it's good to have that there when you really need it. And it's also good to know that there may be some wisdom in it. But you know, That too, That too, That too. You know, It's to be ultimately to be alive. And it's useful. He also used the same metaphor of the swollen river, The fast moving river, To talk about craving and clinging. He said, Suppose that you are in a situation where the waters are rising and you have to leave your home and get in a boat and make your way through the flood. And he said, You really must take care of what you choose to take with you and what to leave behind. And so in this use of the metaphor, He talks about a wealthy person who knows that he has to leave but wants to take everything with him that he possibly can. So he loads up his pockets with, You know, His gems and jewels and whatnot and then gets out on the river and his boat falls apart and sinks to the bottom and drowns. And he did that because he was not willing to let go of all the stuff in his pockets. So it's this understanding of sort of the flow of nature and how are we going to relate to it. How are we going to steer our boat, Steer our raft through these currents that we're trying to find ourselves in right now. And that metaphor for me also really, I have a very dear friend of mine who I, He and I helped round the sort of outward bound style program at Prescott College a lot of years ago. He's a really expert boatman. He's been a senior boatman on the Colorado through the Grand Canyon on several occasions and he got in touch the other day and said, Well, We're putting together a trip. You want to go? 21 days on the river next March. And I said, Yeah, Sure. I haven't done serious whitewater in about 20 years of course. I'm going to have to be hit in the gym about three times a week from now until then. Probably having a shower. But some of the most important lessons that I've learned in life actually about the river. And it's turned out to be for me among the very most powerful teaching, The water-based teachings in Buddha Daimler are the ones that have some of the greatest meaning for me as well. Especially when he's talking about navigating flood waters. And then with this horrific tragedy in Orlando, It was like coming around the bend and realizing that this is a dangerous river, That stuff happens, That there is things that come up that are unforeseen that need to be overstowed and to be navigated. And there was a part of me that just had no place to put this. Just the sheer violent insanity of the whole thing. And Colorado, Starting in 2012, We had a series of worst fires in Colorado history. Because each one was bigger than the one before. Each one burned down more houses, In some cases killed more people. It was just bigger and more robbed than the one before. So we've just finished having the biggest mass murder in American history. Who knows how long before the next one happens. But there was just something about this that on the one hand had, Is it unfathomable, No place to put it. But then in the context, Sort of using that metaphor of reading the river historically, Something that I remembered was this. In 1954, The United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown vs Board of Education. It's the one that said, In matters of public education throughout the country, Separatism is not equal. And the period, About the next 15 years from the time that the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown vs Board through the 1968 presidential elections, That constituted the most violent period in the modern civil rights era. There were more church bombings, More murders, Assassinations during that period of time than either before or since. Because the border was changing. First in the courts, And then the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the education amendments after that that really basically revolutionized American politics in that the clergy and then the courts and then finally the Congress decided that it was important to really embody our most deeply held values in our laws and they did so. And there was horrible, Violent resistance because the order was changing and those who previously enjoyed power realized that they were losing it. And for me it's important to keep that history in mind when I think about where we find ourselves now. It was just a few months ago that the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Obergefell case where it basically declared every law, Every state law in the country that forbade same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. An absolutely revolutionary decision. And it had the effect of I think really shaping some of these states in particular that had such laws to their core. And you mix that with the fact that we have some of the most hateful and negative rhetoric in recent political history being shared openly right now. And it just seems like these conditions are coming together that in some ways for me it begins to make it more understandable what we're facing right now. These are turbulent times. Times of real change. And it's probably going to be a rough ride for a little while to come. It's no accident that this mass shooting happened in gay pride mode. There is some consideration about the possibility of canceling the gay pride parade in Los Angeles today because they discovered somebody with some early arm with some kind of explosives and it looked as if he was planning to try to reach the same enemy. So change of the, Positive social change of this nature does not happen easily or freely in a society such as ours. Especially one in which everyone, Unless they're either a felon or provably insane, Has easy access to weaponry that was designed for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of people in a short period of time. Personally, I've gotten to the point where silence is no longer an option. When I begin to speak more openly and frequently, At least in terms of my own personal views, About the need to start sort of a disarmament process, At least insofar as weapons of war in the hands of civilians is concerned. And again, This is going to be sort of an enormous controversy around this. I personally think that weapons of war don't really have any place in our society. And I've heard all the arguments, The ones that say, Oh well, There's millions of these AR-15s out there, Passing the law won't do anything, He bought this one legally, Well he did. That's correct in and of itself, It's one thing, In fact it's illegal to buy weapons like that. And oh well, If you outlawed them, They wouldn't make any difference because there's so many out there. When I hear that argument, I think about Dr. Jonas Salk, He was the inventor of the polio vaccine. Let's imagine that when he invented the vaccine and he went to the government for funding to mass produce it so he could start protecting people from polio, They say, Well, We're sorry Dr. Salk, But you can't immediately eradicate polio from the world. You can't give a dose to everybody easily and no one gets polio again. And you say, No, It's going to take time, It's going to take about 30 years, And it did. The same is true with regard to the public health threat posed by military weaponry in society, It's going to take time. Australians did it in 10 years, It's not that it's not doable, It's that there need to be enough people who care enough about it to steer the raft around that particular react. So, Any thoughts about anything that I've said so far here this evening? Yes, Please. I always come and think about or get faced with, And I never know what to do with it, With the notion of equanimity. I feel the way, And I've been, I mean I could be happy to be outlawed, But then someone will say, We have to give the other point of view, It's a view, I mean isn't that the Buddhist way? Is it? The Buddhist way in terms of the teachings of the Buddha is non-harming, I think so. He advocated not harming others, Not harming sentient beings. He was pretty straight up thinking about death, Just like Jesus of Nazareth was. These were people who taught peace. And so the idea of having a little chat about whether or not we should be able to blow each other away at a moment's notice is not really part of the Buddhist frame. He taught, I teach one thing and one thing only, Suffering and the end of suffering. What would the Buddha do in terms of the politics of common sense gun regulation, I don't know. But his starting point, His position was having non-harming. I have the position taken that the way to avoid harm is to be well-armed. So it's a different view of what kind of society we want to live in, What really makes for a peaceful society. But the goal of not harming each other is to try to pull through Buddha's teachings. Anything else? Any other comments or reflections? Questions? Hey, I'm just wondering how do the courts interpret the words militia, For instance, A well-ordered militia or a well-regulated militia. What is a militia? Is it every citizen owning a gun and able to be called up when the defense of the country is required? Or is it our National Guard in which the weapons are kept in the runway and distributed as necessary to the people who have been trained and are being led? Yes, That was the nature of the debate that happened over the Supreme Court's recent stream of decisions finding that the Second Amendment did contemplate private gun ownership. That it did? That it did. And this was the majority who called themselves sort of the originalists, Including Justice Scalia when he was still in his body. And their argument was that we should look to the original intent of the Constitution and interpret its language in the present day. And back then we didn't have a standing uniform militia. We had the farmers who fought the Revolutionary War and then they came home and they said, Okay, Well if we get jammed up again and get the old flintlock off the mantle and go down to the town square. So they say, Well that was the original intent and so therefore we need to discover there to be a right to bear arms privately. And that's been the majority. They've been 5-4 decisions, Each of them, For the most part having to do with whether or not Second Amendment contemplates the right to private gun ownership. That being said, Every time the court recently has decided that the Second Amendment does include private gun ownership rights, It's always said those rights are not absolute. That they are subject to reasonable regulation. And then the whole question goes to what constitutes reasonable regulation. In order for there to be, Like an assault weapons ban, There would have to be an active Congress, Which right now doesn't look like it's got a prayer, But who knows after November what we or may not be possible to see. Please. I think that there also has to be something about not just, Like not just me not causing harm to others, But also not just standing by and letting other people harm themselves and others. I mean the shooter in Orlando or the shooters in Columbine, The Aurora Theater, Any of those people have brought harm to themselves as well. So whichever side it's looked at from, There's a need to take some action to prevent harm. Right. In terms of making it more difficult for people to be able to hurt each other. Right. Right. In terms of not, Yeah, Not knowingly giving them the means to cause more harm than they probably even want to take on. Thank you. I just wanted to follow up. Yeah, Please. How can it be reasonably argued that no matter whether it's a militia or not, It's well regulated? It is not. It's wide open. That's where we're at right now. That's where we're at right now. And we're wide open. Anybody can get it done. It doesn't matter how crazy you are. It doesn't matter your political beliefs. It matters quite stably, Right? That's the interesting thing. There are some states like Connecticut and actually in Colorado things got tightened up a little bit after the Aurora Theater shooting. But there's enormous variation. There's an assault weapons ban in California. And the shooters in San Bernardino, Somebody bought their weapons for them in Nevada, Which laws are pretty much headed the opposite direction. So it's probably going to take a national action to really bring it in. Maybe the militia aspect is mute because whoever has an 18-year-old knows that the law just got changed. Every 18-year-old has to register in this country. So every citizen or every male or female between 18 and 35 is a militia person by definition. Potentially. Potentially. Yeah, These are great issues. But it seems that the time has come to, Instead of saying, Wow, This is a really rough river. Maybe we need to start feeling smarter about how we seek to take care of ourselves as we go down. So the next few months are going to be an interesting ride. Whatever role you decide to play. So there's other teachings in Puttidharma also that use the image of water that I thought might be worth sharing this evening. I actually want to read excerpts from a Dharma talk that Suzuki Roshi gave a long time ago back in the 1960s. They got gathered into this little book that was published in 1970 called Zen Man, Beginner's Man. You know, A teacher, A dear teacher of mine, Holden Heibergard from my seminary days, Ajahn Amaro, Was a Thai forest monk. He was a student of Ajahn Chah and his monastery in southeastern Thailand. He stayed there for many, Many years and became one of the more senior monks there. And then Ajahn Chah suggested he go back to Europe and begin to teach. And so here he's very widely regarded and highly regarded, Widely renowned. Thiravada Goy is a teacher of British lineage. And he said when he first got to Ajahn Chah's monastery and just undertook the vows and he really started to learn Thai. And there's a joining sort of monasteries. One is for European newbies to come and kind of start getting with the program a little bit. And if they decide they really want to go for it big time, They can move the other monastery and start on their Thai. And so he did that. But he said when he first got there, He was very inspired. And so he was taking the vows of the Thiravada monastic order. And so he was asking when the monk was responsible for kind of running their little boot camp for European Dharma students there, Getting them used to the situation. He said, But do you have any books or readings that I should really study to start getting a feel for this practice and really how to do it? And this Thai monk that was kind of running the show there said, Well yes, Many Westerners have found this book particularly useful. They had a copy of his In Mind Beginners Mind. He suggested he read that first and have you known Thiravada's in practice. But Suzuki Roshi really had a way of speaking to everyone, Whether they find themselves to be following his impact or not. So he was founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and the Tassajara Zen Center in Northern California. He writes, If you go to Japan and visit an Iji monastery, Just before you enter you'll see a small bridge, Hachapu-yokio meaning half dipper bridge. Whenever Dogen, Since he's dipped water from the river, He used only half a dipper full, For turning the rest of the river again without throwing it away. That is why we call the bridge Hachapu-yokio Bridge. When we wash our face we fill the basin to just 70% of its capacity in this monastery. And after we wash we empty the water towards rather than away from our bodies. This expresses respect for the water. This kind of practice is not based on any idea of being economic. It may be difficult to understand why Dogen returned half the water he dipped to the river. This kind of practice is beyond our thinking. When we feel the beauty of the river, When we are one with the water, We intuitively do it in Dogen's way. It is our true nature to do so. But if your true nature is covered by ideas of economy or efficiency, Dogen's way makes no sense. So what he's talking about here is getting beyond the discursive and actually feeling the water in ourselves and its connection with the water and the environment. When the Buddha taught the Four Elements meditation, He talked about feeling the elements internally. Feeling the breathing coming and going. Feeling the flow of life in the body. The fluidity, The flow. For Sita to talk about experiencing the air element, Breathing, The water element, The fire element in terms of temperature, The pulse, The earth element in terms of the sensation, The solidity of the body touching whatever you're sitting on. And then gradually moving over and not focusing on nouns but on gerunds. So breathing, Flowing, Pulsating, Touching, Experiencing the Four Elements not as things but as processes. As sort of literally who we are because we are all in fact this ongoing flow. And so he talks about experiencing the elements internally when you're sitting. And then he talks about experiencing the elements externally. And what it means by that is if you go out and do walking meditation and you're experiencing the breathing internally and then you see the breeze flowing through the leaves and the trees. You feel the breeze on your skin, You feel it flutter. So you're experiencing the air element externally. If there's a nearby stream or flowing water of any kind, You know, You experience the water element by seeing it in an area and you're reminded of the water element that's within. You feel the heat of the sun on your body. You experience the fire element, You experience it externally, You experience it internally. You see the earth and its apparent solidity and you feel the solidity of your own body. So you're experiencing the earth element as you walk around outside. So he talks about experiencing them internally, Experiencing them externally, And then internally and externally both. And the way to do that is something I always, First off when I go on retreats I usually try to go to places where there's a big natural open expanse, Right, And I actually spend a lot of my sitting time out in nature somewhere. And if you're doing this kind of practice in a natural setting, You know, Out in a forest somewhere, It just really, And you can do this just going for hikes in, You know, The city and regional state parks right around where we live. You know, If you can go out and sit in nature sometimes and you do these, You know, This like, Thorelence practice, Somehow or another it really becomes much easier just to kind of melt into the landscape a little bit and feel like there's no difference, You know. Because you're just doing exactly what the Buddha suggested that we do, You know, Just get in touch with who we are, You know, Through our senses in relationship to our natural surroundings, Our surroundings period, And a very sort of whole and in some cases kind of extra rational way. I just came back from this annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in New Orleans, Louisiana, And I was part of a panel where we were talking about disaster management and whatnot. One of the panelists was a professor at one of the law schools there, And he said, And when his friends come from California and elsewhere and he takes them out canoeing, You know, Going up a bayou or a little tributary to the Mississippi or something like that, He said he always comment on how trashed the place looks, You know, Because there's old rusted, You know, Gas tanks and pipes and stuff hanging around along the river's edge from time to time. And he said, Well you know it's not nearly as pretty as it is in the backcountry of California and Colorado. And he said if we were to have any hope at all of healing this planet that we live on, He said we have to learn to love scarred landscapes. We have to learn to love things as they are in order for them to heal. So instead of this sort of despairing when we see the way things are trashed, You know, Like the Orange River flowing from the Gold King Mountain into the Los Angeles, You know, Look at the way it's, You know, It's a dark, You know, Mountains of Colorado have been royally trashed for a hundred years. And it's our job now to heal from that, You know, Restore it for the better. But we have to be able to embrace things as they are in order to be able to do that. And then Suzuki continues, He said, I went to Yosemite National Park and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1, 340 feet high and from it the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly as you might expect. It seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream but it's separated into many tiny streams. From a distance it looks like a curtain and I thought that it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, You know, A long time for the water finally to reach the bottom of the water. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time I thought the water was not originally separated but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in following. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one with the whole river. Only when separated into many drops can it begin to have or express some feeling. When we see one whole river we do not feel the living activity of water. But when we dig into a part of the river with the dipper we experience the feeling. We also feel the value of the person who uses the water. Feeling ourselves in the water in this way, We cannot use it in just a material way. It is a living thing, A sacred thing. Before we were born we had no feeling. We were one with the universe. This is called mind only or essence of mind or big mind. After we were separated by earth from this oneness, As the water falling from the water fall is separated by the wind and rocks, Then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river or one with the universe you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, Water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore and we have no actual difficulty in our life. A useful metaphor. So, Any reflections or thoughts at the end of this? Yes, Please. So, Your earlier discussion and this one kind of hit in an interesting way. I wonder what I have been struggling with today in reading about all of these people. How do you advocate on behalf of something while holding some kind of no self value? Even to be an ally you have to hold some kind of identity thing. As an auto-explanatory, It is going to struggle for me to not identify, But also to identify with the experience of these people who are queer just like me who get shot up in a club when they are just out for a Saturday night. Yes, Well, I think it becomes a matter of learning how to identify skillfully. Just as we conjure the self for various purposes, It can also be very useful to. . . It is something that happens quite naturally. The Buddha talked about not self. Because sometimes now you see it, Now you don't. When the mind is creating self, There is self. And the problem is that we create self automatically and reflexively without understanding that we are doing it or without any control. And then when we do that, Self controls us. And too often self expresses itself in great hatred and delusion. And so the Buddha's teaching is about if you see the self coming into being and you understand the reasons why, Then there can be such a thing as the skillful construction of self if you are doing it knowingly and knowledgeably and for a purpose. In order to convey a message or something like that, As long as you are not being driven by this construct that you created. And the same I think can be true when you find it really important to be true to your own identity in a situation like this. I think what became clear is kind of like what Suzuki Ryokishi was talking about. You can think about those 50 people who lost their lives with those individual drops of water and kind of atomized or separated or whatnot. But it is also possible to think about them as part of a great flow. That there is something about what happened to them that is kind of like the assassination of the church in Charleston. It is showing us as a nation some aspect of who we are that we find unacceptable and unthinkable. And that way these people without knowing it may have given their lives in a great cause. There is this great force moving forward and it is very trivial. And it is possible to worry about our individuality in that or to be enraged or overcome by identity in a way that it drives us instead of us being able to use it skillfully. But I think that the great leaders of the civil rights movement were able to stay spiritually grounded but also very forcefully use their rhetoric and their personalities in order to achieve a great goal. So it is not easily done. Just as we, I was advocating maybe trying to de-escalate or engage in civil disarmament to some extent here, I think it is going to be really useful to be able to engage in some degree of disarmament when it comes to political speech. Because now it is so. People use words as weapons with the intention of causing maximum harm. So to learn how to powerfully convey a message in a non-dual way I think it can be the most powerful means of communication. Martin Luther King had it down as did Gandhi. It is a high standard that they said but they showed it can be done. And I think that is exactly what needs to happen now in terms of a movement with regard to the diversity of our means of expression of who we are and who we love. It is going to take that kind of focus and forthright effort and a sense of higher purpose for it to succeed. I think it will. Let's do just a little music. I will say the words to each verse of this song by Pete Seeger before we sing it together. Oh, Had I a golden thread and needles so fine, I would weave a magic band of rainbow design. Oh, Had I a golden thread and needles so fine, I would weave a magic band of rainbow design. Oh, Had I a golden thread and needles so fine, I would weave a magic band of rainbow design. In it I weave the miracle of women giving birth. In it I weave the innocence of children or of the earth. In it I weave the miracle of women giving birth. In it I weave the innocence of children or of the earth. Of children or of the earth. Show my brothers and sisters my rainbow design. We would heal this very world with hand and heart and mind. Show my brothers and sisters my rainbow design. We would heal this very world with hand and heart and mind. In it I weave the love we share across our rainbow race. A love that knows no boundaries of feeling, Time or space. In it I weave the love we share across our rainbow race. A love that knows no boundaries of feeling, Time or space. Of feeling, Time or space. The first verse again. Oh, Had I a golden thread and needles so fine, I would weave a magic band of rainbow design. Of rainbow design. Thank you.