Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So where are you from originally?
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Well, I was. I was born in Texas in near Houston.
And then I. I lived in kind of most of my childhood in a small town in the very, very northern part of Illinois. Like on the border of Wisconsin.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
So how'd you get started in the path that you're on right now?
[00:00:32] Speaker B: I think a major part.
Well, the looking back in retrospect that the moment in my young life which really pointed my mind in the direction, which very obviously in retrospect became Zen. But at the time it had no name, was. I was nine years old and I used to come home after school as one does. And there were three or two or three hours of complete emptiness in my childhood home. And nobody was there, nothing was happening. It was.
I mean that house is still in the middle of nowhere. So there is nothing around for a couple miles in every direction. And it's so, it's really quiet. Even traffic is kind of pretty thin. There is no traffic. There might be a car every couple minutes or something like that. So it's really, really quiet. And I used to come home and sit quietly.
Very, very strange thing to fall in love with as a nine year old kid. But everything was so noisy. I have several brothers and sisters. I'm number five of six. So at any given point there's chaos. There was always chaos going on in the house or friends coming over or whatever. And those precious like two hours were dead quiet. No one was there. And I noticed that I could arrange my body and in a way that I could sit straight up where I wasn't using any muscles to hold my body up.
Actually it began because I could sit straight up and fall asleep in class if I dialed in my posture just right.
So I was really good at just like looking like I was working, but my eyes were completely shut and I was completely asleep. As a 9 year old kid, you know, it was great. But I got home and I would spend time not doing anything, just like perceiving the silence. And I did that over and over and over for I think a period of months where all the conditions were just right and it got longer and longer. Like I started with just a few minutes. I was like, wow, this silence thing is intense. It's like, wow, you kind of have a trippy experience with your ears. You know, if you go in a sound controlled space where it's dead silent, like you can hear your body more and then you can.
You might have auditory hallucinations. And I had some sense that there was something like that Going on. And.
And I was really interested. Like, what is that coming from?
[00:03:27] Speaker A: That.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Surely that's just coming from my imagination.
And I was fascinated with how my brain would come up with stuff. And then I started to notice, oh, that's just thinking. Oh, that's thinking coming and going.
Then one day, I kind of fell into this perfect, like, zone of sitting still, wide awake, sitting straight up, where there was kind of no thought happening.
And then all of a sudden, I saw this ripple, like, across, through. Like, in the. In the building. In the. In the structure of the house.
And just kind of there was like a big. How do you explain this? There's a big picture window in my childhood home. Huge, like, perhaps six or seven feet diagonally. It was quite a big thing. And it rippled across my vision, which was so strange. And I had enough time to notice it and think, what on earth was that? Also a product of my imagination.
And then I heard boom off in the distance. And then I realized, oh, I think that's the quarry. That's, you know, two, three miles in that direction because the ripple went in that direction.
And I think at the time, I didn't understand that, you know, sound propagates through solid matter much faster than in air.
So the explosion would shake the earth, and that would travel much faster than the sound traveling through the air. So you would. You would see it before you would hear it. But that difference shocked me. And then, of course, I realized what it was. It was an explosion.
And it cued me into this mistake that I had about my perception, which was that the home that I lived in, that I took for granted as a solid object, maybe would have some permanence to it was completely flimsy and impermanent. And I had this sense of, like, whoa, this place that is my safe zone. My home is gonna fall down. It's just a pile of sticks.
It's going to. It's not permanent.
And then it became like, oh, my body is probably.
I also have that sense about my body. It's not permanent.
And, like, what do I do with that? And then that awoke. That experience was a lot. It's a lot to explain. But that experience I remember so clearly had stuck with me until I was probably, like, a year later, when I was about 10, the whole family moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And. And there we saw.
Malaysia has a lot of different religions, and there's some Buddhists there, too. And I saw some guys walking around in their beautiful orange clothes with a big bowl and walking barefoot. And I thought, what are those guys doing? And nobody explained that to me, but I had this impression that that was the right thing to do. Like, that seemed like the thing. And I didn't know what it was for many, many, many years until I graduated college years later and someone introduced me to Buddhism. And they're like, you know, you kind of seem like a Buddhist guy. And I was like, no, I can't be. That's too. That's too hippie. I can't go that far. That's cliche. So I resisted and resisted, and eventually my. A cousin of mine dragged me into a Buddhist temple, and I was like, you know, actually, this kind of fits. I think I'm supposed to be here. And I.
It was never able to leave, so.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: And here you are. Yeah.
But I imagine that wasn't Zen, right?
[00:07:24] Speaker B: No, no. The.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: The.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: The Buddhist monks, in retrospect, they were wearing orange robes with the giant begging bowl, the bowl that they eat out of.
Or certainly Theravada monks, like, similar to the Thai traditions, if not exactly a Thai tradition.
And the first Buddhism that I found was Pure Land Buddhism, where they practiced the reciting the name of Amida Buddha, which is a mythological character that the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, spoke about as a skillful means to help people.
You know, whether we. Whether there was indeed a.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: A.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: A Buddha and an awakened being who lived an epoch prior to this one doesn't sound all that absurd when you think about, you know, universes also being born and dying away. You know, born in a black hole, maybe, kind of thing. Like, it doesn't seem that absurd. But we don't know. We can't verify that, actually.
So I. I just put that in the. Ah, this is just a mythology. It fits. It scratches an itch. For certain people who have a certain kind of need to hear, to encounter. Oh, this is what it means to be a good person. So let's put it in a box that looks like this. Here you go. You can use it.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: So. Yeah.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Mythologies are important, is what I think.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: I get it. Yeah. Especially in terms of the Dharma, if it allows people to relate to the Dharma.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
I think that was maybe.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: What do you think about. What is the. What is.
What is. What is your spiritual leaning? What is. I mean, you interview all kinds of interesting people.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: My leaning is I'm an omnist, so I believe there's truth in every belief system. You just gotta look at it the right way.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: An omnist.
This is my first.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the official term.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: Oh, I Like it? I like it.
Yeah.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: I mean, I resonate greatly with Eastern philosophy, but I think from a basis of Eastern philosophy, you can look at any philosophy and find that kernel of truth.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: My main thing, I would say, is Sanatana Dharma, you know, situated around yogic philosophy and things of that nature. But I also greatly resonate with Buddhism, but I just recently explored Christianity within the last year, Islam within the last year, getting into like Tantra and Tantra Buddhism. So I'm just everything. I'm an ominous in that regard.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: I got two. I have two questions for you on that.
In Islam, have you. Have you encountered Sufism?
Sufism? I don't know if it's Sufism or Sufism.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know. Whatever. Tomato, tomato.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Interestingly enough, I'm talking to a Sufi teacher next week and I've never actually explored it myself, so that will be my first introduction into Sufism. So it's funny that you asked me that.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Well, if.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Stay tuned, everybody.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And everyone should watch. Should go pick up a book.
If you go find any book containing the poetry of Hafiz, any. He was a Sufi poet and he is described among poets as having no colleague. And when you read it, if he doesn't touch the condition of your heart, then you might be dead. He is incredible. And his poetry, even translated from Arabic, from his original language, has a musical quality to it that just sings to, I think, anyone who's ever loved anyone, anyone who has ever been loved by anyone. And he is.
He speaks about God and he talks about himself in third person, which is kind of funny at first, but when you start to really understand how he. There's no ego in the way he does, the way he speaks about it.
And what he refers to as God is something so big, broad and full and non specific.
It's like.
No matter what your religious background is, when you read it, he's talking about the substance of the universe to which we all aim to be more intimate with. And he's just incredible. Sufism is. I have the utmost respect for Hafiz and.
And then the other one, to connect Buddhism and yoga.
There is a tradition in Buddhism that's very, very old, and I think so across a lot of Buddhist traditions, we have this very important philosophy that Siddhartha Gautama transmitted understanding, verified understanding and practice in one person.
It was the understanding of the Buddha. Dharma was transmitted one person to one person, and then one person to one person. And maybe the Buddha verified a few people and then the next person each of those people verified a few people, but it was always an intimate, personal, one to one relationship through which verification happened. So across most Buddhist traditions, we have an understanding of the lineage all the way back, like one to one, all the way back to the Buddha. So I know my master's name, I know my master's master's name and so forth all the way back to the Buddha. So we're all connected somewhere in that line.
And in the early, within the first, maybe eight or ten generations of masters, from Siddhartha Gautama, there was a teacher called Ashvagha. And Ashvaghosa was an Indian monk, of course, and he was quite, quite the master and left behind a text or is attributed to have left behind a text called the Awakening of Faith.
And it's about mind from a school of Buddhism called Yogacra.
And it's very, very yoga.
I mean, it is a yoga tradition, but it's like yoga for your mind.
So it's crazy detailed. And if you ever want to read a text and have your brain shut down because your brain can't understand itself, because, because as you start to process, oh, this is how mind works, your brain goes, I'm tired.
Over, like process or overload.
The Awakening of Faith is probably the most intense explanation of the function of mind I have ever encountered. So highly recommend it.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: Wow, cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. I never heard of it. It's an interesting title because faith is not a term that is thrown around in Eastern philosophy.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And it just.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: How does that come about?
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't mean the same thing as in what. You know, we're, as Western folks, we have a strong conditioned understanding of the word faith. And in most Eastern philosophies and definitely in Buddhism and 100% in Zen, what, what faith means is not the same thing as what it.
It's not. I don't even know why that word is applied. It really, it doesn't match at all.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Or maybe it was a mistranslation or just a wonky translation.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: I mean, it's hard to.
It's hard to explain.
It's more like faith is trusting and doing.
So we're given a set of teachings by a master by, you know, by the teacher who, who directly gives us the thing. Like whether, whether you're a layperson and you meet a monk or you're someone who, you become a monk and you have a really intimate relationship with a teacher and that person makes you a monk and then eventually that person verifies your practice and Then that you can become a teacher as a result of that.
That set of teachings naturally changes over time.
It doesn't look exactly the same from generation to generation because it's colored by the intellectual and personality disposition, while also the context in history and time and culture that that relationship finds itself.
But the purpose of the teaching remains the same from the Buddha all the way to the present in every Buddhist tradition, which is it is an opportunity to accept teaching and practice within a set of conditions, a kind of guideline set of conditions in which you have permission to abandon the typical functioning of your ego.
So you get into this relationship and you take the teachings from a master, and you don't have to worry about the clothes that you wear. You don't have to worry about where the food is going to come from, and you don't have to worry about making decisions or judging, or.
You don't have to worry about thinking to a large extent, when you fully accept what your teacher is there to teach you. And, you know, people could think, well, yeah, I should just become a monk, because if I don't have to worry about what to eat, I don't have to worry about what to wear. That sounds like a life of luxury. Well, actually, it's brutal. It's really hard. And there are parts of it which challenge, which our ego bumps up directly against, and it feels awful.
But that's part of the practice of, oh, that's my ego doing that. If I can radically release the thing, then something else can emerge. And trusting that kind of structure, the container of teaching and practice given to us by our teacher, that is the faith that we have in, at least in Zen, is how I would explain that.
And returning to that over and over with trust is faith. And verifying it over and over, like, is this the right thing? Is this the right thing? Checking it and checking it, that process is the faith in faith in mind. Faith in Zen.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Mmm, it's well spoken. Yeah, I like that. So it's faith in faith in the teachings that were presented to you, faith in the teacher, and essentially faith in the Buddha.
Yeah, it's more so just like, it's not like the Buddha is going to save you. It's faith in. How do I put this? It's faith in the teachings so you can save yourself. It's a big difference of, like, having faith in Jesus, and I accept Jesus, and just because I said that he's going to save me, it's like, no, no, no. You have faith in what the Buddha has presented for you. But there's still work that you have to do.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Yes.
There is no one.
Well, at least the philosophical supposition in large swaths of Buddhism and in Zen is that no one will save you, only you.
And it doesn't matter.
It is inconsequential to the present moment. Whether there is a heaven or a hell or a before life or an afterlife, what you do now defines what kind of state into which you are constantly being reborn. Are you in hell right now? Or are you in the pure land of, you know, where things are easy and everything becomes joy and ease.
So how can we be liberated from suffering now?
[00:20:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's being able to find that joy and ease even amidst the egoic hellscape. Right? It's like, even amidst stuff that isn't necessarily suffering, that isn't necessarily of our own accord. It's like, can you find even peace in the fire? You know?
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I. I went on a walk recently with my dharma brother.
That means. So my master is an old man here in the countryside of Japan, and he has a son who's a few years younger than me. But of course he became a monk many years before me. So he's. He's my older brother, even though he's a younger. Younger guy than I am.
And he's really interesting because he was born basically destined to become a monk. He didn't have a choice.
And so his relationship with Buddhadharma is different.
But our master, his dad also was not a monk, was born as a regular, what's called a householder in Buddhism, and he became a monk. So his dad and I are probably. We probably see more eye to eye than he does.
And he. We were discussing something about dropping away body and mind, which is a phrase that the founder of Soto Zen really likes, Master Ehei Dogen.
And.
And he said it's kind of like practicing until even fire becomes cool.
It sounds cooler in Japanese. Like.
It means, like he is fire, and momata means. And also. And suzushi means cool. So even fire becomes cool when you practice enough so that like.
No, exactly as you said, in the midst of suffering, it's. Even the suffering is the cool. Great place.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: That's fascinating. That's a saying. And I said fire.
I never heard that saying before.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I hadn't either. Strangely enough, I think it's.
Where did he say it came from?
Well, I've lost where he said. He told me where it came from, because when he first said it, it just went.
I was like, did he say, and fire is also Cool. Think that's a reference. But what does that mean? And he. He. He explained it later to me, but it's. Yeah. Beautiful idea. Yeah.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm gonna remember that one. Because all of us are gonna go through our own fire. That's the thing.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: And that's why we practice. Right. It's because we kind of see what the Buddha saw, that we're all gonna get old, sick, and die. So, yeah, that's why I practice, at least. I mean.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: Maybe you can speak. Yeah. Same thing for you.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
I'm pretty sure everyone can remember the first. When you're young enough to go.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Or you're old.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: When you just got old enough to go to your first funeral. And like, it's like somebody's grandma, maybe your own or grandpa. And you, like. You see that open casket? Well, in the west, it's a casket, Right.
And you. You see their. Their deceased form, and it's shocking and weird and, like. Especially as a kid, you're like, are they still breathing? They kind of look like they're sleeping. Why does their face look funny? Like, there's a whole lot of. It's.
It's an intense experience to witness death and a very important and natural thing to witness, and it's hard not to be impacted by it. So.
But then how we regard it going forward, how somebody tells us to understand it, our parents or our. You know, if we go to church or something, how a priest or a minister will compartmentalize it for us so that we can process it, that could lead to some slightly different outcomes in our regard. But, yeah, I mean, everyone is affected by it because we all. We're all. We all subject to it.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: We're all mortal beings. Yeah. That's the thing. We've all seen it. We all felt it in our own life. But how do you deal with it? I think most people don't know how to. It's not their fault. Right. Especially if you're a Westerner.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: And that's why I regard the Dharma so much, because it is kind of like, well, how you. How you deal with your suffering. Right. That's the Four Noble Truths.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: And most people just don't know that's an alternative. You know, most people just try to escape from it through drugs, video games, just hedonism altogether. But, yeah, because of the Dharma, it's more of like an embrace. Right. Rather than an escape that the Western world prescribes for you, it's more of an embrace of the suffering. And that's what Cools the fire.
[00:25:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes, it exactly is.
But doing, doing the embracing, like, I like, I love to make these physical analogies, like. Yeah, that sounds really great. It's like, really cool, man. I'm all in. But actually, if you think about embracing something, hugging someone or something, actually, interestingly, my name, Eshin, the E means embracing, mind means embracing. And then xin is the Chinese character for heart or mind.
So embracing something, we actually have to use muscles to do it, and that means that we're burning calories. It costs effort, and we have to do it intentionally. So to embrace the fire also means that the first time that you touch it, it's going to burn. And you have to do the work of the embracing, even on a physical level. So that would be my encouragement to everyone to really study yourself really, really hard and question yourself.
Figure out what your original nature is and figure out what. What your context is in our waking world.
Change your life, man. Check it out.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: Seriously, though.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Changes everything.
I like that. I like that image of you're hugging the flame and then if you hug it, you hug it enough, it can't breathe and it goes out.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: I don't know. Maybe I'm taking a little too far there, but I like it.
Yeah.
Now, is that the essence of Buddhism? Maybe to somebody that doesn't know any better. Right. Let's pretend somebody listening has no idea what Buddhism is. Is that the essence is like just getting to know yourself, getting to know how the mind works, how everything that you call yourself works.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: It is my.
How to. How to phrase this in as much as I have come to understand the historical Buddha, I use this term now, I'm not so much. Well, okay, yeah, I have. There's a lot of qualifiers around the word Buddha, but Siddhartha Gautama, the original teacher who started teaching people stuff, which then people categorized and organized as a world religion, Buddhism.
Well, he wasn't a Buddhist. Let's start with that. He was just a guy trying to sort out what to do about this life. How do we comport ourselves in this life, given that it sucks?
Actually, it's really wonderful. But at the same time, like, everything goes wrong.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: And ultimately we die. And that sucks. You know, he had back problems in his late life and he got angry sometimes. He was still a person. He was just a person. Maybe exceptional, but still just. Just a regular old human being.
What he did was undertake a whole bunch of kind of weird, maybe esoteric or obscenely challenging practices in order to what suffering is. What is the nature of suffering and, and then what to do about it. And at the end of it, at the end of all these kinds of whatever interesting practices he did with, with different masters of different traditions.
Yoga would be one that was heavily included in asceticism. Very famously where he ate only like one grain of rice a day for some period of time.
The end result was he realized that none of those were actually the point or solving or answering the question that he was looking for. And the final practice was finding a still place where there was no movement and just sitting awake. And the last thing to face was his own ego.
And the mythology we, we are left with is that, you know, Mara, if people don't know who Mara is, kind of like, kind of like the devil, that's like an, it's a, it's a terrible equivalency between east and West. But Mara is sort of just mischievousness or ill will kind of thing. And in the story when you read it, you're like, Mara is a separate character, maybe like a demon or something like this, where the devil.
But actually more subtly speaking, Mara is just Siddhartha Gautama's own ego. If you could see Mara's face, it was none other than the Buddha's own face. You know, Mara presented terrifying things like a, you know, 10,000 foot tall angry elephant charging at him. Pure fear, or a whole bunch of sirens, beautiful, scantily clad young women or young men, whatever you fancy. And those that temptation was presented to, to the Buddha in that period where he was sitting still at the end of all this practice. Well, what is that temptation? It's none other than his own sort of physiological desire for reproduction. You know, to see something that you, you want to make and make a baby with or practice making a baby with. We have human desires around those, that kind of thing and, and then seeing it, but not moving, refusing indeed to be perturbed by any of that, whether that is on the inside or the outside.
And.
That practice is at the end only studying mind and understanding that all of our perceptions, all of our perceptions of all the phenomena that we encounter in the world is our mind. We are receiving it through sensory organs and we are processing it and you know, sorting in our brains, in our thought producing organ. And so everything we think about the world is just thinking what is it? If it's, it's almost impossible to separate from the function of thought and therefore our ego.
But there is a kind of a way to regard it which is free of the inevitable BS that comes along with our ego doing its functioning thing.
And that is the core of all Buddhism. And because of different people's varying dispositions, different means of coming to understand this arose, different styles of teaching arose as Buddhism spread to different cultures without destroying anything that was already there in the faith of the people that it first met.
That kind of spiritual context was, we could say, assimilated or included in Buddhism, kind of like Catholicism realized they couldn't kill whatever the thing was in, you know, South America, I think it's called Santa Maria.
Catholicism couldn't kill those, those sort of old native religions. They couldn't just say, no, this is. This is all wrong. Instead they just said, well, we can just smoothly include this.
You know, Christmas is famously a pagan holiday after all. So, like, Christianity did it too. And I think all the world religions have to, to some extent, although we do have.
There are also lots of stinky proselytization where, where people say, what you believe is wrong, you. You should believe this. And, and that causes all kinds of problems. But the Buddha already realized that that wasn't going to help. That doesn't. That just creates more suffering in a person. So don't do that. Just.
That's fine too.
Just, you need this to study yourself.
And, and so that's really the core of Buddhism, as far as I understand it. It's a long explanation. I'm sorry.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: That was good. I was following you there. So. So it seems like the core is for all of us at that moment of desire arising, to be still enough to not be tempted into it. Right.
We all have our own Mara.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe not so much to be. Not to be tempted because we will
[00:34:27] Speaker A: be tempted, but to act on the temptation.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Yeah. To at least for a moment restrain our animal instinct. To just chase pleasure, to chase snacks, to chase the opportunity to reproduce, to just.
I'm just going to stop for a hot second before. And maybe you're going to do those things. What you got to eat, so you're going to get the snack at the end of the day.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: It's.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: It's very okay to have a family. It's. So it's okay to, to, to audition relationships to find out if you, if, well, can we reproduce? Is this an opportunity that you would like to explore together? You know that I'm saying that in a really funny way, but, you know, those are fine and natural things.
Those are all included.
There's no, there's no rule that says do not do them. The rule is don't, don't misuse them. If you're gonna have a beer, drink a beer. But don't just, you know, waste away your life just pounding alcohol. That's being intoxicated.
Just like picking up. Picking up your smartphone. Look, I'm a monk with a smartphone, you know, to pick this up and be.
How to say, absorbed, as we all are these days, we have an addiction to these kind of. This kind of thing is a.
The same as dealing in intoxicants. You know, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs created something and sold it to the world, which is kind of like in the Buddhist rule set of, like, don't deal in intoxicants. Don't be intoxicated. They kind of did that, which kind of makes it kind of questionable.
But it's not just alcohol. It's not just marijuana. It's not just all those things. It's also, you know, whatever we do to exclusion of other things is in dealing in an intoxicant and recognizing that the more you study yourself, if you just stop, all of that becomes very obvious.
And.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Yeah, so would you say it's how we approach the desires and how we approach the intoxicants because we're using the intoxicant right now quite literally. Indeed. Ironically. Indeed.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: And everyone watching is also doing it.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of funny, sort of a joke in there. But it's like how one utilizes the desires that come about, how one approaches it from a more mindful way that. Is that the middle way?
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. Because, I mean, you know, like, you're gonna have to put it down. We have to put it down. At some point in the. In our. Like in today, we have to turn our attention to our friend or our loved one or our pet or.
Or, you know, our house catches on fire, we have to, like, collect something important and save our life.
There's no time for whatever's intoxicating. We have to do what's alive there. Or you're going for a walk and a bear comes after you. You have to run away. You know, like, there's no intoxication there.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: It's.
[00:37:39] Speaker B: You're purely awake. Or you have to drive. I like driving.
Like, you know, how many people have. I think everyone can relate to driving home from work, getting home, you're kind of a little bit tired, but you get home and you go, wait a minute. How did I get here?
Did I drive safely? Well, yeah, you got there safe. Unless you wake up in heaven and like a cartoon or something. But. But, you know, presumably you got home and you drove safely. You were encountering all these situations and nothing was unusual. And you. You made safe decisions as you went, but. But without leaving any thought behind, you didn't grab onto anything. And that is like a really cool Sanskrit word which is in yoga and of course in Buddhism called samadhi.
And that's like absorption in an activity in a good way, not the intoxicated way. But to be pure and bright and empty and functioning naturally is to be in the samadhi of receiving the self and using the self. And like when you drive home without thinking but safely, that was an example of a natural, spontaneous samadhi that we have in our lives. And we can live with that in that zone. We can meet every situation in our life within that zone if we kind of study our life as a chance to do that.
And that would be a way that even when we suffer, even when we have to deal with our own desires or addictions, whether that be to substances or activities like, you know, Instagram or something, we can see it for what it is and then not be moved. Not be moved by it.
[00:39:38] Speaker A: I like that a lot. Mm.
And it's because we know how to drive the car.
We can reach that flow state. We can reach that samadhi state.
[00:39:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
You had to go to classes, you had to practice something to get there.
[00:39:53] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:39:56] Speaker B: You gotta do the work at the end.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: Gotta do the work. Yeah, yeah. The car's a little more simple than the mind, but it's the same idea.
Maybe. Is it? I don't know, maybe we over complicate it. I think we do, actually.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: Let's go with that one.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we do.
Yeah. Same idea of.
Of flow. I like the word flow. Right. One can sense the dao.
Right. You are in and of the activity and.
Yeah, there is.
There's no pushing away and there's no attachment to what comes about. Right. That's the middle way, essentially. Right. We're just kind of just bobbing and weaving with whatever comes about in our life. And I think that's the essence of not suffering.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The Zen qualifier would be that even though you're no longer subject to this, to suffering.
Well, one, getting there is very difficult. It requires a lot of work. And then two, a lot of boring work, I want to add. And then two, it's.
You're still subject to it. Like in. In. In an ultimate sense, you're still going to feel pain, you're still going to age, you're still going to get sick, you're still going to get angry at stuff.
And then it's what you do with yourself when you find yourself in that situation.
How do you move through it?
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Rather than holding on to the anger, Right.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Holding on to the pain, which just creates more pain.
[00:41:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
And sometimes it's done to you. Like someone gets angry at you for. For you being quirky or interesting or weird. If you're weird like me, then your. Your friends and your partner or whatever will. Will get mad at you for. For doing something strange sometimes. And you just go, yeah, I don't. Don't ask me why I did that. I.
It's just what I do. It's a little bit off. I know. And just. Hey, that's me.
Can't do much about it. As long as it's not causing any harm. It's ostensibly, it's okay, but you still have to sort that out. And we still have to also polish ourselves in a way along this way to be a good community member, to be more or less easy to be around, because we were not.
Yeah, more or less. We're not easy. We're not. We're never alone. We don't exist in a context apart from other people. So being a good friend is also a really important part of probably any spiritual practice, but definitely a big part of sin.
[00:42:52] Speaker A: Yeah. The Buddha, the Dharma, and last but not least, the Sangha.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. Well said.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
Now what is the work, would you say? Is it just a lot of meditation, you know, a lot of asceticism?
[00:43:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
I mean, asceticism becomes restraining yourself from things, intentionally doing less when you can.
There's also the. The meditation, the winzen, what we call zazen.
Although we also like to say that zazen is not meditation. It's just sitting, you know. Yeah. In a way that.
Well, kind of the way that I have come to understand and to try to teach people is that our practice of meditation or of zazen, is orienting ourselves to stillness and silence.
As a metaphor or as a.
As a principle.
Everything exists within silence and stillness.
Space is largely empty. I mean, it's full of, you know, tiny particles, and they're kind of far apart. Right. Well, it's quiet in a way.
Everything exists within quiet. When we listen to music, there are sounds which are punctuating silence. That silence is really important.
If anybody's ever, like, messed around in audio engineering, if you have two pieces of sound and you leave a gap with nothing in the middle and you listen to it, there's like there's a, you know, beep, bop bop boop.
And then silence where there's actually no sound file, no silence recorded, and then another beep bop bom bom. And you, even though there's nothing, no music happening between the beeps that happen over here and then the files end here, this gap where with nothing in it, you hear it, put it on a stereo, all of a sudden you're like, what? This doesn't sound right. What happened here? Because there's no silence.
That's important. Without that, it changes.
And so practicing zazen is creating intimacy with the base level, which is not moving, not making sound.
And from that place, we can use our.
All of our capacities to live in a kind of a balanced, pretty joyful and easy way, no matter what the difficulty that comes up. No matter what the situation that comes up.
So the main.
The main thing that polishes us, that helps us get better is the meditation practice.
But actually the bulk of the actual practice in Zen is living. It's just living. Brushing your teeth, wiping your butt cleaning, cooking and spending time with friends, understanding how to deal with people you don't like. You can't not be around and embracing them. Anyway,
[00:46:34] Speaker A: I wonder if we've spoken.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: So it's bringing that relationship with the silence into the sound, into the music of our life.
Yeah, I feel that. And I think that's really what counts in our practice, because you can't escape. There's nowhere you can go. You can try and go to the cave, but there really is no cave. You know, you can. You can try, but we're here. We're all on Earth, you know, we're all one sangha, essentially.
So, yeah, I guess it's.
Find enough time where you can acquaint yourself, which I think we all have time. And then in whatever you have going on, the drama of your life, bring that essence into it, and then it changes everything. Right? It changes the music, would you say?
[00:47:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it makes it richer.
And every.
Every note. Well, every say note. And could also mean every phenomena in life becomes more meaningful and more beautiful because you're paying closer attention to it, but you're not grabbing onto this one to the exclusion of what came before or what will come next. It's just, oh, this is. This comes and goes.
[00:47:59] Speaker A: Ah, this is.
[00:48:00] Speaker B: This.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:48:04] Speaker B: there's.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: I like that.
[00:48:05] Speaker B: You said. You said cave, and I kind of had this. I. It drew up this funny memory.
Do you know who Bodhidharma is?
Yeah, he was Zen. He was. He's considered the father of Zen.
And he's. He's surrounded by lots of mythology, but one of the important stories about his life is that he sat zazen, silent meditation in a cave facing the wall for nine long years after he became a master, after his teacher said, you got the thing. You're a master. And then he went and did the practice even more.
I told this to a little kid who came to a temple where I was working, and he looked at a picture like I have on the wall back here of Bodhidharma, and he said, so he sat in a cave for nine years doing zazen. Well, what. Where did he poo?
And it's like, you know, kid, you're speaking truth. Where did he poo?
[00:49:11] Speaker A: That's a Zen kohan right there.
[00:49:13] Speaker B: Yeah, we love the mythological story that he. He just sat zazen. Well, actually, no, he ate. He probably cleaned that cave, like, you know, kept the bugs away, you know, keep it tidy so there not too many bugs. And like, you know, probably periodically washed his body and did all kinds of other living things, interacted with other people too. And yet, you know, it was. It was completely oriented to the stillness and silence in his. In his life. And that was doing it for nine long years. Not. Not like just.
Just sitting. Like the Buddha is said to have sat under a Bodhi tree for a week straight, no sleeping, in order to get enlightenment, to. To understand, to penetrate the matter. Well, he also probably had to poo and pee sometimes and probably had to get up and, like, move his body around because, like, no one can actually do that physically. It's not realistic.
So what does it mean to.
To do meditation for an unending, tireless week? What does it mean to sit in a cave facing a wall for nine long years? What does it mean to live a life completely saturated by the practice of studying yourself in meditation?
[00:50:49] Speaker A: Essentially, those stories are like metaphors for us to take and find our own cave, find our own body tree.
[00:50:58] Speaker B: I think so.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: I think so too. Yeah.
Also, what's important about the Buddhist story too, is he came back into the kingdom to teach, right?
[00:51:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:51:13] Speaker A: Do you think that's the path for all of us is, you know, after you kind of get it per se, come back and give back a little bit?
[00:51:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so.
If we.
If anyone understands, you know, the. The teacher, somebody points us in the direction, the teachings, what, the thing that they're pointing at and how we use it, and then the people that we are around are the people that are near us are our community. So you see what I did there? Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.
[00:51:44] Speaker A: Yeah, but without those.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: Without those fancy esoteric words.
If we recognize those things as the three treasures which they are in our life, then when we recognize the teacher and we appreciate the teaching that we receive in any given situation, you know, have a wise boss at a workplace or whatever could be the same effect as having a teacher and teachings. And in our community, we exist among people who come to different levels of understanding, and people who have more understanding than us become other teachers, but people who have less understanding than us, you know, carefully, not being full of our own ego that, like, you know, I'm hot stuff. I got it. Like, not thinking quite like that. But helping those whom we can, when we can, with care and compassion is also treasuring our community. And also taking the wisdom that we have been gifted with, the opportunity to encounter and to understand and then sharing it on that is, I think, a profound responsibility.
And probably, like, I mean, that's quintessentially Eastern.
It's in the. It's in Taoism, it's. It's definitely in Confucianism and it's a hundred percent in all of Buddhism.
But maybe it's not so explicitly laid out in contemporary Western philosophy the way Western people understand our.
I mean, it's there. The thing if the function. The function is there in, like, American culture, but it's not named and sort of.
It doesn't. It hasn't really.
It's not held in its own specific high. Regardless, I think in. In Western culture. Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:00] Speaker A: It is definitely there in terms of, like, Bible verses, like, man would not be saved by faith alone or by works. Something along those lines.
[00:54:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:08] Speaker A: So it's in there. It's hidden, but there's not. It's not like one of the tenants. It's not one of the Ten Commandments, I don't think.
You know, it's not really. It's hidden, but it's not like Bhakti yoga. It's not like karma yoga. Right. It's not really outlined. Service isn't really outlined per se.
So I get what you're saying.
I think it's just natural, though. Like, if one has this understanding, it doesn't matter what books they have or haven't read. That inclination to serve and give back is just natural, whatever. In whatever lineage or belief system that you fall into, you know, because it's like, it helped you so much.
Right.
[00:54:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: Kind of have to give back.
[00:54:47] Speaker B: Yeah. It's obvious. It is really obvious.
[00:54:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because what you see is that.
And this is getting a little out there and esoteric, but what one sees is that they are in the silence. They are in and of the silence just as anybody else's. So it's the Bodhisattva ideal. You know, if the other people that aren't really the others don't make it per se, then you didn't make it. So, yeah, it's like you kind of have to.
[00:55:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
Have you ever heard of Pratyakabuddha? I might be pronouncing that wrong, but that's the pronunciation. I've been transmitted.
So in the canon of Buddhist mythology, the Buddha also described. Siddhartha Gautama also is said to have described a kind of awakened person who doesn't seek to teach and share that enlightenment with other people, with other beings.
Not necessarily that they're bad, because teaching is. Is like banging your head on the sidewalk. Trying to get people to wake up is a fool's errand. It's a Sisyphean effort, as they say.
But so there are Buddhas who become awakened and then come out of the forest, as you said earlier, as exactly what Sudhartha Gautama did, and begins to share the point carefully, hard work. And then there are people who get it and recognize that sharing it is a fool's errand, and they just enjoy themselves in the Samadhi of self and operate as completely fully wise, awake beings.
And maybe someone around them will notice, but they don't say anything in particular about it, but they're operating with complete wisdom. And I think when people begin to study this kind of phenomenon, you might notice that your life is. There are lots of people like that who function a little bit differently, but it's so subtle that if you don't know what you're looking for, you won't see it. If you don't practice to understand it, you won't see it.
But those Buddhas are called Pratyekabuddhas. They're Buddhas who, in a way, are hermits. They might live in a town, in an apartment building, or in a society, but they practice alone, and they come to deep understanding alone, without needing to share.
It's not an ideal, because if I mean the Buddha's own feeling, which has, I think, what became the Mahayana thing, the whole Bodhisattva kind of framework of understanding of being a Bodhisattva, is that I, together with all beings, will awaken. I will not go all the way, because it will leave everyone behind. And it's actually much better to imagine us all getting there together.
It does something good for our heart, and it keeps us in our communities in a.
[00:58:04] Speaker A: In a
[00:58:07] Speaker B: net positive way.
But there is. There are. There are also beings, people who are completely awake and get there and don't teach.
[00:58:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that can be just as powerful, though, because I've come across my own Buddhist. Is that how you say it?
[00:58:32] Speaker B: Some. Somebody. Somebody in comments will correct us if it's wrong, so.
[00:58:37] Speaker A: Of course, yeah. Yeah. So I've come across my own undercover Buddhas, and it affects me so much, just in their resonance and in their energy. And they're not talking any Dharma. The Dharma is in their energy, how they speak, and just. Yeah. Just who they are as a person.
So sometimes I feel like that's more powerful than someone trying to evangelize some kind of teachings, trying to save everybody. Someone has a podcast or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It can be very powerful. And I think that's the glory of the Dharma and the glory of understanding or realization, whether one has any exposure to the Dharma or not, is that when we save ourselves, we save the world. And we don't necessarily save the world in a grandiose way.
We save it in the small ways. I know that might sound a little cliche and corny, but all in the little instances in our life, all the goings on and all the stuff that we got to deal with with each other, that's how we save the world. You know, like holding the door for somebody, you know, giving money to the homeless guy or something like that, or just giving your mom a hug. I don't know. You know, all those little things that adds up, and that's how we save the world, everybody.
Yeah,
[00:59:49] Speaker B: those thoughtless, thoughtless sounds. Wrong. Let's say thought free, naturally occurring, wonderful things are an example of our innate goodness, our whole incompleteness as a living being.
Uh, there's a.
I mean, if you. If you read a lot, if you read enough books, you start to recognize that everybody's talking about the same thing. Everybody says the same darn thing. Every Dharma talk you ever listen to is the same thing. It's. It's just, hey, this is it. Wake up. That said, like, Chogyam Trungpa, who's a. Was a. Was a Tibetan Buddhist monk who disrobed and then did all kinds of sketchy things. He's kind of a wild person, but a really insightful teacher.
He was also a very charismatic writer. His Writing is very beautiful and very easy to glean wisdom from without all the esoteric jargon. But he describes our fundamental goodness, the fundamental goodness of all people. Kind of an opposite contradiction to a kind of a Christian idea of original sin.
But, and there's another. There's a Zen master called Banke who teaches.
He was a Rinzai Zen, a monk.
But when he was alive in the 1600s, monks from all the traditions in Japan would come to hear and ask him questions and to talk about the great matter with him because he, he was, he taught in a way that was.
He never quoted scripture, he never quoted anything. He just talked about. Like everyone has Buddha mind. Actually this mind, our waking everyday mind, is Buddha mind. It is fundamentally good. We operate with it most of the time, but we manipulate it when we get angry, we kind of twist our fundamental goodness, as Jogim Trump called it, whenever we get perturbed or moved or pushed out of our stillness and silence.
[01:02:21] Speaker A: But
[01:02:23] Speaker B: by our emotional responses to things or our attachment or our clinging or our aversion to things. But actually coming back to just this is it and being empty and natural is the Buddha mind which you all have, all of the listeners have, all of us have. We just keep distracting ourselves from it.
[01:02:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the thing is the simplicity of it.
Buddha was trying to show us we're all actually the Buddha. And you just gotta see it. Right. You just gotta get out of your own way. That's the thing is it's hidden in plain sight the whole time. Right here, right now. You are the Buddha. We all can realize that. But yet we run away from it. We're like, ah, not today, maybe tomorrow, maybe next life.
[01:03:10] Speaker B: Yeah, there is no next life. It's now. You gotta wake up now.
[01:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
I mean, yeah, but for some reason we were like, ah, I don't know, maybe we haven't suffered enough. Right. Like why, what holds us back? It's ourselves. But why do we hold ourselves back from becoming the Buddha?
Good question, right? I don't know. Well, how would you answer that?
[01:03:45] Speaker B: If we think about the, you know, the, the kind of cultural understanding of our must say. Well, like common understanding of the physiology of our, of our brain, our thought producing organ, it has these sort of compartments which we say are like the amygdala is like the lizard brain. And then there's sort of a whole aspect of it which is really just a sort of an animalistic function which is maybe a little bit more complicated than a lizard.
Isn't much isn't.
Is Pretty slave to chasing snacks and reproduction.
Yeah, and then, and then we have all this higher thinking where, where we have like complex memories and we have, can create patterns and, and, and have something which we call morality, whatever.
So that said, on a base level, we, we have, we have a nature which is exactly like a wild animal. And it's really easy to lose our higher thinking to our baser instincts and to do just chase everything we want. And what happens when we do that?
Obvious. It's obvious you suffer and you cause a lot of suffering for others.
You're just. It's an obvious mistake. You know, people go to rehab for that or get, go to prison.
Society has ways of, you know, pounding down those, those wild nails, so to speak.
And if you don't ever.
Well, I mean, I think that's why it's said in Buddhism it's really hard to hear dharma, to hear the teachings, to see deeply into nature. It's difficult.
And, and even once you have, it's hard to forget. But we do, we do forget it. We fall out of it.
You know, we wake up in the morning and we fall asleep at the end of the day.
So, you know, getting awake and falling asleep are two halves of nature. And so waking up to the truth of what's in front of us and forgetting it are also two halves of the same thing.
Faith in Buddhism was also returning to that other side. Recognizing that there are two sides. Even once you've forgotten, you're going, oh, yeah, yeah, there's still that other side. You know what, I'm going to sit down, do some meditation. I'm going to do some zazen. You know, that's also part of the faith thing. But we, it's really easy to just let ourselves be driven around by this. Like, I'll say, what's more complicated than a lizard, but still very much an animal. A monkey. Monkey is a good example.
You know, like, she's just.
From this to that, from this to that, going crazy. And if you look in a mirror, you recognize that.
You kind of, you keep missing the point. You keep wasting time.
But maybe some people could recognize that and not know what to do.
There is something there. They don't even know how to form a question out of what they notice. That's hard. That's why we have the treasures of ancient traditions handed down of people studying, deeply, studying the matter, receiving it from a teacher, and then studying it again and then studying it again. And then it gets deeper and more subtle over, over hundreds of generations. You know, that's why Buddhism's pretty cool and yoga is pretty cool in. In terms of, like, teaching us to understand ourselves, because.
[01:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:07:59] Speaker B: It's not one person that started it or it's not. It's not one person that developed it and perfected it. It's more like thousands of people. Generations.
[01:08:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:08:10] Speaker B: Make it deeper and richer and. And give it as a gift to future generations.
[01:08:16] Speaker A: It's fascinating. Yeah. I always say that when one understands the Dharma enough, you become a part of the Dharma. And I think you just explained it in a very eloquent way there. It's like the Dharma is fluid. Right. It's like the Dharma evolves as time goes on, as the. As humanity goes on and develops. The Dharma has to develop in that regard.
Yeah, I like that. That's good, man.
Oh, wow. And it's always seeing in some way that that cycle of sleeping awaking. Sleeping awaking. Seeing that Samsara is Nirvana.
[01:08:54] Speaker B: That's right.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:08:57] Speaker B: Amen.
[01:08:57] Speaker A: Yeah, Amen.
Yeah.
And that's why it has to evolve right through us. Because there are different ways that Mara will tempt us as we.
As we go on through time, as we develop new technology, as we develop ourselves or the ego self. In different ways. There's different. There's different ways that the Dharma has to be explained. Right. The different ways that the Dharma has to be elucidated through us.
So it's an interesting dance in that regard. Yeah, it's like a balancing force.
[01:09:30] Speaker B: There's a heavy qualifier that, I mean, as a Zen, as a Zen priest, I have to say as well, is that we.
I think that one of the troubles with those of us Western folks who get into this thing, one of the things that we might have a strong tendency to do is loving our individuality so much that we go into it with this idea that we're going to innovate what it is to, like, oh, I'm going to change this on an individual basis. And when we do that, we're applying ego in a way that is counter to the actual.
To the real wisdom that we might have access to had we not tried to intentionally change it. Like, for example, because the United States, it doesn't have a really deep cultural identity of its own. It's definitely not homogeneous or. Or the culture that exists is not.
It doesn't understand itself very well yet because it's too darn young. It's a baby. 250 years is just a drop. It's just a drop in a bucket. You know, Japan is like 3 or 4,000 years old. Come on.
China's like 7 or 8. It's like, you can't even compare.
[01:11:11] Speaker A: All right.
[01:11:12] Speaker B: But the tendency that in America is we. Because of our lack of cultural identity, we see people exploring. We do explore. And we. People get into this concern about, are we appropriating something that's not originally ours? Are we allowed. We shouldn't be doing that because it's, you know, American people should not wear these funny clothes or we should not do this thing. We should not do these ceremonies in this shape or whatever that's. That's Japanese or, you know, whatever it is.
[01:11:49] Speaker A: They might.
[01:11:50] Speaker B: But that's just.
Trying to take only what you like from it. And leaving out all the other stuff is maybe not honoring the chance, the meaning of the opportunity of receiving the teaching and practicing in a community or with a teacher, creating a context in which we don't have to have ego. We don't have to operate by ego, by picking and choosing.
If you only take what you want, you enter by picking and choosing.
And then you miss a whole lot of the best part of the work, the best part of the opportunity to hear and to. And to learn, and that's to learn yourself.
And if you go. If you enter by picking and choosing, like, oh, I only like this part. I only like that part, then you're not getting the full picture. You're limiting yourself. You're creating suffering in yourself that you don't need to.
[01:13:04] Speaker A: I see. Yeah.
I think that was well spoken. And I think the.
The customization, you could say of the dharma is really how ideally it should be, how it's conveyed to you, like, how it's accessed. Like, I don't think one should try and change the dharma. Like, keep it the same. Don't change the tradition, but how one accesses it now in the terms of, like, everything that we have at our disposal, literally, like, what we're doing right now is that's what changes, I think, like, yeah, the dharma doesn't change itself. Right. It's like the tools that it's used to transmit is what changes through time. Right. And that's what adapts. That's what we adapt to.
[01:13:51] Speaker B: Yeah. We don't have to intentionally apply change to it. It does it on its own. We have, you know, we all have our. Yeah, that's difficult to hear and difficult to really, like, understand. And I don't mean hear, understand. I mean hear, understand.
We all have personalities. Every teacher has their own personality. They have their own style. And.
And that without trying, even Trying to keep it exactly the same. It changes.
Why do we need to trouble ourselves with trying to make. Ah, well, if we just left this part out, if we just. If we wore these clothes instead of those clothes, it would be better or whatever. Instead of thinking that, just take it as it is. It will change.
[01:14:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
It's the beauty of the Dharma. It's almost like this, how we describe it now, this, like, living force, right? It's almost like this other entity, right? I don't know. That's what I'm seeing right now. It's like this thing.
It's almost, like, parasitic. That's negative. That has a negative connotation. But, you know, it almost, like, lives through us. It, like, lives in us and, like, morphs through us as beings. I don't know. That's just the imagery that I see as we're speaking right now.
Interesting. Yeah.
That's what I say, though, is, like, once you understand the Dharma enough, it's like, it just imbues your life. Like, you become a part of it. Like, it just. It sucks you in. It's just like. It's this. It's, like, contagious kind of too. Like, other people, if they're good enough and if you resonate with them enough, they'll suck you in. The teacher, right? The teacher is ready. The student appears. I'm sorry, it's the other way around. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. And, yeah, the teacher will just suck you in to their. To their aura, to their energy.
And I feel that 100%. I don't have any specific teacher. I don't know why, but I just.
I resonate with specific teachers like you. Like, you're my teacher right now, and that's. That's how I. That's how I download the Dharma. We could say I like that.
[01:15:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:15:57] Speaker A: It's an interesting journey and an interesting path that I'm on. Like, it's almost like I have hundreds of teachers.
Like, I sit down today before this. I was like, all right, I'm gonna sit down, and this guy's gonna be my guru today.
That's how I try to approach every talk. I'm like, this person is my dedicated guru for this hour, hour and a half, whatever. They're my guru. And that's how I really. I try to approach it in that way. And that.
My point is that way of.
Of downloading the Dharma, as I said, is very new. That's very novel. Most people weren't able to do that. I know Buddha has And like people have in the past. But let's be honest, in where I'm at in Boston, I wouldn't be able to do this locally. I mean, there's probably others, some. This yoga teachers. But in the extent that we're going into now and speaking to you, you're in Japan, you wouldn't be able to do this 20, 30 years ago. So it's a very novel way that the dharma has imparted itself into my life. And we're also recording it too, and other people may listen. So. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, how this thing evolves through us through time, it's so interesting and so fascinating. You know, I feel part of it is.
[01:17:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, true that.
[01:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah, true that, man.
[01:17:07] Speaker B: Such a ridiculously cool blessing that we have. This is one of the.
For all of the BS that I think everyone, especially anyone who finds this kind of a conversation on the Internet, they're already thinking, yeah, there's so much BS on the Internet. Or like, technology has so many prickly thorns attached to it. Problems, that's for sure.
[01:17:33] Speaker A: It causes so much Rose has a storm.
[01:17:37] Speaker B: But.
But there are also these wonderful opportunities to connect to Maha Sangha, like something big and broad.
The last couple weeks in my. The. The.
The zazen in. In Japanese, it's called Zazenkai, the Zen meeting. A zazen meeting.
I call it Zen Meet, but it's. I publish them every week on my YouTube channel because every week I host a period of meditation where we do zazen and then we do a little walking meditation and then.
And then there's some conversation time. Sometimes I present. Present a teaching or take questions.
And the last couple weeks, it has expanded a bit and covered a large swath of the earth. And for all of the time zones to just.
To match just this right moment where everyone can be like meeting, like representing, like the whole planet is just mind blowing.
[01:18:45] Speaker A: It's magic.
[01:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Why not? What a treasure we have.
[01:18:52] Speaker A: Truly.
[01:18:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:18:54] Speaker A: As we said before, it's all in how we utilize the times. Utilize the technology of the times. So, yeah, wondrous times. That's for sure. Very interesting. Definitely. Very prickly. There's a lot of distractions on this technology, but if you know how to utilize it correctly, yeah, you can become a Buddha.
It's all available to us.
[01:19:14] Speaker B: You said something earlier about practicing, like, asceticism, and I think. Right. There is a good place where doing the ascetic thing, which is restraining ourselves, is an important practice in being able to understand what we experience.
And by Using technology, we have an opportunity to not restrain ourselves in a lot of ways. You know, endless scrolling is a good example, but to really, really, really carefully guard our senses, our experience, and limit what we do and how we use it.
We can practice a kind of asceticism, and that might produce favorable results.
I don't know if anyone wants to try that. Go ahead.
[01:20:09] Speaker A: Definitely easier said than done, for sure. But, yeah, definitely.
[01:20:13] Speaker B: Amen to that. Goodness gracious.
[01:20:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right. That's Mara right there.
[01:20:20] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:20:20] Speaker A: Our screen staring us right in our face.
Yeah, it's true, though. I always try to. I try to. I'm not perfect, obviously, but I try to use it intentionally. Like my phone and everything I do online, it's like, what am I going here for? Am I just scratching an itch where I feel like I need to scroll, or do I have a goal in mind when I go on here and I try to do that? I mean, obviously, like I said, I'm not perfect. I get sucked. I get lost into the sauce. I get sucked in. But if you do. To anyone listening, approach your technology with intention, with just like, before you use it, Anyone listening right now, before you use it, your phone, after you're done listening to this, think about what you're going to do next rather than just get sucked in. Because it's like our technology decides for us, right? It's like, all right, you're going to go do this, right? So you have to take the reins and decide what you're going to do next. That's what the Internet used to be 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago. It's like you had to actually put in the search terms what you wanted. Now it's morphed into this thing where it just takes your mind over. So I would recommend to use it like the old days, like the good old days of the Internet of what are you going to do? What are you here for? And if it's nothing, which probably. Honestly, it's probably nothing for a lot of people, just being honest. If it's nothing, put it down, go for a walk and do something intentional. That's all I would say.
Yeah, that's all I gotta say.
[01:21:46] Speaker B: Amen.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
[01:21:51] Speaker A: Amen, man. Yeah. Well, it's a miracle to be able to do this and have these conversations, you know, I think this is my form of intentionality, using the technology, hopefully in a dharmic way, in a SATVIC way, to have these conversations with you. And hopefully people listen in in the future, if they don't. It's okay. I had a good time.
[01:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
May. If. If one. If one person gets one good idea to live a little better, a little more authentically, and a little bit more calm, then it will. You know, I like to say that every conversation will have served its purpose.
[01:22:27] Speaker A: Amen. Yeah. Mission accomplished. Because I did. I feel calmer today. I should.
I think this is a good note to wrap it up at, but do you have anything else you want to say before we stop recording?
[01:22:41] Speaker B: No, not really. I, I, you know, there are.
I hope everyone. I hope lots of people are in.
Deeply encountering themselves. Maybe if anybody has listened all the way to this point.
When you, when you finish, whenever this, this conversation finishes, my. My wish would be that you close the. The. The browser or the. The. The app that you've watched this video in or listen to this podcast in, and then set a timer on your device for one minute.
Arrange your body, sit up straight, and just don't close your eyes. Close your mouth. Just be straight up. Breathe quietly.
Be where you are for just one minute.
And then when the timer goes off, you'll know exactly what to do next.
Go do that and just be there.
That's it. That's my wish.
[01:23:54] Speaker A: I'm gonna go do just that.
All right. Thank you, Ashton. Amazing conversation, amazing human being.
I honor you and I bow to you.
[01:24:03] Speaker B: Thank you. Right back at you.
[01:24:05] Speaker A: That's it, everybody.
Peace and love.
See you guys.
