10 Day Retreat at Te Moata Day 6 Evening Talk
5 July 2012
It’s great to see the local sangha here, joining us this evening. We have been on retreat for 6 days now. 23 of us plus the service team who are coming in and out as well. We’ve endured torrential rain, cold and enjoyed the sun. The food has been good – no one’s left!
What have we been doing, sitting here hour after hour, sharing this aspiration in silence? For someone who has never done this, they might have an idea that we come here to ponder on deep and meaningful things, we come here to do some deep thinking about stuff. Probably the most popular idea is that a situation like this is one that we come to for spiritual self-improvement and hopefully, finally, to attain some spiritual goal. And the common idea is that we do that by practising some method, some ritual. So I have spent the week exploring this.
One of the things I’ve been doing is exploring this common assumption, this common approach to what we have here. And what I have been suggesting is that taking up any practice or ritual on the basis of trying to generate spiritual self-improvement, taking up any method to try and achieve some kind of spiritual goal, is based upon the false presumption that you we not already the Real. That in fact we are that which we are seeking. I have also been suggesting that this critical insight initiates true spiritual practice, and anything prior to that is the dramatisation of the separative self, always seeking, always involved in manipulating conditions of body, mind and world, to try and have some kind of desired experience or use conditions to console oneself in the midst of mortal fear. In the midst of the unkillable recognition that we are all going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it! So that’s the basis that I have been putting out. And the practice, if we want to talk about taking up a practice, is to feel the Real. You could say we want to make a little enquiry into the truth of this. Is this true? Do we have to practice some method or ritual in order to improve ourselves spiritually or reach some kind of goal? Is that true? Or is it true that we are already the Real?
It’s crucial that we get clear about this, otherwise we could go off on the wrong path. So what I’ve been suggesting to us all, myself included, is, making use of the patience of archaeological time, we sit and feel the Real. Feel what is most Real, here and now. Another way to talk about this is feel where you are, feel where you really are. Are you in a place that is needing spiritually improving? Have you fallen short of some kind of goal? Are you not where you are supposed to be? Is it true that you are in the wrong place? You, where you are, essentially, fundamentally in your form in this moment, is there something flawed about it – you’ve messed it up, you’ve got it wrong, you’ve lost the plot, something needs fixing, something needs changing, something needs realising, something needs improving or something needs getting rid of, and only then, will you be fundamentally most deeply and fully, okay. Only then will you be happy. Only then you can breathe easily and relax, but until then, you can’t. Is this true?
Okay, now we’re into something here! Let’s find out. You are making use of your life, this is about your life, this is the truth of you. This is not a casual enquiry. It does require us to really pay attention and feel to get to the bottom of this. So there’s a few practical considerations that immediately arise. If we are trying to make this enquiry but we keep finding we are distracted all the time, then that’s not useful. The distractions keep making us go sideways, thinking about the past or the future, all that. It doesn’t help because we are trying to feel where we are. We can’t feel where we are if we are madly distracted. Because it’s like the mind keeps thinking it’s somewhere else – it’s over here, no it’s over here, it’s like chasing a rabbit or something…. it’s over there! So the challenge is that most of us, when we say “okay let’s just sit here and feel where we are”, we find, oh my God, we find we are massively distracted. That’s not helpful is it? So much noise in my head. So it normally takes a few days at least to quieten that down. I’ve been suggesting that we tether our attention to the breathing. Just take up a simple practice of calming the mind. It’s a kind of remedial practice, it’s not a spiritual practice. It’s not magic. It’s just a remedial practice, just like cleaning our teeth. If you’ve got a crazy mind it’s not good for anything is it? What’s a crazy mind good for? It’s not good for this enquiry, so we just need to get it back into balance. If you’ve been over-thinking, over-stimulating it, over-emphasising it, you need to just come back into balance for a bit. Ideally we would already arrive here already with everything all lined up – all the chakras lined up, ready to go, ready to rock! This is not normally the case, is it? We have got our karmic lives, we are all twisted out of shape, bent out of shape, collapsed in on ourselves, people kind of hobble in, half broken, emotionally wounded, lots of unfinished business, blah blah blah blah blah… all over the place, full of anxiety, the body disturbed in all kinds of ways. Anxious, worried, we are half burnt out, some of us stressed, all the rest of it. It’s all just from what we have been living. So that’s all stuff… you have got to acknowledge that. It’s not the natural state! It’s some bizarre, nutty kind of thing. I’ve been talking a lot about nature and if you look out at nature you see everything in perfect balance. You go up to the kauris, they don’t appear to be stressed, the tuis that have been singing today, they don’t appear to be full of anxiety, but humans, another matter altogether. We’ve got all this stuff going on where we have somehow managed to convince ourselves that there are an awful lot of things we have to worry about here. We almost define our humanity on the basis of worrying about stuff. It even makes us feel important somehow, as if it’s a good thing to do. You know, you gotta worry about things, you gotta take care of stuff, keep on to it. I don’t know where we got that idea from. We have all been born, we are here briefly, then we disappear mysteriously, but somehow in that brief flickering of Divine consciousness and inherently free life force, we somehow submit it to anxiety and worry, among other things. So there is a sort of restorative aspect to this practice in the beginning where we just come to our senses. We actually just be natural and normal. That’s a huge challenge for most people. How do you be natural? What’s the natural mind anyway? Let me think about that…..write some notes…what’s the natural…how do you rest your mind? I mean it’s an achievement even to be able to let the body rest in its own nature, isn’t it, just to be able to breathe without anything exaggerated or out of balance. That’s fantastic. As for the mind… phew! Some people probably consider it’s not even possible – the natural mind, the natural state of the mind is disturbed – I’ve never known it any other way.
All of this is a profound hindrance to this enquiry which I mentioned about ten minutes ago. We haven’t even started that yet! And of course, sometimes there is a tendency to try and “set up shop” in that confusion, in that bewilderment, in the desperate anxiety and try and do some kind of spiritual practice from there. Which is a complete lost cause. It’s an absolute lead balloon – the crazy mind is good for nothing. Generally it’s not even interested in feeling where I am. It’s in total avoidance of that. It’s got a better idea, it’s seeking something else.
An interesting thing, a practical thing, just sitting here tonight, just sitting as we just were … will you be completely happy? This is an absolutely simple, practical, completely significant thing. Will you be completely happy in this moment, will you allow it? Isn’t this what we want, we all want to be completely happy. Can you notice anything in your being that disallows that? Anything at all, even subtly. Do you notice that even subtly you are kind of waiting for something? Like being on retreat here for six days you still find even subtly, when you come to sit, the mind is maybe running ahead even just very slightly… “we have only got two more days to go” – you might be thinking about when you are leaving. But this thing that you want most of all… peace, complete perfect peace profound. Are you locating it here? Truly? Or is there any part of you that is just still thinking that it’s in the future? Maybe even the next sit, or tomorrow or when you leave or when you see your partner, whatever, I don’t know. It’s like a shadow within us that there’s always this sense that it’s not here. It’s almost like it’s a presumption, it’s an uninspected presumption that this peace that I am seeking, this happiness, this release, this freedom… it’s not here, it’s not now. What would it take? If I was to say “This is it”! I had one teacher once who gave a talk and said “This is it!”, “This is it!”. If I was to say that, you might not have confidence in me, you might think, “Oh it’s just him, it’s old motor-mouth going on again. ‘This is it’. Na, it can’t be. This can’t be the Real. This can’t be the profound truth, the Dharma.” What would it take? It’s just that, that’s where seeking is. You see the seeking, we’ve have all got our own version, “I need some improvement here, some improvement has to happen here”. And then, perfect peace profound. But it’s not here right now, not like this, because my mind is like this, my body is like this, my life is like this, the world’s like this… So now I am submitting my energy to try to fix that all up. But we’ve all had a go at that. How many revolutions around the sun do you need to make before you realise it never comes to an end? You don’t get to “fix this up”. You just grow old and die. Matter of fact, the conditions are basically designed to decline, they are not actually designed to get better, just on the level of conditions, in terms of your body, even the mind, the memory starts going…
I left my cell phone in the cafe on the way up here and I thought “Oh bugger”, I thought I was being really mindful as well, I was feeling okay. Normally I have some excuse when I do something like that, like I am stressed or something. But I had a nice drive out and left my cell phone in the café!
But if we come back to this inquiry, of like this moment right now, why not? I was on the previous retreat and I said “Here it is, (draws an imaginary graph) the human life cycle – birth, aging, maturing, declining, and death. That’s the human life cycle. Which bit on that is the best place to be? Which is the best place to be on there?” Somebody said “30”! But this is completely practical, we are all doing that, we are all involved in that, where is the best place to be? You have got to be careful – it’s like sticking the pin in the tail of the donkey with a blindfold on, if you ever played that game as a kid. Because if you stick it anywhere, you are buggered aren’t you! Wherever you stick it, it’s just a moment, one breath and it’s gone. And the rest of it, you’re shot! But somehow we are not profound enough in our normal thinking to even consider this. If you are trying to get somewhere, well, where is it? Have you realised it’s not happening and that even if you get something you lose it because it’s all changing, you can’t hold onto anything.
But what have you got? This moment. Matter of fact if you consider, actually it’s the only thing you’ve got. It’s the only thing you’ve ever had. You don’t have anything other than this moment. Your life is this moment, this is it. There isn’t anything else. There isn’t a past or a future, it’s in the mind, time is in the mind, it’s mind-made. The truth is this moment right now. What would it take then for this moment to be perfect peace profound? Well, you’d have to allow it rather than keep resisting it, by thinking that life is somewhere else. “My real life, my great life, my wonderful ecstatic life of love, liberated life force and peace – it’s somewhere else”. No – because there isn’t somewhere else. It isn’t, because there isn’t somewhere else. How would that be? It’s got to be good news, isn’t it? How would it be if you were to let yourself have it right now? You would have to allow this moment fully. You’d have to be so impressed with this moment where you feel yourself to be truly, that you’d absolutely allow yourself to have it. And I have been suggesting that this practice makes it way on the basis of this. It’s something you have got to animate. You’ve got to be more impressed with where you really are, than where you think you are. Where you think you could be, should be, ought to be, used to be, want to be – whatever you are making your mind up about, you have got to lose sympathy with that because you realise it’s just a mirage, it’s a dream. It’s got nothing to do with where I really am, matter of fact it keeps distracting me from where I really am, I keep thinking I’m somewhere else. I keep thinking something else is going on, or there’s something I have got to do and every time I submit my feeling attention to that I start getting worried about stuff. I start feeling cramped, I start feeling less than love and peace.
It’s all very simple but it’s not an easy thing to do. So this is where it kind of gets really interesting. We take the heart of this understanding into our very life. We sit here and think – okay, now do it. Give it a go, do it, allow it, allow this moment, feel this moment…. and it’s amazing what happens when we start to do this. Pretty much anything can happen from the whole spectrum of moods…some people fall into a kind of depression where they feel like they have just had all their toys taken off them. “Oh my God, you don’t mean just this moment? You don’t mean I have to feel this moment now? But what about all my hopes and dreams?” You’ve got to let go of all that lot otherwise there’s an emotional reaction to this or resistance. It’s quite common for people at the beginning of retreat to often think about running away. It’s an irrational thing, just thinking “Get me out of here!” It’s an interesting one. I’m sure we have all felt it at moments. But there’s something else, there’s a proportional aspiration that’s going on, or proportional desperation or inspiration. I go for the inspired end of the spectrum but some people come to this practice because they are desperate, because nothing else is working. They’ve realised, “if I run away from retreat, well where do I go? Doesn’t matter where I go, I’m still me” – how do you run away from yourself? I can keep distracting myself, anaesthetising myself but that’s like being half dead, I just can’t bear to do that. Just can’t bear to keep deadening myself all the time. Surely life is better than that.
So as a result of whatever shenanigans we go through, more and more it dawns on us that in the end it becomes choiceless, you have no choice – it’s now or never. Literally, it’s now or never! There is only now. It’s completely obvious. If we quieten the mind sufficiently and just simply pay attention it becomes completely obvious that it’s only, always and already now. So this is when the heat turns up because now we realise, it is now. It’s not like I have to try to orientate myself to now or try and get present – it is now. So now we are noticing our relationship, what’s your relationship to the now of yourself? Where you have just woken up, where you feel yourself to truly be. How are you doing with it, are you okay? Are you okay being here, now? Is there anything terrible happening, are you resisting it? You can just feel that the resistance is hell isn’t it, resistance is hell. Why on earth would you resist your real life? What reason on earth would you have to not want to feel where you really are, when you see that that disassociation from presence is your suffering, is your dilemma, is your anxiety, is your feeling of alienation, is your feeling of betrayal in the heart?
So I’ve been suggesting that we profoundly devote ourselves to presence. Love it, relax into it. Stimulate even, the feeling of presence rather than stimulate else-where-ness. Rather than stimulate distraction, stimulate the feeling of Being. This is consenting to spiritual practice, the spiritual process. You are no longer at odds with yourself. It’s called overcoming self division, you are not divided against yourself, there’s not two of you. Do you feel in any way that this practice here, whatever practice this is, is like a struggle with yourself? As if there are two of you – there’s a me struggling with myself. It’s kind of nutty isn’t it? Do you ever find that’s going on? You see there’s a sense of being divided against ourselves. Who’s the one that is struggling? That one is not submitted to Being, it’s got its own agenda therefore it’s struggling against what is. If you just relax completely with what is, it’s the end of the struggle – it’s simply Being, it’s choiceless. There’s no choice in this, the ego, the separate mirage – me – thinks it’s full of choices, I can do whatever I like, choices, all kinds of choices. But when you come to this practice you realise it’s the end of choices. We have no choice over the mysterious place where we feel ourselves to be. You have to consent to it, here it is. Hell, I am not even doing it. I’m not making it up. If we start getting more subtle we start realising actually it’s living me, it’s doing me. This me is arising out of this presence thing, how funny, how peculiar! Presence and then there’s this sort of me thing. What is it? I don’t know, you can’t even find it, can you? There’s one Zen teacher whose student went to him and said “I am having great trouble with my mind” and the Master said “Show me your mind, show me this thing you are having trouble with”. The student couldn’t produce it because it doesn’t exist, doesn’t really exist, it’s ephemeral. And yet somehow the old tendency is to keep trying to make life on the basis of something that doesn’t even exist.
So we take our practice, the practice of feeling the Real, the inherent self, where we are now – it’s choiceless, it’s the end of seeking, there’s no more seeking now, there’s simply Being, simply feeling, simply attending. No more manipulating. You can’t manipulate the present moment, you can’t manipulate presence, doesn’t make any difference, nothing makes any difference. From the personal separate point of view, everything makes a difference to me but from the point of view of presence nothing makes any difference, because presence is unqualified by conditions. The present moment doesn’t depend on anything , and you are that, you are presence. When we orientate ourselves to the present moment and feel presence, eventually we get absorbed into it – there’s simply presence. Being is present, merely mysteriously existing, self-revealing, our real inherent sacred mysterious nature reveals itself as merely mysteriously present. We are awake as this. Peaceful from the beginning, already peaceful. You can’t make yourself peaceful. Twice on this retreat I’ve caught myself, I sit down at the beginning of a meditation.. I try to do something in myself and then catch myself out.. ah! – I am already peaceful, that’s the end of it. I find it quite useful just to say that to myself. I don’t mean to try and condition something into myself, it’s just a reminder, and then I feel it, oh yeah I already am, already peaceful. There’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to do, we are already peaceful, but the thing is, will you allow it? It’s a huge letting go. It’s kind of weird but it’s like this phoney half life that we have and if we just feel the disposition of the ego, the disposition of our seeking private self, it always presents itself as wanting all the good things in life, but it doesn’t! If you say I want peace, I want love, I just want to be free – okay, then do it, here it is, it’s here right now, this is it. The door is open.
On the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment, after he realised where he really was, he made this great proclamation: “The doors to the deathless are open. Let those who have little dust in their eyes bring forward their faith”. The door is open. The door to the deathless is open. Presence is the deathless, it’s the amata dharma in Buddhism, it’s deathless. It doesn’t begin and end. The present moment – there’s no birth and death in presence, it’s continuous, it’s wide open. Somehow we’ve missed it, we think it’s somewhere else. The recognition -I’ve been suggesting that you need to recognise this, feel this until you are beyond doubt that it is the truth. Then it’s really self authenticating where you are. You don’t need to go to any more books or any more teachers for this – you might want to go to books and teachers to keep stimulating you in the Real, that’s a different matter – but in order to get beyond doubt there needs to be this submission, this persistence in feeling-contemplation of the real location of your Being, until you are utterly beyond doubt that you are here and it is now and the door is wide open, there is nothing obstructing it, there’s nothing obstructing this. You are already peaceful, you are already awake, there is nothing you could possibly add to yourself to make yourself more peaceful or more awake or more present than you already are. Most of the work of this practice is actually elimination. All the junk that we have consumed because we have been out of whack with the law of nature or the law of life, which is that this present moment is a sacrifice, it’s not an accumulation. That this submission, this devotion that enables us to relax and feel where we are is not an attainment, it’s not something we’ve just added to ourself. Really, it’s more accurate to say that something has just fallen away, some cramp has just fallen away, some madness, some disturbance has just fallen away. It might not all fall away all in one go, it falls away just enough for us to recognise something completely new and yet paradoxically, it’s like somehow, there’s some instinct in us that we’ve known it all along. We are just waking up to the truth of our own Being. The mind, the narrative in the mind, unless you’ve been grown up through some sacred culture, will probably not match your realisation. So it’s a little bit funny in the beginning which is why it’s really most appropriate for this unfolding to happen in the context of the wisdom community where we can be instructed in this. We have probably got a whole lot of nonsense in our mind that makes us ill fitted – the society makes us very ill fitted for this realisation. We think the purpose of life is to make money or I don’t know what, but certainly not to feel and submit ourselves to presence, and make this the principle of existence. Because this is only the beginning… if we were in a truly evolved or mature culture or community, we would have been inducted into this as we were growing up. In a sacred culture we are going to make life on the basis of this principle – we go and have children and chop the wood, carry the water and do whatever we have to do – engage in all the usual necessary functions of life, but on the basis of this. Make our relationships on the basis of this understanding, on the feeling of Being. This is a community that is practising love, this is the practice of love, liberated life force, free Being is love, it’s not the cramp. The cramp is love-less. The cramp is obstructed life force. Obstructed life force is the resistance to Being, the refusal, the adolescent refusal to feel where I am. “Bugger it, this is my life and I can do whatever I like!” We stomp around doing whatever, but if we were to confess, we know we are running away. We are betraying ourselves, we are not fully human yet, we haven’t grown up enough yet to take on this highest moral responsibility which is to honour the heart, spirit, presence. To submit to the law of life so that we can move through this realm peacefully. Every being here has the right to move through this place peacefully, doesn’t matter whether it’s a stick insect or a fly or a fish or a human being, everyone has the right to move through this place peacefully. So we are feeling the inherent force that is living us through conditions and beyond, the force that brought us here, the force that is living us, the force that will dissolve back into itself.
It doesn’t matter what we call it, by the way. Some of you have been asking me about the words I use – I just make them up! It doesn’t matter. What I’m talking about is prior to words. I was thinking about the first line of the Tao Te Ching, if you are familiar with that – “The Tao that can be spoken about is not the real Tao”. It’s funny because then there’s like 80 pages of stuff that follows that first line. I love it! It’s the grand paradox. If you are still hung up on the words, goodness, you’ve got to get over that. It’s like I have been recommending that we practice speaking this which is more akin to poetry, the language of the heart, the Dharma – it’s a beautiful thing to give expression to. Make up words. If I were to say “presence, the practice of presence, divine nature”… what is it, I don’t know… you could get hung up when I say “presence” and think “is that what the Sufi’s mean by fana, dissolving into God – is that the same thing?”. If I were to say, “well yes, it is the same”, then you think “Oh well, that’s good, that’s okay!” – does that mean you can do it now then? That now it’s okay because you’ve got the words right? Or if I were to say, rather than calling it “presence”, just call it “Fred the Spotted Bullfrog”. We are now submitting ourselves to Fred the Spotted Bullfrog! How would you do with that? I could bring out a book – “The Way of Fred the Spotted Bullfrog”. Start a new religion and if someone comes up and says, “well is that the same as the way of mindfulness?” you go “Oh no, no, this is the way of the Bullfrog, the Spotted one as well, not the lesser spotted one of course, but the greater Spotted Bullfrog.” This actually happens out there doesn’t it? People have conferences about this kind of stuff. I don’t know about you guys but for me I don’t give a s***, I don’t care. I’m interested in the experience of this. It’s like, let’s just do it! It’s great to have a silent retreat because we don’t have too much of that going on but even so, I’m sure some are sitting here thinking “is it this or is it that?” Well, what difference does it make? You are not going to do it from the point of view of mind. Presence is a feeling. It’s wonderful once we start submitting to the feeling of Being then wonderful thoughts can arise, profound thoughts can arise and we are all going to give expression to it in different ways, very different ways. I like talking, but some people don’t even bother with words, I have some spiritual companions and they don’t have much to say about anything, but they love to live it, they just want to get on with it. My disposition is one that’s given to running off at the mouth! I’m sure you have already noticed that. Other people not, they would rather just go out there and build something or make art. I have one beautiful spiritual companion who is an artist – that’s his language – beautiful. It’s the practice, that’s it. It’s like stripping it all back, it’s great just to keep this inquiry going, to say okay, what is it that actually makes a difference? For me it’s not rational understanding. I’d read so much about all this stuff before I was even 20, and now I’m 53 and I notice for me there is only one thing that really makes a difference and that is inspiration. You could be different to me, but I just need…because I’m a bit of a lazy dog by nature, I could just spend the day blobbing out doing nothing. But I need to be stimulated in this to make me want to do it, see, so that’s a different matter. If you really want to do this, it’s great to strip it all back and discover what makes a difference for you, what gets you going. What is it that’s going to get you out of bed and dedicate this life, this day, to your real Being, rather than just switch on the radio, go on the internet, spend two hours having coffee or whatever it is you do? The spiritual life is a very practical consideration and in the context of community we keep inspiring each other with this. It’s very contagious because it’s of us, it’s our inherent Being. That’s the marvelous thing about it.
One of the things I find most marvelous about this is that it works. And the reason why it works is because it’s inherent of us, we are not trying to add something to ourselves, it’s like you live what you come with, but live where you really are. And it’s marvellous when we all do this, if we live this to each other, through the form, however your form is, it doesn’t matter how your form is but you do it in the form that you are in. Your divine Being, through this form, it’s unashamed, you don’t have to make any excuses about it, you haven’t got to ask for permission, you just go “here I am”.. it’s a marvelous thing, I’m alive! And it’s enough. This is it, I don’t need any status, any achievements, I don’t need a PhD, I don’t need to give you my life history, I don’t have to have any kind of experience, I’m not trying to prove I’m better than you or anything. It’s like we are all in this together – the life force -it’s the only thing that’s really happening here. From the point of view of dharma you could say there’s only one thing happening here, expressing itself through all these different forms, and our orientation is to feel that one thing. Submit to that one thing. It’s the only way to overcome inner division, it’s the only way to realise peace, it’s the only way to be happy, freely happy. It’s the only way to be unproblematic. It’s the only way to be free from self-confinement, dilemma, anxiety and seeking.
All right, let’s have a cup of tea and come back in about 15 minutes for a final sit.