Голоса трёхлетнего ретрита (2013, разные места, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
This is actually a first for me. So I'm basically just going to have to read this because it's hot off the press. I was actually, I think some of them saw me up at the Annie Gumper working on it not that long ago.

So I haven't had a chance to rehearse it or even see how long it is. So I'm just going to read. I'd like to say that this is because I've been so busy.

And that's what caretakers like to say. We're so busy. Donna and I are getting pretty good at identifying some birds by their call.

Cardinals and Gila woodpeckers and red-tailed hawks. They actually say the white-winged dove. If you listen, you might be able to catch it.

It says, who cooks for you? But if you hear so busy, it's got to be a Diamond Mountain caretaker. By the way, I attested that excuse on Nicole.

And she said, nonsense. You're just procrastinating because you don't want to face the fact that you have to get up in front of all these people and talk. So it's good to have people around who will call you on your nonsense.

And somehow llamas always sniff this stuff out, even from a far great distance. So I'm sitting at my desk the other night, planning an all-nighter of writing, all hyped up, just like in college. Seriously regretting my procrastination.

And this e-mail pops up from Gashy Michael. And it requests my assistance with formatting a short document. Somewhere in the range of a million pages.

So, rush, rush, of course. And the so-busy thing didn't work with him either. When we were planning this event, Gashy Michael offered the idea that the talks would be based on what is your mind like after two years in silent retreat.

So I thought, okay, then what is my mind like after two years of caretaking? I could not really figure out how to skillfully describe what my mind is like. So I thought I'd go through what I've discovered.

And by the way, retreaters call us CTs. It's faster to write, I think. So I like it, because if you say it fast with a certain accent, it sounds like city.

The Sanskrit word for superpowers. And since I see many of the CTs as superheroes, I'll probably use CT from time to time. Okay, so what have I discovered?

I've discovered that kind, beautiful people show up, give of themselves in service to others in sometimes very difficult situations, in an isolated place, and expect very little in return. People who ask what can I give, not what can I get. Someone said volunteers are love in motion, and that is clearly true here at DM.

Maybe they do it because they believe the words that are on that green poster in the back of the room that Geshe Michael wrote. This one thing will free you. Understand that there is nothing at all that doesn't come from how well you take care of others.

Mahatma Gandhi said the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. And Kahlil Gibran, you give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

So thanks to these generous, committed, volunteering souls, caretaking is actually pretty easy these days. Pretty mellow. As every retreater well knows, Nicole Davis has certainly become a superhero.

She seems to be everywhere at once, an expert in just about everything having to do with maintenance, which proves beyond a doubt that practice does indeed make perfect. Once you've switched out 98 frozen tank floats, you get good at it. You finally figure out that at four degrees Fahrenheit, metal works better than plastic.

Soon she'll figure out that you cannot complete every circuit there is on Earth with either a black wire or a white wire. Sometimes you just have to go with gray. Where is Nicole?

Nicole is actually one of the best co-workers I've ever had in like 45 years of co-working. She now has an inside the sound maintenance team. Single-pointed, I'm sure.

They never hit their thumbs with a hammer. Just one of the many nice benefits of long-term retreat. She gets a major assist from her partner, Brian MacMillan, who is an amazing craftsman, and also from Joe Parrizzo, who always seems to show up just when we need him most, even in the summer when he could be hanging out instead near the lake with his grandkids at his cool Green Bay, Wisconsin home.

Tahiya Knapp and John Dutchman have brought a little less talk and a lot more action to the food storage and delivery facility, the commissary and CT talk. They have improved on the foundational work of Tiana Lewis and Venerable Chandra. The commissary hums along like a well-oiled compassion machine.

Fewer people can do more things in less time, and more importantly, more people are happier while they do more things in less time. And by the way, a little less talk and a lot more action is from a Toby Keith country western song. Slide keytars, not sitars.

Chuck Vadova makes sure, among many other things, that all the retreater propane tanks are filled and in good working order. He must wear special glasses and protective gloves so that his irises and digits don't freeze. He's the only guy I've ever known that afterwards might go and contact his muse and pin a perfectly written, uplifting 2,000-word e-mail in praise of all the gas at Diamond Mountain.

I considered asking him to write my talk. Scott and Areet and Scott Vasey create websites, produce events, and stay on top of any retreater medical needs that may arise. Do you know how hard it is to find a dentist who will come out here?

It's probably even harder when you have an Israeli accent and a shaky Google Voice connection. Scott and Areet have spent many hours on the phone. And a big thank you to Dr. Renee Miranda for being our doctor in residence and to Dr. Ori Savelli, Ari and D'Vorah's son, for his medical visits. Scott's best feature, from my point of view, is that he laughs at my jokes. I laugh at his jokes, too, because he is a very funny guy who can charm any stranger. If you need to charm a stranger, call 260-9090.

I've tried it and it works great. Scott and I get this joking banter going, and pretty soon we don't even know who's telling what joke. Once we even had a little argument over who was the first to tell a certain joke.

Donna Peterson prowls the stores of Tucson. She's our number one hunter-gatherer. She has a regular fan club at Safeway.

They greet her at the door. And, of course, for me, Lana Dante is the main thing that keeps me sane. Vicki Mills and Will Duncan's mom, Barbie Goldschmidt, have organized a team to help with shopping, which includes Barbara Allen, Bradford Trojan, and his partner Amanda, Barbara Allen, Yasmin Rieger, and Elizabeth Annable.

Chaz Gross shows up very early mornings on Mondays to help load the truck and do the pickups. Through his many contacts in Tucson, he has arranged deals for us, like with produce wholesalers, so we get fresher fruits and veggies at a lower price. He has even taught me some of the secret food buying lingo.

For example, the word chill means stuff that goes in the refrigerator. You can call it chill. Here's the chill.

Where's the chill? Or just chill. He also sets aside special days to help with events like this one.

Dennis Moore, known for both his roses and his rosy disposition, created the Temple landscape. Long hours and hard work digging and planting and running irrigation lines, and he continues to make it bloom and survive. I never stop being amazed at the devotion of those folks who travel one after another all the way from Israel, mostly to serve their Lama who is in retreat here, but also to help with the entire Diamond Mountain effort.

Venerable Chuky coordinates the volunteers and answers gigabytes of email inquiries and then teaches ACI courses on a moment's notice. I think she has them all memorized. Ten or so years ago, I heard about these DM Advanced Studies classes coming up, the Tantra classes, and I wanted to be there, not exactly sure why, because I had absolutely no idea what Tantra was.

Trouble is, Geshe Michael and Lama Christi had the personally okay admission, and I had never ever even met Geshe Michael or Lama Christi. I had, however, met Venerable Chuky and John Brady, and they offered to be my pitchmen. We hatched a plot.

They would let me know when they had Geshe Michael and Lama Christi alone in John's New York apartment, and then I would fire off an email letter, and they would sell the Lamas on letting me in. So maybe we had some kind of destiny to fulfill together, huh? So in the next public talk in Tucson, I wade in the line during the break, and I finally reach Geshe Michael and I say, I just want to introduce myself.

I'm Rob Grusinger. I'm going to be in your Advanced Studies class. He's up here, and I'm down here because of the steps and everything, and he looks down at me and he says, it's going to be hard.

Get ready to ride the tiger. So thank goodness those predictions never came true. So Chere Sachanandandi on our board is someone I do not get to see as much as I would like.

She lives the farthest away. She is a steady, calming voice in a Skype meeting, a voice that offers ideas and solutions based on years of professional experience, which is precisely what DM Board needs. I've come to really like that voice.

It gives me a lot of confidence. It gives me comfort every time I hear it. I extend a deep felt thanks, high praise, and loads of love to the Retreat Council.

Retreat Council members have been willing to sacrifice a bit of their own retreat in order to serve their fellow retreaters. CTs and Retreat Council have this sweet relationship, and our love and respect for each other, I feel, grows deeper and deeper every day. General Jigme helps with fundraising and does one of the hardest jobs.

She keeps up with all the dollar-a-days and contacts people when their cards expire or start getting declined. I think she may be the real brains behind the Guardian Angel Program, our most important fundraising program. And, of course, Geshe Michael provides the emotional, psychological, spiritual, energetic support, and he does almost all the fundraising.

It's tricky being the bookkeeper. That's me. I'm the bookkeeper.

I once proposed to Venerable Chanda that he and I do a series of talks called The Bookkeeper and the Tattooed Monk. Anyway, it's tricky being the bookkeeper when you work so closely with someone like Geshe Michael who has such an unlimited mind and unlimited thinking. It's like, I don't think we can afford to put on a quiet retreat teaching right now.

There's limited funds, and from him it's, sure we can, I'll raise the money. And so I'm thinking, the pen that writes the numbers in the spreadsheet is only ever a pen writing numbers in the spreadsheet no matter who or what sees it. And if any dog comes around, I'll growl it into submission.

The true lifeblood of the retreat is the donations. Without donations, there would be no retreaters or caretakers. I extend my heartfelt thanks to all our donors.

Your generosity is deeply appreciated. I've discovered that caretaking is itself a kind of retreat with a sweet magic of its own. It's not the traditional four-session-a-day-don't-leave-the-retreat-boundary type of retreat, but neither is a Sindhura retreat, which is a traditional Buddhist retreat that includes world-wandering.

The CT retreat certainly involves a lot of wandering from store to store to store to store. The CT retreat looks very different from our Retreat Valley retreat, but the two are intertwined and move as one. They are like a lock and key.

They look completely different, but are utterly useless one without the other. I call our CT psalm, Octopus Psalm. When you do a retreat, you set your retreat boundaries, east, west, north, south, with markers called samtas.

Inside those boundaries is the psalm. You do not go outside the psalm. Geshe Michael did a special ceremony last night to create a psalm corridor running from Thubud's Gate to our temple so that the retreaters can walk down without leaving their psalm.

I call CT psalm, Octopus Psalm, because wherever we go—Tucson, Safford, Target, Walgreens—our psalm goes with us, yet always stays connected to DM psalm, reaching out like the tentacles of an octopus withdrawing when we return. Potentially, the whole world is our psalm. The psalm boundary markers are purely in our mind.

It just depends on how well we hold it. The key to holding it, for me, is mainly attention. And when you hold it properly, you can feel it.

A certain electricity in the air. You feel a little more peace. Not so stuck in your body.

Things are a little bit brighter, and at the very same time, less solid. You can see it in the faces of the workers at Stern Produce and Dukhan Indian Market and the solar store. It pumps up your energy.

I'm driving the rental truck full of retreater supplies when ACDC, I'm TNT, I'm dynamite. It comes on the radio, and I'm going, I'm TNT, I'm dynamite. Is it okay for Buddhists to like ACDC?

By the way, I'm not some old guy stuck in the rock and roll past. I also like modern stuff like Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO. Keep on shuffling, shuffling.

Actually, that's my current CT theme song. I've had a few other ones in the past. What is your mind like after two years of caretaking?

Keep on shuffling, shuffling. I help myself keep a sound mind by playing pretend games. When I'm driving Interstate 10, I'm not moving at 80 miles per hour.

I'm shifting between states of consciousness up to 10, obviously. I'm not moving. The world is a movie moving past me.

The two sides of the road are the two energy channels that you hear about in yoga classes, the ones that run up and down the spine. The way I'm facing is always the direction of the upward-flowing winds, just because I think I'd rather be an upward-flowing wind than a downward-flowing wind. The cars and trucks are the thoughts riding on the winds moving in those channels.

Big ones, slow ones, heavy ones, boastful ones, wide loads. Buoy is a marker in the ocean of samsara indicating exit here for a safe port. And so on, stuff like that.

The nuclear power generator for Octopus Sam, the only thing that makes it possible is the powerful meditations and realizations taking place in our traditional Sam. I've been fortunate to sit in on a couple of classes Geshe Michael has done with retreaters. He'll start with a meditation and the entire room is just instantly quiet and meditative.

I've never been in a group like that before. It's just like whoosh. It's like we're going to meditate and it's like whoosh, you know.

And no shuffle and shuffle and just complete stillness except my mind. I'm the only shuffle in mind in the room up there. Truly the Sam, that Sam is an amazing quiet place in every sense of the word.

You can feel it as soon as you cross the line if you're paying attention. Wherever I go, I see all of the retreaters floating around up there sort of like this poster, like a Buddha field, much like in this poster behind me. You know how there are, you know, all these little meditations and preliminaries and everything where you're supposed to visualize various figures maybe on thrones held up by lions or just floating in the air.

I really never got the hang of visualizing that kind of thing no matter how much I tried. But now it just comes to me naturally. All I have to do is pay attention, then all of the retreaters are right up there.

Every retreater goes with me everywhere I go effortlessly. The C2s are there too, Donna too of course, but she's always been there. And now it has become quite easy to add a Jason Coppa.

He's pretty much always been there, or a Milarepa. Did you know that before they decided to do three-year meditation retreat, at least three of our retreaters took time to earn PhDs? There may be a fourth, I'm not clear.

One flew U.S. Air Force fighter jets. Three became physicians, assistants, or nurse practitioners. Another became a registered nurse and a chef.

One became an MD and ran her own practice for many years. One wrote one of the most authoritative books about the Cold War Titan Missile System. At least one was a high school marching band teacher, New York ad agency owner, executive in a huge New York catalog company with print runs in the millions.

I worked for a company here in Tucson and we'd do print runs of 50,000 and all the printers in Tucson would be slobbering. When I talked to him and he told me they would do 5 million, I couldn't believe it. And one ran an international nonprofit.

Did you know that the retreat is governed democratically? They vote on their own rules and processes. The DM board, nor anyone else, tells them how to run their retreat.

I have discovered that you can totally transform a mind from a mind that hates to shop to a mind that loves to shop. You can indeed teach an old dog new tricks. I used to hate to shop.

I wouldn't set foot in a store unless I had to. And even then I was on the verge of tears. Now I've become a master shopper.

Want to know where to get the best price on raw almonds, evaporated milk? Sometimes I get to Tucson and I just can't wait to head to Restaurant Depot. Donna says she is quite worried about this new tendency.

After the end of the retreat, I may have to enter shopping rehab. I've discovered a thing or two about wildfires. In case you do not know, the fire god took notice of us in the summer of 211.

He huffed and puffed and sent a wave of flames straight at us. For 30 miles and 200,000 acres it kept coming. 2,000 firefighters couldn't stop it.

Then finally, just over that ridge right there, it ended. For a few nights, the ridge right above this temple was glowing orange. We did all the prep necessary for evacuation.

Though frightening and stressful, there were a lot of really fun things about the fire. You could, like in the city, if you were in the city, there'd be cordoned off and all this stuff. Out here you could drive right up to the fire line and talk to the firefighters while they were fighting the fire.

Scott and I drove over there one time and he almost parked on the hot coals. Seriously, you could get that close. One night we watched firefighters setting a backfire.

They had this gun that sent these huge balls of fire flying through the air with tails like comets. In the dark, it was dark. I thought at the time, man, if I had seen that when I was 19 years old, that's what I would have wanted to become in life.

At one of the fire meetings over in Rodeo, New Mexico, they had these fire meetings all around that you could go to to learn about what was going on. They described this pillar of fire, which is not unseen, but it's unusual, that rose more than 1,000 feet in the air up here. Talk about biblical.

God appeared as a pillar of fire to guide the Israelites in the wilderness as they fled from Egypt. I've discovered that you can lose yourself at least for a while in the service of others. Caretaking wasn't always as mellow as it is now.

We were thrown into the deep end of the pool of helping others to see if we could sink or swim. There were times when I thought I was going to drown. There have been times when I was near drowning.

There have been moments when I felt like a complete failure, times when I doubted everything. We were put into a position where we were forced to serve others every waking moment, no other options. We delivered weekly and there were no breaks, not any day at all.

When we were not actually working, we were thinking about how to solve a problem or do something better. It was what we were thinking as we fell asleep at night. When we woke up in the morning with serving others on our mind, it became a kind of total obsession.

I just went ahead and made the Diamond Mountain Retreat my daily morning meditation object because there was no use trying to do anything else. We were so busy. You found yourself no longer thinking, I wish I had a Ferrari Enzo with a 660-horsepower 12-volt engine that goes 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds red. Instead, you find yourself fantasizing about large refrigerated Zuzu trucks with turbo diesel to make sure the produce is fresher when it arrives for retreaters. White. I think they only come in white.

CTing has been hard at times. I have to confess that there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. I just can't do this any longer.

I'm resigning. We've been totally abandoned out here. Quite the pity party.

Some here are old enough to remember Tucson's own Linda Ronstadt's song, Poor, Poor Pitiful Me. But then you start to notice something interesting. Every once in a while, something pretty cool happens.

You catch a wave. It just happens. You're riding the wave, and on this wave, you simply lose yourself in the service of others for a little while.

I use the phrase catch a wave to pay homage to our lineage's sacred traditional holy surfing metaphors, which no doubt go back thousands of years. I mean, aren't there waves on some of the Tonkas? But I'm actually more of a river runner, and so catch a current or run a rabbit works better for me.

With surfing, you have to basically work your tail off to paddle, paddle, paddle, paddle out, only to then turn around and come back to the same beach you left from and then do it all over again. Sounds a little too much like what we're all trying to get out of. On a river, you launch yourself into the current that sweeps you away into the mouth of a spectacular red canyon, and my God, you're off on a 225-mile journey with something brand spanking new around every bend.

I mean, look at that red poster back there. Jason Koppel started his long treat in a boat on a river. Anyway, it's really more like the wave catches you rather than you catch the wave.

It suddenly sucks you in, and then an hour later you realize there has been no use serving another but only the act of serving itself, a kind of single-pointed serving. And you know, while you ride this wave, you are happy, simply happy, giving never any thought not to make a big, joyful effort, no sweat. Maybe you could even say that you're a little bit blissful, not the wowie-zowie ecstatic form of bliss, but a gentle bliss, you know, a peace, a joy, a contentment.

I've heard Rama Root say the only way to be content is be content, which is very cool because obviously if you're seeking contentment, you're not content. But what we've discovered is that a very good way to be content is to just lose yourself in the service of others. And you can also use this as kind of a precise measure of where you're at in any moment.

If you are suffering, if you are worrying, if you are mentally afflicted, then you know you have lost the wave, which means you are self-cherishing because it is impossible to be suffering when you're in a state of losing yourself, making others happy. As most of you know, Shantideva said, the total amount of happiness that exists in the world has come from wanting to make others happy. The total amount of suffering that exists in the world has come from wanting to make yourself happy.

This is completely logical, of course, if you accept the notion of karma. If you believe that whatever a man soweth, that shall he reap. If you sow happiness in others, then happiness comes back to you.

There is no other place that it could come from. Everybody is happy making everybody else happy. If you sow selfishness, then only selfishness can come back and selfishness means conflict.

This is the only place that suffering could come from. But we found that this also works in a more immediate way as a moment-to-moment test. When lost in the service of others, we experience only joy.

When self-cherishing, we tend to experience suffering. If you're neither, just sort of blah, then I guess you're just giving blah to others. So how far can this take you?

I truly do not know, but in the Sun Sutra, which Geshe Michael translated and included in one of the Master Shantideva courses, there is a kind of concentration called living in happiness over everything that is. Any bodhisattva that attains this type of concentration feels a sensation of pleasure and only pleasure whenever they focus on any object at all. They never feel any kind of unpleasantness.

These types of persons could even be assailed in the realms of hell and yet still maintain their perception of pleasure. I've discovered that devotion in serving others is not blind acceptance. It does not necessarily always mean saying yes.

I've been through some very painful lessons on this subject. I've learned that you can love someone very deeply and yet still say no, this far and no further in my personal opinion. It is the duty of true disciples to question.

A true disciple makes decisions not based on blind faith but based on ultra-clear unblindness or whatever the opposite of blindness is. He makes very conscious choices, not blind choices, and he owns those choices. Although from time to time a little blind faith seems to be able to take you a long way.

In the Guidelines on Lamas, they say if you do not feel that you have to do, then you must be willing to go to your lama and explain why you cannot do what they have asked and take the consequences. The important thing is to be courageous and open, never deceptive. I think it is the duty of a mature practitioner to be willing to do this and also, of course, to be willing to listen to any counter-arguments.

If anyone with sincere motivation would like to talk to me about meditation, I have discovered a slightly different approach to meditation. I used to be an Excel spreadsheet meditator. Column 1 was the day.

Column 2 was the object. Column 3 was the start time. Column 4 was the duration.

And since I have got a little trouble with my knees, I cannot do an hour, so I have two sets of these, half an hour each. I made sure I got an hour a day, then I had a column running with a seven-day average, and then I colored in the cells with all the records. So people come to me and say, if I miss my meditation one day, then my whole day does not go well.

I used to think that way, but then I turned it around. If I do not do some really good deeds today, then how does it affect my meditation in the morning? Then I do a meditation where I consciously look at my mind to observe what my mind is like after the good deeds I have done the day before.

I have also become a dedicated practitioner of Geshe Michael's coffee meditation. Each night as I wait to fall asleep, I contemplate the good deeds I have done that day. And we are kind of lucky here because we do so many every day.

That is really easy to do. I have learned that you can take this losing yourself in the service of others to a whole other level. One of my favorite experiences actually was my first river trip, a paddle raft trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

I was doing some pro bono brochure design work for an organization called American Rivers. They phoned me one day and said, there is a 15-day river raft trip leaving in two days. Would you like to join it?

You cannot say no to that. Some of the biggest rapids in North America flow through that canyon. One called Lava Falls creates what they call a hole, which literally looks like a big hole in the river.

The hole at Lava Falls is big enough to put a whole house in. You have to avoid it when you run that rapid. After you get through, you pull over to the side to watch other rafts coming through.

So we are pulled over to the side and I see this person in a wetsuit coming through the falls just by himself. Maybe he fell out of a boat. But then he comes over to the side and the entire 225 miles in just the wetsuit, no raft, they call it swimming the river.

I ask him how he does it. He says, first you have to surrender to the river. But that doesn't mean you let the river take you wherever it wants.

You have to reserve a little part of your mind that watches every second, every wave, every rapid so you can make these little corrections when needed. If you lose this watchfulness, the river can sweep you to your death. He says there are legends of people who make perfect river runs, but he'd never actually met one.

If you apply this same theory to losing yourself in the service of others, when that wave catches you, then you have a much greater chance of riding it longer. You can see the moments you start to veer, self-cherishing, creeping in, and you can make small corrections before the demon gets you. Here's another one of my pretending things.

John Irving wrote a novel called The World According to Garp. Garp as a child misunderstood what he'd been warned about at the beach. They told him to beware of the undertow, but he hears beware of the undertowed.

I see this entire caretaking experience as a river trip that launched into the canyon on December 30th. Unknown rapids and waterfalls lay ahead. As I float down the CT River, I pretend that under the surface lurks the undertowed.

He has his mouth wide open like the Lord of Death in some Buddhist paintings. He has this long, sticky tongue. This sticky stuff is all kinds of icky, self-cherishing, jealousy, resentment, bitterness, feeling abandoned, pity party.

My job is to be ever watchful for even the slightest sign that the undertowed has got me and then make those corrections. I believe that the more skilled you become at doing this, the more habituated you become to the joy of losing yourself in the service to others. So, I'm now discovering that my river of words have wound out.

And from the King of Dharma, in the winter of 1392, Jason Kappa, with a group of hand-picked disciples known as the Purest Eight, launched a leather raft onto the River Oka, heading downstream to deep retreat, abandoning every worldly activity. Even in this, this is a quote from the book, even in this, the master gives us lessons. If you really love your family, if you really want to help them, then leave and perfect your own heart first.

Geshe Michael wrote those words. We, the caretakers and the retreaters, are in the same boat, doing our best, both of us doing our best to perfect our hearts.

[Speaker 2]
That's it.