Голоса трёхлетнего ретрита (2013, разные места, Аризона), занятие 7

[Speaker 1]
So, I'd first like to thank you all for coming and for supporting us, taking care of us like our mothers and fathers. It's so precious. And I want to let you know that all the retreaters are really happy and they're working really hard and we're all so grateful to you.

So, thank you. And like Rob, I've never done this before with or without a blindfold. I've only once taught a Dharma class that wasn't formed around an ACI course or something similar to that.

So, I'm a little nervous and I have my little stack of cards to help keep me on track. So, I hope you don't mind. I can peek a little bit through here down, straight down.

I can't see anything out there, but I can see straight down. And this morning I spent some time and made the letters really big so I could read them. And I'm a little nervous.

So, I want to take just a few more moments to settle myself. And I ask you to join me. When I took this talk down from the shelf where I had put it a year ago and dusted it off, the spring equinox had just passed.

And so it passed over and Easter was on its way. And then the teachings were going to be on Cinco de Mayo. And so I began to think about what these four had in common, the equinox, Passover, Easter, Cinco de Mayo, all from different cultures, all from different times and places.

And what they had in common was going from one world to another. Like Holy Lama Geshe Michael said once, going from black and white to technicolor. And for me, they represent going from the black and white of my mental afflictions, the black and white of being at the mercy of my emotions, the black and white of pain, of ignorant liking, ignorant disliking, and the ups and downs of life.

To a world of freedom and a release, release from that darkness, from that black and white, into a world filled with light and love and joy and wisdom. Is this not what we've always sought? Is this not what every human being has always sought?

Is this not what we were meant to do and to be? With these thoughts, I came into this retreat. I came in with the faith and determination that yes, I could change my mind.

That yes, I could change how the world appeared to me. That yes, I could change all of these pictures. I could change it all.

To become, to become fully awake and enlightened. I don't know about your mind, but my mind has not been so easily changed and tamed. They say that you can reach single point of concentration in three months, and I'm sure it's true.

And maybe the next three months I'll do it. It's like I'm getting closer and getting closer, but I'm not quite there yet. It's really hard to change my mental habits, my ways of thinking, and the endless chatter that goes on in my mind.

It's really hard. So hour after hour, day after day, year after year, I sit on my cushion trying to change my mind, trying to change the pictures I see, trying to change what I hear. And how do I do this?

By what Lama calls gardening. First cleaning out the weeds, then fertilizing the ground, and then planting new seeds. So what I'd like to talk about is something that has helped to loosen my deeply ingrained ignorance and believing that things are just happening to me, even if it's been ever so slight.

That the world, my emotions, that they're just coming at me, everything coming at me and not from me. With my training and a few glimpses, I know this isn't true. And so I fight this tendency.

I call this talk Stories, Pictures, and Associations. I think I can safely say that we all love stories. That there's nothing like a good storyteller, or a good movie, or book, or painting, or song, to open our minds to new ideas and places, to touch our hearts.

But the story that we're most fascinated with is our own story. Where we've been, where we are now, and where we're going. An ever fluid, changing story of me.

So what is this story? What does it tell me? Am I my story?

In the highest school of Buddhism, Majjhimika Prasangika, they say everything is tokepe taksa. Everything is a product of my projections forced on me by my past deeds. So what do I do with this?

I try to see my world as made by made of pictures. Little vignettes, all connected together by my mind. And why would I do this?

Well, not only are these pictures what we call projections, or mental images, not only are they responsible for my physical world, they're also responsible for my mental world, how I perceive my own mind. Everything has its own emptiness. My mind has its own emptiness.

My experiences have their own emptiness. Even how I perceive my own thoughts has its own emptiness. So what pictures do I see?

I see pictures of myself interacting with the world, with the people, with the places, with things, with sounds. And every one of those is produced by 64 discrete pictures, karmic ripenings, in a finger snap. And they are creating everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think.

Every experience I have. And they're all connected together to make a story, a life. So I'd like to do a little meditation.

After all, I'm in a meditation retreat. So get comfortable. And we're going to do a review meditation.

Let's just do it and go through it. Play the movie back. Okay, you can relax.

So what did you see? I'm going to assume that you saw yourself doing things, that you met with old friends, and you even met new friends. That you came into the temple and maybe heard some talks.

You had something to eat. And maybe these thoughts, maybe these pictures that arose in your mind triggered other pictures of other friends or other places. Maybe even what you're going to do later today or what you've done in the past.

And I know what I do is I string all of these pictures together. I string them together. And I have galleries and galleries of these pictures.

Hundreds and hundreds of stories. And I identify with them. And I think that those stories are me.

I even rearrange the pictures, rewriting the stories. Sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it's not. When it's healthy, we call it spiritual materialism.

And it's like deciding that the person who is causing me so much pain was really trying to help me. Was really trying to free me of some deeply entrenched misperception that I had. Or maybe two or three.

So how is this useful? How is it useful in our daily lives? Well, suppose I'm having some difficulty and I go to a friend and I ask them for help.

Because to me, I'm so entrenched in it that I can't see a way out. I feel stuck. It feels fixed and unchangeable.

And then if this involves another person, well, then there's blame. And do you know what they said? And then they blah, blah, blah.

We all know it. We all do it. And yet, if I can just stop even briefly and look at it, it's just a string of pictures that I'm putting together in my mind.

One image after the other. Images that I am perceiving in a certain way. If I understand how these pictures, how these images, which are forced on me, work.

Which is dependent origination. The appearance side of things. Then it begins to weaken the habit of thinking that things are the way they appear.

And this is the wisdom side of things. Emptiness. If I understand how it's only colors and sounds and shapes that I'm perceiving and putting it together, picture after picture, and then putting those pictures together into a story and not something, and believing, I'm sorry, and believing that that is me.

That is the way this situation is. That is you. Thinking or mistaking it for the real thing and not that it's something made up in my mind.

Something conjured up in my mind. Forced on me by the way it's appearing. Appearing to me in a certain way.

Forced on me by anti-karma. If I can see this, if I understand this, then, then there's hope. Then there's the possibility of transformation.

Of creating that world of light and love, of peace and joy. Then there's a possibility of ending all suffering and teaching others how to do it. And them stopping their pain in the process.

But when I believe in the small, limited me, it keeps me from attaining my full potential. And it's a huge obstacle. Now you might ask, does that mean that these pictures, these mental images, since they are pictures and mental images, don't affect me?

Well, I might ask you, does this mean that when I see myself slipping on a rock and spinning around and trying to catch myself and breaking my wrist instead, that it's just an illusion? That it's not happening? Or in one of the ACI courses, as Holy Lama said, a bright yellow taxi hurtling down the street, hitting me and breaking my legs.

Or a sweet, sweet evening spent with a special friend. Of course not. I still feel the pain.

And I still experience the joy. The experiences still exist. They function.

For they too are empty of any self-existence. That's why they function. Things can only work through these mental images, through these pictures.

Master Shantideva in the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, I think we like to quote him a lot. He says, indeed, it's not our objective here. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting my quote.

Indeed, it's not our objective here to disprove experiences of sight and sound and knowing. Our aim is to find out the cause, to destroy the cause of pain, thinking that things truly exist. So here I am in retreat, trying to change the pictures, trying to change the stories, trying to change what I see in the world, trying to change who I think I am, trying to figure out am I who I think I am, trying to see emptiness directly.

In deep retreat, it's possible to get to a place of profound silence and stillness. Because the input, the amount of data that we have to process is so much more limited than when we're in the outside world. During our break periods, like now, we get together, we do practices together, we help each other with projects and fixing things in each other's houses.

And for me, the first 10 days are exhausting, absolutely exhausting with all the stimulus, as much as I love it. There's so much stimulus, and it's such a relief to go back to the quiet simplicity of being alone in the silence after a break month. In that silence, I can begin to slow the pictures down, to look at them piece by piece.

I can examine how the memories and feelings are triggered by the arising images. And the memories and feelings, in turn, trigger more images. And then, I can examine how each of them exists.

It's like having a hand-cranked projector and slowing the movie frames down so that I can see them frame by frame. And how my mind is connecting each of those together to make a story, the story of my life. It's funny, as this image arose in my mind and I was thinking about it, another one followed closely behind.

And it was of me, of a little girl, maybe three years old, with a toy hand-cranked projector. And it had these little disks with celluloid pictures, and you slotted it in and turned the crank. And the faster and faster it went, the faster and faster your movie went.

Or you could slow it down and watch it frame by frame. So by slowing this movie down, this movie of my life, I can watch my mind. I can watch the thoughts.

I can watch the pictures. And I can try to see the seeds from which they all come. One of the advantages to being able to look at all these pictures is that I can see all the stupid, thoughtless, inconsiderate things that I have thought or said or done.

And then I can purify them and work hard not to make the same mistakes again. I can see my demons, my pride, my judgment, my jealousy, my laziness. And once they're out in the open, not hidden in the dark, I can look at them more objectively and I can begin to dismantle them.

I can begin to see how they cause others and myself pain, which isn't acceptable. And I can remember how these pictures are being forced on me by my karma. And that even though that I have no control of what's arising in the moment, I can plant different seeds for the future.

And of course, the most powerful antidote, the most powerful enemy of my demons is to try and see their emptiness. I also can see the good things I've done. I can see the kindnesses I've done.

I can see my generosity, my service, and my wanting to become one who can destroy all the pain and suffering in the world. And so these seeds, I water. I rejoice in them and make them strong so they can bear more fruit in the future.

Looking at the emptiness of the stories, at the emptiness of the pictures, all of the associations, eventually touches on me and how I exist. The me that's appearing to my mind and the emptiness of that me. Very early on in my meditation career, in one of my first 10-day meditation retreats, I remember clearly seeing that how I perceived myself was how I perceived others perceiving me.

That I couldn't point to any self-existent me. There was no me that I could find other than that. It was pretty traumatic at the time.

And since then, I've had many teachings on it, and it's not so traumatic anymore. But in retreat, I'm alone. There are no mirrors.

And so it becomes a much more raw experience when I really look at who I think I am. And I try to break it down into the emptiness of me. Seeing that there is no solitary, solid, self-existent me that I can appear in many ways.

Therefore, I can become infinitely greater. I can become infinitely more loving and compassionate. I can become infinitely more wise and capable.

Than I am now. I can be one to end suffering and pain in the world. And so, as I began to unravel my story, memories arose.

It's really quite amazing how vast the mind is. And these memories, I didn't even know were in there. And goodness knows, I'm sure I don't know the half of it.

I feel like there's galaxies and galaxies and universes and universes of memories and experiences in there. You know. You have your own warehouse full of images.

And they're all pictures that come together. And they just make a story. And these stories can be told countless different ways.

And as I begin to look at these things, the story began to lose its power over me. After all, it's just bits and pieces put together in a certain way. Pictures from my own mind force on me by what I've said or thought or done in the past.

And how they ripen into the present moment. And how I perceive that present moment. And so, I began to explore these.

I'd like to do another meditation. Sit up straight. Get comfortable.

Focus your mind on the tip of your nose. And then I'm going to say a single word. And I want you to see where your mind goes with it.

Rose. Okay. You can relax and open your eyes.

So for me, the first thing that arose was, I can smell a rose. Right here. Right now.

And then the next image was of this beautiful bouquet of roses that suddenly appeared on our side of the curtain during the break. And then I thought about the posy of roses. The red and yellow rose that I gave my holy lama yesterday.

And how I saw the same rose plants and the roses this morning. And then my mind wandered up to the top of the mountain where this spring there was the most beautiful climbing rose with these teeny tiny yellow flowers covered in them. It was just a cloud of pale yellow.

And then I thought about the roses that I planted by our temple. And then next I had an image of holy lama Geshe Michael showing us pictures of his garden and his roses. And then I thought about the roses in my garden in California, which led to me thinking about my son, who's taking care of those roses because they're his roses too.

He loves them as well. And then the last image that came to mind was the bouquet of roses that John Stilwell sent to each of us on the evening that we came in to retreat. And so you can see how this chain of thoughts, of pictures, of images like dominoes in a line, one knocking one down, and then the next, and then the next, arose from just one word.

One thought, one picture, how this one word has multiple associations. And I give each of them a meaning. Not only that, I give each of them a feeling.

They each hold a feeling. When I think about the roses in California, my son, that has one feeling. When I think about the roses at the temple, that has another feeling.

Some feelings are I like or I dislike, or I neither like nor dislike them. There's a funny story about associations in my family I'd like to share with you. When I was about eight or nine, we moved into this beautiful old Victorian house.

It was built just after the end of the Civil War. It had an attic where I played Heidi, and in the basement I had my chemistry set and my ballet bar. It was a dream house for me.

We had a porch swing, and it was on maybe a half an acre of land, right in the middle of Chicago. Anyway, my parents decided to try and fix it up to its old grandeur. So they were spending a fair amount of money, and the IRS decided to audit them.

So the story goes, of course, I don't remember any of this. It's just a story. The story goes that the day came that the taxman came, and he and my stepfather, Tom, and my mother, they all went into the den, into the office.

And my stepfather opened the file drawer and pulled out a shoebox where he kept all the receipts. Not in files, not in ledger sheets, but a shoebox. Now my stepfather, Tom, was a great storyteller.

If you asked him what time it was, he first, before even telling you the time, he would tell you how a clock worked. And it was like, I just want to know what time it is. Not a whole soliloquy about how a clock works.

So he pulled out the shoebox, and he turns to my mother as he looks at a receipt. He says, Lou, my mother, do you remember this one? Let me see.

You know, it was really hard to find. And do you know who I met while I was looking for it? And then, and then, and he'd go off on this huge story every third or fourth receipt.

Now the taxman was fairly patient trying to keep my stepdad on course, but it wasn't working. So after a few hours he left, and they never heard from the IRS again. Now I've never used associations to curry the favor with the taxman, but I have thought of four ways that these associations, that I have used these associations.

One is thinking about their cause and effect. And another one is thinking about how they're forced on me by my karma, by what I've said and done. And I like to think that with these two, that they help me to not get as upset in situations that I don't like as I would have in the past.

They also, these associations, help me to remember qualities I am cultivating, such as a bracelet or a piece of clothing that some holy being has given to me. It helps me to see myself as that angel, as that one that I want to see myself as. And it also helps me to remember the holy being who gave it to me and all their blessings now, and all the blessings in the past.

And then there's also the domino effect. And not only can I play it forward, but I can play it backwards. I can look at how one thought came from the previous thought, that came from a previous thought, and came from a previous thought, and trying to see the seeds from which they all came.

And then, back on the cushion, I can open my heart to every story, to every experience, and learn from them all. They are all part of this journey guiding me. I can question, was the last big disaster in my life that brought me to this path a disaster in and of itself, or was it just something trying to wake me up?

Or was it neither? So I work on purifying, purifying all of the bad deeds I've done, and creating new pictures, new associations, new stories. Off the cushion, I try to see this place and the people in it as divine.

And it's not really that hard. They're not very good at hiding who they are, including our caretakers, including all of you, our sponsors. You have to be a little more careful.

And it's so easy if I just stop and look around me. The past few weeks, the hillsides have been covered with beautiful, delicate springtime flowers. In the winter, when it's already silent, and it snows in even more profound silence, falls upon our valley.

The sound of the dove, the smell, the sweet smell of the summer rain, a song, a smile, a touch. But I also have to say that sometimes it's not easy. Those times when it's just too hot, and when the crickets are singing all night long in your house, and when the kissing bugs are feeding off of you, and when I'm just too dang tired and worn out, and everything looks normal.

But the world does look different at times. I can say, too, that in retreat, the pictures, the karmas, the seeds, they seem to ripen so quickly sometimes. One day I was meditating, and I was picturing offering a Two Boots pizza from Manhattan to a certain holy lama.

And then two hours later, a holy angel leaves homemade pizza at my gate. And then another time, I gave two pairs of boring black sports socks to another retreater. And I came home, and there was a box waiting for me.

And inside that box was a pair of rainbow-colored socks. And then one time, I was singing a song about blessings raining down on us all, and pure white snow began to fall. And then just this last deep retreat, I was outside gardening, and an unkind thought about somebody began to arise in my mind, and I caught it.

But not three minutes later, I scalded my finger pretty badly. These coincidences keep pushing me on. My pictures, my story, my world are changing.

And as it does, it becomes pure magic, and so delightful, and so fun. Just a little glimpse into my daily practice. I think of it kind of like painting the same picture over and over again with different nuances, different flavors, different colors.

And hues. And I'm burning new images of my world and myself into my mind as I do it. It's like jumping into a magic painting, into a world where I'm a holy being doing the things a holy being does.

And then the veil between that world and the world that I have inhabited for so long gets thinner and thinner and thinner. I've been reading a book that I've had for many years, and I love to dip into it, of short stories. Its original name was Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart.

And in that book, I found a quote that I'd like to share with you. And it says, We paint the landscape of our life with the color of our thoughts, values, actions, and feelings. May the landscape we paint be colored by our love and care.

I am living in my stories. I am everything I do or say or think is rooted in my belief in them. I sometimes think, What would it be like to step out of my story?

But then it would still be my story. It's like, how can I do that? So, why do all this?

Where is it leading? If I can see how I am mistaking the world, which is ever so close to seeing emptiness directly, it is a huge step in that direction. And if I can do that, then I can see emptiness directly, and it will lead to ending all suffering and pain in the world.

It will lead to the blossoming of joy and happiness for everyone. And so my world, myself, and my story slowly change. Once there was a man who found an eagle's egg.

And he brought it home, and he put it in the nest of one of his backyard hens, along with her other eggs. In due time, the eaglet and the chicks hatched out, and Mama Hen taught them how to scratch and peck, looking for worms and insects, how to cackle and cluck, and how to even thrash their wings and fly a few feet off the ground. And so the eagle learned all of these things along beside his little chicken brothers and sisters.

The eagle grew old, and one day a shadow crossed over him, and he looked up into the clear blue sky, and there he saw the most beautiful, magnificent bird gliding effortlessly upon the currents of the wind with nary a flap of his wings. And he turned to his neighbor, and he asked, and who is that? As he looked on in wonder and awe.

And his neighbor said, Oh, that is the king of birds. That is the eagle. He is of the sky.

We're chickens. We're of the earth. And so the eagle lived and died as a chicken, because that's who he believed he was.

I am here to change my story, to help you change your story, so we no longer believe that we are incapable of flying in the sky and riding the currents of the wind. You have given me the greatest gift anyone could give me, a chance to see emptiness directly, a chance to become one who can end all suffering and bring all joy and happiness to blossom. It is all due, it is all due to the kindness and the blessings of my holy lamas and all of your prayers and all of your support.

I thank you deeply from my heart and leave you with this one last quote by a woman named Miriam Reikesser. She said, The world is made of stories, not atoms. Thank you.