given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
March 07, 2009
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This was an important talk for me and I did depart quite a bit from my notes, pasted in below. Be a really good one to transcribe if anyone's interested in that work. The recording does include a song that the talk is built around so maybe it's just one to listen to. --Tim
Norman has given us very cheerful talks about the wonderful potential of the mind. New granpapa! That makes anyone cheerful. I've been curious about Lojang so I've really enjoyed being reminded that the mind can be trained to open to the beautifully empty and open nature of reality of our living. As he mentioned though we get there honestly. We open to this understanding with some effort and with deep honesty about our actual condition as human beings. So I need to give a less cheerful talk about my experience lately in training. That to touch the heights of awakening we have to at the same time be deeply feeling the depths of our conditioned suffering. We need both.
The background is that we've finished a five week class considering the ethical precepts of Zen. It was wonderful to get together and consider our lives with a real feeling of honesty and intimacy. Precepts start out sounding like rules you know, but as we study them we realize they are just us. They are just live. And I was thinking I'd write a nice little retrospective sort of talk on the precepts and our discussions about them. But as it turns out that's not what's up for me so I didn't write that talk.
It was a wonderful class and it was also really difficult for me and I think in some ways it was difficult for everyone. It's difficult to bring up our lives with honesty and openness. Rewarding and difficult both.
It was great but I was having some strong but subtle difficulty and I was having trouble putting my finger on what the difficulty was. I'm generally feeling squeezed by my schedule lately, the mind oscillating around a lot. The narrative of how squeezed I feel seems to revolve around my job. My day job as a computer programmer. The mind yo-yo'ing between some version of "it's fine, it's full and intense, but I'm lucky I have so many blessing, in this economy it's a miracle to have a well paid job. I can do this" and "this is not fine, it's too much, I need more time, I need to quit my job and find some other way." And being so busy I didn't have so much time to prepare for class. I've always been the over-preparing type.
So I figured that was what was disquieting to me a bit in our classes. That I wasn't prepared. That I didn't give everyone all I could give. Which is maybe true, or maybe not. Conversely I was more willing and able to just listen to everyone. Most of the classes we started with first some reflective writing as we finished our lunches and then Nancy and I would each give our spin on the precepts we were talking about that week. Nancy with a nicely organized report of the two or three sources she was consulting with nice tie ins to her own life, me saying maybe a few things from books but more just reflecting a little on what felt up for me. And then opening it up to the rest of the class to either speak to all of us or speak in pairs about what we were finding in our lives around the precepts under consideration. A pretty straight forward plan and it worked well.
I felt actually pretty radical in the last class, before Nancy and I even said a thing I suggested we just listen to everyone else. Probably if I'd been super prepared with pages of remarks and brilliant insights ready to go such a thing wouldn't have occurred to me. I'm sure everyone would have enjoyed my remarks, I don't think it would have been spurious or irrelevant or anything, I'm pretty good at giving remarks, I know that. But probably it would have been less valuable as there would have been less room for everyone to speak their hearts. And we had some revealing and important issues and topics raised in that class. The feeling of trust and intimacy was so powerful.
So no on reflection I don't think my disquiet in the class was a lack of preparation from being too busy. It was more that as important as our discussions were about each precept, how to apply it without over doing it, how to be more mindful, how to respond to others and our judgments and projections about them in a more graceful and harmonious way; that as nice as these discussion were we didn't quite touch something important and central. And probably most discussions between people don't quite touch what's really important and central. This is normal and not surprising. There's nothing wrong with me or Nancy or the others in the class, we did fine, but still I couldn't help noticing something was missing.
One of the wonderful treasures of Dharma is that we start to feel in our bones some potential for a deeper life. A much deeper life. For deeply touching the ground of our being beyond all of the many and important details of our living. Beyond our anger at our brother's bad behavior, beyond our worries about our failing joints, beyond our issues around control or self-esteem or our desire for a drink or some loving words. That there is something more and that something is so solid, solid and dependable beyond anything we can imagine or think about.
And our Dharma practice teaches us little by little that the route to that deep, ultimate sense of the solid ground of being is not through sweetness and light I'm sorry to say. At least it's not for me. It's through honest experience, hard work, and suffering. It's through radically and honestly feeling how we are really feelings. To our core. To our bones. Sometimes there is a wonderful opening and it all drops away but more often for me there is suffering that strongly and inexorably encourages me to open up, to adjust to reality to get out of my narrow view and touch the bottom of my life again. I just have no choice. And when I do even if there's pain, even if things are not quite to my preference, there is such a deep and radical okay-ness. It's just okay. Everything is. It just is. And it's complete, that is enough. To rest in that feeling is the most beautiful thing. And it's a beauty that doesn't exclude pain, that doesn't exclude tears. It's the beauty of the full scope of this crazy and wonderful and unbelievable human life.
So often we short circuit this process when we paper over our suffering. When we don't really let ourselves feel the depth of this human life including it's pain. When we participate too much in the social lie of "oh it's okay, I'm fine." When we don't truly let ourselves feel how hemmed in and trapped we are by the cage bars of our self-concepts and oh so solid views. As Norman was saying yesterday it does us no good to believe in this "fine".
Sometimes the depth of human experience comes to us through the human imagination in the form of art. Poetry, music, all of the arts can express something. Something important it's so easy for us to forget and when we forget we're missing sometime. We're missing some possibility for awakening. There is no avoiding our suffering and it's so beautiful when we can enter fully into our suffering. That sounds conventionally awful - like pretty stupid even- but it's ultimately so true for us. Study your suffering. Not because Buddha said so in his noble truths, not because it's what good spiritual seekers do, study your suffering because it's exactly awakening. Suffering itself is awakening. It's a strange thing isn't it?
Here is a song that expresses that feeling of really opening to our trapped-ness. It's by Bruce Cockburn and it's called "Pacing the Cage" - the refrain is those words exactly: pacing the cage. It's a song about feeling this. Feeling when we are trapped in our human idea of me here trying to do it all. Someone in our last precepts class said the very true words, "I don't see how I can do all of these precepts." And that's true we can't do all of these precepts, we can't do any of these precepts. It can't be just me. It can't be just you. When we think that's how it is we are so squeezed and held by this narrow concept-based life. We are pacing the cage.
[play Pacing the Cage]
Sunset is an angel weeping, holding out a bloody sword.
No matter how I squint, I cannot make out what it's pointing toward.
Sometimes you feel like you're lived too long, days drip slowly on the page.
You catch yourself, pacing the cage.
I've proven who I am so many times, the magnetic stripe's worn thin.
And each time I was someone else, and everyone was taken in.
Power chatter in high places, stir up eddies in the dust of rage.
Set me to pacing the cage.
I never knew what you all wanted, so I gave you everything.
All that I could pillage, all the spell that I could sing.
It's as if the thing were written in the constitution of the age.
Sooner or later, you'll wind up pacing the cage.
Sometimes the best map will not guide you, you can't see what's round the bend.
Sometime the road lead through dark place, sometimes the darkness is your friend.
Today these eyes scan bleached out land for the coming of the out bound stage.
Pacing the cage. Pacing the cage.
(Transcribed by me, see also http://cockburnproject.net/songs&music/ptc.html)
What I like about that song is not just the deep acknowledgment of our dark and desperate feelings but the sense of dignity and the beauty that arises so naturally when we really allow ourselves to feel. When we drop the story of "I'm fine" - you are not fine in that way, it is not the nature of you-ness to be fine. You are suffering and limited because you believe in you. Because I believe in me, I set up the great wheel of birth, suffering and death. But in denial awakening is suppressed and in opening to reality awakening finds its foothold. And the potential of awareness is startlingly beautiful. In that bright awareness we are fine in a whole different way than we thought. We are fine in our not-fine-ness.
We need a lot of support, we need maturity, and we need the stability of our regular zazen practice to do this, but feeling our suffering through to the end is the beginning of fully practicing the precepts. As we fully own up to the bars we've surrounded ourselves with we create a beautiful possibility. We create the possibility of awakening. Crouched in our cage surrounded by our fears and judgments by our righteousness we can see there is another possibility.
But so many things bind us. We have to study our bars. We have to study our chains. We can't skip over this. We have to study the dark of our heart. Each of us must find our way in and through what binds and holds us. Lately myself I'm really noticing righteousness. It is a hallmark of human living that seems to be very well developed in our culture generally and also well developed in our sangha. It seems to be well developed in me. And as these things go I find I'm particularly reactive to people who exhibit righteousness themselves. It triggers my own discomfort with that tendency in myself. And a whole cascade of emotions and judgments and reactions and fear arises so quickly. So quickly. One of the great joys and challenges of sangha life is studying these kinds of reactivity. The many ways we active each other. We all need to study this. How we talk to each other and be with each other in way that's truly kind, in a way that's liberating, in a way that does send all us back to pacing the cage.
And when we realize that we're pacing the cage we have an opportunity to study the cage. What is this experience of conditioned human life? What I notice lately is that the bars of my cage are conditioned mental formations. They arise from conditions, some obvious, some more mysteries. And like all formed and conditioned things they are not permanent. Sometimes I feel so trapped in this life lately. And sometimes I'm fine - the real fine. Just this moment breathing in this body, engaging in this activity, just this is enough. So the bars come and go. It's our habit of mind to think that once we notice them they are now permanent and impenetrable.
And art really helps us. Sunsets help us. Taking care of the body helps us. Studying the precepts help us to both enter into the reality of our situation and to awaken from there.
Since this song helped me this time let's study this teaching from Bruce Cockburn for a minute:
Sunset is an angel weeping, holding out a bloody sword.
No matter how I squint, I cannot make out what it's pointing toward.
I'm so happy we have Manjusri and Avalokitesvara on the altar along with Buddha. Compassion and wisdom hold up the Buddha and make Buddha possible. And Buddha makes compassion and wisdom real and embodied - out in the world where it can do so good. Manjursi here has a sword and he uses it when he has to. Sometimes we need strong medicine and Manjusri has to cut us away from our craziness and wake us up. Sometimes as the Lojang teachings point out big difficulty is our teacher. That is Manjusri's realm. His sword gets bloody but in our confusion we can't see where he's pointing. We want him to tell us what to do, and either he's not saying or we can't hear it. We just feel the pain. And we have to just feel it. The pain of the sword is our teacher.
Sometimes you feel like you're lived too long, days drip slowly on the page.
You catch yourself, pacing the cage.
Our usual attitude is not sustainable and once in a while it all catches up with us. We are stuck in the mud and live feels so heavy. Yesterday the very air felt so thick to me. As we touch our body and breath practice we notice sooner when we're trapped and we find ourselves pacing the cage. And in that awareness the seed of awakening sprouts. I remember reading a Chogyam Trungpa book ages ago where he talks a lot about mental manure. We don't like our mental manure but that's what's fertile.
I've proven who I am so many times, the magnetic stripe's worn thin.
And each time I was someone else, and everyone was taken in.
Our identity is our burden isn't it? And we try over and over again to prove to our many critics who we are and that we have value. This "me" is a good me, please believe me. And of course our harshest critic is ourself. It wears us out so much. And as we study the mind in zazen we gradually see how silly and repetitive it is. How boring. But at the same time we and others are fooled. Everyone, including us, is taken in. Isn't it time we stopped?
Powers chatter in high places, stir up eddies in the dust of rage.
Set me to pacing the cage.
The Lojang on making all blame one is in this stanza. We blame others. We blame our society. We blame our government. We blame our parents. We find ourselves in the middle of an impossible situation we tell ourselves, and there's nothing left to do but trash around in our cage in reaction. What if we learned how to eat the blame in a way that helps all beings?
I never knew what you all wanted, so I gave you everything.
All that I could pillage, all the spells that I could sing.
And our suffering expresses in relationships. We want so badly to give our beloved what she wants, what he wants, but from our limited perspective as a suffering being we don't know how to ask. We assume, we project, we decide, so we give ourself away but with strings and magical expectations. Can we give ourself away in a healthy way? Can we give fully with no thought of giving, without pillage and reaching for magic and spells?
It's as if the thing were written in the constitution of the age.
Sooner or later, you'll wind up pacing the cage.
From our conditioned point of view it feels inevitable. There is no escape. Suffering and non-connection feels to us like it's written into the very fabric of the universe. Like it's written into the constitution of the age. We have to feel how deeply we believe this before there can be real possibility of waking up from that nightmare-dream. Spiritual practice is a massively creative act. We fully imagine that we are Buddha and then somehow we can feel in our bones that we were Buddha all along.
Sometimes the best map will not guide you, you can't see what's round the bend.
Sometime the road lead through dark place, sometimes the darkness is your friend.
This feels very much like a verse about dharma practice in sesshin. We don't know where we're going, even when we have the best teachings and wonderful teachers we can't access the teachings from dark. Maybe it's a perfectly good map only we can't read it. It's like the letters that made sense yesterday are just meaningless symbols today. And we really touch bottom. We enter the darkness. And if we can let ourselves feel the darkness we find that it is our friend. This makes me think about dharma teachings which riff off of Dante's "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" - we can't really feel the warmth and support of the darkness if we're still craning our necks searching for light. Feel what is and let that be your ground.
So please let's allow ourselves the support of this practice so that we can really study our actual lives experience. Not the life we think we have, not the live we wish we have, let's investigate the life we actually are living. And if we do this we will see that sometimes we are pacing the cage.
The wonderful opportunity of feeling the cage and knowing when we're in the cage is that then we know two very important things we didn't know before. Those two things are: we see and feel the bars that bind us and we see in between the bars. We may not understand them really but we can feel them. And we see into the distance the fields of Buddha which stretch on endlessly in all directions. So there is such potential there. When we see that we are in the cage we can imagine being out of the cage. This is very powerful and important for us. Pretending we're not in the cage is not the same thing.
And so we study the bars. Naturally we start by shaking them. By pushing at them. And when they don't give we spend a long time rearranging the cage to make it more comfortable and doing our level best to forget we're in the cage. But once we've seen in between those bars even once we can't really forget. We get distracted for a while maybe but we can't really forget. And so we study, we ask for help, we imagine, we dream, we enter the dream time and we find ourself slipping through the bars like mist, like a phantom. And when we awake back inside we see we have a choice. We can believe in the solidity of those bars and live the rest of our lives hemmed in by this cage of our own making or we can deeply accept our situation and work with it.
And the way it goes is one day we just find ourselves standing outside the cage. Where we really even inside the cage? Maybe the bars aren't solid after all, we just thought they were. We are free to come and go. Maybe there's a door we thought was locked up tight and somehow we were so convinced it was locked we never tried opening it. We have that feeling of "OH….." and then we aren't pacing the cage. We aren't just me, we aren't just you, we merge and enter into Buddha's love and we touch the mind ground of Buddha's fields. We are all together, out of our cages and it's such a wonderful feeling.
And then we study that and we see there are no fields, there is no cage, it was all a very powerful idea, it was all a dream, a fantasy. So powerful, so convincing. One we need to use to help ourself and to help others but we see now it's not real. It's really not real. There is no me here, there is no you. There are no mistakes. There are no precepts. As we touch the mind ground of reality where there are no precepts then we can really practice the precepts. This sounds very lofty, it sounds far away. It's hard to believe from over here inside the cage. But it's really possible. It really is. I have faith that ths is true.
So please in the rest of our retreat really practice feeling what's really happening. Allow yourself to see a little more fully what is really going on. Don't try to fix it up, don't try to improve your cage pacing technique, just be where you are. Feeling it to your marrow. And if there's deep suffering there, please as much as you're ready for really feel. Let it in. It's okay, we will support each other. We can help each other. It's safe here, it really is. This is Buddha's community and the power of our vow of awakening is strong beyond measure. When we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha there is nothing we can't bear. And through the deep entry into reality, into Suzuki roshi's things as it is, we will really start our lives. Start our true lives. We have to start over with our lives. We have to start over every minute if we want to find the freedom that has no causes and conditions. Continuing our idea of our life is not going to cut it if we want to touch the true freedom of being a real person. On this breath, on this moment just be here. Right here. And let reality take care of you.
And many of you have reported recently that actually you are not pacing the cage at all right now. That you are opening up and happy and content. That's wonderful. I am not trying to convince anyone to be miserable! But even if you feel like what I'm talking about is not up for you exactly right now, please feel what is up for you more deeply. Drop below your idea of happy or depressed or tired or whatever it is. Open to the boundless possibilities of our true human life and see what you can see. One thing I remember I told our precepts class that felt very true is that there are two things we can really count on in practice. The first is that it's actually possible to actually feel what we're feeling. And the second is there's more there that we haven't felt yet. Our hearts run deep and our practice-exploration is the project of many lifetimes.
I hope you will help me with this practice and I will help you too. Thank you very much. May we awaken together.
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.