Day Three continued (Section 23)

Barbara: May all beings find ease of well-being. (Bell)
May all beings love and be loved. (Bell)
May all beings find perfect peace. (Bell)

Stretch your legs slowly. Be as fully in your bodies as you can. Whatever we're doing, we're doing it with awareness.

Now we're going to do walking meditation. I want to teach this to you. We're going to walk in a circle through all of these rooms.

Begin by standing as we did yesterday. Feel the weight on both feet. Now let the weight shift onto one foot. Now back to the other. Now back to center, feel your body balanced, the touch of the feet on the floor.

'Touching, touching.' Let the weight shift almost entirely on one foot, 'shifting, shifting.' After the shifting is finished, the touching again becomes predominant. With walking meditation, a breath is not the primary object, but rather the sensation of the body, the weight, the touching. Now let the weight shift to the other foot, noting 'shifting, shifting.' See if you can catch that place where the shift is finished and touching again becomes predominant. Touching, touching, shifting back, touching, touching.

Now we're going to take this on to walking. Please open your eyes and watch me. We'll start with a faster walking, simply lifting the foot and call it touching and, as the foot comes down, stepping. Touching, stepping, touching.

(Some time of practice.)

Now we'll slow it down further. Feel the foot lift and know it as 'lifting.' Feel the foot move and know it as 'moving.' Feel the foot touch and know it as 'placing.' Then the weight shifts, 'shifting.' Then the other foot lifts, 'lifting.'

(Barbara demonstrates and we do this.)

Keep your eyes just a few feet ahead of you on the floor. Hold the arms still. This is not 'taking a walk.' The mind may want to be entertained after a few trips around the circle. Just note any restlessness and bring attention back.

(We walk for thirty minutes.)

(Bell sounds three times. There is a short, silent break with tea and then the group comes back to their cushions.)

Barbara: When we meditate, the mind that stays with each object as it arises, fully aware, fully concentrated, this is awakened mind. This is pure awareness mind. When we're meditating in that way, there's no place we need to go. We talk about enlightenment as something out there. In this moment, fully awake, fully with each moment, we're already enlightened. We begin to experience in our practice the truth about how everything arises because conditions are present for it to arise. And when the condition ceases, it ceases. We begin to see that this is the whole play of the conditioned universe. Everything is interdependent. This is because that is. Nothing has a separate self.

An example is this wooden chair. It comes from a tree. The tree exists because there was sun and rain and soil. So, the sun is right here in the chair. Water is also here in the chair. Clouds, rivers, the ocean are all here. Where is the self of the chair? Does it have any self? It's made up of treeness and sun and water and soil. The lumber man who cut the tree down is in the chair. The artist who crafted it is in the chair. This is what we mean when we say it doesn't have a separate self. Certainly there's an artifact that we would call a chair, but is there any one piece of the chair that you can take and say, 'This is the chair'? Is there anything that we could call the 'self' of the chair that doesn't come from other sources?

Question: Can you give the same example with a human being?

Barbara: I plan to. But, before we get to a human being, let's look at a cat. Its body content is largely water. It needed to have a mother and a father. A cat is carnivorous, so its food consisted of other animals and maybe of milk. When you look at the cat, it's all of these things. Everything it's eaten in its life is part of it. Its mother and father, the people who cared for its parents, the air it breathes, the cow who gave milk and the man who liked the cow, are all part of the cat. Within this material object we call a cat, is there anything that we can point to and say, 'Here is the cat'? Is the skin the cat? the blood? the heart?

Shall we take this same thing to a human being? Water content, bones, skin, mother, father, light, oxygen, and then the non-material aspects such as thoughts and impulses; are any of these the human? Now, many people think of the human as having a soul. We say, 'Ah, that soul is the self.' Or we think of human consciousness and consider that to be self. But, what I experience is that when I get to that level of meditation when all sense of identification of me as my body has dissolved, all sense of identification of me as my thoughts has dissolved, all sense of identification of me as my emotions, or my impulses, or my opinions have dissolved, then I rest in a place where all the boundaries seem to have fallen away. It's not that I cease to exist, but this pure heart/mind, as Aaron calls it, pure awareness that's left has no separation from anything. I rest firmly in the Unconditioned, or in God, and there is no edge between us.

So, is there something we call a soul? The word 'soul' is usually used with the connotation of a separate personal being. It's often thought of as the combined spirit and mental bodies. This is not what I experience. What I experience is also not a negation of the being. There's definite being, but it's not separate. The 'I' that rests there is not Barbara. It is the pure heart/mind. While it's there, it cannot even have a thought of being there. This is beyond thought, beyond the mental body which is clearly seen as arising from conditions. There's a beautiful Buddhist scripture, the Heart Sutra, which contains the lines, 'form is emptiness; emptiness is form.' 'I' contains the forms of body, thought, perceptions, impulses, preferences, and so forth but these are all conditioned aggregates, empty of 'self.' Beyond the conditioned realm, only pure awareness is there, and all the human aggregates are experienced as expressions of the Unconditioned.

I can only share my experience here with you. I can't ask you to take my word for it. Find out for yourself.

Buddhist teachings talk about the conditioned realm, the phenomenal world and the Unconditioned. Yesterday we talked about how those two terms, Unconditioned and God, can be used very synonymously. This is not God as a puppet master pulling strings and making things happen. This is God in a much broader sense, as a core energy of the universe. It's really not a something of which we can say, 'This is God,' because God is limitless, infinite, eternal. We can say, as the Buddhists scriptures do say, unborn, undying, unchanging, uncreated.

When I am in that place where I'm very clear that I'm not my body, or my thoughts, or my emotions, I rest in this sense of just pure awareness. The closest metaphor I can give you is what a drop of water might feel like that had been pulled out of the ocean and then fell back into the ocean. It merges completely with the ocean. It doesn't cease to exist. It's not the whole ocean any more than I am God. But, there's no separation. There's no place where I can say, 'This is me and that's the ocean.'

The body, the thoughts, these conditioned aspects of our being act like the cohesiveness of the drop of water as it is out of the ocean. Then, it has form as a drop of water. Then we can say, 'This is a drop of water,' because it has form. Here in my body I am Barbara. I have forms-physical, emotional and mental. But, when I let go of the form, when I let go of all the different forms of Barbara, when I cease to identify myself by those conditioned forms, all that is left is this pure awareness, boundaryless, pure awareness.

There is a zen teaching, 'The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon itself.' I cannot give you the moon. I can give you a variety of fingers pointing to the moon. Some of these fingers will be useful for some of you. Other of these fingers will be useful for others. If one part of what I teach you doesn't help you, put it aside. Use what does help you.

We do meditation practice for many reasons. The most important reason is just to be here, to be fully present, because everything you need to know really is within you and accessible to you. But, in order to access what's already within you, that deep wisdom, you've got to be here, to pay attention.

I have never been to a gambling casino, but I'm told that there are signs that say, 'You must be present to win.' You must be present! In meditation, we can experience all of this for ourselves, really come to understand the whole interplay between the conditioned and the Unconditioned and move into a direct experience of the Unconditioned. That is, to me, one of the greatest fruits of this practice, that direct experience of the Unconditioned. It's also helpful to some people to understand conceptually, like having a road map of where they're going. And so, we also talk about it in words. The words won't take you there. The words are only a road map. The meditation is what will take you there.

(Lovely smell from the kitchen.)

I would like you all to stop and note the smell. 'Smelling, smelling,' sense touching sense object, 'smelling, smelling, pleasant, pleasant.' If any sense of wanting arises, simply note it. If there's no sense of wanting and the smelling diminishes, go back to the breath. I don't smell it anymore, but I see myself wanting more of that lovely smell. Okay, that was just a brief moment of opportunity to practice with what was coming through.

We are going to sit.

Question: Can we learn more about the relationship between the drops of water of the ocean and the drops of water themselves?

Barbara: I would like to put your question on hold for now. We'll have a sitting, and then a long question and answer period.

(Sitting, with little instruction. Bells.)