Judith R. at the 12 Steps and Buddhism Retreat – 2012

Well, I would first just like to say that I was moved and I had a certain poignancy about listening to these three talks. It almost makes me cry. I thought they were really brilliant talks and they're all people I've known for a long time and I really see their maturation and their understanding of the Dharma by how they spoke today so I just felt like I really absolutely had to say that I I was like taken aback why should I be taken abacus course they're brilliant so anyway I really appreciated those talks I always I feel like I'm putting on my teacher hat a little bit right now so please forgive me but that's what I think is appropriate and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna give a little Dharma talk a mini Dharma talk on God what God is or is not in Buddhism just to give us some grounding in the tradition you know what the tradition says so that we can talk about how we view a non-theistic god because i think that's why we're all here uh there was something about a nontheistic God that resonated with us and it's not totally what happens in AA especially sometimes there's conflict with your sponsors sometimes that they don't get it what how you conceive of a higher power so and over the five years we've been doing this retreat this has been kind of a big part I think everyone's cooled down but the first two retreats this is a really hot topic you know and people were really angry a lot of anger came up at not being able to express their Buddhist opinions and meetings about what God or no God meant. So with that as an introduction, I'd like to go into a little bit about the underpinnings, if I can in 20 minutes, of what are the teachings behind this idea of a god now some people say that in buddhism there is no god and a lot of people love that and love saying it and get off on saying it but i don't believe that's true either i think that if we polarize between there is a mystery and there isno god that polarity doesn't function very well as all polarities don't we have to learn about the dynamism the dynamic between the opposites that's more the truth than siding on one side or the other so um you know i think there was a time magazine cover like 20 years ago that said there is no god what yeah and blamed it all on us i suppose uh blamed it on the buddhists uh but for in my opinion that's not actually so that through my buddhist practice i've really become more uh in touch with the total mystery of what is going on i mean it just opens my eyes particularly meditation to the awe of this phenomena of life that I can even speak and you guys can understand me is just awesome. Awesome! You know, not like L.A. awesome but awe, like awe. So for me, that's a higher power. Awe! And it doesn't have a name. The minute we name it, actually, it reduces the awe and many religions believe that as well uh jews don't say the name of god muslims don t i understand although i know very little bit about muslim so many religions understand that to name something is almost to kill the aliveness of the something because the name has no depth to it the way oh does so in and then as katagiri roshi would say you have to say something you know so i as a teacher have to save something about god especially 12-step group we're very concerned about what do we mean uh we turn our will and our life over to the care of god as a buddhist what does that mean so i've had a few over the years the course of the years i've um different languaging for it uh i got from ken mccleod uh the mystery of being That's the word he uses. My most favorite at the moment from Dogen is Zenki. He did a whole fascicle on this, which is translated as either total dynamic working, total dynamic working sometimes it gets translated as the whole works w-h-o-l-e the whole works those are nice i say so it allows me a little bit more freedom to say instead of saying there's no god i can substitute a word for while I when I have to speak so I'm going to start with some of the principles that we have in Buddhism that I think are related to God and then um we'll go from there so the first one are the four seals or the four marks they're called and this seal is not not that kind of seal I tried to make a seal a stamp you know the ancient ones would stamp or oh mine doesn't have it but on the back of a ruckus of the teacher has stamped and this uh this square stamp is buddha dharma sangha it's the seal of buddhah sometimes they say buddhas sealed is is a stamping of what becky was talking about this pivot that we do in a spiritual life there's a pivot about how we see the world and that's the buddhist seal so the four seals Now, I'll just say, there used to be three seals. Now there are four seals. This has been talked about language in different ways over 2,000 years from different schools of Buddhism. I'm kind of now going with the Dalai Lama who just decided to change it to four seals Dukkha and Nirvana sometimes are condensed into one seal and then you call it the three seals but the seals are dukkha that in a human's ordinary consciousness we are constantly dissatisfied and that dissatisfaction produces our suffering the second one is impermanence that's the buddhist seal everything is imperMANENT everything is moving and changing. There's nothing to hold on to. Even the name God is moving, so you can't catch it. You can't touch it. Everything is impermanent. The third is that there's no centralized self. That's a big one and a hard one. We solidify a sense of ourselves as an independent unit. We solidify everything as an independent unit I'm an independent union this column is an independent unit and I see the columns right but as you get more mature in Buddhism you see the interdependence between I and the other and this interdependent I wrote down Thich Nhat Hanh's beautiful phrase, I am made of non-I elements. We're completely interrelated and when you search and you can do this in Zazen, there are certain meditation instructions to search for your I inside your body. Where is the I located? Some translation is the non-locatable i in fact steve hagan has that's really one of his teachings that you can't locate who you are actually besides a dynamic being that's completely interrelated with other people so no centralized self now this is important in understanding god when we turn the page Buddhism does not have a centralized intelligence that is God. This is, I think, one of the primary differences that somehow, I'll say again, I will stop and say, in the mystic traditions of Christianity, Muslim, Buddhism, I think we kind of meet, because I think a mystic Christian also says there's no I in slightly different language. But so on the mystic tradition, we meet. On the concrete tradition, We're quite different, right? We have different theological views. but mystically i think i i say thank god mystically we're the same otherwise it couldn't possibly be the truth right you know the truth isn't just one person's view so um so if we understand there's no self we are made in the likeness of god isn't that what the christians say god doesn't have a self either he's not centralized either uh so instead of that we say something like universal functioning or the dna how does dna work that's like i'm taking that from katagiri roshi my primary teacher he said when you see a moose you go oh but even before you say oh that's the experience by the time you say oh the experience has gone so by the time you stay God the has already permeated gone changed into the next moment so we can't hold on to the word god and nirvana is that this confidence this hope this knowing for some of us this knowing that there is freedom that there is a way to cessate our desires or our clinging that we can through practice learn how to let go and that there is a transformation at the base that can happen in a human being where you release your ordinary consciousness and you start like Becky said you start to view the world from a different point of view that's called right view that the first limb in the eightfold path and how did my latest teacher call it oh I don't have his language yet in my you organize life from a different point of view okay so this is the base one of the main bases then I would like to go to the three doors of liberation Buddhists love these numerical things three doors of liberation I love these three doors they just helped me so much in understanding how to be in the moment in the aliveness of the moment the first one of course is emptiness which nobody gets because the word is so if I may be this precocious to say this word is so stupid it doesn't help people understand what it means so we are empty of a solid independent existence and in that sense we're empty because I am made from other people other people like what I'm saying right now is made through your attention through your listening these words are called forth that's the way I feel now in terms of what is interdependence so emptiness is really largely about if we are completely interdependent The self has to be empty because it has to be influenceable. Able to be influenced by everything that's happening. Signlessness. I'm going to go into signlessness. It has its own page because it's a lot about the naming of the mystery. That Buddhism doesn't put a lot of stock in naming something and aimlessness I just threw in because it's one of my favorites for the overachiever I'm more like your sister Becky maybe that's why there's sometimes tension but I'm learning how to be aimless and aimlessness means not grasping for a result we do our action but we don't we're not aiming at something like you know zen archery they're fabulous archers but the reason they're fabulous is they're not obsessed with hitting the mark they're just obsessed with how the process of doing it and then they hit the mark and aimlessness uh well maybe that's enough said for me it has a lot to do with relax and take it easy was that from you math yeah uh we don't have to be so aimful if we're in the flow of what's supposed to be happening if we're in our life right now we don't have to think about the future as much of course you still should do your taxes you still shouldn't move your parking if someone says you know these that's taking care of the karmic reality of life we're not saying not to in fact even more so as you mature in buddhism you take more and more loving care of what's actually happening in your form world okay now i'm kind of whipping through this but that's the way it is uh okay let's go to signlessness okay so this is why some people say there's no god in buddhism there's a very famous koan when you meet the buddha on the road kill him or kill her um so what does that mean when you meet god on the road kill god i don't that's a hard one isn't it but what i think it means for me and why i brought it in is when you think through your consciousness that you see god you are really off the mark because through consciousness we can't understand the mystery you know even the even einstein didn't understand the mystery although he was quite perceptive you know you cannot name or understand through consciousness the awe of what is happening in life and the precious human birth we can't understand that through consciousness when you think you do understand through consciousness that arrogance makes you far from the mark do you do i need to go more on that and this is the sequence that's been very helpful for me too this is about how we solidify things so instead of um knowing that everything's impermanent that everything is changing that we're not a independent unit like judith regier solid and independent as opposed to you if we're trying to break open that idea this is one of the hindrances to opening that idea which is the first thing we do is we name it so well shall we take me as an example you named this energetic system judith then you we and we can see this you can see it in meditation right something pops up you name it and then all of a sudden all these stories start to happen you elaborate on the name so you have previous experience with me maybe or you like or dislike the way i look or you know whatever all of a sudden after you've named me judith all these stories about me come up in your mind and then you start to cling to your story about me as the truth That's what's really happening in this dynamic thing over here. The dynamic thing, the five skandhas. There's a body, right? There's sensation, there's feeling, there're formation and there's consciousness over here but I'm not an independent unit but we make me an independent union by clinging to our stories about what we think I am And then you develop from the stories a concept or belief. Now, since we're using me, you can say I love her, I hate her, she needs to get a haircut, or whatever you think you solidify into a belief. And I like to add a fifth thing is then you're willing to go to war about your beliefs. so this whole process of language and naming takes us farther away from the truth of what's happening in the moment and the clinging and the concepts and the beliefs are what begin to breed the three poisons of greed anger uh greed uh hatred and ignorance comes out of our belief system so that's quite far away from so that is why you could say there is no god in buddhism because we are not doing we are trying not to do this we are tring to stay with Oh, there's one thing down here that's important. So if there's no centralized God in the sky, there's nobody looking after us like the Christians have. I'm very jealous. You know, like they can say thy will be done and know what that means and feel like someone's watching over them and going to take care of them. So sometimes the Buddhist point of view seems kind of cold to me. Like my devotional part says, hey, wait a second, I want someone looking over after me. Even though I'm now a Buddhist, I'm even a Buddhist teacher for God's sake. you know why is that coming up this longing oh you said it matt quite well longing to know that the universe wants me and cares somebody cares about me so the way i say it well how do we get around it in buddhism how do we take this kind of no no no no no eyes no ears no nose no tongue no body no mind no this no that no this know that no this so that how do i take that and make it make it so that i can get some relief like the christians do that Jesus is going to help them you know even now they don't say when Jesus appears in the parking lot kill him they say when jesus appears inthe parking lot you have a revelation you know really wow you're reborn so so this is how i get around it well first of all it's the honoring of the relatives so we have an absolute truth and a relative truth the no no no part is the absolute truth of emptiness but there's also a relative proof of me and eric and i have two kids and i'm from a jewish background. All these things impact my karmic life, my karma, the historic self. That's what Thich Nhat Hanh calls it. A historic self and a universal self meet in this person. Kavagiri calls it the total personality. You have a total personality which includes your relative history your historic self and your universal buddhahood i just want to make sure i'm not okay i'm good um that's nice so for my relative self the you know i i am 60 i'm almost going to be 61 and i i feel very old that was a big birthday I didn't mind any of my other birthdays, but 60 was like, oh God, I'm really old. And Leonard Cohen has a new album out, it's really great. Do you guys know that Leonard Cohen was in a Zen monastery for three or four years? Very strict one too, Rinzai Monastery. And his last album is all Buddhist and it's all about age. In fact, he calls it, the name of it is Old Ideas. which I felt like were ideas that comes from an old person and why did I want to bring that up there was a line I was trying to remember oh about age he writes something like I'm paraphrasing oh something like oh I'm an old man the mirrors don't lie and the whole album is about this grief that we're going to die it's very buddhist uh and it's the blues it's definitely a sad blues album and it the music is the blues behind this older person facing his death very beautiful um so so given that as the tragic human predicament i need some devotional things to do and i found them in buddhism the bodhisattvas are there for us and we can pray to bodhisattvas, we can ask them to intervene. We can ask them to be present. And the bodhisatvas are archetypal energies personified or metaphorically made into a being. So it's like calling on the energy of love. You might call for Avalokiteshvara or calling on Manjushri. You're calling on the energy of clarifying the mind so i have found the bodhisattvas to be very helpful when i want to call out and there are many many invisible beings in buddhism many if you read the sutras like this whole room is filled with people come to hear the karma invisible people look if we're lucky maybe there's just a few of them because I'm a minor teacher but a major teacher sitting on one word here the whole room would be filled with invisible beings that helps me so much just the idea that I'm not alone that the invisible being That the energy of the universe is regarding me. And Avalokiteshvara's nickname is called the cry-regarder, the regarder of the cries of the world. So when you're crying or when you are really hurt, there is a universal energy that is regarding you. And speaking of my children, I also have a 17-year-old. oh my gosh although I better not talk too poorly about him because he's coming to help cook tomorrow so please be nice to my 17 year old son but anyway uh sometimes he has ornery moods like stomping through the house and not saying anything or yelling at us and we didn't do anything you know she's very moody and my husband he'll like we'll be sitting in the parlor he'll come down the stairs and go through stomping and not saying anything and my husband will turn to me and say cry regarding that's our thing for someone's suffering there's nothing i can do really so just cry regard just be intimate with that person's suffering so so that calling on avalokiteshvara at that moment even though my husband isn't a buddhist but he's lived with me for so long he he invokes avalekiteshvaraya by by just reminding me that all we can do is cry regard isn't that a beautiful sentence cry regarding of other word is bearing witness in many of our languaging so i believe that if you want to have some personal intervention you can get it in buddhism through the use of bodhisattvas and invisible beings and even Dogen talks about invisible beings so we're cool okay the last thing I wanted to talk about is the refuges so where do we take refuge isn't that what we mean by calling to God is we need to have a refuge So the three refuges, the three treasures they call it, these are uplifted as diamonds, are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. So when we want to turn to something in Buddhism, these are the places we turn to. We take refuge in the buddha dharma and sangha so i'm just going to do a little bit of unpacking of what that means and then we'll open up the discussion to talk about god how how you've managed the non-theistic god in your program or that kind of thing because i do want to open it up so there's threes again we always have three so under Buddha when we say the word Buddha we mean the historic Buddha there was Shakyamuni Buddha he lived you know 2500 years ago and he gave us the original teaching now again we don't exactly know what his original teaching was because it was 2500 you know just like the original teachings of Jesus it's gone through so many machinations that we don't really know what Buddha said but I always say well if it's lasted for 2000 years even the machinations must have some truth to it so the other one is me as Buddha that we are inherently Buddha. And what that means to me is the faith that I can manifest my highest potential. And the highest potential of a human being is a human Being who can work in the world without the poisons being activated, greed, hate and delusion or ignorance. And that we all every single person in this room has the potential for realizing their buddhahood now katagiri roshi would add we all are inherently buddha you are inherently Buddha right just because the mystery is in you but we can also manifest it through practice this is what jogan calls practice realization we're in and Suzuki Roshi says we're perfect the way we are that's our inherent Buddha's Buddhahood and we needed a little improvement that's the practice part of practice realization and the last one is the omniscient Buddha or Buddha nature that the essence the suchness is in everything and the famous line well i'll save that for there buddha is everything and everywhere so that's buddhah dharma the first dharma usually if you read it in a book it has a lowercase d every phenomena is a dharma everything that arises in the form world is a Dharma a momentary Dharma and it's momentary because everything changes it's not solid right even judith regier who appears solid i change i don't look like i did 10 years ago 20 years ago 40 years ago even i'm not the same person now as i was before this talk because the talk has already changed me and you your faces have already changed me so um each moment is a dharma then overall a capital d is usually the the teaching so right now i i'm giving you the teaching pretty classically that would be dharma teaching and it also can mean just the truth the truth of the moment now one thing about these which is cool is you can say there are three separate things but they also collapse into one thing this very moment is the teaching and the truth they're completely collapsed in every moment this very movement I am Buddha the historic Buddha is with me and everything I'm not an independent unit so everything is buddha the last one is sangha and again I feel like 12 steps has the greatest sangha that there is really and could teach them a lot about sangha I believe but originally it was a sangha was just considered amongst the nuns any any sometimes sangha means practicing buddha that you you know you're not in the sangha if you're a christian sometimes they say and the last one is everything is sangha and the famous line from dogan is senses walls piles and pebbles animals plants and minerals everything can be included in the sangha and I have one little joke to end which is when I it was a period of my life it was actually kind of long six years where I wasn't associated with a sangha a dharma center and I sat outdoors my practice was sitting by myself outdoors and I would sit on a little dock outside and at that time you know people would talk to me and I would say that my sangha was the fish the turtles the red red black what are those called red wings black birds the cats tails the raccoons all these creatures that would come visit me were my sanga at that times and i have uh i guess i'm getting off the point can i get off the point no okay all right so now i'd like to open it up for people to talk a little bit about uh how they handle or what they think in terms of non-theistic god or how do you relate to the seventh third and seventh step prayer for example things like that Do you want to start, Alice?