When anger gets so intense that it is already being expressed, you can’t manage that. The ship has already sailed. It already has its momentum. Take that opportunity as a dharma gate. Use the heat of the situation. Approaching it as actually materializing it and making it into something wrong and something that needs to be fixed or managed is a misunderstanding. In order to relate to anger fundamentally, directly and radically it seems to be necessary to go down into that with our awareness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdsnd9wv_o0

Look at our world today. How do you balance all of this? How do you correct it or fix it? How do you help it so it doesn’t implode or explode? When our warfare is internal, how do you lose the war?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_mmokKWTPE&t=102s

Any time you know something you ignore everything else. Don’t get in the way of conclusions, they may have relative accuracy, but they need to come out of your awareness rather than your completely circular thought process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qydrf6JhAp4&t=1091s

As soon as we begin to feel overwhelmed we immediately come up with additional discursive elaborations around whatever that is: “Why am I doing this? Why am I feeling this way? Why can’t I get it? Why can’t I get rid of this? Oh no, here I go again!” and so on. How can we work with this in our meditation practice?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX0TvQJ6q3A&t=1s

Sokuzan responds to questions about FONK: Fear Of Not Knowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N_fK2KsoWE&t=1s

Before you take your opinion and ideas that are based on relative truth and things that are changing constantly, before you take that out in the world and use that to convince others and have discussions about who’s right and who’s wrong…don’t join, reject or look away from what’s going on in your own mind. This is the path.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XeOEOJ3XDk&t=88s

Sokuzan’s talk is inspired by a verse from “In Praise of Dharmadhatu” by Nagarjuna: “Enlightenment is neither near nor far, it does not go away or come to you, right there within the cage of your afflictions, either you’ll see it, or you will not.”

Contemplate that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8cERy5ex3s&t=743s

Don’t sit down and have a smartphone start telling you how good your meditation is. The more you rely on it the more it relies on you for its purpose in the hands of the corporations that are motivated to make money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrA8ca7IxdU

Sokuzan’s talk is inspired by this verse of Nagarjuna from the Mahayana Vimshika: “Through the wheel of mind stopping all phenomena come to a standstill, therefore the nature, the phenomena, is identity-less, hence the nature of phenomena is completely pure. “

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHbztVS5Ess

To say this is to point out our assumptions of time, that it actually is something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abdzc5tnY1Y