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

“It’s ordinary” is pointing to the nature of mind. Even to say this is too much. There may be flashes of it, but then the ego mind wants to treat this profound insight in such a way that it hangs onto it. There’s a big difference between thinking it’s ordinary and seeing it’s ordinary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BWBOKEcsMU

Sokuzan focuses on three of the Twelve Links (Nidanas) on the chain of existence to support looking closely at what arises and see how we jump from feelings and emotions to craving and grasping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58CxNWfRKyk

Parikalpita, one of the three ways of being described in the Yogacara, is a Sanskrit word that means the “imaginary nature”. It is part of a simple teaching, broken into concepts so that we can better approach the way we confuse ourselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXPCg1bBHWY