To say this is to encourage you to see the way consciousness works. If you focus on anything you are ignoring everything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak8BVFcIDes

Emphasize the awareness part of experience rather than focus or tighten down on one aspect. The wisdom mind doesn’t need a focus. With a soft gaze just watch what arises in any of the sense fields and practice receiving.

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

As it is said in the first line of the Hokkyo Zanmai, The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi:” The teaching of thusness has been intimately communicated by buddhas and ancestors.” “Thusness”, “suchness”, “just this”, “as it is”, “tathata” "soku", "tathagatagarbha", …. you are looking right at it. It can’t be taught but you might need some help to see it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKeB6L11mLw

We’re so impatient with our minds, we want to be clear NOW! Don’t be that person who doesn’t want to be confused. The way to liberation is right through the confusion, that is your dharma gate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtMaDfFa6Yw&t=1s

Sokuzan’s dharma talk is inspired by the First Reminder in a traditional teaching called The Four Reminders That Turn the Mind toward the Dharma: “First, contemplate the preciousness of being free and well favored, difficult to gain and easy to lose, now I must do something meaningful.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5KbSb1LqJc

The afternoon dharma talk during today's meditation retreat continues the theme of the morning talk with Sokuzan responding to questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vB0nlP9fyc

This talk was inspired by a student’s question from SokukoJi’s Monday evening book study of “Meditation on Emptiness” by Jeffrey Hopkins. These are translated teachings from the Gelukba order of Tibetan Buddhism. It says of the first stage of meditation on emptiness “First one concentrates and clears one’s mind”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGhIRVjDdb4

Flash on the contrast. When the apparent polarity between two different things collapses, then the polarity becomes the observer and the observed. When the observer collapses into the observed…that’s the final collapse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxy_KN760RM

The motivation for Sokuzan’s dharma talk is to address the effects of a strong daily practice of sitting, study, relating to a teacher and working with sangha by responding to questions from the monastery residents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZQJECRl0AQ&t=1s

Sit down and watch the way the mind makes decisions. Thoughts masquerade as awareness when narcissism wants a reference point. What you really have to do will be choiceless. Your unencumbered consciousness knows exactly what it needs to do next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8t0dsq343Y