The OzZen Podcast

This talk is continuing our conversation about nonduality. One of the core dualities we are trained into is subject and object duality. The theme of this talk – recognising our essential self as awareness – and some of the experiential exercises are taken from a book called “Standing as Awareness” by the nondual philosopher Greg Goode.

Last month I spoke about the Koan of the goose in the bottle. This represents “normal” experience of duality – the goose in the bottle is a description of the self-centred dream – we are trapped, or identified as, a separate body-mind self that is the activity of suffering.

Practice can be described as shifting from our identification with the self-centered dream (the goose in the bottle) this limited body and mind which we take to be me, towards recognizing and establishing ourselves as being awareness itself. This is our journey from suffering in the self-centered dream to discovering our in freedom when we recognize ourselves as awareness (there never was a bottle in the first place) – is the journey to our home which we never left.

This guided meditation leads us into the non-duality of Simply Being through the gateless gate of silence.

This talk, based on an old koan, continues our exploration of psychological or mind-generated suffering and the ending of this suffering through seeing how psychological suffering is always synonymous with getting caught in conventional duality of “me” and “not me” and not seeing from the alternative perspective of unbounded awareness.

Here is the old koan. Lu Geng asked Nanquan:

If someone puts a gosling into a bottle and feeds it until it is full-grown, how can they get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?

The Master kept silent for few moments and then clapped his hand. Lu Geng was startled and Nanquan said, “The goose is out!”

In this guided meditation Doshin leads us on a train ride through the desert and a beautiful rendition of the Heart Sutra – casting her “zen spells for slowing down” and bringing us into the heart of the now.

This talk continues with the theme suffering and the ending of suffering. It introduces two complementary practices for ending suffering: self-inquiry and nonseparation.

In our OzZen sangha, when receiving the precepts, recipients also give a Jukai talk, reflecting on their experience of studying the precepts in the monthly study group over the past year. Recipients are encouraged to personalise their experiences.

Tonight, we will discuss the practice of “taking refuge” as it relates to the question of suffering and the ending of suffering. During discussion I want us to clarify the difference between psychological suffering and what we might describe as our natural emotional responses that arise from being creatures who become attached to each other. I don’t think that grief should necessarily be problematized, however, it can get complicated by the thinking mind.

So, in some ways, I want to suggest, that we can, at times at least, bring an end to psychological suffering but natural emotions such as grief, we don’t want to bring an end to them, because they are simply manifestations of our love; but neither do we want to complicate them or dissociate off from them. We can add an unnecessary layer of psychological suffering on top of the raw grief. So our core practice of nonseparation from this moment is the key guide to how we approach this experientially. We will explore what it means to take refuge experientially, and what it means to clarify suffering and the ending of suffering experientially.

How do we find constancy amid constant change? When we let go of attachment to form: attachment and aversion, we find our freedom in the formless field of benefaction.

If we are attached to form: body, feelings, perceptions, personality, as night follows day, we are going to suffer. Liberation from suffering is found through the gateway into the formless.

The middle way practice of non-attachment to desire is not to give-in to desire or to repress desire. We allow desire to naturally arise and pass away, without clinging. Sometimes can do this and sometimes we can’t. Yet this is our practice.