A few notes

With palms together,


Good Afternoon All,



Thank you for taking the time to read my notes from time to time. This afternoon a few housekeeping notes are in order. First, we will be practicing sesshin from the evening of Wednesday the 11th through Sunday morning at noon on the 15th of September. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are evening practice only from 7:00 PM through 9:00 PM. Saturday will be all day from 7:30 AM to 8:00 PM, and Sunday from 7:30 AM to 11:30 AM. Please let me know if you intend to sit with us.



Second, our Study Group is moving along very well. I hope to see some of you who haven’t attended join us. We meet in the Zendo from 6:30 to 7:30 each Tuesday evening and are involved just now in Chapter Three addressing the Three Treasures of Okumura-roshi’s “Living by Vow.”



We continue to practice Zazen in the Veteran’s Park on Roadrunner at 9:00 AM Friday mornings and again on Thursday’s at 7:00 PM in our Zendo. Our Sunday morning service begins at 10:00 AM.



Practicing together as a Sangha is vitally important. Sangha is one of the pillars of Zen Buddhist practice and offers an opportunity to learn from each other. The energy developed in a group is nothing like that of individual practice.



Anyway, I hope to see you at one of our practice opportunities soon.

In gassho,

Daiho

Bodhisattva Vows

With palms together,


Good Morning All,



At our Temple we are studying the Bodhisattva Vows. At last night’s meeting I asked our group what their Bodhisattva Vow might be. Our text, “Living by Vow” presented several examples of people who had personal vows in addition to the Four Great Vows. This would be a challenging question, I suspected, and it was. For in our answer we reveal much about ourselves. Our discussion was lively and, in the end, students left with a thing or two to practice with…as did I.



Bodhisattva Vows are a foundation of Zen practice. We recite these vows daily in order to put them in the center of our mind’s eye. They are a solemn promise/commitment to action:

Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.

Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.

Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.

The buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to realize it.



Each vow is rather like a koan. How to free a being? If beings are numberless, how can I vow to free them all? The vows themselves are a Dharma Gate and we must enter each one wholeheartedly. It is this wholeheartedness, I believe, that gives us a clue to the creation of our own personal vow. Whatever we vow, we must enter the vow wholeheartedly making it the foundation of our life.



So, I ask myself, what is my life and my personal vow? This question has arisen of late. Perhaps its age; perhaps its being recently married. What I know is I have been somewhat reflective of late. At odd moments memories of my past just pop into my eyes and I am spending more time in reflection on the past, less time on the present and hardly anything on the future. My personal vow has never been articulated perhaps because, as an old existentialist, I hold that behavior is far more revealing than words. What I do is my vow.



Still, perhaps that is hedging. After all, a vow unspoken cannot be held up to us as a measure or an inspiration. So, here goes, my personal vow:

Daiho’s Vow: I wholeheartedly vow to care for and nurture all beings, without exception, and to do so in such a way as to allow them to bring peace to themselves and others.



Thank you for your time,

Be well.

Brad Warner Tour

Clear Mind Zen Temple will host controversial author, Brad Warner, at the Center for Spiritual Living! Brad authored "Hard Core Zen" which started him down the rocky road of Zen politics and controversy. Several books later he has come out with "There is No God...and He is Always With You." Come meet this breath of fresh air in the Zen world. Join us!

News

With palms together,




Good Morning Everyone,







As most of you are aware, we have been thoroughly busy with packing, moving, changing around the Zendo, a roadtrip to South Dakota, and just yesterday, a trip to Albuquerque. In the works is a visit from Zen teacher, author, and rebel Zenster, Brad Warner. Brad has agreed to come to El Paso and Las Cruces in July. I believe he will be in El Paso on the 12th and here in Cruces on the 14th. He has published a new book, "There is No God and He is Always With You" which I am reviewing. I can tell you it is a very good read; thought provoking and insightful.







Since we have been so busy, I have given some thought to our Engaged practice. I think it is best to continue to do park and street practice on Wednesdays at the Federal Building at 5:00 PM and at Veteran's Park on Roadrunner at 9:00 AM Fridays. I will no longer sit at the City Hall park on Mondays. Zazen will continue on Thursday evenings at 7:00 PM and on Sundays at 10:00 AM. I would very much like to contain dokusan to Thursdays and Fridays if at all possible. And I would like to accomplish these at my residence.







If you would care to meet with me, please call me at 575-680-6680 or email me at harveyhilbert@yahoo.com







Yours in the Dharma,







Daiho

Zendo News

With respect to all,

Good Morning Everyone,



We have excellent news regarding our Zendo. Jane Grider has agreed to rent the entryway room. This will reduce our portion of the rent to $370.00 per month. I believe this is quite managable and will allow us toi keep our Zendo open. The landlord has agreed to a month to month lease. I am very happy that this has happened, as I am sure you are as well. I look forward to practicing with you in the future.



We will need a little help moving the tan and butsudan out of the room. We also need to clean out/sort out the closet. Perhaps this coming Sunday?



I am sorry I have not been writing to you very much of late. Worse, I have missed several dokusan appointments through my lack of attention. So many things are happening that have taken so much of my time, energy, and attention. A very long and incredibly painful year of spinal issues topped the list for awhile and going through a rather long and costly divorce has been a terror. Kathryn and I were married, and we are now cleaning and painting our home in Sonoma Ranch so that we can move there toward the end of the month, beginning of June, and of course, worry over the Zendo. This has been both a stressful and joyous experience.



The one thing I can say about my practice over this past year is that it has proven itself. There was a time in my life where the stressors mentioned above would have sent me into combat mode and I would have been quite literally destructive. As it stands now, the worst of it has been cigars, a bad thing which I am working very hard to no longer indulge. Anger and hurt come and go, replaced easily by love, joy, and a sense of contentment: feelings are like that, aren't they? Mindfulness of my body in motion, my mind in motion, and my environment in motion with the "me" that is "not me" bearing witness to it all has been quite a change from the horrid feelings that used to attach to my heart turning it black, or at least shades of steel gray.



As we conclude this transition from one home to another, maintaing the Zendo and our street practice, I hope to offer more teaching on my blog and through this list, as well as in person at the Zendo.



This afternoon we practice at the City of Hope at 1:30 in the library. This evening we practice at 7:00 PM in the Zendo and tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM at Veteran's Park on Roadrunner Blvd. Please consider joining us. And if not, consider coming to the Zendo for Sunday morning Zazen at 10:00 AM



Be well.

God

With palms together,


Good Morning All,



This morning I woke at 4:30 AM and sat outside under the stars. It is a lovely morning with a slight chill in the air and a clear sky. It occurs to me that I have not written to you for awhile. So, this morning as I sat I remembered that last night Shukke Shin and I were talking and the topic of God came up. So many of us struggle with our understanding of God, some reject the existence of a deity, others assume He or She or It exists, but quickly forget about it in everyday life, dismissing God as meaningless in daily life. In Zen, while we might argue that each of us must come to our own understanding or not, it is our practice that is most important. .

To quote John Lennon from his song “God” he says, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” He goes on to list all the things he doesn’t believe in and concludes: “The dream is over.” We each must encounter our ideas, dreams, and our lives. Some of us frame our lives around our ideas, others allow our ideas to arise from our lives. In Buddhism, it is our direct encounter with our daily life that informs our ideas and through our practice we see the deep truth that everything changes so, naturally, our ideas about the universe, God, and everything else, must change as well. It is the realization that the dream is over that is actually the starting point to genuine spiritual growth.

God is a concept when we begin with an idea of God. When we begin with direct experience of the everyday world, God can become a label for our experience of that world. A label for an experience is not a concept, but rather, a linguistic expression of our experience. We say; if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! I say, if we have an idea of God and we wish to meet God, we must first kill our idea of God.

Over the years I have come into intimate contact with many understandings of God. I’ve come to dislike the word itself as I believe it carries with it so much conceptual garbage, so many conceptual filters, that it hinders our true appreciation for what “God” might actually be. It is here that genuine “don’t know” mind becomes essential. To quote Zen Master Seung Sahn, “Only Don’t Know.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote an excellent little book entitled, “God was in this place & I, i did not know.” In this text he takes us through several understandings of Jacob waking from his dream. He says early on, “The trick is to pay attention to what is going on around you long enough to behold the miracle without falling asleep.” One of his points, then, is that we are always in the midst of the Absolute, but are asleep.

The teachings in the Torah about God have to do with the words we use. The Torah reveals a constantly changing understanding of God as revealed in the names the Torah uses for God. This is often missed in English translations of the Hebrew Scriptures. When Moses faces the burning bush, for example, God says “Tell them “I Am” sent you. Jewish theologians and mystics have pondered this name, essentially an unpronounceable verb, for millennia. The Torah offers us a koan: God is not God, the noun, the being, but God is “I am that I Am, I will be that which I will be,” an eternally changing, ever-present reality. The kabbalists offer a tree of sorts with each “sefirot” or facet interconnected to the other where the Absolute or “Ein Sof” is understood to be unknowable “emptiness.” So, those on a path to meet God, like those of us on the path to enlightenment, must grapple with the koan, “If God is ever-changing and everywhere, is both relative and absolute, and unknowable, how do I realize it?” Here, as with Zen, we must recognize the essential difference between “understand” and “realize.” Understanding God or Enlightenment places us in the world of ideas and concepts; realization places us in the experience itself: that place without words. The moment we put a word to it, we kill it.

Realization is not insight. It is not a flash with associated thoughts and feelings. It is a direct pre-verbal experience like the moment lightening strikes nearby and before we “realize” that it did. Yet, we are human beings with brains, are we not? Thus, we cannot remain pre-verbal. Like Jacob waking from his dream with the direct insight that wherever he is, there is God, indeed, that he and God are not two, but one, so too we may experience the early morning sky realizing the Absolute and Relative are one and “I” am” is all there is. Be it.





It’s that time of month when I ask for your support of our Zendo. Please, if you have not already, offer your dues and dana so that we might pay our rent. Your assistance is deeply appreciated. Go to our website at http://clearmindzen.org and use the PayPal button or better, drop by the Zendo in person. We would love to see you!

Sequester Values

With Palms together,


Good Morning Everyone,



Our government does not care about the people it serves or the people who serve it. A story on the Huffington Post helped me see this more clearly. Apparently, Congress decided rather quickly to lift sequester restrictions on programs assisting our nation’s airline traffic, but did nothing to ease the constraints being imposed on programs that actually save lives such as Meals on Wheels, Medicare, and support services for our military, among a host of others.



This, it seems to me, is a class issue, and because it is so, should involve the conscience of those in all faith traditions, including Zen Buddhism Programs that help our poor, our retired, and those least able to mobilize and advocate, have been set aside, and the one program that assists those who are in a position to afford to fly from one place to another is granted a lessoning of restrictions. This is outrageous. Since when is it a priority over life itself to fly?



I grant that air travel is a necessity from an economic standpoint. People traveling from one point to another are often contributing to our economic well-being as a nation, but the sequester does not prevent air travel, it simply slowed it down. No one likes to wait in lines, but perhaps waiting in line offers an opportunity to think about our spending priorities. Apparently, we dislike such considerations. I also grant that I no longer am willing to fly, refusing to offer myself up to draconian TSA measures that invade my privacy without warrant. But, even if all of a sudden the TSA were to disappear, I still would not fly, preferring instead to ride my Harley Davidson from point to point enjoying the resultant intimacy with our country. It seems to me that our health and quality of life issues are far more important than whether we wait in line for flights to other places. From a Zen Buddhist point of view, we have an obligation to not kill and through its positive, care for, protect, and nurture life. I do not see saving time in a line at an airport as in any way connected to this precept. Apparently our Congress thinks otherwise. I think this is a disgrace.



Zen practice is nothing if it does not engage us in the world around us. Our precepts are a guide to living a morally up-right life and the foundation of this is ahimsa, do no harm. Valuing airline wait times over people’s lives does harm. Perhaps this sequester has a value in that it forces us, as it has me, to look deeply at what really matters. May all beings be free from suffering.