Jun Po Roshi on Getting in Touch with Awareness
Practice counterbalances the reactivity that shows up in me. Something small happens, a little "hey ho," and the ego starts running its routines. The body drops into the sympathetic nervous system, the brain chemistry shifts, the neurotransmitters aren't there. So I keep practicing, because it steadies both the emotional body and the physical one. Chi gong, yoga, Tai-chi, swimming, tango. A lot of tango lately, actually; it's been good for my balance with the Parkinson's. I wandered off the point there, sorry.
Erik asked me a fair question: plenty of people have never meditated, and Zen can feel strange and foreign to them, especially Koan work. He wanted to know how someone listening to us right now could touch that awareness immediately. What would they have to do?
My answer was short. Shut up. That's a good Koan on its own. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
The first Koan we use in what we call the Mondo Dialogue is a question: is it possible for you to listen purely? Can you listen with no opinion at all? Is there a receptive listening somewhere deep inside you? Then we sit for a while, and the instruction you give yourself is simply listen, listen, listen. The mind keeps repeating it, and the repetition works like an arrow pointed at the purity of your own receptivity, at the moonlight at the center of who you are.
If the mind is busy, speed up the repetition. Listen, listen, listen. As the mind begins to quiet, you just listen. We use it as a Koan to take you deeper and deeper into silence. That's the first practice. The form doesn't have to be the word listen, by the way; it could be yabba-dabba-doo. The question underneath is always the same: what are you doing to gather the mind and bring yourself right here?
The Soto tradition says you do nothing. You sit and fall into stillness. Go ahead and try it. For me and for most of my friends that didn't work, so we turned to a classical concentration practice that comes out of the Hindustani tradition. There was a great yogi, Sarafa Katama, who trained eight years under two well-known masters in his lineage. He went through the vinyasa yoga process and learned concentration practices that lead to insight, Dharana opening into Dhyana. So we ask: what is that form? And you realize it can be anything.