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I’m thinking (and I know I’m thinking it because I just status-updated it in Facebook!) that I should spend my weekend like a cat. In other words, any time I have the opportunity, I should go to sleep. And any time I need to wake up, I should wake up. Only to sleep again as soom as the opportunity arises.

I’m pretty burnt from work. And from an old dog who sometimes likes to spend whole nights walking around, her long nails clicking on the tile floor until she comes over and puts her grizzly bear head on my pillow to rouse me. And a young dog who rolls around in his crate, snoring and grunting and dream-barking. And from all of my own thinking, of course.

Dharma Overground, I love you, but what’s with all these words?! I’m sure I’ll be visiting more over the weekend, during the waking part of my cat-weekend. I’ll also be reading The Zen Doctrine of No Mind. Hui-neng was illiterate, as well as the Sixth Patriarch of Zen. As D.T. Suzuki notes: “Erudition always tends to abstraction and conceptualism, obscuring the light of intuition.” Still, I can’t seem to put the book down.

Okay, so a weekend of reading and thinking. If I don’t write or talk about any of it, does it make a sound?

Yup, it’s a requirement: go listen to this.

Hardcore teachings, yes. And hardcore speaking!

So. The three trainings: morality, concentration, wisdom.

Oh, I get it: 1) yamas and niyamas, 2) pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, 3) samadhi. Nice.

I love drawing these parallels; they amuse me. Hey, where’s asana and pranayama? I suppose you could make an argument for them as concentration practices.

This reminds me that I came to yoga via zen. I grew very curious about posture. How could I hurt so much when I was just sitting zazen? I was a healthy person, in good shape. Why was sitting kicking my butt? Were there “secrets” to sitting comfortably? Could my posture make me less sleepy (nemesis of my zazen: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)?

Finally I asked Sokai. He directed me to the Indians. Said they had the inside scoop on the physical body.

So I went. I loved the way yoga felt. I was hooked.

And now here I am, contemplating yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, samadhi. Before, I had precepts and zazen. Now I have precepts, zazen, and so much more.

The Cop had his wisdom teeth out yesterday, so had a dose of anesthesia. I asked him this morning if he remembered the ride home. He said he remembered everything. Yes, he remembered mumbling to me through a mouth full of gauze about the relative merits of Streets of New York’s pizza and Ray’s pizza. But there was one thing he didn’t remember: as we were driving down the street, he turned to me and announced happily, “I’m in the moment!”

“The moment is big when you’re in it, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, nodding very seriously.

This morning I decided to try a 40 minute practice to stretch my nervous system. Standing poses, intermediate to kapotasana, a handful of ustrasana variations from Matthew Sweeney’s Vinyasa Krama, urdhva dhanurasana, dropbacks to the dune, abbreviated closing. Then a 15 minute savasana. Total time: 55 minutes.

Yes, my nervous system relaxed. But boy, does it have a way to go.

Waylon… um, “helped” from inside his crate in the yoga room. I gave him a beef tendon to keep him busy. Supposedly, they amuse puppies and small dogs for hours. Yeah, well, not so much. First off, he kept dropping it outside the crate, meaning I stopped three or four times during standing poses to return the thing to his crate. Then he managed to swallow the whole thing within about 15 minutes of having it returned to him. Yeah. Hours of chewing fun. Not.

I guess he was exhausted after watching me retrieve his toy, because he promptly fell asleep. Which is actually the ideal state for a puppy during yoga practice.

At that point, the relaxation really began.

P.S. Now that I’m done and have had a cup of tea and am writing, I feel kind of guilty for not having done “enough.” What’s that really about? I’m kind of afraid to really look at that. I suspect it is rooted in personal insecurity and my impulse to achieve and do more more more!

Definitely related to what Owl was talking about when she said:

Westerners have reinterpreted the practice in a way that takes away from the basic keys of

RELAXATION

and

CLEANSING THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

We really do (1) eat like shit, and (2) refuse to learn to relax the whole organism. And then use asana to get a temporary feeling of cancelling out those behaviors.

It’s easy for Ashtangis to get into running on empty, I think. Little sleep, little food, lots of caffeine, long practices — it’s really easy to turn the system into a treadmill, into a grind. And the physical practice feels intense, and the psychological habit feels compelling, so it’s easy to think the grind is proof of the efficacy of the system. Uh oh, potential for a blind loop…

I don’t think this is just about Ashtanga, by the way. You can do it with anything. I’ve certainly done it with cardio workouts, with academic striving, with corporate ladder climbing.

***

Okay, there’s another zen practice to discuss. Bow to your teacher.

It’s an interesting practice. Especially when you add in the following information: your teacher is whoever stands before you.

Oh, this is easy when you’re talking about your kid (yes, we learn from our kids), your dog or cat (they’re particularly good teachers), or your spouse (provided your relationship is in good shape).

What about when it’s the person you really can’t stand at work? Someone who really sets your teeth on edge?

Yup. That’s part of the practice. Now bow! Yes, bow in your mind to the person who torments you.

Why? ‘Cause it’s time for you to get humble and knock off all the high-horse ego stuff.

You go to a teacher’s Mysore room? Yes, you chose to go. Now BE there.

BE in the meeting room with the person who drives you crazy.

Bowing helps you accede to the situation, to the moment, to the present. Notice I didn’t say “surrender”? People have fits about who they’ll deign to surrender to. Whatever. Surrender is a word. Stop being silly.

Once you are present in the situation, you can learn. From your teacher. Who may be someone you think you don’t like. Someone you don’t think is QUALIFIED. (Yes, I AM laughing at you. And me. And all of us.)

Okay, time to stop thinking. Just bow to your teacher.

It’s a practice. Stop judging this idea with your mind. Just try it. It’s a challenge, and fun even if just on that account.

What if you are just present in the moment and open to the teacher in front of you? What if you learn from everyone, whether you like it or not?

What happens then?

***

And here’s my current teacher. Playing Fort-Da.

While we’re on a zen roll, we might as well take a look at another practice from Seung Sahn. Last time, we reviewed “Put it down.” Next up is “Don’t check.”

Not checking means not spending your time policing everyone else’s behavior. Ah, freedom! You don’t have to decide whether someone is acting the right way, you don’t have to “punish” them if they do the wrong thing. You can keep your dristi and just go about your business.

The Cop has to watch people’s behavior, because that’s his job. Interestingly, though, he does not cultivate much moral outrage — he has to verify that people’s behavior aligns with the laws, and if they don’t, he arrests them. It’s impersonal, because the law is the issue at hand. Black and white.

In regular life, though, the black and white comes from our selves. Someone may do something I disagree with — the laws of Karen have been broken! I must exact retribution! LOL! You see how silly that is.

Someone isn’t keeping dristi! Someone said something inappropriate in a meeting! A salesperson was rude! All of these things break Karen’s laws!

Whatever.

Instead of acting as judge and jury, go ahead and observe your judgment, and then put it down. The universe takes care of everyone according to the laws of karma (“you reap what you sow,” etc.), so if someone is being a jerk, you can rest assured that their life reflects their habit of being jerky to other people. You don’t need to do anything — you don’t need to point out their jerkiness, you don’t need to punish them for their jerkiness. You don’t need to judge and you don’t need to punish. You don’t need to do anything. You can observe behavior and then carry on with your own life. Because you are better off spending your energy attending to your own behavior.

In other words, swim in your own lane.

Astangis are pretty much guaranteed a good foothold in these practices. We already have established practices — using breath, bandhas and dristi to still the mind. Most of us have at least tried a bit of sitting practice. So these zen practices are just continuations, or variations.

And a quick note about these practices: you know how sitting in meditation, the whole point is to “put down” whatever pops into your head? Same deal here. Don’t deny the thoughts, don’t berate yourself for having them, don’t imagine they’ll ever go away. But as they arise, put them down. Thought by thought by thought, moment by moment by moment.

It’s a practice. That’s all.

Okay, so my first zen teacher, Seung Sahn, taught the practice of “putting it down.”

What does that mean? Well, it’s the practice of not hanging on to perceived insults, aggravations, grudges, bad feelings, etc. Lots of people think that if you practice zen, it means you don’t have aggravations or anger — but that’s ridiculous. Of course you have those things, at least if you are human. The point, though, is to practice putting them down.

First off, it’s interesting to think about why you have those things in the first place. If you take a moment, when you’re livid, to observe your feelings, what you’ll find (pretty much 99.9% of the time) is that you are pissed because your concept of your self is being offended somehow. It’s all about what Seung Sahn called “my-me-mine.” It’s all about you being the center of your own little universe, and when something doesn’t go the way you think it should, you have an internal hissy fit.

LOL!

Try it, though. Okay, so you’re driving and someone cuts you off. Anger flares! But wait a minute! Why is it there? Because someone has offended ME! Someone has not acted the way I want them to!

So you have the huge rush of anger. What does it mean, then, to practice putting that down? It means that when you feel that rush, you feel it, and then you dismiss it.

Or what if someone says something and it makes you feel insulted? What?! How dare they?!

Go ahead and try this: Put it down.

Yup. Simple as that. Practice it over and over. And when the little voice in your mind brings the insult back up again (again, and again, and again!), put it down. Again, and again, and again! The interesting thing you’ll find is that you are probably a little addicted to feeling that it’s IMPORTANT that you wring every drop of anger and insult out of your experiences. You’ll find that you think the angry insulted feeling BELONGS to you. That it’s IMPORTANT and REAL. That you shouldn’t just drop it.

So try dropping it. As a little experiment.

And if you like the results, you can keep putting things down. Over and over, every time it happens.

You know what you’ll probably find? That you don’t miss it. That it isn’t important. Imagine that: something that YOU feel isn’t all that important. LOL!

Welcome to some pretty delicious freedom.

We finally had word back about the pathology report. There is no clear cause of death for Ty. Basically, he was just perfect, physically.

The Cop called me at work to tell me the vet had called and that I should touch base with her to ask any follow-up questions I might have. The Cop was shocked and dismayed about the lack of a clear cause of death. I wasn’t. It was kind of what I had imagined.

I’d been out on the internets doing my research over the past couple of weeks, of course. And I’d narrowed the possibilities down to two: fatal arrhythmia or epileptic seizure.

So I spoke with the vet and discussed what kinds of signs would be left if either of those two disorders were in fact the cause of death. She pretty much ruled out epilepsy (as much as she could, being objective about the fact that we just really won’t ever know). Still, she said that she’s known dogs who’ve had seizures that lasted 30 minutes and lived. If he’d suffered a vascular event so dramatic that it would cause death, there would be evidence of it for the pathologist.

On the other hand, a single fatal arrhythmia, while rare, could leave no trace. It would essentially be the body’s electrical system seizing up. Like when a computer freezes.

That seems consistent with what happened that afternoon.

After I talked to the vet, I came home and The Cop and I discussed. He was really hoping for some definitive answer that would offer closure. I hadn’t been expecting that, and just wanted to know if Ty’s death could have been prevented. I was terrified she was going to tell me he’d managed (finally, after many tries) to eat some dirty socks, or that he’d had a disease that needn’t have killed him if only we’d known about it.

So that is all the information we will get.

Honestly, I used to be undone by unanswered questions and painful experiences that I knew I would never be able to understand. There’s a whole class of koans designed to pry our grasping human fingers away from the delusion that we can know the answer to “Why? Why? Why?” — so thanks to the monks who’ve brutally and compassionately smacked me upside the head about this.

***

Last night in my dreams I had a chat with Richard Freeman. Ty was there, too, hanging out. A beautiful California day, with wildflowers and warm breezes. RF wanted me to know that Ty would be coming back as a fuzzy rescue dog.

***

Might as well wrap up with a little learning technology humor. I am a huge fan of Web 2.0 — blogs, wikis, discussion forums — but there is always hesitancy in corporate about these technologies: what if the information is inaccurate? Horrors!

Much to my satisfaction, the organization is carrying on with a project to build an online community for our customers (and non-customers — just plain old uncontrollable strangers!). Really, it makes me proud.

Practice was pretty good today. Physically, quite comfy; mentally, well, I used a binaural beat recording to try to theta-state my mind. The recording starts at 10 Hz and cycles down by 1 Hz every 9 minutes until it gets to 3 Hz.

And it sounds like a waterfall.

***

Wumen’s Comment to Zhaozhaou’s No

So, what is this barrier? It is simply this one word: No – the one barrier of our Zen way. And so we call it the gateless barrier of the Zen way. When you pass through this barrier, you will not only encounter Zhaozhou most intimately, but you will walk hand in hand with all the teachers of our way, you will see them face to face, your eyebrows entangling with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears. Isn’t that marvelous? It is the fulfillment of our heart’s longing. It is secret desire of all human hope and dream.

So, give your whole self into this No. Make your body and mind a mass of doubt. With every ounce of your being, concentrate on this one word, No. Keep investigating, day and night. Don’t think it is a philosopher’s “being” or “not being.” Encountering this No is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. It sticks and you cannot swallow it down nor vomit it up.

How then should you engage this question? Burn out your entire life energy in this single word, No. If you do not hesitate, then right here it is accomplished. A single spark lights the candle.

The student asked Seung Sahn Soen-sa for his advice. Soen-sa said, “If you want the easy way, this is desire. But if you want the difficult way, this too is desire. Zen is letting go of all your desires. Then you will find the true way. This teacher says that Zen is difficult. I say that Zen is very easy. But we are saying the same thing.”

Dropping Ashes on the Buddha

***

Practice was tough this morning.

Usual routine is to get up, let the dogs out, let them back in, feed them, make coffee, let Maxine back into the bedroom to snooze with The Cop. Then Ty and I sit in the livingroom on the couch, his head in my lap while I read some blogs and sip coffee.

Then he gets in his crate, has a treat, and takes a nap while I practice. After practice, a walk.

This morning, I puttered about, not quite ready to hit the mat. What would be waiting for me there?

Decided on Martin Wolff’s Shakti-Bhakti for music. Ty’s favorite, but it’s not melodic, so it doesn’t get all up in my emotions.

And then I puttered around some more, until Maxine and The Cop got up. And then I practiced.

***

Practice was good this morning.

It’s been beautiful weather the past couple of days, bright and warm.

My body felt light and relaxed, even though my mind was afraid to be still because it was scared I’d be flooded with grief. I wondered if backbends would feel awful, but they were good despite the strange simultaneous combination of deep emptiness and a pressurized, vaguely explosive sensation in my chest.

As it turns out, grief in the body is much more “sensible” than grief in the mind. It’s “just there” in the body, whereas the mind keeps wrestling and rationalizing and trying to hide from it.

Sorry. Dualist.

***

Maxine lies by the window, watching over me as I type.

Owl asked if asana can be considered art. From a three-dimensional object in space perspective, it could certainly count as sculpture. But what else?

I’ve been reading a book called Picturing Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art and Poetry. I don’t quite know what to say about it. Now that I think back, I’m not really sure what I expected it to be. The things it gets at seem obvious, which makes me tempted to say that the book is naïve.

I wonder though if the author just isn’t interested in many of the same things that I am and, therefore, drawing many similar parallels — so it all seems, well, obvious so far.

Here’s a quote:

Observational painting as enquiry into “the real, resistant and experienced world”

In our experience of things-in-the-world, we seem to encounter volume, solidity, materiality, substance — yet the appearance of substance is deceptive when looked at through three different lenses. Firstly, through our perceptual experience, we discover that the object is not a static stable entity but a dynamic part of a continually changing field of perceptual and interpretive activity. Secondly, through our cognitive processes, particularly scientific modes of enquiry, we encounter at the sub-atomic and quantum levels a world of interpenetrating energies and forces. Thirdly, in considering our existential condition we find our own identity or self to be anything but a fixed, finite, object-like construction — rather it is a matrix of at times contradictory moods, feelings, thoughts, processes which somehow cohere but are open to continual revision and transformation as we negotiate changing circumstances and conditions. Our position as observer is more transparent, indeterminate and inseparable from what we observe that might at first be assumed.

Thus “objects” are events or fields of relationships, transactions between observer and observed. They have no enduring substance or self-identity, no permanent essence. They are relative, impermanent, and ever-changing. And observational paintings present us with iconic and indexical images which are the products of an engagement with these event fields.

Some of these ideas about painting and drawing from observation can be linked to ideas about experience, thought, perception and notions of the real put forward by a number of poets from the 1960s onwards. In exploring their ideas we can see, from another angle, more of the complexities and paradoxes that surround our relationships with the world — our entanglement in the unfolding mystery of being with other beings in amongst the fabric of things. We share our existence with beings who have purposes, needs and corporeal presences that are not ours, and we exist in a world that has a profound disinterest in our presence and an enduring materiality that is both our habitat and spatial/temporal reference. Engaging with this materiality gives rise to questions about reality and otherness, how we experience and how we represent or express changing fields of consciousness.

Okay, as I was reading that into the voice-to-text software, I thought, “Wow, this is actually quite pretty.”

Now I just want to throw in something that I was reading yesterday from Shunryu Suzuki’s book Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, which is a series of talks as he did on the Sandokai.

We do not make much distinction between things that exist outside and things that exist within ourselves. You may say something exists outside of yourself, you may feel that it does, but it isn’t true. When you say, “There is the river,” the river is already in your mind. A hasty person may say, “The river is over there,” but if you think more about it you will find that the river is in your mind as a kind of thought. That things exist outside of ourselves is a dualistic, primitive, shallow understanding of things.

So the characters in the first line [of the Sandokai] refer to ri, the source of the teaching beyond words. The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking; it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it. That is, you stain the truth or put a mark on it. In the Heart Sutra it says, “no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no objects of mind,” and so forth. That is ri.

The next line reads Shiha anni ruchusu — “the branching streams flow on in the dark.” Shiha means “branching stream.” Sekito says shiha for poetic reasons: to make these two lines of the poem beautiful and to contrast shiha with reigen, “source.” Reigen is more noumenal, and shiha is more phenomenal. To say “noumenal” or “phenomenal” is not exactly right, but tentatively I have to say so. That is why it is good to remember the more technical terms ri and ji here. Ji refers to the phenomenal — to something you can see, hear, smell, or taste as well as to objects of thought or ideas. Whatever can be introduced into our consciousness is ji. Something that is beyond our consciousness — the noumenal — is ri.

We talk about emptiness, and you may think you understand it; but even though you can explain it pretty well, it is ji not ri. Real emptiness will be experienced — not experienced, but realized — by good practice.

So you may ask, “What is the real teaching of Buddha?” If you don’t understand it you will keep asking, “What is it? What is it? What does it mean?” You are just seeking for something you can understand. That is a mistake. We don’t exist in that way. Dogen Zenji says, “There is no bird who flies knowing limit of the sky. There is no fish who swims knowing the end of the ocean.” We exist in the limitless universe. Sentient beings are numberless and our desires are limitless, but we still have to continue making our effort just as a fish swims and a bird flies.

When we understand things in this way, according to Dogen, we are not people in mappo, the final period; our practice is not disturbed by any framework of time or space.

Okay, so back to asana as art.

LOL!

What does art need, in order to be art? Documentation? Intention? A “product” or “object”?

Gah! I can’t go down this path. It gives me art school flashbacks!

Maybe art needs ri, tied up somewhere in the web of its aesthetic or documentation or intention or objecthood? No matter, it is WELL beyond anything we can pick at with critiques or analyses. (Thank God.) And how about the web of the being making shapes? Can it possibly be in a position (yes! a little joke!) outside/beside/beyond ji, with its appearances and words and framework of time and space?

Who knows? No matter. In the meantime, let Suzuki Roshi put a bluejay in your heart.