![]() ![]() I used to think of the image of Lucille Ball and the chocolate factory rather than whack-a-mole because I’m from an earlier generation. Her image wasn’t as violent or drastic as plunging a dagger into the thought in your heart, but it did involve a kind of endless whack-a-mole technique of trying to stay caught up with thoughts in order to label them. So what struck me about this account was how familiar it sounded from what I heard from Joko’s students about labeling their thoughts. Dahui would call that trust in our awakened nature, trust in the fact that we are awake from the beginning, that being awake is innate to our being.” Ultimately, the trust is based on the experience that what we have, from time to time and in large and small ways, that nothing has to change for things to change. ![]() ![]() “Trust based on the experience of trying to change what is and noticing how it results in adding another layer of what I want to change. It takes trust to not try to change the thing you want to change. “The cost was a loss of spontaneity and aliveness and I noticed that I wasn’t willing to continue paying that cost. I heard lots of instruction about making my being a mass of this or that, becoming totally absorbed in this or that, but that felt much like the dagger plunging techniques that had given me some relief from my thoughts, but which also had cost. Gradually, I got tired of watching reruns of my life, or reruns of fantasies of what my life might be and as my interest in these thoughts waned, so did the number of thoughts I noticed. I didn’t try to bring my mind back to anything, I didn’t try to do anything except keep watching as my thoughts unfurled. I sometimes felt like I was indulging myself, or even cheating, as I sat and watched hour after hour as my mind did what it did. So I did, I spent many 7 day retreats observing my mind being occupied with distracted thoughts. What I understood I was to do was to observe my mind and get familiar with it, not to control it. “When I encountered Zen, I appreciated the lack of direction about what to do with my thoughts. But, it set up an adversarial relationship between me and myself. Eventually, just trying to keep up with the thoughts that needed to be dealt with became a point of focus and that helped with not getting caught up in the thoughts themselves. The volume of distracting thoughts that I was attempting to deal with using that technique led to something resembling a game of whack a mole, as soon as I plunged the dagger into one, another popped up. I remember one technique we were taught, was to imagine the distracting thought residing in our heart and to imagine plunging a Tibetan. “When I first started meditating, it was very much about not having my mind being occupied by distracted thoughts. I think it describes a kind of phenomenon a lot of people have gone through in the course of their practice. I don’t think I know him personally, but he’s in the Aiken Roshi - John Tarrant lineage. ![]() This is his quote: “If you wish to not have your mind occupied with distracted thoughts, you must allow it to be so occupied.” Then I want to read a couple of paragraphs of commentary on that quote by a teacher named David Weinstein. First is a quote by Dahui, a 12th Century Chinese Zen teacher who was the dharma successor of the compiler of the Blue Cliff Record. I’d like to begin by reading some quotes that lead from that contemporary compendium of wisdom, Facebook. ![]()
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