Ocean Mind Sangha – Details, episodes & analysis

A talk on the eight ways of cultivatingloving-kindness

A talk on the practice of metta or loving-kindness—includes a guided meditation.

Sloth and torpor is a subtle turning away of our vows, but we can always return and re-engage with what is most important to us.

Do we know things as they truly are, or as our ideas and perceptions of what they might be? In this talk, Zuisei speaks on a concept from Yogachara’s philosophies of consciousness , wherein the first field of perception is the “field of suchness”— where we perceive reality directly. Cultivating this discernment between truth and perception is an ongoing practice— one that ultimately opens us up to liberation.

 “As long as human beings have walked on this earth, there have always been those who’ve said, ‘This is not the way. This isn’t working, it’s never worked. So let me spend my life looking for another way. Let me spend my life living another way.” In this talk, Zuisei speaks on waking up from our conditioned sleepwalking to find the innate wonder that life has to offer. Through watering seeds of practice and presence, we choose wakefulness and seek truth.

The call to turn inward, towards our present-moment experience, is a call toward truth. In this talk, Zuisei explores the importance of letting our minds become still, so that when the call arrives, we can heed it. Accepting the call is saying “Yes” to reality. It’s becoming intimate with that which we know to be true, which then allows us to see how we must respond.”

Zuisei speaks of silence as the way of wonder, humility, and reverence; of noble silence as the unification of awareness. Drawing on stories and poems, she highlights the importance of silence in our increasingly noisy and harried world.

In the eighth talk in a series on the Eight Awarenesses of Enlightened Beings, Zuisei speaks on the seventh awareness: cultivating wisdom. Wisdom is the highest state we can obtain on the path—a complete integration of presence, compassion, and equanimity. It is understanding that all things—all things without exception—are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature. But this is not a problem. Wisdom is accepting, and therefore finding freedom in the fact that this is how things are.

In the seventh talk in a series on the Eight Awarenesses of Enlightened Beings, Zuisei speaks on the eighth awareness: avoiding idle talk (she changed the order of the talks in order to end with wisdom). Master Dogen said, “To totally know the true form of all things is the same as being without idle talk.” In that complete knowing, there is no room, no opportunity, for idle talk. Knowing the true form of a thing, there is no one to speak about it idly, or to speak about it at all. Words cannot express the reality. Live words can point to it, but they are not it. And yet, since we have to speak, how do we do so in such a way that we practice abstaining from thought and language that keeps us bound? How do we create space to rest in a deeper sense of knowing and trusting in our innate goodness?