Into the Scars of the Burning: Audio Dharma Talk by Kosen Gregory Snyder (2023/05/06)

Even when there is really clear awakening, that awakening is useless until it’s turned toward suffering.
Even when there is really clear awakening, that awakening is useless until it’s turned toward suffering.
What I don’t look at, what I will not face, runs my life. From a bodhisattva perspective, denial is a disaster.
How do we reconcile our behavior with the eight-fold path? Are we always deluded?
We are trying to wake up to that activity of how grasping creates the sense of self that we think we need to walk through life.
We do want people to be able to be whole, to live the full expressions of their lives, to be able to have choices about what happens. And to be able to be free in a collective way of freedom where freedom means we are caring for one another.
If we do not view and respond to every human being as a tender, vulnerable body deserving of our love, we are wrong.
Who am I in the midst of this fleeting life? How can I use myself? How can we all use ourselves? Because we are so special, each of us…
The dharma gives us the possibility to love the world and ourselves and one another. And also opens us to a further possibility of healing, of actually leaving the planet better than we found it. Like when we go camping, you know?
It is really important where we put our attention—that is our power. That is what we’re cultivating in our spiritual discipline. Do we know where we’re putting our attention? Because we do have to choose.
What do we rely on when we lose or are threatened by the loss of what we believe is critical for our well-being?
We can endeavor together in cultivating that reverence and that clarity—in the midst of the darkness—to orient.
We don’t know that we have a choice—we can choose to be kind, we can choose the path of kindness.
So much of the harm that happens in the world is because people have not been supported to digest the pain that they have inherited, or have experienced, or carry.
There are moments of disappointment and there are moments of unmet love and there are moments of loss, and these are all part of the pilgrimage and part of any real path.
We are not going to escape our karma somehow by leaving it in a storage space here [in the city] and going to the monastery [in the mountains].
“The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation”—it’s not a technique, a tool, it’s not something we do. It’s a living thing. It’s awakening. It’s Buddha’s sitting.
I take seriously this mandate from the Buddha that we don’t hide from death and we don’t hide from illness.
To carry the self forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forward and actualize the self is awakening.
When we practice together as a sangha, this is a refuge we can take—to recognize that all our ancestors are in this room, literally, right now.
We need to collectively start to care for those forces, so they don’t become monsters of continued colonial oppression, internally and externally.