So,
At a lot of retreats, I give a whole talk about strategies for doing it and why people do it, so maybe I can give you the executive summary.
At night there's an alteration of brain chemistry that occurs,
and that can sort of give you an interesting perspective from which to do the practice.
Different themes tend to come up.
For one thing, each wave of sleepiness induces a wave of rest.
That's why people lurch, because actually what's happening is there's physical relaxation.
You can get into a rhythm where if you happen to be sleepy
— you won't necessarily be sleepy, but you may be at some point sleepy
— what happens is that you notice how the sleepiness comes in waves, and each wave will tend to cause the body to physically relax,
and it could also cause See Rest and Hear Rest — it could turn off the mental talk,
and it could cause either bright light or darkness (sort of an undifferentiated visual experience).
At least Feel Rest and perhaps also See Rest and Hear Rest get triggered rhythmically by rhythmic waves of sleepiness.
If you can get into that rhythm,
then what happens is you're re-engineering the experience of sleepiness into the experience of meditative absorption.
Because there's something —
if you've read the
there's something called the
Bhava
So what is the
That's the boundary zone between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind.
In meditative absorption, and in falling asleep, and in dying
— in those three circumstances, we dip below the
So there's an intimate link between those three things,
and the ability to drop below the
In fact, to live and function below the
is to solve the koan that I'm going to give you, actually.
I just gave away the answer. [laughter]
Living
you're alive in the unborn, you are functioning from the unborn.
So all night sitting is an opportunity to explore dipping below that boundary zone.
If you dip unconsciously, then you're going to have the Zen lurch,
but if you get into the rhythm that I'm describing, it will just take you deeper and deeper.
ani
ani yshn avl hlv shli 'r
That's how you say it in Hebrew — learned that last time in Israel.
ani
"I sleep, but my heart waketh." It's from the Psalms.
The Latin is
That was used as an ideal by the Christian monks
in the Middle Ages, when Latin was the language that was used.
The canonical hours that the monks keep...
We still have remnants in our language in words like "matinee" and "noon."
Nōn
There's a certain set number of hours that the monks kept and very few orders still do this, but a few do.
Essentially it's a radical disruption of the sleeping cycle because they never get more than a few hours sleep.
Then they have to go to the chapel,
and either do chanting, or singing, or have a liturgy of some sort, or Mass, or something.
I think it's like seven times in a 24-hour cycle, so they wake them up in the middle of the night.
They're sleepy all the time.
And that's a lifestyle thing. It never varies, ever.
So, what's that all about?
Why be sleepy all the time?
Why never get any continuous sleep for your whole life?
Well, for that reason —
You learn how to bring
What is it?
In Christianity it was called "infused contemplation,"
but in Buddhism it's called "formless
One way to go about that that's used in Zen — and obviously also was used in Christianity —
is to re-engineer the sleepiness thing.
One facet is you can sort of ride it into these delicious restful states.
[laughs] Of course, takes a little practice — a
[laughter]
So I'm not guaranteeing that you will experience "I sleep, but my heart waketh" [laughter]
and tomorrow morning be enlightened and live the rest of your life in the unborn,
but you can take some sort of step in that direction.
Now I'm sort of convincing myself that I should join you.
[laughter]
Look what Chôshin's doing! She started that. She knew this was...
She was shaking her head even before she knew that I was convincing myself that I want to do this.
[laughter]
Now you probably think I'm a wimp, right? That I can't do it?
[laughter]
"Well, prove it!"
It's like the army, right? "Sir, could ''you'' do that?"
(You're supposed to be able to ask your sergeant to do anything he asks you to do.)
Now I'm really convincing myself.
[laughter]
The truth is you deserve my A game tomorrow, which may not manifest if I'm too sleep deprived.
I can still function, but maybe not the A game function.
Okay. Other things come up. It's not just explore the restful states.
You may never get mental images. Well, at three in the morning maybe you have mental images.
The dreamscape starts to replace the landscape.
That could be all, "Image space is never available to me." Well, maybe it will be available at three this morning.
So, that can be a little window of opportunity.
"The world is solid." Well, at three in the morning maybe it won't be so solid, as your eyes swim.
Now, you might say, "Well, that's bullshit, because you're just tired," and, "That's an optical illusion."
But it's also a place to stand to explore visual experience.
If you do an awful lot of that, it will give you insight into the impermanent nature of See Out
that's there when you're quite recovered, and looking quite normally at the world.
You still have this knowledge of Flow within that experience.
A whole lot of interesting things can happen as the result of the
There is also, of course, you know... It can sometimes be uncomfortable.
Physically, there's this icky-sticky creepy-crawly yucky on your face, coagulating,
and a sort of excruciating yawniness that just
And then there can be all sorts of emotions that come up because we're a little
I mean, it is the classic way to break people down — brainwashing and so forth.
Now I'm giving the... [laughter]
<<
What kind of sales pitch is
Who wants to buy
However, people that are committed to this practice know that there's a thing called "working through stuff,"
and the same process that breaks people down, also can break people
To be broken down is a disempowering experience of abuse; to be broken
"You're broken down" means you're like shattered glass;
"broken up" — you're like a spray of pure steam that now joins the flow of nature forever.
So, anyway, I didn't intend to talk about
Oh, let me just give... Those of you that have never done it... First timers, gonna give you a reality check.
How many people in this room have done an all night sit? [puts his hand up and waits]
How many people in this room have done it again? [puts his hand up and waits]
Okay. So, you can see this is not like, "Oh my god, no one could do this kind of thing!"
So, there you go. That's my