our borrowed measures

pantai kedungu, bali, 2026

talk 2 / silent retreat May 2026 Bali

We continue our talk from yesterday and inquire more into this practice of zazen.

As I mentioned yesterday — and this is perfectly normal and understandable in the context

of living our everyday lives — we develop skills, we improve the skills we have learned, we

perfect them, we move on to new sets of skills and new ways of understanding and

approaching things, and we become masterful, skillful, expert in some particular domain.

But as you are new to this practice of zazen, I would like to point out that this practice is

not about gaining mastery over a skill, becoming an expert, or growing astute in meditation.

In fact, that you are all new to zazen is very refreshing — because you probably don’t carry

any preconceived ideas about what meditation is or should be, ideas you would then set

against this practice of just sitting, measuring zazen WITH the things you have already practiced, already know..

Because that movement of comparing — this experience with that experience, my

experience with the experience of others, my knowledge and understanding, where I am in

life set against where others are —you can’t take that away from the mind. It is one of its primal functions. The mind is comparative in the way it operates. It always needs to compare one thing with another in order to understand and get a sense of where it is, how it is, where we are.

I compare myself to others, and I see that in some respects I am ahead of them, and that

makes me feel good about myself. Then I compare myself in other respects, and I feel I am

behind, and that makes me feel not so good — at times it may even make me feel I have

missed out on a great deal, that other people have a better life than mine. I may even feel I've failed, I may feel defeated. Do I need to point out that all of this is on display on what we call social media today?

The comparative mind did not begin with this leap of technology. Humans were always like this. But we, as a species, were never exposed before to such a deluge — where we constantly need to see and check how others are doing in order to have a sense of how we ourselves are doing.

You don’t have, I suppose, another meditation format to compare zazen to. And maybe later you will experience other formats of meditation, and you will inevitably compare them to zazen and say, “Well, this is better than that,” or “Actually, that was better than this.” This mind of ours never really stops comparing and measuring one thing with another.

That is one of the things we come to understand when we sit. We see — we see and we realize — how we are measuring our own lives: the life we wish we had; the life we feel we would have wanted but are not realizing; the life others have, which gives a sense of diminishment to our own; or, on the contrary, a life that makes us feel we are living grandly compared to others.

Zazen, in a nutshell, is letting go of all these measurements.

Another word for measurement is reference point. The mind is in constant need of reference points to check in and see where we are, how we are doing, how others are doing. These reference

points, all the measurements by which we evaluate our lives, rest on value systems that are completely independent of us. Not only independent of us — they are outside of us. Constantly, in order to understand my life and get a better sense of my own existence, I am in this movement of measuring myself by values that are not of my own choosing, that are outside of me, and there is little awareness of this incessant movement for it is an uncosncious process.

Somewhere along the line I picked them up; they are part of my conditioning.We were told that success, being respected, getting on in life — there are certain criteria, and failing to meet them places you differently in the world. But this value system is not something we conceived on our own, out of our own investigation, our exploration of our own lives, to discover what we would truly want of this existence — something emanating from deep within us rather than from values outside us that have been passd .down to us without my input as a fait accompli. This brings us to the dictum attributed to Socrates — considered by many the father of Western philosophy, the teacher of Plato who reported this statement in his Apology — who said: “ An unexamined life is not worth living.” This is perennial wisdom; it goes back to 2,500 years. To examine is to question.

Already Socrates was pointing to the necessity for us to examine our lives outside the belief systems, outside the traditions and values that society conditions and imposes us with. This is something you could call —as it is in some traditions — self-inquiry. A questions into who I really am, without that constant mirroring from the outside. We cannot live without that mirroring, that is also true.We don't live in abstraction and detachment from the world. We are social beings. We interrelate, we interconnect; we need the mirroring of others. But if the basis of my existence rests only on that mirroring, then it rests on prmises that alienate me from myself.

One day I receive a mirroring that feels positive and encouraging, and it gives me a sense

of enhancement. The next day I receive a mirroring that is quite the opposite — it seems

critical of me, I am blamed, put down or ignored, — and now I feel diminished, I don’t feel so good about myself anymore. These mirroring, what others reflect back to us, rest on conditions that change. And the values on which the mirroring are based change too. Everything constantly changes. Everything that is conditioned is subject to impermanence. That is one of the deepest insights of the Buddha; that impermanence itself is the nature of reality.

And yet, as I mentioned yesterday, this sense of self — made up of my self-image or self-images, my self-identities, my persona — is usually how I view myself. My personality begins to take shape soon after I am born, little by little: shaped by the people who bring me into the world, the place where I was born, the culture around me, the social and economic conditions of my milieu. All of this goes into creating my personality — the family, the heredity, the religion, the culture, the language. I chose none of it. I simply take it for granted that this is me. In the words of Trich Nhat Hanh: you are made only of none you elements. One of the difficulties — not so much a paradox as a hindrance — is that this structure called the psyche, from which my personality emerges, is something I had no say in making. When I come into this world I am completely dependent, at the mercy of my caregivers: who they are, the kind of people they are, how they interact — the parents, the family, the messages they send me, the opinions, the voices with which they speak to me.Sometimes those voices can be harsh and critical. But from very early on, even when the voices are not harsh and critical, I absorb a sense of what it is to be a good boy or a good girl, and what it is to be a bad girl or a bad boy. All of it is conditioned, we are what our conditioning has made of us. And, I can only become self-reflective of my conditioning when the conditioning has already shaped my perosonality.

You do this — you are a good person, a good child. You do that — you are naughty, you are

misbehaving. I am not saying we don’t need education. I am only saying that all of it goes

into the shaping of the me; and the voices of the father, the mother, and those significant others,

through a very subconscious process over time, we internalize them without realizing how much impact they have made on us.

So the “me,” and all these voices in my head — and I can guarantee you that when I am

speaking, it is me speaking — if I have not unpacked and unpeeled and deconstructed that

thing called the psyche, the personality, if I have not examined it, I am not even aware

that I have internalized the voices of so many people, the parents most of all. When I speak

to myself, in a way I am only being spoken to. Sometimes we have been dealt better cards

and were spoken to more kindly; sometimes not — there was a great deal of judgment, of

criticism, and so we develop that critical voice within ourselves. We judge ourselves harshly.

And if we do not judge ourselves, we project that judgment onto others, and we judge them.

In Nonviolent Communication, that voice is called the “jackal.” Others call it the “tyrant.” The jackal is always biting at you — that's the inner critic.

All those voices, all those layers upon layers of accumulated experience since early

childhood, and all the difficult feelings that have arisen in us… and this is another thing the

psyche does naturally: it suppresses what is unpleasant, so that we can move on, so that we

can function. It is a psychological functioning that speaks of a healthy psyche — because if

the psyche could not suppress, we would be flooded by the intensity of our own emotions,

and we would become a wreck. So it is something natural and healthy. But at the same time it is very limiting. Because that suppression, that repression, that pushing-down goes down into the bundle we carry without knowing what it holds — the unexamined life, as Socrates puts it. This is what Freud pointed out when he said, refering to the staggering role of the subconscious mind, man is not a master in his own house.

Another admonition of Socrates — inscribed on the fronton of the temple at Delphi in Athenes—

was the injunction: “Know thyself!” Which is close to what I have been sharing with you. Meditation, in some way — and it has many aspects; I am touching on just this one today —is like slightly lifting the lid on the subconscious mind, the lid we are so good at keeping shut through suppression. How do we keep it shut? By being so busy. What is the thing we fear tremendously, that annoys us enormously? It is called boredom. No one is supposed to be bored. We need excitement, we

need activity, we need busyness and above all we need to be useful and productive. This wheel has to be in constant motion — the wheel of the mind.

If we tell someone, “I’m bored,” they feel sorry for us. But boredom is the gateway; if you

do not cross it, you do not take the first step into the process of self-enquiry. Boredom brings

you close to that sense of simply being. It feels different for each of us, but often it carries a sense of discomfort, unpleasantness and restelessness. It places us to an edge — the edge of what? The edge

of the unknown.

The unknown is that self we have not examined, not explored. And zazen constantly takes us

to that edge. It is not a pleasant practice. You cannot honestly say, “I’m enjoying this.” If

people ask, “How was it?” and you answer, “I really, really enjoyed sitting zazen,” you are

not being honest. There are moments when it feels deeply peaceful, moments when it opens

onto something vast. But much of the time it is lifting the lid and letting all those suppressed

thoughts and emotions rise. And in the process we notice a few things — and they are

valuable.

First, we notice that we have no control over our thinking. You may sit down to concentrate,

or simply to be present. After a few moments things begin to arise, and more and more arise,

and you realize you have no control over it. You may grow frustrated. At some point you ask

yourself, “I’m supposed to be meditating, but all I’m doing is rehashing bits of memory,

random thoughts.”

So that is one of the things that happens. And many people who sit through a longer retreat

will come and tell me — this is something I have heard often — “I actually feel moreconfused about myself than I did before.” But that confusion — the realization of that

confusion — is itself a valuable insight. It simply shows us that the mind is chaotic, that it

runs on autopilot. All these things surface with different degrees of intensity, because the

thoughts carry emotions in their wake. Thoughts are never neutral.

And that is another thing you begin to discover in meditation: the link between emotion and

thinking. You think of something — it is just a thought — and you linger with it, and

immediately there is a feeling to it, an emotion to it. And likewise, you may have an

experience in the body, a discomfort, something physical, and the mind takes it and makes a

story out of it. It tells you the pain is unbearable, that you must do something about it, that

you are about to collapse, that this is the absolute limit. Is it? Maybe not.

That goes back to where we ended yesterday. It is part of meditation, part of its gift, that we

become skeptical of our own thinking. Everything my mind tells me, I realize I can examine.

Maybe it is so; maybe it is not.

And that brings us to another cornerstone of Buddhist teaching, of the whole of Buddhist

philosophy. I mentioned compassion, karuna in Sanskrit. But what meditation offers us —

that deeper insight that lets us see through the workings of our own mind, our thinking mind,

our discriminating mind, constantly busy and preoccupied with objects, some of which it

wants and wants more of, feeling that if it gets them it will become content, happy, and

others that are undesirable, unpleasing, dislikable, that it pushes away, thinking, “If I rid

myself of these, I will find peace” — that mind is never settled. That mind never finds peace.

Because it is bound to the cycle the Buddha called samsaric existence — the cycle of birth

and death. And birth and death are not only physical; they are the multitude of things that

arise and fade in the mind, moment after moment, covering the surface of the mind like

ripples on a lake, like waves on the surface of the ocean. And we are often struggling, confronting these waves, these ripples.

What meditation allows us to discover is that while on that surface level of existence we

are constantly struggling — fighting with situations, with others, with ourselves, wanting

certain things, wanting to push others away — we forget that this ocean has a bottom. And at

the bed of this ocean there is a deep tranquility. It is never disturbed. And that movement of being able to see through the ripples, the waves of the mind, through a practice such as meditation — and I will say more about that — is called wisdom, prajna in Sanskrit.

So, to take the metaphor from the story I shared at the beginning — the bundle we set on the

ground after some time, and the bundle we pick up after some time, and the difference

between them, and the lightness that comes once we have set the bundle down and examined

it — this is the difference between what is on the surface of the ocean, which can sometimes

be turbulent, wavy, the churning of the waves — the stories, the events of our lives, the

busyness — and the deep peace that lies at the bottom.

The two are not separate. What lies at the bottom of the ocean and the movement on the

surface belong to the same body of water. You don’t need to eliminate the waves to reach the

bottom. You only need to see through them. But the waves will always remain.

And another metaphor for the waves: when we sit, we are confronted with this endless

stream of consciousness, all the thoughts arising moment to moment. And if we think there is

some technique we can learn to make these thoughts go away completely, so we can wake at

the bottom of this quiet ocean — that would be like wanting to remove the waves from the

sea. It is a rather vain effort. Because it is in the nature of the ocean to make waves, and in

the nature of the mind to create thoughts.

What we learn in the process of meditation and practice is how to view these thoughts.

Either we get carried away by the mind and what it creates — the thoughts, the stories — or

we set down our bundle from time to time and enquire into what the mind fabricates,

beginning a process that is profound, yet also very simple. It begins with this simple

understanding: that we do not need to take whatever the mind tells us seriously. And yet, when we are submerged in our thoughts, and in the emotions that arise from a mind that is very active, sometimes agitated, restless, we believe: “This is the reality of me. This is who I am.”

So that is one thing on the path, the journey of simplifying. It begins by realizing: “Yes, my

mind tells me many things, many stories — but, as we say in English, I can take it with a

grain of salt. It’s not that serious.” So another way of understanding “not taking our thoughts seriously” translates into what we actually do in zazen — which is, as I said at the beginning, this very simple practice of letting go of thoughts and coming back, again and again, to the present moment, coming back to the unkown for what the present moment is I don't know. If I knew what it is it would be memory and something in the past.

Now, going back to that metaphor of the waves and the ocean: letting go of thoughts is like

letting go of the waves. And in the moment we let go of the waves, we find the calm, the

serenity, that is the presence of being in the depth of our own being that has the feel of walking the ocean floor. The waves don't disappear. They are not meant to. Thought don't diasppear from our mind. That is not the point of zazen. Releasing them, we are released from them. One breath at the time. This moment only.

Thank you very much for your presence, and for your attention.